Hagrid/vet/tin foil/Gray Lady/Dumbledore, Dumbledore, Dumbledore

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 185109

Jerri wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185065>:

<< I didn't want Hagrid to die, but all his near death experiences
just didn't work for me in the context of this book. >>

This is a forbidden "I agree" post.

Geoff wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185075>:

<< Now that's a bit I missed in the books - that Harry spent some of
his time dealing with the effect of the war on cats and dogs and other
four-legged friends. :-)) >>

Cats: Crookshanks. Minerva. Dogs: Fluffy. Padfoot. Other four-legged
friends: Firenze. I imagine that the same medi-wizards and healers
care for other animals as care for humans.

Don't Brits say 'vet' as short for 'veteran'? I confess, as a child, I
confused the words 'veteran' and 'veterinarian' and thought that
holiday in November was Veterinarian's Day -- the one that was renamed
from Armistice Day, but you Brits renamed it differently than we
Americans.

Alla wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185091>:

<< (I know you said full foil tin on, but I do not know what that word
means) >>

Lizzyben already explained that 'tin foil hat' refers to conspiracy
nuts, but a detail is it started with a crazy person who always wore a
tin foil helmet, and told the psychiatrist that it was to block radio
waves with which his enemies were trying to control his brain, and I
believe for a while it just meant 'crazy' before being specialized to
'crazy conspiracy theorist'.

Parantap wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185072>:

<< Looks like gray lady is a better candidate for slith house ghost ..
too much ambition with too limited ability (very much like Draco) >>

I believe there is a rule that the House Ghost must have been a
student in that House when alive; I believe JKR even said so in an
interview, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

I don't know the date of Helena's birth relative to the founding of
Hogwarts; she could have been old and experienced enough to be one of
the teachers of the first class, or she might not have been born until
the school was a well-established habit. I prefer to believe the
latter, and that she was a student in Ravenclaw House. It could have
been before Godric invented the Sorting Hat, while the Founders were
choosing their own students themselves, and of course Rowena chose her
daughter to be in her House. 

I don't think ambition was more than one percent of her motivation for
stealing the tiara. I think she was motivated by one of the normal,
eternal family conflicts, and more interested in bringing her mother
down a peg than bringing herself up. As I've never noticed Slythies
being more motivated by ambition than are Gryffies, Puffs, and Claws,
that wouldn't prevent her from being a Slythie, but I think Helena was
in the right House, because what she valued was cleverness. Insofar as
she acted on ambition by stealing the tiara, her ambition was being
the smartest. 

This is a opportunity for me to repeat yet again my annoyance that
Rowena and Rowling didn't give Rowena's daughter an alliterative name,
like Rebecca or Rosamund or Regina.

Alla wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185052>:

<< But that begs another question for me, leaving the morality of that
act out, I wonder how does that work? How does Dumbledore know that
this is what is going to happen at the end of the year and that is
where Sirius will die? >>

Wellll, let's say ... one way or another he knows (by spies,
LegilimenCy, logic, divination, whatever) that Voldemort is determined
to lure Harry to the Department of Mysteries to hand down the Prophecy
Orb. He, not knowing that he is a character in a novel, doesn't know
that it will happen at end of term, but he knows it will happen
sometime, especially because he does things to encourage it, like
assigning SNAPE to teach Occlumency. 

He knows that if LV's away party screws up, LV will come himself to do
the job. So he plans to trap LV into revealing himself to Fudge by
having his own team ready to defend Harry and cause the DE team to
screw up. Harry serves as bait in this plan, just as a fake vision of
Sirius served as bait in LV's plan after true visions of the Prophecy
Orb failed as bait.

So if he wanted Harry to witness 'Voldemort' killing Sirius, that
battle would be the perfect opportunity to make it happen. But I don't
think DD did it with his own wand: was DD even in the Ministry
building yet when Sirius died? I think if Sirius was killed by his own
side, it was Lupin's wand (Pippin gathered the evidemce with the
intention of supporting her ESE!Lupin theory). And I *insist* on
believing La Gatta Lucianese's version, that DD had gotten both Sirius
and Remus to agree to this.

