PS Chapter Five: "Diagon Alley"
Dec. 18th, 2015 10:28 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslock* Question for the non-English readers here: did your translation of the books try and keep the pun in Diagon Alley, or not?
* I doubt that wizards would have their own separate currency system: their population is too small and thinly-spread for it to be worthwhile, and they’d most likely have adopted sterling long ago. Unless perhaps the goblins just force them to use this weird currency to make sure that Gringotts always has control over the wizards’ monetary system. Government of the day does something to offend the goblins? Massive hyperinflation and economic collapse, here we come. This would fit in nicely with the “Goblin rebellions actually ended in a goblin victory” school of thought.
* Hagrid flew over to the island, even though the ability to fly without a broomstick is later considered a sign of unheard-of magical power. Hmm... Evidence that Hagrid’s actually a secret evil wizard mastermind, and his incompetence is all just an act to throw people off the scent?
* Gringotts is this big, scary wizarding equivalent of Fort Knox, so well-defended that only a crack squad of high-school students would have any hope of robbing it.
* I wonder how the Dursleys fair, given that they’ve got no signal flair, no phone, no food and no water, and Hagrid’s just taken their only means of transportation off the island.
* Note how Harry’s being predisposed to look up to Dumbledore, and to look down on the legitimate wizarding government, right from his introduction to the magical world.
* The Ministry of Magic’s most important job is keeping the existence of magic a secret, because otherwise “everyone’d be wanting magic solutions to their problems.” Oh no, wizards potentially having to give a crap about people outside their own tiny little bubble and do something to alleviate the world’s problems! Will the horrors never end?
* Reasons why the MoM’s job is so difficult #1,477: Hagrid’s going around recklessly drawing attention to himself, talking about “these Muggles” in a loud voice in the middle of a busy street.
* Hagrid doesn’t understand “Muggle money”, meaning that he’s unable to economically interact with 99.99% of the population. I’m not sure if there’s a better indication of the WW’s insularity and xenophobia in all the rest of the book.
* Plus, why on earth would Hagrid need help paying for things? Sure he wouldn’t necessarily know the exchange rates or what would represent a good price for something in the muggle world, but the coins and notes all have their value written on them. If he has to pay, say, £20 for a train ticket, it really shouldn’t be beyond his competence to hand over a bank note with “£20” written on it.
* First-year students have to buy pointy hats as part of their uniform. Apparently this was discontinued early on in Harry’s academic career, because we practically never see anybody wearing them.
* Nice that all the wizarding textbook authors have names which just so happen to suit their topics of expertise. Nominative determinism at its finest.
* It seems a bit pointless making students get a copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, when they won’t actually be studying care of magical creatures until their third year, if at all.
* Letting any students who wants take a cat to school sounds pretty stupid. Cats aren’t very sociable animals, and debouching a whole school intake’s worth of cats into one building is unlikely to end well.
* So what do muggles see when someone goes into the Leaky Cauldron? Somebody just disappearing into thin air? For that matter, what would somebody in an aeroplane flying above Diagon Alley see?
* As soon as he goes in Harry gets mobbed by over-excited fans, which I guess makes him the wizarding equivalent of Justin Bieber.
* Appointing somebody who’s clearly suffering from some sort of dark arts-related PTSD to teach defence against the dark arts seems like kind of a dick move, which is why I’m not at all surprised that Dumbledore’s gone ahead and done it.
* The way Hagrid talks about how Quirrel “was fine while he was studyin’ outta books but then he took a year off ter get some first-hand experience” reads most naturally as if Quirrel had been teaching defence before he left, so I’m guessing Rowling hadn’t thought up the DADA curse when she wrote this.
* Quite unlike the customers at the pub, the people in Diagon Alley either don’t notice or don’t care about Harry’s presence.
* “A plump woman outside an apothecary’s was shaking her head as they passed, saying, ‘Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they’re mad...’” Given that there are seventeen sickles to a galleon, this is a bit like saying “one hundred cents an ounce” instead of “a dollar an ounce”.
* If wizards are serious about this secrecy thing, they probably shouldn’t be making use of conspicuous non-native species like snowy owls to carry their post.
* “The You-Know-What in vault seven hundred and thirteen” sounds kind of suspicious, even without any prior knowledge of what’s in there. “Dumbledore’s asked me to get something from vault 713” would be a much more discrete way of putting it.
