COS Chapter Eight: "The Deathday Party"
Oct. 29th, 2010 06:00 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslock* Everyone’s got such a hate-on for Percy that he’s described using negative imagery even when he’s doing something nice. Here he’s “bullying” Ginny into taking some potion for her cold.
* Knowing what will happen in GOF, everybody’s probably going to blame him for thinking that Ginny’s a little bit ill, rather than realising that she was just being possessed by a Horcrux-ified diary which once belonged to a dark wizard who’s been dead for eleven years. Christ, Percy, are you blind or something?
* Although in retrospect it’s obvious that Ginny’s just too awesome to suffer from such petty ailments as the common cold, so maybe he should have noticed.
* Oh no wait, she hasn’t yet become MarySue!Ginny, so she might still suffer illness like the rest of us mere mortals.
* Obviously Harry’s going to be drenched to the skin, but why’s he splattered with mud? The whole point of Quidditch is that they players fly a long way above the ground, so they wouldn’t have much opportunity to get muddy. Unless Harry fell off a lot… Wait, did I just implicitly diss Harry’s SuperQuidditch!Skillz? Ignore that.
* In the last chapter, everybody acted as if Slytherin spying on Gryffindor’s try-outs was a dirty, underhanded thing to do. Fred and George have been spying on Slytherin. Slytherin, as far as we know, never actually spied on Gryffindor (or, indeed, anyone). IOIAGDI, obviously.
* I highly doubt that the Nimbus 2001 is so good as to make all other brooms obsolete.
* Nearly-headless Nick died in 1492, but the clothes he’s wearing seem more Elizabethan in style, i.e., about a century later. Perhaps there’s a ghost clothes shop where spirits can keep up-to-date with the latest fashions, but NHN just likes Elizabethan fashions so much that he stopped going after around 1600.
* Of course, this sort of fanwank wouldn’t be necessary if JKR had actually bothered to think about her setting, and either gave Nick more period-appropriate clothing or made this his four hundredth deathday instead.
* If the purpose of the Headless Hunt is to play ball games with members’ own heads, excluding members who aren’t fully decapitated seems quite reasonable to me.
* Once again, JKR, trying to enforce rules ≠ “endless battle against students”.
* Filch has been cleaning all morning when any of the teachers (and probably quite a few of the pupils) could have done it in an instant with a quick “Scourgify!” No wonder he’s in a bad mood, really.
* Although I do wonder why Dumbledore hired him as caretaker. Perhaps he just enjoys watching him being humiliated.
* So what is this mysterious power that connects Filch and Mrs. Norris? Does the fact that Filch is a Squib rule out magic, or does being a Squib just mean that he can’t do wand magic, but can still be magically connected to his pets?
* Is it wrong that I’ve always totally rooted for Filch against Fred and George?
* By making Filch’s eagerness to hang pupils by their ankles “common knowledge”, i.e., unsubstantiated rumour, Rowling handily manages to turn us against him whilst avoiding having to provide any evidence to back this up.
* I can’t help but wonder why Dumbles keeps Peeves around. Possibly it’s so that he can handily distract Filch when Our Hero is in trouble. Or maybe blackmail’s involved. “Don’t forget, Twinkles, I’ve got your old love-letters from Gellert Grindlewald. So if you even think about getting rid of me…”
* Harry apparently has no qualms about looking through other people’s correspondence. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen!
* One of these days I’m going to write a fic where Harry suffers karmic revenge for being such a jerk. So his schooldays will be made a misery by people reading his private letters, hexing rude words across his face, beating him at Quidditch by buying superior brooms which make every match a foregone conclusion…
* Nice to see that wizards have picked up on the irritating Muggle habit of deliberately misspelling words in their brand names.
* Any guesses on how exactly a warlock differs from a regular wizard?
* Harry put the envelope down two feet away from where it was. D’oh!
* Filch is obviously ashamed of being a Squib, suggesting that they suffer from prejudice from fellow wizards, unlike Muggleborns. “Mudblood” is still a worse insult than “Sneakin’ Squib,” though.
* NHN is prepared to destroy a priceless antique in order to get Harry out of detention. Good to see he’s got his priorities straight.
* NHN seems like a bit of a joke, to be honest. About the only time we see him interacting with Gryffindor students is when they needle him at the feast; the rest of the time, they just seem to ignore him.
