I Would Sell Out the Nation

[condwiramurs]

I promise I'm still chipping away at Indestructible.

But after I responded to mary's comment on my latest essay, discussing Severus' motivation for joining the DEs, I had another small revelation that snapped some massive realizations about the WW and the HP books into focus for me.* Enough strands for another essay series if I try to follow them

Comments

Re: Witch hunts-- are you now, or have you ever been?

[sunnyskywalker]

DE-sympathizers on the Prophet staff seems like such a missed opportunity. For all we know, the staff was actually bitterly divided while all pretending to follow the same editorial line. Was that turn of phrase on that one article anti-Muggle in an ordinary Secrecy-supporting wizarding supremacist way, or in a Secrecy-overturning way? Is Lucius Malfoy attacking Arthur's Muggle Protection Act because it he thinks it gives the Ministry too much far-reaching power to invade good upstanding wizarding homes on spurious charges, thus threatening wizarding privacy and liberty, or because he secretly doesn't care to make it easier to keep magic-revealing artifacts out of Muggle hands? And whatever Malfoy meant, what did the reporter intend to convey?

Hogwarts has no student newspaper (probably because, like the drama club, it had one terrible accident once and was cancelled forever, while kids can get nearly killed every Quidditch game and that's cool). I like the idea of an underground paper. Maybe one co-created by Hogwarts students and graduates of all ages--see, we're a forward-thinking organization that gets kids involved instead of warehousing them all year!

Of course I also think there's an underground literary magazine, or maybe more than one (divided by house?), full of Deep and Meaningful poetry mixed with adventure stories about wrestling dragons and dodging Muggle helicopters. At least there should be. Probably a new one gets started every couple of years and then peters out as key members graduate.

Re: Witch hunts-- are you now, or have you ever been?

[oryx_leucoryx]

And Hermione never paid attention because there were no House-points in that, nor any adults she wanted to impress.

Re: Witch hunts-- are you now, or have you ever been?

[sunnyskywalker]

We never see her read fiction or poetry on her own initiative, because she's too busy cramming for exams. (Pause to sigh at the lack of appreciation for the arts in wizarding culture.) So yeah, I really doubt she writes any or keeps track of whether anyone else does. (Parvati and Lavender probably do...) If Hogwarts had a journalism program that could actually win you House points, Hermione might have had a crusading journalist phase (editorials about House-Elf liberation!), but they don't.

I can understand why Hogwarts doesn't support a journalism club, though. Can you imagine what would happen if kids started learning how to investigate stories? They wouldn't have stopped at asking Binns about the Chamber one time in class; they'd have been looking at yearbooks to see who was in school at the time, cross-referencing against Nature's Nobility to see who might be an heir of Slytherin, tracking down whose grandparents were there at the time and owling them for more information, asking McGonagall and Hagrid what they remembered from that time... No, definitely don't want to encourage that sort of thing. And that's why the student papers stay firmly underground....

But the staff probably considers poetry and short stories harmless. Probably mistakenly. I'm sure the Ravenclaws and Slytherins have at least figured out allegory and allusion.