deathtocapslock | COS Chapter Six: "Gilderoy Lockhart" (Reply)

* With all those owls flying around at breakfast time, I’m surprised we don’t hear of people getting owl droppings on their food. (Well, not really, since owls regurgitate pellets rather than droppings, but Rowling owls are, apparently, different.) Obviously hygiene is one of those things that hasn’t yet crossed over from the Muggle world.

* Errol’s passed out from the effort of delivering a letter. Christ, Weasleys, just get a new one already. I know you’re poor, but really.

* Couldn’t Ron have dashed off into another room before opening the Howler? That way he’d be spared the humiliation of having everybody in the school know what an idiot he is.

* Arthur’s facing an enquiry at work. Just a pity he doesn’t end up getting sacked for, y’know, blatantly flouting his own laws.

* If a Muggle minister had done something like that, it’d be a major scandal. But then the WW always seemed a bit lax when it came to things like personal probity.

* The enquiry is entirely Ron’s fault, apparently. Never mind that he’s not the one who made the illegal car in the first place. And really, given Mr. Weasley’s contempt for his own laws, it’s not that surprising that Ron had a pretty lax sense of morality when it came to stealing the car.

* Again Harry’s looking at Lockhart and noting the colours of his robes (turquoise this time). Harry seems to have a thing with male antagonists: in COS he always seems to be looking at Lockhart; in a few books we’ll have handsome Tom Riddle; and in HBP he’ll be spending all his time following Malfoy, thinking about what Malfoy’s doing, and going into the toilets between classes to think about Malfoy some more. Mmm, bad boys…

* Not to mention the fact that he spends most of OOTP behaving like a jilted lover after Dumbledore stops paying attention to him. SecretlyGay!Harry FTW! :p

* Come to think of it, that might explain why he doesn’t like Pansy Parkinson so much, even though she never really does anything particularly bad. “Damn it, Pansy, Draco would be free to love me if you weren’t distracting him with your feminine wiles! I hate you!”

* I’m going to assume that Gilderoy Lockhart actually knows quite a bit about Whomping Willows. If he went around offering advice on subjects he actually knew nothing about, he’d probably have been found out by now.

* Although these are wizards we’re talking about, so maybe not.

* Lockhart saying that defeating Voldemort isn’t as good as winning Witch Weekly’s “Most charming smile” award is probably meant to make him look really shallow, but at least winning the award isn’t something he can’t remember and had absolutely no control over.

* Now that I think of it, Lockhart’s actually quite nice in this scene. We know that he’s got hold of the wrong end of the stick (well, maybe, although come to think of it Harry didn’t need much persuading), but from his POV he’s just offering some helpful advice.

* Sister Magpie noted in one of her POA posts that Rowling likes having things happen more than once in the series. “Characters giving well-meaning advice and the audience being expected to criticise them for it” happens again with Percy in OOTP.

* Hermione often comes across as what an unintelligent person’s idea of a smart person would be. If she were truly intelligent, she ought to show more ability in thinking for herself and rephrasing ideas in her own words, rather than just memorising textbooks.

* In my own personal canon, Hermione spends all her time having in-depth philosophical conversations with her friends in Ravenclaw; but, having realised that her universe is geared towards punishing people whose independent thinking annoys Harry in some way (even going so far as to possess Zach Smith and force him to run away in DH, despite the fact that such an action would be totally OOC), she takes care never to show it in front of Harry or let him find out.

* This also explains why she never seems to have any friends other than Harry and Ron: she does, she just keeps their existence secret.

* Wait, so these mandrakes are sentient? And they’re just going to kill them later on to make their antidote?

* Yes, Professor, let’s put a class full of twelve-year-olds in a greenhouse with a fanged, venomous magical plant. And then let’s put earmuffs on them so they won’t notice it sneaking up behind them. It seems like Professor Sprout may be channelling Rubeus Hagrid here.

* Justin greets Harry and Hermione, and then tacks on Ron like he’s just an afterthought. Get used to that sort of thing, Weasley, ’cause it’s going to happen a lot to you in later life.

* Quite clever of JKR giving us a bit of background info on Justin so that we’ll feel it more when he gets attacked. I wonder if the Rowling who wrote the later books would have handled it so well?

* Probably not, given the way she portrayed Charity Burbage’s death.

* “Everything Harry had learned last year seemed to have leaked out of his head during the summer.” Thus begins the Sisyphean task of dumbing Harry down at the start of each book to try and preserve his underdog status/audience surrogate role.

* In HBP, Harry sees Dumbledore telling Tom Riddle that there is a fund at Hogwarts for pupils who cannot afford to buy their own equipment. Apparently this fund was discontinued by Dumbledore, otherwise we’d expect Ron to be bought a new wand (as his parents apparently can’t afford to buy him one themselves).

* I hope they turn those beetles back, BTW.

* Hermione shows a rare moment of humanity by drawing little hearts around Lockhart’s lessons. Luckily this’ll be squashed out of her by OOTP, though.

* Colin Creevey arrives, and promptly makes a spirited effort to wrest the title of “Most annoying character in canon” from Dobby.

* I can’t help but think that Colin’s excitement seems a bit unrealistic, given that he’s a Muggleborn. If he were a Pureblood (or at least Halfblood), raised on tales of how evil Voldemort was and how great it is that he was defeated, his idolisation might make more sense.

* Malfoy arrives, and suddenly the whole scene lights up. :)

* “I don’t think getting your head cut open makes you that special,” says Malfoy, and I’m inclined to agree. It’s not like Harry himself (as opposed to Lilly) actually did anything special, after all.

* Even Lilly wasn’t that special, IMHO. Don’t get me wrong, I think she was very brave to sacrifice her life like that, and I admire anyone who’s prepared to do that sort of thing, but still, lots of people give their lives in good causes without having cults of personality spring up around them.

* “Eat slugs, Malfoy,” says Ron, foreshadowing what he’ll try to do in the next chapter. I wonder if he’s been secretly planning to use that hex, and is just waiting for an opportunity…

* Just when I thought this scene couldn’t get any better, Lockhart arrives to ham everything up wonderfully.

* Speaking of hamming stuff up, I heard that Kenneth Branagh, Alan Rickman and Jason Isaacs had a competition to see who could give the most over-the-top performance and still make the final cut of the COS film. I’m not sure who won, though.

* Given that Lockhart seems so clueless about such relatively harmless creatures as pixies, I’m surprised he hasn’t been found out yet.

* So why haven’t Muggles found out about pixies yet? Britain’s quite a small country, after all; it’s not like there are huge swathes of wilderness where magical creatures could conceivably be living undiscovered. Unless the wizards just Obliviate anyone who’s seen them, but even that would seem a bit odd. After all, it’s not like the existence of pixies necessarily implies the existence of wizards; Muggles would just think of them as animals like any other.

* “He says he’s done,” says Ron, showing that he’s on the right lines when it comes to Lockhart. Enjoy those brains while you still can, Ron; they won’t last for much longer.