16 HP Philosopher’s Stone

[chantaldormand]

Sorry for disappearing for months, but my offline life went off the rails. Hopefully things will calm down now.

Ch16 Through the Trapdoor

>With title like this, there is only one possible outcome of this chapter. *Sigh*

>I love logic here: Fluffy sounds ok through the door=the Stone is safe! Even back in the first book our protagonist is little blood thirsty brat. +1 to Leap of Logic

>I call BS on it being hot in classrooms. Not only it’s, what? June?, in Scotland, but also the lessons are in medieval castle. I don’t know what kinds of castles Jo visited, but I have yet to find one where it’s hot in summer.

>How do Anti-Cheating enchantments work? Do they only prevent me from copying answers from students sitting next to me or do they also stop me from using my premade answer sheets? Or perhaps it informs teacher that I’m cheating? This is the kind of stuff I want to know more about, not your penchant for abusing animals Jo!

>Harry mentions what was expected of him during exams, but since he doesn’t tell us if he managed to do what he was asked to do, I won’t give him any Spell Count points.

>Also Hogwarts has time to teach kids how to make pineapple tap dance, but no more useful subjects like maths.

>I was going to ask why would anyone need Forgetfulness potion, but then I came up with a potential usage for it. Not a nice one, but still.

>Somehow until his trip to forest Harry didn’t have constant Voldie migraine. I’m trying to figure out if Harry is so psyched up by what Firenze told him that he has imaginary scar pains or if Jo screwed things up by trying to keep her cards too close to her chest.

>Harry if I were you, I would go to nurse. God knows what kinds of parasites live in the forest.

>Of course Harry has to over-dramatise his situation instead of admitting that he is too nosy for his own good.

>A quite curious coincidence: in this book shortly after his History of Magic exam Harry decides to push the plot of this book. In OotP during his History exam Harry gets the vision.

>Someone tell the twins that they shouldn’t molest the squid!

>One would think that a kid growing up with Durslays wouldn’t be so superstitious. We know why Harry’s scar hurts, but him assigning meaning to it is bizarre. +1 to Leap of Logic

>”“Don’t you think it’s a bit odd,” said Harry, scrambling up the grassy slope, “that what Hagrid wants more than anything else is a dragon, and a stranger turns up who just happens to have an egg in his pocket? How many people wander around with dragon eggs if it’s against wizard law? Lucky they found Hagrid, don’t you think? Why didn’t I see it before?” I’m torn on this one. On one hand Quirrell knows just how to bribe Hagrid for information, so this time there is real logical connection. On the other hand the way Harry comes up with this one is BS. +1 to Leap of Logic

>So Hogsmeade does exist at this point. Also, in meantime Hagrid gained another title: Gamekeeper.

>LOL Tom took a page from Dumbledore’s book. Get them drunk and then start asking questions. It’s shame that Harry doesn’t take notes.

>LOL even Harry admits that it is easy to get Hagrid to talk after he is drunk.

>Harry, the fact that after almost month of sitting on this information the criminal didn’t steal the stone should tell you something. Also what about your oath?

>A school where students do not know where is headmaster’s office. Wonderful.

>Minerva: Why do you want to see a headmaster of the school?
Harry: We want to file in a formal complain about certain teacher sending us into dangerous situation.

>Heh, Floo, Phoenixes, Portkeys and Apparition weren’t invented yet so Albus can pretend he is busier than he is in reality.

>Good thing that Minerva didn’t see what her colleagues contributed to protecting the Stone or she might not be so calm.

>I just can’t understand how Harry ties his shoes each morning. Not only his plan was obviously going to fail, but also he didn’t even try. Why the heck he didn’t use invisibility cloak for the stake out?

>Why the heck would the culprit wait until night? Tell one of your colleagues that you need to run some errands in London, pretend to leave, comeback covered by some fancy spell to hide your presence and strike in middle of the day!

>Woah Harry, how about we sit down and talk this over a cup of tea and gallon of calming potions?

