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lierdumoaSo, I went to BASCon Saturday. Had a lovely time. Got to see my Oz vid on a big screen and get immediate fan reaction, so that was nice. The DVD player was running a bit fast for reasons I can't fathom and that, I thought, dampened the effect of some of the more serious vids. Things tend to come across as more humorous when they're sped up on film. I think overall the vidshow went very well.
I got a very, very hot Vin Diesel poster.
I usually go for lankier guys but, as someone mentioned to me at the con, "Sometimes a girl needs a place to rest her legs."
;-)
I went to the Smallville, Harry Potter and livejournal panels. They all went well, I thought, though the last went quite a bit off topic. I had fun in all of them.
The Harry Potter Panel: Indisputable Evidence that Albus Dumbledore Is a Shady Motherfucker
The Harry Potter panel touched on a number of issues, including anthropological study points for JKR's world, "What's the most outrageous pairing you've ever read?" (for me, it's a tie between Giant Squid/Hogwarts, Voldemort/Pikachu and Dobby/Sorting Hat), discussion of the latest movie (focusing on failure to include important details and the bad characterizations, of Ron and Draco especially), etc.
Finally we got to the topic of Albus Dumbledore. The book gave hints that he was shady. Not till this panel did I realize just how shady he, in fact, was.
We tend to forget, since Harry Potter is written in the third person, just how much the books really are in Harry's point of view. I was perusing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
iibnf's journal after I met her at the con yesterday and noticed a comment she wrote in her entry on why she does not shy away from putting Hagrid in sexual situations as other authors tend to do. She noted that, and I quote, "In book one [Hagrid]’s described as twice as tall, and five times as wide as a ‘normal’ person. In book three he’s twice as tall and three times as wide as a ‘normal’ person. In book five, he’s four foot taller than a ‘normal’ person. He shrinks considerably as Harry grows." Similarly, in first year, Dumbledore is a benevolent old man rescuing Harry Potter from the Dursleys. By book five, Dumbledore is still mostly benevolent, if a bit of a schemer, continually sending Harry Potter back to the Dursleys for reasons that Harry is growing less and less convinced are for his own good.
I haven't read the books in a long while and I tend to get fanon and canon confused, but someone better than I at getting their facts straight pointed out that in book four, after Voldemort captures Harry, it is noted that Voldemort not carries some of Harry's blood and Dumbledore is described to smile triumphantly at this revelation. Just a small, throwaway line. Of course, with JKR I become more and more convinced that there's no such thing as a throwaway line in her books. One wonders why Dumbledore would be smiling at this sort of revelation, let along smiling triumphantly
My initial assumption: Dumbledore is a shady motherfucker.
But the evidence doesn't stop there. Someone brought up the point that in a recent interview, JKR said that the two most important questions people aren't asking are, "Why hasn't Dumbledore killed Voldemort," and "Why isn't Harry dead?" After all, Dumbledore is supposedly the most powerful wizard around. Voldemort was pretty weak up until recently. He was the one who decided who was to raise Harry, and I'm certain he knew exactly what he was putting Harry though by setting him up with the Dursleys. One gets the feeling that he's breeding Harry for a specific purpose. To kill Voldemort, perhaps. Sacrificing one child's innocense for the greater good.
We all remember the abuse of capital letters in the fifth book. For a long while I simply chalked it up to bad writing. As a few people at various times and places pointed out -- it doesn't make Harry seem more vehement. After a while it just makes him seem childish. The constant yelling loses it's force. The all caps are annoying to read. Now I wonder if that was on purpose, to show that Harry is childish. He's kind of stagnated. The constant abuse he faced at the Dursleys didn't exactly help him to grow. It is often said that Gryffindors are brave, but impulsive. It would be expected that Gryffindors be praised for one and repremanded for the other. Harry is praised for both. Specifically, Dumbledore praises him for both. Whenever Harry acts impulsively, Dumbledore rewards him, and Harry continues believing that he can get away with anything. Yes, certainly most of the time Harry does end up making the right decisions. The fifth book proved that it was only Harry's good luck, and that his impulsivity could result in a major fuck-up. Regardless of whether some of Harry's decisions ended well, Dumbledore should not have kept rewarding him for them. That's quite simply bad parenting, and Dumbledore is the closest thing Harry has to a real parent, most of the time.
