To kill or not to kill and resolutions of the storylineWAS :Re: Disarming spell

[sistermagpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 185525

> > Magpie:
> > The narrator called them friends and family members so that's 
what 
> > they are. 
> 
> Carpl responds:
> I think not. The narrator says, "They [Charlie and Slughorn] 
*seemed*
> to have returned at the head of *what looked like* the families and
> friends of every Hogwarts student who had returned to fight, along
> with the shopkeepers and homeowners of Hogwarts." Note the 
narrator's
> uncertainty, which reflects Harry's. 

Magpie:
I took the uncertainty to be whether or not it's ALL of their friends 
and family or just some--it's pointing to the number. But chipping 
away at the narrator's knowledge of names or Harry's knowledge of 
people does not give me any more reason to add Slytherins. The 
narrator doesn't have to be so specific in that scene. It's a quick 
addition to what's going on. The author chose "they showed up with 
what looked like all the friends and family of the students who 
returned to fight" which connects them to Ravenclaws, Hufflepuffs and 
Gryffindors the most obvious choice to me. If she wants Slytherins 
there she should just say they're there after so pointedly leaving 
them out all the time before this. This isn't the type of sentence 
where I'm going to be thinking about irrelevent issues like whether 
or not Harry has enough time to study everyone. If there's time to 
quickly mark them off as the friends and family, there's time to 
identify them as whatever the author wants me to see them as. 

We see plenty of students returning to fight who aren't Slytherins. 
Most of the cast has returned to Hogwarts for this battle. And there 
were non-Slytherins who left just prior to this--students already 
pointed out as being pro-Harry's side. 

Honestly, if the woman is here trying to tell me that the group of 
students she herself spent so much time telling me wouldn't join the 
fight, then sent away so I could look at their empty table, is in 
fact trying to tell me they're now acting completely opposite to the 
way they acted before, then she really blew it in my case. She 
already had students returning to fight without returning Slytherins. 
She called the Slytherins Slytherins throughout the series and only 
now, at the moment they're acting in the most un-Slytherin manner, 
she's decided to coyly call them "students?" All I can say is wow, 
she must have felt highly conflicted about letting them do something 
for the good side at all, because there's a lot more information 
weighted toward the other interpretation.

As I've said before, I'm not denying that these people *could* 
contain Slytherins. It's not like the English is wrong. But there's a 
reason people came away with the impression that Slytherin didn't 
fight, what with all the clear descriptions of Slytherin (by name!) 
standing apart. It's not because JKR cleverly manipulated their non-
existant prejudice against Slytherins, or showed them how they're 
biased. It's because she chose to bury her meaning behind a much more 
obvious meaning just at the moment she had to be clear for it to come 
across. I can understand the interpretation that these are returning 
Slytherins, but there is no reason whatsoever that she couldn't have 
named them as that. 

> Carol:
> 
> But the narrator doesn't say that they're the students "left at
> Hogwarts." Quite the contrary. They're the students who *left 
Hogwarts
> and returned* with what Harry *assumes* to be their friends and
> families. Who could they be except the Slytherins and a few
> miscellaneous students from other Houses?

Magpie:
All the people we already saw return to fight along with Harry. 
Mostly everybody involved in this melee has returned for it.

I mean, I have no trouble understanding JKR describing this when she 
says it in an interview, where she explains what's going on, how 
these students who were previously part of a blob of untrustworthy 
people were in fact running home to get reinforcements because that's 
how they think etc. But if she doesn't realize that that moment was 
actually surprising enough to need that explanation in the text, and 
that it would be a revelation to Harry, then that's her mistake and 
not mine as a reader. It's possible it was. Maybe she was just 
avoiding that kind of moment for Harry. But the result--for good 
reason--is that one of the main reactions to the book was that the 
Slytherins didn't return at all and that she remembered it wrong in 
her interview. That was because of her word choice, not because she 
was forced to write it this way for any reason.

Pippin:
Being a Slytherin never came between between Snape and Lily. Being a
Death Eater did. IIRC, she never said a word against Slytherin House.
Certainly she didn't hold it against Slughorn. And of course
Slughorn is a well-connected, highly-influential person himself.

Magpie:
I meant being in Slytherin led to his being friends with DEs, and 
encouraged his Pureblood ideas.

Pippin:
The turnaround is revealed in Malfoy not letting go of Goyle to save
himself (growing in courage from the young man who tortured Rowle
under threat of Voldemort's wrath), it's "in the name of brave
Regulus","dueling McGonagall, Slughorn, and Kingsley all at once", and
of course, "probably the bravest man I ever knew."

Magpie:
Yes, I referenced that brave Slytherins exist. They follow the 
Slytherin road to courage: loving someone. I never denied that. 
(Malfoy isn't noted as particularly brave by Harry.) I wouldn't 
really call them turnarounds since Harry just kind of updates his 
opinion of them with the new information. With Regulus he was even 
identifying with him rather positively before he knew he was brave. 

Pippin:
Harry mistook a Ravenclaw for a Slytherin in CoS, not to mention being
completely bamboozled by Diary!Riddle. Of course he was a Slytherin
all along, but the narrator never bothered to mention it.

Magpie:
And we know this because in both cases we found they were Slytherins. 
It's not like every time the narrator makes references to a bunch of 
Slytherins or a Slytherin we should doubt that's what they were. I'm 
not arguing that Harry has perfect House-radar, but that the narrator 
regularly mentions students by house. The narrator saying that 
Slytherins burst in through the door in DH is not outside of the 
narrator's abilities. It's not even out of the ordinary.

Montavilla:
I like the idea that the Slytherins would be smart enough to get
reinforcements before fighting (and JKR seemed to like that, too). 
This might be one of those times when the editing let her down--
because someone should have flagged that sentence as too ambiguous to
qualify as the "Slytherins doing their part."

Magpie:
Perhaps the editor didn't find it any more ambiguous than most 
readers. S/he just assumed it meant the usual people who were on 
Harry's side and took "Slytherin played its part" to refer to the 
obvious places where Slytherins play a part in reaching victory. 

-m