>Harry is so psyched up by what Firenze told him that he is convinced that Voldemort is going to destroy Hogwarts and kill him. It’s so bordering on hysterics that I half expect him to start hyperventilating. +1 to Leap of Logic

>Harry is convinced that not only he can get past the protections around the Stone, but also will be able to protect it from ‘Snape’.

>If my teacher gave me 112% for a test I would start to ask very pointed questions.

>Poor Neville. He tries to warn troublemakers, he gets punished. He tries to stop troublemakers, he gets punished. He simply cannot win. +2 to Crime Count for assaulting another student and breaking curfew, +1 to Spell Count for Hermione.

>Aside from elven tier gymnastics, Harry is also great at mimicking voices.

>So Quirrell left this door open for bonus drama points, right?

>Guys I’m not sure you understand full weight of the situation; you are about to challenge fully trained wizard who has decades of experience and vast knowledge of Dark Arts. You on the other hand are bunch of untrained kids who knows only handful of spells. 

>If there is no way to climb down or up, how do they feed the troll? Wait if the troll is second last, shouldn’t Quirrell already know how to get past Fluffy? Not to mention that shouldn’t Voldie already know how to deal with Cerberus? A ten year old me knew that! I think I’m getting headache. +1 to Death Count for Fluffy’s bite +1 to Crime Count for entering into forbidden corridor

>No, Harry you are lucky that your professors picked defences that can be beaten by a group of determined first years. +1 to Death Count. +1 to Spell Count for Hermione for flames

>Why the heck water is “trickling down the walls”?

>It’s shame that Harry doesn’t have Divination class at this point. Can you imagine what Sybil would contribute?

> In this chapter Harry is acting even rasher than usual. He was first to jump onto hungry plant, first to test just how vicious the keys are... Do you have a death wish? +1 to Death Count.

>Now instead of trying, I don’t know, blasting doors off the hinges; the trio decides to play along.

>How nice of Flitwick for supplying you with brooms. How nice of Quirrellmort for not destroying all of them to prevent anyone from following him.

>It’s time for Ron to shine! Better make it count Weasley.

>The trio doesn’t even test if they have to play their way across the room. Or if they can simply fly over the chessboard on their brooms. +1 to Death Count.

>Poor Ron, he have just experienced his first serious head injury in the series. More to come.

>I have this ongoing theory that each time Ron gets serious head injury he gets stupider. I’m not sure, but I think that in almost every book he gets good hit on his head.

>H&H do not stop to check if their friend is alright. With friends like these you don’t need enemies.

>And here Harry should get clue that something about his reasoning isn’t right. How a guy who fainted after informing the school that there is a troll on loose, provides a troll as a protection?

>On side note, is this the same troll that trio knocked out or a different one. I mean logically it should be different one, or Quirrell would have to deal with Fluffy, but can you imagine Quirrellmort smuggling a new troll into the school? Not to mention that appearance of second troll would be very suspicious.

>I want to both congratulate Snape and scold Jo. Snape managed to write an interesting rhymed riddle, Jo on the other hand instead of describing the table and letting readers try their hand at the puzzle, not only fails to describe it well enough to try to imagine it, but also instantly provides an answer which is disappointing. +1 to Death Count

>Yeah Hermione, wizards fail at logic and during this read through you have proven that you deserve this title.

>At this point muggels are looked down on, but there are still some positive qualities about them. By the time HBP rolls in, muggles act like victims of lobotomy experiments.

>Again, why the heck did Quirrell leave enough of potion to let anyone go to the Mirror Room? If I were him I would take the returning potion with me and smash all other bottles to slow down potential reinforcements. For that matter why Severus didn’t fill all containers with poison and force Albus to carry with himself correct potions?

>If I were to be honest, out of all protections I can see only chessboard and the potion puzzle being somewhat effective. Every other obstacle can be beaten by Hogwarts’ student who finished at least their first year. Chessboard’s effectiveness heavily depends on if you can avoid game by flying over it, how easy are the figures to destroy and how good you are at chess. I can imagine an experienced wizard being able to put out the flames without risking poisoning from failing to solve the puzzle, so there is that.

>Now Harry believes that he can only hold Snape off. Fast forward a few years and his ego balloons to the point where he thinks he can beat Severus.

