HBP Chapter Twenty-Two
Dec. 26th, 2008 04:39 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslock*A burial for somebody we couldn’t care less about. What a shock, it’s a Hagrid chapter!
*ETA: The spiders would have made up for these if they'd killed him in DH but no, even then they had to just waste time.
*LOL! I’m going to miss Harry and his moods that are failed to be lifted even by the approach of summer. Stop trying to out-emo Malfoy, Harry. You may have done it last year with your brooding, fiery rage, but this year your life is an Archie comic. Accept it.
*ETA: Heh. It is kind of funny imagining him pulling that with his kids, though. It's not like anybody in that family understands the true meaning of pain.
*Hagrid sends Harry a note reminding him that he thinks anything he feels the Trio owes it to him to feel too.
*ETA: Again, really the type of attitude less annoying in someone who was going to die in the next book.
*Hagrid says Harry and Ron know how special Aragog was. Special. That’s one word for it.
*You know, usually I think of Malfoy as the character who says what everybody’s thinking about Hagrid, but to be fair he really shares that job with Ron. What else do these two have in common? Oh right, they’ve both spent time in the infirmary thanks to Hagrid.
*Harry notes that tears have fallen onto the parchment. Probably because Hagrid writes all his letters with a magical weeping pen for extra guilt: "Dear Dumbledore, ::sniff sniff:: I’m righ’ sorry ‘bout squashin’ that firs’ year ::snuffle wail:: when I got drunk an’ sat on him. I s’pose you’ll be ::small spray of snot:: wantin’ me outta yer hair…"
*Hermione can’t imagine what’s more important to use the luck potion for than this memory—you haven’t seen the memory, Hermione.
*ETA: Btw, Hermione will still not be able to think of anything more important in the next book when the fate of
*Hey, why doesn’t Harry use it to find out what Malfoy’s up to? Oh. IITS.
*Really he’s been wanting to use the potion to break up Dean and Ginny. As opposed to wanting to use the potion to get lucky with Ginny. If the two of them would just break up he wouldn't be so antsy to get with her.
*JKR finally finds time to drop in some actual war news about the Montgomery sisters—but only in service of giving Tonks a reason to be wandering the halls. Or sort of a reason.
*Hermione vaguely says she heard the Montgomery parents refused to help the DEs. Don’t ask me what she was supposed to help them do or why or how. The DE don’t actually seem to do anything that I can see. Certainly nothing it seems they’d need some random person’s mother to help them do.
*Surely Werewolves don’t kill? asks Harry. Because when one hears "werewolf" the last thing one would think of was excessive violence.
*ETA: Actually, werewolves barely do anything at all and could pretty much be removed entirely except for Remus.
*Ron says they kill when they get "carried away" but isn’t it far more logical to say that they only just bite and infect when they’re interrupted during an attack? Wolves don’t go around just biting as many things as possible.
*I think I’ve asked this before but…they have bells at Hogwarts? A regular school bell seems incredibly out of place in a castle.
*There were only three of them in Potions: Harry, Ernie, and Draco Malfoy, who gets two names because he’s so damned spoiled!
**snuggles three baby Potions boys*
*Ernie speaks sycophantically and Malfoy doesn’t crack a smile on his thinner, greyer face. Harry always needs to have somebody sucking up to the teacher so he can be superior to them.
*Harry notices no air of smugness and superiority like Draco had on the train. Um, Harry? The train was like 8 months ago. You’re just now noticing the superiority wearing off? He's been wetting himself since before Christmas.
*Harry manages to conclude the loss of smugness means the mission’s going badly, but does not link this to his looking ill or consider just how badly it might be going. That’s our Harry “What, you mean Cho was crying because she was sad?” Potter.
*Note he also doesn’t try to fit it into his own narrative of events. Malfoy looked ill after the necklace, now he looks thin after the mead. It’s like he’s just completely forgotten the two murder attempts. Him and everyone else in the school except Malfoy.
*Seriously, in every other book people naturally know to link stuff together because of they know about it, it must all be part of the plot. Except this year where even when Harry likes Malfoy for the murders doesn't make a connection to his emotional state.
