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deathtocapslock* Hermione’s still refusing to stay with Ron “for longer than it took to give him a contemptuous look”. For Heaven’s sake, Hermione, get the flip over it. You’re almost an adult now – in fact in a lot of societies you would be considered a fully-fledged adult – and if that isn’t enough to make you show some maturity, you’re currently in the middle of a war against the most powerful dark wizard in a century. Get a bit of perspective, you stupid girl.
* Also I’m surprised she hasn’t just slipped Ron some love potion. A girl who’s capable of mind-wiping her parents and sending them to the other side of the world would be perfectly capable of slipping some amortentia into her intended’s pumpkin juice… for his own good, of course.
* Although I’m even more surprised she actually wants to go out with Ron in the first place. The two don’t seem to have any real shared interests or hobbies, they never seem to get on with each other or enjoy each other’s company, and Ron is never described as being particularly attractive, so we can’t even go with the “shallow girl wants to go out with school hottie” explanation.
* Harry remembers what a bezoar is because Snape mentioned it in their first Potions lesson. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but things like this really bug me. In the books, bezoars were last mentioned in Harry’s first Potions lesson; IRL, they’d have surely come up more recently than that, and Harry wouldn’t have to go back six years to know what they are, even if he could remember what happened so long ago. Bringing up the stuff in PS just makes it look as if the world or characters have no existence outside of what we’re shown directly, which is the last effect any writer should want to produce.
* Harry wouldn’t have dared try his bezoar trick on Snape, because Snape’s an evil meanie who makes his students’ lives a misery by expecting them to actually learn stuff and do the work he sets, rather than cutting corners and cheating all the time.
* Eh, I don’t think knowing that a bezoar will cure poisons shows “individual spirit” or an “intuitive grasp of potion-making”, any more than knowing that aspirin cures headaches shows an intuitive grasp of medicine or human biology.
* So Slughorn’s not even going to look at Hermione’s fifty-two ingredient potion then? Poor Hermione. No wonder she’s so annoyed.
* Harry “remind[s] himself irresistibly of Voldemort” when he asks Slughorn for information. I’m not sure why the resemblance hits him now, and not when he crucioes a man in DH. Or when a girl gets permanently disfigured for telling a teacher about Harry’s study group. Or when he fantasises about Snape getting tortured.
* Although knowing how attracted Harry is to the dark arts, he’s probably enjoying the comparison.
* Harry asks Slughorn about horcruxes, and Slughorn completely freaks out, like he’s wracked with guilt for something terrible he’s done. Not that he’s actually done anything terrible, of course, that’d be far too interesting.
* Although I’m not sure why horcruxes are seen as such a terrible subject. C’mon, can you think of a society which seems like it would be less blasé about splitting up your soul than the wizarding world?
* Ron’s still wincing on hearing the name “Voldemort”. Kind of like how sixteen-year-old muggles wince on hearing the name “Hitler”. Or not.
* Seriously, what is up with the He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named rubbish? Especially since Ron grew up after Voldemort had been defeated, when he was no longer a threat.
* “Look, I had to try and soften him up so I could ask him about Voldemort, didn’t I?” Yes, Harry, I’m sure your cheating was entirely for the greater good, and nothing at all about maintaining your underserved reputation as a great Potions whizz.
* “I’ve been right through the restricted section and even in the most horrible books, where they tell you how to brew the most gruesome potions.” Don’t try and fool us, Hermione, it’s obvious you secretly enjoyed reading about them. Incidentally, was it really necessary to take out Magick Moste Evile and carry it around with you? (Well, I suppose it might be if it’s not just horcruxes you’re interested in…)
* Harry wonders whether the instructor’s whispy build is due to him apparating so much. Maybe, Harry. Or maybe he just happens to be really skinny and frail-looking. Some people are, you know.
* So the kids aren’t really taught, just given some vague instructions and left to struggle for an hour. That seems… kind of inefficient, really. No wonder everybody apparently has trouble learning, if this is the way they’re taught.