* I’m not sure why the Gringott’s vaults have to be so big – the wizarding world doesn’t have that many people, after all. Maybe it’s just meant to make it harder for people to break in – to get to the vault you’re trying to rob, you first have to navigate your way through this vast subterranean labyrinth full of traps.
* “How often had [the Dursleys] complained how much Harry cost them to keep? And all the time there had been a small fortune belonging to him, buried deep under London.” Alright, I know the Dursleys are horrible people, but they kind of have a point here. Raising a child does take money, and if Harry’s family was apparently so rich, couldn’t Dumbledore have arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Dursley to receive an annual stipend to cover the costs of bringing up their unexpected new ward?
* A currency system based on such high prime numbers as seventeen and twenty-nine is completely stupid. There’s a reason most real-world currencies are based on easy-to-divide numbers like 100 or 20 or 12.
* Also, somebody should probably tell Dumbledore that taking a child who’s been impoverished and deprived all his life and then suddenly just giving him more money than he knows what to do with is generally a really bad idea.
* Why is Draco’s mother buying his wand for him? Wouldn’t he need to be there in person to wave wands around and see if sparks fly out?
* I’m assuming this whole “I’ll bully my father into buying me a broom” thing is just Draco trying to make himself look tough, since judging from their interaction in COS Lucius isn’t really the type of parent to let his own children push him about.
* “I heard [Hagrid’s] a sort of savage – lives in a hut in the school grounds and every now and then he gets drunk, tries to do magic and ends up setting fire to his bed.” That seems... pretty plausible, actually.
* The anti-muggleborn prejudice we see in the wizarding world always struck me as being more like class prejudice than racism, probably because of the way Draco talks about it. “[T]hey’ve never been brought up to know our ways. Some of them have never even heard of Hogwarts until they get the letter” sounds much more like some old-moneyed aristocrat griping about all these nouveaux riches and their uncouth manners than some Neo-Nazi ranting about the Jews.
* Harry’s upset that Malfoy doesn’t think muggles should be allowed into Hogwarts, to which Hagrid reassuringly says “Yer not from a Muggle family”, thus implying that Malfoy has a point and reinforcing the message that anti-muggle prejudice is OK.
* I’m surprised Hagrid knows enough about the muggle world to make a comparison to football.
* Contra Hagrid, I think it’s actually pretty easy to summarise the rules of quidditch: everybody flies around for a bit until the seeker catches the snitch and wins the game, thereby rendering everything that has so far happened completely and utterly pointless.
* Hagrid’s bit about how “There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin” is just stupid. Aside from the prima facie implausibility that every bad wizard over a millennium would come from that one house, there’s a very prominent (supposedly) dark wizard who was in Gryffindor – Sirius Black.
* At the tender age of eleven Harry’s already showing an unhealthy interest in Curses and Counter-Curses, foreshadowing the gallant Crucio of DH.
* Credit to JKR, the descriptions of the shops Harry goes in are quite atmospheric and well-written.
* Darn it, when Ollivander goes on about James Potter’s powerful eleven-inch wand, my mind takes up residence in the gutter and refused to be moved.
* “And of course, you will never get such good results with another wizard’s wand.” Well, unless you snatch their wand away, in which case it will transfer allegiance to you like the flighty little wooden trollop that it is, although this will never once come up in conversation or be mentioned in any books or classes until you’re in your very last year of school.
* Harry and Hagrid take all their magical stuff with them on the Underground, thus proving yet again how badly wizards suck at this whole secrecy business.
* I doubt that wizards would have their own separate currency system: their population is too small and thinly-spread for it to be worthwhile, and they’d most likely have adopted sterling long ago. Unless perhaps the goblins just force them to use this weird currency to make sure that Gringotts always has control over the wizards’ monetary system. Government of the day does something to offend the goblins? Massive hyperinflation and economic collapse, here we come. This would fit in nicely with the “Goblin rebellions actually ended in a goblin victory” school of thought.
* Hagrid flew over to the island, even though the ability to fly without a broomstick is later considered a sign of unheard-of magical power. Hmm... Evidence that Hagrid’s actually a secret evil wizard mastermind, and his incompetence is all just an act to throw people off the scent?
