deathtocapslock | Deathly Hallows, Chapter 6: The Ghoul in Pajamas (Reply)

Author's note: I have no idea why the final sentence in one paragraph came out smaller than the rest of the post. It was all posted and enlarged together.

This chapter starts with more wallowing in the “shock” of grief over Moody. I’m sorry, but why is this a shock? They were in a battle! People get killed in battles! They act like he was walking across the street and got run over by a car, or died in some other unexpected manner. This angsting is ridiculous!

Harry decides to sublimate his self-indulgent wallowing grief by gearing up to hunt the Horcruces. Ron tells him they can’t leave until after Bill and Fleur’s wedding, or Fleur and Molly will “kill us.” I knew that French chick was a sleeper agent! She must have Imperiused decent Mrs. Weasley.

Molly tries to pump Harry for information about the Horcrux hunt. Her old-fashioned, magic-powered, wringer washer does the laundry while they talk. Thanks, I’ll take one of those stupid “muggle” washers with a spin cycle any time.

She manages to keep the Trio from getting together to discuss the hunt by giving them wedding-related busywork that keeps them apart. Molly Weasley, secret Slytherin!

Harry wonders aloud why there’s been no governmental hearing about his use of underage magic during the battle. Is it because he had no choice, or they’re trying to cover up Voldemort’s attack? Gee, I don’t know, maybe it’s because there’s a war going on, and people have more important things to do than worry about anybody doing underage magic.

Fleur says Harry needs to be disguised for the wedding in case any of the guests talk too much after hitting the champagne. I guess non-alcoholic champagne is out of the question, even in such special circumstances. Harry assumes this means Fleur suspects Hagrid of talking about their plans to leave 4PD. Well, you know, Harry, those foreigners are such bigots. They just can’t believe a good-hearted, dumb guy like Hagrid is trustworthy just because he once got drunk and blabbed--uh, never mind.

Arthur confesses to Harry that he’s got Sirius’s motorcycle hidden away for future dissection. “[I]t’ll be a great opportunity to find out how brakes work,” he gushes. Three words, Arthur: Public. Library. Card. Get one. Use it.

The Trio finally gets together and wastes more time with more phony grieving about somebody they barely knew. Hermione works off her tension by compulsively rooting through her books, trying to decide which ones to take on the hunt and which to leave.

Then she does one of the most offensive things in this very screwed up book and weeps crocodile tears--which should now be called Hermione tears, in her honor--about mind-raping her parents and shipping them off to Australia.

THIS DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE! Her parents are the Grangers, not the Howard Hugheses. They’re middle-aged professional people with an office, employees, and clients. They can’t just take off and disappear into the ether without somebody noticing they’re gone. How are they going to close their office? What are they going to tell their employees, patients, and colleagues? How are they going to make a living in Australia? They can’t practice as dentists, unless their unnatural daughter also came up with falsified credentials for them to use. But no, that can’t be right because that would also require falsifying the records at the college and dental school they attended, as well as the British governmental agency in charge of licensing. Surely the Australians would check the Grangers’/Wilkinses’ credentials before issuing them professional licenses. I know Hermione’s supposed to be a SuperCompetent!UltraMarySue!Self-Insert!, but it’s just idiotic to even suggest she could pull off deceiving two sophisticated national governments, as well as a university or two. It’s insulting to the reader’s intelligence.

That’s not even to consider that mind-raping the Grangers to such an extent that they no longer remember being parents could very well have damaged the parts of their brains that they use in their profession. Playing with somebody’s brain isn’t like changing the oil filter in a car. The brain is interconnected; even the very best brain experts would be leery of modifying someone’s mind the way Hermione did, for fear it could have unexpected, even disastrous, consequences. If anybody wants to argue with this, ask yourself: Would you want to have highly complex, experimental brain surgery performed on you by a 17-year-old with no training or experience, and whose scientific education ended at age eleven? I didn’t think so.

What a monster this girl is! She’s just as bad as Voldemort and Dumbledore in her willingness to take over and play with other people’s lives without their knowledge and consent. All for villainous treachery the greater good, of course. If her parents never remember her again, they’ll be better off--and it’ll be no more than she deserves.

Ron complements Hermione’s evil with his own stupidity. He shows Harry their family ghoul in Ron’s pajamas, telling Harry that when they leave, the ghoul will take Ron’s place by pretending to be Ron as a victim of spattergroit. The problem is, the smell from the ghoul is so bad it’s like raw sewage; Ron can’t even stand it for five minutes, so how is his family going to tolerate it indefinitely? Evil on one side and dunderheaded on the other: Imagine what their kids are going to be like.

We now pause for a message from a sane author who respects her fans: Vicky Holmes is one of the team of writers who writes the Warriors books under the name Erin Hunter. In 2006 she spoke to fans about Graystripe, the best friend of Fireheart, the hero of the first series: “There are going to be three manga novels coming out featuring Graystripe's adventures from the moment he is taken from the forest to...the moment he returns to ThunderClan!...I had a lot of fun coming up with the story lines because Graystripe has always been a fascinating character for me. In the first books he was in danger of becoming Firepaw's stooge, the butt of jokes and maybe not the brightest cat, but he showed a much more complex side to his character when he fell in love with Silverstream and then took his motherless kits to join RiverClan. Hopefully I've explored this other side in the upcoming manga books. You'll have to let me know!”

