COS Chapter Eight: "The Deathday Party"

[for-diddled.livejournal.com]

* 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!”).

 

Comments

[borg-princess.livejournal.com]

I have a lot of thoughts on the whole 'realistic effects of abuse' thing, mainly because I read this pdf which is like, over a hundred pages on how the series could've been improved if more mature themes were explored by a better writer.

After ten years of abuse and neglect, Harry discovers that he's not only a wizard, but a famous wizard. How does he respond to this? He quickly accepts the situation, and then takes it for granted. At Hogwarts, he goes through the motions, quite comfortable with his mediocre performance in class. He accepts Ron and Hermione as his friends as if having friends is no big deal. His laziness and apathy are presented not as debilitating illnesses resulting from insecurity and depression, but as harmless attributes.

As a result, Harry's years with the Dursleys are revealed as nothing more than manipulation of the reader's sympathies. Harry's childhood ultimately has no effect on Harry's personality.

Harry kills Quirrell, then effectively goes on about his business as if nothing had happened. He destroys the Horcrux diary and a magical basilisk, but experiences no guilt. After years of being constantly attacked, he shows no signs of post traumatic stress.

The result of all this is that Harry begins to seem inhuman.

Philosopher's Stone doesn't pay much attention to Harry's psychological makeup. While we don't want the book to become an introspective character analysis, the current approach seems too close to the opposite extreme. Harry lacks both inner drive and inner demons, is unaffected even by the most horrific events, and seems altogether unexceptional. Thus, it seems fair to say that Book 1 would benefit from paying more attention to Harry's personality.

Let's take a closer look at Harry as we find him in Book 1. He's spent nearly all his life with the Dursleys, where he's been neglected, forced to sleep in a small closet crawling with spiders, tormented by Dudley, treated as unwanted, and generally abused emotionally, if not physically. After ten years of this, what kind of person is he? From what we see in Book 1, he's lackluster at school. He seems to be something of a loner used to living without friends. He seems to have a dispassionate, objective view of the Dursleys, seeing them as nasty, petty people who he doesn't expect to change, but he shows no signs of acting out his rage toward them, nor does he make any effort to earn their affection. Harry doesn't appear to have any dreams of getting away from the Dursleys, never mind any concrete plans to in fact run away. Still, he isn't beat down. Rather, he's strangely unaffected by it all, as if he merely watched someone else experiencing ten years of emotional neglect and abuse.

Surely, any child raised in this environment is going to have psychological problems, most likely serious ones, and those problems aren't going to suddenly vanish once the proximate cause is removed. Harry would have a number of harmful beliefs: that he's worthless, that nothing he does is ever good enough so there's no point trying, that those in authority are not to be trusted, that trying to make friends just leads to painful disappointment, and so forth. None of this is apparent in Harry.

Philosopher's Stone falls prey to a mistake that plagues the entire series; it creates a situation and then trivializes it. The book invents an abusive environment for Harry, makes him live there through his most crucial formative years, and then has him walk away absolutely unaffected. Several times during the series, Dumbledore comments on how amazing this is. It isn't amazing, it's false, shallow, and a slap in the face to anyone who has lived through an abusive or neglectful childhood.

I adore reading essays that don't just blindly praise the series, and actually critically examine areas where it fell short of the mark and all that, so finding this book-length thing was pretty cool.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

I'm so torn! I want that pdf but I have too much to read as it is for now. Gaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

[borg-princess.livejournal.com]

Lol! Well, it's not a one-time offer! If you decide at some later state, you don't have too much on your plate, let me know and I can send it to you!

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Ooh, could I beg the pdf from you, pretty please? That sounds very interesting.

condwiramurs AT ymail DOT com

Thanks!

[borg-princess.livejournal.com]

No problem! I hoped to whet someone's appetite with this snippet, hee! >:D