Furthermore, Dumbledore's a smart man. Dumbledore knows what he's doing to Harry. I don't see how it could be accidental. Recall when he gave the house cup to Gryffindor in third year. He took it right out of Gryffindor's hands. If you wanted to be childish, you could say that Gryffindor would have won if Harry hadn't been hurt due to dementors in that one game. In the real world, if your star player breaks a leg, you still lose even if it isn't fair. Certainly Harry saved the world, temporarily, from Voldemort. I'd like to know how exactly that relates to the school competition of house points.
Speaking of that incident in third year -- it's obvious that Dumbledore is trying his best to alienate Slytherin. In first year we are shown a very black and white world. Slytherins are bad. Harry is rather reminiscent of Cinderella in the way he is raised. The first book truly is a fairy tale. But then, as I mentioned before, it's in Harry's point of view, and most eleven year olds do tend to see things in terms of black and white and happily ever after. At the end of second year, Harry is worried that he might have ended up in Slytherin. Dumbledore reassured Harry that he was a true Gryffindor -- that only a true Gryffindor could have pulled the sword out of the hat. The Sorting Hat, by the way. Dumbledore's hat. Harry has a certain prejudice towards Slytherins. House pride is all well and good, but I think it would probably have been better for Harry if Dumbledore had assured him, "You could be a Slytherin and still be a good person," rather than telling him, "Don't worry, you're not a Slytherin." I remember a while back having a discussion with a high school friend before I read book five about how I though the Slytherins weren't really that bad -- that we were really only seeing Harry's view of them. At the time I had not yet read the fifth book and my friend had. He insisted that at the beginning of the book, the Sorting Hat pretty much explicitly denounces the house of Slytherin as a bunch of inbred, supremacist aristocrats. Again, Dumbledore's hat.
If I know anything about JKR, I know that she knows the world is not black and white. She made Peter Pettigrew a Gryffindor. She's not afraid to let bad things happen to good people in her books. She's not afraid to disillusion and destroy preconceptions. She made James Potter into a high school bully, for God's sake. The idea that Slytherin house is "the evil house" is basically total bullshit. Albus Dumbledore is a politician. He's drawing lines. He's starting young, when children are malleable. Create a rift between the houses starting in first year, and what are the chances than anyone's going to be able to forget their differences and bind together in the end to fight Voldemort. Rather, we have one army, that's cunning, albeit small (and just who is Dumbledore rooting for anyway?) and we have another, that's self-righteous and encouraged to be implusive rather than think things through.
Hmmmmm.
Dumbledore is rewarding Harry's impulsivity. He's drawing neat little lines for Harry. I can't help but think that he doesn't want Harry to use his brain except when it suits Dumbledore. Evil or no, we know 1) that Albus has an agenda and 2) that nobody really knows what that agenda is but Albus. Couple that with the little smile of triumph I mentioned earlier, and you've got the perfect recipe for Shady Motherfucker.
One question brought up in the panel that I'd like answered: what does Dumbledore have on Snape? He's got to have something on him, because the man hates his job, yet runs Dumbledores errands and, supposedly, spies on the behalf of Dumbledore's order. What does Dumbledore have on Petunia, for that matter. In another JKR interview, someone asked, "Is Petunia a squib" and JKR answered, "No, but close." That means either she was full human, in which case perhaps she was only Lily's half sister (though you'd think if she was that would have come up earlier) or perhaps she's a weak witch.
Some other questions raised in the panel, pertaining to Albus's status as Shady Motherfucker were the presence of flower names in the books and questions as to what house Lily was in. Harry is often told that he is a Gryffindor like his father, and that he looks like his father and got his quidditch abilities from his father. He is told that he has his mother's eyes. His mother's green eyes, which is a very significant color in JKR's world. Green is for the death curse, for snakes, for Slytherin. He is never told of any other ways in which he resembles his mother. His mother's house is not mentioned once, and something tells me this wasn't merely an oversight on JKR's part. Then we look at the names. Lily, Petunia...Pansy, Narcissa. This is merely idle speculation, but the fact remains that flower names are rather uncommon in the books, and the only people with flower names are two Slytherins, one woman whose house we don't know, and another woman who I'd bet would probably have been in Slytherin if she'd gone to Hogwarts at all.
I'll talk about the Smallville and livejournal panels in my next post. I think this is long enough as it is.
I got a very, very hot Vin Diesel poster.
