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reignofevil posted:Hogwarts will become a kaleidoscope of houses. The great hall will be aplomb with motley and at the end of each year everybody wins because the rules are made up and the points don't matter. Headmaster McGonagal: one billion points to Gryffindor! McGonagal the stern strict teacher immediately disregarding the rules to snag a good player for the quidditch team and then buying him a top of the line broom is really charming and wish that had kept up. Iirc the early books also have some scenes where she saves Harry and pals from mean old Snape that can also read as her and Snape knowingly doing a good cop bad cop routine on the idiot children which is cute. And yeah Tonks’ mom was a slytherin and sister to Bellatrix and Malfoy’s mom. She’s only in one scene where Harry almost blasts her for resembling Bellatrix. She was in a ton of fanfics for being the one good slytherin and for being a big tiddy goth gf. Which reminds me, are there any pureblood families where the kids don’t look like little clones of the fathers? Maybe there’s some kind of wizard mohel that goes around transfiguring all the infant Malfoys into blondes and all the baby Weasleys into gingers Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Dec 18, 2020 |
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Dec 18, 2020 17:26
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A lot of stories that follow children characters as they grow up and mature have a sort of turnaround where kids learn that their old biases and feuds are mostly irrelevant as they learn that the world is a bigger place. Harry Potter doesn't really have that, instead all of his childhood feuds turn out to be 204% correct, Slytherin goes from "rival house with some jerks" to "nazis trying to support wizard hitler", Snape goes from that one teacher that didn't like Harry (but ultimately was looking out for him) to being the archenemy of his father and assassin, and Harry takes a year off school and goes backpacking around the wizarding world only to find that actually Hogwarts is the center of the world and there isn't much beyond it. Teachers don't have much of a life out of school. The only thing that Harry matures past is caring about the Durselys. It's kinda weird.
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Dec 18, 2020 20:05
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reignofevil posted:The solution to the problem turned out not to be making Slytherin any more noble or good but in fact to include seventy to one hundred six additional evil houses in what would go on to become known as the "Hogwarts 2000". a very confused sorting hat assigning the first goon wizard into "das goonhouse"
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Dec 18, 2020 20:14
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Hodgepodge posted:a very confused sorting hat assigning the first goon wizard into "das goonhouse" Sorting Hat put me in Groverhaus 
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Dec 18, 2020 20:18
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Mistaken Identity posted:Well, tbf. There is Peter Pettigrew. A bonafide Griffindor Death-Eater. Would have made for an interesting nature vs. nurture theme, if it got explored. But looking back on the books, it probably was sheer accident. lmao I completely forgot about Pettigrew. I wish there'd have been more to him near the end of the books besides his bionic hand strangling him to death because he couldn't kill Harry, or whatever happened.
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Dec 19, 2020 00:29
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SlothfulCobra posted:A lot of stories that follow children characters as they grow up and mature have a sort of turnaround where kids learn that their old biases and feuds are mostly irrelevant as they learn that the world is a bigger place. Yeah and it seems to be steadily building toward this in the early to middle books, with the sorting hat almost putting Harry in Slytherin and then it and Dumbledore constantly talking about the need for unity between houses and that being the way to defeat Voldemort. But then it turns out that Harry was only ever a potential Slytherin because his scar gave him Voldemort powers and everything remained pretty black and white. It felt like Rowling realized it was just way easier to keep things simplistic instead of adding in more nuance.
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Dec 19, 2020 00:49
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Some Goon posted:The initial characterization wasn't that all slytherins were evil, but that all evil people were slytherin, but this got lost over the course of the septilogy. I don't know about that. Salazar Slytherin was an avowed racist who basically just made his own house so he could have a blood purity club, and then installed a dead man's switch to murder everyone from all the other houses. Which of course the Slytherins and everyone in charge knew was there, and effectively did nothing about because wizards are insane.
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Dec 19, 2020 15:40
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Might have been canny to slip a line in somewhere suggesting that the entire large-snake heir-of-Slytherin nonsense was a later addition by a different wizard Hitler, rather than accidentally enshrining murder as one of the four Hogwarts Virtues.
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Dec 19, 2020 15:51
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Sodomy Hussein posted:I don't know about that. Salazar Slytherin was an avowed racist who basically just made his own house so he could have a blood purity club, and then installed a dead man's switch to murder everyone from all the other houses. Which of course the Slytherins and everyone in charge knew was there, and effectively did nothing about because wizards are insane. I've always wondered about this. We know from our history and also a passing mention in one of the books that muggles did in fact hunt witches and wizards. It doesn't make Slytherin good but he seems less evil if, when he was around, muggles were actively trying to kill magic folk.
