death to capslock

If the books were set in the 1930s...

2022-03-19T00:23:19Z

Posted by: sunnyskywalker

Now that we have this shiny new Dreamwidth edition of DTCL, I thought we ought to inaugurate it with shiny new content! Well, it's new, anyway. Good comments might make it shiny ;-)

So, thought experiment time! One of Jodel’s Red Hen essays noted that if Rowling wanted half-baked WWII parallels, the series might work better if it were actually set between World Wars. The series already has a sense of “past-ness” (jolly good boarding school romps, Molly Weasley knitting and talking about “scarlet women”), and we hardly spend any time in the Muggle world anyway, so brief mentions of Muggle technology could easily be changed to accommodate a 1930s setting. But that's just a couple of surface details. What else would have to change, and would it work? ( Read more... )

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The Cunning-Man and the Hopping Pot

2022-01-29T09:18:00Z

Posted by: sunnyskywalker

Even before the Statute of Secrecy, there was pressure from both the magical and Muggle worlds against being publicly known as a witch or wizard. However, lots of magical families probably made their livings by performing minor magics for their neighbors. They couldn’t all be re-trained at once even if the wizarding world could immediately create jobs for them. Which they couldn’t. Restructuring the economy to the point where fully separating from the Muggle world was remotely possible must have taken time. How were village practitioners to support themselves until then?

Well, probably many of them called themselves cunning-folk rather than witches. Cunning-folk were often considered different from witches, and in fact one of their main services was providing protection against witchcraft. They also helped find lost things, magically discovered the identities of thieves, healed injuries and illnesses, made love potions and charms, and other such services. Cunning-folk were often literate, and they could make pretty good money.
( Read more... )

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Expecto il padrino

2021-10-17T20:08:00Z

Posted by: sunnyskywalker

A bit of silliness.

I stumbled across the blog post "The meaning of Expecto Patronum: From Hogwarts to Ancient Rome," which discusses the meaning of "patronus" in ancient Rome, and notes that a patron is more like a (legal) Mafia don bribing officials to protect you from the law than a sparkly representation of your soul protecting you against supernatural evil. Which is an interesting choice for the spell, "unless she really intended for Harry Potter to be calling on The Godfather," as the author says.

Of course, others have noted the similarities of the Roman patronage system to modern wizarding Britain. For example, pharnabazus's 2004 series Expecto Patronus: or how the wizarding world really works. It holds up pretty well despite being written before book six. Dumbledore as a powerful wizarding patron with many clients, which makes him a political heavyweight other patron-networks in the Ministry might reasonably conclude is a threat to their own influence, seems just as accurate after book seven.

Coincidentally, I've been re-watching series one of the original British House of Cards. If you want patronage networks and backroom backstabbing, here you go! Chief Whip Francis Urquhart is such a nice, grandfatherly fellow who appears above all that petty factionalism and can explain how destroying his rivals' reputations and the occasional straight-up murder is really for the greater good. ("This is a mercy killing.") And he knows absolutely everyone's dirty little secrets and how to manipulate them. How very...familiar. Not that I'm saying Dumbledore would ever spike someone's cocaine with rat poison, oh no. He would never--just ask him! And I'm sure it's a total coincidence how many powerful young witches and wizards who threaten his position or don't obey him completely end up dead or otherwise neutralized. Honest.

Still, it raises a probably-most-irrelevant question: is the position of Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot roughly equivalent to Speaker of the House of Commons or Lord Speaker, as I think most fans have assumed, or is it the equivalent of being Chief Whip? I mean, I'm sure Dumbledore knows as much as he can about Wizengamot members regardless, but it would be amusing if his actual job was to know everything and use it to pressure them into voting the "right" way for his faction.

Dumbledore: a version of Francis Urquhart who decided that controlling people behind the scenes was actually a much better job than being the top boss after all?

By Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Fair use, Link

"You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment."

