an thread:
if you want to understand why some of us hated harry potter liberal centrism even before rowling destroyed her own standing among the moderately progressive, i put it to you that actually
in that worldscape
*everyone* can do magic
if you want to understand why some of us hated harry potter liberal centrism even before rowling destroyed her own standing among the moderately progressive, i put it to you that actually
in that worldscape
*everyone* can do magic
there are kids born of parents both of whom know they can do magic. those kids of course know they can do magic. there are kids born of parents *one* of whom knows they can do magic. those kids, uncertain, may or may not know they too can do magic.
and there are kids born of parents neither of whom have any idea they can do magic, and whose kids of course, because it's all a big secret, also have no idea they can do magic, until they accidentally do magic so obvious that it has to be acknowledged.
but the truth is: everyone can do magic. there are no kids (and no parents) who could not do magic if only they knew that they could do magic. the entire culture is however designed to keep that secret, to keep magic cast as an innate talent that you, muggle, are born without.
there are those among the "purebloods" who are cast as villains insofar as they despise those coming from the ranks of those who do not know they can do magic; they aim to exterminate the "mudbloods" and subjugate the "muggles".
but the supposed heroes? they 100% subscribe to the lie that not everyone can do magic, that it's an innate talent one must be born with, that should anyone from the ranks of those who don't know they can do magic nonetheless do it, they are NOT to be seen as disproof of the lie.
they are instead to be accepted (more or less) into the elite, co-opted with the privileges denied those who simply don't know they can do magic because the system is designed to keep them in that ignorance. they are to be made class traitors, loyal to the system.
when the fascists seek to eliminate the "impure" & subjugate (or outright exterminate) the underclass (who could, remember, all do magic if only they KNEW they could do magic,) this is a bridge too far for the liberal centrist, but they fight only in defence of the system as is
every single one of Dumbledore's Army is hashtag-resisting only so far and no further, always already inculcated with the belief in the lie that not everyone can do magic. they fight to keep the bastion of their class privilege ruled by bourgeois propriety, not vulgar savagery.
they fight to maintain a system in which the underclass are subjugated by *deceit* rather than violence, in which crass brutality is abhorred as uncivilised, as breach of civility. they fight for a civil, polite, *paternalist* mastery of the subjugated underclass.
hogwarts is a fantasy of class privilege 100% bought into & selling the lie that not everyone can do magic, that it is an innate talent one must be born with, and anyone from the underclass who has proven that everyone *can* in fact do magic is simply a magically gifted exception
where the absence of diversity in HP is railed against, frankly the *last* thing i'd wish for is to see Teh Gayz represented in hogwarts, blithely signing up for the privileges of class, being boxed into an House, made a champion of the bourgeois status quo of muggle subjugation.
fuck that shit. i'm *glad* rowling kept dumbledore in the closet, showed us zero queers in all the houses. this is a truer picture of how hermione granger, class traitor, would be no more an ally to any abject group than she is to her own underclass, the muggle as prole
none of them would be. raised among the underclass of those who have been convinced that they cannot do magic, harry is a class traitor too, his parentage meaning SFA because everyone can in fact do magic. there are no muggles, only an underclass of those kept ignorant
for all the salt-of-the-earth drag slapped on the weasleys in contrast with the aristo drag of the malfoys, they are no less born into privilege, heirs of its perks and perquisites. the best that can be said of ron is he's welcoming to the class traitors where draco loathes them.
if you understand that the secret truth of rowling's mythos is that *everyone can do magic*--because ffs NO, blood does NOT determine one's capacity to achieve the extraordinary, only the expectations allowed one--then its ossature of classism becomes odious
there is no real resistance to fascism founded on such allegiance to class privilege. it is the ethos of the "moderate" (petit-)bourgeoisie who only seek to *moderate* the subjugation, to keep it non-violent, polite, proper. that liberal centrism is always already compromised.
if you know that you would not be a slytherin or a hufflepuff in this world, neither a gryffindor nor a ravenclaw, but rather a muggle who can do magic, fuck you very much--and not a fuckin "mudblood", just a muggle who can do magic--you know that liberal centrism is an enemy too
it may not be an outright fascism that'd crush your underclass beneath its jackboot if not eradicate it, but it sure as fuck is not your ally, even when it stands against that foe. if it buys into class privilege, you can't trust it not to oppose any "improper" egalitarianism.
it does not escape me that hermione granger, class traitor, erases all memory of herself from the minds of her muggle parents, in her battle for bastion of class privilege that is hogwarts, on the path that will ultimately lead her to a job maintaining the ignorance of muggles.
the truth is: there are no muggles. everyone can do magic. but cock forbid the underclass aspire to the extraordinary. perish the thought of the great unwashed sticking the vickies up at a scholarship to magical Eton, showing the truth of magic as capacity to their fellow scum.
there is a damned lie at the heart of rowling's mythos that no amount of queers or PoC ensconced in Hogwarts' dorms would rectify. & wishing them there is only buying into a fantasy of bourgeois privilege if one doesn't wish them there as muggles with wands crying "Incineratus!"
an addendum for the literalists: yes, of course, the canon tells that muggles *cannot* do magic, that's a TrueFact™ of the world. this does not deny a reading in which 99% would never know to try and any who try & fail do so simply b/c of a lack not of good blood but of belief
and what of squibs? it is not by any means unknown for children of the upper/middle classes to bomb out of the system, to be kicked out of eton, flunk out of oxford, to go live in punk squats or on the streets, rejecting their privilege or losing it in mental health issues
I think of the 7-Up documentary series following kids from the age of 7 over the last 7 decades, of the son of 2 teachers, who was expected by all to excel academically, but who was clearly stressed into a breakdown by the pressure to be extraordinary, to do magic as it is really
failing to get into oxbridge, he ended up dropping out of a london uni where he was living in a squat, ended up homeless & struggling. no alcohol or drug issues as many, but he ended up in the underclass, a kid with no belief in his own ability to do magic despite his class roots
a large degree of his "failure", to be clear, was rejection of the bourgeois future defined for him. if by the standards of the system he bombed out of the upper/middle class, he himself viewed his wilderness years as freedom, as a magic unfathomable to the (petit-)bourgeoisie
this is a "squib" in rowling's fantasy of class privilege, all rejection of one's elite status folded into failure to perform by its standards, and all of this essentialised as an inherent deficit in one's blood, an innate inadequacy the novels have zero sympathy for
we might imagine the childhood of argus filch, a scion of the elite expected to do the extraordinary, who instead "failed" to do the magic his parent(s) demanded. "failed" to meet the bar for hogwarts. "failed" to follow the path into privilege, instead ending up a janitor
shuffling and dishevelled in the movies certainly, embittered and unreasonable, lank-haired and unkempt, if he is not *shown* slugging from a hip flask, he has all the other markers of the long-term alcoholic burnout as a cultural trope. & he is to be reviled, a loathsome thing.
in the fantasy of class privilege, this cannot be another disproof of the lie. it cannot be that just as *everyone can do magic*, so the capacity to fail is distributed across the classes, regardless of some bogus talent carried in the blood. it cannot be that *anyone could fail*
so where we have the kids with one or more parents who know they can do magic, & those kids, despite being raised in full knowledge of the possibility of magic, are sure that they themselves lack the capacity, where we have these "squibs", that is cast as another freak exception
we might rather imagine a filch who *could* have done magic if only his parents weren't helicoptering arseholes, always pushing, stressing, driving a child into a crisis of self-confidence that became a lifetime of substance abuse, menial work the only job he could hold down
but there is no sympathy for the squib in hogwarts, nothing but contempt, abjection. the system of class privilege has a safety net for the most mediocre (ron or neville) and the most abusive (draco), but cock forbid you "fail" so utterly you move class downways, become a prole
removing the anti-semitic goblins would not fix this. removing the enslaved house elves would not fix this. the class privilege is written into the conceit of muggles and squibs being innately incapable, born to be inadequate, at best pitiable & more often despicable
to rectify *that* you'd need the chamber of secrets to have contained the truth: that everyone can do magic. you'd need harry & hermione--& ron as class traitor in the GOOD sense--to have uncovered the lie & waged a war as much against the bourgeois paternalism as against fascism
Responding to this here, as interesting meat to chew through. Yes and no. All power fantasies have an innate fascism, but (super)heroes are mostly made by transformation and/or trauma. Rowling brings in the Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince from epic fantasy...
https://twitter.com/timfblogger/status/1292864846891974658
Coming from the faux-medieval worldscapes of aristos treated not just as GoT style humans born into whatever station in life, made hero/villain/complex by circumstance, the Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince Trope buys into the whole concept of literal actual bloodborne nobility.
You can probably trace that back to the demigods of Greek myth. Yes, absolutely all heroic power fantasy appeals to a juvenile (often compensatory) superiority complex. But there's a distinct reactionary class politics where it's a fantasy of actual *bloodright*.
And Rowling takes this from the faux-medieval elsewhens folding fairytale fantasies of innate nobility into Tolkien, puts it into a British public school fantasy of the 19th/20th century, from Tom Brown to Billy Bunter. She validates a specific real *Etonian* superiority fantasy.
I think it's worthwhile *not* collapsing the distinctions here, lumping this in with a general dubiety with all power fantasy, or even just with all works employing the Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince trope--fairytale, Arthuriana, etc., all set in fantasy elsewhens eons from the real.
The profound alterity of those fantasy realms makes the trope far less mappable to the realities of our world. The dream of being a born prince in such a fantasy worldscape doesn't pander to the same bourgeois class prejudice & fantasy of privilege in a near modern class system.
Snape is interesting as a squandered potential of a class traitor in the GOOD sense--one born into the elite who falls for Lily--who, in this thesis, mind, is actually just a muggle who can do magic. This could have spurred him to abjure his privilege.
https://twitter.com/timfblogger/status/1292866716805070848
His hate for Harry could well be read, in the early phases of the big story, as resentment of Harry's unearned greater privilege as an Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince, an inkling of the secret truth that blood doesn't actually mean shit, born out of his love of Lily.
Had the heroes discovered that secret in the Chamber of Secrets, one might well imagine a Snape who became ally in the struggle not just against fascism but against the bourgeois system that steered him into Slytherin, boxed him into a role in which he'd never win Lily's heart.
In a class analysis, he is to all intents and purposes made a member of the Bullingdon Club at age eleven. He is given no option for his social group but the most blatantly toxic of the elite, the Boris Johnsons of the world. He is told this is his innate nature.
He's bullied by an equally privileged member of the elite, one shorn of the aristo drag slapped on most all the Slytherins, not just the Malfoys, but every bit the born toff, one who's arguably been privileged further by sorting into the house of "innately" sword-wielding heroes.
Yup, he's absolutely disgusted by the falsities of this system. He's put in the Bullingdon Club at age eleven because he's socially awkward. James is put into the ROTC because he's deemed to have the courage, chivalry & fortitude of the officer class. OFC James gets the girl.
Imagine a Snape who learned that everything his Bullingdon Club cohort had been inculcated to believe was not just morally repugnant but *factually wrong*. That there are no muggles, that the class barrier denying him Lily was an utter sham, the whole system built on a lie.
Fuck Dumbledore's Army, we'd have Snape's Subversive Insurgency: Harry & Hermione as class warriors, allegiance to the subjugated muggles they were raised as; Ron as class traitor, disavowing his loyalty to the elite, siding with the underclass despite his "pureblood" status.
Someone might well have a word with Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini, etc., wise them up as to why exactly there are so few PoC in Hogwarts, how their admission into the bourgeoisie is a rarity only b/c of a white class system's lie maintaining a disproportion of "muggles".
What, you mean it *just so happens* that the kids who know they can do magic b/c they have parents who know they can do magic are disproportionately white, that a whole lot of the muggles who could do magic if they knew of it must be PoC? In a British Empire era public school?
Anyway, because I'm still getting the odd QT reading the Secret Truth as an assumption that needs to be supported by the text, let me reiterate that, au contraire, the inability to do magic being bound to blood is what needs to be supported by more than just character dialogue.
Only an *omniscient narratorial declaration, within the narrative itself, that this is the case* would render this an invalid reading--and only then if we accept the narrator as reliable. The narrator is not *intended* to be read as unreliable, of course, but so what?
Death of the Author, baby, Death of the Author. The meaning of a text for a reader is its *import* for them, which can be quite at odds with the meaning intended by the author as *purpose*. You can afford the Author final say if you want. They're not the boss of you though.
And ultimately, this is not intended as an *assumption* about how Rowling's worldscape works, as if this were a reality to be empirically (dis)proven. Rather it is a *contention*, deliberately rejecting the blood-based rationale for muggledom as *figuratively* false.
I.e. regardless of what characters say, what the narrator says, what Rowling would surely say if asked, it can & should be judged as figurative rendering of reality, and if one does so, it is transparently a damned lie, an odious fantasy of class "superiority" as eugenic truth.
A follower posted CFing my class analysis of Harry Potter with this thread on the ideology of "talent" behind the recent exam debacle. Can't RT said follower's protected account, but this is excellent, so I figured I'd point folk at it from the end here.
https://twitter.com/Prolapsarian/status/1295586770801905664
And I don't know if I even used the term "talent" up there, but aye, I have gone off on how I hate the whole notion in the past, and it was very much in my mind while laying into the essentialisation of ability as innate gift.
FTR, sure, if there's genetic factors that disadvantage some in terms of basic traits e.g. agility, mental or physical, there may be factors that advantage, but I'll die on the hill that the complex abilities we deem "talent" are mostly just a virtuous circle of interest & skill.
You enjoy playing footie as a wean, you play footie more and get better at it. You enjoy playing keepie-uppie, so you play it and hone a particular skill: ball control. You apply that skill in playing footie, & you enjoy it all the more as you achieve more. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The exact same is true when it comes to the games of Make Believe by which one develops that virtuous circle of interest and skill and gets drawn deeper and deeper into the craft of writing stories, until people are talking, as with a teenage footballer, in terms of "talent".
Were the magic of Harry Potter an Actual Thing, I'm firmly of the opinion it would be entirely as complex an ability as playing football or writing fiction and therefore likewise cast as "talent", but with that framing likewise a blind for a virtuous circle of interest and skill.
Out of curiosity, btw, I had a read through the first book just to see if anything in the text invalidates my take, and nope. It's all set out via character dialogue & assumptions, and the belief that muggledom is innate can entirely be read as institutionalised eugenic bollocks.
One could well argue indeed that Neville's family thinking he "might not be magic *enough* to come" [my italics] is awfully suggestive that magical ability is *not* in fact a genetically encoded binary reality of haves and have nots.
One might further argue that his mediocrity is clearly tied to a lack of confidence, readable as effect of that cause rather than vice versa, with the pushiness of his Great Aunt & Uncle the root cause; that he narrowly escaped becoming a "squib" exactly as outlined with Filch.
“My Great Uncle Algie kept trying to catch me off my guard and force some magic out of me—he pushed me off the end of Blackpool pier once, I nearly drowned—but nothing happened until I was eight.”
The son of two maths teachers not a maths whizz? Unthinkable!
The son of two maths teachers not a maths whizz? Unthinkable!
How do I get a gig doing a read through of these books and just laying out the receipts for dosh, I could totally write one of those read-through blog series just vivisecting the class politics of the texts book by book, somebody pay me?
A few further thoughts for the monster thread, having had a shufty through the second book, where I find a *little* more authority for the orthodoxy... but not much: "The Dursleys were what wizards called Muggles (not a drop of magical blood in their veins)..."
We might read this as a Word of God binding of magic to blood... but is it? Couldn't one easily read it figuratively, even insert a comparable metaphor after: "(not a drop of magical blood in their veins, not a magic bone in their body)"?
Where the narrative shows us Lucius Malfoy and Borgin disdaining Hermione as "a girl of no wizard family", lamenting how "wizard blood is counting for less everywhere", why should we take this prejudice as anything more than the baseless ugly eugenics it presents as?
Should we do so simply because Hagrid ironically applies the same eugenic rationale for the bigotry and general malice of the Malfoys--"bad blood, that’s what it is"? Hagrid is a simple soul, not the most likely candidate to see through this TrueFact™ every student is taught.
Ron does though, dismissing the whole "pure blood" matter as bollocks: "I mean, the rest of us know it doesn’t make any difference at all. Look at Neville Longbottom—he’s pure blood and he can hardly stand a cauldron the right way up." He has no truck with the eugenics, good lad.
"Dirty blood, see. Common blood. It’s ridiculous." With that "common", the classism of the conceit is made explicit. It's aristos versus commoners, nobles versus proles, an archaic nonsense of "good breeding" that it would seem against the very thematics of the story to validate.
Writers, alas, aren't always as astute as their characters, don't always pick up on the logic of a story driving toward a reversal of some underpinning premise they've adopted, taken at face value. Oblivious of the undercurrents, they gloss over the contradictions.
As where Filch, the "squib" with no magic... *has magic*: "Drawn to the spot by the mysterious power that seemed to connect him with his foul cat, Argus Filch burst suddenly through a tapestry to Harry’s right."
Wait, what? The freak born with no magic has... a mysterious power?
Wait, what? The freak born with no magic has... a mysterious power?
I mean, why the fuck else would he be doing a "Correspondence Course in Beginners' Magic" if he didn't? Why would the Eton dropout be signed up for an OU course to try and get a proper education if the lack for a squib wasn't, as for any muggle, in nurture rather than nature?
Again Ron doesn't think for a second that this is futile due to some inborn failing. On the contrary, he takes it as so natural a goal for a squib to teach themself, it *proves* what he is: "If Filch’s trying to learn magic from a Kwikspell course, I reckon he must be a Squib."
Neville's "pure blood" status means nothing to him, doesn't stop him fearing being targeted with the "mudbloods": "And everyone knows I’m almost a Squib." In a novel where the villainy is eugenics, he & Finch stand as disproofs of the lie, as do the mudbloods, Hermione et al..
Where I talked of the secret in the Chamber of Secrets being the truth, that throwaway fancy rather holds up under a reading of the text. Is the purpose of that chamber simply to hide a monster for the sake of having a hidden monster, or is the monster there to guard the chamber?
When this school was established in the era of the first universities by the forebears of the four houses--our magical Sandhurst, Bullingdon Club, Royal Society, and Civil Service--what better reason for Salazar Slytherin's secret chamber than to bury the uncomfortable truth?
What better reason for a Muggle-raised halfblood loathing his Muggle father, abjecting that part of himself, focused on his noble descent via his mother from Salazar Slytherin, to go full Dark Lord on opening that chamber to discover the hollowness of his fantasy of princedom?
Much is made of the parallels between Harry Potter and Tom Riddle. Tom also is the Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince. Tom is the ugly apotheosis of that trope in full-on fascism, the refutation of the eugenics, the narrative's failure to catch the point it's driving to a tragic misstep.
