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deathtocapslockThe only way I could make sense of King's Cross was by creating a table that laid out the skinned baby incidents in detail. After I did that, I realized chapter 1 contained a similar incident and cried out for a table, as well as a detailed comparison between the two chapters, so I did those things.
When I reached the point in my postings in which Xeno Lovegood gets tortured by the DEs, and Hermione gets tortured by Bellatrix, I realized those were also similar situations that were handled completely differently by the author. I made tables for those incidents, then realized I'd have to rewrite the Malfoy Manor chapter spork to accommodate and compare them. After living with DH for 6 months (I started reading it and writing the sporking in December 2012 and last posted in June 2013), I just couldn't face that. I needed a vacation from it. A nice, long vacation.
Recently I've gotten the desire to write about it again, so here goes. I'll finish it this time.
When last we left our
Hermione having saved everyone’s butt again by Apparating them to a field, they set up their tent and rehash the previous chapter. Hermione explains she allowed the DEs to see Harry so they would know Xeno wasn’t lying about Harry’s being there. Yeah, like they’re really going to care that Harry was there, now that he’s gone again. When Ron asks why she covered him, she tells him it’s so everyone will keep thinking he’s at home sick and not attack his family for lying about him. Spattergroit must be a hell of a disease if its obvious symptoms last three months. I also didn’t know the DEs needed an excuse to attack people, particularly their enemies. I thought they did it just for the heck of it. Ron then asks about Hermione’s parents, and she reminds him they’re in Australia.
Or are they? Remember, we only have Hermione’s word about their location.
After Ron and Harry lavishly praise her for being a “genius,” Hermione and the boys go round and round regarding the reality of the Hallows, with Hermione saying they can’t be real, Ron saying they could be, and Harry beginning his obsession with how SUPERAWESOMECOOL! it would be to have the Hallows himself.
There is one really dumb aspect of this argument. Hermione asks Harry, if Dumbledore knew the Hallows were real and could do what was claimed, why didn’t he tell Harry about them? Silly Hermione. Dumbledore never told anybody anything important. You can’t jerk people around if they know what’s really going on.
Harry becomes convinced he’s descended from the third brother, the one who originally got the cloak from Death. He could be, since they’re both passive people who lurk around under a magical drop cloth rather than taking action. The story says the third brother was “humble,” though, an adjective which does not describe Harry, and sure doesn’t describe his scumbag father. Harry also believes the Resurrection Stone is in the snitch Dumbledore left him. Now he just needs the Elder Wand to complete the set, and he realizes his soul mate Voldy is after the wand, too. Preposterous as these claims are, they are of course true because the title character of the series says they are.
Harry becomes so obsessed with getting the EW (appropriate abbreviation, no?) that he abandons the Horcrux quest and just sits around on his can thinking about the wand and trying to tune in to his Voldie-vision. “He would have been happy to sit alone in silence, trying to read Voldemort’s thoughts, to find out more about the Elder Wand....” Hmmm. Fantasizing about possessing the Ultimate Phallic Symbol while trying to read another guy’s mind...Yeah, nothing at all gay about that, Ms. Rowling.
Unfortunately for Harry, his damned friends keep interrupting his nonsexual fantasies (No, no, really, they aren’t, I swear!) by dragging him around looking for Horcruces. They excuse this outrageous behavior by saying that’s what Dumbledore told them to do. Humph! Don’t they realize Harry’s the Chosen One, the Star of this series? How dare they question his wisdom!? Truly, a prophet is never recognized in his own country.
Things get so bad that--gasp!--Ron has to take charge! You know they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel when that happens. He keeps trying to get Radio Free Wizarding World Potterwatch on his radio but doesn’t succeed until March.
MARCH! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The first fifteen pages of this chapter cover three months, and during that entire time, Harry Potter does nothing, nothing, but sit on his ass fantasizing about the Elder Wand and trying to connect with his Voldie-soul mate. Oh, wait. He also tries to open the snitch so he can get the stone out of it. (Nothing gay about that, either.) I wish he’d succeed in that, too. Maybe he’d swallow the stone, and it would end up in his scrotum. He sure needs something that works down there.