* Gringotts is this big, scary wizarding equivalent of Fort Knox, so well-defended that only a crack squad of high-school students would have any hope of robbing it.
* I wonder how the Dursleys fair, given that they’ve got no signal flair, no phone, no food and no water, and Hagrid’s just taken their only means of transportation off the island.
* Note how Harry’s being predisposed to look up to Dumbledore, and to look down on the legitimate wizarding government, right from his introduction to the magical world.
* The Ministry of Magic’s most important job is keeping the existence of magic a secret, because otherwise “everyone’d be wanting magic solutions to their problems.” Oh no, wizards potentially having to give a crap about people outside their own tiny little bubble and do something to alleviate the world’s problems! Will the horrors never end?
* Reasons why the MoM’s job is so difficult #1,477: Hagrid’s going around recklessly drawing attention to himself, talking about “these Muggles” in a loud voice in the middle of a busy street.
* Hagrid doesn’t understand “Muggle money”, meaning that he’s unable to economically interact with 99.99% of the population. I’m not sure if there’s a better indication of the WW’s insularity and xenophobia in all the rest of the book.
* Plus, why on earth would Hagrid need help paying for things? Sure he wouldn’t necessarily know the exchange rates or what would represent a good price for something in the muggle world, but the coins and notes all have their value written on them. If he has to pay, say, £20 for a train ticket, it really shouldn’t be beyond his competence to hand over a bank note with “£20” written on it.
* First-year students have to buy pointy hats as part of their uniform. Apparently this was discontinued early on in Harry’s academic career, because we practically never see anybody wearing them.
* Nice that all the wizarding textbook authors have names which just so happen to suit their topics of expertise. Nominative determinism at its finest.
* It seems a bit pointless making students get a copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, when they won’t actually be studying care of magical creatures until their third year, if at all.
* Letting any students who wants take a cat to school sounds pretty stupid. Cats aren’t very sociable animals, and debouching a whole school intake’s worth of cats into one building is unlikely to end well.
* So what do muggles see when someone goes into the Leaky Cauldron? Somebody just disappearing into thin air? For that matter, what would somebody in an aeroplane flying above Diagon Alley see?
* As soon as he goes in Harry gets mobbed by over-excited fans, which I guess makes him the wizarding equivalent of Justin Bieber.
* Appointing somebody who’s clearly suffering from some sort of dark arts-related PTSD to teach defence against the dark arts seems like kind of a dick move, which is why I’m not at all surprised that Dumbledore’s gone ahead and done it.
* The way Hagrid talks about how Quirrel “was fine while he was studyin’ outta books but then he took a year off ter get some first-hand experience” reads most naturally as if Quirrel had been teaching defence before he left, so I’m guessing Rowling hadn’t thought up the DADA curse when she wrote this.
* Quite unlike the customers at the pub, the people in Diagon Alley either don’t notice or don’t care about Harry’s presence.
* “A plump woman outside an apothecary’s was shaking her head as they passed, saying, ‘Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they’re mad...’” Given that there are seventeen sickles to a galleon, this is a bit like saying “one hundred cents an ounce” instead of “a dollar an ounce”.
* If wizards are serious about this secrecy thing, they probably shouldn’t be making use of conspicuous non-native species like snowy owls to carry their post.
* “The You-Know-What in vault seven hundred and thirteen” sounds kind of suspicious, even without any prior knowledge of what’s in there. “Dumbledore’s asked me to get something from vault 713” would be a much more discrete way of putting it.
* I’m not sure why the Gringott’s vaults have to be so big – the wizarding world doesn’t have that many people, after all. Maybe it’s just meant to make it harder for people to break in – to get to the vault you’re trying to rob, you first have to navigate your way through this vast subterranean labyrinth full of traps.
* “How often had [the Dursleys] complained how much Harry cost them to keep? And all the time there had been a small fortune belonging to him, buried deep under London.” Alright, I know the Dursleys are horrible people, but they kind of have a point here. Raising a child does take money, and if Harry’s family was apparently so rich, couldn’t Dumbledore have arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Dursley to receive an annual stipend to cover the costs of bringing up their unexpected new ward?
