OotP Chapter Six
Nov. 30th, 2007 07:46 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslock* When George pops into Harry's dark bedroom, sits on his bed and asks, "Got there yet?" my mind went straight into the gutter. I read too much wank fic, apparently.
* Ron locks the door because Kreacher comes in at night. We've heard about him many times now--can't say JKR doesn't give everybody enough of a chance to figure out they should be paying attention to him when they're not.
*ETA:Unfortunately, it's more like she acts like everything and everyone is important so in the end we've got a pile of extra parts that go nowhere.
* Everybody is imagining this fabulous weapon that Sirius, "let slip." Let slip? How do you "let slip" something that's fake? More like, "Lied about to start us firmly down the wrong path for the whole book only to get disappointed in the end."
* "Size is no guarantee of power," said George. "Look at Ginny." SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP with the incessent Ginny exposition. When the twins developed this obsession with her we will never know, but apparently she's some sort of goddess to them now. This is actually their second reference to her-they've already hinted that the little minx is waiting up for Hermione to tell her everything she heard at the meeting. Also first mention of the infamous "bat-bogey" hex so we know Malfoy will Not Know Who He's Dealing With at the end of the book.
*But then, I guess in this story there's no other character who could possibly illustrate the idea that size is no guarantee of power. It's not like the hero is an undersized boy himself who took out a supervillain when he was an infant.
* "Half an hour later Harry and Ron, who had dressed and breakfasted quickly..."
Dressed and breakfasted? ::sigh:: He still hasn't showered, has he?
* You know, if you're trying to clean the house, you'd think keeping a wild animal that eats dead rats in the bedroom would be a bad idea (but marks to Sirius for being childish enough to want to keep Buckbeak in there).
*Hermione defends Kreacher by saying he's probably too old to clean the house properly but he seems more devestated by the loss of his family than anything, and trying to keep things just the way they were. Harry's messy room was also tied to his frustration and anger over his helplessness. I swear the good guys are physically incapable of crediting people who don't like Dumbledore with any positive human emotion.
*ETA: Everybody should listen to Hermione. Kreacher, you're dead to me.
*In general, things like the doxy cleaning started to annoy me the first time I read this. It takes SO LONG for Harry to even get to school, and I felt like there was just too much cutesy wizard stuff that wasn't necessary. The doxies are just Yard Gnomes II.
*Doxies are poisonous, and Fred pockets one to experiment with the venom for...candy. I'm sure it's a much nicer poison than the stuff Lucius was selling in CoS. It's funny poison. They're just trying to make people sick, not actually kill them. And of course kids will only take this themselves to get out of school. It's not like anybody would ever get the idea to slip it to other people WITHOUT giving them the purple half. Well, if they do the twins surely should not be held responsible.
* Harry grinned. He had forced the Weasley twins to take the thousand Galleons prize money he had won in the Triwizard tournament... Uh-huh. Forced them. They wanted to earn the money themselves doing honest work, you see.
*I used to be happy when kreacher showed up. Now I know everything he's saying is really code for "OMG, be nice to me and I'll worship you forever!" Dead. To. Me.
* Kreacher says Sirius broke his mother's heart, though Sirius claims she has no heart. Sirius and his mother are so carbon copies of each other. Btw, I think he's hurt Mummy took him off the family tree just as she was hurt when he left. Sirius is just as obsessed with obliterating people from his family tree as they are.
*ETA: Not that we'll ever find out what happened there. All you really need to know is that Regulus would have loved Harry as much as Kreacher does. Yay.
* It's kind of funny Sirius describes how he spent holidays with the Potters, who adopted him, as a result of his having had enough of his own family. Wonder how Hermione would describe the reason she spends holidays with the Weasleys, her own adopted family...
*Sirius' family might have been bigots, but I'll bet he was also an adolescent nightmare. Rights for Muggleborns? Whatever. I hate you Mummy!