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The Decline of Pagan Magic

2021-08-17T20:54:00Z

Posted by: sunnyskywalker

Though the movies contradict the books too often for me to consider them canon, occasionally, a background detail is useful. One is Bathilda Bagshot’s book On the Decline of Pagan Magic, a movie prop in Deathly Hallows Part I. The existence of this book (should we choose to accept it) suggests that Bathilda didn’t only write propaganda for children. It could be propaganda for adults, but even that might include some genuine scholarship.

What might The Decline of Pagan Magic be about? ( Read more... )

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The Floo Revolution

2019-07-22T20:17:00Z

Posted by: sunnyskywalker

Occasionally, something on Pottermore actually makes sense and supplements what's in the books rather than breaking all of time and space. Here's one that I think works: Ignatia Wildsmith (1227-1320) invented Floo Powder some time in the 13th century.

What other things happened around this time?

The Golden Snidget was used in Quidditch for the first time in 1269 and quickly became an integral part of the game;
The first Triwizard Tournament was played around 1294;
The Black family allegedly started marrying only other magical people.

Let's say Ignatia invented Floo Powder around 1260 and started marketing it pretty quickly. Within a few years, Quidditch development goes from introducing and refining new elements over the course of a couple of centuries to the latest addition becoming so popular so quickly that the Snidget is an endangered species within decades. After about 35 years, they organize a major international sports tournament with wizards on the Continent and probably Scandinavia.

This is about what you'd expect if travel suddenly became easier and faster. Anyone--not just those who can Apparate, but sick people, children, magically weak people, groups of people too large to side-along all at once, etc.--can suddenly instantly transport themselves at least anywhere in Britain. (We don't know the limits of Floo travel, but the kids Floo from either London or Ottery-St.-Catchpole, I can't remember which, to Hogwarts at one point. So it's at least that far.) And suddenly, they can chat with each other in real time instead of having to wait for an owl to arrive with a letter. We know how much cars, airplanes, and telephones have changed our own societies; imagine if we had (smoky, awkward versions of) FaceTime and Star Trek transporters seven hundred years ago.

This also makes a plausible turning point toward wizards separating from Muggle society. They went to magic school before, and had a national (or possibly international, depending on how much of the British Isles the Wizards' Council covered) magical advisory council. But they still lived in Muggle communities for the most part, and were limited in how much they could visit and communicate with other magical people once they'd graduated. So they had lots of reasons to integrate into Muggle society, marry Muggles, etc., even if they did also have their far-flung alumni/hobby community with a few traditions of its own. But once it became easy even for (temporary or permanent) non-Apparaters to visit their children even if they'd married people hundreds of miles away, well, that opens up some possibilities. Now marrying your school sweetheart doesn't mean losing your family support system--Mum can still help watch the baby even if she lives in Devon and you live in Yorkshire. A family of wizarding apothecaries can make a marriage alliance with another such family instead of whoever is available locally. And if you didn't meet someone at school, now you have more opportunities to meet someone at one of those increasingly well-attended sports games instead.

I doubt that the Blacks really have no Muggle or Muggle-born marriage partners going that far back, but I can believe that they started strongly preferring magical spouses and seeing themselves as set apart from their Muggle neighbors around that time.

And after a couple of centuries of the magical community growing increasingly defined and separate, you get witch hunts...

It probably isn't perfect, but this bit of backstory works well enough that I wonder if it happened by accident, or if someone other than Rowling made up the date.

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Salazar's retirement career

2019-02-13T15:17:00Z

Posted by: sunnyskywalker

It's interesting that we never hear what happened to Salazar Slytherin after he "departed" that fateful morning. Jodel suggested a couple of possibilities (included below). As a slightly tongue-in-cheek exercise, here's a quiz on his possible post-Hogwarts activities.

(a) He founded Durmstrang.
(b) He founded the Department of Mysteries (whatever it was called pre-Ministry).
(c) He started a war (maybe with pureblood supremacist ideology, maybe something else).
(d) He retired and lived a quiet life of scholarship and contemplation.
(e) He served on the Wizards' Council.
(f) He started a pet shop specializing in exotic snakes.
(g) He accidentally got killed by his own basilisk. The other Founders covered it up out of respect for his memory.
(h) The other Founders killed him and buried him under the foundations of their new Astronomy Tower.
(i) Other, explained in comments.