* I bet the Slytherins treat their ghost better. They probably hold a big party in their common room every time it’s the Bloody Baron’s deathday, with music, dancing, and various wizarding party games. The highlight of the night is a play (written by and starring Draco Malfoy, of course) about the Baron’s death. It’s absolutely excellent. :)
* Off on a bit of a tangent here, but isn’t the Baron supposed to have been contemporaneous with the Hogwarts Founders? Which would mean that he lived sometime during the Anglo-Saxon period, which would mean that he couldn’t be a baron, as the rank was introduced by the Normans, who didn’t control England until 1066…
* F&G are feeding a firework to a salamander, continuing the long tradition of cruelty to animals in the series.
* “‘A promise is a promise,’ Hermione reminded Harry bossily.” Because only bossy kill-joys care about such things as keeping your promises. Most normal people are fine with the idea of just breaking them whenever you feel like it.
* Apparently when their bodies died, the ghosts’ musical taste died too.
* Rather careless (some might say rude) of Nick to invite three living people along and then not bother to provide them with any food.
* Rotting food might have a stronger flavour than normal food. Unfortunately, it’s also a not very nice flavour.
* So, the good guys can’t stand Myrtle and make fun of her behind her back; the evil Slytherin Draco Malfoy, OTOH, is able to get past her unpleasant exterior and make friends with her. I’ll just chalk that up as #147 on the “Instances when the bad guys actually seem better than the good guys” board.
* Rather rude of Sir Patrick to interrupt Nick’s speech like that. Makes you wonder why exactly Nick invited him.
* Or why he’s so keen to join the Hunt, for that matter.
* “Time to kill… I smell blood… I SMELL BLOOD”? Do basilisks always speak in such a melodramatic way, or is it just putting it on to amuse Harry? Or did it just pick up the Slytherin theatrical habit from Salazar or Tom?
* Given that all the students are coming up from the same place, why exactly are they coming in from different ends of the corridor?
* I know that people often think of Draco as a bit of a drama queen, but pushing to the front of the crowds and shouting “You’ll be next, Mudbloods!” seems ridiculously over-the-top (not to mention rather stupid), even for him. I literally cannot imagine what his motivation for doing this is meant to be.
* Actually, I think Olivander shows us a spell in GOF to make wine fly out of their wands. Maybe Draco’s just discovered this, and currently drunk off his arse.
* Or maybe Rowling just hooked his testicles up to car batteries and turned up the voltage until he agreed to be one of the book’s red herrings.
* Come to think of it, a lot of the plot/characterisation in the series would make a good deal more sense if we assume that that’s what happened. “Look, Sirius, I don’t care if you’re smart enough to figure a way of staying sane despite being surrounded for twelve years by an army of depression-inducing monsters, before masterminding an escape from an impregnable island fortress and evading the biggest man-hunt in recent wizarding history for almost a year, I need you to be really reckless and immature in this book so that you can get killed at the end and make Harry feel miserable. Quick, Dobby, get the car batteries!”
* Hey, maybe that could be a new acronym, for any time when someone does something inexplicable or otherwise out of character: QGCB (for “Quick, get the car batteries!”).
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 12:43 pm (UTC)Can I just say I really like Ron for thwarting Hermione's campaign there? He shows much more concern for their feelings and autonomy than Hermione does. Unilaterally deciding she knows what's best and using sly, underhanded tactics to force them down a path they don't want is really horrible of her. It's like 'oh, they're free, mission accomplished!' and she doesn't take into consideration that maybe they were happy with the family they were serving (not all house-elves are miserable with their families like Dobby was) or what they're going to do to survive once they're free.
a common punishment was to have to arrive at school at 6:30 am, sometimes combined with some duty such as searching the school for suspicious objects
Oh, what do you class as 'suspicous' objects? O.o
Our school had students pick up rubbish from the grounds on Friday after school, if they were in trouble, otherwise, they just served detention during lunch-time.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 02:14 pm (UTC)This was in Israel. Anything that might be a bomb in disguise. Anything even slightly odd or out of place. Not a very useful working definition, but what can one do?
no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 06:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 01:29 am (UTC)whitewizard masters.I can't help but read the house elves as being either magically compelled or otherwise brainwashed (perhaps by the way they're raised- no one ever gives them the idea that they have rights or the ability to choose anything in life for themselves). Forcing them to be free against their wills isn't exactly ethical, but how can one respect the wills of people who have no free will?
House elves have no protection under the law and no concept of being anything other than slaves, or, at best with Dobby, poorly paid servants. Their masters can abuse them however they like and no one will care. This is not a case of people who have freely chosen to serve their families, and that Rowling wrote them this way honestly disgusts me.
In book four Hermione starts up an organization for the promotion of house elf rights, tries to raise awareness among the students, tries to talk to the elves, hopes that Dobby's example will help them begin to consider their situations from a new angle, and talks to various adults. With the exception of Dobby, every single person shoots her down and says that the elves are happy being slaves. That there's nothing wrong with their masters having the ability to abuse them, and that it's cruel to try to free them and offer them basic rights.
