The Internet Personified: Why didn't they ask Hagrid?

Hello my beloved ones,

This is a Harry Potter newsletter. Some of you will rejoice at that news, but readers who are not interested in Harry Potter, please scroll down to the links section (lots for you to read today!) and similarly, readers who haven't read Harry Potter and have somehow managed to make it to 29th September 2019 without any spoilers, please scroll ahead to the link section also.

Okay, those of us that are left, hello! I'm doing a Potter re-read. I've stopped counting, even, how many times I've read the books. Over and over and over again. First, we obsessively re-read everything while waiting for JKR to bring out a new book. (The podcast Witch Please, recommended to me by friend and newsletter reader Manasi and also by Richa Kaul Padte on Twitter yesterday, of which I have already listened to two episodes, says that the long gap between books is what caused fan fiction to suddenly erupt. I used to read fan fiction myself, my great favourite was Draco/Hermione, there was this one woman who wrote the world really beautifully. But in fan fiction, the focus was on the romance, no pesky Death Eaters or Voldemort, just long boarding school days with Draco--back when he could still be redeemed--and Hermione falling deeper in love. Also fun, and definitely more risque than Draco/Hermione was Draco/Harry, which also I read and once, I ill-advisedly read Harry/Snape (after Harry is of age or something) and that was just disgusting.)

Anyway, as I read the books again this time, despite practically knowing them off by heart (always great satisfaction reaching the bit in Half-Blood Prince, incidentally my favourite Potter book, where Ginny turns to Harry with a "hard blazing look" on her face and he finally kisses her. Oof, *chef's kiss* I have never been that thrilled by any YA description of teenagers getting together before or since) I spotted some plotholes which I had never noticed before. Plotholes and observations, that's what we're going to talk about. (Obviously, write back to me with your thoughts so we can have energetic Potter debates which is what I live for.)


* The entire point of book six, Half-Blood Prince, is Harry and Dumbledore shuttling off across the country and in space and time to get memories of Voldemort as a young man, to see how he operated. In that case, why didn't anyone think of asking Hagrid? After all, Hagrid was expelled from school because of Tom Riddle, and so would have come into his peripheral notice, at least, during Voldemort's stint at Hogwarts. Before you say Hagrid might be too oblivious to anything that's going on, I think that's doing him a disservice. He's intelligent enough to observe people, and certainly was more on the ground, as it were, than the house elf whose name I forget, who was that Hufflepuff descendant's slave. Similarly McGonagall who we know is older than Neville's grandmother because of a snarky remark she makes about her, and IF Neville's grandmother is at least in her 50s, because magical people tend to have kids young (further on babies below) then McGonagall has got to be at least twenty years older than HER and we know that Hagrid and Voldemort are in their 60s because the Chamber was opened 50 years ago when they were in their teens, so okay, I think I have argued myself out of the McGonagall conundrum, she was clearly too young to remember Riddle at school.

*Speaking of house elves, I remember on previous readings, I tended to treat SPEW and Hermione's defense of the elves as comic, like Harry and Ron did. Dumbledore taking it seriously was just one of the Dumbledorian things he did, he moved in mysterious ways etc. But now that I think about it, there's this whole analogy about indentured servants, being born into slavery even if you're so magic that your magic might be better than human stuff, and you still have to scrape and bow and serve against your own interests. I mean, it's quite creepy if you look at it closely, which no one except Hermione does for a long time. I don't think Harry treating Dobby nicely has anything to do with Harry being anti-slavery, he's perfectly happy accepting everything magical as status quo, but he's generally a decent human being so if he has a servant, as he does later, he just wants to be a benevolent master etc.

* The Hagrid problem leads me to the Slughorn problem though! If Lily was in his Potions class then Snape was also in his class. Remember at the end of Half Blood Prince he's all "I taught Snape! I thought I knew him!" In fact, he might've even liked Snape, because he was a) Head of Slytherin and b) into collecting really smart people. How did he not recognise ANY of Harry's Half-Blood Prince textbook tricks? Okay, so maybe Snape wasn't trying out Sectumsempera in class, but there's all the fancy potions shortcuts which surely he employed as well.

