Subject: re: Chapter Ten Wizarding Duel Commandments
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Posted on: 2023-02-13 01:43:23 UTC
Well, my gosh. I never, ever thought I would be able to unironically type the sentence, “I feel so much solidarity with Gregory Goyle right now,” but here we are. I know it was just an off-hand joke, but I’m glad he got his vision fixed! And I love that something legitimately good came of the protagonists doing underhanded stuff.
The conversation between Lockhart and Quirrell in the hospital wing is hilarious; I love how Lockhart can be so wildly off base one minute (“Potters are too honorable . . . would a twelve-year-old boy know of blood magic?”), and so observant the next (“Potter wouldn’t invoke Mother Magic or draw the Knight’s Mark”). The “fun sponge” comments are funny too, both childishly stupid and weirdly insightful.
Oh man, I totally forgot about Astoria’s blood malediction. It’s coming on hard in this timeline, considering it doesn’t get her until 2019 in canon! (Honestly, I forgot she’s Draco’s wife in canon too, despite just reading Cursed Child last year . . .) That’s why she’s been so weak lately. And the symptoms seem similar to cancer . . . Man, I feel bad for ever suspecting her in the attacks. I hope St. Mungo’s can do something for her. She’s too young to go down like this, and it’s so sad to hear her so deluded about the Mother Magic stuff, that she’s not even seeking any scientific means of recovery
. . . Okay. Oooooooooookay, I take back every nice thing I said about this version of Lockhart. (Not that I’ve much nice to say about the canon Lockhart, but you know what I mean.) Lockhart can just die right now. And that’s putting aside the fact that he’s clearly the attacker, and that he was torturing the wizarding world equivalent of an eleven-year-old cancer patient, the way he’s starting to act around Hermione, he can just please die forever. Can he die . . . now, please? This next chapter, please? Pretty please?
Oh, I was going to point out that it feels pretty silly that the entire wizarding community has failed to notice that the plots of a famous, best-selling author are rip-offs/libel of real family histories, especially with how tightly knit the pureblood houses are, and that it took a bunch of 12-year-olds chatting about it at school to put the pieces together. But then I remembered this is the Harry Potter universe, and 80% of the adults are self-interested morons blinded by adherence to arbitrary traditions and social mores. And then I remembered what I literally brought up last chapter: that Lockhart is real good memory charms. So. Less a plothole, more a feature.
—doctorlit seconds Hermione’s stance that Hogwarts needs a mixed-culture literature class