Harry doesn’t have the right to bail out on his society like this. He can’t have it both ways. He can’t have the adulation that goes with being Mr. Boy-Who-Lived-Chosen-One-Wizarding-World-Savior and abdicate the responsibilities that go along with those titles and that adulation.
I just love it that people make such a big damned deal about how “heroic” Harry is when he is so passive. Yes, Severus Snape is a jerk, but he is a jerk who does something. While Harry is sitting around with his wand up his ass, Snape is busting his ass 24/7, running the gauntlet between serving two unstable, sadistic tyrants, operating a school, and protecting the children of Hogwarts. It’s not for nothing that terri_testing wrote a story about him called, To Do All in My Power. That’s his motto. If Harry had to do Snape’s job for a week, he would collapse and die from the strain, not least because he would have to do it while everybody was condemning him for being a villain, instead of constantly petting and praising him as a hero. It’s no wonder people with a mature and responsible concept of heroism regard Severus Snape as the true hero of this series.
Which brings me back to Harry’s obsession with the Hallows. Some time ago, terri_testing wrote a pair of very well-reasoned articles saying the Elder Wand encouraged hubris in its owner, and the Resurrection Stone should be called the Suicide Stone because it encouraged people to kill themselves so they could be with their dead loved ones. I agreed with her when I read those pieces, but rereading this book, I can’t agree any longer.
Look at what happens in this chapter: Harry becomes obsessed with finding and uniting the Hallows, so much so that he withdraws from his friends, bails out on the job his idol Dumbledore gave him, and spends all his time brooding and trying to connect with the Dull Lord. In other words, he acts clinically depressed. Ron and Hermione were exposed to the same information Harry was, but they didn’t become obsessed/depressed. Ron was mildly interested in the SuperWand, but not enough to distract him from the Horcrux hunt. Hermione dismissed the whole DH story as nonsense and continued following Dumbestbore’s orders. So why weren’t they tempted?
I think the Hallows are inanimate but potentially addictive objects, like drugs and alcohol, and with similar effects. Take people’s reactions to alcohol as an example. At one extreme are people who can’t stand alcohol and never drink it at all. At the other extreme are people whose lives are destroyed by their addiction. In between those extremes are gradations of consumption and vulnerability. Some people drink only socially, or with meals, or sometimes have a few drinks to relax. Other people drink heavily, or even binge drink, sometimes for years (e.g., in college), then give that up and drink little or not at all when the circumstances of their lives change. In other words, not everybody will become an alcoholic just because they are exposed to alcohol. There are factors besides mere exposure to an addictive substance that predispose someone to addiction of any kind, such as heredity and a history of child abuse.
I think the Hallows are the same. They can only control people who are vulnerable to being controlled in that Hallow’s particular way. It’s not a coincidence that all the people referred to as either owning or wanting the Elder Wand are men. It’s extremely unlikely a woman would care much about having a wand she could use to kick the ass of everyone she met. Neither would a lot of men. Imagine Neville turning into a badass because he had the EW. You can’t, can you?
The proof that the wand is just a wand lies in the fact Snape had it within easy grabbing distance for almost a year but made no effort to get it. He literally didn’t even know what it was until Voldemort was getting ready to kill him to possess it. One can argue that’s because he wasn’t really the wand’s master; Draco was. But the wand didn’t affect Draco, either. And even if Snape was technically not the wand’s master, if it was powerful enough to (1) make everyone who encountered it desire it, and (2) enslave its owners, he surely would have felt some desire to possess it when it was so close to him for the better part of a year.
In the same way, a person with either no dead loved ones, or who was at peace with their deaths, would not care about using the Resurrection Stone to recall the dead. They certainly would not kill themselves just because a rock told them to. I agree the stone has the wrong name, however. As Hermione pointed out, it doesn’t really raise the dead; it just brings back a “pale imitation” of a person. It should therefore be called the Shade-Calling Stone.
