OOTP Chapter Seven: "The Ministry of Magic"

[for-diddled.livejournal.com]

* Jeans and a t-shirt seems like quite a scruffy combination for a hearing, even if they are freshly laundered. Doesn’t Harry have a suit or something he could wear?

* So why is it again that moving Harry to No. 12 required a small battalion of witches and wizards to keep him safe, but taking him to the Ministry requires just one middle-aged guy?

* Kudos to Mr. Weasley for getting excited about automatic ticket machines, instead of just assuming that they’re an inferior substitute for magic like everyone else does. Still, it does make one wonder why he hasn’t learnt more about Muggle technology.

* To enter the Ministry, type 62442. This is where the letters MAGIC are on a numberpad. Just thought I’d point that out.

* Nothing triumphalist about that Statue of Magical Harmony at all, is there? Still, it does make the pureblood supremacists look a bit less bad. Wizards clearly think that they’re better than sapient magical creatures; all Mr. Malfoy et al. want to do is add sapient non-magical creatures to the statue.

* So does St. Mungo’s rely on charity to keep itself afloat, then? ’Cause you’d have thought that the WW would be able to fund at least one hospital, especially if it’s literally the only hospital available to them. But then, why get people to donate to it at all, if you can just fund it out of general taxation? And why would people put coins in the well? After all, you never hear people saying “I think the NHS is such a good thing, I’m going to voluntary pay more tax to help fund it.”

* And do we ever see the Department for Experimental Breeding investigate Hagrid?

* An “Official Gobstones Club” just sounds silly to me. Yes, let’s have all these senior governmental officials using public office space to play a game which squirts foul-smelling liquid into your face! I mean, I get that the HP books have a lot of whimsy in them, but the series is supposed to be growing up at this point. Official Gobstones Clubs just don’t fit with the serious atmosphere JKR’s trying to create.

* Does a society as small as the WW really need such a big government? Or are they all just so stupid that they need two bureaucrats to every normal citizen to constantly tell them what to do?

* The fact that the Goblin Liaison Office is part of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magic Creatures should tell you all you need to know about the wizarding world’s mindset when it comes to other sentient beings.

* If it’s any consolation, though, the Goblins do control the WW’s only bank. I bet they laugh about the wizards whilst secretly holding the Minister to ransom by threatening to use their power to take down the entire wizarding economy.

* A bit like Jews in anti-Semitic literature, now that I come to think of it. Normally, I’d just brush this off as a coincidence, and say that anyone trying to compare Goblins and Jews is reading too much into the text. In light of the fact that Rowling constantly bludgeons us over the head with her heavy-handed Nazi analogies, though…

* Oh, and now they have a “Muggle-Worthy Excuse Committee” as part of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. Once again, “Muggle” is being used as a term of abuse, despite the fact that it’s the Wizarding World, not the Muggle, which is a corrupt, authoritarian, nepotistic dictatorship which breeds Dark Lords like a rotting log breeds toadstools.

* Once again, though, it makes the Pureblood Supremacists look a bit better. After all, if you were brought up to believe that Muggles were inherently stupid, wouldn’t you want to keep their (no doubt equally stupid) offspring at arm’s length?

* In fact, sod it – the Supremacists are actually better than mainstream society. At least their sense of superiority is consistent with their society’s views on Muggles – none of that hypocritical “Oh, Muggles are stupid and inferior – but whatever you do, don’t say so!” crap.

* And now I’m going to shut up on the topic for the rest of this chapter, lest my blood pressure climbs to unhealthy levels.

* Percy appears to have walked out of the photograph. So does this mean that magical photographs are able to know and react to events around them? But how would Photo!Percy have known about the argument? And isn’t there a scene later in the book when Moody shows Harry a picture of the Order of the Phoenix, and Harry thinks something along the lines of “They had no idea that they’d shortly be killed”? Probably Arthur’s removed his son himself.

* So why was the hearing time changed? Was it just to discredit Harry by making him look too arrogant to show up to his own hearing? But then, surely it would emerge that he was meant to turn up several hours later, thereby defeating the purpose of the change?

 

Comments

[madderbrad.livejournal.com]

If Rowling wanted Harry to do was fight one dark wizard, why did she set all this up and then not follow through?

In addition to "it would be complicated and I didn't put that in the outline"? Hmm.

You got me wondering at that. Why wasn't Voldemort just another dark lord? Rowling wanted to set Harry up as (a) someone special, and (b) as the hero who is 'connected' to the dark lord. Which wraps the story into the whole mythical 'destined to fight' thing.

(She did the same with Dumbledore/Grindelwald too.)

