OOTP Chapter One: "Dudley Demented"

[for-diddled.livejournal.com]

* So, having done COS, I thought I’d have a bash at Harry Potter and the Capslock Button of Doom, or Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix it's sometimes called.

 

* OOTP was where the series started to jump the shark for me. Prior to it, Harry had been a fairly bland but basically nice boy; after JKR discovered the capslock button, though, he went rapidly downhill. IIRC, this is the first book where I started actually disliking Harry.

* No, Harry, I don’t think the neighbours avoid you because of your scruffiness. More likely, it’s due to your egoism, recklessness, unfriendliness and general lack of empathy.

* Well done, Harry! Truly, thinking to hide somewhere where your relatives can’t see you is a masterstroke of genius, indicative of a brilliant mind.

* Is it possible to grind your teeth loud enough to drown out the sound of a TV? Anyway, I shudder to think of what the Dursleys’ teeth must be like. Wouldn’t all that grinding wear them down something terrible?

* For all that JK Rowling seems to link Dudley’s lack of interest in the news to a general lack of moral virtue, it should perhaps be pointed out that Harry only follows the news because he thinks it might involve him, rather than out of any general desire to find out what’s happening in the wider would.

* Given that Harry’s apparently ignored and maltreated at home, you might expect him to be glad of Mrs. Figg inviting him to tea. This seems to be one of the occasions when JKR’s desire to make Harry into a normal everyman character clashes with what a real person in his situation would be like.

* According to Harry, the Dursleys are “astonishingly stupid”. I’ll just pause there to let the irony of that description sink in.

* Dudley and his gang go around vandalising, smoking and throwing stones at people. Yep, it’s a jungle out there on the mean streets of middle-class, suburban Surrey.

* “‘Give ’em a lifelong siesta, I would,’ snarled Uncle Vernon.” Just to remind us all that he’s racist, and therefore evil. Unlike Rubeus “There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad that wasn’t in Slytherin” Hagrid, Albus “Good Slytherins really belong in Gryffindor” Dumbledore, or indeed Harry “Squib-hexer” Potter.

* A helicopter’s almost crashed in Surrey. Wiltshire’s the next county but one. Just thought I’d point that out… :p

* “Look,” said the neighbours, “that Potter boy’s grubbing around in the dirt again. Better stay away from him, he might turn violent if we come too near.”

* Uncle Vernon is trying to strangle Harry, just like Homer does in The Simpsons, providing yet more evidence that the Dursleys’ treatment of Harry is just cartoon violence, not meant to be taken seriously.

* Harry’s already using outraged italics on the Dursleys. Fortunately, though, we’ve so far been spared the ANGRY CAPSLOCK OF RAGE!

* How does Harry know that the sound was made by someone apparating? It may have sounded like it; but, given that Harry’s been thinking about magic a lot recently, he’d be quite likely to think that about any loud noise.

* Harry does eventually conclude that he’s mistaken, which is impressive given that Hermione isn’t here to tell him what to think.

* Does it not occur to Harry that Voldemort’s rise might appear in the wizard papers as it would in the Muggle ones – i.e., a series of unexplained disappearances, the significance of which has not yet been realised? Why assume that the front page will be the only place to find information? Although I suppose that NewspaperReading!Harry wouldn’t give Hermione the chance to make a long expository speech in a later chapter, so on second thoughts it’s no wonder that idea was dumped.

* These next four paragraphs really encapsulate all the problems with LaterBooks!Harry. We have the inability to come to the most obvious conclusions (hey, Harry, do you think that the reason Ron and Hermione aren’t telling you anything is that they’re worried their owls might be intercepted, just like they say in their letters?), the angriness and lack of proportion (yeah, Harry, throw those chocolates away! That’ll show ’em!), and the unjustifiable sense of entitlement (I saw Voldemort come back, therefore I deserve a key role in the war!).

* “Nevertheless, it was quite galling to be told not to be rash by a man who had served twelve years in the wizard prison, Azkaban, escaped, attempted to commit the murder he had been convicted for in the first place, then gone on the run with a stolen Hippogriff.” All this, of course, proves that Sirius is not in fact rash: a truly rash person wouldn’t have been able to plan ahead enough to escape Azkaban in the first place; and, even if he did so, would almost certainly not be able to avoid the largest manhunt in recent wizarding history for almost a year.

* “How could Dumbledore have forgotten him so easily?” Thus commences Harry’s “jilted lover” act, which will last right up until the end of the book.

* I quite like the word “wending”. It adds a certain old-fashioned charm which seems to fit well with the quasi-Victorian wizarding world.

* Nice to see JK Rowling equating becoming a boxing champion, with all the self-discipline and hard work that implies, with juvenile delinquency.

* Come to think of it, why’s learning to box inherently more likely to lead to petty crime than, say, attending the Hogwarts duelling club? Both teach skills that could be turned towards negative ends, after all.

