Slytherins come back WAS: Re: My Most Annoying Character

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 180197

> Alla:
> > BUT when the crowd lead by Slytherin head of the house described
> > VAGUELY, it is not Okay to assume that narrator left staff 
out?????
> 
> Magpie:
> It's not described vaguely at all! If it's left out it's not there.
> <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Really? Okay, then could you please name every person who belongs 
to 
> that crowd. That to me would mean that it is not described vaguely. 
> I think it described quite vaguely considering the fact that Harry 
> would not even know the parents at all.

Magpie:
Nobody has to name every single person. The people who are identified 
are shopkeepers and friends/family of non-Slytherin students. Whether 
Harry knows the parents at all doesn't matter, that's who are 
described. Slytherin students would be just as easy to describe. They 
would also be the most important to describe, given that they have 
consistently been characterized as pro-Voldemort leaning and leaving 
the fight. Any vagueness of the description still doesn't cover the 
Slytherins being there.

> Alla:
> 
> No, it is me saying that I consider the description of that crowd 
to 
> be vague enough to imagine that some Slytherins returned.  Of 
course 
> she does not tell us explicitly the names of Slytherins who 
> returned, but to me what she described is enough to fill in that. 
If 
> I feel like it of course.

Magpie:
She never had to give us any specific names of Slytherins one way or 
the other. She didn't mention any names in her interview, but we're 
discussing it now because there, for the first time, she introduced 
the idea of this group being included at all. I can imagine tons of 
things in the story, that doesn't make them canon.


> Magpie:
> Yeah, I bloody well do. He's telling me shopkeepers and families of
> students already there just came in, not to mention Slughorn and
> Charlie. It has nothing to do with what Harry cares about, this is
> the narrator telling us what's there. <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> And do I have  to start naming the occurrences when narrator tells 
> us what it is is NOT what it is at all?
> 
> How  about "Severus, please", which turned out to be quite 
different 
> from what narrator thought it is ( and me LOL)?

Magpie:
So now we're reduced to equating an intentionally ambiguous bit of 
dialogue and a mundane physical description of who's entering the 
room that's supposed to be helping us keep track of who's actually 
there? Even if we do that, Severus please turned out to be quite 
different because we were TOLD what it meant ON THE PAGE. It's not 
like in an interview JKR said, "One of my favorite bits of DH is 
where it was revealed that "Severus please" actually referred to 
Albus asking Snape to organize a student-run space trip to Mars."

Alla:
> There are plenty of occurrences where narrator is describing 
> something and it turns out to be something completely different.

Magpie:
And plenty more times when it doesn't, and this is one of them. The 
reason the times when there's a turnaround work is that for the most 
part the narrator is just telling us what's there, and if it looked 
like something different than it was we see why/how. There was no 
turnaround to this. Harry never learns he was wrong about who showed 
up with Slughorn.


> Carol responds:
> <SNIP>
>  How much
> clearer can she get that "what looked like" or "seemed" is not
> necessarily what *is*? <SNIP>
> 
> Alla:
> 
> Just wanted to say me too. I often argued myself that narrator is 
> reliable more often than not, but um, certainly not always.

Magpie:
But if it's not "what is" then we're told what is. We're not here. 
There's as much evidence for Slughorn showing up with the Rockettes 
as there are for him showing up with Slytherins who left. The best 
you're doing here is saying "maybe Harry and the narrator were wrong 
about who was in the crowd," which doesn't get you any closer to 
saying Slytherins were there than you were before. Not to mention it 
requires a lot of, imo, senseless dismantling of the narrator's 
ability to tell us what is going on in a scene where the narrator's 
mostly just keeping track of what's going on for us. I think "seemed" 
and "looked like" more obviously refer to the number of people. There 
is no reason for Slytherin students we, the narrator and Harry would 
know perfectly well to "look like" a bunch of completely different 
people. Even your own examples of trying to change it to the Weasleys 
make the changes necessary to make it make sense to a normal reader 
in ways this interpretation doesn't. You have Molly walking in with a 
crowd of red heads that Harry can't see meaning the other Weasleys, 
not Molly walking in with Ministry employees that Harry can see 
perfectly well meaning the other Weasleys.

-m