Harry Potter Abridged! GOF Chapter 3

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

[Life at the Dursleys goes on as usual.]


Petunia: Alright, come and get your tasty, nutritious grapefruit for breakfast!

Dudley: But Muuuuuuuuum, this is destroying my propensity to act like a nasty, slobbish, lazy Fatty McFatfat!

Petunia: Orders from your school nurse so quit your complaining!

Harry: Cheer up, Dudley- if you can get thinner you just might turn out to be an alright guy!

[Just then, Vernon gets a letter from the Weasleys.]

Vernon: Not this shit again.... Harry, we need to talk!

[Vernon drags Harry to the living room.]

Vernon: So... yeah. Those wizard friends of yours sent me a letter: “Dear Mr. Muggle. We want to take Harry to the Quidditch World Cup. We will take Harry there NO MATTER WHAT! Signed, Mrs. Weasley. PS: If we used too many of your bliddy stamps you can pay the cost.”

Harry: Well that’s saying something considering the envelope is covered in stamps!

Vernon: Do your friends have any idea that they look positively functionally retarded?

Harry: Well, they say the same thing about you.

Vernon: So who is this Mrs. Weasley, anyway?

Harry: She’s my best friend’s mother, of course!

Vernon: Yeah, yeah. Whatever. And... what is Quidditch?

Harry: It’s a game played on broomsticks that every one of us loves even though it makes no sense.

Vernon: Honestly, the stories you bring under our roof. You’re mighty ungrateful, considering everything we’ve done with you over the years.

Harry: Yeah, well... you guys are abusive! Oh, by the way, I’ve been telling my mass-murderer godfather that.

Vernon: ...Are you serious?

Harry: Yeah, he’s not happy. So let me go to my friends the Weasleys’ or I’ll tell him about the time you beat me with all sorts of-

Vernon: We did no such thing!

Harry: He doesn’t know it!

Vernon: Aye, aye, aye... alright, go hang out with your wizard friends, then! See if we care!

Harry: Alright, then I will!

[Harry then returns to his room to gorge himself on the sweets that his friends sent him.]

Harry: [Excessively twee] Ooh, goodie! I gets my sweeties today! I shall rise above the oppression- starting with my delicious birthday cakes that my friendses have sented me! *Gurgles* By the way, these cakes really should be getting rotten or moldy by now, but whatever.

[Just then, a tiny gray owl enters the room with a letter.]

Harry: You’re Ron’s owl, aren’t you? This is interesting. It says here, that they’ll be picking me up at five on sunday. Hermione is going to stay with them as well- convenient! Oh, and Percy is boringer and stupider than ever. Why do I get the feeling every single one of these events is orchestrated to get my trio together?

[Harry writes his eager reply and sends it back with the little owl, Pig, before sending Sirius a note with Hedwig explaining everything that’s been going on.]

Comments

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I think I'm of two minds. One, she's a billionare so she must be doing something right, but...

Two. When you're wrong, you're wrong. ANd here, she's just wrong.

I hate bullies. I hate people who mistreat others for kicks. And most of all, I can't stand people who use their power to hurt others. Wizards who abuse muggles need their wands snapped.

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

Doing something right in terms of what will sell and doing something right morally are by no means the same....

Especially given a society in which education is so poor and intellectualism so hated that attempting to apply a sustained critical reading to a text - especially a popular one - is unthinkable. What do you do when you want to sell a story in a society that is overrun with anxiety, is seeing all of their systems breaking down, is distrustful of intellectual activity/education, glorifies violence, action and unthinking recklessness, and feels the right to bully other parts of the world into submission? Give the people easily-identified scapegoats, "others" who are responsible for the chaos/bad things, whom the heroes can bully into submission and then further for vengeance's sake defeat vicareously for them through sheer unthinking "bravery" and bigger/better weapons. Let them identify with this glorious divinely-chosen hero who defeats all of his, and their, problems by getting rid of the evil Others who hate their freedom and control all the money/political influence. Classic (see: all of 20th century for references.

Really, the only vaguely original thing JKR added here was having the reader identify with the ones who actually are different (magic), versus the ordinary-folks who suffer under them; and it only works because of the witchhunt craze in history and the explicit emphasis on Secrecy and Being Threatened, on the one hand, and the splitting of the Others into Muggles and Slytherins, on the other hand. And of course for this to work Harry has to really belong to the world of heroes, the ones who are special and threatened, despite his upbringing - it can't be any sort of 'ordinary kid is pulled into another world for a time, to rescue his own world, but can/does go back.' He has to be a changeling, a hidden prince, who doesn't go back to the ordinary world because he never belonged there. (See also Hermione Granger and the breaks she does not spend with her family.)* The from-our-POV-ordinary world IS the otherworld, and vice-versa. Except the morals didn't get flipped when the story went through the funhouse mirror; they are just as ugly as they are in the original version.

