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deathtocapslock2013-04-14 05:54 pm
Deathly Hallows, Chapter 13: The Muggle-Born Registration Commission
Author’s note: The phrase “the twinkling twit” comes from the story Lily Fixes a Mistake, by severusphoenix on FFN.
To drag out this already overlong book create dramatic tension, JKR separates Harry and Hermione. Hermione has to go with Umbridge; Harry quickly lies about needing to see Arthur.
I liked the description of Thicknesse. He sounds much more imposing than I’d imagined. The merciful amnesia that took over my mind after reading DH caused me to imagine he was a short, skinny, wimpy-looking guy, but it says he’s tall, with long black hair, a beard streaked with silver, and a large, overhanging forehead. I’m now visualizing a cross between Snape and Frankenstein’s monster as played by Boris Karloff (but without the green skin, of course).
Emulating Linus van Pelt, Harry pulls his security blanket invisibility cloak over himself and begins to search the floor for Umbridge’s office. As he strides alone through the corridor, he starts to feel trepidation. He passes door after door and begins to realize how big, powerful, complex, and impenetrable the Ministry is, so that “the plan he had been carefully concocting with Ron and Hermione over the past four weeks seemed laughably childish.” That’s what I was thinking, too, when I read those gleeful descriptions of violent vomiting, induced by “joke” candy, complete with “flying chunks of vomit.” Yuck! At least William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist) didn’t pretend projectile vomiting was funny. Harry realizes he and his friends had put so much effort into just getting inside the Ministry safely that they’d devoted no thought at all to what they’d do if they got separated once inside.
Harry comes to a room filled with people sitting at desks, all working in unison. The bureaucratic creepiness of this scene made me think of 1984; the unison aspect reminded me of a music video. I kept expecting everybody to suddenly jump up and start dancing and singing.
Harry picks up a pamphlet--which is pink, of course, since Umbridge is in charge of this department. Written on the front it says, “MUDBLOODS and the Dangers They Pose to a Peaceful Pure-Blood Society.” The front bears a silly looking illustration of a sweet-faced red rose being strangled by a fanged, scowling weed. Sorry, Ms. Rowling, I just have trouble taking seriously anything printed on a pink pamphlet, no matter how “ominous” the words and “scary” the illustration. And what’s with all these hyphens all of a sudden? We never read about “Muggle-borns” and “Pure-Bloods” before, just “muggleborns” and purebloods.”
Uh oh. I shouldn’t have said that about singing and dancing. I feel a song coming on.
(Suddenly everyone leaps up from their desks. The furniture whisks to the walls, and the people divide into two lines facing each other on either side of the room. They bow to each other and begin dancing and singing together.)
Mudbloods! Mudbloods!
Gotta watch ‘em.
Look out for their beady eyes.
Mudbloods! Mudbloods!
Always scheming,
Don’t be taken by their lies.
(A handsome, dark-haired, clean-limbed--thanks, marionros--young man dances to the middle front as everyone else backs away a little.)
I once had a mudblood neighbor
Stinking up my neighborhood.
Thank God for those fine Death Eaters.
They got rid of him for good.
(Everyone cries, “Yay!” and applauds briefly as he dances back and an equally attractive young blonde woman dances forward.)
I recall a filthy mudblood
Asked me out upon a date.
(Everyone cries, “Eewww!” and recoils in horror, looks of disgust on their faces.)
I never knew until that moment
Just how good it feels to hate.
(They all say, “Yeah!” as she rejoins the group, and they dance together again.)
Mudbloods! Mudbloods!
(The second “mudblood” is sung slightly louder and more emphatically than the first.)
Always plotting,
Scheming as they sneak around.
They are always filled with evil.
There no trace of good is found.
(A plain, middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair dances forward.)
Hogwarts used to coddle mudbloods,
Rigging grades to make them first.
It’s a LIE! Retarded mudbloods
Always have to be the worst.
(As the woman dances back, a paunchy, balding man dances to the front.)
I’m so glad our blessed Sev’rus
Saved us from the twinkling twit.
Thanks to him, our pureblood children
Never more have to eat--
(He’s cut off as the whole group begins to sing again.)