But why the whole 'blood purity' movement? Because she needed some excuse/way for Voldemort to recruit minions? But she could have just set him up as a bank robber with a very good health plan. :-)

Because she wanted to clearly establish that Voldemort was BAD - not just an enemy of society, but EVIL? But being a murdering dark lord would automatically establish that.

I don't know. Maybe she just picked 'racism' as the most contemporary issue to copy. She really didn't do too much with it. A couple of taunts from Draco against Hermione and that's about it until the last book where we are told muggle-born are being put in concentration camps off page. Oh, and Hermione gets to be first in line for a spot of torture.

Maybe she wanted to set things up from the start with we muggle readers being firmly against Voldemort - who is firmly against us. But muggles barely appear in the story.

(And that WOULD be because it would have made everything too difficult to write. Like all those many fan fiction stories that introduce guns and modern armaments into the wizarding world and quickly bog down.)

But if Rowling was jumping from bullet point to bullet point --

Which is most definitely the case, at least for the last book, which was either Harry going to A to B to C to collect the information we needed on the Hallows ... or otherwise massive information dumps on the latest gimmicks or what Voldemort was doing.

... it would be easy not to realize what might have been going through his head during that time.

Towards the end I don't think Rowling could see anything but the immediate narrow path of where she wanted Harry to go to get him across the finish line.

When it comes down to it, it would have been trivial for Rowling to put in a sentence or two into the epilogue at how Harry & Co. *improved* things in general, at how wizarding society as a whole had gotten better over those 19 years. Hermione's success at passing house elf legislation, werewolves being integrated into society, anything. But she didn't.

Which leads me back to thinking that she just simply didn't care about such things, or didn't see them. Dark Lord attacks boy, boy becomes hero, hero vanquishes dark lord, boys awarded their girls, the end.

[sunnyskywalker]

Yeah, I don't think she really tried to engage with the issue much, otherwise we would have at the very least seen Hermione have more trouble than the occasional insult. I can't remember who suggested that she could have had some cute goblin kid getting on the Hogwarts express in the background in the epilogue so we could infer that the wizarding world had improved, but it shows how trivially easy it would have been for her to do something like that.

Maybe she did glom onto racism as a button to hit that would make readers go "okay, he's even more bad than a regular mass murderer." Although she could have just had his animal cruelty be consistent and bring it in earlier than the HBP revelation about the other kid's rabbit. Having Voldemort kick puppies would be cheap, but not any more so than dragging in the giant issue of racism as scenery and then pushing it offstage once it gets inconvenient. (Plus then we'd have to wonder about the ethics of Fred and George feeding salamanders firecrackers and all that.)

What other recruiting tactic could he have used, if she didn't go with the blood purity thing? Because there usually is some ostensible "plan" even in real-world equivalents besides just "whee, killing is fun! join me!" I suppose she could have made it more of an internal wizarding power struggle - maybe she could have tweaked her racism metaphor, actually, and had Voldemort's party be about suppressing the other magical races more while the... Dumbledore party, I guess... think it would be bad to cut down the centaurs' forest and that the goblins shouldn't be denied wands, and that werewolves who take their medicine or some other measures to keep from eating people (like locking themselves up during full moon) should be treated like regular people. Although then we'd probably have goblins in concentration camps in DH instead of Muggleborns, and the WWII parallels were already horribly anvilicious as it was. Hm. Maybe just straight-up democracy vs. fascism, which is always popular with readers? Voldemort and co. think using Imperius on wizarding world citizens to reduce crime and make the trains run on time is a good thing for law and order (and Obliviating any magical folks who were about to go public with dirt on the DEs), and the designated good guys don't like that idea at all.

Harry was practically just a camera for us to look through by the end. Almost literally during the Voldiecam scenes, which had to break all kids of rules of common sense and logic to exist so very conveniently.

JKR and heavy handed analogies

[urbanman1984.livejournal.com]

JKR lacked the skill to build a story with themes of democracy versus fascism *or any type of totalitarianism*.

Alan Moore was able to make a picture book about a ruthless anarchist fighting a neo-nazi government and his story did not insult the reader's intelligence by making out that all the categories were simple. The anarchist is only just less terrible than the government officials who are his primary targets. JKR never had the imagination or the grit to write about a story where everything is meant to be in shades of grey and the protagonist is himself an acknowledged bad guy. She only knows the motto: "IOIAGDI!"

Re: JKR and heavy handed analogies

[sunnyskywalker]

Yeah, I mean, she couldn't even handle Good Guys vs. Nazis. *sigh* We can dream about what a more talented JKR might have done, though! (She wouldn't even have to be much more talented if we're not aiming for great, just "decent." Democracy vs. Fascism is so overused as it is, you can use a lot of short cuts for a workmanlike product.)