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The Cunning-Folk of England

2018-11-17T13:09:00Z

Posted by: sunnyskywalker

A while back, I read Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History by Owen Davies, and I've been mulling over how the author's contentions might fit into the Potterverse.

To (very, very) briefly summarize, Davies says that the cunning folk were distinct from other classes of magic workers (though there is always some overlap). For instance, he contrasts them with those who were solely fortune-tellers and with charmers, who depended entirely on using a magical artifact of some sort for their work. He defines the cunning folk as the more full-service magic workers: they could find lost objects, help you scry for your true love, perform love charms/potions, heal, and--this is one of the biggest services--protect you against malevolent witchcraft.

One of the really interesting points Davies makes is that whatever the church said, most of the common people were insistent that the cunning folk were not witches. He claims that according to the records he studied, cunning folk were rarely prosecuted for witchcraft, and their neighbors often defended them. He also hypothesizes that the final decline of the profession in the late 19th/early 20th centuries was due to people no longer believing in witchcraft as a cause of many problems (even if they did believe in other occult phenomena) and so no longer needing anti-witch services.

(Other points of interest: they charged for their work, but often had another profession; they were often of the artisan/trade classes rather than farmers and laborers; they were usually at least semi-literate and used this as a mark of distinction; cunning men outnumbered cunning women; though many were rural, some worked in cities too; they usually worked alone unless training their children in the business.)

Pre-Statute of Secrecy, of course, this is no problem. The father in "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot" was probably the local cunning man, and he earned enough to allow his son to attend the full seven years at Hogwarts (whether or not they charged at the time, losing his son's labor for so long could be tough on the household). Said son then proved to be too high-and-mighty after his fancy education and needed to be taught a lesson about the value of work. Oh, and sure, do some good for the neighbors in the bargain.

But after? The idea of magic workers being paid for performing magic who are not witches, absolutely not, post-Statute of Secrecy, raises some interesting questions.( Read more... )

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Rowling Offends Native Americans

2016-03-19T13:44:00Z

Posted by: spongebending.livejournal.com

I don't know if anyone on here heard about it, but Rowling is writing a new series of sorts called the History of Magic in America.

Not only does she seem to have done barely any research at all on American history (if there are any Americans on here, check it out and have a laugh!), but she also seems to have caused a bit of controversy as many Native Americans have found her portrayal of them to be backwards and offensive.

Can't say I'm surprised, I've always felt that in Potter fans could reread the books without their nostalgia goggles on they'd find the series has a lot of unfortunate implications and overall nastiness. Without the protective shield of nostalgia, it seems that people are starting to see the many of the faults of Rowling's writing that this community has been pointing out for years.

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Hermione Granger and the Missed Opportunity

2015-09-29T21:09:00Z

Posted by: sunnyskywalker

I'm re-reading PS/SS, specifically paying attention to things which are part of the overall 7-book plot but which Harry (and we, back in the day) didn't have enough information to flag as relevant. Absolutely fascinating, and I'm sure I'll be posting about some of that soon. This isn't that time, or not exactly. I was also paying closer attention to wizard/Muggle relations, and so I stopped at this little exchange:

"And you could ask your parents if they know who Flamel is," said Ron. "It'd be safe to ask them."

"Very safe, as they're both dentists," said Hermione.

I can't help but picture the AU where she does ask, and her father says, "Flamel? Wasn't there something about him in that history program on the telly last night?" And her mother replies, "Yes, something about alchemy, wasn't it? Was he really a wizard, Hermione dear? How exciting!" And then Hermione comes back after the break all bright-eyed, very pleased as she shows the boys her photocopies of Flamel's entry in her Muggle library's encyclopedia. "No wonder he wasn't in any of the books on modern magical discoveries, he was born so long ago that witches and wizards still lived openly among Muggles, can you imagine? Do you think alchemists can really make a Philosopher's Stone?" Which reminds Harry of Flamel and Dumbledore's alchemical partnership on the Chocolate Frog Card, and off they go.