Mudbloods! MUDBLOODS!
Walking poison,
Lying, cheating, wrecking lives
Polluting everything they touch
Best thing they can do is DIE.
(Two of the men dance forward, one of them with the word “Mudblood” on his chest. The other pretends to curse the “mudblood” until he “dies,” as the group sings the next verse.)
If you come upon a Mudblood,
Curse it! CURSE IT!
Till it’s dead.
Blessings from our precious Dark Lord
Will rain down upon your head.
(Suddenly, Voldemort is there, raining money, gifts, confetti, and streamers down upon the “killer,” as if he were the winner in a game show.)
(The workers line up across the room, facing the front, and join arms as they yell one last sentence.)
DEATH TO MUDBLOODS!
(As they finish, they laugh and pat each other on the back. An outraged Harry can stand no more. Bellowing, “THIS IS FOR HERMIONE AND DUMBLEDORE!” he throws off his cloak and begins shooting hexes and curses left and right. The Ministry flunkies turn on him and return fire, holding him in place until Voldemort kills him. The Dull Lord then laughs and promises to reward everyone handsomely.)
THE END
I told you I’d make this book a whole lot shorter.
Whew. That’s a relief. I thought that book was never going to--
What? Wait. What do you mean, Harry’s not dead? That’s not the end of the book? But it was such a good ending. He even got a Gryffindor death, going out in a blaze of glory against impossible odds. That’s so much better than that wimpy, passive death he got in the book. That’s the kind of death I’d expect of a slimy Slytherin like Sev--
Oh.
Oh.
Oh. My. God.
Severus Snape died the same way as Harry Potter, passively offering himself up to Voldemort to protect others.
If Harry Potter is a hero because of the manner and purpose of his death, then so is Severus Snape!
Glad we got that cleared up.
Damn. I guess we have to continue. On with the story. *sigh*
One of the workers mentions Dolores having a magic eye, and Harry sees Moody’s magic eye stuck on Umbridge’s door. When he sees that, “rage rear[s] in him like a snake.” That’s right, even the justifiable anger Harry feels at the sight of a gruesome trophy taken from someone he cares about isn’t his own; it’s the result of that evil snakiness that was transplanted into him as a baby.
I find this whole snake = evil business really offensive. Rowling needs to use some of that money she’s earned to take a course in zoology. Snakes are very valuable animals. Their main prey is rodents; without them, people would lose many more tons of grain to mice and rats than we do. The ancient Egyptians revered both snakes and cats because both animals are superb mousers.
Rowling also spits on her own ethnic heritage when she trashes snakes. The ancient Britons revered snakes as symbols of fertility and wisdom. The Druids, their priest and bard class, were even called “adders” to honor their knowledgeability. The Greeks, Mayans, and Indians (of India) revered snakes as symbols of wisdom, too.
The Jews reviled snakes because snakes were the symbol of the Egyptians who had enslaved them. Thanks to the bigotry promulgated by the Bible, millions of innocent, useful animals are killed just for existing. (SWM has more levels than we realized.) Limbless lizards also die because they look similar to snakes. It’s enough to make me quote Bill Maher, who calls religion a form of insanity, and Christopher Hitchens, who literally wrote the book on religion being poisonous.
Back to the story:
Figuring people will notice if the private office’s door opens by itself(!), Harry sets off a Decoy Detonator to distract the staffers, then enters the office. When he gets in there, he realizes the office looks just like the one Umbridge had at Hogwarts. The description makes it sound like a Laura Ashley showroom exploded, with the addition of decorative plates with nauseatingly cute pictures of kittens on them. I like Laura Ashley, so maybe I shouldn’t make that comparison, but that’s what it sounds like. He also sees the magic eye is attached to a telescope Dolores uses to spy on her subordinates. In a fine exhibition of Gryffindor bravado moral indignation superseding good sense, he yanks the whole gizmo out of the door, leaving a big hole in it. Yeah, ‘cause the office workers won’t notice a big hole or the loud noise you’re making, Harry.