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Dec 19, 2020 16:15
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NikkolasKing posted:I've always wondered about this. We know from our history and also a passing mention in one of the books that muggles did in fact hunt witches and wizards. It doesn't make Slytherin good but he seems less evil if, when he was around, muggles were actively trying to kill magic folk. Though it's made into a complete joke given a pretty simple spell renders a wizard immune to fire.
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Dec 19, 2020 17:04
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Though it's made into a complete joke given a pretty simple spell renders a wizard immune to fire. Not being good at killing you doesn't mean they aren't trying to kill you.
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Dec 19, 2020 17:47
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Some Goon posted:Not being good at killing you doesn't mean they aren't trying to kill you. Harry Potter: 
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Dec 19, 2020 17:56
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I bet a lot of 11-year-olds wound up getting killed when an owl letter told them that they were a witch right around when a witchhunt was going on.Sodomy Hussein posted:I don't know about that. Salazar Slytherin was an avowed racist who basically just made his own house so he could have a blood purity club, and then installed a dead man's switch to murder everyone from all the other houses. Which of course the Slytherins and everyone in charge knew was there, and effectively did nothing about because wizards are insane. That wasn't the initial characterization. That was written later. Although I guess that's an early example of Harry's initial biases getting affirmed, since it turns out that actually the people trying to out-rich him in Quidditch are tacitly responsible for the otherwise unrelated attacks happening on school grounds. I guess at least there's a couple other red herrings and it turns out that a Gryffindor, Ginny, was the one physically doing it, but you can still walk away with the assumption that the bad guy is always the person that you otherwise hate. There's subversions of expectations of who the real bad guy was in books 1-4, but by 5 Umbridge shows up and just is bad from the start. Maybe there's a little bluffing from the persona she puts up, but it doesn't last long.
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Dec 19, 2020 18:55
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What could have been a neat twist was for Dumbledore to demolish the house system after Voldemort came back to life. Instead of houses, Dumbledore could make all the students in Harry's year room together, and it would force Harry to interact with people from other houses and reevaluate his biases.Ghost Leviathan posted:Though it's made into a complete joke given a pretty simple spell renders a wizard immune to fire. Doesn't the fact that the witch trials still happened kind of imply that wizards were perfectly fine letting all those women get killed, while the real witches that do get caught treated it like a laugh?
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Dec 19, 2020 19:53
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Not caring about the lives of inferior races and classes is a very British elite thing to do.
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Dec 19, 2020 20:36
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amigolupus posted:What could have been a neat twist was for Dumbledore to demolish the house system after Voldemort came back to life. Instead of houses, Dumbledore could make all the students in Harry's year room together, and it would force Harry to interact with people from other houses and reevaluate his biases. I remember this was actually a theory in a lot of fandom before the seventh book came out, that the series would end with the eventual dissolution of the house system. I guess in a way it did, as members of all the houses were part of the Resistance/Dumbledore's Army, but then they all went back to the status quo after Voldemort died. I remember my first experience with JKR being a bit of a micro-manager of her world to the detriment of fandom was when she said Neville and Luna, a moderately popular and harmless ship, would never get together. I was 18 or so at the time and wondered why it mattered at all. Then the movies made them canon, so whatever. Speaking of fandom theories, has this thread talked about time travelling Ronbledore yet?
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Dec 19, 2020 20:37
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Who What Now posted:Not caring about the lives of inferior races and classes is a very British elite thing to do. Like categorizing various sapient species as being a being or a beast?
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Dec 20, 2020 01:08
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Zesty posted:Like categorizing various sapient species as being a being or a beast? Have you looked at the history of Ireland?
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Dec 20, 2020 01:33
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https://twitter.com/JennyENicholson/status/1029000253414891521?s=19
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Dec 20, 2020 07:18
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This just raises questions for me. So is a house elf screwed if they’re owned by a nudist household?
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Dec 20, 2020 10:05
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Who did the Malfoy’s laundry?
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Dec 20, 2020 11:53
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Regalingualius posted:This just raises questions for me. Aren’t house elfs screwed. Period? The one case of liberation we see gets treated like a freak and a leper by his own people, implying that not only is it exceedingly rare in the first place but house elfs are so indoctrinated that they don’t even want to be free. Holy poo poo, I just realized that house elfs are basically the racist “the faithful slave” trope.