>”Well- I was lucky once, wasn’t I?” That is very arrogant of you Harry, especially since you don’t know how you survived the first time. +1 to Leap of Logic

>Hermione feels that she has to ensure Harry of her loyalty to him. The level of sucking up here is sickening. Also another major anti-intellectual ad from Jo. You are welcome!

>DUN DUN DUN! Our hero realises he was wrong! Does that mean he will apologise to Severus? Or learn anything from it? We shall see in the next chapter!

Crime Count: 3

Death Count: 5

Freud Would Be Proud: 0

Leap of Logic: 5

Uncovered: 0

Spell Count: 2 for Hermione

Comments

[aikaterini.livejournal.com]

/Harry: We want to file in a formal complain about certain teacher sending us into dangerous situation./

Heh, and that applies to two teachers: McGonagall and Hagrid.

/Poor Neville. He tries to warn troublemakers, he gets punished. He tries to stop troublemakers, he gets punished. He simply cannot win./

Well, at least he is rewarded for trying to stop the troublemakers at the end of the year feast. Except that he doesn't try to report the Trio again. I wonder if it's because he would start to look too much like Percy (who we all know is supposed to be a stuffy stick-in-the-mud for trying to enforce rules).

/Aside from elven tier gymnastics, Harry is also great at mimicking voices/

I thought that Ron was good at mimicry. After all, that's what supposedly helps win the day in the seventh book, when he can miraculously imitate Parseltongue.

/It’s time for Ron to shine! Better make it count Weasley/

Ron's one shining moment of success, importance, and integrity. And then it's gone. :( Too bad that JKR didn't want to come up with more chess-related obstacles or come up with something else for Ron to excel at.

And notice that at the end of the year feast, it's Percy who's bragging about Ron's accomplishment to his friends. What a different story it would've been for Ron if he'd realized that Percy was the one sibling who consistently stood up for him and he'd grown closer to Percy as a result.

/H&H do not stop to check if their friend is alright/

Unlike the movie version.

/Hermione, wizards fail at logic/

In hindsight, I wonder if anybody's suggested that this could have been a clue that Snape wasn't a pureblood. Because he might have designed this riddle precisely because, like Hermione, he too realized that wizards aren't good at logic.

/Also another major anti-intellectual ad from Jo/

*sighs* I see what JKR was probably going for here: friendship is more important than showing off how smart you are. But one can be smart and brave (as Hermione and Snape repeatedly show) at the same time.

/Our hero realises he was wrong! Does that mean he will apologise to Severus? Or learn anything from it?/

*snorts* Don't be silly. That might imply that Severus was someone worth apologizing to and that Harry wasn't justified in hating his guts.

[chantaldormand]

/Heh, and that applies to two teachers: McGonagall and Hagrid./

Hagrid isn't teacher in this book, so Harry might need fill out different paperwork in his case :)

/I thought that Ron was good at mimicry/

Poor, poor Ron. First his expertise in WW's culture was stolen by his future wife, then he was given a talent his best friend didn't need or want. What is next? They will steal his dog?

/Too bad that JKR didn't want to come up with more chess-related obstacles or come up with something else for Ron to excel at/

If she didn't dumb him down, then his talent at chess could be transformed into strategic thinking. For example in DH he could propose much better plan than the 7 Potters Mess.

As for Percy, yeah he is awesome brother. He doesn't deserve the hate his author and HP fans give him :/

/Because he might have designed this riddle precisely because, like Hermione, he too realized that wizards aren't good at logic/

I'm pretty sure that Severus is the only wizard in this series that can use basic logic. In B1-B3 Hermione and Ron are decent for their age, but starting from GoF they are getting worse and worse. Harry and Voldemort wouldn't notice logic if it bit off their noses and I'm pretty sure Albus starts off his day with a fortune cookie.
We don't see enough of other citizens of WW to pass judgements, but what we see doesn't look very promising.

