Subject: re: ch. 9 times 9 makes 81, and 8 + 1 equals nine!
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Posted on: 2023-05-07 16:14:41 UTC

Wow, this news article! (“News”) There is a lot to take in here. I should have seen it coming, since I think Neville has mentioned living with his grandmother before, but with the Longbottoms being a Pureblood family, I totally assumed they were fine and normal. When will I learn that nothing in Purityworld is fine and normal? Of course they couldn’t escape their canon fate, of course Bellatrix and friends still got brutal on them. Poor Neville. Some of the metaphors in here are way painful, like Gaunt complaining about equalization schemes and defending tradition against an outgroup (not to mention “Lying Longbottom” being a very Trumpy style of nickname, to my ear (Ears: that thing we read words with)). I also can’t help but see the lines, “. . . and to work harder to secure a future for my Pureblood child and her peers. To safeguard the right for magical blood and culture to exist,” as basically being the “14 words” transplanted into a magical fantasy setting. I also find it interesting that this Rita, a middle class white woman, used to be in favor of championing progressive causes, but is now acting deferential to an authoritarian figure and acting as a mouthpiece for his restrictive views, and is finding an audience in otherwise perfectly nice and reasonable middle class white women, like Molly Weasley, as a result, helping to shift the views of the general public against an oppressed minority. Gosh, I . . . I feel like there’s . . . something there, tying this in with real world meta, surrounding the Harry Potter fandom? I just can’t think what that would be, exactly. Oh well!

Hermione is losing her books budget to a hair product? Truly the most degenerate timeline! And of course, when an arbitrary social stigma makes a product artificially valuable, the market is always there, ready and willing to generate a profit from it. Fun! But hey, the alternative would be forcing Draco to view scandalous ponytails against his consent, so. What choice is there?

Oh, wow, I keep forgetting the Knight Bus exists at all! Definitely one of the least fantastical and interesting elements of the canon, honestly.

—doctorlit is dismantling his desktop today in preparation for replacing his floors, but will try to continue reading and reviewing from his cell phone for the immediate future

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