The schedule of events would hardly be different from the actual book, but the kids would have discovered that Muggles aren't just helpless, pitiable lumps. Wouldn't that have been something.

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POTTERMORE: The Potter Family

2015-09-22T21:04:00Z

Posted by: radicalhighway.livejournal.com

I've been a lurker of this place for so long! I've decided to post my first entry... I hope it's enjoyable.

The old Pottermore was scrapped and another one is going to take its place. Here I thought it couldn't get any less interesting, but it did. Supposedly, there's going to be something similar to the old thing that will be added. I found the FAQ page to be absolutely hillarious, so I thought it would be funny to share a few snippets.

This is where you’ll be able to read brand new writing by J. K. Rowling (yes, it’s canon!), check out magical characters, objects, spells and places, reminisce about the first time you read the books, ruminate on advice from the great Dumbledore, speculate about Newt Scamander, try to guess the identity of the Cursed Child, fall in love with the stories all over again and SO MUCH MORE.

So yes, these thing is canon and it's very important that we all know this. JKR really likes to tell people what to think, there's no such thing as readership interpretation, and she's a real hack, because she didn't include any of this in the series and instead chose to spend her time writing about nonsense.

The good thing about it is that there's more "canon" stuff to spork. It's amazing how I used to love this series until a certain point, but then it became so bad I get entertainment out of mocking it, for years too. Pottermore was really slow in the updates by the end tho, so expect it to go exactly like the books. Really fun when it starts, bland and lazy after awhile.

The Cursed Child... Uhm... Must be every Slytherin that has ever existed... Remember though, choices make you who you are. Except if you're Tom Riddle. That one was rotten since conception. Oh no, I know, the Cursed Child is Tom Riddle. Such a pair, the Cursed Child and the Boy Who Lived.

Also a moment of silent for the great Dumbledore. I almost cried but I'm over 20 so I managed to hold myself. Imagine if I cried, I'd be classified as a Cho Chang, not a Ginny Weasley.

From the bottom of my Hermione-loving heart, welcome to the new and improved Pottermore.

The Cho Chang badge of tears belongs to me after all.

We have so much more to give you; writing, movies, plays, books, characters, places, backstories, and it’s rumoured that discovering your very own Patronus is also in the works...And the icing on the cauldron cake? The new Pottermore logo is in J.K. Rowling’s own handwriting.

The icing on the cake of the website is JKR writing a word in her own handwritting. There's setting the bar low and then there's this.

Now onto her lovely backstory about the Potter family.

( The Potter Family by J. K. Rowling )

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Closing Their Eyes

2015-09-02T01:26:00Z

Posted by: condwiramurs.livejournal.com

More thoughts on the ICW, Secrecy, wizarding isolationism, and the rise of the Death Eaters. This was sparked by a long reply to sweetalkeress' comment on I Would Sell Out the Nation, which will be posted separately soon.

This is somewhat half-formed thinking, working as I go and edited a bit. Influenced mainly by swythyv, jodel, and terri. I steal shamelessly from the masters; forgive me.

There’s a little bit of Snape stuff at the end, but mostly this is historical musings and speculation. I used mostly Wikipedia and the HP-Lexicon, especially its master timeline, as references.

( Read more... )

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Harry Potter Abridged! DH Chapter 28

2015-08-20T10:51:00Z

Posted by: sweettalkeress.livejournal.com

Since Chapter 27 is so short, I decided to also post Chapter 28.

( Time for Dumbledore's backstory! Bum bum buuuuuuum! )

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Harry Potter Abridged! DH Chapter 20

2015-07-29T14:36:00Z

Posted by: sweettalkeress.livejournal.com

( Read Chapter 20 )

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The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters

2014-10-28T13:14:00Z

Posted by: terri-testing.livejournal.com

In response to my last, Vermouth1991 objected to the Hogwarts Express as follows:

Re: taking the train
I've always found it a rather shite idea for all British magical students to gather over to that one station in London and then ride the train all the way north into Scotland, without stopping anywhere in between so that some northern English or Scottish persons can hop onto the Express on stations more closer to their homes. And the train stops at Hogsmeade anyway, not within the magical protection sphere of Hogwarts itself. Why can't more half-blood or pureblooded families just travel directly to Hogsmeade and wait until the rest of the students arrive and then take the Thestral carriages?

