01 HP:Philosopher’s Stone

[chantaldormand]

Hey guys, I hope you don’t mind me posting yet another chapter commentary.

Just for fun I decided to count some things during this commentary:

Crime Count: Times when the supposed good guys break rules/law

Death Count: When our protagonist could die.

Freud Would Be Proud: The text is suggestive in some way or this commentator’s brain managed to

Comments

[chantaldormand]

Both Crime and Death counts started as tongue-in-cheek poking at Hagrid's statement about safety in Hogwarts, but then I realised that Harry has strange tendency to walk into potentially deadly situations and not getting hurt. There will be a lot of comments in this commentary that are not really plausible, like for example awarding point for potential death via landslide of wands in chapter 5, because I grew annoyed with characters and writer.

I considered splinting Crime count into Rule and Law counts, but wizards have very strange attitude towards law. Consider this: in chapter 13 Draco fuses Neville's legs with spell and poor guy has to bunny-hop back to Gryffindor tower. When Neville enters the tower "everybody" starts to laugh until Hermione fixes him. The trio makes some fuss that Neville should tell teacher, but doesn't really pushes for it and the whole incident is treated as case of bulling. There is a lot of situations where what we would treat as law breaking (even if it's reversible) is either dismissed by wizards or at most treated as bullying. This and the Blood feuds make me think that main job of the Ministry and Aurors is not keeping order among population, but keeping wizards hidden from non-magical people.
Besides I don't want to make the commentary too cluttered. As it is I considered hiding some counters and just adding them to the final post.

The Death count works only for Harry. If I had to count every instance of what could happen for every character I would start to bite walls :P

As for what call what Hagrid did, yeah I know the difference, but last I checked Albus had yet to gain title that in any way gives him authority to leave Harry at the Durslay's so I left that out. Well that and I don't want to make the commentary too dry. I'm writing it as my self-appointed homework, but others don't have to suffer while reading it.

I don't think that Albus cares if somebody is too traumatised. As we see later in the series he has absolutely no qualms to use trauma to get what he wants, but yes Severus probably is not running Hogwarts.

As for recommendations, thanks :)
I'll read them once I get some time to properly enjoy them.