For that matter, the Hallows themselves need a new name because there is nothing “hallowed,” or holy, about them. From now on, I am going to call them the Deathly Booby Prizes because they lack holiness, are desired only by fools (boobies), and are a nasty kind of gag prize for their recipients.
Eventually, Ron is able to guess the password of the Potterwatch show, and HRH get to hear it. I don’t get that. A broadcast program is not a computer file or secret society that might require a password to gain access to it. It’s available to anyone who can tune in. That even applies to similar technologies such as cell phones, as the British royal family found out in the 1990s when people were able to pick up on their radios the highly personal cell phone calls Princess Diana and Prince Charles were having with their lovers.
Even a young child should be able to see how lame this “protection” is. It’s known to the Order that anyone who has the password can hear Potterwatch. It’s inconceivable that the DEs wouldn’t know about such an underground program. They could anticipate it and be listening for it, just happen upon it by accident, or find out about it some other way, e.g., by questioning prisoners. All they’d have to do to tune it in is to guess the password, which, even given the extremely limited imaginations and talents on both sides, they should be able to figure out would have something to do with subjects important to the “good guys.” To make matters even more ridiculous, the broadcasters even give the password for the next show at the end of the current program!
On top of that, the pseudonyms the participants use are so obvious, they could be figured out by Rubeus Hagrid. Why couldn’t Remus be “Lon Chaney, Jr” (who starred in The Wolfman)? Or Lee Jordan could be “Almond,” and Kingsley could be “Executioner,” which has the added advantage of sounding really badass. (I like Jordan almonds. Shacklebolt sounds like some device a medieval torturer would use, and torturers were executioners.) And what’s with Fred being “Rodent”? Is that a play on his last name, Weasley? Weasels and ferrets are not rodents! They are carnivores! Do the research, people! Jeez Louise! I just--I can’t even--this is too dumb for words.
Rowling tries to make us selfish “muggles” care about this overhyped gangland rumble by telling us our kind is getting killed in large numbers by the DEs. Oh. Come. On. This is so stupid, it’s positively painful. Now we are supposed to believe the British government would emulate Harry Potter just sit on its ass doing nothing, while its citizens were being slaughtered wholesale by terrorists on its own soil. As the Thing likes to say, “It’s clobbering time!”
Apropos of the “muggle” attacks, Kingsley exhorts his listeners to protect “muggle” neighbors, reminding them, “...[I]t’s one short step from ‘Wizards first’ to ‘Purebloods first,’ and then to ‘Death Eaters.’ We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”
Okay, anonymous author, who are you, and what have you done with J K Rowling? I know you can’t be the woman you claim to be because this enlightened sentiment appears nowhere else in the entire series. It has to have been written by someone besides the person named on the cover.
At last we have proof. Deathly Hallows really is fan fiction ghostwritten by someone besides Joanne Rowling.
There’s a silly bit of “comic relief” when Fred rebuts a misconception that Voldemort can kill you just by looking at you, saying it’s basilisks that do that. He adds, “One simple test: Check whether the thing that’s glaring at you has got legs. If it has, it’s safe to look into its eyes....” But how would you tell, since wizards wear robes that conceal their legs? And what if it’s disguised like Nagini was inside Bathilda Bagshot’s body? That’s not even to consider that allowing Voldy to look into your eyes would allow him to Legilimize you, which would be very bad, even if not fatal. Hah! We were too clever to fall for your tricks, anonymous author.
It’s a good thing Potterwatch doesn’t really involve watching Potter, given that he’s done absolutely nothing these last three months. Seeing that, Harry’s supporters would have despaired about his “saving them.” Then their resistance would have crumbled, causing the Death Eaters to exult and step up their attacks. The book would have ended a lot sooner, and with a completely different result.
At the end of the chapter, because the author, whoever it is, is not able to come up with another way to move the story forward, Harry stupidly says, “Voldemort,” and the Trio gets captured by Snatchers (mercenary kidnappers hired by Voldemort). Yawn. Wake me when something really interesting and not contrived happens.