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Dec 20, 2020 12:35
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It would have been better if the ur-fascism brought by Umbridge was portrayed in a more realistic and insidious light. In the book+movie it's clear very quickly that Umbridge is a baddie and everyone except the baddie students wind up resisting her right away, it would have been better if she was more charismatic and less cloying.
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Dec 20, 2020 13:09
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Rowling doesn't realise that Umbridge is just herself.
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Dec 20, 2020 13:54
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The general idea of good fiction is that no characters are perfectly good or perfectly evil, but Rowling ends up variously executing this idea poorly or forgetting about it. The general through-line of this thread is that the wizarding world doesn't make any sense and at best, you just have to throw up your hands and say "wizards, am I right?"Edgar Allen Ho posted:I loved Draco and Snape since I was like 7 and I got slytherin in every goddam quiz, from the official one to the ones going "what do u like, potions or herbology?" and "would you wear cargo shorts and a tank top or a black hoodie with thumbholes cut in the sleeves?" Snape will always be my hot goth daddy. I appreciate this post and it's nice to hear from people from whom Harry Potter was formative fiction. For me it was the 90's Star Wars novels so I'm not sure who came out with the short stick there.
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Dec 20, 2020 14:33
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Taotipper posted:It would have been better if the ur-fascism brought by Umbridge was portrayed in a more realistic and insidious light. In the book+movie it's clear very quickly that Umbridge is a baddie and everyone except the baddie students wind up resisting her right away, it would have been better if she was more charismatic and less cloying. Fascists are "charismatic" but that doesn't mean that they are traditionally cool and well-spoken. I feel like Reagan shot for a similar type of cloying superficial niceness, which maybe that makes Umbridge Thatcher? I dunno. Like the current "charismatic fascist" in the whitehouse has managed to form a pretty strong cult of personality despite having a disgusting face, mostly fake hair, and being generally unable to coherently put sentences together under his own power. There will be essays written for decades trying to piece together how that kind of charisma worked.
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Dec 20, 2020 18:48
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Draco’s characterization in the last book where he is seeing the brutality up close and is sickened and terrified is great but then Rowling decides there has to be one last Potter/Malfoy showdown so he is back to being “I’ll show you mudbloods and blood traitors what for and the dark lord will like me!” in the last few chapters which is frustrating
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Dec 20, 2020 19:19
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Draco is acting in desperation because he and his family are under constant threat due to Lucius's mistakes and his own failure to kill Dumbledore. Also he's being used as a torturer despite being disgusted by it. After Dumbledore died he probably lost all hope of Voldemort being defeated so he saw an opportunity and went after it, thinking his thuggish cronies would back him up. He does learn a couple of lessons throughout the story but she does not do a good job of portraying his personality changes except for said desperation and horror.
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Dec 20, 2020 20:01
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The part where Crabbe or Goyle (or both?) is like “you’re not in charge anymore Draco” is great there too I just wish it was more obvious Draco only tried to stop Harry in the room of requirement because he was coerced or desperate, instead of reverting so readily to his previous sneering characterization
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Dec 20, 2020 20:09
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Yeah for the first five books Draco is all bark and no bite, he loves talking up the wizard nazis and how cool blood purity is but he's also a sniveling coward who hides behind his muscle and is only ever willing to actually do stuff when he has cover from authority figures, like Snape supervising his duel with Harry or Umbridge giving him disciplinary powers. Then book six hits and Wizard Hitler actually comes up to him and is all "Oh hey so I heard you're a big fan of mine. That's great, absolutely great, because you see your dad is a colossal fuckup I'm debating killing, and I could really use some fresh blood. So go kill Dumbledore for me and kill two birds with one stone." And when somehow Draco actually finds himself in the position to do it, he can't go through with it because ultimately he's just a privileged dipshit kid spouting rhetoric he doesn't really understand, and doesn't actually have the conviction to commit murder in support of it. By book seven his motivation has entirely shifted to just keeping his family safe. Which in theory is a fine arc, I think the problem is that we as readers don't really get to see a lot of it. Most of Draco's actions are off screen in book six and what little we do get either comes off as Harry's paranoid delusions, or Dumbledore enumerating a list for the audience of all the things Draco's done this year and how he felt about them. Then he gets what, two scenes in book seven? He also doesn't really get a proper "redemption" like a lot of fans hoped for, he just cowers out of the more hardcore aspects of being evil without ever really refuting anything he ever did or said. Also his only real comeuppance for causing some actual terrible poo poo in book six and acting as an actual torture technician (even if he was just following orders) in book seven is that he's... going bald in the epilogue? I guess?