To bring a rather warped real life example into this... If slaves in the United States had been so battered that they hadn't even wanted to become free, would that somehow have made their emancipation wrong?
There is something very wrong with a series which tries to present slavery as a good thing. I write original fiction set in ancient societies and tend to portray it in a more neutral light, since those societies typically have no movement for abolition- for them slavery is an economic and social/political reality. That's a far cry from trying to portray it as moral.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 06:28 am (UTC)If slaves in the United States had been so battered that they hadn't even wanted to become free, would that somehow have made their emancipation wrong?
If all house-elves were regularly downtrodden and beaten, I think it's safe to say it's a terrible practice, but Winky went from being a happy house-elf to a miserable, alcoholic house-elf with frequent crying jags. And none of the Hogwarts house-elves would be abused by any of the teachers there, so for her to want to sneakily 'free' them so that they could be lost and without a home, it's just cruel, I think. I have a hard time believing any of the Hogwarts staff would abuse house-elves, so obviously they're happy to be serving the school and they're not being battered into believing that it's a good thing.
Anyway, that's me speaking from the pov that Hermione and Harry eventually adopt by the end of the series- Harry has no problem with Kreacher as his own personal slave because 'a happy house-elf is okay'. So I'm going to assume that JKR intended all along for the house-elves to not really be an example of institutionalized abuse, otherwise for her heroes to blithely accept it and participate in it would be sending totally the wrong message, no? It's just a case of JKR using serious issues from our society to make her world seem more sophisticated and her writing more insightful when she really has nothing of value to contribute on that topic.
However, if we assume JKR just lost her way and her integrity and really, she totally meant all along to show that slavery was wrong and the house-elves really are abused and crave freedom and all that, then I still think Hermione went about it the wrong way. She should've educated them first, gotten them to realize they deserve better, that they're been taken advantage of and shouldn't stand for it, get them fervent about liberating themselves and then helping them do it once they're committed.
She had good intentions, but being sly and conniving about it just further rubs it in that they're apparently these primitive beings with low intellects who can't be trusted to know what's good for them, so clever Hermione will sort it out for them, even if it's against their will.
Anyway, I do see your point, and I do agree to some extent, but...it's a really complicated issue, I think, and the way JKR just squashed its complexities and dismissed it does it no favors. Because the way it ends suggests she never meant for it to be this big thing about civil liberties and equal rights and everything, so I'm backtracking from that to assume that she created these beings who are genuinely happy to serve people and derive great pleasure in helping out.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 09:52 am (UTC)I have issues with many of Hermione's actions over the course of the series, but a fifteen year old girl becoming desperate in her attempts to do something about this issue while no one else will even listen... I can sympathise with that. Her methods weren't the best, but did she really see anything else available to her at that point?
I hear your point and I totally accept that slavery is wrong, btw, but for Hermione to impose her own beliefs upon a different species is also wrong. What she finds abhorrent may be totally acceptable by that species, and it's arrogant of her to assume she knows best.
'Slavery is wrong' is rather different to more gray areas of cultural differences. When such basic rights as freedom are denied people, I think that's when respect for cultural differences breaks down. Or to quote a series called the Sacrifices Arc: 'everyone has a right to freedom which doesn't trample on the freedom of others.'
Or...
I think it's disrespectful to try to force Muslim women to stop covering their hair, but... When the ideals of female modesty are taken to such extremes that men beat and even kill women for 'immoral behavior', then that's something which should be stopped.
Respecting cultural differences =/= ignoring basic human rights. And the implication that it does equal that because the house elves aren't human...
Squick.
After all, Rowling can just say that slavery is in their nature, they're born that way... Squick again.
So I'm going to assume that JKR intended all along for the house-elves to not really be an example of institutionalized abuse, otherwise for her heroes to blithely accept it and participate in it would be sending totally the wrong message, no?
Rowling sending the wrong message? Erm...hardly new for her. And it is made clear in the series that house elves are not protected under the law, and no one even seems particularly bothered by, say, Dobby being mistreated or Winky being wrongly (as they saw it) dismissed. Even if the house elves are slaves by nature, this is a problem in the wizarding world, and it needs to be addressed.
And that house elves are so panicky at the very suggestion or word of freedom, literally terrified, does not lead me to believe that they've chosen this. I re-read the 'House Elf Liberation Front' chapter in GoF, and they're described as panicky, not simply insulted. I have actually read a series with a magical race of servants which did not bother me. It depicted brownies who had an agreement with a family- for them, it was an exchange for one of the family members helping them long ago. They liked keeping the house clean and making the food, but they stood up for themselves. If the humans tried to mess with them, they retaliated. They weren't abused and had the ability to stand up for themselves, which is a very different story to the house elves in HP.
