Happy birthday westmoon!!

I've been following a rather long discussion about Harry's getting special treatment in the books, and have something to say about it (pause for expressions of shock). It has gotten into a good area, I think, which is the idea of people resenting special treatment regardless of the reason for it. Think, for instance, about children with serious diseases and their siblings. I believe it's generally understood that siblings can feel jealous of the attention paid to the sick child, and that these feelings should be addressed and not just dismissed by saying the child should feel lucky he doesn't have a disease. Of course the child doesn't want to feel sick; but the jealousy speaks to an anxiety about how he's felt about by his parents or whatever.

So that led me to realize the three characters in HP canon who get the most focused on Harry's special treatment are all characters with issues about themselves not being special--or worse. It's not about Harry, really--Harry could be carried to class by Veelas every day and it wouldn't bother them as much if they were happy in themselves, but as it is they just can't not let it bother them. If you look at what happens to these characters in canon their experience seem to all speak to this same issue. We're not inside their heads hearing about how this is an issue, but JKR is constantly thinking up new things to happen to them that play on it where they're not good enough or don't triumph. I think that's as close as she can come to telling us this is an issue.

( The characters I'm thinking of are Ron, Draco and Snape. )

I was reading something today that brought up that old HP argument, Weasleys vs. Malfoys and it once again made me ask: ( Are there any really happy families in HP canon? )

Phew! That was a lot longer than I expected it to be. I just started babbling about families. The basic idea being that this is why it drives me crazy when any family gets made one-dimensional either way, because it seems like it really goes against canon to both say a family is just completely negative or to say a family--usually the Weasleys--is ideal. I honestly don't even know if JKR *could* write One Big Happy Anybody's Family, because she just seems too aware of how people, especially families, fuck each other up and hurt each other. It’s not just that Voldemort comes from a bad family and Harry from a good one, it’s that while Harry’s family was good and then gone, Voldemort’s was just always gone. (Which of course probably means he never bonded and a sociopath is an expected result, but anyway…)

I was reading something on a list today about Slytherins being evil, perhaps specifically due to the fact that their house was based on Pure bloodlines (something that's changed to "ambition and cunning" by Harry's first year, though was possibly pretty unremarkable an idea thousands of years ago-Durmstrang doesn't even accept Muggleborns iirc). Anyway, there was the comment, "Unless of course one considers Draco to be a good Slytherin, which I most definitely don't." Somewhere else there was another essay on Slughorn being the "true" Slytherin--what they were before Voldemort, and so what they should be. I've written about the idea of Slughorn as "The Good Slytherin" before, and this is sort of the next step from that. Because I was thinking that while at this point I wouldn't say Draco was a Good Slytherin (meaning the Slytherin who is a good person), I did think he had potential in ways that Slughorn really did not.

( And here's why. )

Happy birthday jewelsong and tiranog!!

I've been thinking about how magic works, I think mostly due to recent conversations about Dumbledore's death and the duel in the bathroom in HBP. My reactions to those things got a little more complicated than I originally expected, and connected to magic in general in the Potterverse, but I think it's important for interpreting that bathroom scene, in particular.

( Magic in the Potterverse--err, long )

I just really wanted a subject line that was all letters.

But it is relevant. Oddly, I found myself thinking about the state of H/D post-HBP. I can't begin to cover all of it, but I was thinking about one of the ways in which HBP seemed so H/D-friendly. That is, not anything to do with sexual attraction, but just that of all the standard H/D ideas it picked up on, ( this was one of them. )

p.s. My allergies are driving me crazy.

p.p.s. Unrelated but also about HP, why does it seem like everyone is very quick to assume that the writing in the HBP book could be Lily's, because she was so great in Potions and was helping Snape? Couldn't the joke be that Lily was a Potions genius just like Harry was--because she was getting help from the HBP? Slughorn makes it clear that he's more apt to praise you if he likes you personally, for either personal or political reasons. Plus, does "Just shove a bezoar down his throat" sound more like Snape or Lily? And did Lily create Sectumsempra and write it in Snape's book with the direction "for enemies?"