The narrative itself asks the question via Lee Jordan: "why don’t they just chuck all the Slytherins out?" The answer: complicity, the other founders accepting the mere *moderation* of the prejudice, rejecting an extreme of class subjugation but not the lie of its righteousness.
Out of the mouth of Salazar Slytherin comes the great serpent, perennial symbol of deceit, to render the muggle-born--which is to say the muggles who know fine well they can do magic--inert. If they can't be exterminated, let them be ossified as in ignorance, made unable to act.
If one imagines the basilisk as guardian of a buried truth, there could hardly be a better hidey for it, if only this other muggle-raised Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince had thought to press on after his vanquishing of the fascist monster there is a little bit of within him, if only.
This isn't, perhaps, quite the place for the revelation in the series though. Too early, I'd say; it's a reversal for a midpoint, to upend this whole unspoken assumption that Slytherin eugenics has a foundation in aught but class prejudice. No, you'd want just a clue here.
Me, I might have put a broken statue in a tomb deep inside the mouth of Salazar Slytherin, a mystery figure with a wand in hand, the "Muggle" after whom all others are named, the Muggle Who Did Magic, the Muggle Who Rebelled. Call him Mikkel Mollytoff, heh, the Muggle Who Could.
Mikkel becomes Mickle becomes Muckle becomes Muggle, the vulgar prole who stood against the bastioning of privilege, who was turned to stone & broken & buried deep below the foundations, giving his name, by way of old words for "many" & "great", to the mob of the Great Unwashed.
A broken statue and a name--or some other signpost to the forgotten truth--might be all the greater narrative needed to avert its surrender to eugenics as TrueFact™, to undermine the assumption here, allow the contradictions we get via Ron, Filch & Neville a foothold to exploit.
I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that had the thematics been pushed just a little further, had author (or editor) only seen the tacit validation of the very beliefs the villainy hinged on, Rowling's reported struggle with the fourth book might never have happened.
Why did she have to go back & overhaul it? A book doctor's answer: 9 times out of 10, if there's a problem in the middle of a story, something's gone awry in the first act; there's a misstep, a *missed step*, a plot point the narrative is signposting that the author's overlooked.
Reading Chamber of Secrets with my book doctor hat on, I can't help but see in it exactly such a misstep, a turn-off that the narrative drove right by, where there was every opportunity to take Harry into the mouth of Salazar Slytherin's statue to get behind the lie born from it.
A wee history lesson in the political context all of this comes out of. Am I suggesting Death-Eaters versus Dumbledore's Army be understood simply as class war versus pacification, the latter allied with the former beneath the conflict over methods. Aye.
https://twitter.com/Johntheduncan/status/1296856738268938240
Will the next instalment of this be analysing Azkaban as a wizard Bastille, torture blithely used on the seditious and suspect, used even on the innocent & just as "a precaution" in Hagrid's case, by Dementors who, as secret police / military, are indubitably AFAIC of Gryffindor?
Also aye.
So. Azkaban. Really there's not a lot needed here to fix the fuckery except an ounce of fuckin recognition of the ethical import of literally everything that's happening. The book basically holds a steaming mug of coffee under yer face and says, WAKE THE FUCK UP.
From the first page, where we learn that muggle persecution of magic is overblown: "On the rare occasion that they did catch a real witch or wizard, burning had no effect whatsoever." To the last, where Harry's new hero remains a "convicted murderer", on the run from injustice.
From Uncle Vernon supporting capital punishment ("hanging’s the only way to deal with these people?") to Aunt Marge supporting corporal punishment for kids, the monstrosity of the Dursleys gains a Toryism that complicates the classism of muggles as proles.
An aside: if the Dursleys are coded as middle class suburban snobs (Dudley off to private school), it's the snobbery of the aspiring *lower* class abjecting their roots. Vernon's firm is a manufacturer and of *drills* at that, of workie's tools. He's a supplier to the trades.
They're vulgar in their bourgeois aspirations precisely because they have no real "class" in the grace sense, lack the "good breeding" (i.e. proper grounding in bourgeois propriety) that would've instilled the correct liberal centrist pity for the poor orphan boy in their care.
They can ape the social etiquette of the born bourgeoisie, but they're incapable of doing it properly. Where they caricature the aspirational, they're of a kind with Hyacinth Bucket of the contemporaneous BBC sitcom, pronouncing her name "bouquet", laughable as an *imposture*.
In Book 3 though, with the reactionary politics of capital/corporal punishment brought in, the working class Toryism has a more legit ugliness. Rather than loathe them simply as jumped-up proles aping propriety, there's a class treachery on offer to despise, a betrayal of roots.
Aunt Marge, as villain, mouths the exact same eugenic tosh we got from Hagrid, exposing its ugliness: "It all comes down to blood, as I was saying the other day. Bad blood will out." We get the dismissal of James as unemployed, as "no account, good for nothing, lazy scrounger".
Where Harry's outraged at this, denies it, the narrative may be validating the idea that this *is* an unconscionable slur on James's character, but it must also be read as villainising the Tories who think in terms of such slurs, laying groundwork to overturn the whole shithouse.
I'm not sure we need much more to crystallise the thematics than for Harry to actually register WTF he's seeing or being told of How Things Are, as when he's told of the Dementors, that the wizarding world uses torture demons as prison guards and secret police.
"Azkaban must be terrible," he says. But doesn't think for a second of Hagrid being sent there, of how unjust this is for the innocent--or even a lesser criminal. Hell, does *anyone* deserve wizard Guantanamo? What kind of Aunt Marge Tory cuntfucker supports a wizard Guantanamo?
Or, you know, assassination by "Hit Wizards from the Magical Law Enforcement Squad"? And when Hermione, Granger, not yet class traitor, does comment on the injustice given Hagrid as innocent, "Think that matters to them?" says Hagrid.
Good wizard justice system. Totally normal.
Good wizard justice system. Totally normal.
"Do you really think anyone deserves that?" asks Lupin, like Lee Jordan asking why the Slytherins aren't just chucked the fuck out, another character voicing a question that challenges the narrative, begs it to acknowledge the inequity, to see the necessary ethical reversal.
All this is also tied thematically of course to the failure of the justice system as demonstrated via Buckbeak, where all Hagrid & Hermione's work is worth nothing against the power of the privileged Malfoys to pull strings. The whole novel is an indictment of the magical State.
"“They can’t do this,” said Harry. “They can’t. Buckbeak isn’t dangerous”"
...
"“An’ then Lucius Malfoy stood up an’ said his bit, and the Committee jus’ did exac’ly what he told ’em…”"
Good justice system. Totally normal.
...
"“An’ then Lucius Malfoy stood up an’ said his bit, and the Committee jus’ did exac’ly what he told ’em…”"
Good justice system. Totally normal.
Hermione Granger, class traitor to be, is aghast at Ron's outraged j'accuse that, "This isn't justice!" But it's in fear of unjust *retribution*: “Ron, your dad works for the Ministry, you can’t go saying things like that to his boss!”
Good justice system. Totally normal
Good justice system. Totally normal
But even Hermione Granger, not yet class traitor, out of all of them the most bound by bourgeois propriety will ultimately choose to break the rules of time itself (albeit having been only to happy to break them as a privilege gifted her to better assimilate to the system.)
The whole novel is building to the damning indictment of a system so quick to bang up Sirius Black that his side of the story clearly can't even have got an airing, else Lupin would've known--might not have believed him, but would have known his story that Pettigrew was to blame.
But all the niceties of liberal centrism with its bourgeois propriety aren't quite enough to get a Harry woke enough to see that no one deserves Azkaban, that death for Pettigrew would be better than "a fate worse than death". "If anyone deserves that place, he does..." he says.
Still, he's working his way toward it. He recognises that Sirius will be "worse than dead" if the Dementors have their way. He sees that "Fudge would’ve told Macnair to murder Sirius on the spot…" He has the Dementors try to administer the Kiss *on he himself*.
Totally normal.
Totally normal.
Where Percy can find no one but his girlfriend to listen to his "something must be done" nonsense in light of Black's escape--which is clearly, given the focus on Black's escape rather than the Dementors' actions, a call for *more* draconian measures, this is... unfortunate.
Had he tried to tell it to our heroes by now, by narrative logic, we might get a voicing of their broken faith in a system using demons as cops, with judges in the pockets of the powerful, and the execution of an innocent man’s very soul ordered on a minister’s intransigent whim.
The thematics of the narrative are driving to that conclusion, to the awakening of the heroes to the inequities of the worldscape. It is begging for Harry, Hermione & Ron to now be fuckin *woke* to the realities of the privilege trying to subjugate & pacify them. But alas, no.
"The thing that was lowering Harry’s spirits most of all was the prospect of returning to the Dursleys."
Instead, the narrative leaves Harry unwoke, trapped in his Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince fantasy, now w/ a noble uncle figure, pureblood godfather as tantalising vector of escape.
Instead, the narrative leaves Harry unwoke, trapped in his Orphan-Secretly-A-Prince fantasy, now w/ a noble uncle figure, pureblood godfather as tantalising vector of escape.
Hermione dropping Muggle Studies is tragically emblematic of a squandered opportunity, like a queer, and/or Black, and/or female student dropping the politics / social studies subject focused on their abjected group(s) on their path to assimilation into fratriarchal bourgeoisie.
There is a hint of the subversive in Harry's mischievous trolling of the Dursleys re Black: "But the thing that was lowering Harry’s spirits most of all was the prospect of returning to the Dursleys." But it's little more than a hint, where we could & should have seen true steel.
Had the narrative just followed through on its own logic, *really* followed through, the Harry we should've seen at the end of Book 3 would've been primed to the point of *sprung* for a Big Reveal in Book 4 that the whole system's built on a lie, that in fact anyone can do magic.
As for that Big Reveal, btw, with my book doctor hat on, I can't help but see a golden opportunity set out on a platter as a mechanism for maintaining the Big Secret that everyone can do magic: the conceit of the Fidelius Charm.
We learn in Book 3 that James & Lily used this magic to hide their location. Once enacted, "You-Know-Who could search the village where Lily and James were staying for years and never find them, not even if he had his nose pressed against their sitting room window!"
So no-one can learn a secret with this charm, no-one can become aware of the truth even when it's staring them in the face (like a muggle-"born" who can do magic.) Only the nominated Secret-Keeper can choose to divulge the truth, tell those not in the know.
This seems rather handy if you're Salazar Slytherin and want to bury the truth that everyone can do magic--literally bury it underground. In the form of a basilisk that only a parselmouth can speak to, a basilisk that could only tell another parselmouth... like Tom Riddle, say.
The Book 3 narrative alone doesn't offer more mechanics to the Fidelius Charm than that, but noseying online, it seems the orthodoxy is that those already knowing a secret continue to know it, just can't ever acknowledge it. And once they're all dead... hey presto! No one knows.
The orthodoxy also seems to be that someone told the truth by a Secret-Keeper would assume that role upon the Secret-Keeper's death. Meaning Voldemort would become the Secret-Keeper upon the slaying of the basilisk & could then divulge the truth to Harry in Book 4... if need be.
Given that Harry carries a little bit of Voldemort within him, it's perfectly consistent with him taking on the ability to speak parselmouth for him to also take on, in a fragmentary way, the power of the Secret-Keeper to see the truth. And to begin to tell others.
This is your finale of Goblet of Fire then, that confrontation with Voldemort, a midpoint reversal of the highest order laid out on a platter for the taking, if all the action to date--as it well should--leads Harry to the realisation that everyone can do magic, even "muggles".
Given the Fidelius Charm, his ability to see the truth offers a gut punch to Voldemort--this should not be possible!--that balances the bitter blow of the death of Cedric Diggory with a blow just as bitter to the Dark Lord. The stakes are raised: Harry could blow the whole gaffe.
With my book doctor hat on, if the movie is faithful to the book, there's still a massive plothole to be addressed in this whereby the whole tournament storyline is immaterial to a plot that only requires Harry to touch any old portkey set in his path at any time, cue the ending.
But with the thematics of that ending in mind, one need only ask why Harry might suddenly see the lie of privilege *now*, and *only* now, after the action of the book. And why Voldemort too would require him to run this gauntlet of noble deeds.
Might it be because the spell to restore Voldemort requires the "noblest" blood, the blood of a champion proven by exactly these deeds, and Harry (who has been sneakily helped at very turn throughout, mind) sees the lie of him, the supposed Chosen One, being "nobler" than Cedric?
Might it be because he sees the fascist lie in the whole faux-medieval lionising of a knightly champion, the wank of this being innate, like a Gryffindor is somehow inherently nobler than a Hufflepuff, a pureblood "purer" than a mudblood, a "muggle-born" different from a muggle?
One angry outburst--"I don't believe there's any difference at all! I bet any old Muggle could do magic if they only tried! If they only knew about it!"--and the shock on Voldemort's face, at the breach of the Fidelius Charm, confirming it, and the dire class politics does a 180.
Harry returns from the cemetery not just with Cedric Diggory's body signifying a death of innocence but with a bona fide *actual* death of innocence, the truth of a rotten system that he can now start telling everyone, beginning a *real* insurgency, no mere liberal "resistance".
A Fidelius Charm would, I'd note, somewhat absolve those rather *expediently* oblivious of their class privilege, denying them the capacity (& duty) to wake the fuck up on their own, but as a metaphor for the blinkers that one inherits with that privilege, I feel it's rather apt/
Stay tuned for me to see if I can't even book doctor the fuck out of what follows, try and flip the script while nonetheless following it as faithfully as possible. Because I suspect it's doable given the logic of the charm wherein only those told *directly* by Harry can know.
I'll just put it out there right now that the death of Voldemort (and of Harry, for a bit,) would by my understanding make every single person he's told a Secret-Keeper now capable of spreading the word, with everyone they tell inheriting that power on *their* death.
And until that time, since no one but Harry could divulge the secret--even though they know, even as they organise against the fascist system that's dropped the facade--they could only talk *around* their very reason for the Cause, never stating it, saying only, "You-Know-Why".
(I am available to fix the fuck out of *your* fantasy epic, btw, heh. Have scalpel, will book doctor.)
Going back to Goblet of Fire anyways, it doesn't escape my attention that, leaving aside the prologue at Riddle House, and the throat-clearing of the opening with the Dursleys and the Weasleys, as soon as we get to the start of the actual plot, there are clear signposts AFAIC.
From the moment they arrive at the Quidditch World Cup, we see a Muggle with "the symptoms of one who had just had his memory modified," who in fact needs "a Memory Charm ten times a day." Casual mindfuckery making Swiss Cheese of a man's memory for the sake of a sporting event.
A Harry written to actually *register* this in line with him actually registering the injustice of the wizard State in Book 3 is a Harry who might question the ethics of this, not least b/c it's been done to every Muggle witnesses who could've cleared Sirius on more questioning.
A Harry starting to wake up to wizard privilege is one on whom it might not just dawn "how many witches and wizards there must be in the world" but also how few there must still be if Hogwarts is the only school for all of those in Britain and Ireland. Only Seamus in his year?
A Harry starting to wake is one who might see not just "that he had been stupid never to realize that Hogwarts couldn’t be the only one" but that Hogwarts being the only one *in Britain* is odd af. He might think of his old school, of Dudley's, all the Muggle schools in the UK.
Little is made of meeting another wizard of many involved in maintaining secrecy ("an Obliviator—member of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad"). Much is made though of the mindfuckery used to keep the stadium secret: "Muggle Repelling Charms on every inch of it."
"Every time Muggles have got anywhere near here all year, they’ve suddenly remembered urgent appointments and had to dash away again… bless them." The narrative is making no small point of the degree to which the wizarding world has the power to obliviate and warp memory.
A more astute Harry on hearing talk of a magic carpet ban in the UK, might well ask, "But what about wizards who came here from places where that's their culture?" And then think of how *they're* as few and far between at Hogwarts as the Irish.
A Harry no more astute than an average fifteen year old, might not give much thought to all this, to be sure, but when Winky the house-elf comes in with her abject servility & defence of slavery as natural condition, one would think he'd have more to say than "Dobby was weirder."
This is the sort of WTF?! moment in a narrative I run into as a book doctor all too often. A "Do you realise what you're writing?" moment. Less, to be clear, in the idea of the willing slave, which may be argued as (dodgy) conceit, but in the utter obliviousness of the character.
Imps and such being bound to serve humans because Them's Teh Rulez is a timeworn trope of folklore. Fifteen year old modern human kids thinking one house-elf wanting pay is fine but shrugging off another's avowed obeisance to her master is just non-credible character dynamics.
Given the mindfuckery preceding & that coming *just a few pages later*, as the veela's dancing entrances the stadium, Harry included, to support Bulgaria over Ireland, the narrative is rather hammering us over the head with one very simple reason for Winky's abject submission.
Where Harry doesn't wonder if house-elves have been charmed into obeisance, it's because his logical WTF?! reaction simply doesn't happen, the import of the narrative sailing right over the writer's head, it seems. Another signpost missed, I say, to a book doctor's eye.
Dig deeper into the action here, simply imagine Harry reacting as he *really kinda oughta* to the shit that's going down, and the narrative is offering the groundwork here for the reveal at the end, a portrait of wizard privilege built on fuckery with memory & sense of status.
If you want to go *really* dark in confronting the state of the house-elves head on, one might well put that together with the dearth of wizards & witches from Britain's one-time colony and... all those leprechauns giving out their gold (when captive, as folklore says.)
It's an old trope of folklore studies & fantasy inspired by it that the fairies & suchlike are what became of the Tuatha-de-Danaan in human culture, usurped by Christianity. Might we not ask if leprechauns and house-elves have an erased history as something more?
Transfigurations and Memory Charms would make mighty weapons for a British Empire against the wizard populace of a colonial subject. Maybe there's a damn good reason Irish wizards and witches are few and far between at Hogwarts. If you want, as I say, to go *really* dark.
Even if you don't, instance after instance of mindfuckery in this opening action building to this WTF?! moment of house-elf slavery, all the niggling discomfort swept away in the hullaballoo of pageantry & gallant sports-as-combat is not hard to read as signpost to The Story.
And how do the villains enter?
"It was as though the masked wizards on the ground were puppeteers, and the people above them were marionettes operated by invisible strings that rose from the wands into the air."
The fascists' physical violence is signpost too, to mindfuckery.
"It was as though the masked wizards on the ground were puppeteers, and the people above them were marionettes operated by invisible strings that rose from the wands into the air."
The fascists' physical violence is signpost too, to mindfuckery.
In which Draco unwittingly speaks the truth that Hermione *is in fact* a "Muggle" because a "Mudblood" is just any member of the "Muggle" underclass who realises they're not incapable of magic, groundworking the realisation Harry should make at the end. Because he is too. 