Winky falls apart and is depressed because she has no master, even though she's still doing exactly the same work that any house elf does. That the house elves desire not just tasks like house-work as their professions but slavery itself is... Well, the fault lies with Rowling's world-building, but the whole concept is very skeevy.
In the end, though, it's just so disturbing that the house elves are a species who exist to be slaves. The moral message of a series on that topic being that slavery is good as long as the slaves are treated well... No. Just no.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 12:29 pm (UTC)Lol, IKR? *shakes head*
The difference, for me personally, is that with things like bullying, with Muggle oppression by wizards, all that is with human beings in common. So I can make statements condemning it and feel justified.
The problem with house-elves is that this is a species JKR created. And if she is having her heroes buy into the concept that as long as house-elves are happy, it isn't slavery...and putting the suggestion into the series that they live to serve, that it's fulfilling for them to do so, then I just...I don't know. It's so confusing, IDEK what message she's trying to send. But because it's a magical race she created and made them so subservient and pleased to serve humans, I have a harder time saying it's wrong than I do with, say, the Marauders' treatment of Snape.
Basically, I kind of agree with you, I kind of don't, but at the end of the day, the fault lies entirely with her world-building. I think she possibly had intended to do a more sophisticated and hardhitting story arc with that, but then wimped out and flattened it entirely and just shrugged and handwaved it away because she couldn't be bothered.
Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-03 06:41 pm (UTC)The issue isn't whether Elves have an inate nature to serve others; the issue is that the Wizarding World has enacted laws making it impossible for Elves to autonomously make decisions for themselves regarding their own lives.
Elves may be ecstatic to be servants to humans, but they're not given the choice of who to work for, or the ability to express their service in other ways other than as house-servants.
Elves aren't allowed to be entrepeneurs; an elf can't start their own housecleaning/maid service. An elf can't become a chef and open his or her own restaurant, employing other elves as wait staff. An elf can't open a chain of laundromats/dry cleaners. An elf can't start his or her own landscaping business. An elf can't become a self-employed seamstress/tailor. Elves can't be self-employed nannies. Elves can't run their own candle-making factories.
Elves aren't even allowed to get an education, which further limits their ability to even dream about another type of life, let alone have the opportunity to pursue it.
Re: Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-03 10:15 pm (UTC)Not that I think Rowling ever thought of it that way. I think she was trying for an updated and/or insider version of brownies and failed with the analogy.
Re: Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-03 10:51 pm (UTC)Re: Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-03 11:11 pm (UTC)The best thing would be for Hermione to educate them on what rights they ought to have and help them dream about what they could achieve and put that into practice. There's no point just arbitrarily freeing them and saying 'job well done', because then what do they do? And it's not going to be effective to pass legislation saying 'house-elves can do what they want, it's their choice' if no house-elves are going to take that opportunity, they have to realize it's what they want to do for themselves, otherwise nothing changes.
Re: Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-04 01:10 am (UTC)The point is, the state of affairs that Rowling presents in the books precludes the majority of Elves even being able to formulate the idea of independence, let alone entrepeneurship. They are uneducated, and have been enslaved for hundreds of years so that no Elf even remembers a time they weren't enslaved.
Add to that a world that by law says that the only thing they can do is be unpaid servants to humans, but only humans who belong to the Wizarding community. There are no laws for the protection of Elves against abusive owners. There is no "Underground Railroad" whereby Elves would have assistance to run away; indeed the whole concept of an Underground Railroad makes no sense, since it seems there is no geographic area they could escape to where Elf slavery is illegal.
So you have a population of sentient beings where hundreds of generations have been born into slavery, and they are told that that is the "natural order" of things, that they have no other reason to exist than to be slaves to superior overlords who are more intelligent than they are, and therefore are better suited to make decisions on the Elves' behalf without consulting with said Elves.
And why would most Elves at that point think that any other option was, well, an option?
What I was saying in my previous post is that a law was enacted by the wizards enslaving elves. Prior to that elves had been free, and had presumably been a free race for millenia.
Even if elven nature compelled them to serve others, if the wizards hadn't made them slaves and elves had instead remained free, then they could have developed a culture of free elves who ran service-related businesses catering not only to wizards but any other creature they chose to serve.
But Rowling gives us a world where Elves are not allowed a choice, and even worse, presents that as being in the Elves best interest.
Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-03 05:34 pm (UTC)It is sending the wrong message, YES!