* A currency system based on such high prime numbers as seventeen and twenty-nine is completely stupid. There’s a reason most real-world currencies are based on easy-to-divide numbers like 100 or 20 or 12.
* Also, somebody should probably tell Dumbledore that taking a child who’s been impoverished and deprived all his life and then suddenly just giving him more money than he knows what to do with is generally a really bad idea.
* Why is Draco’s mother buying his wand for him? Wouldn’t he need to be there in person to wave wands around and see if sparks fly out?
* I’m assuming this whole “I’ll bully my father into buying me a broom” thing is just Draco trying to make himself look tough, since judging from their interaction in COS Lucius isn’t really the type of parent to let his own children push him about.
* “I heard [Hagrid’s] a sort of savage – lives in a hut in the school grounds and every now and then he gets drunk, tries to do magic and ends up setting fire to his bed.” That seems... pretty plausible, actually.
* The anti-muggleborn prejudice we see in the wizarding world always struck me as being more like class prejudice than racism, probably because of the way Draco talks about it. “[T]hey’ve never been brought up to know our ways. Some of them have never even heard of Hogwarts until they get the letter” sounds much more like some old-moneyed aristocrat griping about all these nouveaux riches and their uncouth manners than some Neo-Nazi ranting about the Jews.
* Harry’s upset that Malfoy doesn’t think muggles should be allowed into Hogwarts, to which Hagrid reassuringly says “Yer not from a Muggle family”, thus implying that Malfoy has a point and reinforcing the message that anti-muggle prejudice is OK.
* I’m surprised Hagrid knows enough about the muggle world to make a comparison to football.
* Contra Hagrid, I think it’s actually pretty easy to summarise the rules of quidditch: everybody flies around for a bit until the seeker catches the snitch and wins the game, thereby rendering everything that has so far happened completely and utterly pointless.
* Hagrid’s bit about how “There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin” is just stupid. Aside from the prima facie implausibility that every bad wizard over a millennium would come from that one house, there’s a very prominent (supposedly) dark wizard who was in Gryffindor – Sirius Black.
* At the tender age of eleven Harry’s already showing an unhealthy interest in Curses and Counter-Curses, foreshadowing the gallant Crucio of DH.
* Credit to JKR, the descriptions of the shops Harry goes in are quite atmospheric and well-written.
* Darn it, when Ollivander goes on about James Potter’s powerful eleven-inch wand, my mind takes up residence in the gutter and refused to be moved.
* “And of course, you will never get such good results with another wizard’s wand.” Well, unless you snatch their wand away, in which case it will transfer allegiance to you like the flighty little wooden trollop that it is, although this will never once come up in conversation or be mentioned in any books or classes until you’re in your very last year of school.
* Harry and Hagrid take all their magical stuff with them on the Underground, thus proving yet again how badly wizards suck at this whole secrecy business.
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no subject
Date: 2015-12-19 12:03 am (UTC)Their society is *completely* divorced from that of the muggles; I don't think size matters. If you don't interact with the muggles at all then there's absolutely no reason at all to adopt their currency.
- so well-defended that only a crack squad of high-school students would have any hope of robbing it.
Hee. :-) Just one of the many things which showed how 'dumbed down' DH was; Harry defeating the dark lord with fifth-year high school spells and an invisibility cloak.
Hagrid’s going around recklessly drawing attention to himself, talking about “these Muggles” -
Ditto Molly at Kings Cross and so forth. It's hard to take the Ministry seriously if they don't try and stop such offenders.
Nominative determinism at its finest.
Rowling didn't shy away from that at all, did she? :-)
For that matter, what would somebody in an aeroplane flying above Diagon Alley see?
MAGIC!!! *waves hands*
:-)
Appointing somebody who’s clearly suffering from some sort of dark arts-related PTSD ... “was fine while he was studyin’ outta books" ...
Is it canon or fanon that had Quirrel teaching another subject - Muggle Studies? - before he got the DADA job? I have read that somewhere ...
Conversely, does the text state definitely that he was teaching DADA before Albania?
- the people in Diagon Alley either don’t notice or don’t care about Harry’s presence.
Good one.
this is a bit like saying “one hundred cents an ounce” instead of “a dollar an ounce”.
Maybe they used to be 15 sickles, then 16, so it was only natural to retain the denominational context.
