Entry tags:

hbp uberwank

Half-Blood Prince Uberwank: Chapter 5, An Excess Of Phlegm

Welcome to the house of fun.

- Madness, "House of Fun"

As with the last chapter, we pick up right where we left off - this time outside the Burrow. This is what passes for continuous non-stop ACTION in the Potterverse. Harry Potter, the boy who got up and went for a wee and had a shower and ate some breakfast and put on his clothes and brushed his teeth and put on his shoes and went for a walk and came home and read a book and scratched his arse and had a nap and read the paper and ate some crisps and... and so on.

Dumbledore knocks on the door, to be answered by a squeak from Mrs Weasley, asking who's there. Like Brian Blessed or William Shatner, he booms, "It is I, Dumbledore, bringing Harry!" He's so bloody melodramatic in this book.

Molly opens the door, and she is still short and plump. Tonks is there too (she is still young and still has a heart-shaped face, although her hair is now angst-brown. I have to say, I'd have liked it if her "real" hair colour was black - for the family connection, because it might go some way towards making her alleged relationship with Remus even more dubious, which I approve of, and most of all because it would provide me with the opportunity to call her an emo). Dumbledore addresses her as "Nymphadora", and she doesn't argue. You'll recall that she did argue when Remus called her that back in OotP, so I guess their love is totally... er... ?

Anyway, Tonks fucks off, first thanking Molly for the tea and sympathy and turning down an invitation to a dinner at which Remus and Mad-Eye will also be in attendance. Dumbledore fucks off in turn, explaining that he has urgent business with that Scrimgeour chap. Isn't it like one in the morning? (It is. I've just checked a couple of pages ahead and Harry tells his homies that he arrived at 1am.) This concluded, Molly is free to begin her summer project of feeding Harry until he explodes. The first course in this ongoing shovelling session is a bowl of onion soup. I'd now like to explore in detail her serving methods and therefore why magic is pointless and stupid.

First she taps her wand on a big iron pot, which "bounces" onto the stove and immediately boils through (and incidentally, why bother putting it on the hob when it's clearly being heated magically? Bit redundant, isn't it?). It then flies through the air towards Harry, where it tips itself in the direction of his lap; only then does Molly manually place a bowl underneath it. To provide some accompanying bread, she waves her wand behind her back, without looking, which causes a loaf and breadknife to fly across the room and land on the table. Now, I guess the reason all this is done by magic is because magic is supposed to be easier than doing it all by hand, as it were (in fact, later in the book I'll revisit that point when Ron and Harry find themselves manually peeling about four million sprouts). However, personally, I would much rather heat my soup gradually, so that it doesn't get too hot (Harry burns himself on it in a moment or two), and also because I have a feeling instantly heated liquids can behave a little unpredictably. I then like to carefully ladle it into a bowl I have ready, rather than pouring the scalding soup in the direction of my crotch and remembering to whack a bowl down at the last minute. If I fancy some bread with my soup, I like to slice it carefully, while actually looking at it, rather than having a fucking breadknife fling itself across the kitchen behind my back where I can't even see it. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here.

And, actually, there is a bunch of other dodgy logic I may as well include here. Now, the thing about instantly-heated liquids behaving unpredictably is because - well, there's this thing called brownian motion, which is the random movement of the molecules in gases and liquids. Now, as you heat liquid slowly, collisions between particles happen, but this is sort of self-correcting as it gets hotter. (I'm probably making all kinds of errors in here, by the way - I'm no physics expert. At any rate, I'm vastly simplifying things, entirely for my own benefit. Corrections are welcome if you know any more about this that I do.) Anyway, point is, any spell designed to bring soup immediately to the boil would almost certainly have to include not only something to make the particles move faster (which is what heat effectively is) but also something to cancel out the random effects of this sudden increase in motion, almost certainly an explosive surge of pressure and probably a "Foosh!" of soup all over your kitchen – without cancelling out the end result, i.e. the part where it gets hotter.