I usually go for lankier guys but, as someone mentioned to me at the con, "Sometimes a girl needs a place to rest her legs."
;-)
I went to the Smallville, Harry Potter and livejournal panels. They all went well, I thought, though the last went quite a bit off topic. I had fun in all of them.
The Harry Potter Panel: Indisputable Evidence that Albus Dumbledore Is a Shady Motherfucker
The Harry Potter panel touched on a number of issues, including anthropological study points for JKR's world, "What's the most outrageous pairing you've ever read?" (for me, it's a tie between Giant Squid/Hogwarts, Voldemort/Pikachu and Dobby/Sorting Hat), discussion of the latest movie (focusing on failure to include important details and the bad characterizations, of Ron and Draco especially), etc.
Finally we got to the topic of Albus Dumbledore. The book gave hints that he was shady. Not till this panel did I realize just how shady he, in fact, was.
We tend to forget, since Harry Potter is written in the third person, just how much the books really are in Harry's point of view. I was perusing
iibnf's journal after I met her at the con yesterday and noticed a comment she wrote in her entry on why she does not shy away from putting Hagrid in sexual situations as other authors tend to do. She noted that, and I quote, "In book one [Hagrid]’s described as twice as tall, and five times as wide as a ‘normal’ person. In book three he’s twice as tall and three times as wide as a ‘normal’ person. In book five, he’s four foot taller than a ‘normal’ person. He shrinks considerably as Harry grows." Similarly, in first year, Dumbledore is a benevolent old man rescuing Harry Potter from the Dursleys. By book five, Dumbledore is still mostly benevolent, if a bit of a schemer, continually sending Harry Potter back to the Dursleys for reasons that Harry is growing less and less convinced are for his own good.I haven't read the books in a long while and I tend to get fanon and canon confused, but someone better than I at getting their facts straight pointed out that in book four, after Voldemort captures Harry, it is noted that Voldemort not carries some of Harry's blood and Dumbledore is described to smile triumphantly at this revelation. Just a small, throwaway line. Of course, with JKR I become more and more convinced that there's no such thing as a throwaway line in her books. One wonders why Dumbledore would be smiling at this sort of revelation, let along smiling triumphantly
My initial assumption: Dumbledore is a shady motherfucker.
But the evidence doesn't stop there. Someone brought up the point that in a recent interview, JKR said that the two most important questions people aren't asking are, "Why hasn't Dumbledore killed Voldemort," and "Why isn't Harry dead?" After all, Dumbledore is supposedly the most powerful wizard around. Voldemort was pretty weak up until recently. He was the one who decided who was to raise Harry, and I'm certain he knew exactly what he was putting Harry though by setting him up with the Dursleys. One gets the feeling that he's breeding Harry for a specific purpose. To kill Voldemort, perhaps. Sacrificing one child's innocense for the greater good.
We all remember the abuse of capital letters in the fifth book. For a long while I simply chalked it up to bad writing. As a few people at various times and places pointed out -- it doesn't make Harry seem more vehement. After a while it just makes him seem childish. The constant yelling loses it's force. The all caps are annoying to read. Now I wonder if that was on purpose, to show that Harry is childish. He's kind of stagnated. The constant abuse he faced at the Dursleys didn't exactly help him to grow. It is often said that Gryffindors are brave, but impulsive. It would be expected that Gryffindors be praised for one and repremanded for the other. Harry is praised for both. Specifically, Dumbledore praises him for both. Whenever Harry acts impulsively, Dumbledore rewards him, and Harry continues believing that he can get away with anything. Yes, certainly most of the time Harry does end up making the right decisions. The fifth book proved that it was only Harry's good luck, and that his impulsivity could result in a major fuck-up. Regardless of whether some of Harry's decisions ended well, Dumbledore should not have kept rewarding him for them. That's quite simply bad parenting, and Dumbledore is the closest thing Harry has to a real parent, most of the time.
Furthermore, Dumbledore's a smart man. Dumbledore knows what he's doing to Harry. I don't see how it could be accidental. Recall when he gave the house cup to Gryffindor in third year. He took it right out of Gryffindor's hands. If you wanted to be childish, you could say that Gryffindor would have won if Harry hadn't been hurt due to dementors in that one game. In the real world, if your star player breaks a leg, you still lose even if it isn't fair. Certainly Harry saved the world, temporarily, from Voldemort. I'd like to know how exactly that relates to the school competition of house points.
