The Mirror of Erised

[urbanman1984.livejournal.com]

The Mirror of Erised

*It’s winter!  In Scotland, winters in the mountainous regions would be even more intense than the series implies.

 

*The twins charm snowballs to follow Quirrell, but they are actually bouncing off Voldemort as it turns out.  I wonder if Voldemort has noted their thuggish tendencies and considered them as possible servants yet?  Only joking, we all know IOIAGDI!!

 

*Poor owls – how would Hagrid go about nursing them back to health?

 

*It must be terrible for the muggleborns trying to adapt to life with no central heating, especially in their first December they experience with no central heating.  I remember the times my central heating broke down have always been in December and it is no laughing matter *brrrrrr*

 

*I wonder if the Slytherin Common Room is as uncomfortable as Snape’s dungeon?  In the second year of the series, JKR was really laborious in her efforts to show how much worse it is than the common room of the elect.  Magical kids must be supernaturally resilient to the cold as well as to Bludgers.

 

*Ron isn’t wanted at home for Christmas either since Molly and Arthur are taking a trip to Romania.  Have they left Ginny 1.0 locked in a birdcage?  She could possibly have had one of her personality shifts and become entirely self-sufficient.  I wonder if she changes her personality as much as she does later in the series, where she is written as a different character from year to year.

 

*Oh stop complaining Malfoy, the Potterverse will always change to accommodate Harry and will never change to accommodate you!  Of course the Snitch was going to fly right into his open mouth for him.  He could only fail to catch the Snitch if he were unconscious.

 

*Hagrid demonstrates *again* that in human terms he has the mental age of roughly an eleven year old boy.  He makes excuses for Ron about verbal provocation which indicate that he has no knowledge of the rules.  I wonder if Snape would have been wound up by Hagrid using the excuse “IOIAGDI!”

 

*Bet Harry wishes he could duel both Malfoy and Snape to the death.  A pity that the midnight duel with Malfoy never happened.

 

*So the Hogwarts library has no cataloguing system of any kind?  Again, the muggleborns were in for a terrible shock when they moved to Hogwarts.

 

*Poor old Hagrid honestly thinks Stumblebore trusted him not to blurt out information about Flamel and the Philosopher’s Stone!  Hagrid’s level of ineptitude is sufficient for him to be a tool by which everything is leaked to the trio in the end; they just can’t find it out all at once.  They can’t bribe Hagrid with a dragon’s egg.

 

*On first reading this chapter back in the 20^th century, I thought the Restricted Section sounded really interesting, although it is now obvious that JKR did not have the imagination to fill it in so as to match my expectations.  I wonder exactly which books Dumblesnore removed?  Just those about Horcruxes or anything that was more outlandish still?  We now know there was once a DIY book for Horcruxes right where anyone with a signed note or invisibility cloak could read it.

 

*Once Hermione isn’t nagging them, Harry and Ron can just procrastinate :)

 

*Is this the last ever Christmas break Hermione spends with the Grangers?  What did she do in the Christmas during Half Blood Prince, the last one before she lobotomised them?

 

*The idea of expelling Malfoy must have more piquancy than constantly humiliating him, because Harry can already do that, but cannot get him expelled.  Perhaps Lucius could prevent Draco from being expelled during the first two years of the series, while he was still a school governor.

 

*Ron is still skilled at chess this year.  He will lose this skill after JKR turns him into a total buffoon and simultaneously inflates Hermione’s role to beyond the point where it still makes sense *pass the vomit bucket*

 

*Ron is good at this game of sending living chess pieces that trust him completely into battle.  Some of them have to be sacrificed for the greater good, but Ron always wins the game in the end and even the expendable pieces obey him.  This must be where the theory of Dumbledore being Ron from the future came from (naturally the theory ceased to be believable once Ron was dumbed down)

 

*Harry on the other hand is very inept at the game :p  None of Dumbledore’s pawns would tell Dumbledore “don’t send me there, can’t you see the Dark Lord...”  Harry himself never did.

 

*Harry wasn’t expecting any presents, so he hasn’t sent any.  Did Ron send Hermione anything?  If not, then she got nothing from the magical world that Christmas.  I wonder what she thought about this when she was still written as being a *relatively* nice (if neurotic) and nerdy sort of girl.

 

*There is a fan theory that Egodore stopped the majority of mail to Harry to prevent him from becoming too content and therefore less willing to be sacrificed.  Logically, given his celebrity status, he should be getting some kind of fan mail and gifts on a regular basis.  Even Lockhart still got fan mail years after suffering amnesia.  If JKR were any good at consistency, a lot more should be being sent to Harry.

 

*The 50p is the Dursleys’ last ever real present to Harry.  (Subsequently they only send a toothpick and then a single tissue... ) In the movies, the Knuts, Sickles and Galleons are also weird shapes.  I suppose in the books they are round, although expecting consistency from JKR is always futile.

 

*Molly clearly intends for Harry to be appropriated into her family.  She must have ordered Ron to be his sidekick and subsequently ordered Ginny to grab Harry and tie him down.  Is it more likely that she ordered Ginny to become a Mary Sue or that she swapped Ginny for a succubus changeling three years after this chapter when Ginny still hadn’t been able to catch Harry’s interest?  Just trying to ascribe a method to JKR’s madness.

