alasse_irena | Harry Potter Reread

So over on Tumblr, a few friends and I embarked on an epic Harry Potter reread. (We are currently up to chapter 4 or something. This will take us like several years to complete at this rate.) Anyway, while we are having fun, Tumblr doesn't really seem to encourage discussion the way Dreamwidth does, so I thought I'd bring my part over here, bit by bit, on the off chance that anyone else wants to weigh in.

I presume I will encounter other Dumbledore outfits in the future, but if my memory serves me correctly, “long robes, a purple cloak that swept the ground, and high-heeled, buckled boots” is the most fabulours of them, and this disappoints me greatly. Why couldn’t there have been a scene in which Harry and Dumbledore go clubbing in tight pants and eyeliner? (Also, while we’re on outfits, McGonagall is apparently “wearing square glasses”. I choose to imagine that they are black framed super hipster glasses.)

Further questions about Dumbledore: do you know what’s hundred times less suspicious than all the streetlights in a street suddenly going out? Yup, it’s all the streetlights in the street not suddenly going out. Seriously. My house has a low brick fence at the front, and people sit on it in the dead of night to chat reasonably often. I and a lot less likely to question that than I am to question all the streetlights suddenly turning off. Seriously, guys. Not to mention that a) you’re in the city; it’s not going to get dark enough for you to be invisible; and b) you have a flying motorbike arriving pretty soon. I hardly think darkness is going to make a great deal of difference at that point.

Okay, my next issue is this:
“A fine thing it would be if, on the very day You-Know-Who seems to have disappeared at last, the Muggles found out about us all.”

Surely, after eleven years of war - a war, notably, whose whole ideology is based around the superiority of wizards to Muggles - you might start thinking that maybe the way your society relates to Muggles at the moment isn’t really working? I feel like this is the time when maybe significant changes might be a good idea.

(On an aside, with regard to the eleven years war, Lily was I think 21 when she died. This means that her entire experience of the wizarding world has been war. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but it interests me.)
Hints about wizards’ problem with Muggles are all over the place here, though. When McGonagall raises objections to Harry living with the Dursleys, what she says is, “you couldn’t find two people who were less like us”. That’s the worst thing she can say about them. Similarly, Hagrid: “poor little Harry off ter live with Muggles”. It’s not, “Poor Harry, his parents were murdered.” The absolute worst thing about this situation is that he has to live with Muggles.

I suppose I could take from this that Dumbledore is more open-minded than the other two, because he deems this a legitimate home for Harry, in spite of knowing that Muggles are living there, but he also doesn’t seem to think it’s important to maybe have a conversation with a person before he leaves a baby on their doorstep, so I don’t think I can cut him much slack, even if he’s less prejudiced than the others.

On a totally different topic, this exchange happens:

"But you’re different. Everyone knows you're the only one You-Know- oh, all right, Voldemort, was frightened of.”
“You flatter me,” said Dumbledore calmly. “Voldemort had powers I will never have.”
“Only because you’re too – well – noble to use them.”
“It’s lucky it’s dark. I haven’t blushed so much since Madam Pomfrey told me she liked my new earmuffs.”

Are they flirting? My limited experience with flirting is not really helping me here, but it looks a hell of a lot like some flirting is going on. So at first I presumed, given that we know (I think?) that Dumbledore’s not interested in women, that it’s affectionate teasing - maybe a little jarring in the middle of a conversation about Voldemort’s sinister dark powers, but hey, everything’s been so sinister and dark for the past decade that I can forgive them.

Then I thought about this: in the conversation that follows, McGonagall clarifies that the rumours she’s heard about James and Lily are true, and expressed surprise that this is where Harry’s family lives. So - she doesn’t know about the Potters’ deaths until Dumbledore clarifies. She doesn’t know the Dursleys are related to Harry until Dumbledore tells her. Anyway, dropping off a baby is not a three person job. The only reason I can see for her to be here is that Hagrid told her that Dumbledore would be here. And she’s been hanging out here all day. Is she crushing on Dumbledore? Does she think he’s up to something suspect? Why did she follow the Dursleys all day if she wasn’t vetting them as potential parents for Harry?

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I tried to reread HP and the Philosopher's Stone a while ago and it didn't hold up as well as I hoped. In general the beginning of book 1 has a different tone from the later novels, a bit more comedy. And yeah, several details don't make sense, like McGonagall waiting for Dumbledore. Dumbledore is not good at spy stuff *g* Though really if they could keep an entire war hidden one street won't make a difference.

I didn't realize/forgot that the first war lasted 11 years, whoa. Now I feel very sorry for Lily, and the others of her generation. I also often forget how young she and James were!
And I didn't realize before how condescending they are towards Muggles, ouch. Now that I think about it it bothers me how everyone thinks Mr. Weasly is a bit odd and funny because of his fascination with Muggles. Sure apparently he has no clue (which is curious, because apparently there are "Muggle Studies", there must be ways for him to get better info), but still.

Yes, it freaks me out to think that I'm older than James and Lily were when they died. Like, Sirius at my age was in Azkaban, and would be there for another decade or something.

