Deathly Hallows, Chapter 22: The Deathly Hallows
Author's Note: I apologize for the months I took between postings. It started out because of tables.
The only way I could make sense of King's Cross was by creating a table that laid out the skinned baby incidents in detail. After I did that, I realized chapter 1 contained a similar incident and cried out for a table, as well as a detailed comparison between the two chapters, so I did those things.
When I reached the point in my postings in which Xeno Lovegood gets tortured by the DEs, and Hermione gets tortured by Bellatrix, I realized those were also similar situations that were handled completely differently by the author. I made tables for those incidents, then realized I'd have to rewrite the Malfoy Manor chapter spork to accommodate and compare them. After living with DH for 6 months (I started reading it and writing the sporking in December 2012 and last posted in June 2013), I just couldn't face that. I needed a vacation from it. A nice, long vacation.
Recently I've gotten the desire to write about it again, so here goes. I'll finish it this time.
When last we left our wimpy intrepid trio of self-serving losers brave heroes, they had just found out about the Deathly Hallows from Xeno Lovegood. After he calls the DEs to turn the Trio in, they blow up the house, leave him to his fate, and Apparate away.
Hermione having saved everyone’s butt again by Apparating them to a field, they set up their tent and rehash the previous chapter. Hermione explains she allowed the DEs to see Harry so they would know Xeno wasn’t lying about Harry’s being there. Yeah, like they’re really going to care that Harry was there, now that he’s gone again. When Ron asks why she covered him, she tells him it’s so everyone will keep thinking he’s at home sick and not attack his family for lying about him. Spattergroit must be a hell of a disease if its obvious symptoms last three months. I also didn’t know the DEs needed an excuse to attack people, particularly their enemies. I thought they did it just for the heck of it. Ron then asks about Hermione’s parents, and she reminds him they’re in Australia.
Or are they? Remember, we only have Hermione’s word about their location.
After Ron and Harry lavishly praise her for being a “genius,” Hermione and the boys go round and round regarding the reality of the Hallows, with Hermione saying they can’t be real, Ron saying they could be, and Harry beginning his obsession with how SUPERAWESOMECOOL! it would be to have the Hallows himself.
There is one really dumb aspect of this argument. Hermione asks Harry, if Dumbledore knew the Hallows were real and could do what was claimed, why didn’t he tell Harry about them? Silly Hermione. Dumbledore never told anybody anything important. You can’t jerk people around if they know what’s really going on.
Harry becomes convinced he’s descended from the third brother, the one who originally got the cloak from Death. He could be, since they’re both passive people who lurk around under a magical drop cloth rather than taking action. The story says the third brother was “humble,” though, an adjective which does not describe Harry, and sure doesn’t describe his scumbag father. Harry also believes the Resurrection Stone is in the snitch Dumbledore left him. Now he just needs the Elder Wand to complete the set, and he realizes his soul mate Voldy is after the wand, too. Preposterous as these claims are, they are of course true because the title character of the series says they are.
Harry becomes so obsessed with getting the EW (appropriate abbreviation, no?) that he abandons the Horcrux quest and just sits around on his can thinking about the wand and trying to tune in to his Voldie-vision. “He would have been happy to sit alone in silence, trying to read Voldemort’s thoughts, to find out more about the Elder Wand....” Hmmm. Fantasizing about possessing the Ultimate Phallic Symbol while trying to read another guy’s mind...Yeah, nothing at all gay about that, Ms. Rowling.
Unfortunately for Harry, his damned friends keep interrupting his nonsexual fantasies (No, no, really, they aren’t, I swear!) by dragging him around looking for Horcruces. They excuse this outrageous behavior by saying that’s what Dumbledore told them to do. Humph! Don’t they realize Harry’s the Chosen One, the Star of this series? How dare they question his wisdom!? Truly, a prophet is never recognized in his own country.
Things get so bad that--gasp!--Ron has to take charge! You know they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel when that happens. He keeps trying to get Radio Free Wizarding World Potterwatch on his radio but doesn’t succeed until March.