He searches the office but doesn’t find anything except a paper confirming Arthur’s suspect status. Then he sees Rita Skeeter’s biography of Dumbledore on the shelf. He opens it and sees the photo of a young Albus and Gellert laughing together. Just then, Thicknesse enters the office and writes a note to Umbridge. Harry shows a glimmer of intelligence by hiding under his cloak again and taking that opportunity to leave the floor.
He encounters three Weasleys on the elevator: Percy, a disguised Ron, and Arthur, who lectures the disguised Harry. Harry regrets choosing to impersonate someone Arthur detests. That’s a good point: Since the Trio spent a whole month standing outside the Ministry several hours a day spying, why didn’t they choose the people they were going to masquerade as with more care? Their best bet would have been to impersonate faceless bureaucrats, like the people making those pamphlets. Nobody notices them.
Harry ends up in the bowels of the Ministry, where Umbridge is dishing out shit to “muggleborns.” Harry slips past the dementor guards into the hearing room, where he settles behind Hermione on the dais and notices Dolores is wearing the locket Horcrux.
It occurs to me now to wonder whether Umbridge’s virulent hatred of “mudbloods” is at least party because of the centaur incident in OotP. Maybe she’s less a racist than an opportunist, taking advantage of the DE beliefs to get revenge on Hermione. Of course, a lot of innocent people are suffering, too, but that wouldn’t bother her, as long as she eventually gets the person she wants. Y’know, just like Voldemort and Dumbledore.
Umbridge’s Persian cat Patronus keeps the dementors from getting at the government officials. It doesn’t surprise me that Rowling hates cats. For a control freak like her, such an independent species would be a constant reproach to her own dependence. (You have to be extremely dependent on other people’s opinions if you want to micromanage their interpretations of your books.)
Umbridge brags about being related to most of the pureblood families. Since she “went to Hogwarts instead of a real school,” she knows nothing about genetics and doesn’t realize that means she’s inbred, let alone what that implies about both her character and mental abilities.
Harry acts just the way I described in my own scene above: He loses his temper and Stuns Umbridge and Yaxley. When Hermione expostulates, he starts to argue with her about his actions because of course what he does is all that matters. Instead, she’s pointing out the dementors are attacking the accused. He casts his Patronus, which is ever so much more effective than Dolores’s. That’s probably true, but not for the reason JKR wants us to believe: A stag is several times the size of “an ordinary, domestic, household cat,” so one would expect it to be a lot more effective. (The quotation is from an episode of Saturday Night that Eric Idle hosted, in which he had people put live cats down his pants.)
Hemione replicates the locket, gives Umbridge the phony one, and frees the accused woman. She, Harry, and the victim leave the hearing room and tell the waiting “mudbloods” to go home and either hide or leave the country. Harry proves that, while his IQ may only be in two digits, it’s a high two digits, when he realizes that, if they try to leave with a couple of Patroni and almost two dozen people, that might attract some unwanted attention.
When the group reaches the lobby, they encounter Ron, who tells them the Ministry knows there are invaders because of--guess what?--the hole Harry ripped in Umbridge’s door. You don’t have to be either a Slytherin or a fan of same to condemn Harry to the status of Eternal Dunderhead for this incredibly stupid move.
Harry-as-DE orders the Ministry flunkies to leave the fireplaces in the lobby open so the mudbloods can leave. When people try to argue with him, he puts his Gryffindorishness to good use by blustering and threatening them into obeying him. Harry and his friends get back into the toilets, only to have a recovered Yaxley chase them. Instead of Stunning him again and then Disapparating with Ron and Hermione, Harry just Disapparates, but he can’t keep a grip on Hermione’s hand. They land at 12GP, but there’s a flash of purple light, and Harry loses consciousness.
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He also sees the magic eye is attached to a telescope Dolores uses to spy on her subordinates.
I totally read "Dolores" as "Dumbledore" there….
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That fits perfectly with my description of his dissociation in chapter 34. One could make a solid case for Harry's having a full-time dissociative disorder, as I go into there.