Mr. Weasley's attitude to Muggles is kind of puzzling. Maybe Muggle Studies wasn't available as a subject when he was at school? But he works in Misuse of Muggle Artefacts, so surely it would be part of his professional development to keep up with this stuff. I don't know.

(In a couple of later chapters, I tried replacing the word Muggle with "Catholic" to see if it sounded offensive to me as someone who'd been raised Catholic, and, well, let's just say Hagrid's not coming up great.)

Yeah, sometimes I think about their ages and I'm like, "Surely Hogwarts needs to add some sort of Magical Sex Ed and Contraception class for its students?"

Also re: Mr. Weasley, he reminds me a bit of some of the earlier Anthropologists who were just embarrassingly wrong about the way they studied other cultures but laid the groundwork for better study later. Like, say, Margaret Mead.

OK, so I did an epic reread a bit ago because I got the UK versions of the books and I was enjoying the different language uses. (For example Dudley has a knickerbocker glory at the zoo instead of an ice cream sundae, which Harry gets to partake of.)

I took that line “Only because you’re too – well – noble to use them.” in a really different way once I'd read the whole series and especially all the stuff about Dumbledore's youth and his sister and Grindlewald the Deathly Hallows. Like, I would think of all people Minerva would have known at least some of that history...

Also, re: McGonagall sitting on the wall all day; if at the time of Harry's death there were a lot of people under the Imperius curse and a lot of who-knows-who-is-a-Death-Eater, I can see her waiting to speak to Dumbledore himself. I mean, if you look at counterparts in repressive regimes in the "real world"...if you lived in East Berlin before the wall came down, anyone could be informing on you to the Stazi and so if you wanted to relay something private you'd have to be really careful about not only who you spoke to but also where (because of listening devices). So I feel like randomly meeting up on some Muggle street to avoid detection might not have been so out of the ordinary? I mean, if Peter Pettigrew made sense as a possible Secret Keeper, you know things are pretty desperate.

And yeah, *wince*, all the Muggle references. I like to think that Hermione has some influence later in life on reforming Wizarding treatment of Muggles and House Elves. (Oh gods I'm going to tear up about Dobby all over again...)

I don't know if you've looked at any of the stuff on Pottermore (I think I stopped after the first book because that was all that had been released and then I lost my password), but there's some really interesting stuff about Dumbledore's past history with Mrs. Dursley -- because he knew her through her sister's time at Hogwarts. Not gonna spoil it here, but yeah I think he knew he was *not* sending Harry off to the happiest childhood.

I think the hardest time I have with this whole scene/set-up is like, "To protect you from Voldemort, being stuck up about being The Boy Who Lived, and anyone else who might try to kill you, good luck with years of child abuse! That will certainly make sure you turn out nothing like the Dark Lord!" ... like, for an interesting narrative, sure. But if I actually wanted Harry to be a decent human being, I'd have stuck him with someone like Molly Weasley ASAP.

Australia got the UK version the first time round. It's still a bit weird to me seeing people talking about "Weasley sweaters" online. (To be fair, Australians are also much more likely to talk about an ice-cream sundae than a knickerbocker glory, but we have a relatively small population and get so much of our media from either the UK or USA that you can mostly just assume that Australian kids will cope with either English dialect.)

I guess McGonagall has just heard that Dumbledore will be here, and wants to speak to him safely and privately about the situation. (This still leaves me puzzled about why she's following the Dursleys around, when she apparentyl doesn't know they're Harry's aunt and uncle, but I suppose if she's there all day, she'd be bored with nothing to do.)

My other question is, if it's imperative that Harry live with a blood relative for his childhood, how close a relative? What happened to Lily's parents? Did Lily have cousins? It's apparent that the Potters are related to a whole host of people (including, distantly, the Weasleys, I think). Surely there are blood relative options beyond the abusive home...

Also, I got the feeling from Privet drive that everyone would be respectably in bed by the time Dumbledore arrived, and that if anyone was upset about the lights they wouldn't *go outside* or *talk to their neighbors*, they would just call the power company and argue in loud and entitled tones about how it needed to be fixed immediately don't you know there's even a motorbike about! until suddenly the lights came back on, well done that man who fixed it.

Like, even if someone on that street did see something, would any of them want to admit it to their neighbors? "I saw a flying motorbike and a man in high heels and a cloak!" Yes, that would almost be too embarassing to be worthwhile gossip.

I suppose that's true. It's too weird to even be gossip... Although I feel like there could be something in them gossiping about people these days and their motorbikes and lack of gender norms.

Although - if it's too weird to gossip about, why bother risking waking people up by turning off the lights?

I was under the impression that Little Whinging was a small town/large village? I might be wrong though, haven't looked it up on Pottermore.

Yes, you are right! I had to look up Surrey just now, and it turns out to be way more rural than I imagined it. Okay, maybe you would be able to achieve a useful level of darkness by putting out the street lights...

May we link this on

metanews? We also post on LJ and Tumblr.

Go ahead! =)

Harry Potter Reread - Chapter 1.1

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