*Harry doesn’t tell Slughorn the sprig of peppermint wasn’t his own inspiration. Which doesn’t make him a cheater at all! Or a plagiarist!!11!
*Ernie is really determined to win me over in this book. First the leaping pirouette and now the purple dumpling in the bottom of his cauldron.
*Malfoy’s hiccoughing solution is graded merely passable. But he made it out of the regular book so Malfoy wins!
*ETA: If it makes people hiccough (or as I would say, hiccup) isn't it fine? But I guess Harry's throwing off the curve.
*Ron suggests that thinking you’ve taken FF is the same thing as really taking it, which is probably true in a universe where "confidence" is pretty much enough to do anything. (Note that Malfoy, not being a Gryffindor, has "arrogance" not "confidence.")
*ETA: Not that it really is the same. After this book there were theories that FF was all fake, which makes no sense in a universe where yeah, magic just exists and magic potions do exactly what they say they do.
*Harry walks through the portrait hole and accidentally gives yet another blow to the slowly dying Ginny and Dean relationship. I support everyone's "all teenagers have lots of short romances—don’t judge Ginny!" defenses, but Ginny doesn't have short romances. Nobody does. Hogwarts romances hang on like grim death for the sake of the plot.
*Does anyone else find it hilarious that JKR invented herself a canonical deus ex machina? "Hmm…it would be far too fake if Harry just ran into Slughorn—wait, what if that’s the point—that it’s fake?" And thus Felix Felicitas was born!
*During chapters like this you wonder if JKR ever regretted just not giving the Gryffindors an actual plot for this book, because finding ways for them to kill time until Malfoy’s ready in June seems like it might have ultimately been harder.
*Harry tells Slughorn he’s off to see Hagrid, because the best thing now is to tell the truth. Err…except that isn’t the truth. Apparently for Harry truth=one level of lie up. It's all relative.
*Slughorn knows Dumbledore trusts Hagrid to the hilt (?!) so he can’t be up to anything dreadful. Which is a bit like saying that you know Tom Cruise thinks Scientology is awesome, so it couldn’t be stupid and crazy.
*Harry invites Slughorn to come along to the funeral to get some venom from Aragog. After all, Harry’s only using Hagrid’s grief as a way to get the FF, why shouldn’t it be of some use to Slughorn too?
*ETA: If only everything about Hagrid could be made use of some way.
*Who else thought they were going to wrap Aragog in a Kleenex and flush him down a great big magic toilet?
*Hagrid says Aragog would have been touched Harry was there, proving that Hagrid once again has bonded with his ideal fantasy of Aragog instead of the real thing.
*The other spiders won’t let Hagrid near their webs now that Aragog’s gone, because even monstrous spiders find him annoying.
*Hagrid says he had trouble getting Aragog out of the forest because the spiders usually eat their dead, but he wanted to give him a proper send-off. Note that a "proper sendoff" naturally means a wizard send-off. It’s hardly proper for a spider to have a spider send-off—much better he be harvested for some Potions ingredients and be an excuse for a bout of drinking. I believe Aragog’s Apparition license does say he was an organ donor.
*ETA: Oh man, wouldn't it have been wonderfully neat if Hagrid got a proper spider funeral in DH? Mmmmm....
*Hagrid takes time out of sobbing to indicate that he of course does know that he risked getting Harry in trouble by asking him out and is ready to blubber and whine to Harry about that if necessary.
*Ah! The Slytherin’s arrived—-in fancy clothes with an armful of liquor, natch!
*Why am I not surprised Slughorn owns a cravat?
*At first I thought Slughorn was bringing all the booze to try to get Hagrid drunk and then suggest he offer Slughorn some venom, but he just steals that. So I’m left to assume that he brought the booze solely in order to get Harry drunk and molest him.
*Harry once more tries to make us believe that Hermione really does still care about that house elf business. ETA: Just in a different way.
*Slughorn calls Ron Rupert, which is still not as much of a cinematic tribute as Hermione’s punching Malfoy in the face.
*FF tells Harry not to drink tonight. I actually don’t think that’s FF so much as some dim memory of Harry’s from his Muggle childhood where they went to an assembly about "Good touches and bad touches" and "why you shouldn’t let strangers who are always trying to give you candy get you drunk."