* So Harry spends all his spare time wondering what Malfoy’s doing, looking for Malfoy on his map, going into the toilets to think about Malfoy… the slash fiction jokes pretty much write themselves, don’t they? :p
* Harry doesn’t bother telling Lavender that Ron’s been drugged, because that would be far too sensible.
* Love potions can become stronger the longer you leave them. Yeah, I’m sure that couldn’t cause any problems at all.
* Ron gets poisoned, and Slughorn, like all adults in this series, stand around and does nothing while Harry saves the day. Colour me surprised.
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no subject
Date: 2013-09-14 02:04 pm (UTC)*applauds*
/Also I’m surprised she hasn’t just slipped Ron some love potion./
Ah, but then we would see that Hermione wasn’t Ron’s One True Love because, like Merope and Romilda, she had to resort to using potions to make her crush notice her instead of being appreciated by him for her own merits.
/So Harry spends all his spare time wondering what Malfoy’s doing, looking for Malfoy on his map, going into the toilets to think about Malfoy… the slash fiction jokes pretty much write themselves, don’t they?/
As soon as I read the line, “Harry was becoming rapidly obsessed with Draco Malfoy,” I knew that the Harry/Draco fans would jump on this book.
/Harry doesn’t bother telling Lavender that Ron’s been drugged, because that would be far too sensible./
Also, that would imply that Lavender, the girl who’s been portrayed as a silly and brainless embarrassment, deserved to be told anything.
/Ron gets poisoned, and Slughorn, like all adults in this series, stand around and does nothing while Harry saves the day./
This happened in the movie too. Harry is the one who quickly grabs the bezoar and gives it to Ron, who is foaming at the mouth by this point, while Slughorn just stands there looking upset. Hey, genius, aren’t you the Potions Master? Shouldn’t you know this better than Harry? Why are you just standing there?
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Date: 2013-09-14 04:24 pm (UTC)Although I’m not sure why horcruxes are seen as such a terrible subject. C’mon, can you think of a society which seems like it would be less blasé about splitting up your soul than the wizarding world?
They weren't seen as a terrible subject until Albus, the one who wanted to be Master of Death, tabooed it.
“I’ve been right through the restricted section and even in the most horrible books, where they tell you how to brew the most gruesome potions.” Don’t try and fool us, Hermione, it’s obvious you secretly enjoyed reading about them. Incidentally, was it really necessary to take out Magick Moste Evile and carry it around with you? (Well, I suppose it might be if it’s not just horcruxes you’re interested in…)
So, do you think she was looking for a way to beat Harry and his secret assistant, looking for hints for the assistant's identity in the brewing style or something else?
So the kids aren’t really taught, just given some vague instructions and left to struggle for an hour.
Just like everything else is taught at Hogwarts. At least some teachers have them read up and write essays on the underlying theoretical aspects in advance. But that's just mean of them, of course.
Love potions can become stronger the longer you leave them. Yeah, I’m sure that couldn’t cause any problems at all.
At the same time, they are neither Dark nor dangerous. Yeah right.
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Date: 2013-09-14 04:29 pm (UTC)Isn't it funny how the least affected hate all that shit the most. Now that is something that's like real life. Middle class white women clutching their pearls at 'sick' jokes for example when some people that are affected are laughing their arses off. Okay, I'm rubbish at analogies but Ron didn't lose any members of his family due to Voldy so he shouldn't be telling Harry (of all people) to not call him by his real name.
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Date: 2013-09-14 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-14 10:31 pm (UTC)Exactly why I've never been able to see them as a romantic couple and married. Perhaps Ron is the one who used a love potion . . .
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Date: 2013-09-15 01:30 am (UTC)Of course they don't (have any existence outside of what we’re shown directly). The wizarding world is the only thing that matters. Haven't you figured that out yet? :D
* Harry wouldn’t have dared try his bezoar trick on Snape, because Snape’s an evil meanie who makes his students’ lives a misery by expecting them to actually learn stuff and do the work he sets, rather than cutting corners and cheating all the time.