I’m not sure why the Gringott’s vaults have to be so big - the wizarding world doesn’t have that many people -
But those few people apparently have big possessions. :-)
There’s a reason most real-world currencies are based on easy-to-divide numbers like 100 or 20 or 12.
And the other real-world currencies are also 'completely stupid'?
The UK and lots of other Commonwealth countries had a bewildering (to me; 'completely stupid' to you?) currency until relatively recently, the 60s and 70s. Crowns, shillings, florins, pence, gah. Given the overall impression that the magical world is backward I'm not surprised they haven't gone through decimalisation yet.
suddenly just giving him more money than he knows what to do with is generally a really bad idea.
Still, in this case Harry behaved sensibly. Lucky, that ...
everybody flies around for a bit until the seeker catches the snitch and wins the game, thereby rendering everything that has so far happened completely and utterly pointless.
Yep. Quidditch is the easiest and most concrete example of Rowling's bending her entire world around Harry. :-(
Well, unless you snatch their wand away, in which case it will transfer allegiance to you like the flighty little wooden trollop that it is, although this will never once come up in conversation or be mentioned in any books or classes until you’re in your very last year of school.
Because Rowling didn't have a clue about how she was going to finish the series - despite all the nods and smirks and reassurance to the fans over a decade - and in the end just ran roughshod over her continuity (which she probably didn't remember). *nods*
Shocking how she got away with it. That whole "the wand chooses the wizard" thing was one of the founding principles of her entire magical world, from book #1 onwards. And yet in the end it's rendered as a meaningless tautology - "the wand chooses the wizard ... unless it doesn't". Pfah.
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Date: 2015-12-19 04:25 pm (UTC)All of which divided into each other - 20 and 12 have a lot of factors and thus if you're going to have multiple subdivisions of coinage, these are the sorts of numbers to go with. Wizarding currency is just stupid.
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From:Gringotts
Date: 2015-12-20 02:37 am (UTC)Mary, aka Grrl one of the Gringotts Grrls.
Re: Gringotts
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Date: 2015-12-21 05:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2015-12-19 06:12 am (UTC)❧
Let's just say that if I ever write a post on this distinguished LJ group, it'll be a rant on all the mistakes I'd spotted in the Simplified Chinese version of HP books, and a warning for you folks to stay away from them should you seek for literature to read if you're learning Chinese.
They had the f@&king audacity to say in HBP chapter "Will or Won't" that Regulus was written as Sirius' older brother, and then in a footnote say that "Rowling wrote that Regulus was the younger Black son back in OotP, we suppose this was a slip of the pen here", when the f@&king text specifically said YOUNGER BROTHER. That's the level of sheer incompetence we're talking about here.
In the very first page of Philosopher's Stone they also failed to convey the "thank you very much" part correctly and made it out as if the Dursleys were grovelling for compliment instead of feeling that they deserve all the compliments for bein Perfectly Normal. Long story short, no they simply don't have the brains to convey the puns.
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Date: 2015-12-19 11:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-19 03:41 pm (UTC)Letting any students who wants take a cat to school sounds pretty stupid. Cats aren’t very sociable animals, and debouching a whole school intake’s worth of cats into one building is unlikely to end well.
Maybe the idea is that the cats are there to roam around and keep out mice, or something? I mean, we see that every other time people own pets they're meant to be used for something, so I'd assume that was true of cats as well. And you might well need a lot of cats to keep a castle of that size clean.
Raising a child does take money, and if Harry’s family was apparently so rich, couldn’t Dumbledore have arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Dursley to receive an annual stipend to cover the costs of bringing up their unexpected new ward?
Especially since I think in the real world, people are given a stipend to cover outstanding expenses if they decide to adopt a child with special needs.
[Sigh] So much of what appears in this book would be acceptable in a standalone story, or in a work of children's fiction, but then Rowling decided to make it a long series and have it go all dark....
no subject
Date: 2015-12-19 10:58 pm (UTC)Maybe the idea is that the cats are there to roam around and keep out mice, or something? I mean, we see that every other time people own pets they're meant to be used for something, so I'd assume that was true of cats as well. And you might well need a lot of cats to keep a castle of that size clean.
I'd say the reason is simply because cats have always been the #1 choice of animal for witches' familiars through the ages in literature and popular myth. Just something else that Rowling borrowed and threw into the mix, no thinking involved.
