PS Chapter Fifteen: "The Forbidden Forest"

[for-diddled.livejournal.com]

* Hermione is “trembling” at the prospect of having to face McGonagall, which is something of an about-face given that just last chapter she was almost singing with joy at the thought of Malfoy being given detention. I guess she’s worried about being given the kind of non-funny detentions only heroes get.

* I’m not sure why Neville should be feeling hurt at Harry – even if he and Hermione did feed Malfoy the dragon story, they obviously didn’t intend for Neville to get involved.

* McGonagall’s explanation has got a bit of a gap in it – if the Gryffindors had just fed Malfoy a story about a dragon to trick him into wandering around at night, why would they need to get out of bed too?

* “I’ve never been more ashamed of Gryffindor students.” Crikey, Professor, calm down. Going around after curfew isn’t exactly the most heinous crime in the world.

* Also, for those of you who are keeping track, Harry, Neville and Hermione wandering about after hours > the Marauders publicly humiliating young Severus.

* “In one night, they’d ruined any chance Gryffindor had had for the House Cup.” Well, I’m sure his fellow housemates will be understanding. After all, it’s not like the House Cup actually does anything, right?

* Given Gryffindor’s house ethos, I’d have thought that they’d regularly blow their chances of winning the Cup by breaking rules, probably in some spectacular and dangerous fashion.

* “The rest of the team wouldn’t speak to Harry during practice, and if they had to speak about him, they called him ‘the Seeker’.” Wow, what a bunch of childish arseholes. Is there any doubt after this that Gryffindor is really the house of the petty and vindictive?

* It’s a pity that Hogwarts’ pastoral provision is such a joke, since otherwise one of the teachers might have realised that Harry, Hermione and Neville were being bullied and done something to stop it.

* Ah, the good old days when we could realistically believe that Harry might get thrown out for excessive rule-breaking.

* “Like Harry, [Hermione] felt they deserved what they’d got.” Wait, what?! All they were doing was trying to save Hagrid’s sorry arse – who, incidentally, still hasn’t done anything to help them or even apologised. If anybody deserves punishment for what happened in the last chapter, it’s Hagrid.

* Not that this stops Hagrid from giving Malfoy a patronising mini-lecture about how “Yeh’ve done wrong an’ now yeh’ve got ter pay fer it.”

* So not only has Hagrid endangered the children by roping them into his little illegal dragon-breeding scheme, he’s now endangering them again during the detention WHICH THEY ONLY HAVE BECAUSE OF HIM. Gah, I’m starting to hate Hagrid so much here.

* WTF if up with Hagrid telling Malfoy that Fang’s “a coward”? Is he just trying to scare Malfoy? Or is he just displaying his usual gross negligence by giving Draco a guard which will run away at the first sign of danger?

* Apparently “It’s not easy ter catch a unicorn, they’re powerful magic creatures. I never knew one ter be hurt before.” Don’t worry, though, I’m sure it’s no match for three eleven-year-olds, a high-school dropout and a cowardly dog.

* Harry’s worried about something happening to Neville, because “It’s our fault he’s here in the first place.” Well, actually it’s Hagrid’s fault, not that anyone ever acknowledges this.

* Centaurs don’t care about anything closer than the Moon. Except for Harry Potter, because he’s Just That Awesome.

* Given their great speed, hard hooves and sharp horns, I don’t think unicorns can really be described as “defenceless”. Still, killing one will land you with “a half life, a cursed life,” apparently. Not that we’re ever told what exactly a half life looks like or how it differs from a regular, non-unicorn-killing, life.

* Luckily Harry meets up with Hagrid and Hermione. Draco, Neville and Fang are all still unaccounted for, but since they aren’t main characters there’s no need to worry about them.

* “It sounds like fortune-telling to me, and Professor McGonagall says that’s a very imprecise branch of magic.” Huh, so it turns out Hermione and McGonagall’s contempt for divination is foreshadowed as far back as PS.

* Dumbledore gives Harry back the invisibility cloak, because he took such good care of it last time.

Comments

[oryx_leucoryx]

Hermione - well, she certainly doesn't want to share the fate she was wishing on Draco.

Neville - how did he get involved anyway? Why was he out in the first place? Where did Draco run into him?

Minerva knows her Gryffindors. When they prank someone they want to see them get in trouble, so what she sees fits with her perception of her House. As opposed to Draco earlier in the book who had the brains not to be around when Argus Filch was chasing Harry et al.

“I’ve never been more ashamed of Gryffindor students.” Crikey, Professor, calm down. Going around after curfew isn’t exactly the most heinous crime in the world.

Ahem, does this mean Minerva was not aware of the werewolf affair? What about Snape's Worst Memory - that happened in public. Did she forget about that or does she think that is less shameful behavior than being out after curfew? (Or perhaps Rowling hadn't figured that one out when she wrote this.)