MARCH! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The first fifteen pages of this chapter cover three months, and during that entire time, Harry Potter does nothing, nothing, but sit on his ass fantasizing about the Elder Wand and trying to connect with his Voldie-soul mate. Oh, wait. He also tries to open the snitch so he can get the stone out of it. (Nothing gay about that, either.) I wish he’d succeed in that, too. Maybe he’d swallow the stone, and it would end up in his scrotum. He sure needs something that works down there.
Harry doesn’t have the right to bail out on his society like this. He can’t have it both ways. He can’t have the adulation that goes with being Mr. Boy-Who-Lived-Chosen-One-Wizarding-World-Savior and abdicate the responsibilities that go along with those titles and that adulation.
I just love it that people make such a big damned deal about how “heroic” Harry is when he is so passive. Yes, Severus Snape is a jerk, but he is a jerk who does something. While Harry is sitting around with his wand up his ass, Snape is busting his ass 24/7, running the gauntlet between serving two unstable, sadistic tyrants, operating a school, and protecting the children of Hogwarts. It’s not for nothing that terri_testing wrote a story about him called, To Do All in My Power. That’s his motto. If Harry had to do Snape’s job for a week, he would collapse and die from the strain, not least because he would have to do it while everybody was condemning him for being a villain, instead of constantly petting and praising him as a hero. It’s no wonder people with a mature and responsible concept of heroism regard Severus Snape as the true hero of this series.
Which brings me back to Harry’s obsession with the Hallows. Some time ago, terri_testing wrote a pair of very well-reasoned articles saying the Elder Wand encouraged hubris in its owner, and the Resurrection Stone should be called the Suicide Stone because it encouraged people to kill themselves so they could be with their dead loved ones. I agreed with her when I read those pieces, but rereading this book, I can’t agree any longer.
Look at what happens in this chapter: Harry becomes obsessed with finding and uniting the Hallows, so much so that he withdraws from his friends, bails out on the job his idol Dumbledore gave him, and spends all his time brooding and trying to connect with the Dull Lord. In other words, he acts clinically depressed. Ron and Hermione were exposed to the same information Harry was, but they didn’t become obsessed/depressed. Ron was mildly interested in the SuperWand, but not enough to distract him from the Horcrux hunt. Hermione dismissed the whole DH story as nonsense and continued following Dumbestbore’s orders. So why weren’t they tempted?
I think the Hallows are inanimate but potentially addictive objects, like drugs and alcohol, and with similar effects. Take people’s reactions to alcohol as an example. At one extreme are people who can’t stand alcohol and never drink it at all. At the other extreme are people whose lives are destroyed by their addiction. In between those extremes are gradations of consumption and vulnerability. Some people drink only socially, or with meals, or sometimes have a few drinks to relax. Other people drink heavily, or even binge drink, sometimes for years (e.g., in college), then give that up and drink little or not at all when the circumstances of their lives change. In other words, not everybody will become an alcoholic just because they are exposed to alcohol. There are factors besides mere exposure to an addictive substance that predispose someone to addiction of any kind, such as heredity and a history of child abuse.
I think the Hallows are the same. They can only control people who are vulnerable to being controlled in that Hallow’s particular way. It’s not a coincidence that all the people referred to as either owning or wanting the Elder Wand are men. It’s extremely unlikely a woman would care much about having a wand she could use to kick the ass of everyone she met. Neither would a lot of men. Imagine Neville turning into a badass because he had the EW. You can’t, can you?
The proof that the wand is just a wand lies in the fact Snape had it within easy grabbing distance for almost a year but made no effort to get it. He literally didn’t even know what it was until Voldemort was getting ready to kill him to possess it. One can argue that’s because he wasn’t really the wand’s master; Draco was. But the wand didn’t affect Draco, either. And even if Snape was technically not the wand’s master, if it was powerful enough to (1) make everyone who encountered it desire it, and (2) enslave its owners, he surely would have felt some desire to possess it when it was so close to him for the better part of a year.
In the same way, a person with either no dead loved ones, or who was at peace with their deaths, would not care about using the Resurrection Stone to recall the dead. They certainly would not kill themselves just because a rock told them to. I agree the stone has the wrong name, however. As Hermione pointed out, it doesn’t really raise the dead; it just brings back a “pale imitation” of a person. It should therefore be called the Shade-Calling Stone.