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Date: 2015-12-21 05:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2016-01-01 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-20 07:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-20 07:07 pm (UTC)At least that's my system. Others see things differently, as is their privilege.
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Date: 2015-12-20 10:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2015-12-21 05:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-21 05:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2015-12-21 05:48 am (UTC)Because Draco's relationship with his wand is supposed to be screwed from the start...? I dunno, you'd think the Ollivander family would've drilled the "Wand Chooses Wizard" doctrine into the Pureblood Families' heads already.
❧
Good catch on the Sirius Black point. Think of all the missed opportunities we could've had in PoA: Harry thinking Sirius must be a Slytherin, and then it'll be "My father was friends with a Slytherin? That moron!" and then "Wait what, he's in Gryffindor?!" and finally "Well s@&t, Wormtail's still from Gryffindor!"
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Date: 2015-12-21 11:53 am (UTC)We could have had it alllll!
This and Mafalda the Muggleborn!Weasley!Slytherin (who I'm still sad Rowling got rid of).
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Date: 2015-12-21 02:19 pm (UTC)What’s funny is that in “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot,” one of the stories in “Tales of Beedle the Bard”, the antagonist of the story is a selfish wizard who refuses to use his magic to help Muggles. I don’t know if JKR forgot or she just didn’t realize that Hagrid is basically agreeing with the wizard of that story here.
/If wizards are serious about this secrecy thing, they probably shouldn’t be making use of conspicuous non-native species like snowy owls to carry their post./
And if they insist on hiding while living among Muggles, then they should probably take the time to *learn* about Muggles. Learn how they dress, how they live, etc. so that they can more effectively hide themselves.
/I know the Dursleys are horrible people, but they kind of have a point here. Raising a child does take money, and if Harry’s family was apparently so rich, couldn’t Dumbledore have arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Dursley to receive an annual stipend to cover the costs of bringing up their unexpected new ward?/
Maybe a quick fix for this would be if the Dursleys knew about Harry’s fortune, but spent it all on Dudley?
/somebody should probably tell Dumbledore that taking a child who’s been impoverished and deprived all his life and then suddenly just giving him more money than he knows what to do with is generally a really bad idea./
Somebody should’ve also told him that taking a child who’s angry and hostile towards Muggles and has used his magic to hurt them and then suddenly putting him among children who also don’t care for Muggles and use their magic to hurt each other probably isn’t the best idea either.
/judging from their interaction in COS Lucius isn’t really the type of parent to let his own children push him about./
Yet the two most prevailing theories in fandom about the Malfoys’ parenting have either been a) Lucius is an abuser or b) Lucius and Narcissa spoil Draco rotten (and the second is usually used to counter the first).
/Harry’s upset that Malfoy doesn’t think muggles should be allowed into Hogwarts, to which Hagrid reassuringly says “Yer not from a Muggle family”, thus implying that Malfoy has a point and reinforcing the message that anti-muggle prejudice is OK./
It’s kind of the same deal with Hermione. She’s a Muggle-born, but she’s a talented one and she’s still a witch. Neither Harry nor Hermione is called upon to defend their Muggle relatives from racists. The Dursleys are awful, so they’re punished with impunity, and the Grangers are almost nonexistent, so they’re shuffled out of the way.
/Hagrid’s bit about how “There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin” is just stupid. Aside from the prima facie implausibility that every bad wizard over a millennium would come from that one house, there’s a very prominent (supposedly) dark wizard who was in Gryffindor – Sirius Black./
Did JKR plan the Sirius Black/Peter Pettigrew reveal at this point?
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Date: 2015-12-21 11:26 pm (UTC)In early editions of PS, chapter 1, Hagrid says he was going to return the motorbike to Sirius Black. So at that point he was not planned as being a prisoner.
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Date: 2015-12-22 03:23 am (UTC)They can go anywhere you tell them to go, which COULD cover 'take me to Harry Potter' and just hasn't been clarified one way or another and they can handle quite heavy loads (IF I recall of this correctly). Hagrid would certainly qualify as a heavy load.
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Date: 2015-12-22 04:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2015-12-22 03:38 am (UTC)The whole question of the 'wand chooses the wizard' seems strange when we have several examples of pureblood families that don't seem to care about it.
