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

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

The ring was a nice touch, I thought, just as it lay in HBP. This dirt-poor, backwards family keeping and cherishing a family heirloom when it could have been sold to provide... well, anything better than that shack or, maybe tomorrow's meal if Burke got hold of it. It put some human sentimentality under the obnoxious pride.

I could go with three Founders' Artifacts with Voldy deliberately cutting out Gryffindor (the way the books cut Slytherin off, in fact) or, being foiled in the attempt to gain the fourth. I could also go for Tom's diary and maybe a couple of other things like the trophy as his Horcruxes, which would be separate from the Hallows.

I would hazard that she had some idea of relics from early on just because this sort of story screams for them. We have the Sorting Hat from the beginning, we have reverence toward the Founders from the beginning, why not have more relics from them that have some significance aside from being school property? We also have other artifacts in the books - the Sorcerer's Stone, the diary, the dragons' eggs in GoF come to mind. Even if they're not outed as relics or artifacts (eggs), they play roles in the plot. (Yes, like game tokens sometimes.) I just don't think she knew what the Really Important to the Series artifacts would be.

I also think she meant to use the Founders' artifacts as Hallows in the beginning but got a wild hair sometime later on and switched things around so that the hat and the sword did play roles as Hogwarts protection devices but not playing on the originally intended uses for the other Founders' relics. I think she ended up destroying those relics (leaving only Gryffindor's relics to the school, which gives another creepy reading about Place in the Potterverse now that I think of it) instead of using them in similar ways to the Gryffindor relics.

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, oh dear. The Sorting Hat Horcrux. That was *such* a promising theory. There's your Gryffindor artifact, hiding in plain sight where Tom could get at it. And an artifact that has control of which child goes where, to boot. I'll admit that after she announced the DHs title I didn't have a *lot* of confidence about Rowling going there--although I wouldn't have been astonished if she had, she could be tricky enough to pull that, and might have pulled it off.

Yes, the ring and the locket worked quite well as the symbols of the fallen fortunes of the Gaunts, exactly as they were presented in HBP. And it played quite smoothly that Tom would have stolen the ring and made it into a horcrux. Which is exactly what Tom *would* have done with it. We knew that by the end of the book. It was suddenly giving it a makeover along with Harry's cloak in the following book and trying to pretend that *one* story of Beedle's was real that takes some swallowing. I mean, are we supposed to believe that the other four stories in Beedle are also real?

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Maybe the other stories are supposed to be metaphorical for real stories, like the Little Jack Horner rhyme is supposed to be a fictionalization of a real incident of document stealing.

But, really, I don't think Rowling ever meant to go anywhere near there.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Well, the other Beedle stories were only made up after the publication of DH. She rather regretted throwing in the Rabbity Babbity title in the story. At some point she was thinking of writing more, but the 4 already mentioned by Ron in DH were too hard to come up with already.

[aasaylva.livejournal.com]

I think she ended up destroying those relics (leaving only Gryffindor's relics to the school, which gives another creepy reading about Place in the Potterverse now that I think of it)
OMG, you are right - I never caught onto that! And another prove for JKR's fundamentalist views along the line of "Oh islam fundies are SO evil - not because they want everybody to convert to their own ideas but because they don't want everybody to have OUR ideas!"

[oryx_leucoryx]

We do know the diadem amplifies intelligence (the way the sword gives more power to the brave), which is another approach to a crisis at Hogwarts. Perhaps the cup was meant to amplify cooperation among those who shared a drink. I'm not sure how the locket would fit in.

[sunnyskywalker]

Maybe it's a bit like the conch in Lord of the Flies - whoever's wearing the locket gets to talk and lead, and this inspires ambitious kids to be worthy of wearing the locket someday. Or maybe its movie projection abilities were part of the original enchantments, and you're supposed to use the locket to show people your vision so they'll get excited about helping you out.

The Founders' protections against crises

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

I like this interpretation, but it does raise the question of why none of the other objects are as tightly bound to Hogwarts itself as the sword is. The diadem is understandable: Helena could easily have stolen it after her mother had completed the functional enchantments but before she could add the full set of security features we see on Gryffindor's sword, such as the 'can be summoned any time from anywhere through the hat' trick. (Would Ravenclaw have used the hat as well for convenience and as a show of solidarity, or would she have had an entirely different retrieval system?)

The cup and locket, on the other hand, seem to have been family heirlooms from the start. They only became famous because they were associated with such famous people - if they have any intrinsic magic of their own (and they likely do) its precise nature seems to have been lost in time.

It's just as possible that the other founders wove their own protections into Hogwarts castle itself - just because they're not as flashy as Gyffindor doesn't mean they wouldn't have been just as (if not more) effective.

Rowena is said to have designed the moving staircases. True, they're random and irritating now (or at least seem so - it's possible that there is an underlying logic to them that has been lost over the centuries) but if you could program the stairs to continue moving in seemingly random patterns, but in such a way that they will *never* allow access to the secure portions of the castle, that would be an excellent way to disorient and frustrate an opponent, especially if it was a muggle army like some hypothesize Slytherin was afraid of. There's also the fact that there's no apparating or disapparating inside Hogwarts. Even though we've seen house elves able to get around those wards, there's no proof that *goblins* would be able to, and they were (at least later, though possibly originally) one of the wizards' main threats.

All of this also applies to the walls which pretend to be doors.

Slytherin supposedly had his Chamber and the basilisk inside (though from all the evidence we have it might have been a tribute to him made after he left). If the castle's occupants could be evacuated to a safe location - another wing, or somewhere else entirely by floo or portkey - then a basilisk would be a devastating advantage for whoever controlled it. Or it might just have been a pet.