I know. If this were the Warriors series, they'd never get their warrior names. They'd spend their lives as apprentices, picking ticks off elders and fetching moss for their beds.
* Eh, I don’t think knowing that a bezoar will cure poisons shows “individual spirit” or an “intuitive grasp of potion-making”, any more than knowing that aspirin cures headaches shows an intuitive grasp of medicine or human biology.
Harry Potter: the boy for whom the learning bar is set so low, it's--well, it's lying flat on the ground. Maybe it's even lying in a trench specially dug for it.
Harry “remind[s] himself irresistibly of Voldemort” when he asks Slughorn for information. I’m not sure why the resemblance hits him now, and not when he crucioes a man in DH. Or when a girl gets permanently disfigured for telling a teacher about Harry’s study group. Or when he fantasises about Snape getting tortured.
I'm taking this course now on Coursera called, "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue." The textbook says, "People often spend time discounting weak objections to their views in order to avoid other objections they know are harder to counter."(page 68, italics in original) That's what Rowling is doing here. By bringing up a completely harmless and unobjectionable reason Harry and Tom are alike, she associates them as "Lost Boys of Hogwarts" in a benign way, thus (she hopes) cutting off the reader's consideration of the uglier ways they resemble each other. Is she doing this consciously? I doubt it. She honestly doesn't seem to realize how unpleasant and unheroic her main character is.
Yes, Harry, I’m sure your cheating was entirely for the greater good, and nothing at all about maintaining your underserved reputation as a great Potions whizz.
Interesting that "whizz" is a synonym for "urinate," since Harry acts very pissy in this book, and he pisses all over his studies in all the books. Pun intended? ;-)
“I’ve been right through the restricted section and even in the most horrible books, where they tell you how to brew the most gruesome potions.” Don’t try and fool us, Hermione, it’s obvious you secretly enjoyed reading about them. Incidentally, was it really necessary to take out Magick Moste Evile and carry it around with you? (Well, I suppose it might be if it’s not just horcruxes you’re interested in…)
Is this a good girl pretending to be a badass, or is she preparing to mind rape her parents even now? Surely destroying someone's entire memory and life and cutting them off from everything they've ever known, without their knowledge or consent, qualifies as the darkest magic. If a DE had done it, it certainly would.
Ron gets poisoned, and Slughorn, like all adults in this series, stand around and does nothing while Harry saves the day. Colour me surprised.
It's no wonder fanfics portray Slughorn as incompetent, when he's a POTIONS EXPERT who doesn't even have the sense to grab a bezoar to save his student from poisoning. Sheesh!
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Date: 2013-09-15 07:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-15 12:09 pm (UTC)>> Is this a good girl pretending to be a badass, or is she preparing to mind rape her parents even now? Surely destroying someone's entire memory and life and cutting them off from everything they've ever known, without their knowledge or consent, qualifies as the darkest magic. If a DE had done it, it certainly would. <<
And yes, the definition of Dark Magic is apparently based on whether the caster is a Gryffindor or not. The point of the arc with Harry and the Cruciatus Curse was apparently to show that a path becomes the right one to tread as soon as Harry sets foot on it.
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Date: 2013-09-15 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-15 03:05 pm (UTC)And he'd probably been planning for months what to do if Albus showed up on his (borrowed) doorstep--get out of the conversation by pretending not to be in. Permanently. He was prepared for this eventuality--that's the whole point of fire drills, after all, that if you already know what to do in a particular emergency scenario you're more likely to do it, and not freeze or run in the wrong direction.
Horace knew that Albus and Tom were both interested in recruiting him, he'd had time to come up with plans for what to do if his detectors told him a wizard was approaching, and even then he lost his head and forgot a key detail. So no, even with an anticipated crisis he doesn't deal all that well.