*Sirius also seems to still be angry over Mummy liking Regulus best. Not that he wants his mother to love him at all, cause he HATES HER GRRRR! Anyway, we hear the WW was generally supportive of Pureblood control before Voldemort showed he was crazy, and it makes me wonder if now wizards aren't resentful of Dumbledore using that to push his own policies. ETA: As it turns out, the WW have no minds of their own, so really no.
*ETA again: Not that it matters whether or not Mummy loves you when you've got Harry Potter!
* Sirius also tells us his great-grandfather was the least popular Headmaster Hogwarts ever had. He can just tell. It's in Hogwarts, A History I guess.
*Naturally Harry buys it.
* Kreacher is supposed to obey everyone on the tapestry, which makes it quite practical that some family members aren't on there. Sirius was once, and Kreacher seems to take that to mean he must obey him somewhat. I used to have some speculation here, but of course none of this means anything once Kreacher belongs to HARRY FREAKIN' POTTER, at which point he'd probably gladly slit Draco's throat if Harry told him too. I hate House Elves.
* If the house elf heads are hung up in the hallways as I think they were, presumably it's considered an honorable death. Pretty sick, but it doesn't seem intended to be disrespectful, so I can believe the house elves think it's the way things should be, like a warrior put to death honorably or something. You can see why Hermione's plans of giving them cake and sending them out into the world in
*So I guess Wizards have some sort of embalming/taxidermy spell? Which is why these heads haven't rotted?
* According to Sirius, this house is the safest place in the world. Why again does Harry live at the Dursleys?
* [Harry] had not thought about the hearing once since dinner the previous evening; in the excitement of being back with the people who liked best... LOL! Those would be the people he's been raging about since he got here.
*Seriously--that's not affection, Harry, it's just your natural miniscule attention span.
* Harry and Sirius continue to compete in the "Life sucks" department. When Harry says he can't go back to the Dursleys, Sirius must reply they must be really bad for Harry to want to live at his house (which is horrible too!).
* George steals a biting snuff bux, if we're keeping score. More Nuts o'fun.
* Sirius is contemptuous of his grandfather's Order of Merlin and promptly explains Grandpa just gave the Ministry money. Because nobody in Sirius' family can ever deserve anything honestly, ever. He's so much better than all of them. They buy Orders of Merlin just like Malfoy bought his place on the Quidditch team. Sirius is such a baby here--which you might think might get proven wrong, but it won't really. No, the Regulus story doesn't really do that.
* Kreacher watches as the personal items of people he loved are thrown away while they're insulted. Hermione does not jump to his defense, which is probably good because it would just be condescending and deny Kreacher's feelings even more than Sirius does. ETA: Kreacher really doesn't love anyone, because he's a stupid House Elf who isn't Dobby.
* Harry rightly describes "cleaning" the house as waging war--and I think we should all take note of what that entails. The Purebloods are wiped out of their own home, their history erased and their families destroyed. Let's do the Weasleys next.
*ETA: Wait until you see how wonderful the house is when it's been fully cleansed and the Golden Trio move in and spread their Gryffindor glitter-cooties. It's awesome!
* On page 110 of the UK edition, Mrs. Weasley tells Harry to wash his hair. Well, somebody had to.
Designated Hero and villains
Sirius vs. the rest of the Black family. For somebody who doesn't care about family history, he can tell us why each and every one from the Middle Ages on was evil and had no heart while advocating wiping them out in response. Also, Fred and George.
Informed Attributes
Did I mention my sister Ginny is an Atomic Grenade?
McGuffin
Ooh, I'm so glad Sirius let slip about that weapon. Let's hint heavily that it's the magical equivalent of an atomic bomb, and wonder at its size and shape. It's sure to be amazing after this build-up!
Misdirected Answering
At least we know how to get doxies out of curtains.
Nut o’ Fun
I hearby dub this place House o' Nut o' Fun. What kind of evildoers would actually destroy this stuff??!!
My score: 7 1/2
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Date: 2007-12-01 01:01 am (UTC)When George pops into Harry's dark bedroom, sits on his bed and asks, "Got there yet?" my mind went straight into the gutter. I read too much wank fic, apparently.
