long Re: Chapter 22 - The Unexpected Task

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 6527

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Sarah Rettger <ara_kel at y...> wrote:
> 
> Several girls, however, ask Harry, and he flatly rejects each of
> them.  

As a young person, I was taught that it is very bad manners to reject 
anyone who politely asks you to be his date to the prom. The only 
permissible grounds for rejection are if you already promised someone 
else, you are not going to go, or your parents had forbidden you to 
have anything to do with him in particular. It is possible to lie 
when using the excuse that you are already going with someone else... 
Harry didn't even bother to use the polite lie.

Something I didn't really notice the first time I read GoF: girls 
asking boys to the ball was not standard Muggle practise in my day. 
Even if it has become standard Muggle practise now, it meshes oddly 
with the wizarding world's many old-fashioned features. 

At first, I just assumed that the girls were so forward because they 
were pursuing Harry only because he was the TriWizard Champion, but 
later realised that girls asking boys for a date might be perfectly 
normal in the wizarding world, part of the gender equality shown by 
having two out of four ('four') Founders be female. If so, some of 
the boys didn't have to go through that fear of rejection thing and 
some of the girls did.

At first, I noticed only that the girls were pursuing the Hogwarts 
TriWizard Champion rather than pursuing Harry ... then I noticed that 
the big deal about being a Champion's date was the glory of opening 
the ball. That is a glory (being on public display) that would NOT be 
desired by a person who thinks heesh is ugly or hisir dress robe is 
ugly or heesh is a very bad dancer (Harry, for example, tried to get 
out of it). So if it had somehow happened that Ron did achieve his 
wish of being Fleur's date, he would have spent all the rest of the 
time until the ball wishing that he HADN'T, because of worrying about 
everyone watching him in his horrible dress robe, and watching him 
not know how to dance. 

> while it is known that the Weird
> Sisters will be providing the music for the evening.

I wish JKR had told us the number, gender and species of the Weird 
Sisters. I imagine there are 5 to 7 of them. (I didn't count the 
instruments waiting on stage, but there can be fewer players than 
instruments. There can be MORE instruments than players if some 
players carry their inseperable instrument with them, such as 
singers. I typo'ed signers, but that would not be a typo if 
describing a modern Muggle concert with a sign language interpreter 
for the deaf.) I imagine that all of them are male and bearded, but 
some are not entirely human: might one or more be half-Giant and as 
big as Hagrid? Would the hottest band in wizardom fall into disfavor 
if Rita Skeeter revealed that the ten foot tall man was half-Giant?

> Ron asks his brothers if they've found dates yet, and both of them
> admit that they have not. 

Q: Who are you going with? 
A: Angelina. 
Q: Have you asked her yet? 
A: No.
Q: Shouldn't you?          
A:
> Fred decides to quickly rectify the situation by asking Angelina,
> who is sitting in another corner of the room.

By shouting across the room to her. This makes it obvious that he is 
not afraid that anyone would hear her reject him. Which shows that he 
is confident either of all Gryffindors' esteem of him, or that AngieJ 
will accept. I believe that he is confident that Angie will accept, 
that in fact both of them already knew that they would go to the ball 
together, because they're going steady (do modern people still have 
the stages of relationships, from 'going together' to 'going steady' 
to 'engaged to get engaged' to 'engaged to be married'?) and that is 
pretty much what going steady *means*: an agreement that if there is 
a dating type event, the two go to it together or not at all (also, 
no flirting with other people). I suppose that Fred put on this 
little act, instead of telling Ron "I don't have to ASK her, we're 
going steady", to have some fun with Ron not having noticed the 
romance going on.

> She agrees, 

It says she looked him up and down once carefully before answering 
Okay and turning back to her conversation with (Katie?). Some people 
understand this to mean that she looked him over to decide whether to 
accept his invitation, therefore that they are not going steady. I 
believe that she was just looking him over to see what kind of a joke 
he was playing NOW ... because they've been in the same House and the 
same Quidditch team for *years*, she must already know without having 
to look at him whether she wants to go out with him. Btw, I think it 
must be a brave and tolerant person who would pairbond with a Weasley 
twin.

We don't hear anything about George's date or lack of date. I like to 
imagine that he's going with Katie Bell, but some people like to 
imagine that he's gay.
> 
> Cho, who tells [Harry] that she's going with Cedric.

In another example of adult HP fans having the same mentality as 
secondary school students (apologies to the real secondary school 
students on the list, who seem much more mature than my memories of 
being that age), there is argument whether:

1) Cho really would have preferred to go with Harry and is selfishly 
regretful that she already agreed to go with someone else.