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True, but maybe some fans don’t acknowledge that because of the alleged motivations for each. The narrative says that Harry sacrificed his life for the safety of all, but the narrative says that Snape only sacrificed his life for Lily. In other words, “Snape only turned to the Light because of a teenage crush” doesn’t sound halfway as noble or selfless as Harry’s reason, even though there are many examples in the text of Snape caring for people other than Lily.
/I find this whole snake = evil business really offensive. Rowling needs to use some of that money she’s earned to take a course in zoology. Snakes are very valuable animals. Their main prey is rodents; without them, people would lose many more tons of grain to mice and rats than we do./
It’s true that snakes don’t deserve their nefarious reputation. But to play the devil’s advocate, JKR is not the first nor will she be the last to use snakes as a negative symbol. As you’ve said, there’s been a long history of snakes being portrayed negatively in Western culture, so it’s not as if JKR came up with the idea by herself. On the other hand, she does nothing to challenge or subvert the negative image of snakes, so that was a choice on her part.
Thanks for the added info about the historical symbolism of snakes around the world, it was very interesting.
/The description makes it sound like a Laura Ashley showroom exploded, with the addition of decorative plates with nauseatingly cute pictures of kittens on them./
Either this is supposed to be an indicator of the deceptive nature of Umbridge’s evil (even though that was already made clear in OotP) or maybe JKR doesn’t like stereotypically feminine things like pink and cute kitty memorabilia (note how girly Lavender is depicted in HBP).
/It doesn’t surprise me that Rowling hates cats./
Well, Ms. Figg and Umbridge’s love of cats may be portrayed negatively, but McGonagall is a cat Animagus and I don’t think that we’re supposed to look down on her for that.
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That he was only added in the books because she knew that kids like animals and reading about animals. And because she needed him as a plot device in the PoA.
Crookshanks only ended as a cat because it made the rat / cat / dog thing whole.
Also she said in the first book that owls, toads, rats and cats are only permitted pet animals. So, it's not like she could have decide to give Hermione a mongoose or something else. Plus, it went well with the Witch & Cat folklore.
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Actually rats are not on the list of permitted animals. It's just the Weasleys having special rules for themselves, even if they use them to show how pathetic Percy and Ron are. And in HBP Ginny has a pygmy puff, again, not an allowed animal. Just to show how awesome she is.
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Which sums up JK's planning for the series. She has the first part planned. Then once it is set up she to do to finish it up.
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I just can't figure out what the Trio were doing for a whole month. Establishing what the regular Ministry schedule, especially with Ron's pre-existing inside knowledge, shouldn't have taken more than a week to be certain. (Start on Wednesday and watch through the next, to make sure some special occurrance from one week is messing you up.) Maybe two to be extra sure. Since they're planning to break in on a weekday when it will be easier to blend into the crowds, they'll have the weekends off to plan. "Let's knock out three people in any of the many ways we know of and take their places" isn't exactly hard to think of, especially since they already pulled this trick when they were twelve.
And, uh, they ran into the exact same problem of not knowing what to do once they got into the Slytherin common room besides "keep Draco talking," didn't they? And it nearly ended in disaster? You'd think that would have been a hint!
Anyway, so let's say they're busy watching the Ministry for seven to ten business days, all day. Coming up with a list of five or six different ways to ambush and knock out three people, with different scenarios for what might go wrong, shouldn't take more than a few hours to think of at most, and let's give them another few evenings to practice their techniques (they shouldn't need much more, with all the training they did in the DA plus other past experiences, right? Right, Rowling?) They don't need to brew the Polyjuice, since they're using Moody's supply iirc, and even if they were brewing a fresh batch they wouldn't have to watch it all evening, every evening, and all weekend.
So what were they doing during the evenings and weekends for the other three weeks? (Not watching TV, at least, since they don't have it.) How is it that it never once occurred to any of them that they would have to know how to impersonate Ministry officials once they got inside? They never once discussed, "So, would it be easier to get near Umbridge if we're pretending to be clerks or janitors or what?"
This reads like Rowling's subconscious telling her that since she skimmed over that month, she hadn't properly thought out what they did during all that planning and was now trying to cover for it.
That song sounds just like what some of the young DE recruits were probably envisioning back when they first joined!