Maybe Harry really was paying them for all their services with 1000 galleons. *is shot*
Wonder how Hermione would describe the reason she spends holidays with the Weasleys, her own adopted family...
I love you. I just don't want to be with you. Then I'll take away your memories to protect you. I see Hermione's superiority complex and her self righteousness if emerging strongly.
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Date: 2007-12-01 05:44 am (UTC)You expressed it perfectly and while I'm aware this cliche can be true, it was expressed so badly and pointlessly that I simply loathe it. And it wasn't as if Harry ever saw Ginny in this way at all, which was all I needed to accept this tripe (not that she ever bothers to prove it to him).
*ETA:Unfortunately, it's more like she acts like everything and everyone is important so in the end we've got a pile of extra parts that go nowhere.
Which is why I now consider OotP to be firmly 100% part of the OotP-HBP-DH downslide. In the good old days I assumed that all of the extraneous junk went somewhere but it was all just hopelessly unnecessary filler with no real purpose. So many stories suffered. I can't believe JKR's comments that she wrote book 5 so long because we needed what was in there. Bullshit.
I had no idea that George stole a biting snuff-box. I hated the twins and I forget this Nut-O'-Fun?!
I liked it when Kreacher was a nasty little piece of work too. One Dobby was enough.
Keeping a huge Buckbeak in a narrow house sounds really cruel. (Even if Sirius cleaned out the place constantly it would still stink and have hygiene issues). Couldn't he have lived deep in the Forbidden Forest or some other wild and larger place that's a good distance away from most people? Or am I forgetting something here that completely exonerates our goodies? (I find OotP to be absolutely excruciating on re-reads except for some tiny bits where I'm hopelessly biased).
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Date: 2007-12-01 06:58 am (UTC)And the worst part is that it would have been a good twist, if Dumbledore's description at the end had actually been accurate. I mean, if the weapon Voldemort was seeking was knowledge (of how to destroy Harry), that would have been cool. (And if he had been seeking knowledge of something actually useful, that would have been even cooler.) But the trouble is that the prophecy doesn't contain any information about how to destroy Harry, or any information at all that Voldemort doesn't already have.
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Date: 2007-12-01 08:24 am (UTC)Isn't this the first time that a locked door has prevented a house-elf going somewhere? Consistency, where art thou?
* Sirius also tells us his great-grandfather was the least popular Headmaster Hogwarts ever had. He can just tell. It's in Hogwarts, A History I guess.
They've had surveys for the past one thousand years, I guess. The Sorting Hat conducts them as well as keeps book, since its been around since the time of the Founders. It gives it something to do besides compose Sorting ceremony songs. (It's heartily sick of the songs anyway, because no one ever listens to it.)
The reason why we haven't heard of the surveys is that Dumbledore decided they weren't necessary; obviously he's the best-loved of all headmasters. The Hat knows better, but it's seen headmasters come and go and thinks it's not worth its while to argue with Dumbledore. It's just watching as the events unfold and having a quiet giggle and a sad shake of its tip every now and then. It's not particularly worried about Voldemort, since Dark Lords are like headmasters: they have always come and gone. It knows that even if Voldemort won, sooner or later an underground rebellion would start. It'd rather avoid the whole mess of a war, though, because wars only create piles of bodies and lots of resentment between the survivors from different parties. It knows the war will change nothing--it'll just change the people who have power. It can't do anything, though, because no one wants to listen to it.
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Date: 2007-12-01 08:58 am (UTC)Not even the author...
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Date: 2007-12-01 09:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-01 09:13 am (UTC)Poisoning people used to be what actually got you executed for withcraft, before the whole "deal with the devil" thing caught on. Anyone want to burn Fred and George at the stake? I'll bring matches.
Honestly... the whole slapstick hah-hah-funny-injuries thing might actually work if Rowling didn't pile on so much angst whenever people get injured in a way that she doesn't want us to see as funny. Are we to assume that no one is ever going to be seriously hurt and that it's therefore okay to laugh at people's misfortune, or are we to assume that we're reading about real people with real bodies who can get hurt and die? Either's fine, Rowling, but make up your mind!