For that matter, the Hallows themselves need a new name because there is nothing “hallowed,” or holy, about them. From now on, I am going to call them the Deathly Booby Prizes because they lack holiness, are desired only by fools (boobies), and are a nasty kind of gag prize for their recipients.
Eventually, Ron is able to guess the password of the Potterwatch show, and HRH get to hear it. I don’t get that. A broadcast program is not a computer file or secret society that might require a password to gain access to it. It’s available to anyone who can tune in. That even applies to similar technologies such as cell phones, as the British royal family found out in the 1990s when people were able to pick up on their radios the highly personal cell phone calls Princess Diana and Prince Charles were having with their lovers.
Even a young child should be able to see how lame this “protection” is. It’s known to the Order that anyone who has the password can hear Potterwatch. It’s inconceivable that the DEs wouldn’t know about such an underground program. They could anticipate it and be listening for it, just happen upon it by accident, or find out about it some other way, e.g., by questioning prisoners. All they’d have to do to tune it in is to guess the password, which, even given the extremely limited imaginations and talents on both sides, they should be able to figure out would have something to do with subjects important to the “good guys.” To make matters even more ridiculous, the broadcasters even give the password for the next show at the end of the current program!
On top of that, the pseudonyms the participants use are so obvious, they could be figured out by Rubeus Hagrid. Why couldn’t Remus be “Lon Chaney, Jr” (who starred in The Wolfman)? Or Lee Jordan could be “Almond,” and Kingsley could be “Executioner,” which has the added advantage of sounding really badass. (I like Jordan almonds. Shacklebolt sounds like some device a medieval torturer would use, and torturers were executioners.) And what’s with Fred being “Rodent”? Is that a play on his last name, Weasley? Weasels and ferrets are not rodents! They are carnivores! Do the research, people! Jeez Louise! I just--I can’t even--this is too dumb for words.
Rowling tries to make us selfish “muggles” care about this overhyped gangland rumble by telling us our kind is getting killed in large numbers by the DEs. Oh. Come. On. This is so stupid, it’s positively painful. Now we are supposed to believe the British government would emulate Harry Potter just sit on its ass doing nothing, while its citizens were being slaughtered wholesale by terrorists on its own soil. As the Thing likes to say, “It’s clobbering time!”
Apropos of the “muggle” attacks, Kingsley exhorts his listeners to protect “muggle” neighbors, reminding them, “...[I]t’s one short step from ‘Wizards first’ to ‘Purebloods first,’ and then to ‘Death Eaters.’ We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”
Okay, anonymous author, who are you, and what have you done with J K Rowling? I know you can’t be the woman you claim to be because this enlightened sentiment appears nowhere else in the entire series. It has to have been written by someone besides the person named on the cover.
At last we have proof. Deathly Hallows really is fan fiction ghostwritten by someone besides Joanne Rowling.
There’s a silly bit of “comic relief” when Fred rebuts a misconception that Voldemort can kill you just by looking at you, saying it’s basilisks that do that. He adds, “One simple test: Check whether the thing that’s glaring at you has got legs. If it has, it’s safe to look into its eyes....” But how would you tell, since wizards wear robes that conceal their legs? And what if it’s disguised like Nagini was inside Bathilda Bagshot’s body? That’s not even to consider that allowing Voldy to look into your eyes would allow him to Legilimize you, which would be very bad, even if not fatal. Hah! We were too clever to fall for your tricks, anonymous author.
It’s a good thing Potterwatch doesn’t really involve watching Potter, given that he’s done absolutely nothing these last three months. Seeing that, Harry’s supporters would have despaired about his “saving them.” Then their resistance would have crumbled, causing the Death Eaters to exult and step up their attacks. The book would have ended a lot sooner, and with a completely different result.
At the end of the chapter, because the author, whoever it is, is not able to come up with another way to move the story forward, Harry stupidly says, “Voldemort,” and the Trio gets captured by Snatchers (mercenary kidnappers hired by Voldemort). Yawn. Wake me when something really interesting and not contrived happens.
