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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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....