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Date: 2007-12-01 09:30 am (UTC)Now - is Ron depicted as overly stupid here or is it just JKR in amnesia - house elves even can apparate at Hogwarts - what on earth would stop them apparating within Grimmauld Place? Even the twins can do it...
*ETA:Unfortunately, it's more like she acts like everything and everyone is important so in the end we've got a pile of extra parts that go nowhere.
Oh yes. Part of the fun inthese books was trying to figure out what was a hint and what wasn't - but if 99 % of probable hints turn out to lead nowhere, that sort of falls on its face...
*But then, I guess in this story there's no other character who could possibly illustrate the idea that size is no guarantee of power. It's not like the hero is an undersized boy himself who took out a supervillain when he was an infant.
On no, don't you get it? It's just the sign, they are meant for each other: both so tiny and both so awesome!
sigh:: He still hasn't showered, has he?
Bear up, sistermagpie, it's only about two years until he'll be firmly immersed in sea-water! Come to think of it - maybe that was the reason why Dumbledore decided not to apparate straight to the entrance of the cave but went skinny-dipping with his young hero (unless you decide in favour of a naughtier explanation).
You know, if you're trying to clean the house, you'd think keeping a wild animal that eats dead rats in the bedroom would be a bad idea (but marks to Sirius for being childish enough to want to keep Buckbeak in there).
No, it's to show Sirius and Harry are soul mates - what with Harry living in a mess of apple cores and owl droppings... Although Sirius IS reported to have washed his hair in GoF.
It's funny poison.
Yay, it's right there with the gallant cruciatus and protective imperius (I know Hermione officially didn't imperius her parents, but how else did she get them to move to Australia? I mean, where is the difference between Imperius and another spell, if you get people to do what YOU want
Sirius and his mother are so carbon copies of each other
This made me picture a Sirius portrait hurling insults at Albus Severus when he brings pureblooded evil Scorpius to the house...
Wonder how Hermione would describe the reason she spends holidays with the Weasleys, her own adopted family
Hermione's parents weren't left in a fight but just drifted out of existence. They are muggles, so they are irrelevant, you see. Not worth a fight.
Sirius' family might have been bigots, but I'll bet he was also an adolescent nightmare. Rights for Muggleborns? Whatever. I hate you Mummy!
What's so annoying is the assumption that all the goodies made the right choices out of right philosophical and ethical ideas, when it's quite clearly not the case: Harry voted against Slytherin because of what his two new best (and only) friends had told him, Sirius clearly just was against whatever his parents were in favour of, the Weasleys are against Slytherin and Malfoys because of an old family feud that's been drilled into them...
* Sirius also tells us his great-grandfather was the least popular Headmaster Hogwarts ever had. He can just tell.
There are ballots every year! ANyway, the fact that Dumbledore is the most popular makes one think if old Master Black might have been a REAL monster. Or, on the contrary, really nice...
* According to Sirius, this house is the safest place in the world. Why again does Harry live at the Dursleys?
Living at Grimmauld place would have meant protection from the wrong people: From bad dark wizards. Whereas the Dursleys conveyed the protection of Saint Lily!
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Date: 2007-12-01 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-01 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-01 03:14 pm (UTC)God yes. What, exactly, needed to be in OotP? Not Grawp, for one thing. No trip to see the giants at all. The Prophecy at least I'll give her that it did set everything in motion, but the actual wording of it doesn't matter, only that there was one. Voldemort getting his hands on it doesn't matter one way or another. (Honestly, why didn't they just create a fake prophecy and switch it, knowing that he was trying to steal it?
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Date: 2007-12-01 03:16 pm (UTC)As I said above, I give her that the Prophecy is important because it set everything in motion, but what it actually says doesn't matter one way or the other. And I can't believe nobody thought of making a fake one. Not to mention, that's why people started to think Trelawney was important. Voldemort was in control of the school for a whole freakin' year and never thought to have anybody try to get the thing from her with a Pensieve?