So, another dive into The Thread That Would Not Die, now I'm through Goblet of Fire, & it remains the case that there's only a single parenthetical "not a drop of magical blood" (which *can* be read figuratively) to set against the the Muggleborn as evidence Muggles can do magic.
But if Book 2 misses a signpost to the basilisk as Secret-Keeper of the buried truth, & Book 3 underwrites the impact on Harry of the wizard justice system's fuckeduppery--both symptoms of an obliviation of the class privilege--ho boy in Book 4 do the chickens come home to roost.
Obliviating the class privilege requires the narrative to find other privileges as proxies, to be worthy by the centrist's bourgeois propriety. By the Post-Thatcher early-90s, in the wake of AIDS & Section 28 waking straights to gay rights, egalitarianism is just plain etiquette.
Crude allegory is still, alas, mainly the order of the day, so where Book 4 commits to its progressive themes, it's not just undercut by the politics of moderation (in which Hermione's activism is as much an "extreme" as Ron's bigotry) but by the translation of Others to species.
The narrative's not going to show us actual racism against, say, Dean Thomas, and it's bottled it over the pureblood/mudblood/muggle issue where "anyone can do magic" would blow up the fantasy of innate Specialness, so it's got to tackle bigotry via house-elves & half-giants.
In the book doctoring, I can often nail a specific point early on where It All Goes Wrong, a derailment point with most all other issues as knock-on effects compounding to trainwreck. "Dobby was weirder." is the derailment point here, setting the WTF?! servility of Winky as norm.
Dobby is most emphatically *not* weirder. He's a slave who still has agency, who can abhor his master's plans, rebel against them, albeit he's bound enough in his mindset, not just by fear but by guilt, to beat *himself* for disobedience. Winky's abject servility is the extreme.
Thing is, magical creatures--e.g. the werewolves the half-giants are compared to--can have essential natures, behaviour bound by rules in folklore, as where a leprechaun must give his gold if caught. So the narrative setting Dobby as weirder is setting Winky as natural. Ho boy.
The narrative applies this bogus invented "norm" as if it should be taken as read by Harry, as it is by Ron, because it's taken as read in the author's backbrain. House-elves *are* just folklore's servaholics, helpers to Santa Claus or a humble cobbler. Werewolves *do* rampage.
This is not how you address bigotry. Duh. This sets stereotyping as Word of God canon, and allows only the car-crash spectacle of the moderate's "progressivism" whereby a liberal centrist Hermione's defence of house-giants is that they can't *all* be bad. Bigotry *moderated*.
The narrative is giving a distribution curve of servility for house-elves, of murderousness for giants. To say there must be exceptions to the stereotypes at the extreme lows, where the Other is in the same range as a normal human and can be treated as such... is not progressive.
The train wreck that Goblet of Fire becomes in the house-elves storyline is rooted in this, the narrative bound into validating Ron's bigotry, ridiculing Hermione's activism not for its white saviour assumption of authority but simply for its busybody steamrollering of "reality".
This is not unfixable though. A Harry woke to the weirdness of Winky coulda shoulda woulda nailed into the narrative a recognition of the wrongness, recast Winky's servility as magical mindfuckery rather than innate nature, a valid device for speaking to *internalised* prejudice.
Where Harry's blankness as "neutrality" makes Hermione as tiresome to him as to Ron, a Harry as repelled by slavery as he should be--as modern-day 14 year old & *skivvy for the Dursleys*--might still be "exasperated" but at the bourgeois superficiality of badge-making saviourism.
And aside from Winky's introduction, there are two key nascent pivot points where a narrative kept on track shoulda woulda coulda flipped the trivialised tosh of an activism labelled SPEW to a more real critique with actual import.
In one common room scene where Hermione's stance is mocked by all & sundry, there's an open goal to be taken if only Hermione were to nail the Weasley twins' defence of slavery as wizard normativity, looking normal to them but not to *some of us* raised outside that privilege.
And quite forgotten in that scene's background is Dean Thomas, a Black kid with every fuckin reason to say, "Yeah, to *some* of us, it looks *really* messed up."
"Only the word he used wasn't 'messed' and the quiet fury in the swear word that he actually used silenced the room."
"Only the word he used wasn't 'messed' and the quiet fury in the swear word that he actually used silenced the room."
A couple of lines before the tension is broken to laughter by Neville being Neville, and that wizard bigotry could be put the fuck down with a bullet in the skull, the gravity of house-elf slavery driven home by characters simply responding to the situation as they should.
It's a failure of imagination not to have them do so, a pure craft issue of character dynamics. The Mudblood & Muggle-raised Black kid aren't realised fully enough to act on the narrative logic here, calling out the privileged in a moment that makes trivial fancy suddenly real.
The second pivot point is the midpoint of the whole book, the kitchen scene where Dobby & Winky turn up at Hogwarts, a horrendous trainwreck of kowtowing slaves ending in Hermione's white saviourism as "insult" to elves among whom Dobby is a freak exception, Ron's bigotry right.
The tragedy of it is that the white saviourism could've been demolished just by Dobby's agency in taking rights for himself extending to *him* having already done the job: the "uniforms" worn by the others are clothes given to free them; instead of taking lower pay, he shares it.
If the narrative *must* be bound by imaginary rules of elf behaviour, a need for a master, it could have pushed itself to a logical loophole:
"Dobby had an *idea*, Harry Potter. All house-elves have *each other* as master! Dobby has every elf here to serve and all serve Dobby!"
"Dobby had an *idea*, Harry Potter. All house-elves have *each other* as master! Dobby has every elf here to serve and all serve Dobby!"
So the heroes walk in on a kitchen turned to a little anarchosocialist commune, elves all bowing & curtseying to each other as they hand teacups & saucers back & forth, elves sharing wages & clothes, dealing with Hogwarts,, still serving humans but as autonomous collective.
So we get both Ron's bigotry & Hermione's white saviour nonsense scotched, one realising slavery is NOT a natural state FFS, the other realising it was *not her place* to "educate" the unfortunate. And a point might well be made that Dobby, in rebelling to help Harry, started it.
Flip the storyline this way at the midpoint and the hamfisted tackling of bigotry which only serves as apologetics becomes a parallel & prefiguration of the endpoint confrontation with the eugenics to be exposed at the end, overturning the whole idea of muggledom.
From here, there is still a lot of rectifying to be done, as the narrative missing these points of natural plot & theme development stalls *character* development. So Ron *keeps* spewing bigoted bullshit at every turn & Hermione *keeps* being a tedious caricature of activism.
But in the talk of house-giants and such, at every turn there is scope to not simply retread Ron voicing crude working class Tory style prejudice, but to render him falling back through all the defensiveness of the clueless liberal, all the denials & excuses & white guilt.
For a young audience there is scope not just to give the fictional equivalent of both sides journalism, too busy profiling how a "nice" guy can also be a bigot to actually take the bigotry to task--which would entail uncomfortable recognition of systemic & moderated bigotries.
There is scope to show them not just how sometimes adults--and even mates!--can be bigots, but to chart the trajectory of dismantling one's prejudice, show the stages of handling the shameful realisation that you've been a bigot, from making it all about you to getting past that.
Goblet of Fire would be a tougher edit than the others, but it's just as doable without substantive changes, and seeing how it plays out, yup, I'm all the more convinced now that the key plot issue--the utter immateriality of the tournament--is another symptom of that blind spot.
For the tournament to matter, it needs to be a requisite *proving* of Harry as spell ingredient. The blood needed has to be a tested *champion's* (not just "enemy's"), and the fact the game is rigged is key, made explicit: "I shouldn’t have won it. It should’ve been Cedric’s."
But the narrative's repressed any uncomfortable recognition of exceptionality NOT being borne by blood, of this being eugenics, so the idea of Harry's "champion" blood being an artifice of behind-the-scenes help, of this exposing the falsity of Voldemort's fascism, can't emerge.
There's another signpost here by way of an illogic needing fixed, where Harry's and Voldemort's wands connect and it's the novice's blast that triggers the expert's. This is counter-intuitive given the power differential & calls for Voldemort to be momentarily thrown off.
So, if we have the third ingredient as "the blood of the champion to resurrect his downfall", and Voldemort taunting Harry as he hides, "Come out, my champion, and meet your downfall," then *this* is the point Harry calls shenanigans on his "champion" status & voices the truth.
This is the point Harry rejects the whole idea of blood purity, tearing it down, right down to a vehement rejection of the idea that Muggles can't do magic, a truth that with Voldemort as Secret-Keeper he should not be able to utter. Cue Voldemort sideswiped, his focus broken.
After that, it's just a matter of deciding where exactly in the aftermath of his return Harry should reveal this truth, and to whom. In the hospital with Fudge present, for Fudge to reject it outright? Or only to Dumbledore and/or Ron & Hermione? Might he even keep it secret?
I'll withhold judgement for now to see what the text of Order of the Phoenix calls for, but AFAIC, I gotta say, this is just... what the narrative's reaching for. It's a case, as I often see, of a narrative struggling to emerge from the backbrain by its own logic, sadly thwarted.
OK, just reading the opening and *I'm* actually a bit scared by how perfectly it fits. "Why had the Dementors come to Little Whinging?" To wipe his soul, to keep the secret, duh. And he knows it.
Hence all the doubts about Arthur & Sirius--because he cannot know how any wizard will react after hearing the truth, being confronted with their class privilege, their complicity. Every adult ally is in question. And the denial of Voldemort shows how the *system* reacts.
And in the narrative preceding the Dementor attack, Dudley is conspicuously coded as chav, ned, underclass yob, Harry's bullying of him absolutely readable as not just a matter of revenge but of torn class sympathies: the Muggle's thuggery is a product of subjugation, but still.
On the one hand, he might see good cause for a Muggle to lash out at a Harry cast as gifted: Tall Poppy Syndrome handed down from Aunt Petunia, part of the underclass culture. On the other, the mere fact *he* had the imagination to do magic despite near ignorance is... seductive.
The narrative is explicit that he's scapegoating Dudley, bullying to vent frustration. It is still a dark temptation to accept the fancy of innate superiority, specialness, become class traitor. And he gives in to it, Muggle-baiting, goading as viciously as a Malfoy.
The narrative doesn't wholly let him off the hook, but where Dudley blames him after, reverting to stereotype, it's failing, because of the missed turns, to step things on, where we could and should be seeing a further reversal in their relationship.
I can't find the response upthread suggesting Dudley using magic in the Dementor attack would make sense, but yes. Full magic use is not quite what I'd suggest, but a few minimal tweaks could keep the action with just a different spin to have them help each other.
When Harry stops Dudley fleeing, a Dudley backed up to his side could be there to, as the Dementor has Harry clutched after his failed spells, grab Harry's fist which the wand should be slipping from, hold it up, & shout, "Do it again!" unprecedented support lending him strength.
A Dudley ceasing to be the caricature quite natural to the kids' fic idiom, becoming instead a character fleshed out for the maturity of the transition to YA, is one who could do this but still flee, still fall victim to the Dementor. Still have to be saved as he's saved Harry.
He's such a wreck in the aftermath, it's literally a matter of a few tweaks here & there to have the shellshocked Dudley *trying* to tell his parents it *wasn't* Harry's fault but not really coherent enough to make a difference. Let him grow with the action, become a human being.
Give him a look at Harry tacked on after that "trembling", unlike anything Harry's ever had from him before, disbelief that Harry's so together, horror at what they've both felt, knowledge that only Harry *gets* it, how they've saved each other's lives. A bonding beyond words.
Demolish the demonised Dudley Dursley and make a real human character in his place in that little moment of a shared look, and you give the reader class solidarity in place of class privilege, and you point the way ahead into the class war to come.
Given that the wizards who come to take Harry to Grimmauld Place are mostly strangers, cannot know the basilisk's secret until told by Harry, if he doesn't spill the beans there, how do we read his reply to Tonks prattle of Muggle tidiness varying "just as it does with wizards"?
Is that "Er--yeah," now the forebearance of a prole at a patronising privileged boho? One who on the next page will be blithely telling him that Metamorphmagi are "born, not made", chuckling at his desire to learn, obliviously staring at his scar? She doesn't come off well.
The liberal centrist narrative has him impressed by her being a cop, that being "the only career he’d ever considered after Hogwarts". A Harry woke by the injustices of Book 3 might still be reformist--*he* wouldn't arrest the innocent--but radicalisation is stirring in subtext.
Taken to a house with house-elf heads mounted on the walls, privilege at its most grotesque, the subtext is virtually outright text as his resentment at being kept in the dark ("So everyone had known he was being followed, except him") simmers to boiling point, explodes.
Even Dumbledore might come down on the side of class loyalty, head of a bastion of class privilege that the previous book makes a point of telling us is hidden by warding, like all wizard schools:
"“Maybe he thinks I can’t be trusted,” said Harry, watching their expressions."
"“Maybe he thinks I can’t be trusted,” said Harry, watching their expressions."
They want to keep *everything* secret, wizards--certainly from *him*. He’s come back with the truth, and they sent him away for four weeks, like none of them wanted to know it, like they were worried he’d tell all the Muggles—all the *other* Muggles—and then the Dementors came.
His stroppy teenager blow-up isn't unjustified going solely by the surface action of his four weeks out of the loop, but it's certainly in synch with this alterior reading, his broken trust in his wizard allies a logical product of his shock awakening to class consciousness.
The limits of The Order of the Phoenix become all too clear with a Fidelius Charm as metaphor for the erasure of privilege. This is why Sirius and the adults are bound to fail, why they can't overcome Fudge and the Ministry's party line of complete denial.
"“But you’re telling people, aren’t you?” said Harry, looking around at Mr. Weasley, Sirius, Bill, Mundungus, Lupin and Tonks. “You’re letting people know he’s back?”"
Add to the end of this: "Even if you can't tell them how he's wrong, you're letting people know he's back?"
Add to the end of this: "Even if you can't tell them how he's wrong, you're letting people know he's back?"
Those in the know are, for all their decency, too bound by their class privilege to fully face up to it, to admit it wholly. They can abjure the overt extremity of prejudice as a demon Other, Voldemort, but they cannot admit the invisible systemic privilege that has shaped them.
They can *want* to. It's not a flaw of weak volition, rather simply that the greatest trick of privilege is to render itself invisible, inacknowledgeable. Those steeped in it, even when they (i.e. *we*) know this, are always already compromised by their inculcated blind spots.
The series is an exercise in just that failing, capable of warning against the Voldemorts of the world, but bound by its own Fidelius Charm into an inability to ever admit *his very philosophy of class supremacy*, of *eugenics*, written deep into the very fabric of it.
But in the warpings of narrative logic, of natural character dynamics & ethical savvy, it betrays itself. In tracing the pattern of negative space(s) woven through the text here, to me it becomes *self-evident* what is missing, what is unspoken, what has been made unspeakable.
And here it is manifesting, in the shape of the adults doomed to fail as reformists always already compromised, its own indictment. This is what the end (as is) will recapitulate, in a Harry & Hermione & Ron overthrowing Voldemort but in defence of class privilege they'll accept.
For Sirius, the narrative's failing means a Kreacher still enslaved because the erasure of house-elf agency cannot be acknowledged, where recognition woulda coulda shoulda made it *his* failing, that of a Sirius who freed Kreacher long ago but has washed his hands of it at that.
A simple edit to bring this home in place of the denialist bollocks that he "knows too much" and that "the shock would kill him": “I freed him long ago. He haunts this house like some ghost of my family’s crimes. Nothing I can say or do will undo what my mother’s made of him.”
Arthur Weasley meanwhile, class tourist in the London Underground, offers another blind spot of clueless privilege, none of Sirius's guilty handwashing for him, but rather excitement to think he's "actually a Muggle" with the exoticism of a white person claiming Cherokee descent.
It's clear to me now how exactly the end of Goblet of Fire should play out: with Harry revealing his exchange with Voldemort to Dumbledore and Sirius after his leg is healed, them unpacking the workings of the Fidelius Charm, Dumbledore advising him to keep it between them...
But with Harry then blurting it out to Fudge at the peak of his argument with Dumbledore, Fudge dismissing it as "Nonsense!", treating it as proof of Harry's unreliability, storming out in denial. Dumbledore's caution & Fudge's denial are the seeds of Harry's doubts in Book 5.
So we get a Harry brought to his hearing & confronted with Fudge, knowing his response & wondering how the wizards around him would respond, understanding why Dumbledore urged caution, because they'd probably send him straight to Azkaban. Which is of course exactly the aim here.
A Harry aware of the truth that anyone can do magic, knowing the threat to the system of class privilege his secret constitutes, knows *exactly* why Lucius Malfoy is there in the Ministry, why Fudge is talking with him despite knowing he's a Death-Eater. Class loyalty prevails.
Absolutely. Had his experience in Book 3 registered fully, his aim to become Auror would have been a reformist's ideal--*he'd* have made sure the *right* person went to Azkaban--with the driving theme of the narrative here the awakening from that dream.
https://twitter.com/catvincent/status/1298322798637731846
As Sirius is the spur to Harry's reformism, so his resistance to Harry's return to Hogwarts is a matter of the cynic's worry that this reformism, the desire to "change the system from within", will be co-opted. He sees how Harry in Hogwarts *will* become a cop.
I think I see here a Sirius who wants to let the truth out to everyone, a Dumbledore (not insignificantly closeted) who wants to moderate that, to bring Harry into the system where the truth might be told to his peers, for a more gradual "transition".
I'm jumping the gun though, so I'll hold off for now, but the subtextual trajectory so far--with the basilisk's secret in mind--is one of Harry's radicalisation beyond that ideal of reform, of recognition that an auror could do little to stop a false arrest ordered by the State.
Aye, Hermione Granger, class traitor, liberal centrist devotee of bourgeois propriety actually *textually* embodies the reformism the narrative woulda shoulda coulda been *pushing past* for Harry. Where oblivious Harry *textually* isn't even reformist.
https://twitter.com/cuchlann/status/1298328246950539264
Dumbledore making Harry's two best mates prefects certainly rather lends weight to a reading of his reaction to the basilisk's secret as fundamentally a default to his closeted gay assimilationism, the moderate reformism focused on power within the system of privilege.
Or, thinks a *class-conscious* Harry, a Harry disgruntled and distrusting because he's seen the truth and Dumbledore knows it, maybe Dumbledore just wants my best mates feeling a duty to the school, a shiny badge to feel proud of, so they’ll help keep me in line.
C.f. Lupin on himself being made prefect in James & Sirius's times:
"“I think Dumbledore might have hoped I would be able to exercise some control over my best friends,” said Lupin."
"“I think Dumbledore might have hoped I would be able to exercise some control over my best friends,” said Lupin."
Where the text has Fudge supposedly afraid that Dumbledore's after his position, the baseless concoction of this betrays it as post-rationalised patch, a flimsy proxy for the real fear: that Harry will start speaking the basilisk's secret to one & all: that anyone can do magic.