2) Cho is regretful only that she hurt Harry's feelings, something 
which she (being a very nice person: other examples are, she picks up 
his quill when everyone else outside Gryffindor is heckling him, and 
she doesn't wear a POTTER STINKS button) doesn't like doing.

3) The ball is Cho and Cedric's first date. For all any of us really 
KNOW, they know each other more from the Gay-Lesbian-Students club 
than from interHouse Quidditch.  

4) Cho and Cedric have been a couple all this time (making her lack 
of POTTER STINKS button all the more noble) and Harry just didn't 
notice. In my universe, they started going together during PoA. At 
the end of that year, when Cedric asked Cho to go steady with him, 
she did the right thing and told him it is not wise to make a 
commitment like that and then rush off to separate holidays, but if 
he still wanted to go steady when they got back to school, he should 
ask him again then. Which he did, and she joyously fell into his 
arms. And at the Yule Ball, in the making out in the rose bushes (I 
would have been scared of thorns) part of the evening, he asked her 
to get engaged to be engaged, and gave her a little silver ring with 
a heart shape on it. Which she is twisting around her finger at the 
funeral. It might not come off her finger until she makes an actual 
Decision to take it off... For her sake, it should break from metal 
fatigue (which a number of little silver rings have done on me) or 
get lost down a sink when she washes her hands. Maybe, in that world 
where girls invite boys to dates, girls invite boys to commit to 
relationships, but my elderly imagination can't quite see it.

> Parvati and Lavender enter the common room, and Harry asks Parvati
> to go with him.  After a cascade of  giggles, she agrees. (snip)
> Parvati offers to ask her twin sister Padma to be Ron's date, and
> Harry hopes that Padma Patil's nose is in the center of her face.

At some point, some other boy asks how Harry and Ron (implication: 
two graceless lunks) managed to get the two prettiest girls in their 
year. Which led someone on the list to ask why the two prettiest 
girls in their years didn't have dates yet. I imagine that Parvati, 
at least, had turned down other offers because she was counting on 
going with Harry and opening the ball. She's lived in Gryffindor 
Tower and taken classes with Harry for 3.5 years, and if that isn't 
enough for her to know him well enough to know that he'll leave 
getting a date until the last, desperate minute, she may also 
be talking more with her roommate Hermione than we readers guess. Or 
she might know it from Divination <g>.

> 2. Why don't parents object to their children's staying at school
> over Christmas?  Christmas has always seemed to be a very 
> family-oriented holiday, yet most of the students choose to stay at
> school in order to attend the Yule Ball.

While the 'big doings' at Hogwarts this year might have been supposed 
to be secret until announced after the students arrive at school, I 
believe that the parents must have been told WHY they have to supply 
dress robes this year. At least, that at Christmas, there would be a 
very very important formal dance where there would be students from 
classy foreign wizarding schools and other important people, and 
making a good appearance at the Ball would be very good for their 
child's future career. Because *some* kids will cry and whine and 
sulk and threaten suicide if they have to go to the Ball instead of 
going home (not that they love home THAT much, but they can't stand 
to go to the Ball to make a public display that no one wants to dance 
or snog with them) but their parents FORCE them to attend the Ball.   

> 3. How does the Wizarding Wireless Network function? 

I am quite certain that Wizarding Wireless has nothing to do with the 
electromagnetic spectrum. It works by some totally different form of 
magic, perhaps related to the magic that makes the golden egg sing 
when underwater.

Muggle Wireless got that name by contrast to telegraphy, which uses 
wires. I invented Spellegraphy, the wizarding version of telegraphy, 
but the original Spellegraph used ley lines, not wires, so the wizard 
radio should be called Leyless not Wireless. There have been 
considerable improvements in the Spellegraph spell (some amounting to 
total change of spell?) during the twentieth century, so now it has 
nothing to do with ley lines and is more like e-mail than like 
telegraph. But I don't see it as ever having needed anything like 
Morse code, but rather it has always been two enchanted quills, one 
at the sending station with which the operator writes the message and 
one at the receiving station which writes the message with no hand on 
it, just by writing in sympathy with the sending quill.  

> 4. Why does Professor Binns never teach about anything
> but goblins rebellions?

There were probably a LOT of goblin rebellions, which says something 
about the preserverance of goblins... and that they must have been 
quite oppressed before they started Gringotts. 

However, I vaguely recall from Book 1 that Binns also lectured about 
mad old wizards who had invented self-stirring cauldrons.