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Date: 2007-12-01 03:18 pm (UTC)That's how we get stuff like Krum in DH suddenly being disapproving of all these neo-Nazi stand-ins in his country who are apparently wearing
swastikasDeathly Hallows symbols to be cool.And still somehow none of our heroes recognize the symbol.
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Date: 2007-12-01 03:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-01 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-01 08:14 pm (UTC)I want to read a version of these books translated into Muggle. The school's star football player, pursued by all the girls, is a skinny boy in glasses who never takes a bath, doesn't know the names of his classmates after five years, and has spent his whole life being hunted by neo-nazis, but has never heard of Hitler.
(Actually, now that I think about it, that's not strictly correct, but I'm too lazy to change it. It's swastikas that the boy pursued by neo-nazis has never seen or heard of. He knows who Hitler is because he's read about him on the back of his baseball cards.)
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Date: 2007-12-02 04:14 pm (UTC)Hmm, for some reason, I was never too keyed up about the "weapon" hint. It was so vague, and nobody ever talked much about it after this point in the book. My main thought now is that this would have been the ideal moment to introduce the concept of the Elder Wand ... if JKR was absolutely bound and determined to have the Hallows plot at all, that is. I really hated the Hallows subplot and think the books would have been better without it, but if it had to be there, it should have been introduced much earlier than Book 7.
When the twins developed this obsession with her we will never know, but apparently she's some sort of goddess to them now.
Somebody on FAP recently has been pulling out all quotes related to Ginny, book by book, for discussion. When the OotP quotes were posted in isolation, I was really struck by how many times in this book Ginny is linked to other, more popular characters--often the twins. This is usually done by having her echo the more popular characters' reaction to something or other, but having the twins speak favorably about her is part of the same deal. Ginny also is very often shown doing something cool, knowing the solution to a problem, or coming up with a "witty" line. This is where the selling of Ginny begins, and compared to HBP, this is subtle.
You know, if you're trying to clean the house, you'd think keeping a wild animal that eats dead rats in the bedroom would be a bad idea (but marks to Sirius for being childish enough to want to keep Buckbeak in there).
Why is Buckbeak even still in the books after PoA? Couldn't Sirius just have set him free in whatever tropical paradise he was hiding out in earlier and bought himself a broom to get back to England on?
And of course kids will only take this themselves to get out of school. It's not like anybody would ever get the idea to slip it to other people WITHOUT giving them the purple half. Well, if they do the twins surely should not be held responsible.
To be fair, JKR actually did touch on this issue at the end of HBP, with the Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder which Malfoy used to get the Death Eaters into Hogwarts being said to come from the twins' shop. It wasn't a major issue for anyone, but at least it was there. (At one point, I had a theory that the twins were going to become "Q" for the Order and devise magical gadgets for use in the fight against Voldemort. I'm kind of surprised JKR didn't go down that road, as they seem perfectly positioned for that type of role, and they'd probably bother people less if they weren't using their own inventions.)
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Date: 2007-12-02 04:21 pm (UTC)Or at least, spell out the difference between an injury we should be concerned about and one that can be laughed off, so that we know how to repond in a given situation. Why can arm bones be regrown, but not ears?
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Date: 2007-12-02 04:27 pm (UTC)It's funny because for me this book was so not subtle--I couldn't believe other people weren't howling as much as I was about the selling of Ginny in this book. It was just so blatant all the things you mentioned. Every time she opened her mouth she was doing something cool, or being witty or impressing in some way. And when she wasn't there other people were telling us how she was like that. Many people saw a change b/w OotP and HBP but to me it was just a continuation of the same--except that in HBP it got so bad that she crossed the line into being mean to others.
At one point, I had a theory that the twins were going to become "Q" for the Order and devise magical gadgets for use in the fight against Voldemort. I'm kind of surprised JKR didn't go down that road, as they seem perfectly positioned for that type of role, and they'd probably bother people less if they weren't using their own inventions.
Yeah, but that would mean the Order might actually have done something when Voldemort took over. Since their whole job was to just sit around and wait for Harry to act, none of these gadgets were needed at all.