It’s a pity that Hogwarts’ pastoral provision is such a joke, since otherwise one of the teachers might have realised that Harry, Hermione and Neville were being bullied and done something to stop it.

In good (boarding?) school tradition, the teachers are letting the students teach one another the ethos of not getting the House in trouble. Bullying of this kind was considered desirable behavior.

Re: killing unicorns - since Tom was already living a cursed/half/whatever life due to Horcruxes it doesn't matter, right? Or did killing the unicorn and drinking its blood make him any worse of an overlord? I think we had that discussion once, but I can't recall what the conclusion was.

I wonder what happened between Draco and Neville. This is the very last time Draco deliberately does anything bad to Neville in the series. So I'm kind of disappointed we never find out how this went.

Dumbledore gives the cloak back to Harry becuase Harry was using it exactly as Dumbledore had intended - getting himself into danger pointlessly at the drop of a hat.

[vermouth1991.livejournal.com]

I guess I wasn't a veteran enough member to have taken part in the previous unicorn blood discussion :) but I think the slaying and drinking was more of a condemnation on Quirrel the Host than on Voldemort himself.

As for Malfoy stopping his bullying on Neville, the Watsonian explanation I can think of right now is that I wouldn't put it past Lucius to nudge Draco towards the fact that the Longbottoms are still a respectable old pure blood family (although one might argue that Frank and Alice's role as aurors and OotP fighters may have "tainted" that status) and Neville is still a potential ally, at least not to be openly and irrecoverably antagonized right now. Don't forget that as of this year, the old DEs except Snape have no idea that V is still half-alive and plotting to return.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Lucius did tell Draco to leave Harry alone the following summer, to no avail.

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

Also, for all that he is constantly called a bully by fans, Draco rarely engages in the classic bullying behavior of attacking those weaker than himself. As has been pointed out by others before me, he generally attacks those he regards as personal or family enemies. That makes them valid targets. Draco sees himself at war; attacking the Trio is bombing the enemy's military base, while attacking Neville is bombing the enemy's shopping mall.

[sunnyskywalker]

I think someone also raised the possibility that it was basically an "all your plans will go awry" sort of curse. You get fixated on using your enemy's blood for your resurrection instead of grabbing some random person, and oops! Turns out there's some weird Horcrux magic... something... whatever, it lets the kid come back from the dead a few years later. Of all the rotten luck! And then your minions mess up the prophecy fetch quest and get arrested. And then the kid tasked with killing Dumbledore manages to fail in exactly the right way to enable some pesky wand mechanics to kill you next year. And three clueless kids elude capture no matter how careless they get, and find most of the pieces of your hidden soul practically by accident. How bad can your luck get, seriously? It's like fate is conspiring against you...

Quirrell didn't do too well either, obviously, but you could make a case for Voldemort getting walloped as well, and possibly not even realizing it (because he might assume Quirrell would take the full brunt, being the only corporeal one involved).

Nice irony, in a way, since Voldemort created his own bad-luck curse on the DADA position and then ran afoul of another one. Or both, who knows. Again, he might have assumed it would only affect Quirrell, and yet he did have to leave the position at the end of the year... Oops. Maybe that curse is actually what nudged him to get careless or desperate enough to risk the unicorn curse and think he wouldn't be harmed.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

* “I’ve never been more ashamed of Gryffindor students.” Crikey, Professor, calm down. Going around after curfew isn’t exactly the most heinous crime in the world.

I think this is hyperbole. She's definitely seen worse - you mention the Marauders publicly humiliating Snape, but I'll bet it wouldn't take an entire generation for the head of Gryffindor House to see much worse. Even if it did take that long, in this generation alone, she has Fred and George in her house. Sneaking around after hours sounds like it's a bit too tame for them.

* It’s a pity that Hogwarts’ pastoral provision is such a joke, since otherwise one of the teachers might have realised that Harry, Hermione and Neville were being bullied and done something to stop it.

Teachers used to let kids try to work things out for themselves before stepping in. That's how kids learn to negotiate with their peers. If it gets too egregious, then the teachers would step in. Not sure if that would be true at Hogwarts, though. Looks to me like the WW is fine with losing its "weaker" members.

...Not that we’re ever told what exactly a half life looks like or how it differs from a regular, non-unicorn-killing, life.

It had always been in the back of my mind that Voldemort's sub-human appearances throughout the books were the result of this half-life curse.

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

"It had always been in the back of my mind that Voldemort's sub-human appearances throughout the books were the result of this half-life curse."
======================
That's an interesting idea! I had attributed his snakeyness to Pettigrew feeding him Naigini's 'milk' but since I doubt Peter came up with that idea (instead of Voldy) then it was most probably unexpected. Having the unicorn blood 'twist' it would make a lot of sense.