Aaahhhh. This is a woman who (1) respects her fans and cares about their opinions; (2) tries to write logical, interesting stories; (3) wants all her major characters to be competent and interesting. She doesn’t feel it necessary to dumb down her supporting characters to make her main character look good. Her main character is intelligent, competent, and moral enough that he doesn’t need that kind of artificial propping up.

Why couldn’t you have cared this much about your work and fans, J K Rowling?

Back to the story:

Ron insists this ghoulish deception is necessary because when the Trio doesn’t turn up at school, the DEs will go hunting for their families to make them betray the Trio’s plans. It is now official canon: Ronald Weasley, sidekick, doofus, and the dumbest member of the Golden Trio--is now more intelligent than Voldemort!

Read it and weep, ladies and gentlemen.

After Ron explains his plan fully, Harry is flabbergasted: His friends had gone to so much trouble to be with him. *sob* They really were going to risk their lives to help him defeat Voldemort. *boo hoo* He’s too overcome to tell them what their devotion means to him. I’m overcome, too, but obviously not for that reason.

They continue to discuss their plans, and things move along reasonably until Hermione says something really stupid again. She tells Ron and Harry how she used a Summoning Charm to fetch the Horcrux books out of Dumbledore’s office. She acts embarrassed as she insists it’s not really stealing because they were still library books even though they’d been pulled from the stacks and secreted in Dumbledore’s office.

Once again I ask, What the hell? (1) How did she know that’s where the books were? There was no mention of their being there before. For all she knew, Dumbledore could have taken them home, sold them, given them away, or burned them. (2) Why weren’t there protective spells put on the books to keep them from being removed from the office? One would think anything precious enough to be tucked away in the Headmaster’s office would be defended effectively. (3) If Hermione is no longer a student at Hogwarts, she should no longer be able to check books out of its library, so yes, she is stealing. Even if former students are allowed to check out books, keeping books checked out indefinitely is also stealing. (4) She’s planning on risking her life to defeat ultimate evil. I think stealing a few books is acceptable under the circumstances. (5) She had little problem with mind-raping her parents and upending their entire lives, but she cavils at taking a few books? Just when I think the morals in this book can’t get any more screwed up, something like this happens to prove me wrong.

Hermione says The Horcrux Handbook, I mean, Secrets of the Darkest Art says the only way to heal one’s soul from making Horcruces is by feeling remorse for one’s crimes. Well, Voldemort is a psychopath, so that’s never going to happen. They’re incapable of remorse because they have no consciences.

She also says that once the vessel containing a part of the split soul is destroyed, the soul bit is destroyed with it. That means Voldemort can never put his soul back together again, à la Humpty Dumpty. I’m now imagining a chorus line of little soul bits dancing together and singing in very high voices a slightly altered version of Taylor Swift’s hit song:

We are never, ever, ever

Getting back together.

We-ee are never, ever, ever

Getting back together.

You go talk to locket,

Talk to diadem, talk to cup.

But we-ee are never, ever, ever

Getting back together.

Like, ever!

You know, it just occurred to me that all the Founders’ Artifacts got made into Horcruces--except Godric Gryffindor’s. What, are the Sword and Hat too pure to be contaminated by the slimy Slytherin Tom Riddle? Do they have some speshul “Dark magic-repelling” properties the other artifacts don’t? This is just so--so--disgusting of JKR. It’s bad enough she slobbers all over Gryffindor in the text of the books; she has to favor it in subtle ways like this as well.

The Slytherin locket is also the only Horcrux that taints the Trio for several weeks and causes problems for their relationship right before it “dies.” How convenient that they weren’t in contact with the cup or diadem long enough to be tainted by those objects.

Of course, there is another interpretation Rowling apparently didn’t think of. *cackles fiendishly* Maybe the reason the Gryffindor artifacts weren’t tainted by Riddle is because Gryffindor House is already so corrupt it was impossible for Tom to poison anything associated with it any further.

After some more info dumping about Horcruces, Harry starts angsting about Dumbledore again, wishing, as he did in chapter 2, that they had spent more time together, gazing into each other’s eyes, sharing the secrets of their souls, learning everything about each other...No, there’s nothing gay going on here. Just keep telling yourselves that, Potter apologists.

His musings are shattered when an enraged Molly Weasley slams open the bedroom door, demanding the Trios help with sorting wedding presents. Where did all these presents come from? We’ve seen no indication before that the Weasleys had much of a social life. Are they all from furrin acquaintances of the Delacours?

The Delacours arrive and prove, despite their foreignness, to be gracious people with far better manners than their hosts. For some reason, everybody is crammed into the house, instead of putting the Delacours, at least, into one of those expanding magical tents that figures so boringly prominently in the story later. Since the security spells are on the entire Weasley property, there’s no reason a tent couldn’t be set up in the yard to relieve overcrowding in the house.

Molly asks Harry how he wants to celebrate his birthday, and he starts angsting again about all the trouble he’s putting her to. Maybe I should keep a tally of all the times in this book Harry angsts about something he shouldn’t.