Hogwarts a nice place? (Was Re: The Movie vs. JKR?)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 100400

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dan" 
<darkthirty at s...> wrote:
>In Rowling, that is to say, the  muggle world is an exaggerated 
world (at least, through the home life  of the Dursleys), and the 
magical world is a fair reflection of all  the problems of the real 
world. That is her inversion. <

Petunia and Vernon have done their best to pretend that  Privet 
Drive is a fairy tale world--a great, good place where good 
children, ie Dudley, are never punished, you can watch TV and 
play video games as much as you like, and eat whenever you 
care to,  everything is always clean, the lawn and garden are kept 
bright in defiance of law and nature, the scut work is done by an 
invisible servant (Harry), and scandal only happens to 
other people. We see the cost, first to Harry but also to the 
Dursleys themselves, of maintaining such an illusion.

But Hogwarts, even in Book One, was never like that. The 
Gryffindor common room with its shabby armchairs was never 
the tapestry-clad wonder that we saw in the movie. The innocent 
suffered and died.  And for all the romance of its towers and 
turrets, the castle is and always has been a fortress and  a tool  
of war, its corridors booby-trapped and its animated suits of 
armor standing vigil in the halls.

Pippin