[aikaterini.livejournal.com]

/“I’ve never been more ashamed of Gryffindor students.”/

Gryffindor students including the Marauders (one of whom betrayed the Potters, as Minerva well knows), Hagrid (who was expelled for keeping a monster at school), and the Twins. If Snape were around to hear this, I'd imagine that he'd be quite incredulous and/or contemptuous. Maybe this is supposed to be an exaggeration on her part to make Neville and the Trio feel bad, but it's odd that none of them ever point out to each other that the Twins break rules all the time, so why is McGonagall going ballistic like this?

I wonder if Minerva *did* catch them with the dragon in earlier drafts and that's the reason for this reaction as well as the detention.

/“The rest of the team wouldn’t speak to Harry during practice, and if they had to speak about him, they called him ‘the Seeker’.” Wow, what a bunch of childish arseholes./

Again, the team that includes, I remind you, Fred and George Weasley. Who like Harry and who are proud about breaking rules. I guess that in their mind, the problem is that Harry got caught and cost them points, not that he broke the rules to begin with? (Although one could say that that sounds like a Slytherin mindset).

But, yes, nice to know that we don't hear of Slytherin House bullying Draco for costing them points. Granted, it wasn't as many as the Trio lost, but we never hear of them ostracizing Draco. Not even when his father is caught and sent to Azkaban.

But yes, even when I first read this, I thought that Gryffindor House was being childish and stupid (and the whole 'they only call him the Seeker now' sounded melodramatic and dumb to me too). I know that JKR wants us to feel bad for Harry, but does every single person in the House care that much about the House Cup? To the point where they'll do this to an eleven-year-old? Jeez.

/Not that this stops Hagrid from giving Malfoy a patronising mini-lecture about how “Yeh’ve done wrong an’ now yeh’ve got ter pay fer it.”/

Hagrid will do this again in PoA.

/So not only has Hagrid endangered the children by roping them into his little illegal dragon-breeding scheme, he’s now endangering them again during the detention WHICH THEY ONLY HAVE BECAUSE OF HIM./

And yet the Trio stays friends with him. Hagrid gets them into trouble and never bothers to take responsibility for his actions or stand up for them, and he remains their friend. McGonagall blames them for wandering alone at night, takes away enough points for their entire House to hate them, and assigns them detention in the Forbidden Forest, and she's still a fair and just teacher.

But Snape takes points from them and snarls at them, and he's the worst teacher ever. Draco gets them into trouble, and he's doomed to never be their friend. Hermione survives the troll with Harry and Ron, and she becomes their friend. Draco survives the unicorn-killer with Harry, but they never become friends. I guess it comes down to "It's Okay If a Gryffindor Does It."

[maidofkent.livejournal.com]

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<Gryffindor students including the Marauders (one of whom betrayed the Potters, as Minerva well knows)>

At this stage, Sirius was still thought to be the betrayer, and as he himself tells us, prior to his sorting, all the Blacks sorted to Slytherin.

As with Hagrid's comment that there had never been a wizard gone bad who wasn't a Slytherin, I imagine that once Sirius' 'betrayal' was known, he was rapidly forgotten as a Gryffindor in many Gryffindor minds. 'We sort too soon'.

Who assigned the detention?

[hwyla.livejournal.com]

It is extremely harsh that the four each lost 50 points each AND still got detention. The big question is WHY does the detention take place WEEKS later? Almost a MONTH later? Aside from the ridiculousness of harshness of the detention - just what is the point of assigning one so very long after the act?

I know Hogwarts is not the best example of how to get kids to behave, but to make punishment take place so very long afterwards makes no sense. The only answer I have is that it was decided to delay it specifically so the kids would feel the point loss longer?

But it isn't as if we ever hear Minerva say -'...and detention a month from now...' or '...when I can find the time...' and she's just so busy that she finally assigns it to Hagrid.

It seems more as if the detention was specifically set to get them into the forest and run into Voldy. Which it was in a Doyalist way, but how to explain it within the story (Watsonian).

I'm left with the thought Albus set it up, just like the gauntlet to the Stone. And that the detention had to sit waiting for Quirrel to kill a unicorn (thereby implying he has killed one previously and they so they know it will happen again) - just need to wait and we can send Harry in.

But he cannot know he's being singled out so we'll send the other kids too - not like Voldy will kill all of them. He'll be too focused on Harry. Or Neville - the other prophecy kid. And if he kills Draco? Well, one less kid of a DE. Or Hermione? She won't really be 'needed' once HarryHorcrux is dead.

What would Albus have done if Hermione was killed and Harry was not? Who would do Harry's thinking for him?

Re: Who assigned the detention?

[oryx_leucoryx]

Albus? Convince the Grangers they never had a daughter, then find some other way to get Harry killed in a way that did not reflect badly on himself.