Speaking of that incident in third year -- it's obvious that Dumbledore is trying his best to alienate Slytherin. In first year we are shown a very black and white world. Slytherins are bad. Harry is rather reminiscent of Cinderella in the way he is raised. The first book truly is a fairy tale. But then, as I mentioned before, it's in Harry's point of view, and most eleven year olds do tend to see things in terms of black and white and happily ever after. At the end of second year, Harry is worried that he might have ended up in Slytherin. Dumbledore reassured Harry that he was a true Gryffindor -- that only a true Gryffindor could have pulled the sword out of the hat. The Sorting Hat, by the way. Dumbledore's hat. Harry has a certain prejudice towards Slytherins. House pride is all well and good, but I think it would probably have been better for Harry if Dumbledore had assured him, "You could be a Slytherin and still be a good person," rather than telling him, "Don't worry, you're not a Slytherin." I remember a while back having a discussion with a high school friend before I read book five about how I though the Slytherins weren't really that bad -- that we were really only seeing Harry's view of them. At the time I had not yet read the fifth book and my friend had. He insisted that at the beginning of the book, the Sorting Hat pretty much explicitly denounces the house of Slytherin as a bunch of inbred, supremacist aristocrats. Again, Dumbledore's hat.
If I know anything about JKR, I know that she knows the world is not black and white. She made Peter Pettigrew a Gryffindor. She's not afraid to let bad things happen to good people in her books. She's not afraid to disillusion and destroy preconceptions. She made James Potter into a high school bully, for God's sake. The idea that Slytherin house is "the evil house" is basically total bullshit. Albus Dumbledore is a politician. He's drawing lines. He's starting young, when children are malleable. Create a rift between the houses starting in first year, and what are the chances than anyone's going to be able to forget their differences and bind together in the end to fight Voldemort. Rather, we have one army, that's cunning, albeit small (and just who is Dumbledore rooting for anyway?) and we have another, that's self-righteous and encouraged to be implusive rather than think things through.
Hmmmmm.
Dumbledore is rewarding Harry's impulsivity. He's drawing neat little lines for Harry. I can't help but think that he doesn't want Harry to use his brain except when it suits Dumbledore. Evil or no, we know 1) that Albus has an agenda and 2) that nobody really knows what that agenda is but Albus. Couple that with the little smile of triumph I mentioned earlier, and you've got the perfect recipe for Shady Motherfucker.
One question brought up in the panel that I'd like answered: what does Dumbledore have on Snape? He's got to have something on him, because the man hates his job, yet runs Dumbledores errands and, supposedly, spies on the behalf of Dumbledore's order. What does Dumbledore have on Petunia, for that matter. In another JKR interview, someone asked, "Is Petunia a squib" and JKR answered, "No, but close." That means either she was full human, in which case perhaps she was only Lily's half sister (though you'd think if she was that would have come up earlier) or perhaps she's a weak witch.
Some other questions raised in the panel, pertaining to Albus's status as Shady Motherfucker were the presence of flower names in the books and questions as to what house Lily was in. Harry is often told that he is a Gryffindor like his father, and that he looks like his father and got his quidditch abilities from his father. He is told that he has his mother's eyes. His mother's green eyes, which is a very significant color in JKR's world. Green is for the death curse, for snakes, for Slytherin. He is never told of any other ways in which he resembles his mother. His mother's house is not mentioned once, and something tells me this wasn't merely an oversight on JKR's part. Then we look at the names. Lily, Petunia...Pansy, Narcissa. This is merely idle speculation, but the fact remains that flower names are rather uncommon in the books, and the only people with flower names are two Slytherins, one woman whose house we don't know, and another woman who I'd bet would probably have been in Slytherin if she'd gone to Hogwarts at all.
I'll talk about the Smallville and livejournal panels in my next post. I think this is long enough as it is.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 03:20 pm (UTC);-)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-08 11:07 pm (UTC)That means either she was full human, in which case perhaps she was only Lily's half sister (though you'd think if she was that would have come up earlier)
*Magic candle* It was Lily's parents that were the Muggles, right? So proud of having a witch in the family? I suddenly wonder if Lily's mum knew a wizard or two before she gave birth to one herself. Like, nine months before. Biblically. And such. (Of course, that brings up the question of whether or not the recording of birth would be able to determine true parentage...)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 07:01 am (UTC)SHAAAAAAAADY!!
