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]

I was just checking the Occlumency lessons, and there's a very interesting bit where Harry accidentally breaks into Snape's mind with Protego. Unlike in the movie, this isn't the point where Harry sees SWM, nor is it the point where Snape throws Harry out. Harry sees bits of some very personal memories - Tobias yelling at Eileen, a girl laughing at kid!Snape trying to get on a broom, things like that.

And Snape basically just tells him that was unexpected, good job, let's keep going. No yelling or nasty comments, at a time you would definitely expect it. I think he's often nasty rather than just firm with students - but then, even the supposedly kind Flitwick has students writing "I am a wizard, not a baboon with a stick," McGonagall is often unjustifiably awful to Neville imo, and turning students into small rodents and bashing them against stone floors is something you just get a warning for, so I can't really say his classroom behavior stands out at Hogwarts. (The teaching there is truly awful.) Harry doesn't seem to see anything wrong with Flitwick or McGonagall, or even "Moody," so it seems like his problem isn't so much that Snape can be nasty as that Snape is nasty to him and not Seamus, Neville, or Draco. *dislikes Harry even more*

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

turning students into small rodents and bashing them against stone floors

I've seen people refer to the Ferret!Draco incident as involving a rodent before, but that's not true. Members of the weasel family are carnivores, not rodents. /pedant point

[sunnyskywalker]

Good to know! I thought a carnivore was any meat-eating creature in general, though? (Lions, eg.)

[oryx_leucoryx]

There are all sorts of carnivorous animals, but specifically members of the order Carnivora include several mammalian families, among which are Felidae (cats), Hyaenidae (hyenas and similar), Herpestidae (mongooses), Canidae (dogs), Ursidae (bears), Mephitidae (skunks and stink badgers), Mustelidae (weasels, badgers, ferrets, otters and the like), Procyonidae (racoons and the like), Odobenidae (walrus), Otariidae (sea lions, fur seals) and Phocidae (true seals). Go to the wiki article to see why they are grouped together and how they are interrelated.

[sunnyskywalker]

Ooh, that's very cool! I was sick through a lot of freshman biology and don't remember anything, so this is awesome. (Though that teacher was also the one who described the Big Bang as "the explosion when the Earth was created, which is why the rest of the universe is rushing away from us," so she might not have explained this properly either...)