The insertion of Umbridge into Hogwarts is as transparently to keep an eye on Harry--if not to have another go at taking him out--as the Dementor attack is aimed to wipe his mind, as the hearing is aimed to get him stitched up and sent down to Azkaban. The secret must be kept.
When the Sorting Hat sings of Hogwarts's founding & the schisming off of Slytherin, warns of threat and pleads for unity, it is pleading for class loyalty to maintain the status quo, for the bourgeoisie to *tolerate the fash*, lest the whole system crumble and be brought down.
Sure, we can read the "external, deadly foes" as Voldemort's Death-Eaters, but an appeal for unity across the houses is an appeal for our fantasy Sandhurst, Royal Society & Civil Service to see their common cause with fascism's agents in the Bullingdon Club, not to reject it.
Sirius, noble become dog--man's best friend but also outcast cur--*literally* shaggy, seen most often hiding in the wilds or a derelict house, literally cooped up in the latter, is the rebel (barely) restrained. Of course he wants to spill the beans to fuckin *everyone*.
And more than him being just, when Harry tells him to stay away in case he gets sent back to Azkaban, a man-child huffy not to have his proxy James, *this* is why he suddenly turns cold: because Harry fails to show the rebel spirit needed to reject the system, Azkaban be damned.
"“You’re less like your father than I thought,” he said finally, a definite coolness in his voice. “The risk would’ve been what made it fun for James.”" He is *also* a huffy man-child, but the black of Sirius Black is that of the anarchist flag. He'd hoped Harry less... Hermione.
In the narrative that's failed to trigger character progress via the import of the action though, he's reverted to type, the shallowest Gryffindor (i.e. Sandhurst) cop-to-be, no less rulebound than Hermione when push comes to shove, enamoured w/ the glory of being a good soldier.
Hermione's white saviour tosh meanwhile, which should have been nixed in the last book, persists in the storyline beyond *facepalm* and *headdesk* and into *bridgepinch*, the apotheosis of "oh ffs no" where one pinches the bridge of one's nose in pained aghastitude.
That's simply fixable again though: where the hat-making is introduced, a simple edit: she's paid a visit to Dobby in the kitchen, turns out all Hogwarts elves are free & paid now, but they mostly just use their money to buy clothes as ornament; so she's making *gifts* for them.
See, she was reading in [Insert Whimsical Title here], that this is how it started: people waking to find work done for them by elves who can't help themselves helping, leaving thank you gifts out the next night. Only *somehow* wizards got the idea they could just *demand* help.
“Don’t blame me for what some wizard did forever ago!” Ron might say, progressed to the (white guilt) denial of inherited guilt.
"It's called a *tip*, Ron," Hermione might say, still trivialising reparation but shading her white guilt into simple common decency to service staff.
"It's called a *tip*, Ron," Hermione might say, still trivialising reparation but shading her white guilt into simple common decency to service staff.
A Ron rummaging in the rubbish she's used simply as giftwrapping of a sort need simply snort, "Belongs in a tip more like," to slur the quality of her hats, enabling the subsequent friction between them to continue with minimal edits, but without the gobsmacking cringe factor.
Better still, in restoring the traditions of folkloric elf/human relations, she might well warn of tricks liable to befall ingrates who *don't* put out gifts for the helpers, a Ron who removes the hat from under his bed waking to find, say, spectacles drawn on his face overnight.
So, we get a *sufferable* house-elf storyline *progression* in the background while Harry's class conflict simmers: his mates made prefects; his mentor cold shouldering him in guilt, frozen in the moderate's inertia even as the fascist defences of the system kick in.
The chattering class (all Skeeteresque tabloid hatemongery of course, erased of the bourgeois NYT high end that would be profiling "dapper Lucius Malfoy") has kicked into gear to pre-emptively character assassinate the prole, making it futile to try & spread the word.
Seamus the half-blood & Irish kid (ergo inherently underclass in British Imperialism) is the natural ally whose animosity underlines this: "How many more people were going to suggest that he was lying, or unhinged?" And just imagine what they'd say if he denied their specialness.
Ron is with him in rejecting the appeasement of the fash urged by the Sorting Hat, but Hermione Granger is ever the establishment Dem urging civility. She does see the appeasement of fash in the form of Umbridge, to be fair, but then Dumbledore's the moderate trying "compromise".
As prefects now, his mates--one pigheaded pureblood and one paragon of propriety--start doing Harry's nut in, not just in their textual bickering but in what they stand for in the system of class privilege he's textually rather disenamoured of, subtextually in full conflict with.
Umbridge's speech shows us the villainy of the whole idea of inherent talent: *gifts with which you were born*; skills *unique to the wizarding community*. The surface narrative still buys into that, has not refuted it. But it also *yearns* for this lie's unrealised demolition.
Return to the intro of Tonks & see the unrealised irk of Harry at her patronising class tourism, see the unrealised *challenge* in a question, “Can you learn how to be a Metamorphmagus?” if asked *in an innocent voice*, Harry knowing the answer, testing her.
"Tonks chuckled."
"Tonks chuckled."
This is the unrealised opening of a radical interrogation of class privilege, *allies included*. Or supposed allies.
“There will always be help at Hogwarts for those who ask.”
“He was not going to go to Dumbledore for help when Dumbledore had not spoken to him once since June.”
“There will always be help at Hogwarts for those who ask.”
“He was not going to go to Dumbledore for help when Dumbledore had not spoken to him once since June.”
When push comes to shove, when the prole won't assimilate into the system of class privilege but rather threatens it with egalitarianism, the kindly paternalist moderate(d) eugenicist simply closes the door, ceases the outreach, & lets alienated inaction be the victim's fault.
So, Harry recognises his path of radicalisation in Sirius: "Harry thought Sirius was probably the only person he knew who could really understand how he felt at the moment, because Sirius was in the same situation." But without the basilisk's secret in the open, he can't take it.
There is, I'll note, a full-on "Call From Fred" (a character speaking from the author's backbrain to highlight bollocks the author needs to fix) when Sirius touts the bogus proxy for Fudge's *actual* motive, the baseless paranoia of Dumbledore trying to oust him. Ron calls it:
Listen to your characters, people. When they say something makes no fuckin sense, they might just have a point. What does make sense here is a Fudge petrified that Harry's secret invalidates wizards' privilege, class loyalty allying him with Voldemort via Umbridge to silence it.
But Harry, alas, didn't click that a Chamber of Secrets (plural) should have more than one secret, that the basilisk is only guardian, didn't click that the rigged game put the lie to his artificial pedestaling as champion by blood, and so isn't now seeing the class war he's in.
No wonder Sirius is disappointed in the kid who wants to join the ranks of those who banged him up in Azkaban, where he was literally tortured for a decade (though the narrative of course sanitises it for him, affords him superpowers of endurance).
Sirius knows ACAB.
Sirius knows ACAB.
Umbridge is the bastardy of the fash personified but not owned: she intimidates Trelawney so her predictions of Harry's death become appeasement. (Which will fail. LOL. Fuck you, collaborator.)
McGonagall *at first* carries on with a moderate's prim "business as usual" faith in the system, subtracting points from Harry for the crime of being victimised. But she proves to be a Nazi-puncher when Umbridge shows her colours with her. There when Harry tells Fudge, she knows
Enquiring after half-giant Hagrid, voicing bigotries earlier, Umbridge is there to quash the egalitarian uprising already thwarted by the erasure of class but visible in other related abjections treated a *bit* less cluelessly than the house-elves. It's all fratriarchy after all.
That's to say, the Old Boy's Club(s) of Sandhurst, Bullingdon Club, Royal Society, Civil Service are powered by a fratriarchal capitalism that excludes not just women but ethnic unbrothers & unbrothers not measuring up to toxic masculinity as well as non-aristo unbrothers.
The fantasy Eton has admitted women, of course--it's the 1990s after all!--but only via an assimilation requiring them to become Umbridges, Umbridge as Thatcher as "Mummy" (she was literally called this) to the fratriarchy of her public schoolboy cabinet.
Umbridge is what Hermione will become if she doesn't wake the fuck up, of course. And the fratriarchy persists in its abjection on grounds of race (essentialised as fantasy species) & sexuality (Dumbledore's position tenuous because *fuckin duh*, it's Thatcher's Section 28 '80s.)
The narrative shows us Harry now getting radicalised against this fratriarchal fuckery, in defence of Hagrid, not just reacting to goads but proactive, interrupting, on the attack.
"“Only because he was too stupid to listen to what Hagrid told him to do,” said Harry angrily.”"
"“Only because he was too stupid to listen to what Hagrid told him to do,” said Harry angrily.”"
The recognition of the systemic failure is there; it’s just missing the *source*. Fudge’s bollocks motive renders Umbridge just a product of weak authority (Fudge) within a legitimate system giving wickedness a foothold. In fact, it's the illegitimate system working as designed.
This is the point where Hermione proposes that a fifteen year old Harry--who's shite at his studies & really just a bit nippy on his broomstick, having got through his ordeals with luck & help, not least an explicitly rigged tournament--start teaching others the Dark Arts. O-kay.
No. This is not the point where that happens. That is a fuckin stupid thing to happen. That is just the fuckin *Riddikulus!* transformation of what's *actually* happened, but too scary to accept: Harry deciding to clue everyone the fuck in on the fact that *anyone can do magic*.
It wouldn't take a great deal to wrangle Ron and Hermione's rather cringesome arguments on him being the bestest and worthiest to teach magic into an exchange about the leadership of an insurgency, his qualms about the "champion" role, what they'd all be getting themselves into.
Dumbledore's Army? LOL. It's the inaction of the benevolent moderates in power within the system of class privilege, in the face of the shifting Overton Window, that necessitates the grassroots organisation to oppose where the liberal centrists appease.
And who do Ron & Hermione ID as potential recruits? Near-Squib Neville, PoC Dean, PoC Lavender (fight me), PoC Parvati & Padma, PoC Cho, "Loony" Luna, PoC Angelina & her Quidditch team allies, "Muggle-born" Creevys & Justin, & so on through sundry minor players to PoC Lee Jordan.
It's a veritable Who's Who of the few characters who offer any sort of diversity in the cast, with a whole lot of clueless white clumsy tokenism, but precisely the students for whom loss of class privilege will be trumped by fury at *why* they're so few & far between at Hogwarts.
It may or may not have escaped your notice, btw, that I've found myself referring to the truth as "the basilisk's secret". This whole monstrous thread could be titled, really, Harry Potter and the Basilisk's Secret...
It may or may not have escaped your notice that "basilisk" derives from the Greek word "basiliskos" meaning "petty king", "little prince", "young ruler".
The basilisk's secret is the secret of the petty little aristo toff, of all petty little aristo toffs:
blood means nothing
The basilisk's secret is the secret of the petty little aristo toff, of all petty little aristo toffs:
blood means nothing
Welcome to House Mollytoff.
Again, it doesn't take that much editing to respin the Hog's Head scene so Hermione's intro is for Harry to spill the beans, with Zacharias's disbelief derailing with a worry that anyone denying Voldemort's return will also, like Fudge, deny the basilisk's secret.
Harry is literally struggling to say he's not special. All his protestations in response to queries about his exploits read perfectly as build up to a denial of magic as gift:
“No,” said Harry, “no, OK, I know I did bits of it without help, but the point I’m trying to make is—”"
“No,” said Harry, “no, OK, I know I did bits of it without help, but the point I’m trying to make is—”"
Zacharias need only be tweaked to accuse Harry of trying to weasel out of telling them this big secret: "We've all turned up to hear some earth-shattering revelation and now he's telling us he's nothing special."
"“That’s not what he said,” snarled Fred.”"
"No, Fred."
"“That’s not what he said,” snarled Fred.”"
"No, Fred."
“No, Fred, that’s *exactly* what I’m saying. I’m not special. None of us are, not by blood anyway, not by some magical gift of magical blood passed down from our parents, except when it’s not because we're 'Muggle-born'.”
And he took a deep breath.
“Anyone can do magic.”
And he took a deep breath.
“Anyone can do magic.”
The narrative would require maybe a paragraph or two of inserted material to work in the impact, maybe a test of the inability of anyone other than Harry to divulge the secret as proof of a Fidelius Charm, but then it's back on track, meetings to be organised to prep for action.
Sirius is (of course) 100% behind an activist group subverting the House system, a sodality of the abject rejecting being bought off with class privilege. The narrative? Not so much. Umbridge's ban on Quidditch along with other groups is a canny win/win move for the status quo.
What it imperils is the ritualised gamified expression of the whole insidious House points system designed to inculcate a dog-eat-dog top dog champion ideal (shown as rigged game in Goblet of Fire) but also fervent pack loyalty (with other teams as Enemy).
I.e. fratriarchy.
I.e. fratriarchy.
Umbridge's denial of this makes the heroes yearn for it. And pushes buttons for any reader now w/ identity invested in the wonder of the fantasy ("I'm a TOTAL Ravenclaw because I LOVE maths!") rooting for the spectacle as part of the escapist formula, wanting status quo restored.
Quidditch is the wonder-coated emblem of a life policed by a points system active every hour of every day, designed to instil an ideal of being the star player--but also *team* player, but also *star* team player--in one's fantasy Sandhurst & whatever takes its place post-school.
Harry struggling to attain/sustain class consciousness in a narrative that's erased his awakening, canonised eugenics, manages to keep his priorities, at least. When told Quidditch is cancelled, he's just like, "Good." There's a revolution to be getting on with.
Harry's estranged from Hogwarts from the moment of his return, seeing the thestrels now that pull the carriages: the mythic pegasus turned to skeletal revenant of itself, harnessed to be the earthbound toiler pulling the little princes to and fro, workhorse worked to the bone.
Only the traumatised can really grasp trauma, recognise it when they see it, and this is the trauma of (white) class supremacy--elsewhere erased in house-elves *yet again* being cast as averse to freedom, giants cast as their own worst enemy, the narrative clinging to blindness.
We headdesk, facepalm, bridgepinch again as the narrative FFS waltzes blindly past the capacity for the action of THIS book--Hermione restoring folkloric symbiotic human/elf relations--to *earn* our heroes the Room of Requirements, Dobby helping out in appreciation of her gifts.
Instead the narrative hinges it on a single act performed three fuckin books ago ambering Dobby in abject servility to jump in by authorial fiat as plot device *despite* the action of this book, Hermione's gifts to the elves being cast as alienating insults. "FFS!" is inadequate.
But the narrative clinging to its role as apologetics for class privilege & imperialism, clinging to the eugenic premise it was meant to upend, cannot get past itself. Hagrid's tale of the giants is another such car crash exercise in colonialist victim-blaming & self-absolution.
"Wizards killed a few, o’ course, bu’ mostly they killed each other,"
A few. Sure, Hagrid. Dumbledore, ever the moderate, accepts fault in wizards forcing giants into, essentially, reservations, but there's no question the core issue is the innate brutality of (ig)noble savages.
A few. Sure, Hagrid. Dumbledore, ever the moderate, accepts fault in wizards forcing giants into, essentially, reservations, but there's no question the core issue is the innate brutality of (ig)noble savages.
Harry is alienated from Dumbledore though, his refusal to talk to him about his scar acting up again an estrangement born of recognising Dumbledore as moderate, worrying that he’s compromised by that. Which he is. Just like Hermione in her qualms about the group she started.
The mere fact of Sirius's approval has her baulking. Hermione Granger, voice of bourgeois propriety, liberal centrist, now worries about egalitarian activism simply because Sirius is for it. His radical stance (no compromise with eugenics) seen as *immature* must be moderated.
When Harry worries that Dumbledore's cold shoulder comes from fear he's possessed by Voldemort, this is a suspicion that a centrist’s Horseshoe Theory is in play, whereby the radical egalitarian left, as threat to the status quo, is just as monstrous a spectre as the fascist.
And of course, where the abject (sexual or otherwise) is always already the queer, an Other cast as deviant from the norm, to be avowedly queer (as one is in class terms IDing as uppity prole) is to own that role of Enemy because fuck the fratriarchy.
So when Dumbledore actually meets his eyes for the first time: "there rose within Harry a hatred so powerful he felt, for that instant, he would like nothing better than to strike—to bite—to sink his fangs into the man before him—" He rages at the moderate who's urged moderation.
He's recognising the "my hands are tied" appeasement that comes of a reformist's anti-radicalism, that "power within the system" ultimately means compromise with Fudge which means Umbridge which means Voldemort. That Establishment Dem-bledore's inaction is only enabling fascism.
This is a Harry who's twitchy af at Tonks, and rightly so. Her blithe prattle at the start, if seen for what it is, renders her emblem of the well-intentioned but clueless privileged blind to their own eugenics even as they fight the demonised Dark Lord of it. She sets a theme.
As they head to the hospital, she irks him again: "There isn’t any Seer blood in your family, is there?" Textually he's irked at association with Trelawney. Really, he has zero fuckin time for this "blood" tosh. He's *explicitly* glad when they get off the bus & he can avoid her.
(I'm given to understand there's a fair bit of resentment of the Lupin/Tonks pairing from the shippers of Sirius/Remus. I dunno about that, but I gotta say I'm with Harry right now & cannot fuckin abide her clueless ass.)
If we can imagine the basilisk's secret in play in this narrative, his reaction to her at the start is the opening of a theme of his alienation from the ineffectual allyship on offer from a wizarding world too steeped in its own privilege to get with the program.
Fix the fuckery, and even the expedient Room of Requirements takes on meaning as response to need: "Mostly people stumbles across it when they needs it, sir, but often they never finds it again, for they do not know that it is always there waiting to be called into service, sir."
Read as a gift from Dobby in return for gifts, at a deeper level as the outcome of a process of restoration of agency & equality, of a house elf culture of mutual help, this is solidarity, sodality, socialism: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
But no. Even as the secret determinedly asserts itself in subtext, shaping every action into a story of Harry's radicalisation, the narrative's determined to thwart this story's realisation, to lock even the icon of rebellion, Sirius, into its eugenics mindset, reviling Kreacher.
As Ron suspects Snape of trying to open Harry's mind to Voldemort & Hermione highlights that to do so is to suspect Dumbledore (unpossible!) the narrative is inviting us to do just that with dramatic irony:
“And if we can’t trust Dumbledore, we can’t trust anyone.”
“And if we can’t trust Dumbledore, we can’t trust anyone.”
Why would Dumbledore want this in the text as is? One might suspect a mercenary motive, a hope for Harry to work (as he has done) as an eye on Voldemort. In the subtext: a Harry possessed by Voldemort is a pretext for silencing him in defence of the bastion of class privilege.
In the narrative locked into liberal centrist faith in the system though, this can no more be thought by Harry than he can take the next step from "Dementors not hunting Death-Eaters must be outside Ministry control" to "the Ministry must be collaborating with the Death-Eaters".