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Date: 2013-11-17 05:02 am (UTC)Why would Severus have been more tempted by an Elder Wand he didn't know about that was buried in a tomb by the lake than by an Elder Wand he didn't know about that was held by his boss in the castle, a boss he met on regular basis? I don't think this is a good counter-argument to Terri's hypothesis.
Kingsley's expression of humanism looks like something Rowling was forced to stick in so that people would know that Kingsley taking over the Ministry after the battle was a good thing despite being a coup.
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Date: 2013-11-17 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-17 05:07 pm (UTC)I'd consider the theory that Hallows (and probably some other Dark Objects) are addictive, and that people are variously vulnerable to that addiction, as to others, to be a valuable extension of my Hallows-theories, not in any way contradictory to it.
But oryx_leucoryx is right, I don't see why Severus should be more tempted by the EW when it's in Albus's tomb than when he sat next to it at dinner or had the headmaster use it on him. If it's going to have effects on people other than its immediate "master," you'd think that it would show signs before Twinkle's death.
Hmm. But maybe that's another reason for turning down becoming MoM? If it only attracts those who are susceptible, only those truly wanting the ultimate power-over others, like Albus and Tom do, would feel its pull. And Albus doesn't hire those people for Hogwarts. But as Minister they'd be around him anyhow (imagine Albus with Barty Sr. as the head of the DMLE!), so they'd be around his wand enough to be pulled to it.....
In which case Severus (and Draco) felt no especial pull to the wand, either before or after Albus's death, because they just aren't the sorts to be seriously tempted by it.
Okay, on to the chaprter--dear gods, three months. You are right.
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Date: 2013-11-17 06:19 pm (UTC)Honestly, I didn't think about Severus's daily encounters with DD's wand. If anything, that proves the wand is not inherently tempting to everyone. If he could live and work with it 10 months a years for 17 years without wanting it, it can't be a magical black hole sucking everyone in to desiring it.
Hmm, if Hermione is not affected by the Stone, doesn't this disprove your speculation about her having killed her parents (accidentally? or to spare them the fate of living with badly done Memory Charms?)
Not at all. I said, "In the same way, a person with either no dead loved ones, or who was at peace with their deaths, would not care about using the Resurrection Stone to recall the dead." Hermione shows a remarkable--one might even say, Dumbledorean--capacity for rationalizing her bad acts. If she thought killing her parents was what she had to do, she would be able to make peace with that within herself.
Don't forget she'd been marginalizing them for years. For all her lip service about caring for them, nearly all of her time was spent with her magical friends and the family she wanted to be adopted into, the Weasleys. If she'd really cared about her parents, she wouldn't have acted like they were a burden she wanted to shuck off.
It occurred to me while formulating this reply that the real reason she (allegedly) mind-raped them and shipped them off to Australia might not have been to protect them, but to get rid of them. It's common for parents to take a laissez faire attitude towards their kids, as long as the kids aren't getting in trouble or having obvious problems, such as mental illness or addiction. Then, when they try to assert their authority, they find out it's so eroded their kids will no longer listen to them.
Maybe the Grangers saw their relationship with Hermione slipping away and tried to insist she spend more time with them. Even worse, maybe they found out about the war and tried to keep her out of it. I can just see them saying, "You may be an adult in that world, young lady, but you're still a minor in ours. We absolutely forbid you to get involved in this struggle against Moldywarts, or whatever his name is. If you fight us on this, we'll ship you off to a boarding school in Australia (or Canada)." Then Hermione could have rationalized that doing the same to her parents was a form of self-defense. And if somebody gets killed or maimed when you defend yourself against them, well, that's too bad, but it's certainly not the same as murder, or even manslaughter. No reason to beat up on yourself.
