deathtocapslock | OOTP Chapter Twenty-One: "The Eye of the Snake" (Reply)

* I’m going on holiday tomorrow, so I’m putting this
up a bit earlier than usual.

* Fred and George bewitch a snowball to fly into
Ron’s face. I’m surprised he doesn’t think to dock points for that. I’m sure we
saw Percy taking points off Ron in COS.

* Hermione stood outside Hagrid’s door for over half
an hour? Man, that girl’s determined. I’d have given up after a couple of
minutes.

* Of course, she’ll show her determination later on
in the series, when she successfully plots to ensnare Ron.

* Hermione can do a warming spell to dry out her
clothes. Is this the only time in canon we see such a spell being used? Because
it seems to me that people ought to be using it all the time.

* Also, why is it that Hogwarts children learn
useless things like how to turn a rabbit into a pair of slippers, but never
anything that might be useful, like drying or cleaning spells?

* I think it’s interesting that JKR recognises Hagrid’s
incompetence as a teacher here. That woman can do good characterisation when
she sets her mind to it – Malfoy’s story in HBP, for example, is quite
realistic and well-done – but it seems that most of the time she’s too blinded
to the faults of her heroes to write them well. Which might be why the minor
characters whom she can allow herself to write as having both good and bad
qualities (e.g., Percy, Mr. Crouch) generally come across as more realistic.

* Harry is worried about “Malfoy and his cronies”.
Malfoy, as a Slytherin, can’t have proper friends; they’re always cronies,
minions, servants, goons, and so on.

* Ironically, though, it’s Harry who has friends who
are terrified of contradicting him, not Malfoy.

* Malfoy gets all panicky when he hears Hagrid
saying “they prefer the dark”. Because as well as being snobbish, weak, and
generally outshone by Harry in literally everything he does, he has to be a
coward as well.

* “‘Mind yer own business!’ said Hagrid, angrily.”
Yup, that’s really going to allay the pupils’ fears and make Hagrid look like a
responsible adult.

* On second thoughts, I’m acting as if Hagrid
actually cares about allaying pupils’ fears or looking like a responsible adult.
Ignore that.

* I don’t see how people can be so terrified of
Hagrid’s lessons and still learn much from them. That man clearly needs
replacing.

* I can’t really imagine why Dumbledore wouldn’t
want to apparate on a long journey. The twins were apparating all over the
place earlier in the book, so it doesn’t seem that difficult.

* Hagrid’s never heard Umbridge’s “Hem, hem” before,
and assumes one of the threstrals is making it. I’d have hoped that a teacher
showing semi-wild animals to a group of schoolchildren would have known enough
about them to distinguish between the noises they make and the sound of
somebody coughing, but knowing Dumbledore’s hiring practices this is probably
too much to hope for.

* Umbridge speaks to Hagrid “as though she were
addressing someone both foreign and very slow.” I’m not sure about the foreign
part, but given that Hermione spent several hours trying to convince him not to
give Umbridge an excuse to fire him and he still didn’t get what she was going
on about, I think that “very slow” would be a rather fair description of
Hagrid.

* Just in case we were thinking that Hagrid is a bad teacher after all, Umbridge
starts acting like a total bitch in order to put us off supporting her.

* “‘Threstrals aren’ dangerous! All righ’, they migh’
take a bite outta yeh if yeh really annoy ’em.’” I was going to come up with
some sarcastic comment, but I think this sentence rather speaks for itself.

* Although Hippogriffs attack people who blink too
much and Hagrid thought them safe enough to take to class, so his definition of
“not dangerous” and “really annoying” are probably somewhat broader than most
people’s.

* I’m not surprised that Malfoy enjoys seeing
Umbridge criticising Hagrid like that. Being attacked by a wild animal due to
inadequate instructions, and then being blamed for that attack himself,
wouldn’t really make him feel particularly well-disposed towards COMC. I can’t
imagine the other Slytherins would feel particularly happy about that, either.
For all that people go on about the Hufflepuffs being the stick-together House,
Slytherins seem pretty close as well.