In the narrative of profound doubt in the privileged moderate that this is trying to be (via the silence of Dumbledore), Harry should be worried about the reason he's supposed to be learning Occlumency either way, whether it's to defend him from Voldemort as stated or weaken him.
If his sense of being made *more* susceptible is accurate and this is the covert aim, he must worry that Dumbledore seeks to throw him under the bus, to let him fall prey to Voldemort as pretext for Azkaban, to silence him, to preserve the status quo.
If the aim is as stated though, if it's simply to protect him, he must worry that Dumbledore's liberal centrism is rendering him too risk-averse, a capacity to spy on Voldemort going unused in over-caution, in the complacency of privilege blind to the urgency of a greater threat.
But this is where the revisions engendered by recognition of the basilisk's secret themselves generate the missing piece of Order of the Phoenix, to click into place and resolve *exactly* WTF is going on with Dumbledore's silence. In a book published in 2003, I'll quietly note.
If we have jettisoned the tosh of Fudge fearing Dumbledore to be raising an army, turned "Dumbledore's Army" to a "House Mollytoff" (or whatever), we require now a means for Dumbledore to fall on his sword in Harry's place when the illicit group is rumbled.
In theory, we could simply have Dumbledore interrupt Fudge's question of him recruiting these students for--"For an army." But it's little less ridiculous coming from Dumbledore than it is when supposed to be coming from Fudge's bizarre fever dream paranoia.
He might better simply call it what it is: "An inter-house friendship society for students of diverse ethnicities, sexualities, & *breeding* I believe the common term is, in the interest of solidarity & mutual support. As urged by the Sorting Hat itself at the start of the year."
Naming it after the Muggle whose name (Mikkel here) gave us the word "Muggle" (make him Salazar Slytherin's servant, I say,) is an easy claim for Dumbledore, and can be rendered too provocative to be steamrollered over to get at Harry by binding it to another silenced truth:
"I have made no secret of my Muggle sympathies, Cornelius--no more than I have hidden my homosexuality, regardless of opinion or Ministry Decrees frowning upon either. Regardless of legislation prohibiting, as they put it, the *promotion of deviance* in the education system."
The book is set in 1995-6 if I reckon it right (or 1994-5?) at a time when Section 28 was in force. It was published in June of the very year in which, in November, Section 28 was repealed. Umbridge is Thatcher analogue. If Dumbledore is gay, *this* is how he forces Fudge's hand.
This is the reason for his distancing from Harry: *accusations have been made*, insinuations of impropriety in his over-familiarity with Potter. In the Daily Prophet's campaign to discredit him & Harry, it is the blindingly logical tabloid attack that renders his position unsafe.
As an assimilationist gay, he has had no choice but to back the fuck off, closet himself away in his office even if (or especially if) out to the staff & board. And what he confesses would literally be an arguable breach of actual law: a support group could be deemed promotion.
Trust me. I have often told the story of how as a kid in the 1980s, an English teacher I found *profoundly* supportive of my writing had to veto, in the debate group he set up, a discussion of Section 28 *lest it deemed be a breach of Section 28*, a sackable offence.
A pointed analogue of such legislation in the wizarding world, & Dumbledore goes from being so assimilationist his sexuality is erased from the text to being not gay but *queer*: "I understand this group is illicit, Cornelius, but I simply cannot tolerate intolerance any longer."
There is required also, perhaps, to deal with the basilisk's secret, a challenge to Fudge to state his grounds for suspecting Harry--Why would Harry name his group after the first Muggle?--Fudge of course being unable to speak the secret, to even acknowledge it. But that's all.
So Dumbledore goes on the run, no longer a moderate out to change the system from within but an exiled Other in open conflict with the system of class privilege which, as fratriarchy, is also a system of straight privilege & white privilege. And House Mollytoff's uprising begins.
There are sundry minor tweaks called for in a narrative actually acknowledging Harry's radicalisation--a rote trotting out of "Auror" as career path, his question on character tests at the Ministry turned to a sly dig at Umbridge--but it is there in the subtext to be realised.
His awakening to his father's bullying of Snape is crying out to be sourced to its actual root, not "just one of those things", but a fuckin inevitable product of the insidious house and points system. All Sirius's talk of personal grudges can stay; he need only add the context.
"And the school only made it worse—ten points off Gryffindor, five points to Slytherin, sit up straight and tidy your hair, here’s to this year’s winners at Hunt the House-Elf!" His voice softened. "They only stopped that under Dumbledore. The whole system bred cruelty, Harry.”
There is of course also the by now *exhausting* inevitability of non-human creatures being turned to apologetics for white supremacy, giants & centaurs given cringesome treatment, simple lovable Hagrid made mouthpiece of the ugliest tosh. This too is fixable though, if only seen.
From there, it would change little in the finale that the Death-Eaters would be under orders not to kill Harry (else anyone he's told gets his power to tell the truth), and to be clear that Fudge wants him in Azkaban and that the Aurors are after Sirius because hello, ACAB.
Voldemort would just be aiming to crush Harry's mind instead of kill him, while Fudge would be caving not just b/c Voldemort *is* back but b/c Dumbledore gets Harry away after the battle by a veiled threat to let him give a *full* account there & then with countless witnesses.
In Dumbledore's muddled confession of a "mistake" in keeping Harry distant lest Voldemort use him as a spy on Dumbledore, to try & make him kill Harry in the hope of killing Voldemort--huh?--the motives becomes much simpler.
Any hint of a relationship “closer than that of headmaster and pupil” & Dumbledore gets ousted while an "examination" of Harry's memories to investigate impropriety becomes the means to accidentally wipe his mind, just as the aim was with the Dementor attack and the hearing. Duh.
Where closet gay moderate Dumbledore throws Sirius under the bus as an *inadequately kind* *master* (*bridgepinch*) to Kreacher, radical queer Dumbledore bangs Sirius to rights for freeing the elf but doing SFA beyond that except guiltily loathe this ghost of his family's crimes.
In a narrative actually *confronting* the import of Sirius trapped in this house, we'd get not just the parallel Harry draws to being stuck in Privet Lane--“You did it to me all last summer—”--but to Hogwarts, the whole system:
"Harry, I've been doing it to you for five years."
"Harry, I've been doing it to you for five years."
Grimmauld Place is just the rotted Gothic recapitulation of Hogwarts as figuration of the whole system of class prejudice the whole wizarding world has been trapped in for a *thousand* years, breeding cruel aristos who (like the narrative) can't escape the mindset of eugenics.
Man, even as simple & obvious a thing as the protection of Privet Lane by sisterly *love* gets warped by this idée fixe:
"While you can still call home the place where your mother’s blood dwells, there you cannot be touched..."
So, that'd be *anywhere he resides* then?
"While you can still call home the place where your mother’s blood dwells, there you cannot be touched..."
So, that'd be *anywhere he resides* then?
"He shed her blood, but it lives on in you and her sister."
Yes, Dumbassbledore, it lives on *in Harry himself*. So there is zero need to look to a living relative who shares Lily's blood to power some magical protection for whatever home that blood relative lives in.
Yes, Dumbassbledore, it lives on *in Harry himself*. So there is zero need to look to a living relative who shares Lily's blood to power some magical protection for whatever home that blood relative lives in.
What *doesn't* live on in Harry is the *love* that Petunia had/has for her sister, despite their estrangement, which Harry as a babe was too young to feel. How is it not obvious that Petunia's loving memories of Lily are how Lily symbolically lives on enough to protect him?
But no, the narrative's so locked into the literal bloodborne magic trope now, it chooses that over the nigh universal notion of people "living on" in the memories of those who loved them. And it simply can't for a second crack the Muggle caricature, afford Petunia some humanity.
Where it could have flipped the script on Muggles with Dudley in the opening and driven it home here with Petunia, in a story radicalising Harry to fight Voldemort as emblem of the whole wizard world's eugenic fuckery, it reverts to status quo, all back to normal at Hogwarts.
Neville assures him it's all settled down, points are taken by Snape, dispensed by McGonagall, Hagrid might get another giant (which oh no, is bound to be an even worse brute than Grawp, because that's how giants are) and Harry's going to miss Hogwarts terribly when he leaves.
Most odious: as he grieves for Sirius by the lake, he doesn't see himself alienated as a Muggle who knows magic among these wizards, as a member of the underclass among the privileged, but rather "felt as distant from them as though he belonged to a different race."
Wait, what?
Wait, what?
This is... not what I'd call even moderately progressive, to use "it's like being among people of a different race" to characterise just how little connection one feels with those around you, how incapable one is of identifying with them. This is your *benchmark* for alienation?
So instead of Harry seeing humanity in Aunt Petunia looking "frightened" on his return, Dudley "trying to look small and insignificant", the narrative again reverts to formula, carries on with the caricature, blithely setting Moody on them to bully the uppity Muggles.
It's a lamentable ugliness, where the power dynamic in operation at the start of the series has been flipped since before the start of this book, really, and the sort of comical come-uppance viable previously for a poor orphan's boorish jailors is now clearly punching down.
It's a tragic cop-out, when a radicalised Harry could have shut that bullying down, still got the support from Lupin &c., goodbyes playing out as written, just with a blunt veto from a Harry who strides off with the Dursleys "in his wake"--all that's needed to nail his new state.
So the first thing we learn in Half Blood Prince is that the Ministry of Magic is not a government ministry at all. If Fudge is appointed, it's not by the PM, who knows nothing of him until told & has to take the wizard's call as a call from *his* boss. The power dynamic's clear.
Unless I've missed something in an earlier book, there's no talk of Fudge being elected to counter the default reading of the Ministry as bureaucracy staffed by paid civil servants, headed by an appointee, and the nearest thing we see to a high level council is the Wizengamot.
The Wizengamot looks like a House of Lords & quacks like a House of Lords, and while to be fair the action has been mostly away in a boarding school in the countryside, there's been zero hint of democratic elections in 6 books to correct the impression of unelected oligarchy.
Unless & until corrected by a text showing Fudge's replacement (coming up in this book IIRC) happening democratically, the Wizengamot reads as a House of Lords / High Court selecting by fiat the head of a civil service primarily concerned with maintaining proletarian ignorance.
Given the antagonistic actions of the co-opted Ministry in the coming narrative, this would be grand in a series setting radicalised Harry on a course to topple that shitshow, but the key word above is *co-opted*: Voldemort serves as scapegoat in an apologetics for the oligarchy.
In the future, I understand, Hermione Granger, class traitor, is to end up as Minister of Magic--which is to say, with the PM at her beck & call, a portrait built into a wall in 10 Downing Street, incapable of being removed, to peremptorily announce her arrival to the Muggle PM.
And the text confirms: "Rufus Scrimgeour, previously Head of the Auror office in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, has succeeded Cornelius Fudge as Minister of Magic. The appointment has largely been greeted with enthusiasm..."
Great democracy. Totally normal.
Great democracy. Totally normal.
The liberal centrist narrative absolves its moderate Dumbledore from the coming police state via a “rift” with Scrimgeour even as it sets him as “newly reinstated Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot”, the body we must surely imagine to have appointed the Cop of all Cops as autarch.
Well. Done with Half-Blood Prince now, & jesus fuckin cock does it start as a trashfire of reversion & entrenchment--Harry Potter, slave owner: smashing!--but with the subtext positively *straining* to shatter the lie & leave Harry at the end ready to burn Hogwarts to the ground.
And there's a massive midpoint reversal that's blindingly obvious AFAIC but has been *criminally* sailed right past on the big banana boat of "eugenics is OK *in moderation*, it's just the demonised extremist *bogeyman* version of it we have to worry about".
Needless to say, we begin with a Fudge who's just *weak* rather than complicit handing over to a Scrimgeour who's just *a bit strict* rather than complicit, Aurors just "mishandling" the situation, making few arrests & few of em right, rather than (ACAB) helping the Death Eaters.
The arrest of Stan Shunpike for "talking about Death Eater plans in a pub" is a *ludicrous* centrist sublimation of an actual working class loudmouth agitator who, Citizen Smith by way of On the Buses--even such parody denied--is agitating for opposition to the wizard fash, duh.
There's a handful of Death Eaters. There's an entire shadow state apparatus dedicated to enforcing the secrecy of magic. It's clear who's behind the disappearances to anyone without blind faith in the wizarding world as wondrous spectacle of bourgeois privilege built on eugenics.
But no, this a narrative blind to the absolutely arrant fuckin *presumption* of a Dumbledore who invites himself into the Dursleys', invites himself into their living room & plonks himself down in the best seat, all the while dissing Uncle Vernon for his lack of manners.
The uppity working class Tories who've got above themselves by running a factory clearly fail to understand that one need only affect a blithe demeanour & speak with a certain sophistication of politesse for one's entitled hauteur, shorn of contempt, to be rendered quite seemly.
And what entitlement: with Sirius's death, we learn Harry has inherited his house, and with it Kreacher. Because ofc the house-elf wasn't imagined freed in the previous book, *couldn't* be imagined freed, despite rebel Sirius despising everything his family stood for.
I mean FFS just have Ma Black anticipate her abolitionist son and, knowing the loyalty brainwashed into her slaves, have Kreacher's consent written into his binding as requirement for his freedom, so Sirius had dismissed him umpteen times but to no avail.
If he needs to be prevented from betraying them to Bellatrix, simply have Harry transfer the binding he's inherited to the Hogwarts house-elves, now a collective, gambling that this mutual "mastery" will restrain and/or repair the poor thing. Because SLAVERY IS NOT A GOOD LOOK.
A few pages later this portrait of genial, mannered entitlement wouldn't dream of so rudely mistreating one of his own class (which is to say race here, what with the eugenics): "Courtesy dictates that we offer fellow wizards the opportunity of denying us entry."
Slughorn offers the same mannered geniality as screen for bourgeois brutalities: avarice for connections here in place of rudeness or aristo cruelty, his Slug Club as Old Boys' Club, like Grimmauld Place, a projection outward of Hogwarts' vices, the wizarding world in general's.
Harry's woke enough to see through Slughorn by now, as is the narrative, but of course he's Slytherin, the scapegoat emblem of classism, the abjection of it by which it's disavowed: rendered no longer Us, but something Other, something once-Us-but-not-Us-anymore.
Evil bigoted Slytherin schismed from the three other houses, the good houses! Salazar left Hogwarts, walked away in disgust because the others reviled his eugenics! Except of course he clearly didn't: Slytherin are still *right fuckin there*, their otherness a complete pretence.
With all anti-egalitarianism projected into the blatant bigot, the classism that comes veiled in bourgeois propriety is disacknowledged. The narrative can't even see the creeping *fascism* of its hard-on for Aurors when it's waving flags in the air, setting off klaxons.
“It was odd, really, seeing that it had been a Death Eater in disguise who had first told Harry he would make a good Auror, but somehow the idea had taken hold of him, and he couldn’t really think of anything else he would like to be”
LOL. The Alastor Moody who is revealed to actually be Barty Crouch Junior in Goblet of Fire is of course actually just Alastor Moody. ACAB. It's a justice system with Dementors as prison guards, FFS, and Moody is the mad dog bastard of all Aurors. Of course he's fascism's man.
The only extent to which Moody's actually a teenage rebel kicking against his own cop of a father is that to which he's a centrist's bogeyman articulating the same anarchist contempt for the system as Sirius, his comment a sarcastic jibe that Harry would be a "good little cop".
There are *hints* of recognition that the Ministry (i.e. the wizarding world) is a police state in, say, Dumbledore wanting Hagrid as Harry's escort over Aurors, but the narrative is, like the Daily Prophet (or NYT,) three steps behind radical subtext & reality, playing catch-up.
It can blithely have Fred & George supplying jinx defence gear to the Ministry (for "support" staff) without seeing defence contractors. They're yer cheeky, chirpy suppliers of riot shields to the pigs, lol. Gotta love their high-jinks and japery, hoho!
It can revert Ron & Hermione to eleven year old guilelessness just b/c it's expedient to have them doubt Harry on Malfoy's recruitment, like they didn't have an entire book with a villain who was 18-19 when he was banged up in Azkaban & presumably hadn't joined the fash that day.
It can have them disband "Dumbledore's Army" b/c there's "no point now we've got rid of Umbridge" in order to revert to the formula of the jolly hockey sticks exciting train trip into the boarding school mystery, all wokeness to the threat won in the last book erased, reset.
What should be House Mollytoff (or whatever,) would get in the way of the adventure, requiring further political engagement with the conceit, so it's sidelined--& needlessly, b/c it would've been simple & apt to hand the reins over to Neville who was explicitly flourishing in it.
No place for it in the plot? Cement Neville's character growth & the egalitarian themes: when he & Luna mope how they'll miss the group, give Harry a bright idea to pass on the torch; he's got private lessons organised with Dumbledore anyway, won't have time. Don't undo progress.
But no, all that cross-house unity must be jettisoned in Harry's instant dislike for Zabini because "Gryffindor and Slytherin students loathed each other on principle". Harry can't be seeing beyond that now to the conflict of *Mollytoff* with fascism's advocates & apologists.
So we nix the chance for socialist solidarity contrasting the nepotism of the Slug Club not as proxy for Hogwarts but as j'accuse encapsulation of it, the Sorting Hat's plea dismissed offhand: “More of the same, really… advising us all to unite in the face of enemies, you know.”
Slughorn gives voice to the eugenics *often* ("it’s clear you’ve inherited your mother’s talent") & Harry's advantage with the Half-Blood Prince's Potions book is ripe with potential to tackle privilege, but the option of *not* having, of *undoing*, privilege is never imagined.
Hermione is only miffed that Harry's success isn't "his own effort", Ron that *he* didn't luck out & get the book. There's an arguable idea that Hermione won't share the book because it's not proper, a risible one that Ron finds the writing more difficult than bespectacled Harry.
No one for a second considers the possibility of simply copying it. There are Duplication Charms to learn. There should be a practising House Mollytoff all keen to learn any invented hex. All that's needed? Make it Neville again, after the levicorpus spell, asking to make a copy.
A copy for Ron next when it works. "Me too!" from Dean & Seamus. Copies being made for all who want them, samizdat spell sharing turned to a tackling of the wizarding world's economics which can only be based on the licensing & (time) limitation of Duplication & Conjuration.
Gringotts must have a monopoly on the duplication of gold--only allowed in their vaults, the vaults of pureblood elites. The permanent conjuration of objects must be restricted--perhaps at a family level--to explain the abject squalor of the Gaunts, the poverty of the Weasleys.
Scarcity must be an artifice. The means of production--duplication and conjuration--must be controlled. Licensed & regulated. Else every Galleon could be doubled exponentially, and any luxury one could need for one's home (the home itself!) could be conjured from thin air.