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Date: 2013-11-17 06:25 pm (UTC)I'm glad to know somebody won't feel their eyes glaze over when they see the tables. :D
It just now occurs to me the EW gave Scummy a compelling reason to get rid of James and Sirius. If anybody would be tempted by that wand, they would! Heck, they'd probably fight each other over it. Getting them conveniently killed or sentenced to a lifetime in Azkaban is a great way to thin out the competition for the wand. It also allowed Scummy to hang on to the cloak indefinitely. Now, if he could just find the Stone to complete the set...
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Date: 2013-11-17 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-17 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-17 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-17 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-17 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-17 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-17 11:42 pm (UTC)Well, Dumbledore knew that Horcruxes were real and important, so why didn't he tell Harry how to destroy them?
/The first fifteen pages of this chapter cover three months, and during that entire time, Harry Potter does nothing/
I don't understand why JKR wrote that. One month would've been bad enough, but three? Was it really so important that Harry face Voldemort at a certain time of year that she needed some way to fill in the timeline leading to that point? The Trio has a sword that's destroyed one Horcrux already. Why aren't they still looking for more Horcruxes during this three-month period?
/running the gauntlet between serving two unstable, sadistic tyrants, operating a school, and protecting the children of Hogwarts./
Maybe part of the reason why some people don't see this is because readers don't actually get to see Snape do any of this. It's either implied or merely spoken of. True, Neville's resistance at Hogwarts also happens off-screen, but he's already been established as an unambiguous hero, so it's not hard to imagine that he's doing something to help the cause. At this point, the reader is still supposed to think of Snape as a traitorous Death Eater.
/Now we are supposed to believe the British government would emulate Harry Potter just sit on its ass doing nothing, while its citizens were being slaughtered wholesale by terrorists on its own soil./
And we're also supposed to believe that other countries of the world somehow know nothing about this or, if they do, have not offered any kind of assistance to the British government to help combat this threat.
I've seen people criticizing other series for not believably creating a world where normal humans know nothing about the supernatural and contrast them with Harry Potter, citing HP as an example of the suspension of disbelief done right. At the beginning of the series, yes, wizards are established as having their own hidden world with secrecy laws and the appearance of Memory Charms helps to explain why Muggles don't know that magic exists. But at this point where, like you said, Muggles are being slaughtered in large numbers? Muggle governments would notice.
/Seeing that, Harry’s supporters would have despaired about his “saving them.”/
Yes, I doubt that Neville and the rest of the DA would be happy if they learned that while they were staging their Hogwarts resistance, Harry was sitting in a tent for three months.
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Date: 2013-11-18 01:27 am (UTC)Well, Ron and Hermione are searching, only Harry can't be bothered. Ron fans cite this part to show how dedicated he was once he returned, but of course it just makes him more pathetic to non-Ron fans because clearly the Horcrux hunt lost its importance.
But at this point where, like you said, Muggles are being slaughtered in large numbers?
As Terri once pointed out, the radio broadcast in late March tells of the discovery of Bathilda's body, which was left to rot since Christmas. Which suggests this was the first broadcast since late December or early January. Yet in all this time all Kingsley has to report in the way of Muggle deaths is that one family of five. Not really dying in large numbers, at least not since December.
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Date: 2013-11-18 01:40 am (UTC)Hermione and Ron are. Harry is the one who's sitting on his can doing nothing. In va32h's fanfic, DH Redux, Harry falls into a coma for three months. It's been years since I read it, but I think everybody else just sits around doing research while they wait for him to wake up.
Maybe part of the reason why some people don't see this is because readers don't actually get to see Snape do any of this. It's either implied or merely spoken of.
True, but HP is the ultimate "tell not show" series. If readers are willing to accept that when it comes to, say, James reforming, despite the complete lack of evidence for this reformation other than his (extremely dishonest, prejudiced, and self-serving) friends' words, they should be able to accept Snape's heroism, given that there is ample onscreen evidence of its veracity once we see his memories.
But at this point where, like you said, Muggles are being slaughtered in large numbers? Muggle governments would notice.