 

*So Dumblesnore has been sitting on Death’s own hallowed cloak for ten years, having taken it so it would be of no use to the Potter’s when Voldemort came to call.  At this point it was not of course a Deathly Hallow; they were a clunky plot device that comes into existence much later.  Right now, the cloak is a means for Harry to move around the Hogwarts complex, free of the usual constraints.  Curiously, this particular plot device was never used in the Greyfriars stories, although a lot of the characters could acquire supernatural abilities if the plot demanded, including shape-shifting, super-strength and inhuman flexibility.  By giving the genre a bit of magical embroidery, JKR plugs a great many plot holes.

 

*The twins observe that Molly makes a lot of effort for Harry because he is not yet a member of their family and she wants to rectify that.

 

*George gets confused about the twins’ names as well.  Not surprising since he doesn’t have a distinct personality from Fred.  It must be as confusing for him as it is for Molly.

 

*It’s not surprising that Percy is not keen on being associated with the twins and Ron :p

 

*The Weasleys must be terrifying if no one makes jokes about their jumpers being maroon or having labels on them.  Not even in Gryffindor House where recklessness is a virtue.  The twins at least, must be much feared and admired.

 

*The magical crackers certainly are better than the feeble muggle variety.  You know what would make them even better?  If they blew up the whole table, food and all.

 

*Fumblewhore’s wearing a flowered bonnet... oh dear.  Is this how JKR thinks gay men behave?  Given her subhuman intelligence, I expect it is.

 

*Hagrid’s drunk.  I wonder how much wine that takes, given his size and his alcoholism?  He’s moving on Professor McGonagall.  I don’t want to know how that ended.

 

*I don’t doubt Mrs Norris will beat all the owls to the mice if she really is intelligent for a cat. 

 

*Scary thought, even a friendly fight with the Weasley twins.  What sort of prank might they play?

 

*Well video games are no competition for wizard chess... erm perhaps.  I doubt Dumbledore would solicit Percy’s help with his Machiavellian schemes. 

 

*Isn’t it cute how little Harry just wants to use invisibility for researching Flamel?  When he becomes a stalker, his priorities will shift somewhat.

 

*So Snape is ever vigilant, knowing Quirrell is up to no good? 

 

*And Dumbledore left this door ajar for Harry to find?

 

*The inscription on the Mirror of Erised is in code.  Not much of a code, just written backwards, but Harry is too dim to crack it.

 

*And now begins the Mirror of Erised sequence.  The one and only powerfully emotive passage in the entire series :(  Literally nothing else in this series ever affected me the way this did on first reading it – everything else is so insipid.

 

*Naturally there are no feeble caricatures of middle class suburbanites in the vision of Erised.  Only Harry’s creditable biological relatives can be shown.  So they would not include muggles at all...?  I wonder if JKR envisioned Lily as being an illegitimate child of some wizard we know of in the series.  A lady on fanfiction dot net suggested that she could be an illegitimate Weasley (I suppose she was making the connection with the red hair)

 

*Harry’s now determined for another Erised fix.  So much so that he is already off his food.

 

*Ron dreams of being head boy... Sorry Ron, you are going to be downgraded to a complete joke :\  I won’t tell Ron 1.0 that.  What would he think if I told him that there will be no seventh year, just the horrible mess of Deathly Hallows?

 

*Lucky Ron was there to get Harry out of the room.  Harry is already losing such competence as he had to begin with (which wasn’t much).

 

*It isn’t remotely creepy that Fumblewhore has been stalking Harry on a nightly basis after arranging for him to be roaming the corridors after hours!  IOIAGDI!

 

*It is despicable how Egodore arranges for Harry to see the terrible mirror, given that it actually did ensnare him and he did actually begin to waste away just like its other hapless victims. 

 

*Nice hint dropping Blunderbore!  “If you ever do run across it...” Dumblesnore has arranged for a confrontation between Harry and Voldemort in the imminent future.  Perhaps he intended for eleven year old Harry to be sacrificed for the Greater Good.  Either in the Forbidden Forest or when Harry next finds the Mirror.  If so, neither occasion went to plan and it was left to Harry to sacrifice himself, years later.

 

*Doesn’t Dumbledore remind us of Scar in the Lion King? I am thinking of the when Scar is still pretending to be avuncular and he drops hints about the elephants graveyard – just enough for Simba to go on a wild and potentially deadly adventure.

 

*What on Earth was Wormtail doing on Harry’s pillow...? o_0

 

Comments

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm sure that was JKR's reasons for situating the dorms where she did: Gryffs and 'Claws are above the other houses, literally and metaphoricly. (I guess Ravenclaw wouldn't be too bad, but imagine if the hat put me in Slytherin/Hufflepuff!) And it wouldn't surprize me if such symbolism were why Godric and Rowena housed their houses in towers.

Of course there's also the association of the four elements: Hufflepuff's dorm is in the earth, Slytherin's is under the lake (we're told in DH, though it wasn't specified in CoS), Ravenclaw's is in the air, and fire--well, all right.