(no subject)

[ladyhadhafang.livejournal.com]

Am I the only one a little bothered by Dumbledore? Not only with the fact he could end up in the Guinness Book Of World Records for "Most Incompetent Headmaster of All Time" (though I'm sure there's worse. :P), but also because...he just bugs me. I know JKR was trying to write him as the "flawed Yoda", so to speak (and to be fair, he's nowhere near Yoda. XD), but it's also how...preachy he gets. Towards Fudge, for example. You know, in Goblet of Fire, with, "You place too much importance on purity of blood, yadda yadda et cetera et cetera" -- which considering how he treated Tom Riddle and the Slytherins is...slightly hypocritical isn't it? Probably bad writing on JKR's part, though. :/

Anyways, sorry 'bout the rambling. Thoughts?

Comments

Re: Why Lily Was Not an Oppressed Minority, Part 1

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

I don't mean to equate the struggle of LGBTs and religious believers to hide themselves in order to avoid persecution to Lily's simple option of pretending to be a Muggle, since I know that one is real while the other is fictional. It's just that I'm not sure if Lily's option would be so simple. Magic is an intrinsic part of her and I'm not sure that it would be so easy for her to live in a world where she'd be forced to deny who she is just to hide from people who are prejudiced against her.

I'm not suggesting she would need to deny who she is all the time. She could be like Samantha on Bewitched and use her magic at home. And as I said, she's perfectly willing to abandon her non-magical family of origin for a cushy life in the wizarding world, so if she can deny that part of herself without apparent undue distress, I find it hard to believe she'd suffer much by not using her magic in public.

As for non-magical people's being prejudiced against her, we see no evidence of that in canon. It's asserted all the time that using magic in front of non-magical people is dangerous, but we never see any magicals suffering adverse consequences for publicly using their powers (which may make this the biggest example of Rowling's habit of telling rather than showing). In fact, when Severus meets Lily, she's using her magic right in the middle of a public playground! Since Petunia tells Lily to watch herself, we can safely assume Lily's done that before--and apparently nobody's ever threatened or attacked her for it, or she wouldn't still be flaunting her powers in public. Nowadays, if a person saw a someone using magic in public, the witness would probably just think they were seeing things or imagining it. They'd be unlikely to talk about it, if only because they wouldn't want to be regarded as delusional. So I just can't see that Lily would lose much by abandoning the wizarding world for normal society.