Particularly since this was the time during which the British government started setting up surveillance cameras in public places. If people were being killed in public, somebody would have seen it on tape. The news media would have gotten hold of those tapes and gone public with them. For that matter, private citizens with their own cameras would have shot footage of these attacks and gone public with them. And what about tourists? Everybody's familiar with the stereotype of Japanese tourists photographing everything. It's just idiotic to suppose that in a country of almost 60 million people (in the late 1990s), with a thriving tourist industry, that nobody nowhere nowhen saw nothing and went public with it.
I'm inclined to believe what Sister Magpie once wrote in a spork of hers: The "muggles" know all about the foolish wizards and are just indulging them by pretending not to. That makes a lot more sense than Rowling's version.
And we're also supposed to believe that other countries of the world somehow know nothing about this or, if they do, have not offered any kind of assistance to the British government to help combat this threat.
Not only that, one could argue the NATO alliance requires its signers to assist. Granted, the treaty applies to external threats, and the DEs are British, but given that they're terrorists who want to take over the world, I think an exception could be made in their case. And we all know how much the US loves to butt into other countries' affairs with the military. I certainly can't imagine we'd sit on the sidelines, particularly since we intervened in Bosnia under similar circumstances (i.e., civil war and ethnic cleansing).
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Date: 2013-11-18 01:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 04:00 am (UTC)Harry spent MONTHS trying to invade Tom's mind while remaining untouched himself. He dint't OPEN himself to Tom; he tried to violate Yom'd most secret places without giving anything of himself.
You tell me what to call such an attempt.
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Date: 2013-11-18 05:08 am (UTC)Returning to the Hallows, something occurred to me. Severus wouldn't care about the wand, but he sure would about the stone. Imagining him with the stone reminded me of that scene in The Best Revenge where he's standing in front of the Mirror of Erised. He envisions digging up Lily and resurrecting her. They get married and raise Harry. Their love for each other and Harry is perfect, and they're perfectly happy, and they'll always be perfectly happy and--Then Minerva yanks him away from the Mirror.
So now I'm wondering if the Mirror is a Hallow, I mean, Booby Prize, also, or at least something made by Death. It certainly acts like a Booby Prize. It would be easy for someone to sit in front of it and gaze at it until they wasted away and died. According to the HP wiki, nobody knows who made it or where it came from, so there's nothing in canon to contradict my theory. DTCL makes another breakthrough in HP research! Yay for us! YAY!
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Date: 2013-11-18 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 11:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-18 11:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-19 01:25 am (UTC)Okay, about 2 years ago I started an essay on that damned Mirror. Yes, it's a Dark Object; yes; it's addictive; yes, it's designed ultimately to kill its victims. And if one looks at it long enough, even if it doesn't kill one it causes severely damaging long-term emotional effects. In fact, Ron's experience can be used to argue that a single short exposure might have caused permanent, crippling damage in someone vulnerable..
Harry's wasn't short, and it was engineered by Albus.
Guess I'll have to dig that one out and finish it, yes?
As to its being a Hallow, something created by Death.... Well, the effect justifies that supposition, but nothing else that I can see. So not a Hallow, perhaps, but a trap set by Death for wizards...?
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Date: 2013-11-19 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-19 01:40 am (UTC)JKR reads like someone who read about the concept once, forgot all the details of what she read, and resurreected the idea in her own work because that's how Resistance fighters separated from each other communicated with each other. Right?
Details, shmetails. O maths!
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Date: 2013-11-19 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-19 04:40 am (UTC)I wonder whether prolonged Hallows usage is a factor? Or even just usage (vs. propinquity)? Ron and Hermione used the Cloak with Harry maybe once or twice a year at most, while he's used it a lot more, and carried it around with him all last year. (Snape never used any of them.) Could that make him more susceptible to the other two? Maybe a super susceptible person (of which there are enough for it to keep getting new masters) might want the Wand just after hearing about it, but most people won't really care that much just from stories or being in the general vicinity. Sort of like how hearing that alcohol exists or seeing someone else take a drink is a negligible inducement for most people under most circumstances. But if you had your first taste of the Cloak at age 11 and used it regularly afterward? Trouble. Actually get your hands on a Hallow and use it, rather than just being in the same room? Trouble. See one used spectacularly when you're in a vulnerable state, like in the first stages of anger or grief? Trouble. It could take time to build up in your system, too, so that the pull gets stronger over the years.
