J. K. Rowling presents Umbrigde's backstory

[t0ra-chan.livejournal.com]

In time for Halloween JKR gave us another short story (more background info to be honest, it's not like it has a plot). You can read it at Pottermore (if you have an account and can actually remember your user name and password) or you can read it here: J.K. Rowling writes Harry Potter Halloween tale profiling 'malicious' Dolores Umbridge

My personal take on this little story is that it's wholly pointless. It just repeats that Umbridge was always a nasty person with no depth to her and she's worse than blood purists. Nothing really new or insightful is revealed, nor do I believe did anybody care to know this sort of stuff about Umbridge. I also found it very unbelievable that anybody would buy her claims of being a pureblood, considering how small the wizarding community is. And of course she was a Slytherin, because where else could an evil person in HP have come from.

Comments

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

You know what's sad? Is Umbridge is less scary to me now. She was actually my favorite HP villain because she was something so simply terrifying, a person with power who wants order and will crush anything to achieve it. She was the ruthless gardener who had started cutting flowers with the weeds.

Now she's just a stereotype, a person born bad, bred in Slytherin and completely noxious to the core.

And that's not scary.

Also, am I horrible if I think Umbridge would have been more frightening had she looked like Imelda Staunton in the books, a sweet granny figure who you wanted to like and was so nice and kind and motherly, until you saw the venom beneath the fluff? Because how does JKR's villains not know they are villains? If you went to the costume store and opened the box for villains, it would be their clothing!

The Ruddigore Effect

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

Saith W.S. Gilbert: "When in crime one is fully employed / Your expression gets warped and destroyed / It's a penalty none can avoid."

Of course Gilbert was writing a satire on the cliches of old-fashioned melodramas (which were old-fashioned in the 1880s when he was writing). And he pointed the satire by having the good guys and bad guys switch places half-way through, adopting the appropriate names, costumes, and facial attractiveness. Though there is a lot of cartoonishness in JKR's writing, she loses any pretensions to genuine satire long before Umbridge makes her appearance.

[vermouth1991.livejournal.com]

And the "proper" illustrations on the American OotP books surely wasn't helping (although in Ms. Grandpre's defense she was following Jo's text descriptions; still not sure about her depictions of Sirius [he looks younger than Snape even after jail?] and Severus [stupid goatee! I can't differentiate him from Kakaroff now]).

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.--Francois de La Rochefoucauld

It also doesn't help that Snape is played by the incredible Alan Rickman who is closer to 60 than the 31 he was when he met Harry for the first time.

[vermouth1991.livejournal.com]

Almost all of the adult characters were played brilliantly by more than competent actors. Alan Rickman was 55 in the year 2001, but actually none of the Marauder-era characters' actors were really in their 20s in flashbacks or in their 30s in the Present Time. My previous post was mainly about the illustration on Chapter "Occlumency" where Mary Grandpre depicted Sirius giving the "If you try anything funny on Harry..." speech, and I felt that the unshaven Sirius (BTW the movies flipped the sides so that Sirius was the unshaven one—very appropriate imo) looked way too young for someone out of Azkaban.

[t0ra-chan.livejournal.com]

You know what's sad? Is Umbridge is less scary to me now. She was actually my favorite HP villain because she was something so simply terrifying, a person with power who wants order and will crush anything to achieve it. She was the ruthless gardener who had started cutting flowers with the weeds.

Now she's just a stereotype, a person born bad, bred in Slytherin and completely noxious to the core.

And that's not scary.

Yeah, if she was a guy, I would expect her to have a moustache to twirl. I'm surprised JKR didn't give Umbridge facial hair just to hammer home the point about how un-feminine she is.

Umbridge is less scary to me now

[nx74defiant.livejournal.com]

One of the great things in the first book was the vilian wasn't the stereotype looking Snape, it was the seemingly harmless Quirell.

Re: Umbridge is less scary to me now

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

Yes - that was what hooked me on the books and the reason I actually bought them for my niece to read. I kept waiting for that to play out better. There were hints at it, but in the end it was dropped.