* She never explains in the books where Harry's parents GOT all the zillions of Galleons they left him and please don't send me that revisionist interview where she's like, "OH YES I KNEW ALL ALONG THAT JAMES' WAS FROM A VERY OLD AND RICH FAMILY WHO INVENTED SKELE-GROW" if it's not in the books, I'm not considering it a valid opinion, even from JKR's mouth itself.

* Speaking of Harry's parents, I started wondering about why two kids, barely in their early twenties would have a kid themselves, especially in those dark and difficult times. And something in that podcast I just told you about, got me thinking. They were talking about how wizards managed birth control and they said apart from the Weasleys and their thousand children, everyone else seemed to stick with just one or two kids. I started to think that maybe the magic gene is hard to carry and so might lead to more miscarriages than normal? I mean, it would make sense if it's an anomaly in the DNA causing your body to just spontaneously abort it like it does with a lot of non-viable pregnancies. That would explain greater why so many magic children don't have siblings and why Harry's parents (and the Longbottoms, let's not forget them), when finding themselves pregnant at such a difficult time, would choose to have the baby despite everything, because carrying a magic baby to term was difficult in the first place. I think that the reason the Weasleys have so many kids is because something in their combined pure blood genetic codes offers a resistance to this and so they were able to carry on, as it were. This is further supported by how later Harry and Ginny and Ron and Hermione are able to have multiple kids, obviously Ron and Ginny carry the same thing in their blood.


* I wondered how Molly killed Bellatrix because you can't use an Unforgivable Curse unless you are a shitty person (which of the good guys, no matter how powerful, ever used Crucio for example?) Apparently a hitting spell straight to the heart can also kill someone if you aim carefully, like a bullet. Also, someone on the internet speculated that Molly's Mother Love might have caused her simple spell to be extra powerful (remember she killed Bellatrix just after Bellatrix tried to get Ginny) much like Harry's mother protecting him led to the rest of this story. BUT if you have to be a Bad Guy or to mean something deeply in order to use the Unforgivables, I don't understand how Snape killed Dumbledore. See, Dumbledore asked Snape to kill him, yes, but then Snape would have wanted Dumbledore dead in his own heart in order to execute him so neatly, and I can't see that being the case with any mercy killing.

* Finally (for now, I can't promise I won't do another one of these later) I understood why Wormtail joined Voldemort even if it meant ditching his friends. He always wanted to be cool, and the Dark Arts are cool if you look at them dispassionately, and it also meant for once that he, Wormtail, was the Main Guy, something he never wanted to be. Similarly with Snape. And similarly, with a lot of real world examples, of people who feel that they have been shunted to the sidelines and want something, anything, to make them relevant again.


PS: there's this great Twitter thread which is totally relevant too!

I take your ‘first name’, and raise you my full name. https://t.co/b3K3invfiQ

— Harry Potter (@HPneuro) September 26, 2019

***
Stuff I wrote: My Mythology for the Millennial column gets POLITICAL this week with an analysis of Kerala's own Mahabali (and has put me in the mood for a fish curry lunch from Mahabelly).

Stuff other people wrote aka The Link List

How to make new friends as a grown up.

Stories of women trying to get later stage abortions in India.

FUNNY: Spotify's dinner party playlists ranked.

The last quizmaster in the age of big trivia.

How Tik Tok holds our attention. (K has downloaded it and we spent a little time going through videos the other night, we blinked and an hour had sped by.)

Welcome to Hotel Millennial.

Fatima Bhutto on Shah Rukh Khan.

What it's like to have chemotherapy.

Why are so many children placed for adoption in India being returned?

And that's all she wrote! Speak to you very soon.
xx
m

Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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