(There's no salvaging the anti-semitic goblins, not even with a nod to the historical reality of usury forbidden to Christians, Jewish people being denied work other than those of stereotype. You could analogise that magically, but *they'd still be fuckin "swarthy" goblins FFS*)
(What one might do though is switch leprechauns in for goblins & give them an exclusive license to mint coins by Duplication Charm--or allow the duplication of coins in client's vaults. A license held by the Malfoys maybe, Lucius's ancestor's portrait up in the bank in book 1.)
The means of production in the wizarding world *must* be controlled by the elite of the elite, otherwise there *is no elite*; there is no wealth or poverty, none of the charms & spells we see here costing more than a bit of focus, a word, a wave of a wand. Yet we see squalor.
If we are to make any sense of the House of Gaunt at all, we must ask why Malvelo's ancestors, having squandered the gold, did not just *make more gold*. We must ask why they even needed gold, could not just conjure some cosy armchairs, a sideboard, lace doilies, whatever.
Either the Gaunts are living in penury because they're *all* squibs (which they aren't) or they've been reduced to such by curse or Ministry law, punitive restrictions disallowing any magic that would alleviate their squalor.
Or, of course...
Or, of course...
Or, of course, the narrative cannot imagine the hateful and abusive father and son as anything but *abject Poors ewww*! It somehow cannot imagine the ragged skivvying squib Merope being throttled by her father as members of bourgeois wizard society. Only the Poors are so brutal.
The whole Voldemort backstory is odd af, offering us the Victorian melodramatic trope of the squire's son Tom Riddle, callous aristo, impregnating & abandoning the poor serving girl, but setting the Muggle as aristo, the girl as witch & victim-blaming her as bewitcher.
Is the class privilege of wizardry so deeply denied that we're put through the looking glass? It can't be the wizard toff bewitching the Muggle serving girl? Can't even be the upper class girl dallying with a handsome but feckless young swain, deserted and cast out by a stern pa?
There are, I think, two significant sticking points my book doctor brain cannot help but read as signposts, bugs as pointers to the true features of a backbrain's story muddled by bad decisions: a dodgy timeframe; an incoherent sequence of action.
The latter first: When Ogden visits the Gaunts and ends up fleeing, he does not simply Apparate away, but runs from the house outside, down a lane we've heard Riddle's horse's hooves fading away along, in a pure authorial contrivance to see Tom Riddle *before* then Apparating.
This does not belong in the narrative logic. For a wizard, this is like shuffling your seat all the way through the doorway still sat on, only standing up to run when you're at the garden gate. It's bollocks. Why not just have him look out the window as Riddle passes? Why indeed?
Listen to yer narrative, writer peeps. That sight of Tom Riddle is contrived by the conscious in place of a perfectly simple glance out of the window that the backbrain has, for some reason, vetoed. Why does Ogden not see Tom Riddle through the window? I hazard he's not meant to.
The timeframe: this happens in summer. "A few months later", Merope & Tom run off. "A few months later" after that he's ditched her. With midsummer at the end of June, three months as a fair default for "a few", that'd mean a late September elopement and abandonment in December.
But we're then told Tom Riddle Junior is born a year after the marriage, in December the next year, and Tom Riddle Senior can't very well impregnate Merope in the March after he's left her. It doesn't add up. Or at least not clearly enough to avert confusion in the reading.
One can appeal to vagueness--it's late summer, August pushing into September, & a longer few, more like four months each time, and let's just ignore the time for her to *find out* she's pregnant, maybe he didn't know, shusht--but if you need to handwave, there's something wrong.
And again, there's a simple fix that's weirdly not been taken: why the fuck even have the line about it being a year after the marriage when you could just cut that and *have Merope three month's pregnant* in the summer scene, Riddle junior born in the December of that year?
Why, when Harry is all "EWWW! Who'd want to fuck/marry that uggo?!" is wise & genteel Dumbledore not pointing out that *what's plain to you and I, dear boy, may be quite beautiful to another*? This is surely a more natural response than, "It must have been a love potion!" FFS.
Why is the narrative insisting she's so plain it *had* to be a love potion. Forget the talk of villagers saying she coerced him into marrying her b/c she was pregnant, it *had* to be a love potion. By a squib. Who suddenly becomes capable of magic. (Until she's not again.)
Why so set on this love potion tosh that "nobody marries uggos" is made an assumption to sustain it, when the simplest scenario is a spring fling, pregnant Merope guilting Tom into marriage by September, only to be abandoned just before childbirth in the middle of winter?
Morfin's attack on Riddle and taunting of Merope make all the more sense if she's pregnant by his child already when Ogden visits, not just in love but taken advantage of. Marvolo's murderous rage fits too, not just at a report of her desire but at actual muddying of their blood.
The oddities we've got in place of that are the sort I tend to suspect come of a writer *avoiding* the logic of the narrative, over-complications generated as contortions in denial. Insistence marks compensation for a niggling awareness of the deviation from the backbrain's plan.
So I read this and I think Merope is *not* that plain. This is bolstering, the writer's attempt to persuade themself. I think Tom Riddle is *not* seen to be amazeballs handsome. The backbrain knew better when it had him pass the window heard but unseen. The backstory is warped.
An obvious question in a story with magical memory tweaking: is it *meant* to be warped? Is the backbrain offering a memory from Ogden that it wants be revealed later as modified? Is that what the narrative is working itself towards? But no, it's simpler, I reckon.
Bring in the basilisk's secret--that anyone can do magic--and jump to a later sequence where Dumbledore shows Harry his own memory: young Tom Riddle in the orphanage, speaking Parseltongue & showing unprecedented magical talent.
But there *is* no talent. No magic in the blood.
But there *is* no talent. No magic in the blood.
A Dumbledore who's learned the basilisk's secret is one who's revisited this memory now many times, knowing he *assumed* inborn talent, where these skills are now evidence of *previous exposure to magic*, maybe only a fleeting one, but enough to spark his active investigation.
Where Mrs Cole has said, "no Tom, nor Marvolo, nor Riddle" ever visited the boy, this is in a story *with Memory Charms throughout*, and there's a name suggestively not on that list, who could have visited & showed the boy magic & cruelty, even spoken Parseltongue to him: Morfin.
A Dumbledore who's seen this is a Dumbledore who's revisited the later sequence of teenage Tom Riddle's visit to Morfin, who himself extricated this from under an implanted false memory, who might well ask now if there's more here than meets the eye.
Another signpost of implausibility & insistence: the narrative has Morfin mistake *a teenage boy* for the grown man who lives next door just about. Because yeah, he looks just like Tom Riddle, handsome Tom Riddle, total spitting image of handsome Tom Riddle. Honest, guv.
If we have a narrative in which young Tom Riddle has been visited in the orphanage by Morfin--even just once to spark his magic & bitterness at being left--we've a Tom Riddle here for revenge, & one Morfin recognises instantly, & an exchange that has been buried in false memory.
We have a Tom Marvolo Riddle, named by his mother after her husband who abandoned her & her father who abused her, & it doesn't take brain rocket science to put 2 + 2 together here. These are the two possible fathers she knew he might have, the endpoint of eugenics being incest.
We've had literal references to "inbreeding" in the books, at least one usage of the actual word. The Gaunts are the most zealous of the zealous when it comes to blood purity, and Merope is victim of physical & emotional abuse in no uncertain terms. The combination is not a leap.
Voldemort is the embodiment of the perfection, for want of a better term, of eugenics & subjugation, & it's the narrative's avoidance of the drive toward this obvious symbolism that engenders a weird chronology--to have Merope made pregnant *after* Morfin & Marvolo are arrested.
It's this that gives us the insistence on him being the spitting image of the handsome Muggle--despite the also obvious significance of the surname "Riddle" as marker of an uncertain father--as an action of denial. It's a kids' book after all. That's a dark place to go.
It's where the story is/was going though, if you face head on the essentialisation of class prejudice/privilege into outright eugenics, if you reject the reading of magic as innate talent which is really only canonised in one line that *can* be read figuratively.
It's this avoidance that gives us the daft & dodgy idea of Merope as so damn plain it *must* have been a love potion she used to bewitch Tom Riddle senior, because she has to be plain so *only* the handsome Muggle could give him his looks, meaning he *has* to be the father.
It's this that gives us the odd, implausible & dubious talk of Merope "choosing" to die in childbirth despite having a son to look after, because she has to go from squib to witch to squib to sustain the love potion, when in the story that's trying to be she's a squib throughout.
It's this that gives us another logic flaw, where with the chronology as is, she's abandoned just a few months after marriage, newly pregnant, but somehow manages to support herself on the streets all the way to December, rather than just being cast out when she's near full term.
If one allows even unresolved uncertainty--Tom Marvolo Riddle inheriting his good looks from his mum so his father remains unclear--all of that resolves & irons itself out, & you get a Voldemort even more twisted by the poisoned chalice of being possibly a pureblood... by incest.
The pieces all being fitted together at the Morfin memory sequence, this comes just past halfway, a huge midpoint reversal, & it would allow for another oddity to be rectified whereby somehow nobody ever questions if the Half-Blood Prince's fifty year old textbook is Voldemort's.
To be fair, when Harry checks the date, it's "nearly fifty years old" & it'd have to be "just over fifty years old" to be Tom Riddle's, but he's not exactly a maths whizz, so you'd think the thought would cross his frickin mind after the parallels being made a deal of previously.
You want to at least have someone *float the idea* only to have it ruled out because no, see, the dates don't quite line up, if only so readers don't suspect the characters have been subject to an Idea Bypass Operation their thinking warped to make a reveal come as a "surprise".
The characters *have* been given exactly such an operation, I'd hazard, because any thought of it being Voldemort's and Harry would have to take it to Dumbledore, who'd likely confiscate it--or the moderate Dumbledore in *this* narrative would at least.
The radical queer Dumbledore who knows the Ministry must go & the basilisk's secret must be made public, would probably be down with Harry not just using it but distributing it through House Mollytoff, with the reveal that Voldemort is not a Half-Blood tied into this plotline.
After the first memory sequence, Ogden's visit, one might easily extend Dumbledore's plea to inform only Ron & Hermione, via a "however", into an approval of continuing House Mollytoff under Neville's leadership as a sharing of the burden that's laudable as both shrewd & humble.
With the requisite explanation of why the Gaunts are poor (Duplication is licensed) one might bind the themes of nepotism (Slug Club) vs socialism (Mollytoff spreading the Potions book) with a simple stitch, Dumbledore blithely encouraging sharing as a general principle.
"From each according to their ability, my dear boy, to each according to their need. Young Neville is showing no small ability these days, I understand, and he has *always* shown abilities in one area where I believe Miss Lovegood is somewhat in need, which is to say friendship."
Have Dumbledore support Mollytoff by offering a "common room", since the plot needs the Room of Requirements. And have him wryly assure Harry the Potions book is not Voldemort's, but warn some spells are vicious & highlight the unfair advantage it gives, urge exercise of ethics.
In the next chapter, the comment on the cost of the new potions book Harry switches covers with by a Diffendo! & Reparo! becomes an opening then to introduce the idea that nine Galleons for a freely duplicated copy is alright for *some* but not for others. "Hear hear!" said Ron.
Next chapter has Harry doing Levicorpus on Ron, ideal juncture to start the duplication of the Potions book, Neville having taught himself the Duplication Charm, being OK on the detail (albeit his copies only last a week & copies of copies lose detail, so's not to fuck the plot.)
It's notable that this is just before Mundungus shows up having nicked a bunch of stuff from Sirius's, and if he's done so to *duplicate & put it back*, counterfeiter/pirate vs simple thief, again we get interrogation of wealth inequality & the circumvention of elite controls.
It's notable *also* that the narrative tries to patch the issue w/ Dumbledore talking to 11 year old Tom Riddle of "a fund at Hogwarts for those who require assistance to buy books and robes", a blatant retcon (Ron never had help) of typical centrist tosh: paternalism fixes all!
Work in a tart comment from Dumbledore about said fund being "small and rather belatedly instituted, to my mind", and the liberal centrist handwaving of reliance on the privileged to be charitable becomes another critique of the capitalist system of its weak band-aid "solutions".
This is the narrative of a Harry who should have been radicalised in *attitude* in Order of the Phoenix (by the knowledge that Fudge means Umbridge means Voldemort), getting radicalised in *understanding* of wealth inequality, privilege & power.
Really he shouldn't want to be an Auror any more *at all* now, but the narrative insists on it, and it's arguable he could cling to an ideal of reformism, of being a "good" cop, slowing his disaffection process to make his conflict with Scrimgeour the watershed moment.
His flat refusal to be puppet for Scrimgeour turns on Stan Shunpike being in Azkaban, & where that's a cartoon pastiche of Sirius at the moment with the risible idea they think he's a Death Eater, it *could* be emblematic of centrist oppression of antifa as threats to status quo.
A woke Harry here might *finally* acknowledge that the Aurors are & will always be the system's jackboot enforcers, acting in defence of privilege, actively *quashing* grassroots opposition to the fash in the name of law & order. And fuck that. He knows they're the enemy too now.
"I don’t remember you rushing to my defense when I was trying to tell everyone Voldemort was back. The Ministry wasn’t so keen to be pals last year." Extend, acknowledge: "If Umbridge is anything to go by, as far as I’m concerned you’re just... *the polite version of Voldemort*."
It strikes me as not insignificant that in all the books IIRC it's *entirely unprecedented* to see a *lesson* being charged for, but here in Half-Blood Prince where wealth inequality is bubbling up in subtext, we suddenly get Apparition lessons costing 12 Galleons.
There's zero comment on this, absolutely nothing made of it, it doesn't register at all, but suddenly *students* are being charged for lessons in a school their folks have paid fees for. *Personally* charged, at a cost only some will be able to cover with allowances from parents.
The value of that which is being made artificially scarce is underlined soon after in the Prince's bezoar note giving Harry the knowledge to save Ron's life. The narrative could & should be making the connection with Apparate: this could save your life; tough luck if you're poor.
The narrative is in love with privilege though, even as it abjects it in Slughorn, Slytherin et al.. It would have Harry imperiously order a slave Kreacher (and a *free* Dobby) to watch Malfoy, simply handwave away the possibility of enlisting the D.A. to assist *b/c solidarity*.
It won't give Neville & Luna *actual character growth* of leadership in House Mollytoff, would rather snuff out "Dumbledore's Army" altogether in this book, to privilege these two as explicitly the only ones who get their arses in gear to play hero during the Death Eater attack.
Dumbledore's mention of how Voldemort only ever felt at home at Hogwarts, Harry's discomfort at feeling so himself, is a golden opportunity (missed) to have Dumbledore himself say *why*: b/c Voldemort was seduced by aspects of its traditions he himself now finds dubious at best.
Even as it *reaches* for the import in Voldemort learning of Horcruxes via the Old Boys' Club that is the Slug Club, which is Hogwarts itself ofc, in him seeking relics of the founders to use, it cops out with Gryffindor's sword safe & sound, uncorrupted, ofc.
Fuck that: Nagini is a red herring, a good means to cement the idea a living being may be a horcrux, as groundwork for Harry being so, but a blatant avoidance of the truth: it is the sword of Sandhurst which needs to be broken *by* the snake in the finale of the whole story. Obv.
The locket isn't quite so traditional an icon for the set, but there's a cup & a crown, FFS. How can you have personified eugenics out to corrupt each of the 4 cornerstones of a bastion of privilege, the sword *right there*, & decide... umm, I know, *let's make it his pet snake*?
Honestly, Dumbledore's blithe confidence, his trust here in the Gryffindor "nobility" within everyone needs to be *wrong* (in focus on Gryffindor). It's that (at least as far as Harry knows) which gets him killed by Snape, trusted as lover of Lily (i.e. for chivalric nobility.)
The text is crying out for a skeptical Harry to ask, "Are you sure it's a snake? Are you *sure* it couldn't be some other relic of Gryffindor?" For a Dumbledore calmly "Quite sure, dear boy." But no, infinite points to Gryffindor! The ideal of co-opted "nobility" is unassailable.
Not even as the narrative shows the vice of "nobility" when Harry uses an untested sectumsepra (which here Dumbledore would have warned him of) against Malfoy, a spell that literally slashes *as a sword*. Wake up & smell the coppitude, Harry. Playing cop just made you a bastard.
In his horror at the sight of Draco's wounds, he should absolutely be thinking that for all Dumbledore's trust, he's not so sure a sword wouldn't make the *perfect* Horcrux for Voldemort. When he defends the book to Hermione, he should be seeing that cop in himself as to blame.
This is all a narrative trajectory leading up to Dumbledore's futile self-sacrifice (as far as Harry is concerned) for a horcrux that isn't even a horcrux, his death due to trusting in reform (even as a radical queer, he's not quite ready to give up on Hogwarts or Snape).
In the wake of it, he shouldn't just be saying he won't come back to Hogwarts next term. He should be ready to burn it to the fuckin ground, seeing that Dumbledore's death is not a "stain on Hogwarts' history", but rather its entire sorry history snuffing out any gentler future.
McGonagall gives us the missed cue, when she speaks of Dumbledore's death as worse than the basilisk, as if the latter were not the very foundational cause of all Hogwarts' ills, the former the capstone of them, damning it as irredeemable:
What is missing here is Harry seeing no difference. It's the lie that's lain beneath the foundations of Hogwarts from its very beginnings, given flesh in Voldemort as the embodiment of pureblood zealotry in its incestuous perfection, that's risen to murder Dumbledore.
It's done so with the Half-Blood Prince as its weapon, murdered the wizard who was wisdom and kindness itself. This isn’t a stain on Hogwarts history, but the hollowness of its every tradition. Dumbledore has sought to reform it, and it has murdered him.
"And in that moment, Harry did not want Hogwarts simply closed. He wanted it burned to the ground."
If only the "ground sown with salt" Carthage reference from The Haunting of Hill House weren't already out there in The Haunting of Hill House, man, that'd be the line to use.
If only the "ground sown with salt" Carthage reference from The Haunting of Hill House weren't already out there in The Haunting of Hill House, man, that'd be the line to use.
My thoughts on Deathly Hallows so far are mostly craft issues (ffs, how many retcons on the workings of things are you trying to cram in?) but lol at Moody's death (ACAB) and lol at the heroes fondly remembering his "constant vigilance!" refrain... which was BARTY CROUCH JR FFS.
But then the whole Barty Crouch Jr storyline is a desperate liberal contortion to avoid the obvious bridge between Book 3's "Azkaban is Guantanamo" and Book 5's "Fudge wants Harry in Azkaban" whereby Moody is just Moody all along, the top Auror who went Death Eater b/c ACAB.
He's basically a 1970s hard case cop from the magical Sweeney, a "smack em up & send em down" bruiser in a world where Wormwood Scrubs uses torture, in a force with carte blanche from Crouch Snr to kill, imprisonments w/o trial. Might as well be a cop in Apartheid South Africa.