What I'm getting at here is that - if we ignore the fact that they are ~*wizards*~ and it's ~*magic*~ and all that - in instantly heating the soup and not having it explode all over the place, Molly is arguably using immensely complicated magic, because this is, in effect, a spell that can moderate the paths and collisions of literally trillions of individual molecules. So, much more complicated than an Avada Kedavra (which simply switches off the being on the receiving end) or a Cruciatus (which I've always assumed works by simply causing every neuron in the body to fire simultaneously).

And all this over a passing mention of a bowl of soup. Sigh.

Incidentally, at some point during the above, Crookshanks - still an angry-looking ginger cat - jumps on to Harry's lap for a cuddle. Hey, here's something that has only just occurred to me about Deathly Hallows: what the fuck happened to Crookshanks, anyway? (I will assume Hermione's parents didn't take him with them to Australia: you can do that, but you have to pay for the animal to be quarantined and so on, and given that Crookshanks is part-kneazle, that might be more trouble than it's worth.)

My theory: killed and eaten one week into the Infinite Camping Trip.

Meanwhile, Harry is throwing food down his neck like there's no tomorrow. While he does, Molly chatters away about Slughorn, eventually shoehorning into the conversation the fact that Arthur has been promoted at work. He now has ten minions underlings staff and is responsible for confiscating the pointless crap - fake amulets and counterfeit potions and so on - peddled by Mundungus Fletcher and his ilk, inspired by and taking advantage of the current climate (the one in the book, obviously, I'm not talking about the credit crunch RECESSION. IT'S A FUCKING RECESSION). Why Fred and George haven't been thrown into Azkaban under the accompanying new legislation, given that (as we'll see in the next chapter) they are clearly the wizarding version of illegal arms dealers, is left unexplored.

Speaking of Arthur, where is he? Still at work, apparently, and Molly attempts to confirm this by glancing at her "clock", which we've seen a few times before - it has a hand for each family member and instead of numbers, a variety of conditions they could be in, like work and school and travelling and so on. (If I had one of these devices, there would be only two conditions: "sleeping" and "online".) Anyway, the "clock" is really only called that because it has hands and a face, as far as I can tell; it might as well be called a compass or a barometer or, indeed, some whimsical magical name, like a Baddy Barometer or some shit. In any case, it's not all that useful; every single hand is currently pointing to "mortal peril", and Molly tells us it's pretty much like that permanently now that Voldemort is on the scene. There's no way of telling whether, say, Arthur is currently in mortal peril because he's on a tube train and there's a bomb in the next carriage, or whether he's being held at wandpoint by death eaters right now, or whether he's just in the bathroom and he's in default peril. In other words, Voldemort has broken the clock. That bastard.

Speak of the devil, anyway - the clock's "Arthur" hand leaps to "travelling" (raising the question, if there were a bomb in the next tube carriage, would the hand be on travelling or mortal peril?) and the next thing you know, Dad's home! He lingers outside the door to begin with; they seem to have set up a kind of security question system, so Molly asks Arthur what his greatest ambition is, and he replies that it's to find out how aeroplanes stay up. That's not much of an ambition, really, not when there are children's books that could tell you, but I'm not going to rip Arthur apart over this one as I quite like him. (Nevertheless: here's one for toddlers, start with that, and then maybe try this one for spoddy twelve-year-olds. Those four years in a library weren't wasted, then...) Then it's his turn to ask her a question, which is: what is Arthur's secret private pet name for Molly? It's "Mollywobbles", which is embarrassing, but at least it's not something disturbing like "Uncle Daddy" or "Pedobear". There is a question to be raised around the fact that, according to the phrasing of the question, Molly likes Arthur to call her that, but... oh, let's just not go there. Anyway, then Arthur comes indoors and we learn that he is still thin, balding, red-headed and wearing glasses. (This is getting really stupid.) They talk for a while before Harry is dismissed to bed, on account of it's still the middle of the night.