I was thinking about essential choices today in HP...well, that and Peter Pettigrew and Draco. It all goes back to that line in CoS, ( It's our choices that show us who we are. Spoilers for HBP. )

Okay, I've been reading a bunch of posts and getting the uncomfortable feeling that I'm still in the boat of seeing something slightly different going on with Draco's characterization than some other people. This post is long, cause I went through a lot. Basically...

( Well, I'll cut right here because we're talking spoilers... )

I don't really do predictions, but I've been thinking over what we've got to work with coming into HBP. That is, I think JKR as a writer plays fair, walking that line between giving you enough to figure things out and yet not giving you enough to insure you do, if that makes sense. Hurtling into the last two books, I get the feeling we've been given a lot to work with if we knew how to interpret it--which magical things might come into play, for instance, and more importantly, I think we've gotten to know the people on the chessboard.

See, I tend to think of most of the supporting characters (really, everybody but Harry) as chess pieces who are carved in interesting ways, but are important to look at in terms of their position on the board and what their move is. I don't actually play chess, so I may not be able to talk about this intelligently, but what I mean is that just as different chess pieces move a certain way and can move no other, so do I think we've been shown how the characters in HP move and so can be expected to move in future. The surprises we get about characters do not come in the form of new moves, but in us seeing what they were doing all along. For instance, throughout PoA Peter Pettigrew is described as a sweet but incompetent guy who worshiped MPP. But in the Shrieking Shack, iirc, Lupin and Sirius are able to rip him apart for "always" being the same, sucking up to somebody powerful and hiding behind him. It's not that Peter changed--in the Pensieve he's doing just that. It's that his friends weren't correctly understanding what he was doing when they knew him.

This, btw, is why I don't understand fears that Neville is this generation's Peter. Neville's move has been pretty clear from book 1: he has courage. He is generally timid concerning himself and puts up with a lot of personal abuse, but is prone to wild, reckless acts of bravery to protect his friends, family and house. GoF shows us that Neville's position on the board is more interesting than we thought, but his behavior is fairly constant. I feel like further revelations about characters are probably similarly foreshadowed in earlier books, although with some we may not be able to see the consistency until we get more information. When we do get that information, I think it will incorporate any odd moments the characters had that didn't fit with what we previously thought. (I suspect if we were reading MWPP's era Peter would be generally accepted as that bumbling nerd who worshipped the others, with people skimming over little things that didn't fit.)

Anyway, naturally I wonder how Draco will be used in future, having never understood the idea that Draco is the one character with no place on the board who will spend the endgame lying on the rug under the coffee table, having been knocked off by a careless elbow because he wasn’t interesting, ( so here I am thinking about it-last Draco babble before HBP I guess! )

Happy birthday primroseburrows, who hopefully will not mind being upstaged by:



Happy birthday Draco!!

Here's hoping getting a birthday means getting a life.

*toots pitch pipe*

D is for your detour, may it not be a dead end

R is for the robe shop scene

A's for little asses, because they have birthdays too

C is for the canon that we've seen

O is for the grades you get in Potions

M is for the midnight duel (it could have worked!)

A is for the prison where your father's living now

L is for Lucius; you called him Dad at school!

F is for your friends, fangirls and ferrets

O is for outnumbered on the train

Y for the Yule ball and your tasteful Vicar-wear

The Slytherins have all chipped in and bought you some champagne!

Put them all together they spell Draco Malfoy's name,
The kid whose popularity his author finds insane.
His birthday is in June, the month he's disgraced by routine
Perhaps Buckbeak will eat him just as he turns 17!

I was thinking about flaws this morning...or more accurately, character flaws, and how characters must have flaws, and how the word has come to be a good thing and thus, to not ( always refer to flaws anymore. )

Also I'm putting this here in case I can't do it tomorrow. Happy birthday go_back_chief!!!