Really vermouth1991 touched on almost all of the relevant issues. Why not, indeed?
( Read more... )

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Noble and Most Ancient: The Black Family Tapestry

2014-10-22T21:28:00Z

Posted by: terri-testing.livejournal.com

Let’s think about the Black Family Tree for a moment—not the data in the possibly non-canonical display of Phineas’s branch that was created by JKR for a charity auction, but the hanging itself, that Sirius showed off to Harry, with commentary. What does canon say, and what can we deduce, about the Black Family Tapestry?

It’s not a prepossessing object, to Harry’s eyes. It’s a downright disgusting one, to Sirius. But Kreacher regards it with all of his late mistress’s utter veneration. Here they all are in OotP 6:
( Read more... )

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Development of Pureblood Culture

2014-10-08T22:11:00Z

Posted by: terri-testing.livejournal.com

The Development of Pureblood Culture

The subculture of magical Britain is, of course, to a very large extent the culture developed and transmitted by Purebloods. But that subculture itself developed out of, and in response to (in at least some respects probably in deliberate distinction from) the surrounding culture at the time the magical world cut itself (partially) off from the rest of us.

( Read more... )

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Deathly Hallows, Chapter 31: The Battle of Hogwarts

2014-05-11T19:54:00Z

Posted by: oneandthetruth.livejournal.com

In the Great Hall, McGonagall instructs the students about evacuating. When a Slytherin girl asks where Snape is, Minerva using the slang phrase, “done a bunk,” which causes all the houses except Slytherin to cheer. In other words we know the snakes are bad ‘uns because they like the Greasy One. Sorry. I don’t believe most of the non-Slytherin students either (1) hated Snape, or (2) blamed him for the way the school was run. That would require me to assume everybody in the wizarding world is as stupid and prejudiced as Harry and his allies. I’d be the stupid one if I believed that.

( Read more... )

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Of Mudbloods and Bathtubs

2014-03-03T00:57:00Z

Posted by: oneandthetruth.livejournal.com

Author’s note: This essay offers a Watsonian explanation for certain things in the Potterverse. It ignores any Doylist explanations for those things, including Rowling’s.

In reply to my DH sporking, chapter 29, maidofkent wrote in part,

You're right that it seems pretty hypocritical to joke about Snape running away from shampoo, when the male Hogwarts students seem so uninterested in cleanliness. (Perhaps the Slytherins, being under the female influence of water, are namby-pamby types who do bathe regularly and Severus was indeed sorted too soon :))

This got me to thinking about a trio of seemingly unrelated subjects: baths, “mudbloods,” and the Slytherin prejudice against the latter. Many commentators have speculated the reason Salazar Slytherin didn’t like witches and wizards from non-magical backgrounds was because they threatened to expose the world of magical people to their non-magical families and friends. That’s a reasonable explanation, but could his dislike be founded on something more simple? Could it just be a matter of cleanliness?

( Read more... )

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Product of the Department of Mysteries

2013-11-19T18:49:00Z

Posted by: sunnyskywalker

On oneandthetruth's last DH chapter commentary, an interesting thread compared the Mirror of Erised to the Resurrection Stone in its seductive (and potentially deadly) powers of showing something/someone you want.

There's another object somewhat like that: the Veil in the Department of Mysteries. There are voices coming from behind the Veil - voices Luna believes to be those of the dead - and Harry feels tempted to walk through it.

Well, okay, Harry is being trained to have a death wish. But maybe that just means he's more susceptible.

The Department of Mysteries is a research facility. One which we know has produced tangible items now available for (restricted) public use, such as Time-Turners. (Whether they invented them or improved on an existing idea, we don't know.) I seriously doubt they've only produced one artifact ever. So what else might they have made?