Harry spends a little while unconscious before he is woken by Ron and Hermione storming into his room, clearly having decided that he's been sleeping long enough. Hermione wrenches the curtains open, whilst Ron punches Harry in the head (no, really). These salutations concluded, they proceed to shoot the breeze for a couple pages. The entire time, Harry worries that Hermione is going to start asking him questions about Sirius, about whom discussion is forbidden. She doesn't say anything; regardless of her intentions, though, his preoccupation with NOT WANTING TO THINK ABOUT SIRIUS is, in my view, highly suggestive of post-traumatic stress disorder. (I have a pet theory that Harry's CAPSLOCK OF RAGE in OotP was due to PTSD. He displays virtually all of the major symptoms and a good few of the minor ones, as outlined in DSM-IV: outbursts of shouting, quick loss of temper, nightmares, flashbacks, avoidance, anxiety, survivor's guilt, over-vigilance, listlessness... but I digress).

After some time, the conversation turns to the topic of "her". Harry erroneously assumes this is a reference to Mrs Weasley, and is confused by the extreme vitriol Hermione and Ginny are directing at her - until the real target makes an appearance. Fleur Delacour, for it is she, demonstrates exactly what a fucking bitch she is by commiting the heinous crime of bringing Harry that flighty temptress, some breakfast on a tray. Molly was about to do it, so this is clearly completely out of order and Fleur should be left outside over the winter to freeze to death, the slag.

Sigh. As you may be able to tell, I have very little patience with the way poor old Fleur gets treated here. As far as I can tell, much of the anger she receives seems to be the result of her being a) the first serious partner of any of the Weasley sons, and b) foreign. But most of all, this pisses me off because the thing where they call her "Phlegm" simply isn't funny, no matter how you approach it. Because "Fleur" doesn't actually sound that much like "phlegm", nor like someone coughing up phlegm, unless you put on an incredibly over-the-top and mildly offensive "comedy" French accent.

So, anyway, Fleur (who, incidentally, is the victim of another one of those annoying descriptions, which in her case includes the fact that she emanates a faint glow. She should get together with that vampire guy who sparkles like a diamond) explains that she and Bill are engaged, and plan to get married next summer. Because she's only working part-time, she has come to stay at the Burrow - at Bill's request - in order to get to know his family. It strikes me as a little insensitive of Bill to put her in that potentially awkward position, and I suppose it's going to be easier for Molly to think of it as Fleur's fault rather than Bill's that there's an extra person in the house, but other than that, it seems like a nice enough idea.

As Fleur leaves, Ginny states bluntly that Molly hates Fleur. Molly protests, explaining that she doesn't hate her, she just thinks she's got nothing in common with Bill and they are rushing into getting married. Bill is down-to-earth and hard-working, whereas Fleur is - and here, Ginny interrupts, describing Fleur as merely "a cow". She offers no evidence, and thus far I haven't seen any - unless you count her manner, which I suspect is more to do with cultural barriers than actual rudeness (and I'll come back to that in a moment). That's so utterly textbook Ginny, isn't it? Saying something but offering no proof. Well, I suppose Ginny's own characterisation is based on that same principle, so there we are. (To be fair, Ginny does then say that Bill isn't down-to-earth, but she's disparaging about it, implying that she sees Bill's attraction to Fleur as mere thrill-seeking.)

It certainly isn't fair to imply Fleur isn't hard-working, anyway. She was chosen for the Triwizard Tournament, and now she works for Gringotts and can speak English fluently - and I don't see any of these fuckers making any effort whatsoever to learn a second language.

I suppose there's an argument that Fleur comes across as rude, but personally I don't see it - if there's anything in that, it's because her English isn't quite at the stage yet where she can grasp every subtle nuance of a sentence, or pick up the connotations of particular ways of wording things. But that's totally to be expected - in fact, I'm fairly certain that most people, when speaking with someone whose first language isn't the one in which the conversation is taking place, will simply overlook minor errors in speech like that, because even if the non-native speaker is being unintentionally rude, it would be deliberately rude to make an issue of it.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the erection that Fleur induces in Ron draws all the blood away from his head, which in turn makes him go all woozy and therefore brings forth in Hermione a fit of extreme jealousy. She actually "strides" across the room (how big is this room, to allow for any kind of striding?), stopping when she reaches a wall, where she stands with her arms folded. At first glance I thought she was facing the wall; I've just checked and she is, at least, facing into the room, but still, grow the hell up.