Saying that since the majority of House Elves are well-taken care of that therefore makes them being SLAVES perfectly alright is like saying that since the majority of slaves in the U.S. were treated well by their owners justified the institution of slavery.
I don't care if a House Elf isn't beaten, has a nice bed to sleep in and gets 3 square meals a day -- they are still SLAVES, they are not free to leave or make any meaningful choices regarding their own lives and how they will live
the way JKR just squashed its complexities and dismissed it does it no favors. Because the way it ends suggests she never meant for it to be this big thing about civil liberties and equal rights and everything, so I'm backtracking from that to assume that she created these beings who are genuinely happy to serve people and derive great pleasure in helping out.
Yes, Rowling has a problem adequately handling any deep, complex, and especially emotional issue, including the issue of slavery in the wizarding world.
The Elves were enslaved back in the 1700s when the Wizarding World imposed rules regarding all nonhuman magikal creatures, so how did the Elves managed to survive and thrive and have their own society before then?
Re: Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-03 11:13 pm (UTC)Re: Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-04 01:29 am (UTC)When I read the books, the way Rowling handled this whole Elf slavery thing, especially the character of Winky, reminded me of the character of the slave Prissy in the movie "Gone With The Wind", played by Butterfly McQueen.
Especially the part when the Union Army is nearby, Prissy runs in to her mistress Scarlet O'Hara, screaming in terror, "Miz Scarlet! Miz Scarlet! De YANKEES is comin'! De YANKEES is comin'!"
Of course the arrival of the Union Army ("Yankees") would result in Prissy being emancipated. She would no longer be a slave.
But instead she's terrified; she can't even formulate in her mind what the concept of freedom means. At most, she knows that Miz Scarlet would no longer "take care of her".
So instead of ecstatically rushing out to greet her liberators, and getting the 40 acres and a mule promised to freed slaves, she instead flees from them in terror, joining her slave owning mistress on a treacherous journey back to the mistress's home plantation where she then endures starvation, and even tho said mistress is not adverse to smacking her around.
Re: Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-04 04:22 am (UTC)Re: Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-04 04:36 am (UTC)And yes, I don't understand how JKR could not understand how disturbing the whole situation is with the house elves either. You and the others have already stated why it is so wrong, so I think that any comment that I might add to that would be redundant.
I don't think we can use JKR's cultural background as an excuse. The U.S. may have a long and bitter history of slavery, but so does Britain. Britain may have abolished slavery earlier than we did, but they still had slaves at one time. Not to mention an entire empire that was based on the subjugation of non-white peoples. So, I really don't know how JKR could have missed the implications.
Re: Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-04 04:22 pm (UTC)Hear! Hear! That is exactly the point I've been trying to make.
When slavery was legal in the United States, many slave owners were not abusive to their slaves...just as those slave owners weren't abusive to their horses, cattle, or purebred hunting dogs.
The slaves were a valuable "investment", therefore many slave owners treated them fairly well, at least as well as their other "livestock"...
But that didn't make slavery any less evil; owning a sentient being and not allowing said sentient being the ability to make decisions regarding their own life is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!
The U.S. may have a long and bitter history of slavery, but so does Britain.
And don't forget that while officially Great Britain did not take sides in the American Civil War, unofficially it sided with the Confederacy, to the point of even sending military "observers" to the Confederate Army.
Britain gave lip service to the evils of slavery, but it damn well needed all that cotton that the American slaves picked, processed, and hauled onto ships...
Re: Slavery in the Wizarding World
Date: 2010-11-04 10:50 pm (UTC)Exactly, and that's how slavery is so terrible. It isn't just abusive towards slaves; it's also degrading. By the very definition of slavery itself, slaves are interchangeable objects. No matter how kind the slave master might have been, there was always the pressing reality of the slave being inhuman and of inferior worth by his or her very status as a slave. Under slavery, people are dehumanized and as such, stripped of any rights that they may have had as human beings. Animals didn't have rights, children didn't have rights, furniture didn't have rights, so why should slaves, which were roughly around the same level as them (and in the cases of white children, even *less,* since the white children would grow up to own them), have any rights either? Why should they even have any feelings that are worth considering?
/And don't forget that while officially Great Britain did not take sides in the American Civil War, unofficially it sided with the Confederacy, to the point of even sending military "observers" to the Confederate Army./
Ah, yes, I forgot to mention that. I think another explanation for Britain siding with the Confederacy may be that Great Britain was hoping that the U.S. would be divided in two, since that would make it less of a threat, so it backed the secessionists.
Non-abusive owners
Date: 2010-11-07 02:56 am (UTC)If Tom was property, he'd end up treated as property even if his first owners acted as though they mistook him for human....