If in addition the Cloak has the effect of making you feel "cut off" from the world (which, depending on your preexisting inclinations, could manifest in you feeling above everyone else and so justified in meddling with their lives, or in you becoming a passive observer - or both, either as a sequential progression or in some messy alternating combination), that might exacerbate things. So much easier to sit back and watch the others do trivial worldly things like looking for the Horcruxes... and while you're slacking, there's more time for the Cloak in your pocket to fill your mind with the idea that you need the bigger, better hit that having even more Hallows would bring. Yes, just sit back and think about how to become even more special than other people...
Why couldn’t Remus be “Lon Chaney, Jr
That would require them to know something about Muggle culture, silly! Besides, truly good pseudonyms in this case would have no connection to their real identities at all.
...I was about to say they could call themselves Tom, Dick, and Harry, but that would hardly do, would it?
Er. Anyway. Same for the passwords - they should be totally random, like "pineapple teacup" or "dustbunny carrot." (Better yet, there should be two passwords, and they should be given out by different means - one in the broadcast and one via substitution cipher on a charmed coin, say - and you need both to decrypt the next broadcast.) What kind of amateurs have meaningful, guessable passwords for their top-secret resistance radio bulletin? Usually dead ones, I would bet.
You know, a lot of this book's problems could be explained if it was written by committee. JKR wrote big patches of it with some hazy outlines between the patches, and three or so "editors" filled in the rest as best they could, under a tight deadline.
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Date: 2013-11-19 04:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-19 04:49 am (UTC)One could argue that it's very similar the the stone, in that its reflection acts like the shades called by the stone: You see somebody you want to see, who tells you what you want to hear, and who makes you want to throw your life away to be with them. Just because JKR didn't see the obvious similarities doesn't mean we should ignore them. Don't we pride ourselves on picking up on things about her books she has overlooked?
Besides, think about how much worse it makes Scummywhore look: He put a supremely vulnerable child in front of an object he knew could kill the boy. Maybe that was his first attempt at getting Harry to throw his life away. At the very least, it could have implanted in Harry's mind the idea that his life wasn't worth living.
I wonder if he stuck Severus in front of it from time to time to keep him in line? If Snape started getting "uppity," Scummy could have tricked Snape into sitting in front of it, left him there to rot for a while, then "rescued" him when his spirit was good and broken. If he got out of line again, another "treatment" would break down his defenses again. It's a very effective torture, and it leaves no (physical) scars. IOW, it's quintessentially Dumbledorean.
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Date: 2013-11-19 06:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-19 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-19 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-19 10:30 pm (UTC)Someone else, I forget who, once posited that it was a test--that he wanted to know Harry's heart's desire. And I think he did, too. But I also think he expected Harry to see roughly what he did. And that that was part of the campaign to make Harry burn with the desire to get vengeance for his murdered parents, After the mirror, Harry started having recurrent--it sounds like, non-stop--nightmares about his parents' deaths. Before he saw them in the Mirror, it had all been rather abstract.
As for Severus, I'm sure you're right.
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Date: 2013-11-20 01:50 am (UTC)So that's all in the background. We know Tom is fine about killing us non-magicals.
But that he had unleashed his Death Eaters to do so, wholesale?
Jo keeps referring to WWII--the Nazi salute used in Chapter One, the Resistance methods of communicating,...
So we tend to fill in the gaps for her and assume the Death Eater takeover of Wizarding Britain is like the Nazi occupation of whereever. People with the wrong blood or wrong politics sent off to death camps, terror as a normal instrument of government, people dead in the streets....