What I wonder about more is how he dealt with exploding cauldrons in class. Or did he dumb down the practical part of the curriculum so much that was not often a problem?
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Date: 2013-09-15 03:10 pm (UTC)Whereas Ron gets a Molly who will (he hopes) actually put him first.
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Date: 2013-09-15 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-15 06:58 pm (UTC)We do seem him dueling in DH - after taking some time to regroup and prepare, though. And we see him giving assignments to NEWT classes like "make me something interesting," which sounds like it ought to have produced dangerous results at least once in the last seventy-ish years, from accidental poisoning (or poisonous fumes) to explosions. Though maybe only lets the advanced students do anything that dangerous and so it doesn't happen as often. And being in class is still a situation he could have prepared in advance for.
So maybe just the setting threw him - he's in his quarters, at night, serving up something he bought, and poison hadn't crossed his mind. As long as it's a situation he's had time to prepare for, he's fine. If Ron had been poisoned in class, it might have triggered Slughorn's "help student who's ingested/inhaled some dangerous potion" programs, as it were, and he would have gone straight for the bezoar.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-15 10:25 pm (UTC)IOW, a straw man argument is completely phony and made up with the purpose of making one's opponent look bad. What Rowling is doing is making a small, true concession (yes, Harry resembles Tom, but only in a minor and unimportant way) to cut off the reader from noticing the true, but also big and ugly ways Harry and Tom are alike. So she's admitting those ugly similarities are there; she just wants you to ignore them.
Think of it this way: Rowling is like a car saleswoman who admits the car she's trying to sell you only gets 25 mpg instead of 30 mpg, and knocks $500 off the price as compensation. She doesn't mention the recent discovery that this model's anti-lock brakes tend to fail at high speeds. Both facts are true, but she admits to the lesser one to distract you from the big, dangerous one.
BTW, for those unfamiliar with Coursera, it has hundreds of college courses on dozens of subjects, all of them free. Even the e-textbook I'm using is free until the course ends.
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Date: 2013-09-15 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-16 07:02 pm (UTC)"But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths"
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Date: 2013-09-16 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-16 10:07 pm (UTC)Yeah - but he could have gotten that from Lavender.
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Date: 2013-09-16 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-17 01:15 pm (UTC)I've really never figured out why Ron apparently liked Hermione. Not that she doesn't have qualities to like, just not ones he probably would value.
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Date: 2013-09-18 12:51 am (UTC)I never could fathom, though, why JKR arranged them to have so little in common that they've hardly been seen voluntarily spending non-Harry-related time together since that chess game in PS/SS. How hard would it have been to throw in a one sentence aside every so often that they were... well, doing anything that suggested they enjoyed each other's company?
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Date: 2013-09-19 01:00 am (UTC)Don't you think Ron would make an excellent absentee father? Don't need to have anything in common with your bride if you plan to leave her with the kids while you indulge your own interests......
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Date: 2013-09-19 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-19 01:52 am (UTC)Actually I see it more as Lavender acting like a child. That she was acting like one of those girls who pull the "baby" act with their boyfriends. The cutesy baby talk, the pouting, making big eyes and acting like a child.
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Date: 2013-09-19 10:05 am (UTC)Also, far from having to struggle for acceptance in the WW, Hermione is widely praised by teachers and students alike for her intelligence, and never seems to suffer because of her origin (except perhaps for Draco's "mudblood" jibes, but I don't think a couple of throwaway insults from somebody she'd dislike anyway really counts as suffering). Then again, though, I wouldn't be too surprised if JK Rowling thinks of Hermione as a victim of prejudice, but just forgot to actually show us this...
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Date: 2013-09-19 10:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-19 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-19 02:59 pm (UTC)In regards to the love potion and Romilda not facing consequences over it - I'm pretty sure that the Wizarding World doesn't see them as 'wrong'. At the very least, they are not illegal, though supposedly banned (according to Hermione) at Hogwarts. But then who ever reads the list of banned items on Filch's door? Albus has made it clear that he finds the long list silly.