*Hagrid tells the story about how he raised a man-eating monster in school, the moral being that Tom Riddle contrived to have him thrown out and he totally didn’t deserve it at all. Sure Hagrid’s spider could easily have killed Myrtle. The point is that he didn’t!
*ETA: That is a pretty consistent theme: Wishing bad things on a good person can be just as bad as murder, but recklessly endangering others because you just don't care makes you a lovable scamp.
*Hagrid reveals he uses unicorn hair to bind wounds if a creature get hurt. If a kid gets hurt he just gets annoyed. No wasting of unicorn hair on them!
*Harry notes that Slughorn is looking around Hagrid’s cabin for stuff to add to his collection. Unlike Harry who’s watching Slughorn to see how he can pluck a memory out of his brain. Or Hagrid who’s looking out for ways to get everyone to feel sorry for him. What a lovely Trio these three make.
*Hmm…well, I guess if I stretch the definition of "luck" I can accept Harry’s being able to do a charm nonverbally that he’s never been able to do that way before counts. But it’s a stretch.
*Btw, we’ve been told that magic can’t create food and stuff out of thin air, right? But a refilling charm rather makes you wonder why anyone ever buys more than six bottles of any kind of drink in their life. ETA: Maybe it's understood you're refilling from a specific bottle.
*Of all the heroic things Harry’s done in canon I think staying in a cabin with these two giant leaky-eyed drunks ranks up there with the worst of them.
*In his drunkenness, I half-expect Slughorn, upon being asked if he liked Lily to say, "I don’t imagine anyone who met her wouldn’t like her…very brave…very funny…total Mary Sue. We had to like her. ‘Twas in the script."
*ETA: Oh Slughorn, you have no idea. Just wait until DH!
*Harry says FF tells him Slughorn won’t remember any of this in the morning and I see no reason to not believe FF now.
*For some reason I love it when Harry says "Of course I am" to being the Chosen One.
*Honestly, why does Slughorn the Slytherin have to be such a pussy in such a silly way? Why would it be so dangerous for Voldemort to find out Slughorn helped Harry when it isn’t dangerous for Voldemort to know perfectly well he’s walking around with this memory and could spill it at any second? It somehow seems like the polar opposite of Hermione’s pointless lie in PS/SS that she seems to tell only to get herself into trouble.
*Harry tells Slughorn to be brave. He waves a pudgy hand to remind him that as a fat person, he’s really just an overgrown baby and must be treated as such.
*Slughorn hands over the memory to Harry, which is…well, not really brave at all but Harry has to pretend it is to appeal to Slughorn’s vanity or something. Because we all know even Slytherins, especially a Good Slytherin, secretly want to be brave like a Gryffindor. That’s why Harry can’t, like, appeal to his pragmatism even if it would seem more persuasive.
*ETA: Not that he's earned the absolute highest praise for a Slytherin, that perhaps he should have been given a few more years before his inferiority to the world.
*(Yes, Dumbledore's "sometimes I think we Sort too soon" sounds like you could be something else, but the hat is never wrong. So basically, Slytherins are inherently bad unless you put it that way, at which point it's just too bad they Sort too soon.)
*Slughorn begs Harry not to think too badly of him when he sees the memory. Am I remembering this memory wrong? Because I don’t recall Slughorn coming off badly in it. It’s not like he gave Voldemort the idea for Horcruxes even.
*ETA: It's particularly not bad compared to any memory of Dumbledore's would be.
*Phew! Glad we’ve dealt with this Slytherin finally so we can get back to the
The Cricket Rule Day-for-Night
Pretty much!
Designated Hero
Thrill as our hero gets some big old guys drunk and manipulates them!
IITS
For the last time, says Hermione firmly, just forget about Malfoy. She says it firmly, because that’s ITS too.
Idiot World
Only in an idiot world could this memory be so important and require so much page time to get.
Informed Attributes
Aww, Hagrid’s made an armband. He’s just like a big kid truly crying over the loss of his pet. Except really he’s a big dumb narcissistic adult who demands other people participate in his fantasies at personal risk to themselves.