* Harry’s longing to vent his frustration on Dudley’s gang. As Jesus once said, “If your enemy slaps you on the face, just turn the other cheek. Unless you’re feeling irritated and you want to vent a bit of anger, of course, in which case you can use your magical powers to provoke him into a fight which you’re guaranteed to win, and proceed to seriously kick arse.”

* All the houses of Privet Drive have “perfectly manicured lawns”. Clearly mowing your lawn is a sign of great inner evil.

* Actually, magically replicating the effects of a Dementor attack on his cousin would be totally IC for Harry. His behaviour often reminds me of that quote from Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: “Bullying is wrong. But destroying someone’s mind with magic is A-OK.”

* Do Dementors normally make you go blind? I don’t remember that from other books; or, at least, I don’t remember it being emphasised as much as it is here.

* Erm Harry, what’s so unbelievable about Dementors in Little Whingeing? The wizarding and Muggle worlds are one and the same, after all, so there’s nothing to stop them from gliding over to your place – it’s not like Lucy Pevensie suddenly finding a talking beaver in her home in England, for example. And you know that Voldemort is back, you know that he’s been obsessed with killing you for the past fourteen years, you know that the Dementors used to work for him and might well go over to his side again. Is it really so difficult to put two and two together and work out that Voldemort might have turned some Dementors and sent them to try and kill you? That would be wrong, but still a reasonable conclusion to reach.

 

Comments

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

I still don't get it. Was she so stupid as to really believe she needed all that turned out to be mere filler? Or were HBP asnd DH completely different from what she originally intended? Or could she just not bear to throw something away she'd already written just because it had cost some effort?

My opinion leans toward the latter; I think she'd made the commitment in her mind as to what the ending would entail, including the Hallows, however unformed they may have been when she first started writing Book 1.

I think that over the course of 5 books she lost sight of what she'd originally envisioned, and found herself needing to shoehorn the narrative back onto track after she'd finished Book 5 and realized she now only had two books left to get to the goalposts she'd originally set for herself.

What a more mature writer would have done would have been to sit back, calmly assess the five books that were completed, and made modifications for the last two books so that they fit into the existing narrative. Instead she stuck to her original vision, which resulted in the last two books having an "out from left field" feel...

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

I think she'd made the commitment in her mind as to what the ending would entail, including the Hallows, however unformed they may have been when she first started writing Book 1.

We've touched on this before, I think, but I really have to challenge you on that. Show me a sign - just one! - of a Hallow before book 7. I don't think you can.

And if Rowling did know anything about the Hallows before she sat down to right the final novel in 2006 then she would have surely put in some foreshadowing in the earlier books. She'd done it before with other artifacts of her magical world. It makes for better storytelling, more complex and satisfying novels. There's absolutely no reason not to foreshadow something that's already planned, and acknowledgement all round that to do so makes for superior storytelling.

It's just that she hadn't planned the Hallows at all prior to writing the seventh book.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Show me a sign - just one! - of a Hallow before book 7.

There is talk about the philosophical aspect, about the need to accept death as the next adventure, and there is his friendship with Flamel. So perhaps she had Albus in her head as one who at one point sought immortality or something related but learned a bitter lesson. However considering all the situations when someone sees or otherwise perceives Harry while he is under the cloak I seriously doubt that Rowling ever planned for the cloak to be part of a set of uber-magical items that are related to immortality. IOW she may have had some vague idea but not how it was supposed to be applied in practice.

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

IOW she may have had some vague idea but not how it was supposed to be applied in practice.

Yes, that.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

We've had hints from the beginning that a wand was going to be important. Not a single hint, all the way through, that an invisibility cloak is anything but an invisibility cloak, or that there was anything special about Harry's--apart from the fact that the bloody things are supposed to be rare (Mad-eye Moody has two of them, but one of those was originally Barty Crouch's). The ring doesn't even show up until HBP, and although the Peverills were mentioned in connection with it, there wasn't even a blip on the screen about the resurection stone. In fact the whole resurection stone thread reads like it was shoehorned in after the fact when she sat down to write DHs.

No, I agree, there is no evidence to suggest that the Hallows were anything other than a last-minute plot token invented as a deus ex machina for a final resolution. Plenty of hints that a wand was going to be crutial, but that in itself doesn't indicate the Hallows.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

If wearing the ring makes people see their dearly departed, why didn't Marvolo see ghosts?

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

And what about TOM wearing it? Sluggy said he flashed it around, IIRC, but wasn't apparently having chats with anyone incorporeal.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

That's another glitch. You have to take it off and turn it in your hand in order to call the dead. Just wearing it doesn't do it.