The only way I could make sense of King's Cross was by creating a table that laid out the skinned baby incidents in detail. After I did that, I realized chapter 1 contained a similar incident and cried out for a table, as well as a detailed comparison between the two chapters, so I did those things.
When I reached the point in my postings in which Xeno Lovegood gets tortured by the DEs, and Hermione gets tortured by Bellatrix, I realized those were also similar situations that were handled completely differently by the author. I made tables for those incidents, then realized I'd have to rewrite the Malfoy Manor chapter spork to accommodate and compare them. After living with DH for 6 months (I started reading it and writing the sporking in December 2012 and last posted in June 2013), I just couldn't face that. I needed a vacation from it. A nice, long vacation.
Recently I've gotten the desire to write about it again, so here goes. I'll finish it this time.
When last we left our wimpy intrepid trio of self-serving losers brave heroes, they had just found out about the Deathly Hallows from Xeno Lovegood. After he calls the DEs to turn the Trio in, they blow up the house, leave him to his fate, and Apparate away.
Hermione having saved everyone’s butt again by Apparating them to a field, they set up their tent and rehash the previous chapter. Hermione explains she allowed the DEs to see Harry so they would know Xeno wasn’t lying about Harry’s being there. Yeah, like they’re really going to care that Harry was there, now that he’s gone again. When Ron asks why she covered him, she tells him it’s so everyone will keep thinking he’s at home sick and not attack his family for lying about him. Spattergroit must be a hell of a disease if its obvious symptoms last three months. I also didn’t know the DEs needed an excuse to attack people, particularly their enemies. I thought they did it just for the heck of it. Ron then asks about Hermione’s parents, and she reminds him they’re in Australia.
Or are they? Remember, we only have Hermione’s word about their location.
After Ron and Harry lavishly praise her for being a “genius,” Hermione and the boys go round and round regarding the reality of the Hallows, with Hermione saying they can’t be real, Ron saying they could be, and Harry beginning his obsession with how SUPERAWESOMECOOL! it would be to have the Hallows himself.
There is one really dumb aspect of this argument. Hermione asks Harry, if Dumbledore knew the Hallows were real and could do what was claimed, why didn’t he tell Harry about them? Silly Hermione. Dumbledore never told anybody anything important. You can’t jerk people around if they know what’s really going on.
Harry becomes convinced he’s descended from the third brother, the one who originally got the cloak from Death. He could be, since they’re both passive people who lurk around under a magical drop cloth rather than taking action. The story says the third brother was “humble,” though, an adjective which does not describe Harry, and sure doesn’t describe his scumbag father. Harry also believes the Resurrection Stone is in the snitch Dumbledore left him. Now he just needs the Elder Wand to complete the set, and he realizes his soul mate Voldy is after the wand, too. Preposterous as these claims are, they are of course true because the title character of the series says they are.
Harry becomes so obsessed with getting the EW (appropriate abbreviation, no?) that he abandons the Horcrux quest and just sits around on his can thinking about the wand and trying to tune in to his Voldie-vision. “He would have been happy to sit alone in silence, trying to read Voldemort’s thoughts, to find out more about the Elder Wand....” Hmmm. Fantasizing about possessing the Ultimate Phallic Symbol while trying to read another guy’s mind...Yeah, nothing at all gay about that, Ms. Rowling.
Unfortunately for Harry, his damned friends keep interrupting his nonsexual fantasies (No, no, really, they aren’t, I swear!) by dragging him around looking for Horcruces. They excuse this outrageous behavior by saying that’s what Dumbledore told them to do. Humph! Don’t they realize Harry’s the Chosen One, the Star of this series? How dare they question his wisdom!? Truly, a prophet is never recognized in his own country.
Things get so bad that--gasp!--Ron has to take charge! You know they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel when that happens. He keeps trying to get Radio Free Wizarding World Potterwatch on his radio but doesn’t succeed until March.
