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.