We know less about Hufflepuff than any of the others. We're told that she was somehow involved in setting up the kitchens and that some of her recipes are still used in the present day iirc. I tend to picture her as the more quietly practical one. Letting the other founders focus on the flashier defenses while she calmly worked every charm against plague, illness and disease that she could manage into the hospital wing, along every spell she knew to improve health and outlook. Then, extending them out to the the rest of the castle and grounds as best she could. I imagine she also enchanted the pantries against rot, mold, and pests, and maybe even invented or crafted some containers that would automatically multiply whatever foodstuffs they were filled with, to be sure the castle inhabitants would never fear starvation.

Hmm... now I'm really curious as to how the founders planned to defend Hogwarts. I know Rowling can't be bothered with niggling little details like the history that led her world to be what it is, but does anyone remember any canon details about that could be evidence of Hogwart's natural defenses?

Re: The Founders' protections against crises

[sunnyskywalker]

The Giant Squid and the merpeople, maybe? They don't seem to have done much lately, and maybe any alliance with the merpeople is long defunct, but the Squid looks an awful lot like the Watcher in the Water before the Gates of Moria. Or maybe it's supposed to keep the basilisk from getting out via the plumbing, which we know dumps directly into the lake. On second thought, maybe that's why the plumbing dumps out into the lake (presumable after passing through some sanitation charms... maybe Helga set up the prototype): so the basilisk can get out and glare at any aquatic intruders. This is assuming that Hogwarts had some sort of original plumbing system which got modified into what we see over the years.

There's also that odd moment in GoF when the Durmstrang ship pops up out of the lake, presumably after going in another one near their school. Is there some sort of lake equivalent to the Floo network? And if so, how is that secured, besides letting the Squid crush any ships which aren't authorized (and how do they tell it?)?

We know there are magical wards of some kind which Dumbledore deactivates while they fly over the walls; those might be part of the new and enhanced enchantments for that year, but on the other hand, some of the "new" enchantments might just be reactivations and rejiggerings of older ones that haven't been needed lately. What they are, I don't know. Illusions that lead you in the wrong direction? Giant bug zappers? The gate with the winged boar statues might be more than they appear; if the suits of armor can fight, the flying pigs probably can too, for starters.

I like your ideas on Helga's practical improvements! Maybe she's the one who insisted on adequate plumbing (not all that widespread in England 1000 years ago), maybe based on some old Roman villas still secretly in use or something.

Re: The Founders' protections against crises

[oryx_leucoryx]

Helga was the one who brought the elves to Hogwarts. They are an emergency rescue team when they aren't cooking or cleaning.

Re: The Founders' protections against crises

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

So how old is the squid then? Do we have any idea how long it's been there?

I love the idea about an alliance with the merpeople. Just because wizards today are blinkered bigots doesn't all wizards through history were. On top of that, the founders *were* supposed to be visionaries. Maybe the lake-to-lake to transport that Durmstrang used was originally set up as an escape route for the castle's aquatic allies?

Re: The Founders' protections against crises

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Another thought: it's been theorized that The Marauder's Map functions by tapping into the school's extant defenses/magic. Any theories as to what the original spells might have been? A map (or other device) that tracks all souls on Hogwarts' grounds seems to be regarded as a rather impressive invention, and the concept is never implied to have been copied from somewhere else.

Re: The Founders' protections against crises

[majorjune.livejournal.com]

I know Rowling can't be bothered with niggling little details like the history that led her world to be what it is

Which is a shame, because a "prequel" covering the founding of Hogwarts is just crying out to be written...

Re: The Founders' protections against crises

[oryx_leucoryx]

Recently swythyv suggested the 'locket' was actually a pair of basilisk-goggles. Lockets did not exist in the founders' days, the object was misidentified by people who had no idea what it was.
Also, she noticed that the DADA office is the closest one to the bathroom that guards the entrance to the Chamber. That may have been Salazar's original office. So perhaps the idea was that the DADA prof with the magical eye-protection sets the basilisk on enemies. But Salazar left and the goggles became a family heirloom.

[sunnyskywalker]

I was pretty horrified when we got to find the amazing lost diadem only to burn it up instantly. She could have played it up, made it one of Tom's great evils that he ruined these amazing objects - but she didn't, so it came across as creepy like that. Or if these things are so special, surely there ought to be ways to repair them after they've been de-Horcruxed? I mean, if the Sorting Hat can survive being set on fire...

[aasaylva.livejournal.com]

I hear you. Between Binns' history classes turning out to be just as irrelevant as Harry in his infinite wisdom had always taken them to be and the callous destruction of 1000 year old magical artefacts I wonder what Rowling's attitude towards history really is. Knowing she belongs to some sort of "keep the traditional measuring units of Britain!" movement makes it even stranger... To me, it suggests she likes old things just for the sake of nostalgic cosyness but beware of ever learning something from it or even question anything beyond the certainty that "we've always been the good guys and anyone opposing us - eo ipso - is evil".

[sunnyskywalker]

It seems like she thinks "history" is "a bunch of random stuff with no connection to anything," plus some nifty little nostalgic bits like quills, which makes me want to go all cartoony and shake my fists. It's like she can't envision that these historical figures were actually people existing in an actual world which fit together, just like today, and the stuff they did affected stuff later. But then, she can't remember to have Harry know the same healing charms in DH that he did in HBP, or have the escaped and rapidly multiplying Dementors actually do anything, so obviously connecting the dots about things not staying in isolated bubbles isn't her strong suit in writing.