MARCH! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The first fifteen pages of this chapter cover three months, and during that entire time, Harry Potter does nothing, nothing, but sit on his ass fantasizing about the Elder Wand and trying to connect with his Voldie-soul mate. Oh, wait. He also tries to open the snitch so he can get the stone out of it. (Nothing gay about that, either.) I wish he’d succeed in that, too. Maybe he’d swallow the stone, and it would end up in his scrotum. He sure needs something that works down there.
Harry doesn’t have the right to bail out on his society like this. He can’t have it both ways. He can’t have the adulation that goes with being Mr. Boy-Who-Lived-Chosen-One-Wizarding-World-Savior and abdicate the responsibilities that go along with those titles and that adulation.
I just love it that people make such a big damned deal about how “heroic” Harry is when he is so passive. Yes, Severus Snape is a jerk, but he is a jerk who does something. While Harry is sitting around with his wand up his ass, Snape is busting his ass 24/7, running the gauntlet between serving two unstable, sadistic tyrants, operating a school, and protecting the children of Hogwarts. It’s not for nothing that terri_testing wrote a story about him called, To Do All in My Power. That’s his motto. If Harry had to do Snape’s job for a week, he would collapse and die from the strain, not least because he would have to do it while everybody was condemning him for being a villain, instead of constantly petting and praising him as a hero. It’s no wonder people with a mature and responsible concept of heroism regard Severus Snape as the true hero of this series.
Which brings me back to Harry’s obsession with the Hallows. Some time ago, terri_testing wrote a pair of very well-reasoned articles saying the Elder Wand encouraged hubris in its owner, and the Resurrection Stone should be called the Suicide Stone because it encouraged people to kill themselves so they could be with their dead loved ones. I agreed with her when I read those pieces, but rereading this book, I can’t agree any longer.
Look at what happens in this chapter: Harry becomes obsessed with finding and uniting the Hallows, so much so that he withdraws from his friends, bails out on the job his idol Dumbledore gave him, and spends all his time brooding and trying to connect with the Dull Lord. In other words, he acts clinically depressed. Ron and Hermione were exposed to the same information Harry was, but they didn’t become obsessed/depressed. Ron was mildly interested in the SuperWand, but not enough to distract him from the Horcrux hunt. Hermione dismissed the whole DH story as nonsense and continued following Dumbestbore’s orders. So why weren’t they tempted?
I think the Hallows are inanimate but potentially addictive objects, like drugs and alcohol, and with similar effects. Take people’s reactions to alcohol as an example. At one extreme are people who can’t stand alcohol and never drink it at all. At the other extreme are people whose lives are destroyed by their addiction. In between those extremes are gradations of consumption and vulnerability. Some people drink only socially, or with meals, or sometimes have a few drinks to relax. Other people drink heavily, or even binge drink, sometimes for years (e.g., in college), then give that up and drink little or not at all when the circumstances of their lives change. In other words, not everybody will become an alcoholic just because they are exposed to alcohol. There are factors besides mere exposure to an addictive substance that predispose someone to addiction of any kind, such as heredity and a history of child abuse.
I think the Hallows are the same. They can only control people who are vulnerable to being controlled in that Hallow’s particular way. It’s not a coincidence that all the people referred to as either owning or wanting the Elder Wand are men. It’s extremely unlikely a woman would care much about having a wand she could use to kick the ass of everyone she met. Neither would a lot of men. Imagine Neville turning into a badass because he had the EW. You can’t, can you?
The proof that the wand is just a wand lies in the fact Snape had it within easy grabbing distance for almost a year but made no effort to get it. He literally didn’t even know what it was until Voldemort was getting ready to kill him to possess it. One can argue that’s because he wasn’t really the wand’s master; Draco was. But the wand didn’t affect Draco, either. And even if Snape was technically not the wand’s master, if it was powerful enough to (1) make everyone who encountered it desire it, and (2) enslave its owners, he surely would have felt some desire to possess it when it was so close to him for the better part of a year.
In the same way, a person with either no dead loved ones, or who was at peace with their deaths, would not care about using the Resurrection Stone to recall the dead. They certainly would not kill themselves just because a rock told them to. I agree the stone has the wrong name, however. As Hermione pointed out, it doesn’t really raise the dead; it just brings back a “pale imitation” of a person. It should therefore be called the Shade-Calling Stone.
