OOP: Loony Luna

[elfundeb]

No: HPFGUIDX 62692

After one read, I've got a thousand thoughts flitting through my head, some positive, others negative, but I'm a thousand posts behind now.  So I'm going to try to tackle one topic at a time, because I can use the search function to find relevant posts.  First up, Luna Lovegood. 

Knight_of_Walpurgis wrote:

> The third relates to Luna Lovegood. During their first meeting, 
> Ron tells a joke and "Everyone laughed, but nobody laughed harder 
> than Luna Lovegood. She let out a scream of mirth that caused 
Hedwig to wake up and flap her wings indignantly and Crookshanks to 
leap up into the luggage rack, hissing." (OOP, Scholastic, p. 190) It's 
> possible that Crookshanks reaction was not just to her laugh, but 
to Luna herself. Up to this point, Crookshanks has been a very good 
> judge of character, which is part of the reason it is presumed by 
> many that he is part Kneazel who have "an uncanny ability to detect 
> unsavory or suspicious characters" (FB, p. 24). I have the feeling 
> that Luna is not all that she seems to be. 

Good catch on Crookshanks' reaction!  I think it is a well-placed clue that Loony Lovegood isn't quite as loony as she appears.  Kneazles can detect "suspicious or unsavory characters."  In POA, Sirius says that Crookshanks knew he was no dog right away, and that it was awhile before Crookshanks trusted him.  In her opening scene, Luna seems as strange as they come, right down to her bottlecap necklace

I rather liked Luna from the beginning, and (though I missed the Crookshanks clue) hoped she would turn out to be more than a simple caricature of someone who reads magazines with headlines like "Woman Bears Child of Space Alien!"  The evidence was there from the start that it's a part she plays in public; when she tells Harry she can see the thestrals, she is calm, gentle in fact, and to the point.  Whenever she speaks to Harry one-on-one, I'm struck by her matter-of-fact honesty, and never more so than in her final conversation with Harry.  Thus, I think what Crookshanks senses is that Luna, like Sirius-as-Padfoot, is not what she seems.  Not everything that arouses Crookshanks' suspicion is unsavory or evil, though.  It's just that our most vivid memory of such behavior involves Pettigrew.

I also wonder whether JKR is using Luna and the Quibbler to drive home a point about journalistic integrity.  Rita Skeeter tells Hermione,  "The Prophet exists to sell itself, you silly girl," a statement that's generally associated with the National Enquirer than even those dreadful Gannett papers.  The willingness of the Quibbler to print controversial interviews (and the Quibbler articles we read are always carefully attributed to their sources -- so there is nothing untruthful, for example, in reporting that some old bat somewhere thinks Sirius is a singer in a rock and roll band) suggests that, for a careful reader, the Quibbler has more journalistic integrity than the Daily Prophet.  I think that may reflect on Luna herself.  She is odd, but ultimately more trustworthy than more conventional people.  Just compare her for a moment with Cho and Marietta. 

Yes, I like Luna a lot, and not for her shipping potential (I'm officially neutral on shipping; my view on who to ship her to is any one of the "sextet".  I'd like her to stick around.  Oh, and one more interesting bit of information about Luna.  The Lovegoods are mentioned in GoF, by Amos Diggory in "The Portkey," where he tells Arthur that they had been at the QWC for a week already.  So, it seems that Luna might live somewhere near the Burrow, and perhaps we'll see her in Book Six even before they get to Hogwarts.   It also suggests that Luna has been planned for a long time and is not just a replacement character for Ron's cousin.

Nicole:

> I find Luna herself an enigma.  She seems to know or
> at least suspect things that no one else believes in. 
> I think she is going to prove key to the series from
> here on out.  There is definitely more to her than
> meets the eye, IMHO.
> 
I guess the way I'd describe it is that she has the ability to accept things.  In addition to the oddities she doesn't discount just because they're not mainstream, she accepts that people think she's loony.  She accepts that people take her things, but believes they will turn up eventually.  She's managed to work out a nice little coping mechanism.  She also doesn't assume that something doesn't exist because it's out of the ordinary.  This could definitely be an advantage in the future.  In fact, she seems to have quite a bit in common with the misfits that compose the Order of the Phoenix.

Definitely a keeper (but not a Keeper).

Debbie
who also thought Sirius was toast early in OOP and therefore was utterly unsurprised when he fell through the veil


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