Draco's mother chooses HIS wand. Neville's Gran insists he use his father's wand even while she doesn't think he had much potential. Wouldn't it make more sense to ensure he got the best possible fit to maximize what potential he DID have?
And of course Ron is sent off with Charlie's wand. So, why did Charlie get a NEW wand and Ron doesn't? Perhaps it wasn't even originally Charlie's since it apparently didn't work all that well for him. Ron's wand IS a bit better understood due to the Weasley's poverty. But I would think that a wand of his own would rate over an owl for Percy that year.
I have to wonder whether the Purebloods think Ollivander is just performing a bit of marketing on the (gullible) muggle-raised. JKR has however since insisted that Ollivander was correct.
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Date: 2015-12-22 05:11 am (UTC)Pureblood families be hypocrites, though. They look down on muggles but steal their infrastructure, while at the same kind can't even keep up with their own lore.
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From:no subject
Date: 2015-12-26 08:52 pm (UTC)I heard [Hagrid’s] a sort of savage – lives in a hut in the school grounds and every now and then he gets drunk, tries to do magic and ends up setting fire to his bed.” That seems... pretty plausible, actually.
Draco is criticizing someone Harry likes. Only bad people criticize people Harry likes. Doesn't matter that the criticism is true.
Hey, the Dursleys are just trying to help with the secrecy by making Harry keep his owl locked up. A snowy white owl regularly flying in there neighborhood would attract too much attention. Don't want loads of Birdwatchers hanging around.
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Date: 2015-12-27 06:26 am (UTC)As French Canadian, I read the first 4 books in French, Diagon Alley lost the pun in French, and has been translated into "Chemin de Traverse". In France French it would be something like crossing road or road to the crossing. In French Canadian, a Traverse is often meant as a ferryboat, so my own interpretation was "road to the ferryboat" or "ferryboat's road", and that brick wall was gateway into a parallel dimension. Knockturn Alley was translated into something like Cloudy Alley, cloudy in that context might refer to lots of fog around, or directions difficult to remembers as if you'd be in a labyrinth, or a place where shady deals and dangerous individuals are lurking.
Which made me think, if Dementors breeding generates fog, could there be Dementors lurking somewhere in Knockturn alley, does feeding off Dark magic places is more attractive to them than regular wizards, which would be the reason they're set as Azkaban guards and since the prison mostly has dark wizards as prisoners?
what would somebody in an aeroplane flying above Diagon Alley see?
From my initial ancient read in French I thought that Diagon Alley was truly in another dimension, I got the idea later in the book when Harry gets to platform 9 3/4, where they truly couldn't have squeezed a whole platform between the 9 and 10 without anyone noticing. To me Diagon Alley and Kingscross 9 3/4 were 2 independent miniature "parallel universe bubbles" in the middle of London.
I would extend it through the rails up to Hogsmeade and Hogwarts, because Muggles would quickly find out rails that go nowhere, no matter how stupid Rowling paints Muggles in the books. The "real world" Hogwarts location would have those ruins Ron(or Hermione) talks about when they discuss about Hogwarts being hidden from Muggles. The original bubble would have been Hogwarts/Hogsmeade then extended to London with the rails once trains were invented. So how did the kids travelled to Hogwarts before trains existed?
So maybe the borders of the bubble would be Hogwarts grounds set up by some Stone Edge stone structure. In GOF Karkaroff gets very pissy about Hermione and Viktor talking about their schools and comments that Hermione might just know where to find them, I thought that might hint that Durmstrang is similarly hidden and you'd need to get into the parallel universe to get to Durmstrang. I would think the Ministry's job is to monitor all the wizarding locations who aren't in the parallel universe to make sure nothing escape them, because the amount of magic performed in Diagon alley you'd think Ministry owls would be flying be to everyone in there and distributing warnings, which isn't the case, same for Hogsmeade.
Gringotts is this big, scary wizarding equivalent of Fort Knox, so well-defended that only a crack squad of high-school students would have any hope of robbing it.
I lost a lot of respect for Gringotts in DH, in fact I lost respect for pretty much everything in DH, but I'll keep what was in the previous books. Hagrid seems genuinely afraid of Goblins here, the same Hagrid who thinks dragons and giant spiders make good pets, even though Goblins are tiny compared to him. I wonder what has made him wary of Goblins like that.