* Umbridge is “trying to make out Hagrid’s some kind
of dim-witted troll, just because he had a giantess for a mother.” Hermione’s
probably right about Umbridge’s motivations, although there are still good
reasons for making Hagrid out to be a dim-witted troll, not least the fact that
is it, actually, extremely dim-witted.

* Threstrals are really good, “for Hagrid”. The fact
that Hermione feels the need to qualify her statement like that should tell us
that Hagrid’s lessons are not actually very good.

* Trust Harry to get all passive-agressive with his
“Do you?”

* Hermione’s surprised that as many as three people
in the class could see the Threstrals. Knowing the wizarding world’s lax
attitude to personal safety, I’m surprised there aren’t more.

* Unfortunately, patrolling the corridors with Filch
doesn’t lead to any sympathy for him among the Trio.

* Hermione’s fretting because she hasn’t yet tricked
enough elves into leaving their home and living a life of shame, ostracism and
uncertainty.

* Ron finds the idea of strapping bits of wood to
your feet and sliding down a mountain to be very funny, although he doesn’t
have time to laugh too much, because he’s got to go sit on a household cleaning
implement and stop balls from flying through an oversized blow-bubble hoop.

* Am I the only one to find Dobby’s obsession with
Harry to be slightly creepy?

* Harry’s first reaction to the news that he’s been
replaced on the Quidditch Team is to retort that he resents the ban more.
Nobody suffers more than the Chosen One, Angelina!

* Zach Smith’s being irritating, because everybody
who criticises Harry has to be annoying in order to stop us from agreeing with
them.

* Neville has “improved beyond all recognition”.
Presumably this is related to the idea of magic sometimes developing later in
life, because I can’t see how Harry’s non-existent teaching skills could have
anything to do with it.

* I like the idea of Harry having to resist the
temptation to keep walking past Cho. It seems realistic and natural for a
teenage boy, quite unlike the usual way of depicting romance in these books.

* Although in retrospect I suppose this shows that
their relationship was doomed from the start. If he’d tried maiming her with
magical canaries and sending her to the hospital wing, then they might have had
a chance.

* Harry’s heart sank. “He ought to have known. She
wanted to talk about Cedric.” Yeah, Harry, how unreasonable of her to want to
talk about her dead boyfriend, instead of just trashing Dumbledore’s office and
then totally forgetting about him. It’s not like people ever try and make
themselves feel better about things by talking about them with other people.
You self-centred little twerp.

* BTW, isn’t this the first time she’s tried to
start a conversation about Cedric with Harry? So it’s not like she’s been
talking about it non-stop for the past year. So whence the resigned note in
Harry’s interior monologue?

* Harry is “in a state of shock” after kissing Cho.
Part of me wants that shock to come from him realising that he was actually
moaning Draco’s name rather than Cho’s. :p

* Hermione’s asking about Cho in a “brisk” and “business-like”
way. Somehow that doesn’t seem to me to be the way in which a girl eager to
hear a bit of romantic gossip would talk. More like somebody who’s been told
that the plot requires her to ask what Harry did, and who’s just trying to get
it out of the way as quickly as possible.

* Hermione’s got to explain Cho’s feelings to Harry
and Ron, because she’s just so caring and sympathetic all of a sudden.

* I thought that this scene was done better in the
movie. Having everybody laugh after the “Just because you’ve got the emotional
range of a teaspoon…” comment made it seem like a bit of good-natured teasing,
rather than a nasty put-down.

* Come to think of it, the movies are just overall
better full-stop. They manage to make the Trio seem like nice, ordinary people,
which is more than I can say for the books

* Seriously, Ron, grow a bit of self-control. Yes, I
know you want to get into Hermione’s underpants, but you shouldn’t fly off the
handle every time Viktor Krum comes up in conversation.

* I don’t know why, but “His body felt smooth,
powerful and flexible” seemed like a very slash-y sentence to me.

* Other than that, though, this scene is quite
exciting and well-done, which unfortunately is rather rare for scenes in the
later books.