Even after Molly GTFOs, the slagging-off of Fleur continues. Ginny says - twice on one page, indeed - that she'd "much rather have Tonks in the family". Ginny, if you like Tonks so much, why not marry her yourself? Because unless you plan to do that, you don't get to pick whether Tonks is "in the family" or not. (For the record, as far as I'm concerned, pretty much the one ship that could salvage both Ginny and Tonks from the mess they both end up in is, in fact, Ginny/Tonks. I just think that a spot of girl-on-girl action would do them both the world of good, in that they would have something to do other than pine over men who don't really suit them, and certainly don't do them any favours - not to mention, it might help them relieve some tension. And - I can't put my finger on why this is, and I hope I'm not just fetishising here, but both of them strike me as infinitely more interesting and, well, cool as lesbians. Who's with me?)

The conversation touches on the subject of Sirius, and Harry immediately fills his face with eggs in a vain attempt to suppress his multitude of issues. By DH, of course, Harry will actually be sleeping in Sirius's bed, so I'd argue this attempt at repression is an unsuccessful one. (Srsly, the more I think about that, the creepier it gets. Do you think he even washed the sheets? Or did he just lie there awake at night, sniffing them? Right, that's enough, this is already more wrong than I want to get into.) Meanwhile, Hermione explains that Tonks is so emo these days that she is even having trouble with her magical Mary Sue power of having speshul sparkly hair and a pet unicorn. Wait, I thought that was supposed to be an ability you were born with? Isn't that like getting depressed and losing your double-jointedness or something? Or, actually, scratch that, it's like Harry trying to speak Parseltongue while he's all hung up on Ginny, and failing. Or perhaps, at a pinch, James losing his animagus ability due to being all obsessed with Lily. Neither of those things happens because, as any fule kno, men are far too manly and tough to let emotional things like, you know, emotions have any impact on their abilities. Unless they're Spider-Man.

After a while, Ginny GTFOs and our intrepid trio cast around for other non-player characters to mull over. They settle for noting that Fred and George's Emporium of Lulz and Shenanigans is doing well, because the majority of wizards are epic morons; and that Percy is still not talking to the rest of the family. Finally, they rehash everything we already knew about that stupid prophecy that I don't care about and also everything that happened last night when Harry and Dumbledore went to pursue a flighty fat dude or whatever the line was. After this, nobody can think of anything else to say, leading Hermione to change the subject by getting punched in the face by a "joke" telescope, left behind by the wonder twins. I've put "joke" in quote marks because it hits her hard enough not only to knock her to the floor, but also to instantly bruise her: it leaves behind a "brilliantly purple black eye". In my book, that goes beyond hilarity and firmly into the region of assault, but what do I know.

For some reason, Hermione doesn't seem to care about her injury for the moment, and instead treats Harry to a lengthy monologue concerning what she thinks Dumbledore plans to teach him in their - ahem - private lessons. Harry tunes her out to a distant hum so that JK Rowling can insert some purple prose about how much he loves his friends and crap like that.

Then they talk some more and it's boring, and the next thing worth mentioning happens a bit later when Harry goes downstairs to find Mrs Weasley unable to heal Hermione's bruise. For some reason, Hermione is now extremely agitated, presumably because it's just sunk in that she got punched in the eye (I know she's meant to be dead clever, but all wizards and witches are fairly dumb). Fleur comments that she heard, from Bill, that Fred and George are very funny - and Hermione snaps at her about it. The tone of this passage, the way it's written, implies that we're supposed to side with Hermione and think Fleur is being a bitch, especially as Ginny just commented to the effect that it isn't funny that the bruise won't come off, but this strikes me as a little unfair when the rest of the time we are expected to, indeed, think Fred and George are funny. To me, this whole bit reads like Fleur is trying to be friendly by striking up conversation about Fred and George, and she gets it thrown back at her. YMMV, of course.

Sigh.