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Date: 2015-12-27 06:30 am (UTC)The way Hagrid talks about how Quirrel “was fine while he was studyin’ outta books but then he took a year off ter get some first-hand experience” reads most naturally as if Quirrel had been teaching defence before he left, so I’m guessing Rowling hadn’t thought up the DADA curse when she wrote this.
Maybe Quirrell sabbatical was precisely the consequence of the curse. Something happened at the end of his first year of teaching, and Albus sent him off to get more experience. Question is, who replaced him during the year he was away, and does it even matter, the replacement teacher had a one year contract, maybe the curse wasn't triggered since they knew that person would be gone at the end of the year.
It seems a bit pointless making students get a copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, when they won’t actually be studying care of magical creatures until their third year, if at all.
Maybe it's supposed to be used as a reference book throughout their 7 years, they might need to search through it for subjects like DADA, herbology or potions. Also that could help Muggleborns to get familiar with some of the magical creatures that wizard raised kids might already know. In 3rd year, they're required to buy the Monsters book of monsters for Hagrid's class, so Fantastic beasts isn't the official textbook but seems like a support book as well. In DADA that year, Lupin makes them work on dark creatures that you find in Fantastic beasts.
Why is Draco’s mother buying his wand for him? Wouldn’t he need to be there in person to wave wands around and see if sparks fly out?
In the Canadian (British) edition (Raincoast Bloomsbury) it says that she's looking at wands, not buying one, I guess she would have Ollivanders make a pre-selection of wands for Draco and make sure no other customer would annoy them at the same time. Considering the Malfoys are pretty much the uncrowned Royals of wizarding England, you wouldn't make Narcissa wait, even if you're the only wandmaker on the whole island and you have no competition at all. Perhaps Ollivander has some business with the Malfoys, after all, all these wands ingredients and woods must be coming from somewhere.
Harry and Hagrid take all their magical stuff with them on the Underground, thus proving yet again how badly wizards suck at this whole secrecy business.
The Ministry under Fudge until Umbridge and Malfoy successfully manipulated him, had a big blind spot for Harry. Harry was Dumbledore's favourite during the time Fudge was floo-skyping daily with Albus, Fudge was in Albus pocket and gave Harry a pass for his "accidental" magic for his first 3 years. I think it should really have been Albus or Minerva who would have made first contact with the Dursleys when they saw the letters weren't coming through.
Minerva would have been a much better authority and "normal" figure to convince the Dursleys to let Harry go to school, and if she might have sounded too stern, just bring Hagrid along for a bit of comic relief but without things getting out of hands, but the first chapters would have been less funny for sure. I'm pretty sure Hagrid wasn't sent to break down doors of all Muggles houses to get kids to Hogwarts. After all, it was Albus who went to meet young Riddle himself, even though Riddle was a special case.
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Date: 2016-01-10 06:00 pm (UTC)The bigotry against muggleborns really seems to parallel classism rather than racism. It's how I prefer to read it as like with the lazy Nazi parallels if you actually look a bit further into it the ideas stop making sense and even become slightly offensive.
Harry’s upset that Malfoy doesn’t think muggles should be allowed into Hogwarts, to which Hagrid reassuringly says “Yer not from a Muggle family”, thus implying that Malfoy has a point and reinforcing the message that anti-muggle prejudice is OK.
I never really noticed that before but you're right. There are a lot of subtle put-downs about muggles and Hagrid hasn't shown them any respect so far, though it's written in a way that we won't mind because the people he's mistreated were abusive. Similar to the how easy it is to overlook the way Slytherins are treated in the series because the ones we meet are generally horrible; validating the view that they're intrinsically bad, while for muggles it's that they are lesser.
I think it's interesting that when Draco meets Harry without knowing who he is he's still trying to befriend him by trying to relate to him, and that part of why Harry dislikes him is because he makes him feel like he doesn't belong. Draco fails miserably at befriending him and accidentally reminds Harry of Dursley despite being quite unlike him.
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Date: 2025-08-04 03:25 pm (UTC)I like to think that at least some of them are pen names, and that Arsenius Jigger, in particular, might just be one Severus T. Snape.