Of course that's according to Beedle, who we have no evidence ever had possession of any of the Hallows. He may have made that part up to make it all sound more mysterious, or make it sound more like a *story*. That's one of the problems with stories that end up being true. You can't depend on what you are told in them, because you don't know where they've been...

In fact it sounds like it would be perfectly in keeping for Death to have booby-trapped the stone so that holding alone it would make you see ghosts, to the point that *there was no getting rid of them*. Which would drive you nuts eventually. Maybe setting the stone in a ring to keep it from making contact with your skin was the whole idea behind that.

But you might still see them whenever you brushed your hand across it. Unless they had to be called *deliberately*. Which seems to be the case. Harry wasn't *wearing* the ring on his march through the forest. And when he dropped it all the shades disappeared.

[oryx_leucoryx]

It doesn't, you have to turn it in your hand three times, like the legend said and like Harry did. And you can't turn in your hands a ring with a huge stone if you are wearing it.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

So, then, why did DD put it on? I thought - but, maybe, it's fandom again - that he put it on to see Ariana. He would know how to properly use the ring since he was such a big Hallows fan.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Well, Terri's idea is that he turned the ring over 3 times, he actually saw 'Ariana' and she convinced him that if he just put the ring on everything will be alright, he'll see the proof that she has forgiven him or something along the lines. IOW anyone who activates the ring is driven to suicide one way or the other.

[ioanna-ioannina.livejournal.com]

Maybe it burnt him, when he was turning it in his hand? (I don´t remember, who told he got burned because he put it on, Snape? If so, Snape was not there, so it could be only a guess.)

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

Plenty of hints that a wand was going to be crutial ...

And when it came down to finishing things she couldn't even do the wand trick without repudiating the wand lore she'd employed for the first six books.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Right. Which is maddening. Incapable of consistency, like I said.

[sharaz-jek.livejournal.com]

And if Rowling did know anything about the Hallows before she sat down to right the final novel in 2006 then she would have surely put in some foreshadowing in the earlier books.

Other than the clues about Snape being good, the twin wand cores, and the mention of Grindelwald in PS (if that even counts as foreshadowing), I can't think of a single climax-related plot point in any book that was foreshadowed prior to the book in which it was important. I'm not convinced she had even the slightest clue on how to structure a proper arc plot.

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced she had even the slightest clue on how to structure a proper arc plot.

I'm pretty sure she didn't have a clue. Even though the series was supposed to comprise a seven-year arc each book was pretty much written as a stand-alone effort. The last is the most egregious example of Rowling's failure in this area; in that book, like none other, the previous elements of the series should have been drawn together, closed, completed. Instead she wrote DH just like all of its predecessors; brand new gimmicks inserted to help Harry over the humps.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

One could argue that the importance of Sirius Black's relationship to Harry was foreshadowed by Hagrid pointing out that he lent him the motorbike in PS/SS. That's a debatable example, perhaps. But generally, yeah, not much else.

[oryx_leucoryx]

OTOH there are characters 'foreshadowed' that don't show up, like Molly's accountant squib cousin who was supposed to have a magical daughter that was supposed to show up in GOF. And plenty of names dropped that turn out to be completely minor characters (like Dedalus Diggle) or not at all (whole list of Ministry workers that Arthur introduces to the kids, of whom only Bode shows up in a later book. So it isn't clear if the mention of young Sirius Black who gave Hagrid the motorbike was originally intended to be a close friend of the Potters or was just one of several names that got dropped by in PS and Rowling decided to develop later, when she figured out how the Potters hid and how they got found out. (And was Scabbers intended all along to be Peter the traitor? OTOH was Susan Bones originally intended to have a bigger role as a survivor of a family that Voldemort killed?

[cyotix.livejournal.com]

I think the fact that Scabbers and Sirius didn't turn out to be dud characters like those you listed are a big indication that she had Books 1-3 planned out.

As for Susan Bones, I remember that was mostly due to her appearances in the movie franchise (her actress was the director's daughter) and the fandom just jumped on the bandwagon believing she was going to be significant. The same happened to poor Mark Evans (who appears in Chapter 1 of OOTP) because he shared a last name with Lily.

[oryx_leucoryx]

As for Susan Bones, I remember that was mostly due to her appearances in the movie franchise

Well, the Bones family is mentioned by Hagrid as among those fine wizards that opposed Voldemort and got killed. So Susan joins Harry, Neville, Ron and the Slytherin trio as young characters with first war connections - except she was never developed. (At some point the Boneses that got killed were supposed to be her grandparents but later became her uncle and his family.) It looks like a story that got cut out - like Fortescue the ice cream guy.

[cyotix.livejournal.com]

There were too many students with connections to the first war. I think she even said at one time Dean Thomas had a pureblood dad that was killed by DEs. I don't think there was much of a story there for Dean Thomas or Susan Bones, it was just backstory cruft that probably went nowhere like the members of the Order that were mentioned briefly in OOTP.