The Twins sell them at their store - complete with disguises as perfume when ordered by owl. Molly tells Hermione and Ginny that she brewed one when she was younger, with what amounted to a hint (for me) that she used it to get Arthur's notice.
Yes, being a banned item, Romilda's love potion SHOULD have gotten her in trouble. But then as terri_testing once pointed out in an essay on Snapedom (“Mr. Filch has Asked”: Discipline at Hogwarts - 11/18/10), one must either be caught in the act or confess before a teacher can do anything about your wrongdoing. Even Harry's word that the chocolates came from Romilda would not be enough for her to be disciplined.
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Date: 2013-09-19 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-19 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-20 04:45 am (UTC)Please. Such romantic drivel. (And remember what institutions the Romantics were rebelling against when they first invented this drivel.)
If you're operating in a society with strictly-functioning sex roles, what one looks for in a spouse is a Helpmate. Someone who can play the appropriate alternate role to the one you're playing. If a Guild member, a spouse who can advance your standing in said Guild. If an aristocrat, someone who enhances your power or adds to your holdings (or, worst case, your money). If a trained farmwitch, a trained farmer. If someone trained as head=of-family and-primary-wage-earner, someone who can play the wife-role on the income level you're able to provide.
All while perpetuating the Family and its interests (included, but not limited to, by reproducing) in the way demanded by your culture and the roles you two are playing.
Not, gods help us all, looking for Emotional Fulfillment and Companionship!
(Some Native American societies were completely accepting of homosexual unions--so long as one partner enacted the male-hunter role and the other, the female-gatherer-preserver one. Didn't matter, the actual gender of participants, as long as the roles were preserved.)
If you leave out such romantic drivel, Margaret Atwood neatly captures the perfect bargain of such a marital arrangement (while documenting the violence, deception, and mutual desperation [and exploitatiion, if not necessarily exactly mutual] embodied in it) in her poem "Marrying the Hangman."
She begins, after a few preliminaries, by explaining, "This is not fantasy, this is history." She ends by averring, baldly, They both kept their promises.
A more bitter arraignment cannot be imagined.
Read the poem and see.
But then, Atwood first published this poem in the late 1970's, and intended it as a critique of the unexamined ideas of marriage then prevalent. When JKR was a very very young woman, newly married, and perhaps not fully examining her ideas of what obligations she understood herself and her new young husband to have taken on.
And we know, for Jo has told us so, that the WW can sometimes be a bit old-fashioned.
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Date: 2013-09-20 04:55 am (UTC)When she enters the WW, her most important influences are her Gryffindor year-mates. (Yeah, Percy talks to her at the Sorting Feast, as Lucius talked to Ickle Sev, but she needs to find her feet among among her year-mates.)
And her Gryff year-mates all reject her. No one among HER PEERS is favorably impressed by her ability to impress teschers. They all think that her academic showing-off makes her a horror. And Ron's the mouthpiece for this view.
And Ron's also the mouthpiece of the born-wizards who are rejecting her for her ignorance of their world.
If she can win him to her side, she's won..
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Date: 2013-09-21 02:03 am (UTC)And they just do not work together like this. Ron and Hermione can't be set up in every way as the best ending one could hope for given the "traditional" strictures, where you make do with limited options and hopefully you'll have some chemistry to counteract your general incompatibility in how you approach life, and a romantic subplot that celebrates young love and free choice in partners. Which is the kind of romantic supblot I think a fair number of younger readers expect, and is the framework they try to hammer R/Hr into even when, on any analysis, it doesn't fit very well at all.
We know JKR likes Jane Austen. Maybe bits of Austen's worldbuilding and storylines, as it were, seeped into HP, but without the critical commentary. Not to mention the added problem of a good quarter of JKR's characters supposedly being dropped in from a society with fairly different expectations.