Oh, I forgot to mention this at the time, but a bit ago Harry mentioned that they'd be getting their OWL results today. I think Dumbledore may have mentioned it at some point? Anyway, the "action" of the chapter now turns to our heroes stressing out over the possibility of failure; luckily, a few moments later, a trio of owls appears, bearing their results. How convenient for the plot that they only thought to stress out mere seconds before the arrival of the birds. The results are barely worth a mention (Hermione has achieved top grades in all thirty-seven of the subjects she took, and both Harry and Ron have passed where it counts), but I wouldn't mind just going off on a tangent here about the grading system itself, which goes like this:

O - Outstanding
E - Exceeds Expectations
A - Acceptable
P - Poor
D - Dreadful
T - Troll

The whole scale of grades is, in my view, completely counterintuitive. There doesn't seem to be any logical order to the grades, especially P to T (what the hell does "Troll" actually mean, and how does it differ from "Dreadful"? The only way I can interpret the T grade is as a rough equivalent to there being a GCSE grade R, for "retarded". Lovely). And it's not even like they use this system all the way through school and therefore are used to it by now. (Hell, the grading system at most UK universities can be a bit hard to get your head around when you're a fresher, but you use it for three years, so you get it by the time you graduate.) Oh, I'm sure the system makes sense to someone who's high, but what about people who aren't - and as I have stressed repeatedly in the past, most wizards are really stupid.

And, OK, since we're already on the subject, we need to talk about the Hogwarts curriculum, I feel. (Hell, this chapter is already way longer than it needs to be, so let's go all out.)

The students don't get English, maths, human biology (or any kind of science at all), any foreign languages, or any sort of life skills stuff - no health education, no how to apply for a job, or how to cook, or clean your house, or wash your clothes, or look after your money - and no sex or relationship education whatsoever, which is particularly glaring given that so many couples seem to get married young. (Or course, there's always the possibility that they get all that stuff in the evenings with their head of house or something. There's an image: McGonagall showing the Gryffindors how to transfigure a beer mat into a prophylactic, Snape demonstrating the appropriate use of a lubricating potion to the Slytherins - and let's not even discuss why Sprout's been growing all those cucumbers in greenhouse three.) They don't get Latin, either, which is odd - and it's not like they even get the option to take it later. (I wonder if it used to be on the curriculum, once, but was removed? Later we'll discover that Snape wrote his own spells, which must have taken a hell of a lot of work.)

As for non-core subjects... well, they don't get any of those either. The most glaring omission, in my view, is art: the books are full of magical portraits that both move and talk, as well as photos that move. It's not like these are lost arts: wizarding Britain's only newpaper uses moving photographs (and as I recall, Rita Skeeter has a photographer sidekick). Then there are the statues and sculptures in the main atrium of the ministry, and so on. And yet there is no indication that anyone is taught any of these skills in any formal way, nor even that they are available as extracurricular activities. Both Dean and Luna, canonically, are shown to have some amount of talent in painting and drawing; would it have been too much, say, to have Dean mention in passing a desire to go into a magical portrait-painting apprenticeship after school, perhaps in book 5 when they all get careers counselling? Additionally, the only example we have of someone with an interest in photography is muggleborn Colin Creevey, and going by his excitement at discovering that developing the negatives in the right potion will cause them to move, we can surmise that he was into it before he came to school.

At the same time as all of this, there seem to be some pretty serious holes in the curriculum the students do get. What's the point in Astronomy, for example? That's actually a real (muggle) science, and there doesn't seem to be any magical use for it, except for divination - which is widely seen as bullshit (in any case, don't get me started on the difference between astronomy and astrology, because it WILL end in me punching a hippy in the face). Or what about Care of Magical Creatures? At first glance, I suppose it could be a sort of wizard equivalent to rural science or one of those subjects, except that they never seem to study animals that the wizarding world actually uses for anything; you'd think owls would be a start, given that there's an entire system of communication based on their use. To an extent this can be put down to Hagrid's general suckitude, I suppose, but still...