He just went bad, end of backstory. He was already bad. He shouldn't even *be* in the series after Goblet of Fire, because his unmasking should be figurative, not literal, just a reveal that a top cop is a top bastard. The narrative can't face that, so it concocts a fall guy.
But the backbrain narrative *knows fine well* what the actual story is, that the Moody we see after Goblet of Fire is actually the Moody *of* Goblet of Fire, his bastardy just offloaded out into a scapegoat, the kids' fond memories of his "constant vigilance!" a telling slip.
The only way to even remotely salvage him, I'd say, would be to make his retirement from the Auror Office an ousting b/c he turned whistleblower on Crouch Snr after Sirius's arrest, never buying Black's guilt, but his allegations were dismissed by a "Scrimgeour Inquiry".
Rather than Crouch Jnr masquerading as him in Goblet of Fire, he's puppeteering him under an Imperius Curse, easily & undetected b/c beneath the disillusion that turned Moody against the Auror Office, his bastard cop core is still, to all intents & purposes, fascistic.
The dubiety of having him lead the broomstick ride at the start of Order of the Phoenix would be part of the thematics of reformism versus radicalism: is his bastardy a risky susceptibility to authoritarianism or do revolutionaries need bastardy like his, b/c nazis need punched?
He *could* be a bastard ex-cop who is now *firmly* of the opinion that ACAB: all cops are bastards. Given Tonks's cheery clueless privilege rubbing Harry up the wrong way, I'd hazard her the flipside: his protege but firmly in the "it's just a few bad apples" apologist camp.
Anyway, yeah, again I'm gonna say that a bunch of the spurious nonsenses we get in the first half of Deathly Hallows are results of the backbrain narrative being avoided in disacknowledgement of privilege. Because yes, the sword of Gryffindor is 100% a Horcrux.
Because the obvious truth of the Sandhurst spirit being absolutely as co-opted to fascism as the rest of Hogwarts has been erased in the narrative, gone with it is the real purpose of the Snitch in the finale, which is *not* to contain the Resurrection Stone. Because that's dumb.
Since when the fuck did Snitches have "flesh memories" & secret compartments? Why *would* they have the latter? Why are folk suddenly blithely *taking this for granted* like it's totes been established as a Thing? Like everyone knows magic cricket balls open up to keep shit in?
No, just as the Deluminator is to lead Ron back to his mates, and the book is to point Hermione at the Hallows, the Snitch is enchanted to *lead Harry to the Horcruxes*, duh. It's a *Seeker* for the *Seeker*, FFS. Release it and it goes darting off toward any nearby Horcruxes.
When Harry *thinks* about throwing it away, when they're on the lam, that's the missed turn where he's meant to *actually* throw it away. At which it flies off into the tent to the locket, then back to Harry, then back to the locket, like a dog trying to get you to follow it.
It's coming back to him because he's a Horcrux too, but it just looks like a "follow me, come on" move. It's a Snitch. This is what Snitches do: they dart about as lures for Quidditch Seekers *like Harry* FFS to go after. What more obvious a tool could Dumbledore pick?
The scene where Harry should have tossed it, where he'd realise it's a Horcrux seeker, comes immediately before the jump to the Forest of Dean where by complete authorial fiat they just happen to end up close enough to the sword's hiding place for him to find it.
The narrative can't have the Gryffindor relic be a Horcrux (perish the thought!) so we get utter contrivance in place of Harry simply, now knowing the Snitch's purpose, releasing it, snatching it as it darts, and Apparating, Hermione in tow, to follow it to the Forest of Dean.
If the Snitch *doesn't* contain the Resurrection Stone, where's that then? In the Slytherin locket, duh, put there by some Gaunt ancestor who got the locket from one side of the family, the stone passed down from the other (along with the ring that ends up another Horcrux.)
Which gives you the Resurrection Stone revealed at the midpoint when the locket is destroyed, behind the glass, with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows on it (rather than a random notion by Hermione) the spur for them to go visit Luna Lovegood's dad to try & find out WTF it means.
Except none of this can happen because it would require the narrative to accept the Sword of Gryffindor, symbol of chivalric nobility, of Sandhurst soldiers and would-be magic cops, as a Horcrux. Which it is. Which is why Dumbledore has a *test of friendship* to get it.
Ron's Deluminator not just randomly guiding him back to them by a wild fluke of timing in the nick of time to save Harry, but rather being designed to go off if & when the sword's magic perimeter alarms are breached, leading him to go give Harry backup by actual causality.
The test requires one person to be ready to die to get the sword, another to save that person, so it doesn't end up in the hands of a pure egoist Chosen One wank, but also (structurally) for the echo of Voldemort's defences for the locket in the cave to quietly signpost HORCRUX.
Which is the same reason, really: to actually be able to defeat the embodiment of the wizarding world's institutionalised eugenics requires a fellowship capable of seeing the compromised nature of their own Magical Sandhurst ideal of heroic fellowship.
There's a potential for the Snitch as a Horcrux-Seeker to cause issues in the second half--if it'd work as shortcut to finding the rest of them--but we'll see if there's owt that can't be ironed out with a few tweaks. In the first half certainly it resolves a lot of contortions.
Man, in my edit of this book, I'd have Harry telling Bill "some of my best friends are goblins" Weasley that anyone can do magic after his bullshit speech about goblins' and wizards' differing views of ownership just to facepunch him in his fuckin entitlement.
So, "All goblin made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs," are they, Bill? And if they were bought by wizards, "then they would consider it rented by the one who had paid the money," would they, Bill? You know who owns that object then, Bill? The fuckin goblin, *Bill*.
If the owner of the fuckin dress robes shop considers themself to be hiring you your fuckin dress robes for your fuckin wedding, *Bill*, you don't get to keep them because *you* consider them to have been bought, *Bill*. It's not a difference of opinion. That's not how it works.
The Harry who knows the basilisk's secret and has actually registered the reality around him? Has a drink in him in this scene too. He would totally shut that shit down. And then he'd tell Bill his whole wizarding world was built on a lie btw as they headed back to the others.
But then that Harry also wouldn't be projecting a racist phantom of bloodthirsty sadistic malice onto a Griphook who's clearly got good cause to have beef with wizards. Respect on the attitude, Griphook. Tell them the soup's fuckin cold when they bring it up; I'm with you, man.
Also: ye, gods, the Sword of Gryffindor is so 100% a Horcrux, FFS. It's stolen from goblins, Harry's told, puncturing his perfect little cop ideal of Magic Sandhurst (if he accepts the truth wizards deny) & he's entirely up for swindling Griphook over it "for the greater good".
There is no version of this narrative with a shred of integrity that doesn't have Harry recognising here that when Dumbledore assured him this one relic of Gryffindor was totally safe, couldn't possibly have a bit of Voldemort in it... lol, it was tainted from the get-go.
The Sword of Well We Say It's Godric Gryffindor's But Actually It Was Sort Of A Rental Agreement Godric Just Decided The First Month's Payment Was Enough And Went On The Lam We're Not Giving It Back Now It's Ours Like The Elgin Marbles And Your Point Is?
The treatment of goblins and of house-elves seem to be trying to outdo each other in the gobsmacking apologetics stakes. Nowhere in these books, perhaps, is there a more damning self-indictment of liberal both-sidesism than with the goblins.
In the forbidding of wand-use by non-magical creatures, we have a clear-cut case of an Apartheid/Segregation style division & disempowerment, but at every turn this is obfuscated to present privilege's pedestaling as a level playing field. It's truly repugnant.
I mean, the anti-semitic trope of (literally) "swarthy", gold-grubbing, long-fingered, gleefully cruel bankers is just a *starting point*. More odious yet, arguably, is the feint by which the prejudice of wizards is "critiqued" in a mechanics 100% designed to validate it.
The biological determinism, the racial essentialism, is bedrock already--bad enough as a trick to subvert liberal saviourist anti-bigotry a la Hermione, which is itself simply paternalist bigotry: be nice to one's inferiors. But now we get the active subjugation justified.
The polite bourgeois bigot's trick lies in a substitution of objections where the right to carry a wand "has long been contested between wizards and goblins". Not "has been *denied* goblins *by* wizards." But "has been contested". Coming from Griphook, the euphemism is damning.
From a wizard, one could argue the spin a plain rendering of prejudice. One could pretend the narrative objective, presenting views--Ron's tabloid bigotry, Hermione's liberal saviourism--without comment to be judged by their own demerits by a discerning reader sparked to thought.
But this is putting the wizard spin in the goblin's mouth to erase the *actual* legit objection--to wizard supremacy's power differential; to the disempowerment of non-humans--the denial of a right recast as *contest* over cultural property.
Where prohibition of wand use is actually of a kind with a denial of *voting rights* to non-wizards, Griphook has been made to object to it only as a dispute over the sharing of cultural knowledge. This is so it can be dismissed first as immaterial, then outright vindicated.
First Ron dismisses it as immaterial--goblins can do magic without wands--as if this were merely analogous to a country club membership excluding PoCs. PoCs can do business without being in the golf club, the Freemasons, the white fratriarchy in whatever form. They don't need it.
So this reroutes Griphook's objection to a peeve at being excluded from the perks attendant on such. He is just angry wizards will not share what is 100% defined as *their* cultural property: wandlore. Goblins (in powerlust) resent not getting what's not theirs shared with them.
Now the both-sidesist vindication can be wheeled in: goblins do not share *their* cultural property, their savvy of metalwork. Not only can PoCs do business without membership in the white fratriarchy. They have their own such system that whites are excluded from. See the trick?
Turn about is fair play under this sleight of hand.This is straight up Apartheid/Segregation apologetics: separate but "equal", honest. But this is not about balanced scales of wandlore hoarding versus metal-lore hoarding. It's about prohibition of wand *use*, denial of a right.
The wizards aren't denied the *use* of goblin metalwork. They're not disenfranchised by prohibitions. Rather, the goblin's cultural property is set indirectly under wizard control by denial of wand use narrowing their options for magical work to use of this *to service wizards*.
One cannot help but see (unless one is the narrative, blind to its own bigotry) the historical forcing of Jewish folk into the trades of stereotype--bankers, pawnbrokers, etc.--by denying them the right to work in any trade *but* the "usury" deemed base & sinful by Christianity.
(This is why Gringotts should really *at very least* be owned by the Malfoys with goblins and/or leprechauns as simply staff, explicitly disallowed any other role in the wizarding world, with the narrative *actually acknowledging the subjugation this constitutes.*)
So we have a race forced into a specific service trade by the system of privilege. But we have this justified by, to all intents & purposes, "the goblins have *their own* water fountains"--as if these cultural properties were even equally distributed, Griphook's beef invalidated.
Having achieved this apology for Apartheid, the liberal centrist narrative can now play its trump card of bourgeois propriety, Harry being the "bigger man", the wizard transcending the petty acrimony of Ron ("rightly") defending against Griphook's "unjust" powerlust for wandlore.
That's all just a trivial slapfight of equal factions falling prey to incivility (unequally, the goblin being implicitly most at fault for his boorish chip-on-the-shoulder "reverse racism" ofc,) and we must be objective, the moderate's message is, not be sucked into such "bias".
Wholly lacking in self-awareness, this is the very picture of every NYT both-sides op-ed presenting itself as the voice of reason, of sensible moderate objectivity, and all the while, at the most fundamental level, simply the use of bourgeois propriety in the service of fascism.
Griphook is allowed to voice a hint of the *actual grievance* where he points out the power differential--"your race is set still more firmly above mine"--but the crime is attached to Voldemort's excesses in e.g. taking over Gringotts & killing elves, not to the Apartheid itself.
And not only is the systemic segregation absolved by scapegoating Voldemort, even this critique is mere pretext to *further villainise Griphook* as prejudicially erasing the "virtuous" wizard paternalists pretending (to themselves) to be in his corner by protesting the injustice.
"Who amongst the wand-carriers protests?" and you can just about hear Hermione saying "'Wand-carriers' is a slur!" as she refutes this dire "reverse-racism": "We do!" The liberal centrists protest! The hashtag-resistance protests! The white saviours protest! How very dare you?!
And just for good measure, Griphook is to be damned not just as reverse-racist ingrate unappreciative of the paternalist privileged kowtowing to bourgeois propriety in their sympathy for the poor inferiors, but also for dismissing the victimhood(s) of his so-very-nice oppressors.
Hermione plays the Oppression Olympics, equates her own oppression as mudblood (real but only *institutionalised* by Voldemort's victory) with the systemic & historic injustice meted on goblins. She's "hunted quite as much as any goblin or elf". Shame on you, Griphook! Bigot!
The narrative tacitly acknowledges her point-blank lie in a "we" including Ron as she claims they've desired elf freedom for years--including also Harry, still slave master to Kreacher--but not the lie whereby she's *actually* just been trying to impose "liberty" as civilisation.
She, like the narrative, has in truth *no fuckin concept* of elf freedom. Because the racial essentialism sets elves as inherently enslaved by an immutable servile nature that can only be trumped by the paternalist, colonialist imposition of a white saviour's bourgeois propriety.
Her claim to desire elf freedom is a damn lie. She wants to impose her morality, in which *actual* egalitarian principles have been collapsed to kneejerk taboo, upon a race inherently incapable of freeing them-fuckin-selves, painted as by turns comic jigaboo & monstrous Caliban.
But the narrative sees her as in the right, doesn't just absolve her of this bigotry but sets it as the virtue by which her superiority over Griphook is demonstrated, by which his "reverse-racism" is condemned. It is all in the service of character assassinating him--ALL goblins.
All of this is to give us a vapid pretence that the narrative is critiquing our heroes, bringing in moral ambiguity, when they decide to--oh noes, how un-Gryffindor!--double-cross Griphook on the sword. Look! the narrative says. See how I acknowledge wizards doing goblins wrong!
This is a bullshit smokescreen, a posture of bourgeois propriety's faux-egalitarianism, designed to cover the consistent & profound abjection whereby it's telling us, in every sentence, that Griphook, *b/c he is a goblin*, will betray them (as he does) if they don't do it first.
The actual thrust of the thematics here, beneath a pretence of showing the heroes as flawed, of inviting the reader to doubt Gryffindor "nobility", is sheer unadulterated racism. It is actually insidiously *requiring* the reader to see Griphook as deserving the planned betrayal.
If you still cannot get why the interminable projection (until Rowling went TERF, at least) of the HP mythos onto the political context led to the eye-rolling cry of "READ ANOTHER BOOK", I fear there is no hope for you. It emblematises faux-progressiveness as cloak for privilege.
I have to restrain myself, tbh, from being uncharitable to millennials & Gen-X here, source the problem in the cultural artifact insidiously *erasing* awareness of privilege even as it propagated bourgeois propriety's saviourism. Part of me would be Judgey McJudgerson af here.
I can't help but see what's going on in these books as typifying & reinforcing, maybe even inculcating in young readers, the kind of blindnesses that can only sow divisions between PoC & white "allies" & brocialist class warriors & bourgeois "progressives". As they have done.
I lament for what *could have been* had the narrative woken to the nature of its own underpinnings & tackled them head on. I'm not sure HP would have been the same phenomenon, to be fair--inequities engendering angst & illogic may have been one driver for the fanfic--but still.
This is pithy & pointed enough re the prohibition of wand use among non-human creatures, I feel I have to bring it into the thread, lol.
https://twitter.com/NotTheAeronaut/status/1302687395930877952
I am still formulating my thoughts on the odd retcon of wandlore whereby "the wand chooses the wizard" becomes "wands switch allegiance if their wizard is bested", but I can't help but see assimilationist thinking here...
Where, I *think*, "wands may refuse to work for a wizard they hate" is actually a simpler principle just logically extending the conceit and a better fit for the action of the narrative, the illogic in my mode of critique then a likely symptom of the narrative's avoidant denial.
Alas, from Ollivander:
"In general, however, where a wand has been won, its allegiance will change."
"Subtle laws govern wand ownership, but the conquered wand will usually bend its will to its new master."
"In general, however, where a wand has been won, its allegiance will change."
"Subtle laws govern wand ownership, but the conquered wand will usually bend its will to its new master."
https://twitter.com/skottk/status/1302696170196815873
"Yes, if you won it, it is more likely to do your bidding, and do it well, than another wand."
The unique quality of the Elder Wand is that it (reputedly) requires outright murder.
The unique quality of the Elder Wand is that it (reputedly) requires outright murder.
This is arguably an outright (just fudged) contradiction of "the wand chooses the wizard", since the conquest is fundamentally *trumping* the wand's choice, overriding its agency. In a similar apologetics to the house-elf, it will serve the wizard who conquers it out of "choice".
Another *wildly* erratic retcon likewise suspicious is where Harry's wand in the opening suddenly *performs magic on its own* to destroy Voldemort's borrowed wand, even moving Harry's arm to do so. This is unprecedented, acknowledged as such & never explained.
This more than anything suggests a repression of the *logical* scenario: Voldemort's borrowed wand rejects him to the extent of shattering itself rather than serve him. Even Lucius Malfoy's wand finds Voldemort a bridge too far. This is just the wand choosing "not *that* wizard!"
This works, I think, with all the wand action in the book. Bellatrix's wand resists Hermione. Pettigrew's wand is young & made under duress so it's not trained to Pettigrew, even inheriting Ollivander's hate perhaps, happier to be used by Ron. Draco's *interestingly* likes Harry.
The latter is 100% in keeping with the narrative that's been humanising Draco since the previous book, slowly allowing sympathy for him as victim of a brutal(ising) home environment, hinting of potential redemption & setting his focus on Harry as profoundly queerable.
One can read Draco as a closeted gay scion of a family putting so much stock in breeding there's no question of his sexuality being acceptable. Self-loathing, he fixes on Harry as object of attraction & projects out all hate. But his wand (paging Dr Freud) reveals the truth.
There's a clear option for him to cross the line at the end, a choice offered to choose the sodality of the abject (as House Mollytoff is in the backbrain narrative) over the privileged assimilation sacrificing sexual freedom.
Him choosing not to change sides strikes me as arguably a perfectly legit choice as tragedy (albeit only really rewarding as such in subtext), not a problematic avoidance, but it's definitely tempting to imagine him going over for redemption, & I withhold judgement on what fits.
(I haven't yet got to that point in the reading, so it's possible there will be signposts to come that will indicate one way or the other AFAIC.)
The point of all this being that the logical backbrain narrative with wand's resisting out of agency has been suppressed in favour of one legitimising conquest by projecting a servile acceptance of subjugation by the subjugated. "Wands know their place" is the new principle.
From a book doctor perspective, I'll reiterate a key point: at every turn, we are seeing deficits in hard literary *craft* (e.g. retcons, authorial fiat) that can be read as symptoms of, and signposts to, dodgy ideology generating denial of better choices that would challenge it.