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Dec 20, 2020 20:25
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Mistaken Identity posted:Aren’t house elfs screwed. Period? The one case of liberation we see gets treated like a freak and a leper by his own people, implying that not only is it exceedingly rare in the first place but house elfs are so indoctrinated that they don’t even want to be free. There's also Winky, who becomes an alcoholic after getting fired and the other elves are so ashamed of her that when the main crew break into the kitchens the elves cover her with a tarp so no-one has to look at her
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Dec 20, 2020 21:12
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That actually reminds me of something else that's always bugged me about the Hogwarts house elves - would Hermione's "hide clothes inside other objects, then leave the objects for house elves to clean up to trick them into freeing themselves" plan actually free them? As far as I remember from the books, Dobby said that a house elf's master is the one who has to present the elf with clothes to free them. But Hermione isn't the master of the Hogwarts house elves, presumably the headmaster of the school is. So even if she shoved the clothes directly into the hands of one of the elves, it shouldn't actually do anything, right? But then we find out later that Dobby's the one who's been assigned to the Gryffindors' common room after Hermione starts laying her traps, presumably because he's technically already a free elf and therefore him being given more clothes doesn't actually do anything. Like, were the other elves just forcing him to do it because they were offended by Hermione's plan and her presumption that they would want to be free, or can anybody actually free a house elf that they technically aren't the master of by giving (and we're even stretching the definition of "giving" here by assuming that you picking up dirty laundry someone else has left out is the same as that person "giving" it to you) them clothes, or do the students of the school count as the house elves' master or 
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Dec 20, 2020 21:39
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IIRC the other elves were just annoyed and insulted once they figured it out so Donny started doing it to catch glimpses of Harry
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Dec 20, 2020 21:42
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Guy A. Person posted:IIRC the other elves were just annoyed and insulted once they figured it out so Donny started doing it to catch glimpses of Harry That's what I figured it was, but at the same time I was never sure because Hermione's characterization is to do research on stuff before acting on it, so it wouldn't have surprised me if she'd discovered some loophole or other that would allow her to free the house elves even though she's technically not their master.
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Dec 20, 2020 21:49
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SlothfulCobra posted:Fascists are "charismatic" but that doesn't mean that they are traditionally cool and well-spoken. I feel like Reagan shot for a similar type of cloying superficial niceness, which maybe that makes Umbridge Thatcher? I dunno. What I mean is that she doesn't form a cult of personality at all, every student and staff member hates her right away except for a handful of Slytherins. Her authority just derives from the ministry, no one at the school really wants her there; it would have been more interesting if that wasn't the case
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Dec 20, 2020 21:59
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W.T. Fits posted:That actually reminds me of something else that's always bugged me about the Hogwarts house elves - would Hermione's "hide clothes inside other objects, then leave the objects for house elves to clean up to trick them into freeing themselves" plan actually free them? As far as I remember from the books, Dobby said that a house elf's master is the one who has to present the elf with clothes to free them. But Hermione isn't the master of the Hogwarts house elves, presumably the headmaster of the school is. So even if she shoved the clothes directly into the hands of one of the elves, it shouldn't actually do anything, right? But then we find out later that Dobby's the one who's been assigned to the Gryffindors' common room after Hermione starts laying her traps, presumably because he's technically already a free elf and therefore him being given more clothes doesn't actually do anything. Dobby was playing fast and loose with the rules of elf slavery and must be punished by having to continue dealing with insane wizards.
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Dec 21, 2020 01:01
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Dobby's reaction makes sense because he was never actually a slave, he's just very stupid
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Dec 21, 2020 01:28
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My favorite wizard's christmas tradition is the spiced house elf puddings
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Dec 21, 2020 03:55
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So since wizards seem to be unaware of like the last 50 years of muggle science, I guess they must not have access to the pill? What does wizard birth control look like? Probably you drink some potion that stops you from becoming pregnant but if it's mixed wrong it can turn you into a baby, probably?
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Dec 21, 2020 08:23
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Taotipper posted:So since wizards seem to be unaware of like the last 50 years of muggle science, I guess they must not have access to the pill? What does wizard birth control look like? Probably you drink some potion that stops you from becoming pregnant but if it's mixed wrong it can turn you into a baby, probably? Wizards haven't discovered sex yet. They know of it in theory but are confounded by the mechanics. They reproduce by stealing muggle babies and making them into changelings.
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Dec 21, 2020 08:36
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