/*sighs* I see what JKR was probably going for here: friendship is more important than showing off how smart you are. But one can be smart and brave (as Hermione and Snape repeatedly show) at the same time. /

Oh, I think you are right and if this book was written by somebody else I would leave it alone, but this isn't the first time Jo slips this kind of messages. Nor the last.
Just wait until the next chapter where I rage about Albus' cute comment about nature of truth.

/*snorts* Don't be silly. That might imply that Severus was someone worth apologizing to and that Harry wasn't justified in hating his guts. /

Hey, woman can always hope, ok? :D

[smirkingcat.livejournal.com]

glad to have you back
because this is hugely amusing to me! and it gives me so much to think for - especially when writing for myself

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

I was going to ask why would anyone need Forgetfulness potion...

Nasty reasons aside, people who have witnessed a tragedy might need it; Muggles who have seen too much would definitely need it in this universe.

Glad to see you back posting. Thanks for the chapter!

[chantaldormand]

The name of this potion makes me think that it would cause problems with memory instead of simply helping someone forget certain memory, but who knows this just might be one of those rare instances where Jo's wizards behave like civilised human beings :)

Yeah, I'm also glad to be back.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Note that Memory Charms are high level complicated stuff, but any first year is expected to be able to get the same effect with a potion. And there is no lesson about the ethics of this (or the spell version).

[chantaldormand]

This makes me wonder. Perhaps back before underage magic outside from school was forbidden, kids were held responsible for making sure that muggles do not learn about magic from them; thus memory manipulating potion in first year curriculum.

[sunnyskywalker]

Glad you're back! I hope your life settles down.

I'm pretty sure Jo had already invented Apparition and just hadn't named it. Didn't Dumbledore magically appear in Privet Drive in the first chapter? So he must traveling to somewhere he hasn't been to before which also doesn't have a fireplace, and also being very law-abiding because he isn't authorized to create that Portkey, and Stan and Ernie are both sick and there are no backup Knight Bus employees, and Fawkes is tired or on a smoke break. Right. That's convincing. Uh... maybe the Ministry, um, shut down their fireplaces for repairs that night, and, um, he can't Apparate to London because there might be too many Muggles about, and he can't Apparate to a point near London and catch a bus in because Gringott's is closed and he can't change his Galleons for pounds, and he's just too old to walk from the outskirts to the Ministry's public entrance...

Nope, it's got to be that he left deliberately to lure Quirrell into the maze so he could catch him once he got stuck in front of the mirror. Harry nearly derailed the plan by following Quirrell and accidentally retrieving the stone.

It's actually quite sad, because Harry completely freaking out and assuming no one else can/will stop Snape/Voldemort and that Voldemort's next step will be to kill him makes sense given how he grew up. No one ever did help him before (and his teachers and neighbors must have noticed that something was off about his living situation), and the Dursleys did essentially arrange their lives around fearing and hating him. So I can see how he would have this emotional reaction. But it's absolutely tragic that the way things play out confirms his feelings (at least, he's never given a viable alternate interpretation to ponder). There was an opportunity here for Harry to start learning other ways of coping with his feelings in bad situations and that the world is more complicated, and the author didn't let him have it. It should have been entirely possible for Harry to be commended for his bravery and his desire to protect the school but also gently reminded that he was working off incomplete information and might have put the Stone (and the world) at more risk than if he'd just stayed out of it.

Do we ever see Snape drink pumpkin juice? Maybe there's an anti-logic potion in the pumpkin juice, and the effect is cumulative over the years (which is why no one has any logical faculties remaining by the time they leave school). Little Sev with his interest in potions figured it out and stuck to orange juice forevermore. Unlikely, I know :-)

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

By George, you’ve got it! The pumpkin juice! This explains Hermione’s progressive loss of logic over the course of the series. When she first comes to Hogwarts, she doesn’t like the taste of pumpkin juice, so she is able to keep most of her muggle logic intact. But she wants to fit in with the wizarding world, so she keeps on trying the stuff, a little at a time, until she develops a genuine liking for it.

The same thing happened to me with English baroque opera. Purcell’s Fairy Queen? Dido and Aeneas? What is this stuff? Well, let’s listen to it again, and…and… Hey, you know, this is really good!

