Oh, TV Tropes...!

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

Quite honestly, the Harry Potter stuff on that site has gotten to the point where I can't read it because just about everything is fawning over how great and super-special-awesome the series is, oh, and how Snape is an evil douchebag who wanted to get Harry and James killed so he could keep Lily. But this... this makes me want to scream:

"Hermione... [is] one of the smartest and more pro-active females in the whole Harry Potter canon and English literature in general"

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!

How could they make such a claim?! Hermione is a better heroine than, say, Tiffany Aching?! How about Eliza Doolittle?! And I'm sure you could come up with other examples.

No, no, in Harry Potter it seems fairly obvious that the most powerful women in the series are antagonists. Sure, Hermione's perfectly independent and capable, but in the last several books it's like she becomes Harry's servant because he's too lazy to do anything himself!

God damn it, Harry Potter wouldn't bother me so much if everyone didn't insist it was the greatest thing since sliced bread!

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

She could have kept her head down and not joined any groups, relying on the Order to protect her instead of actively taking a risk and joining... although given that we don't know what she actually did for the Order, maybe there isn't actually much distinction between the joining and not-joining options.

Because I love vocabulary: misandrist, actually! "Anthropos" > misanthrope is more like "human" than specifically "male" (though it is a masculine noun). Aner, andros is the word for specifically male human beings, as opposed to gyne (woman). So, misanthropes hate people, misogynists hate women, and misandrists hate men.

[oryx_leucoryx]

We don't know if Lily joined the Order because she wanted to (in order to fight for her place in wizarding society?) or because she followed James. We don't know if James joined because of some principled belief, to protect Lily, out of family loyalty to the Dumbledore faction, or because fighting DEs was the most exciting game in town.

We know Lily and James defied Voldemort 3 times (each? altogether?) but we have no idea what this entailed. (Nor do we know if the Longbottoms did anything as Order members apart from what they did as Aurors. We have no idea what the Order did period.)

[sunnyskywalker]

I think pretty much all we can say about that defiance was that it did not involve fighting Voldemort and escaping, since supposedly no one ever survived until Harry. They might have just published scathing letters to the editor in the Prophet about how strongly they disagreed with Voldemort.

[oryx_leucoryx]

So you think Dumbles was lying about both the Potters and the Longbottoms having 'narrowly escaped' three times each? I don't think we are ever told nobody escaped. Nobody had survived an AK directed at them with no intervening obstacle before. Doesn't mean nobody managed to duck behind some furniture and escape before. (Don't forget that Albus is the only one who really knows what hit whom at Godric's Hollow.)

[sunnyskywalker]

Didn't escape Voldemort himself, that is - they certainly could have escaped DEs Voldemort sent after them... which is escaping Voldemort, from a certain point of view ;-). I think if four or more were known to have escaped Voldemort by ducking behind potted plants, Voldemort wouldn't have had quite the "if he wanted you dead, you were dead" reputation that he did. (Four people in the wizarding world is a lot!) It would have been more like, "If he wanted you dead, and you weren't quick and nimble from seven years of Quidditch practice, you were dead, but athletes and Aurors would probably be okay," which just doesn't inspire the same level of terror.

[oryx_leucoryx]

But he did get the Potters eventually. They escaped 3 times, succumbed the 4th (according to Albus). He claimed Harry escaped 4 times already by then (OOTP - but of course it's a matter of how one counts. I count 6 attempts on Harry's life by Voldemort in assorted forms by the time Albus makes that pronouncement.)

If Voldemort wants you dead you are dead, it's just a question of when you will notice.

Since Terri's post about Albus' realization that Tom had the resurrection stone in his possession I'm toying with the idea that Albus founded the Order with the goal of stealing the stone from Tom (assuming he was carrying it, in order to use it to raise an army of the dead). But if so he didn't tell them that was the objective. Probably some instruction about bringing Tom to him, dead or alive.

[sunnyskywalker]

I wonder if escaping before Voldemort walks in the door counts? Like, you're fighting some DEs, Bellatrix mouths off about how they'll be sorry when the Dark Lord gets there, and they manage to Apparate away five seconds before Voldemort arrives so he can gnash his teeth and say, "Curses, foiled again! Those damn meddling kids!" Then you do have the scariness aspect of Voldemort personally trying to kill them, without the problem of him failing six times to kill two couples (which rather undermines Harry's accomplishment of escaping Voldemort-in-person several times besides making him less scary in general).

That might work - Dumbledore could tell his recruits that he suspected Voldemort might have a weapon or weapons which it would be very helpful to deprive him of, without going into too much detail, and so if by chance they ever got ahold of any of his personal effects, they should summon Dumbledore right away so he could handle the no doubt horrible curses Voldemort probably placed on some innocuous-looking object. Or something.

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the correction. I knew misanthrope meant hater of humans, but I couldn't think of a word that specifically applied to someone who hates men. I just love learning new words, also.

[sunnyskywalker]

There's so many interesting words out there, too.