The shitty ideology may be loaded into tropes, & the coherence of a more ethical backbrain narrative struggling to overcome it (in any work) makes me loathe to ever judge a writer (I've seen it too often from writers aghast to have it unpacked for them,) but it's worth saying:
Bad ethics makes for bad craft. A lack of political nous as to the bigotries that may be getting woven into the very fabric of a narrative is likely to lead to *practically dysfunctional narratives*. Not just apolitical (or "despite the politics") escapist fun, but bad plotting.
This whole thread is not just about how the politics of Harry Potter is bad. The biological determinism traced here begs connection to the author's terfery ofc, but this thread is as much about how the politics has *thwarted* a woker narrative that would have been better crafted.
There's a bit of a trade-off in terms of depth of sympathy versus narrative trajectory, for example, but I think there's a case for *Kreacher* to be the one who rescues the heroes from Malfoy Manor, not Dobby, called to help without the contrivance of a broken mirror & Aberforth.
The elf's death would still be a Bury Your Elves noble sacrifice of a member of an abject underclass in service of the heroes, but with Kreacher the assertion of agency in action against the Blacks would offer him payback & closure of a narrative trajectory left as loose end.
Such weak logic & blatant expedience: Harry finding a mirror shard; carrying it around w/ him to gaze at; it luckily falling out of his pouch at just the right time for his cry to reach Aberforth; Aberforth having luckily bought the partner off Mundungus; being in touch w/ Dobby.
This is sheer contrivance & as such needs interrogated: is something being avoided? Well, why is Harry not calling on Kreacher? He can apparate into Grimmauld Place from Hogwarts at a call. He *should* be unbound by now, but no matter: free Dobby IIRC comes at a call elsewhere.
Kreacher has been afforded some dignity by now by the reveal of what Voldemort did to him & Regulus's sacrifice *for* him. In a thorough edit in which he's already freed, healed by Dobby's commune, he would come to help on condition of payment/gift & get *reparations*.
Fuck the "critique" of Sirius casting Cissy & Bella as *kinder*, FFS, the Black cruelty would be laid bare as monstrous brainwashing: elves want to feel helpful; it would be so helpful if you'd just punish yourself, Ma Black has drummed into him, if you could anticipate my whims.
It would be so helpful if you could set an example, for wayward Sirius, of absolute loyalty to our beliefs. What the House of Black needs, she's inculcated in him, is zeal about the pureblood creed, the black sheep chastised. Kindness?! It's beyond abuse what they've done to him.
A narrative actually *getting* this would have Harry give him not just the locket of the brother who *was* actually kind, but also *the fucking house*. Where we return after past time to a scene of Kreacher dishing out dinner, he would be the host, not a now-happy servant, ugh.
After the escape where they leave Kreacher to his fate (torture is explicitly floated), Harry doesn't even try to summon him (if only to check he's OK) & on a paper-thin rationale: some villain may be holding onto him just at that moment & would be Apparated into their hidey.
This isn't even needed. If Harry tries to summon him b/c "no elf left behind!" he could simply *not come to the call*, fuelling a worry for him: that he's unable. As a free elf, he *might* be thought unwilling, but one would eschew any "ingrate!" scorn befitting the current text.
This thread left hanging is *exactly* the plotline one would want of a character who's to come bursting back into the story at just the right time--not dead after all, yay!--self-freed from his capture & now swashbuckling in to the rescue! And with *his own score to settle*.
Humanised by the story of the cave (and the erased story of how Ma Black made him what he is), he would be afforded more humanity yet as a character with his own agenda, his own story, the conflict to be resolved in a symbolic punch in the face to the Blacks who broke him.
This is to be set against... what? The sentimentalist button-pushing of using Dobby because he's *nicer*, because he's a figure of comically servile fawning we are fonder of than the Kreacher who's been mostly loathed by a narrative as haughtily revolted by him as Sirius.
But the narrative cannot get the fuck over its loathsome abjection of him. It can get as far as "redeeming" him to a happy servant (when it's healed he needs, not redeemed FFS,) but it can't imagine him as subject vs abject, as free agent in the narrative, so it fails.
And that failure doesn't just leave the political thematics of the narrative *actively bad* where it could be *actively good*; it engenders a car crash of contrivance just to patch the hole where what sh/d have been happening isn't. It results in deficits in basic craftsmanship.
Dumbledore's backstory, meanwhile, has no bad craft outcomes of such blatancy, but it's another exercise in classist dodginess, refuting a "false" version of events that's relevant to reality in favour of a "true" version of uglier import.
The Rita Skeeter version has his sister a squib who is made so by an abusive mother, another instance of magical incapacity as confidence issue, echoing Neville & Merope in showing the source in middle/upper class parents pressuring kids to prove their exceptionality.
This is tragically realistic as per the example of the kid in the 7 Up documentary noted back at the start of all this. But as Merope's aristo family is painted as Dickensian underclass brutes to displace critique of (petit-)bourgeois cruelty to abjection of proles, so too here.
This is a lie of tabloid scum hatemonger & shit stirrer Rita Skeeter. Not to be trusted. The truth? The sister was actually *extra-super-magical* & behind her shut-in status lies not the chronic abuse of a bourgeois mother laying pressure on her to PERFORM, but *muggle bullying*.
Actually, come to think of it, arguably, there *is* illogic here, weak craft. Because it's one single solitary incident of bullying sends Ariana into straight up insanity, breaks her utterly. And the jealousy driving the attack's at least *questionable* in terms of plausibility.
One can see a reality of Tall Poppy Syndrome, to be sure, in a class analysis of a group of Muggle boys (i.e. working class) bullying a girl for doing magic (i.e. being a swot / creative.) It's not classism to acknowledge the inculcated *self-policing* of the underclass.
There's anti-intellectual / anti-creative bullying any smart/artsy kid from a working class background knows all too well--& may well loathe without class conscious recognition of the backlash effect they're collateral damage of, the mechanics of class war underpinning it:
That's to say, where the underclass is kept ignorant of their ability to "do magic", figuratively speaking, has all expectations of exceptionality quashed by constant casting as brutal prole, academic & creative focus is cast as *inherently bourgeois*, class treason, *snobbery*.
This is part of the *mechanics of subjugation* of the underclass: it's made to enforce its own ignorance, trained to bully any kid who, as swot or artsy type (coded gay in toxic masculinity ofc), sets off their "bourgeois enemy" alarm, is seen as snooty, getting above themself.
Add in the gender dynamic of fratriarchal harassment of women & girls, and there's absolutely a validity in the rendering of the Muggle boys reacting with a vicious jealous attack on the girl who innocently tries but fails to teach them to do the magic she can.
But where such bullying is in reality generally a chronic ordeal, here we must believe in a figurative rendering of it as a single attack so brutal in its trauma it left the victim quite literally mad, and here it's hard not to see the monstrosity as symptom of blame-shifting.
I.e. unless we read it as an attack on a 6 year old so horrific as to belong more in grimdark than kids' fic, given the classism rife in the text, we have to question if the Muggle attack's really about again demonising the underclass, projecting blame to justify *their* fate.
Is there an avoidance of a backbrain narrative going on here again, the "false" story a squib made so by a pushy parent actually the truer one, with the Muggle attack fabricated to offload blame to the underclass for the ills done to the privileged *by* the privileged?
There's the friendly engagement implicit in the boys seeking to learn the girl's tricks too, the girl happy to teach, the whiplash with which we have to go from that scenario to monstrous jealousy in a heartbeat, not non-credible (again gender dynamics) but seriously *extreme*.
But why the detail of the attack by the father on the Muggle boys, which complicates things beyond a simple scapegoating to my mind, which *does* afford them victim status too? Is the backbrain reaching for a *third* scenario, a truer truth beyond this "true" version of events?
Factor in the basilisk's secret, and holy shit, but yes. It is not insignificant that the reason for the alleged attack is an *attempt to teach magic to muggles* by a girl *too young to understand* that this "isn't possible", is "doomed to fail".
Narrator voice: it did not fail.
Narrator voice: it did not fail.
If we understand that actually, in this worldscape, *anyone can do magic*, we have every possibility that Ariana *did* in fact teach the Muggle boys magic. This cannot however be acknowledged with a Fidelius Charm in place making it an breakable secret that anyone can do magic.
One random Muggle doing magic by accident can be assimilated into the lie of magic as innate ability; they can be cast as "Muggle-born". Three Muggles *being taught* is shoving it in the face of a father who arrives to see this & *does* understand that it's "not possible".
If the secret cannot be broken due to the Fidelius Charm, if the charm makes you fail to see the truth even when it's staring you in the face, then the horribly logical requirement is for a father *witnessing* the truth to do what needs to be done to preserve his ignorance of it.
So his attack on the Muggle boys (I don't recall now if it's specified as murder earlier, but we can assume it so) would take place to wipe out all evidence & the Fidelius Charm would warp his memory to cast it as revenge for an attack on Ariana, & Ariana's own memory is hit too.
She has the lived experience of having actually taught the Muggle boys magic, but the Fidelius Charm would fuck this the fuck up with a false memory denying it, formed when she's too young to even understand what's happened, this being what actually breaks her sanity & control.
Dumbledore being told what's (supposedly) happened as a boy is motive for his dalliance with fascism via Grindelwald, but any weakness in that story--e.g. the Muggle boys being previously great friends with Ariana--is grounds for a niggling sense of Muggles being hard done by.
And when Dumbledore is told the basilisk's secret by Harry at the end of Goblet of Fire, we might well imagine him suddenly recognising this as the missing piece of a puzzle that has haunted him all his life, on the margins of awareness, everything now clicking into place.
As a woke Harry, knowing the basilisk's secret, class-conscious & radicalised, would also instantly recognise the truth behind Aberforth's account of the events, the truly monstrous impact the Fidelius Charm has had on all encapsulated in this personal instance: murder & madness.
So, finished up the last book, & aye, the tension between reactionary entrenchment that can't even *imagine* reform to the system versus radical potential striving to break through & abolish it persists to the very end: a fantasy of happy slave Kreacher bringing Master a sammich.
Oh dear. The narrative can imagine Harry arriving to find the backbrain's House Mollytoff in their revolutionary bunker--the Room of Requirements--but it's the colours of three houses flying, not the red & black of a unified anarchosocialism, divisions scrapped in common cause.
Neville "Che" Longbottom may be leading an insurgency, but Harry's response to the grassroots antifa, to the rallying of everyone, adult & child to hold the line, no pasaran?
"“You’ve got to stop this!” Harry told Neville. “What did you call them all back for? This is insane—”"
"“You’ve got to stop this!” Harry told Neville. “What did you call them all back for? This is insane—”"
Minerva "Nazi-Puncher" McGonagall may threaten death to Slughorn (possibly Slytherin students) if they try anything, but it's still Hogwarts threatened, the Gryffindors to be roused, all underage students to be evacuated, like Ginnie, b/c Freddie Oversteegen was 21, I guess.
The narrative actually imagines Percy, lickspittle Ministry lackey of Fudge & Scrimgeour--Percy who was stamping the arrest orders for Muggle rights activists half a book ago, no doubt--suddenly arrived with all the rest to make a stand in the name of propriety & status quo.
Those who'd fight? "If you are of age, you may stay," says McGonagall. And we expect, "But no running in the corridors." It's a kids' book, sure, but De Larrabeiti's Borribles would be out to decapitate Death Eaters with shovels here, rumblesticks ready, no quarter expected.
Of the bodies at the end, are any Death Eaters? If so, I missed them. No first year Mollytoffs shouting "Sectumsempra!" here, the heroes must be civilised in their victory, a victory of civility. Neville's gran is there, and she'd surely be most upset if they used bad language.
But hey, after 7 books of being an inveterate wizard supremacist, Ron manages to achieve a quantum leap in wokeness with the recognition that they maybe shouldn't order the slave elves in as cannon fodder--that wouldn't be nice. We'll need em for the epilogue kids, after all.
The epilogue kids who, regardless of the stirring reiteration of Mollytoff unity in the aftermath, people sitting anywhere--gasp!--not at their house tables, are doomed to the same divisive Sorting that Dumbledore can only, with Snape, *vaguely wonder* if it's done "too soon".
Snape's backstory is a case study in a kid doomed by the system. He's spying at 10, sure, but interrupting Petunia's question "How do you do it?" at Lily's magic (the narrative thwarting Lily showing her, Petunia learning,) he's as much Ravenclaw intellect as Slytherin cunning.
"It's obvious, isn't it?" is a smart kid's perplexed hauteur at one who doesn't get it, who has no reason not to get it. If he knows there are "Muggles" & "wizards", a pint-size Spock, he can see no grounds for the difference, just as he sees no difference between Lily & himself.
He's "the bravest man" Harry ever knew, proves loyal to Lily and Dumbledore to the death, the showdown itself hingeing on his *lack of betrayal* of Dumbledore. (It's not Draco's ten-a-penny disarming a murder wand wants; it's the treachery.) Snape is Gryffindor & Hufflepuff too.
People are complex, FFS, duh. The story is showing us the lamentable sealing of fate by the imposition of strictured identity: Petunia declared a Muggle despite somehow getting a letter to Dumbledore; Snape doubled-down on a desire to be Slytherin by James & Sirius's taunts.
The backbrain narrative wants to tear this apart, but the surface narrative would rather have the ironclad eternal status quo reasserted in an epilogue of poor Albus recognising he's *fucked* if they put him in Slytherin, Harry reassuring: the fascists will be lucky to have him!
With the basilisk's secret in mind, I do wonder if the fudging of the cup's destruction--Ron patently *not* speaking Parseltongue but managing to open the Chamber of Secrets with "a horrible strangled hissing noise" to get a tooth--suggests a reversal of roles.
"Find the Ravenclaw ghost and ask where the diadem is, figure it out," seems a better task for Harry's allies, *all* of them--"tear the place apart!"--while Harry himself goes back to where it really all began to weapon up, confront what he now knows the basilisk to have been.
He can still get back to find the search fruitless, remember the Room of Requirements, confront a subtext-loaded Draco (Harry's laugh at his mother's wand an unspoken "gay!", Draco's action against Crabbe ambiguous in motive) & save his life as groundwork for a queer redemption.
It's a fizzle-out resolution for the character trajectory of Harry's human nemesis to have him just fade from the action, not least with the weight put on his "winning" the Elder Wand from Dumbledore, Harry "winning" Draco's by snatching it, making the Elder Wand Harry's b/c huh?
In a narrative *not* clinging to the classist hogwash, *not* denying Gryffindor complicity, *not* refusing to reform Slytherin (just accepting it as fash forever), we'd need a mechanism to destroy the sword after Voldemort's non-defeat. Draco's redemption presents itself.
A Draco panicked in the battle's chaos, flailing wildly with the sword at Death Eaters & defenders, at a horcrux-seeker snitch pestering him (obvious hint). On his knees, pathetic, among the silent crowd as Voldemort & Harry talk on the Elder Wand--which simply chooses traitors.
The wand chooses the wizard; the Elder Wand chooses its wizard's betrayer. Simple. No muddle, it's just snubbing Voldemort FFS. Because you want "Accio, sword!" from Harry to plunge it into Voldemort, with the Elder Wand tossed to Draco (as act of faith) to Fiendfyre the bastard.
There *is* more editing required in Deathly Hallows than others in the series to extract into text the radical subtexts suppressed in the muddle of mythos retcons, Christian allegoric mystification & reactionary twaddle, but like the rest it *is* doable.
The Hallows quest makes a whole lot more sense, for example, I'd say, if one forgets the ghosts there just to hold Harry's hand in his Gethsemane, the stone just a doggy treat head pat "good boy" for faith in Dumblegod, and sees it as Snape pointing Harry at a way to come back.
The Slytherin Dark Arts guy knows the Slytherin locket has the necromancy stone inside it? Never! Why, it's almost like someone who objects to killing Harry is pointing his friend Hermione at a way to resurrect a friend when she gets the book about a stone to resurrect friends!
It's almost like all the "Why would Dumbledore make it so difficult?" and "Why would Dumbledore not just tell you about the Hallows?" and "Why would Dumbledore give us two quests at once WTF?" runaround is pointing at a simpler answer than "Dumbledore moves in mysterious ways."
Anyhoo, that'd be *my* simple solution: Harry has to die as a horcrux, but also as Secret-Keeper, to make a ton more new Secret-Keepers who can speak the truth. Tasked by the portrait with the practicalities after Dumbledore's death, Snape is behind the bequeathed objects.
The Snitch is all Dumbledore, charmed on his instruction, but Snape, knowing the sword task might kill Harry, talks Dumbledore into throwing the Deluminator in to make sure Harry has backup there, then slips in the book as his own plan. Then "finds" the will. Hence the delay.
Once Harry knows the score from Snape's memories, he heads off to the forest to his death, but gives Hermione the stone to turn three times, like, two seconds after a signal via the fake Galleons. None of this "nobody should have that power" shite. It's "everybody should share."
After Voldemort's offed, Azkaban stormed like the Bastille, there's no fucking "temporary Minister of Magic". It's Kingsley Shacklebolt, newly minted Secret-Keeper, Apparating straight into the Wizangamot, announcing the basilisk's secret: anyone can do magic. Your time is up.
In the headmaster's office, Harry tells Portrait Dumbledore he was wrong about Gryffindor being incorruptible, just as he himself was wrong about Snape. Because duh, sorting's a bag of shite. Houses, points, it's over. Radical queer Dumbledore is down with that, blithe as ever.
They're keeping the Hallows, Harry the cloak, Hermione the stone: where death triggers the passing on of Secret-Keeper status, she's the best person to see if it can be used to break a Fidelius Charm. And she's not gonna resurrect generations of maltreated house-elves. Probably.
Ron gets the Elder Wand, b/c he walked out on Harry, but came back--betrayal undone--and its previous owner did go all "subjugate the muggles!" only to turn a new leaf; if it worked fine for Dumbledore it can't be *that* murdery. And it's about time Ron had a fuckin decent wand.
So the three Hallows are united by being shared, & you get a "mastery of death", not of people, but of the old ways, of secrecy & privilege. They're nothing to be afraid of. As the phoenix feather in Harry's wand would say if it could talk: there's no rebirth without death.
You want an epilogue? Fuck that scene of the next gen being packed off to the bastion of privilege to be turned into bourgeois eugenicists. It's Harry as Magic teacher as just another subject at Godric's Hollow High, meeting Ron & Hermione dropping their kids off at the gates.
Chuck Draco Malfoy in the background with his husband, dropping off their adopted kid. Take Harry into a mundane high school with its own Room of Requirements, like every other high school. Into a class for morning registration, reading out the names.
"Dursley, Harry?"
"Here!"
"Dursley, Harry?"
"Here!"
The End.
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