Fortunately, English baroque opera doesn’t actually rot one’s brain. Or does it? How would I know?

[sunnyskywalker]

Now we know what happened to poor Ron's chess skills :-(

I started re-reading GoF and spotted a jug of orange juice. Perhaps long years of campaigning for alternate beverage choices by Muggleborn students finally paid off, and future generations will have a chance at retaining basic reasoning skills. One can only hope.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Whether The Dumb One intended for Harry and his friends to enter the maze too is an unsolved question. He did return Harry his Invisibility Cloak despite knowing Harry was using it for dangerous stuff, not just stealing food. And the obstacles seem to oddly match the talent set of this bunch (there may have been an expectation that Neville would also join them?). Also, Dumbles seems to have hinted that Harry might encounter the mirror again. I think jodel proposed Dumbles was going to have Harry retrieve the Stone after Quirrell was already captured and the maze taken apart.

Notes: - Hermione flies a broom here. She must have continued having flying lessons after the first one. I guess Harry was not required to attend that subject once he proved himself capable of flying safely on a school broom.
- Severus' obstacle was the only one that limited the number of people going through at one time.

[sunnyskywalker]

It really is hard to work out what his plan was. Maybe he was deeply conflicted? Consciously, he thought at most Harry could come in and retrieve the Stone after all the shouting was over, but unconsciously, he kind of liked the idea of Harry rushing into danger because he thinks the fate of the wizarding world depends on him alone. It's good practice! And if he thinks Harry might be the only Horcrux at this point,* well, that might solve everyone's problems at once, right? (Well, except Harry's. The greater good!) Dumbledore might think this is a no-lose situation until a year later, when he finds out Voldemort made a semi-disposable Diarycrux many years before and there might be any number of the damned things out there. Oops.

*Voldemort has the reputation of being deathless/no longer human enough to die, but apparently the Death Eaters as well as the general public know, or think they know, that he's done various other things which he claims gave him this power. He at least claims that the DEs know the "steps" he took--obviously they don't really, but they must know something else he's done that he can semi-plausibly pass off as making himself unkillable. So DD might well think that Harry was intended to be the first, as yet another in a series of immortality plans of which Voldemort has already tried several. Any impression otherwise he might give could be, let's say, slightly misleading.

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

Hah. It's not the pumpkin juice. It's the mugs it's served in. Old-fashioned pewter, with lead in it.

The entire traditionalist faction of the WW, and all children while at Hogwarts, are suffering from cumulative lead poisoning.

(So orange juice would actually be worse, being more acidic.... Sorry!)

The REAL interesting question is, do the House Elves know the effects of lead on the human metabolism...?

[chantaldormand]

/It's the mugs it's served in. Old-fashioned pewter, with lead in it./

Huh? Wait, wait, wait, as far as I have seen in PS the only pewter object that was mentioned in text was cauldron.
Each time tableware is described in text, word "golden" is used as in that "golden goblet" Draco was banging on table in the chapter 17.
Did Jo change her mind in later books?

[penguinsuzie.livejournal.com]

They could have been pewter that was transfigured to look like gold while the properties of it remained the same, more of an illusion. Their economy would be a mess if they could just turn anything into real gold so there must be some restriction there. It would explain why they have such an abundance of gold dinnerware, and if they'd been using the same ones for years then they'd be the old ones that contained lead.

[chantaldormand]

Is it possible for the golden cups and plates to be transfigured/covered in illusion and really be pewter? Yeah, sure.
Is it probable? About as much as for Ford Anglia to be really a brainwashed Transformer, so not really.
This kind of speculations can be interesting ad fun in Fanfiction, but it's not very useful in essays and chapter commentary.
Rowling's magical system is all over the place so sometimes it's really hard to tell what is and what isn't possible. In cases like this one where we don't have precedent in text, I'm even more wary of accepting this kind of explanations.
Because at what point we are going to stop?

[nx74defiant.livejournal.com]

A school where students do not know where is headmaster’s office. Wonderful

And even if they know where it is they can't get in without the password. All they can do is wait outside until someone comes. DD isn't actually very accessible to students.

No secretary or office hours like most schools.