For that matter, the Hallows themselves need a new name because there is nothing “hallowed,” or holy, about them. From now on, I am going to call them the Deathly Booby Prizes because they lack holiness, are desired only by fools (boobies), and are a nasty kind of gag prize for their recipients.
Eventually, Ron is able to guess the password of the Potterwatch show, and HRH get to hear it. I don’t get that. A broadcast program is not a computer file or secret society that might require a password to gain access to it. It’s available to anyone who can tune in. That even applies to similar technologies such as cell phones, as the British royal family found out in the 1990s when people were able to pick up on their radios the highly personal cell phone calls Princess Diana and Prince Charles were having with their lovers.
Even a young child should be able to see how lame this “protection” is. It’s known to the Order that anyone who has the password can hear Potterwatch. It’s inconceivable that the DEs wouldn’t know about such an underground program. They could anticipate it and be listening for it, just happen upon it by accident, or find out about it some other way, e.g., by questioning prisoners. All they’d have to do to tune it in is to guess the password, which, even given the extremely limited imaginations and talents on both sides, they should be able to figure out would have something to do with subjects important to the “good guys.” To make matters even more ridiculous, the broadcasters even give the password for the next show at the end of the current program!
On top of that, the pseudonyms the participants use are so obvious, they could be figured out by Rubeus Hagrid. Why couldn’t Remus be “Lon Chaney, Jr” (who starred in The Wolfman)? Or Lee Jordan could be “Almond,” and Kingsley could be “Executioner,” which has the added advantage of sounding really badass. (I like Jordan almonds. Shacklebolt sounds like some device a medieval torturer would use, and torturers were executioners.) And what’s with Fred being “Rodent”? Is that a play on his last name, Weasley? Weasels and ferrets are not rodents! They are carnivores! Do the research, people! Jeez Louise! I just--I can’t even--this is too dumb for words.
Rowling tries to make us selfish “muggles” care about this overhyped gangland rumble by telling us our kind is getting killed in large numbers by the DEs. Oh. Come. On. This is so stupid, it’s positively painful. Now we are supposed to believe the British government would emulate Harry Potter just sit on its ass doing nothing, while its citizens were being slaughtered wholesale by terrorists on its own soil. As the Thing likes to say, “It’s clobbering time!”
Apropos of the “muggle” attacks, Kingsley exhorts his listeners to protect “muggle” neighbors, reminding them, “...[I]t’s one short step from ‘Wizards first’ to ‘Purebloods first,’ and then to ‘Death Eaters.’ We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”
Okay, anonymous author, who are you, and what have you done with J K Rowling? I know you can’t be the woman you claim to be because this enlightened sentiment appears nowhere else in the entire series. It has to have been written by someone besides the person named on the cover.
At last we have proof. Deathly Hallows really is fan fiction ghostwritten by someone besides Joanne Rowling.
There’s a silly bit of “comic relief” when Fred rebuts a misconception that Voldemort can kill you just by looking at you, saying it’s basilisks that do that. He adds, “One simple test: Check whether the thing that’s glaring at you has got legs. If it has, it’s safe to look into its eyes....” But how would you tell, since wizards wear robes that conceal their legs? And what if it’s disguised like Nagini was inside Bathilda Bagshot’s body? That’s not even to consider that allowing Voldy to look into your eyes would allow him to Legilimize you, which would be very bad, even if not fatal. Hah! We were too clever to fall for your tricks, anonymous author.
It’s a good thing Potterwatch doesn’t really involve watching Potter, given that he’s done absolutely nothing these last three months. Seeing that, Harry’s supporters would have despaired about his “saving them.” Then their resistance would have crumbled, causing the Death Eaters to exult and step up their attacks. The book would have ended a lot sooner, and with a completely different result.
At the end of the chapter, because the author, whoever it is, is not able to come up with another way to move the story forward, Harry stupidly says, “Voldemort,” and the Trio gets captured by Snatchers (mercenary kidnappers hired by Voldemort). Yawn. Wake me when something really interesting and not contrived happens.