solitary_summer | (no subject) (Reply)

... because this is all I'm fit for when I come home from work these days... I can only hope my brain will make a re-appearance once Christmas is over...

* In view of the recent criticism of house rivalries: Slytherin has become a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point, and I think JKR means for us to realise that, showing as she does that Gryffindors can and do behave like Slytherins. One might also wonder if this glimpse into James and Sirius’s past is any indication for Draco’s character arc. I don’t really get the fandom Draco shipping, but it seems a bit pointless to introduce him as a character and then give him so little development.

* Hermione IMO would fit equally well in either house. She mentions at one point that the Sorting Hat considered putting her in Ravenclaw, which is rather obvious, but she also has qualities of Hufflepuff – she’s a hard worker, loyal out of consideration as well as impulse, and has a high sense of justice, as shown by her attitude towards the house elves, though her instinctive resentment against something so closely resembling slavery might come from her Muggle upbringing – as well as Slytherin: She’s courageous, but doesn’t rush headlong and mindlessly into things like the Gryffindors tend to, but carefully plans her course of action; she has the restraint and control Snape tries and fails to impress upon Harry. Given enough provocation she can be ruthless, as shown by her blackmailing Rita Skeeter and leading Umbridge to the centaurs. I won’t go as far as saying she meant for it to happen, but given her hatred of the woman neither will I believe that she hadn’t at least taken into account the possibility that Umbridge would be killed.

I think she does enjoy power and whereas most of the time she instinctively opposes its abuse, she’s not above it, if she believes the means justify the end – again, Rita Skeeter.

I wonder if that will be of importance at any point in the future of the series.

* Snape: Now I don’t really get the Snape shipping either, if it’s supposed to be derived from canon, but OotP certainly increased my interest in and sympathy for his character. Mind you, I still believe that the man should have been sent to therapy as well as pedagogy-lessons before being allowed to teach children at all - another of Dumbledore’s failings, setting politics before his duty as headmaster.

But it certainly looks like the dynamics between Harry and Snape will be more important in the future of the HP series.

I’ll stick with what I said before, that Sirius’s death is far from being pointless. JKR meant this to be a moral lesson - though at this point neither Harry nor Snape seem to be able to see it.

Snape is to blame, of course, taking his old hatred of James out on Harry like that (again – therapy! does it even exist in the wizarding world?), but so are Sirius and, to a lesser extent, Remus and all the well-meaning people who supported the image of St. Potter sr. Granted, it’s hard to really speak of blame, because twelve years in Azkaban presumably aren’t exactly conductive to personal development or introspection and Sirius in many ways picks up his life where he left it off in his early twenties. (Though, Azkaban or not, it’s very hard to sympathise when Sirius in PoA still laughs off what he did as a joke - ‘It served him right’ -, utterly oblivious and unable to regret not only to the danger he put Snape in, but also what it’d have meant for Remus - his friend, for god’s sake - if his ‘joke’ had succeeded.) And it’s a rather understandable impulse to let Harry enjoy an idealised image of his father – after all he’s young and had a difficult enough childhood as it was.

But the fiasco ending in Sirius’s death has its roots in James and Sirius’s behaviour towards Snape during their school days (and Remus unwillingness to stop them), and their incapability of making up for it later in their adult lives, when they should have realised it would matter. Sirius’s attitude especially makes it impossible for Harry to trust Snape at all. First the boy actually forgets (!) that Snape is a member of the Order and then he’s incapable of realising that Snape was obstructing Umbridge with his refusal to give her Veritaserum, was actually helping Neville and obviously couldn’t very well admit in front of her he understood what Harry was trying to tell him.

What especially strikes me about the whole Pensieve incident is Harry’s utter lack of awareness that he’s doing something wrong – his only concern is how not to get caught. When Dumbledore caught him looking into his Pensieve in GoF he knew perfectly well he’d been doing something he shouldn’t have done, even without realising what he’d been intruding upon. With Snape he knows exactly that he was not to see those memories – they were especially removed in his presence to prevent him from seeing them, after all – but doesn’t care in the least, because he’s simply incapable of seeing Snape as a person deserving of consideration or privacy.

It was necessary that Harry learn Occlumency, and there probably weren’t all that many qualified teachers at Hogwarts, but I wonder whether Dumbledore wasn’t also trying to create a situation where some sort of tentative empathy and understanding might have been reached between Harry and Snape. Misguided as I think this attempt was, it might even have worked, because both were apparently at least beginning to see that they were not that different in some respects.

Even after the Pensieve incident that situation might have been salvaged, IMO. Harry’s instincts are right about what he saw, he’s horrified about what his father and his friends did, his sympathy lies with Snape there. It’s Sirius and Remus’s reaction that ultimately sets the fatal sequence of events in motion. They may mean well, trying to salvage James’s image as far as possible, but misguided nostalgia, friendship and loyalty none withstanding, apparently it doesn’t even occur to either of them that Harry ought to apologise to Snape.

At the end of the book Harry is back to blaming Snape, but one wonders for how long he’ll be able to keep this up – after all at one point he’ll have to realise that (again!) Snape didn’t let two people he hated die when he might have easily done so, and if nothing else, his loyalty to the Order has been proven.

All of which begs the question where JKR is going with the Snape-and-Harry plot arc, because OotP certainly indicated it will be important in the future.

* Incidentally I wonder where she’s going with Harry at all, because with all the angst heaped upon the poor boy recently we’re moving from annoying, oblivious and self-centred teenager into psychotic breakdown territory very fast indeed.

* In many respects OotP feels like JKR is breaking away from a lot of things simply taken for granted in the first four books. The inter-house relationships are suddenly called into question, as are Dumbledore’s machinations, his way of running things or Harry’s tendency to rush off to save the day alone, his inability to trust anyone but himself; the treatment of house-elves or non-human magical creatures generally...

* What I really like about the HP series is the narrative structure and especially the way JKR uses of Harry’s POV to expand the book’s perspective as Harry grows up. I’m not sure if she’d planned that from the beginning (in which case it’d be rather clever) or made it up as she went along, but it works quite well. OotP has moved a far cry from the childish and limited black and white worldview of the early books - Harry still thinks the world turns around him (what fifteen year old doesn’t), but JKR managed to slip in more and more glimpses of others' opinions and gives a much more ambivalent and balanced view of things without ever really breaking away from the single POV narrative. OotP makes it perfectly obvious in ways it wasn't before, that Harry and his opinions aren't the moral parameters of the books - Hermione's much closer, come to that.