Date: 2004-11-11 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-13 02:08 am (UTC)"'He said my blood would make him stronger than if he'd used someone else's,' Harry told Dumbledore. 'He said the protection my -- my mother left in me -- he'd have it too. And he was right -- he could touch me without hurting himself, he touched my face.'
For a fleeting instant, Harry thought he saw a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore's eyes. But next second, Harry was sure he had imagined it, for when Dumbledore had returned to his seat behind the desk, he looked as old and weary as Harry had ever seen him" (JKR, 696).
There's always been something about Dumbledore that has struck me as odd. With each book, Rowling has described Dumbledore as becoming older and wearier in Harry's eyes. I'm not sure if that has any relevance to the topic, but I found it interesting. Does anyone know if the color blue might mean hold a certain significance in the HP books? I know people associate colors with certain things, ie. Red- hot, evil, Yellow- sun, happy, Orange- wild, Green- envy, evil, Black- death, etc. Well, I've always associated blue with (being) cold, and ice-like. That could say something about Dumbledore's personality, because we've been told countless time's that Dumbledore's eyes are a twinkling shade of blue -- twinkling can represent mischievousness, and mischievousness can mean scheming. Dumbledore has proved that he's definitely a schemer . . .
Also, Rowling has mentioned that Dumbledore is roughly translated into (bumble) bee. Well, if you're not careful, bees sting. Is that saying something about Dumbledore's character -- he 'stings' if you're in his way, and not wary of him? I'm not sure if I'm making any sense, but eh.
For some bizarre reason, a thought came to me: James might not really be Harry's father. That possibly, Voldemort could actually be Harry's dad. I don't know, it sounds far fetched, but in the Chamber of Secrets, Harry marveled at how much he ressembled Tom Riddle. And Lily's eyes are green, as are Harry's, which is a very symbol driven, and often 'evil' color in the series. If James is in fact Harry's dad, then maybe Voldemort is somehow related to Harry -- most likely on Lily's side. She's muggleborn, as was Voldemort's father, Tom. Maybe Lily's mom had something going on with Riddle's dad? I'm not sure, but I'm convinced that Lily's character plays a major role in this series.
I don't think that Voldemort really wanted to kill Lily. In Azkaban, JKR writes:
'But the classroom and the dementor wrere dissolving . . . Herry was falling again through thick white fog, and his mother's voice was lounder than ever, echoing inside his head--
"Not Harry! Not Harry! Please-- I'll do anything--"
"Stand aside. Stand aside, girl!"
Is it just me, or was Voldemore reluctant to kill Lily? I know he said in one of the books that there as no reason for Lily to die, and that she was foolish for protecting Harry. I think there's something much deeper going on that doesn't ever really scratch the surface. As mentioned in previous posts, we have never been told Lily's house. She seems to have been the epitome of what a Gryffindor is, but, I don't think she was one.
No of this probably makes any sense . . . that's what I get for posting at like 5am.
-- Amanda
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Date: 2004-11-14 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-30 12:17 am (UTC)(Also here by way of
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Date: 2004-11-29 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-29 05:03 pm (UTC)Brillant essay. Am reccing now :D
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Date: 2004-11-29 05:19 pm (UTC)Word on the Harry-as-weapon, though. Then again, if you knew that the only thing between stopping an era of death and general destruction of everything you held dear rested on the instincts and power of a child, wouldn't you try and build him in to the most powerful weapon you could? It's a moral choice that is firmly in the grey, in my opinion, and I can't entirely blame Dumbledore's sentiments actions.
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Date: 2004-11-29 05:45 pm (UTC)Well, some of this I agree with, but I have two nitpicks:
1. Do you mean "full Muggle"? I think we can assume Petunia is full human. :)
2. JKR has mentioned that Lily is a Gryffindor in a couple chats, I'm almost completely positive. So... yeah.
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Date: 2004-11-30 05:59 am (UTC)Great discussion and I think I learned a few new things today :-) I'd never noticed how Harry's report of people changes across all the books.
WRT to the last comment, though, I'd add Lavender and Poppy Pomfrey (Myrtle, you could argue, is also a flower name) - I'm not sure flower names are that uncommon, and Lavender is definitely Gryffindor.
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Date: 2004-12-02 05:58 pm (UTC)