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Date: 2007-12-02 04:52 pm (UTC)I sort of recognized that it was happening at the time, but I was willing to play along. I had been waiting for Ginny to develop a personality, and I was just so glad it had happened that I was willing to overlook a little clunkiness in the introduction. Mind you, I still raised an eyebrow over her sudden revelation as a Quidditch Goddess. HBP was the book that turned me off to such a degree that I was no longer willing to meet JKR halfway.
Yeah, but that would mean the Order might actually have done something when Voldemort took over.
Well, yeah. But back in the halcyon days when I thought all the ideas introduced in OotP was actually going to lead somewhere, I took it for granted that the Order was going to be all cool and active and stuff.
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Date: 2007-12-02 08:15 pm (UTC)Lord, yes. This would have been the ideal time to introduce the Elder Wand, and the fairy tale itself should have been introduced way back in PS/SS. It's an element that should have been seeded throughout the books instead of crammed willy-nilly into the end.
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Date: 2007-12-02 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 04:58 pm (UTC)It seems pretty clear that the Elder Wand was always on the table, even if the whole matched set of deathly unhallowed hallows wasn't (how do you get a "hallowed" something in a story where nothing is stated as being holy?). Which really makes you wonder why *wasn't* it referred to, at least by one of its aliases, in Binns's class (so he could pooh-pooh the idea the way he did the Chamber of Secrets) at some point over the first five books.
The best I can do is that Rowling never discussed the overall story arc with her editors, since an experienced editor would have probably spotted such an obvious detail that needed to be brought forward earlier, so it could be brushed under the rug where it would trip us later. That would have at least been reasonably clever.
That was my biggest quarrel with DHs. It just plain *wasn't clever* it was flat-footed and insulting of the readers' intelligence.
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Date: 2007-12-04 03:51 am (UTC)I sort of wonder about that, actually. Or at least, I wonder what form it originally took. If she was always planning for an unbeatable wand, then I have to wonder why some of the things in the early books were written the way they were. Why "the wand chooses the wizard"? Why so little emphasis on wands in general, actually? Up to HBP, I always thought wands had no strength of their own, that all power came from the wizard and that the wand was just a channel whose effectiveness depended on its condition and how well matched it was to its user. Introducing the idea of wands with their own magical powers seemed to contradict a lot of stuff from the early books. And don't even get me started on the rules of wand mastery!
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Date: 2007-12-04 04:54 am (UTC)I'd say from what we've got, she stuck in some basic hooks and forged on, expecting something to occur to her eventually.
What it looks like is that nothing ever really did and she just cobbled something together and bunged it in all anyhow.
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Date: 2007-12-04 08:34 pm (UTC)And really, HBP should have been more of a warning sign. Only utter morons would have happily plunged into Quidditch and snogging after learning that prophecy and with the war coming into full swing. Instead of preparing themselves to the best of their ability for the ordeal they knew for sure was coming soon for them all. I mean, Harry never had been the brightest or the most motivated, but he at least grudgingly trained and learned stuff to achieve his goals in PoA, GoF and OoTP. Here, zip. And the same in DH.
For some reason after the brief turned towards "realism" and "earned" success in OoTP, Rowling seemed to decide that it would make Harry more of an everyman hero and a "pure-souled" boy if victory were to drop into his lap without even minimal effort he was forced to employ earlier (sometimes). And without anybody else except for Hermione making any effort either.
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Date: 2008-03-15 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-19 02:20 pm (UTC)So no, not at all. This is one of my favorite Sirius chapters and I like Sirius in it (and throughout the books, actually).
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Date: 2008-03-19 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-04 09:53 pm (UTC)Because unpopular = bad. The primary duty of schoolteachers is to make their students love them.
Also, are there no wizard charities? Couldn't Harry have donated the 1,000 galleons to other war orphans? I'm sure the Weasleys could have got a loan to start up their business - omg does the WW have "Dragon's Den" with REAL dragons?
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Date: 2009-01-05 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-04 04:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-04 04:36 am (UTC)