However, I don't believe that Rowling had any conscious intention that
Sirius's death was anything but a normal battle casualty or that
Dumbledore was a spider.

Lizzyben wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185085>:

<< It's sort of funny to me how in OOTP, DD carfully reins in the
Death Eaters, while seeming to be willing to toss the lives of his own
followers to the wind. >>

If the good guys go to heaven when they die and the bad guys go to
hell, then the good guys dying is not such a bad thing (interrupting
myself, surely you know the old joke in which the pollster asks the
widow where she thinks her late husband is now, and she answers: "He's
in Heaven enjoying eternal bliss with Jesus, but I don't like to talk
about such unpleasant things"), but compassion tries to keep bad guys
alive long enough to urge them to repent.

<< I would argue that DD meets at least two of those criteria. Canon
shows us an enormous disregard for human life (Seven Potters plan,
letting Draco roam free, letting Quirrell/LV roam free, letting
Basiliks roam free, etc. etc.) DD's emotion does blind him to what he
is doing, in that he seems unable to recognize how much of his hurtful
actions are due to his own emotional damage. And I wouldn't really
count on JKR's moral compass, which continues to confuse & confound me.

And I could actually like DD as a character. But what disturbs *me* is
that JKR never comes clean about the extent of DD's machinations. She
now says that he's a Machievelli, and that "he's been pulling a lot of
strings." *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*. But she never tells readers the
full truth. I'd be OK if DD came totally clean in DH, confessed all &
then was forgiven by Harry. But JKR seems to want readers to forgive &
love him w/o even knowing all that he's done. It's sort of like DD's
secret w/JKR. And even still, many readers will call DD the epitome of
goodness, or "benevolent" - while referring to a man possibly
responsible for the deaths of many innocent people. >>

Well, y'know, in a novel, the author does evil things to the
characters. It was the author who killed Harry's parents and Sirius
and Mrs Weasley's son and Teddy's parents. It was the author who made
the Dursleys be stupid bullies and then hit them on the head with mead
glasses. It was the author who made Merope Gaunt a pathetic creature
with an obsessive infatuation. It was the author who made Tom M.
Riddle a psychopath who only feels comfortable while murdering people,
which is a cruel thing to do to him as well as to his victims. And it
is the author who knows a lot more about what's going on that she
doesn't tell the characters -- or the readers.

The characters only ever had very limited free will, because the
author overrides it for the sake of the plot and for the sake of set
pieces and even for the sake of a joke. By the time the book is
published, the characters' destinies (at least for the length if the
book) are determined and unalterable. Every time you re-read OoP, it
ends the same way.

I haven't read any Rowling interviews for a while so I don't know what
she has said in the last year or so about DD being her self-insertion.
In the old days, all I heard of her saying was that he was her
mouthpiece for giving information to the reader. 

The readers may question why things happened in the plot the way they
did, like "having so many unlikely coincidences is implausible". That
DD is a big schemer who set up the apparent coincidences is an excuse
that can be given to the reader. As far as he schemed and manipulated,
the author made him scheme and manipulate. And I feel that some
readers attribute some things to DD's schemes that were intended to be
coincidences caused by Fate, which is another stand-in for the author.
Who may feel a bit guilty herself for what she did to the characters.

I'm not sure how to make a graceful transition from speaking of the
author to speaking of The Author, but authors have difficulties when
they make a character symbolize God. And there are parts of the series
where Dumbledore *does* symbolize God, as when the characteristic of
good guys is they have faith in DD and follow his teachings even when
they seem most defeated. And the parts where his plans result in good
people dying at bad times. And other times DD is depicted as a human
being, fallible by definition, which is at best inconsistent. Worse
than inconsistency is that readers see him as consistent by seeing him
as a human being of great power who, as the saying goes, 'thinks he's
God'. 

Pippin wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/185107>:

<< Dumbledore knows that Quirrell has been corrupted. He can also
guess that Voldemort is nearby and is inhabiting a feeble body which
needs unicorn blood to sustain it. However, there's no reason to
suspect that it's Quirrell, who merely looks pale and unhappy -- not
an unusual state for Voldemort's minions. >>

What about his Legilimency?