Ken and Andrew’s Rule of Plot Holes
Ken and Andrew’s rule of plot holes meets its match in Felix Felicitas, the Plot Hole Antidote! I mean it to be contrived!
McGuffin
You just need to get that briefcase—err, memory Harry. What’s in it? Errr, nothing that great, actually. Probably better if you don’t actually open it.
Misdirected Answering
Whole. Entire. Chapter.
Final score: 9
Slytherin Liquid Count: Hagrid’s tears, tears that smear ink, Slughorn’s alcohol, Harry’s refills of the alcohol, drunken Hagrid and Slughorn, Slughorn’s tears, Aragog venom, liquid luck, Malfoy’s hiccoughing solution, Harry’s euphoria potion.
H/D cliché alert: Harry notices Malfoy’s getting pale and thin.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-27 10:41 pm (UTC)- I wasn't too cross about Harry's use of the Prince's text book. Whenever Harry tortures someone to make his feelings known (when Draco was forced to crucio someone), or shoots off at the mouth leading to one of his best friends being tortured, JKR always says that she's trying to show that he's not perfect. Actually, these incidents show that he's an intolerable, nasty, unthinking character. Certainly not fit to lead. Taking advantage of an annotated textbook that lands in his lap, like several pupils would do, shows he isn't perfect. I worry that she didn't see the difference between the dishonesty of this situation and outright cruelty, selfishness and megalomania.
- I'm fine with the bell. Until I was 12, I went to a school where all the lessons/luchtimes/playtimes (the youngest girls were five) were punctuated by the ringing of a large hand bell! Apparently this had been happening since the school was established over a century previously - none of this modern electrical bell rubbish. The Head Girl/Prefects took turns to be responsible for it. With a bit of magical amplification it'd be *perfect* for a school like Hogwarts - Filch could ring it, as our teachers did when the senior class were too bogged down by exams etc. Perfect! That said, I bet JKR is thinking of an electrical bell in her usual inconsistent way.
- Slughorn was such a great chance to show a different type of Slytherin. Sly and cunning perhaps, but not evil. Chance not taken.
- I had no real problems with Harry getting Slughorn drunk. Legal, no permanent ill-effects and requiring no magical ability (luckily for Harry). If it was a trembling 16 year old virgin who got drunk for the first time and ended up in bed with Flitwick; that'd be bad. Slughorn in this case I can live with. The only problem I had with it was that Harry needed Felix Felicitas to work it out, as opposed to common sense. As you point out, he could then have saved it for another occasion. Talking of which:-
- Did JKR cover her tracks in Book 6 as to why the Trio didn't use FF in Book 7? Some might roll their eyes when every time-turner in creation gets smashed during the Battle at the Ministry, but at least she thought of the problem and dealt with it. Does it take 6 months to brew? Does it need Foaming Unicorn Hoof or some other incredibly rare ingredient? Why didn't Harry ask Dumbles to get Snape to start preparing some the moment he learnt it existed? Or to be realistic, why didn't Hermione drop her long sulk over the HBP and nudge him to ask Dumbles? In fact, why did Dumbles need Idiot Boy to suggest it? Why didn't he have some prepared for Harry (and the whole Order) from the moment Voldemort returned? And thinking about it, why didn't Voldiemist ask Quirrel to prepare some, and then aquire the Philosopher's Stone in comfort? Why didn't James and Lily take some when found out they were targeted? Why doesn't every capable, or rich Wizard carry a small flask around at all times? Is it only possible to take it once a year or something, due to it's toxic effect on the nervous system? Or does two doses within 24 months lead to the effects being reversed and an attack of severe bad luck? Or death? Though I liked the way it made it feasible that the five children escaped unhurt after the battle, I really don't think FF was worth the unanswered questions. So unlike JKR....
no subject
Date: 2008-12-28 07:05 pm (UTC)Though one could say that much of the time it was at work anyway since there was little they needed to figure out. Things tended to fall into their lap after long periods of fretting.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-28 08:06 pm (UTC)So did he merely sell it to support his taste for velvet smoking jackets and silk pajamas, or did Albus use it for maximising his luck over the year that he was dying anyway, or what?