They also have the locked room full of either love or Amortensia, depending whom you ask. The Mirror's ability to reflect your heart's desire is suggestively similar to the potion's ability to reflect the scent of what you desire.

A big glass mirror sounds like a relatively recent invention (unless you posit a long history of magical glassmaking, but wizards seem to adapt Muggle technology more often than the other way around). I propose that the Mirror of Erised is a product of the Department of Mysteries, combining attributes of Amortensia and the Veil which the DoM was able to partially replicate/adapt after long study.

Next question: are the Stone and the Veil related? Maybe Mr. Death, whoever he was, created both, and the DoM only got ahold of one of them. Whether this makes the Veil a fourth Hallow, left out of Beedle's version for numerical reasons, is not clear. Possibly it's a super-Hallow, and you can be Master of Death^TM with it alone? Or it's a death-related magical... thing... which shares some properties with the Hallows, but it isn't the same class of artifact and mastery isn't an issue in its case.

Or maybe the Veil is more ancient and the Stone is a portable adaptation created centuries ago by the DoM's first head researcher, Johannus Mors, along with a couple of other powerful items which also escaped the premises and have not been replicated. (And Death took the second lab assistant for his own...)

Thoughts? Fanfic links?

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Pottermore: more contradictions (The Ollivanders)

2013-08-10T10:20:00Z

Posted by: oryx_leucoryx

So I was reading through old spoilers looking for backstories for my head-canon (though my VWar1 series reached the end of the war I'm still working on a couple of appendices). ( Read more... )

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Another Speculation on the Big One

2013-02-06T10:22:00Z

Posted by: terri-testing.livejournal.com

Why single out AK from other lethal curses to make it Unforgivable in 1717, with the strictest penalty on its use?
( It’s )

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Filling some gaps about the first war (part 6)

2013-02-03T19:54:00Z

Posted by: oryx_leucoryx

Once Peter brought Tom the Potters' Secret (and received his Mark) Tom just needed to finish up some errands until he was ready to attack them: Give the cup to Bellatrix (instruct her to watch it well for him), give the diary to Lucius (tell him that when given the signal he should arrange for it to be brought to Hogwarts by a student, and the result would be mayhem that would destabilize Dumbledore's position), get the sword (or some other artifact) from Snape. And perhaps wait for the auspicious night of All Hallows Eve.

( Read more... )

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Filling some gaps about the first war (part 5)

2013-01-08T02:08:00Z

Posted by: oryx_leucoryx

As we arrive at the parts of the tale for which canon has more information my speculations become more detailed. This posting is much longer than the previous ones. I hope you find it useful.

The prophecy must have shaken Tom. For the first time in a long while he felt threatened. I think he put some of his projects on hold in the meanwhile. Taking over Hogwarts and the Ministry would have to wait a bit. He even got delayed in his very secret project to make an even more awesome hiding place for Hufflepuff's cup (because I can't believe giving it to Bella was his first choice; where? maybe under Borgin and Burke's, or maybe under Hepzibah's home, who knows?) His top priority was to find out who was this predicted potential vanquisher and how he was going to stop him.

( Read more... )

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Pottermore : New material about Prisoner of Azkaban

2013-01-01T04:19:00Z

Posted by: dracasadiablo.livejournal.com

( Aunt Marge )

( The Knight Bus )

( Sir Cadogan )

( Kettleburn )

( Boggart )

( Snape in a dress )

Apologies if my grammar, spelling and punctuation are off.
But I just got back from a New Year party and I'm not at my best.

p.s. Happy New Year! ;D

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Filling some gaps about the first war (part 4)

2012-12-09T16:37:00Z

Posted by: oryx_leucoryx

It has been a while since I posted in this series. This posting continues my interpretation of the sequence of events described in part 3

The next turning point is, of course, Sybil's first known prophecy. We do not know exactly when it was made, but we know the academic year 1979-80 was in session (based on Sybil's claim to have been teaching 'nearly sixteen years' in September 1995. ( Read more... )

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