But that's not what Jo wrote. What she wrote was Bill and Arthur, Minevera and Filius, working for the new regime and perfectly safe under it. What she wrote was a Diagon Alley where Muggleborns who'd been deprived of their wands and their jobs begged for handouts from the more fortunate--in the apparent expectation of getting them. They cringed away from rabid Pureblood-supremacist, and torture-loving "Bellatris," but even there those Muggleborns seemed to anticipate hexing, not murder.
And Kingsley speaks of Muggles sustaining "heavy casualties," But he Potterwatch broadcast, as oryx pointed out, lists the deaths--all of them, presumably, that occured since the last broadcast: Bathilda Bagshot's remains had been discovered, Ted Tonks and Dirk Cresswell had been killed, so had a goblin named Gornuk, plus an (Unnamed) Muggle family of five, supposed by the Muggles to have died from a gas leak, but said by the Order to have killed by Avada Kedavra.
that's it for the Death Eater death toll. Five unnamed Muggles, and four named magicals. Yep, we're clearly talking genocide here!
no subject
Date: 2013-11-20 03:05 am (UTC)I can see an extremely-powerful, not-quite-sane or mostly-mad wizard or witch making such an object .... Perhaps even one of the Founders? Maybe the real reason the Founders of Hogwarts broke up was, one went insane and made the Mirror .... as a way of 'testing' students? Discovering if their deepest desire is for knowledge, strength, power over others, etc, or of testing their strength/wisdom/etc? After all, a truly strong/wise person would be able to resist the Mirror's pull .... and they/the Founders would be there to rescue the weaker ones ....
Alternatively, the Mirror was made by someone else --- Merlin? Morgan Le Fay? --- located by a Founder who thought it could be used to Sort students ....
In either case, when the Mirror didn't work as hoped, it's use was stopped, the Sorting Hat was made instead(perhaps as one of the last co-operative efforts of the Founders) and, in the subsequent quarrels, the Founders broke up ...
no subject
Date: 2013-11-20 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-22 07:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-22 07:08 am (UTC)The WW is a VERT small community.
I grew up in a town of about 10,000, about the size Jodel posits for the WW. Believe me, if some gang had killed 9 people in 2-3 months there, that would have been considered CARNAGE and ANARCHY. Rightly enough.
But the 1997 homicide rate for London was about 16 people a month; for the UK as a whole, about 100/ month. Dropping 9 extra deaths into that (5 at least of which were classed as "gas explosion accident", not homicide, wouldn't cause a ripple.
And the British WW has never seen what the death rate in a real occupied territory can be, to compare it to that...
no subject
Date: 2013-11-23 02:56 am (UTC)Hmn. Another black eye for Dumbledore(as if he needed one). If he truly just wanted to keep the Stone safe from Tom, he would've hidden it in the Mirror and promptly returned the Mirror to the Dept. Of Mysteries, to be once again locked in their securest vault. If he still wanted to trap Tom/Quirrell, he could've produced a fake stone to hide at Hogwarts ...
no subject
Date: 2013-11-23 06:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-23 08:56 pm (UTC)I find JKR's idea of how a war looks simplistic, naive, darkly hilarious and even slightly offensive.
This is dark and edgy conflicts where outnumbered resistance (known) combatants can keep going to work, cover for their super important kids with "oh, he's really sick so he can't
go to schooltalk with you!"? The "public enemy number one" can sit around and do nothing for months because evil dictator doesn't have competent (just how good are Hermione's wards? I find it hard to believe that there's no way somebody couldn't have detected them) search parties looking for him? No blackmail, no "we'll kill your friends / girlfriend / whoever if you don't come forward?"I know it's a YA book but this is just silly.
And I don't even have words for the Potterwatch.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-23 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-24 03:25 am (UTC)I actually wonder whether it was a 'hidden thing' or did Albus just go to the RoR and think really hard about a Mirror of Desire that never existed before? OR if it really was in the Room of Hidden Things, then how did Albus know people have wasted away in front of it?
And lastly, IF it was in the RoHTs, then Albus removed it and put it in the room near the library JUST so Harry would find it. If he only wanted to use it for the Stone, it could have gone straight from the RoHTs to the 3rd floor gauntlet.