harry potter: a prediction, a d'oh! and a squee

first the squee.
book seven!! this summer!!! july!!! OMG!!!

second, the d'oh: i can't believe i never saw this before, but an online friend pointed this out and i had to figuratively facepalm. how did i never see this before?
by putting the curse on the DADA position, Voldemort assured himself a bit of a free field. it's in DADA that students learn to defend themselves against the likes of Voldemort. no decent DADA class/teacher, for years and years and years, and Voldemort won't be facing a whole lot of true, effective opposition. smart Voldemort. and dumb Dumbledore for letting Voldemort into the school, where he was able to put the curse on the job!

third, the prediction:
draco malfoy and werewolves will somehow interact in book seven in a significant way. the foreshadowing starts all the way back in book one!

Quidditch

Not that this is important, but in a world as small as wizarding Britain, how can there be so many professional Quidditch teams? Especially when they hardly ever recruit kids who've just finished Hogwarts? Do we know of anyone who's gone off to play professional Quidditch from Hogwarts (in Harry's time, anyway) other than Oliver Wood?

I recall reading about the Chudley Cannons, the Holyhead Harpies, the Falmouth Falcons, the Tutshill Tornados, Puddlemere United, the Montrose Magpies, the Wimbourne Wasps, the Kenmare Kestrels and the Pride of Portree. Then the HP lexicon also lists the Appleby Arrows, the Ballycastle Bats, the Caerphilly Catapults, and the Wigtown Wanderers. That is thirteen teams, which means between them Ireland and the UK have a minimum of 91 professional players. More if they have reserve players on staff.

That just seems, unlikely. I mean, there were only 40 eleven year olds who entered Hogwarts in Harry's first year. I guess it could work if the slow aging of wizards and witches means that they can play professional sports a whole lot longer than a muggle could, but I would love some sort of reasonable explanation. I don't expect one, of course. :)

another harry potter prediction

Ok, at the beginning of book 5, a bunch of folks from the Order of the Phoenix come to the Dursley's house to get Harry. Why so many folks? I predict that they will all serve a purpose (some of them already have, of course).

Prof. Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody - very important to book 4 and shows up often after
Prof. Remus Lupin - very important to book 3 and shows up often after
Nymphadora Tonks - a character in books 5 and 6
Kingsley Shacklebolt - a character in books 5 and 6
Elphias Doge - can't remember him being mentioned again
Dedalus Diggle - mentioned a few times here and there since book 1
Emmaline Vance - horribly murdered "between" books 5 and 6, murder mentioned in book 6
Sturgis Podmore - arrested and sent to azkaban in book 5
Hestia Jones - quite sure she isn't mentioned again in book 5 or 6

Here's my prediction. Elphias Doge and/or Dedalus Diggle and/or Hestia Jones will figure into book 7. i'm rooting for Hestia Jones. She has a cool name. ;)

another harry potter post

A prediction.

I hereby predict (sound pompous enough? ;) that book 7 will end, or Voldemort will end, anyway, in the "always locked" room in the Department of Mysteries.

I also believe that the archway that killed Sirius and those flying brains will be important in the final battle scenes and/or whatever final scenes end Voldemort.

Having studied JKR's style a bit too obsessively lately, I see that she leaves hints for the future in certain ways. Rereading book 5 I am a bit stunned at how often Montague (whose sojourn in the broken vanishing cabinet gave Draco the crucial information he needed to get Death Eaters into Hogwarts at the end of Book 6) was mentioned. She just casually throws Montague in several times, just to remind us of him. His angry parents show up to talk to Umbridge, he's in the hospital wing getting medicine from Madame Pomfrey, etc. I didn't notice that the first time I read the book, or the second, either. I had to read book 6 and THEN reread book 5 to notice.

With that sort of writing style in mind, I see the experiences that Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Neville, Luna and Harry had in the Department of Mysteries in a new light.

I was really struck by the way only some of the students were drawn to the arch that later killed Sirius. Harry was fascinated by it, but Hermione knew it was dangerous, and explicitly labeled it as such.

The flying brains are also mentioned several times. Ron tries to play with them when his brain is addled from an unknown spell. Then the brains apparently come close to killing Ron.

The door that melted the magical knife is probably the "always locked" door that has behind it the power of love. Dumbledore tells Harry about this on pages 843 and 844.

These things were all emphasized to no known purpose in book 5 (or book 6, for that matter), and so I feel they are very likely to be very important in the last remaining book.

Prediction made. Now I have to take care of a crying 1 year old. ;)

more harry potter thoughts

in the first book, when snape realizes that quirrell is trying to get the stone, why doesn't he tell anyone and try to get help with stopping quirrell?

i adore harry potter, but ...

i adore harry potter, but there are things about it that bug me. maybe some of these criticisms will be answered by the 7th book, i hope so.

for one, wasn't the philosopher's/sorcerer's stone safer before harry went down in there to "save" it? he got it out of the mirror, quirrell couldn't. if harry hadn't gone down there, presumeably quirrell would have spent a lot of fruitless time nattering to himself in front of the mirror of erised, and then d'dore would have come down and caught him and been done with him. harry was wonderful and brave and all, but what he did, in the end, served no real purpose.

and i want to know how voldy got his wand back. he says to his DEs that he couldn't hold a wand after his attempt to curse baby Harry backfired. no one takes credit for getting it back to him. he gives no one credit for it, either. so will the wand deliverer be revealed in book 7, or did JKR just mess up?

another thing: If D'dore didn't really believe that the prophecy was "truth", ie, it wasn't Harry's destiny unless he chose it to be (and he says so in HPB), why did he wait so many years to reveal the prophecy to Harry?

I've long thought that prophecy thing was the weakest part of OotP, maybe the weakest part of the whole series so far. If Harry had just known the prophecy (and D'dore could have told it to him at any time, or let him stumble across it in the pensieve if he didn't want Voldy looking at him through Harry's eyes) then in essence the whole book wouldn't have happened. And, not unimportant, Sirius wouldn't have died, either.

and who cares if voldy wastes time and energy going after the prophecy? what mattered (to me, to harry) is that HARRY went after it. sirius went to the dept of mysteries to rescue harry. the prophecy had nothing to do with why sirius was there, except that it was why harry was there. if harry hadn't tried to "rescue" sirius, sirius wouldn't have died. just what voldy was banking on, really.

if instead harry had been told, say 3/4ths of the way through the book, what the prophecy was, he wouldn't have gone to the dept of mysteries that night, it wouldn't have mattered that snape stopped giving him occlumency lessons, and voldy would have spent (wasted) lots more time and energy trying to get the prophecy.

i just think it's weak.