*Someone - I think terri, or mary? - has an essay on the Otherworld and HP, possibly on Snapedom.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

Can I just bow in awe of the awesome in this post?

It's just...right.

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Regarding the Otherworld--yes, that was me, inspired by Maryj_59 (and also Dan Hemmon's excellent essay of the HP series bing a "Nildungsroman").

It's not on Snapedom, because it wasn't directely Snape-related. Nowadays I'd post non-Snape-specifice meta here, but back then it was just on my personal lj.

Here's a link, if anyone's interested... Or if you go to my lj, tag for Harry Potter meta, and go back to 2009....

http://terri-testing.livejournal.com/23772.html#cutid1

[sunnyskywalker]

Or learn to belong to both worlds, with hope that someday there can be more communication and understanding between them. Nope, can't have that. He must fit into a box: wizard or Muggle? You can't have personal and cultural ties to both, because then we'd have to think about identity and that's hard.

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

Wizards who abuse muggles need their wands snapped.

I concur. I suppose that it's no coincidence that one of the main characters in my current novel specializes in nullifying magic. I don't claim to be a great writer or anything, but there's something awfully satisfying about seeing a magic using bully suddenly reduced to being a muggle with no combat skills. ;-)

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a briliant idea, best of luck to you!

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to put together a story about four magical girls whose purpose is bringing anyone who tries to experiment with powerful magic down to normal. That's because in my stories magic use tends to regress your mind, unless (like the abovementioned girls) you were specifically given it for some purpose.

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

That sounds interesting- what powers magic in this setting? "Magical girls" makes me think a lot of Sailor Moon, btw. Is that the kind of trope you are going for? Also, who gave them these powers?

At any rate, it sounds like an intriguing basis for a story.

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

There's numerous forces that power magic in this setting, and truth be told I haven't gotten them all straight. The magical girls to which I am referring were born with magical powers- just acquired them sometime before birth. They were literally born and bred to do magic, so they could keep rogue magic users under control. To compensate for their extreme magical prowess, their bodies are physically much weaker than our own, so they can't fight hand-to-hand. It's not really Sailor-Moon style magical girls because their fighting style is a bit more "realistic", for what it is, and they don't transform or anything- they just grow unusually ornate glowing horns when they cast their magic:)

In this universe, just about anyone can learn to do magic. However, unless you were born with magic to use for some very specific purpose, using it is dangerous, and almost always ends up regressing your mind (incidentally, I still haven't decided if it's a magically-induced regression or if magic-users simply grow childish from the number of problems magic can solve for them).

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that it seems a bit unfair that only certain people get to be born with magic, but it's interesting that they are physically weaker. I'd be curious to know how you develop this concept.

(incidentally, I still haven't decided if it's a magically-induced regression or if magic-users simply grow childish from the number of problems magic can solve for them).

Personally, I think that the latter would be much more interesting to read about. Maybe your magical girls could do magic without harm mostly because they were too disciplined to become dependent on it.

Also, what constitutes a "specific purpose" for doing magic? Would summoning a can of pop from the fridge because you didn't want to get up count as specific, or would it need to be something less trivial? Uh, sorry to ask so many questions but you have piqued my curiosity.

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

A "specific purpose" would have to be something pretty major- either preventing misuse of magic or guardian of some secret or something of that nature, though even I haven't identified all potential purposes yet. But yeah, at least part of the reason why most people become childish from using magic is the potential power to do just about anything and erase the consequences of their actions. People who are seriously born to do magic are given a very specific reason for doing so, and can't really use magic to help with too much else, because they're aware of the risks, as people who decide "Hey, I wanna do some magic today" can't be since they haven't been properly briefed or trained.

I tried to make it less unfair for only certain people to be born with magic considering there's tons of reasons why it's less fun (for example, it tends to kill their mothers during childbirth, and they're so weak that magical girls can't bear children of their own, except with another magic-user who's just as weak as they are, not to mention the overarching idea that they can never be anything other than magical guardians for the rest of their lives).

Any coming-of-age story involving ordinary people will involve their learning to reject magic as unnecessary and a distraction.

[charlottehywd.livejournal.com]

That makes sense.

Sounds like an interesting idea!

[nx74defiant.livejournal.com]

if magic-users simply grow childish from the number of problems magic can solve for them).

In HP it seems like the magic-users simply stay children. No one seems to mature beyond the age of 11 when they start using magic.

[sweettalkeress.livejournal.com]

There is actually one story I've had in mind for awhile which stars a young woman who's been raised since she was roughly 7 or 8 to be the bride of a powerful magic abuser. She grows up with the idea that all ordinary people are little more than toys to play with or obstacles to eliminate if they remotely annoy her, and only she and her would-be groom matter.