DADA seems like a worthwhile subject with real-life applicability, and it's totally neglected - even taking into account the one-year restriction, the teaching has been mainly crap. (A side note which I may return to at the appropriate point: if the DADA position is cursed, why not just abolish the teaching of the subject and replace it with, say, "defensive magical theory and practice" or something, and change the curriculum just enough that it's technically a different subject, or otherwise find a loophole? I get that there's a jinx on it, but surely there's a way around that. Or, alternatively, find maybe three good teachers and employ them on sessional year-long contracts on a rotating basis. Hell, just use sessional contracts for a single decent teacher. Employ that teacher as the manager of a department that doesn't exist and have them conveniently agree to cover DADA classes until the "real" teacher is available. There are ways around this, is what I'm saying!)

And why are Charms and Transfiguration taught separately? They appear to be very similar in practice, and have very little practical application - at least, we rarely see them used for anything, well, useful. Occasionally a teacher will conjure something from thin air, which they aren't ever taught to do in school. The official line is that you can't conjure or transfigure food, and given Ron's horrible Yule Ball robes, it doesn't look like transfiguration of clothing is easy or doable (you wouldn't even need to buy clothes, because you'd be able to keep transfiguring one set of robes in accordance with fashion and to ensure they fit you). And as for Charms - what's the use, really, in being able to make a pineapple tap-dance, except to be an annoying whimsical twat?

I suppose there's an argument to be made that these subjects are taught for the same reason that, say, Shakespeare and trigonometry are taught in maintream UK schools - you might never need the exact facts you learn from studying those subjects, but they provide a more general grounding in skills that will come in useful (or, at least, they are supposed to - whether most people take those skills away with them is a separate issue). In other words, you're unlikely to ever use SOHCAHTOA after your GCSEs, but learning it inside and out is meant to give you a better grasp of numbers in general. And the answer to a question concerning - I dunno - how Banquo's reaction to the witches' prophecy reveals his character isn't something you'll need to know much about unless you make it your speciality, but it allows you to learn how to construct and present an argument.

So I'm prepared to accept that some of the Hogwarts curriculum is based on similar principles: providing a general magical grounding, learning the skills you need for life in the wizarding world in a more abstract way rather than only learning specific useful variants but being lost when you need to perform a slightly different spell. If you can turn a match into a needle or a tortoise into a teapot, then it probably won't be any trouble for you to turn a twig into a knife. Similarly, if you can make a pineapple dance, then you can probably set a spoon to stirring a pan while you chop up the vegetables, or whatever. (That still leaves the problem of why Ron's dress robes couldn't be transfigured, though.)

Aaaaaaaanyway. After all this, it appears that the chapter is finally drawing to a close. Harry, never one to let the opportunity for a wangst session go to waste, reflects that his grade in Potions isn't good enough to take the NEWT, so he will never achieve his life ambition that he's had for all of, what, a year of becoming an auror. He goes on about how he feels that becoming a trained killing and espionage machine would be a great way of living up to that stupid prophecy, because it said that "neither can live while the other survives", and what better way of killing Voldemort than, you know, killing Voldemort. Or something; I'm not sure what he's getting at, actually. In any case, I'd agree that he's living up to the prophecy, but only because it implies he could die and it's quite likely he'll do that if he becomes an auror.

But what's most significant about this, to my mind, is what this thought process implies about Harry's changing character - and, as an extension of that, why I feel the books went downhill from this one on. At the end of the last book, Harry discovered that on top of all the crap he's dealt with in the last year, his life will have to end in or contain murder. And now he seems to have dismissed that thought and is planning for the future. The thing is - three years? Two years? Passed between the publication of OotP and HBP, but in-universe only a couple of months have gone by. JKR seems to have forgotten this as much as anyone. (You see the same problem between GoF and OotP with the way Cho is treated - in our world three years have passed since her boyfriend Cedric was killed, but for her it's been a matter of weeks. People seem to forget this and judge her especially harshly for crying all the time in OotP when, in fact, she's in the full throes of grief. But, once again, I digress.) My point is, the Harry I know would not react like this, and given the other things JKR chooses to gloss over in this book, it reads like she no longer cares.

Previous Chapter | All Chapters | Next Chapter