Deathly Hallows uberwank: Chapter 7, The Will of Albus Dumbledore

[fera_festiva]

We open with Harry waking up on his seventeenth birthday having been dreaming about a chap named Gregorovitch. It's significant but dull, so I won't go into it. Ron and Harry talk about this for a while, then Harry remembers it's his birthday. The first thing he does is summon his glasses. I still don't really get why he couldn't have done this before, given that this trace thing records magical activity around the person rather than specifically done by them (which is why Harry got into trouble when Dobby smashed that pavlova or whatever it was back in book 2, isn't it?), and he's in a house full of wizards. Anyway, he delights in summoning his glasses, and actually I don't really blame him. If I spend, say, ten hours playing a Zelda game, I'll often find myself attempting to hookshot objects once I walk away from the TV, and am incredibly disappointed when I remember I can't. (Where does he keep his glasses, though? I'm horribly short-sighted and I keep mine right by my bed.)

Ron makes a dick joke, then it's breakfast and birthday present time. Ron gives Harry a book - I don't have my copy of Deathly Hallows with me as I type this bit up, but if memory serves the book is called Using hypnotherapy to exploit women for fun and profit. Molly and Arthur have given Harry a watch, which apparently is wizarding tradition. It's rather a sweet scene, especially when we find out that the watch belonged to Molly's brother. Harry gives her a massive hug. There's a lot of hugging in this book, now I come to think of it. Hermione's got him a sneakoscope. Bill and Fleur have got him a magic razor, which is like something out of a parody fic where Harry becomes an emo, and which strikes me as an incredibly pointless, dangerous and stupid item. Fleur's papa says as much, heavily implying he's accidently shaved his balls in the past. This is a mental image I am pleased to have. Harry's also scored some chocolate from Fleur's parents and some hilarious biological weapons from Fred and George. Our intrepid trio head back upstairs, during which Hermione demonstrates, in passing, her intimate knowledge of Ron's pants, another enjoyable mental image.

Harry and Ginny then have a romantic moment which is teh romantic. Well, when I say teh romantic, what I mean is, fucking dreadful. It boils down to this: she wanted to give him the speshul birthday gift of getting his end away. It kind of reminds me of that bit in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones where Anakin Skywalker says to Padme:

I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth.

(I couldn't find the specific clip on Youtube, so instead, here's a particularly touching Anakin/Padme montage sequence, lovingly hand-edited and put to music by a fan. Note its heartrending emotional resonance and the edges of the TV.)

Click to view

Yeah. This bit is pretty much exactly like that, except worse. Here's why: the Anakin/Padme relationship in Attack of the Clones is a godawful, hammy mess, but - at least for me - it was easy enough to suspend my disbelief because I had already accepted that by the end of Revenge of the Sith, Luke and Leia have to have been born to Padme and Anakin.

So it doesn't matter enormously whether the relationship that produces Luke and Leia is the most romantic and tender screen relationship Western cinema has ever known, or the pile of processed cheese it is, because ultimately we know it's just a means to an end. (I suppose the fact that I'm much more invested in Harry Potter fandom than in Star Wars might be relevant too.) This is just as badly-done, but has no discernable purpose - and involves the main character, rather than essentially being backstory to the existence of the main character - so it isn't really justifiable.

Anyway, scene goes like this. Ginny invites Harry into her bedroom. True story: once, I got tipsy on Cuban rum with my friend Jamie, and we ended up pissing ourselves giggling as we imagined what various fictional characters' bedrooms were like. (He-Man's bedroom is decorated in a lot of grey, red and black, and the curtains, duvet cover, pillows and rug all have the same red-and-grey checked design on them, like a teenage boy's room in the 1980s. Skeletor's, interestingly in the context of this book, has loads of posters of motorbikes and girls.) So something I enjoyed about this book is that we get to see so many characters' bedrooms - Ginny's bedroom, Sirius' bedroom, Regulus' bedroom, Luna's bedroom. Um, anyway, Harry checks out Ginny's room, which has posters on the walls, and a view of an orchard where the two of them, plus Ron and Hermione, once played two-a-side quidditch, which sounds like the least fun game ever when you consider that there are four separate player positions in quidditch (seeker, chaser, beater and keeper). Anyway, Harry reflects that he likes Ginny because she is "rarely weepy", which seems to translate as "never shows any emotion other than spunkiness". I guess this is supposed to show us why Ginny is so much better for Harry than Cho was, but I don't buy it. Cho cries because her boyfriend was murdered and because now she feels confused and guilty and for all those other reasons that Hermione told us about in OotP, so this isn't even just the sound of a Harry/Cho shipper fanwanking. Ginny doesn't cry much, but does she even have much of a reason to?

Anyway, Ginny tells Harry she didn't know what to get him as a birthday present, and she wants to give him something to remember her by. Then she makes a slightly jarring comment about a silver lining which is meant to be romantic but essentially implies she's glad he won't be associating with any other women. Ah, the power of love. Then they start making out. During this, Harry reflects that the experience is even better than firewhisky. In the name of research, I wanted to recreate this feeling; however, there is no such thing as firewhisky, so I had to use the nearest thing I could find. To this end, I've just had a shot of a strange Croatian liqueur with a picture of a dog on the bottle that I've had in the fridge for about two years, the end result being that I may puke. Conclusion: the metaphor actually does stand up to scrutiny!

Just as Ginny is on her knees and unzipping Harry's fly (disclaimer: may not be true), there is a bang and Ron and Hermione interrupt the love-in. Personally I'd award them an Order of Merlin each just for cutting this turgid crap short, but it's hardly up to me. As Harry leaves the room, he thinks Ginny might, in fact, be crying now. So Cho cries over the loss of a loved one and that's bad; Ginny cries because her brother interrupts her in the middle of a feelup session, and that's OK. Gaaaaaaaaah!

Once they're out of the way of Ginny, Ron tears Harry a new one for leading Ginny on; Harry protests that Ginny doesn't take it seriously anyway. He has a horrific vision of Ginny marrying someone who isn't him. Harry, you're seventeen. When I was seventeen I was convinced I was going to marry Richey Edwards as soon as he got back from his holidays. Anyway, yes, Harry has a horrific vision of Ginny marrying someone else, which is a funny coincidence, since at the end of this book I have a horrific vision of Harry and Ginny married to each other.

Later the same day, and it's party time! Harry has a birthday cake baked and iced to resemble a Snitch. Mrs Weasley is levitating it to the table. I'm sure it'll be fine until the part where she actually has to put it down. (Perhaps you think I've put too much thought into the logistics of the cake. This is probably true, but in my defence I'd like to say that I've spent long hours in my life trying to figure out if it would be possible to make a cake shaped like a Death Star, which - naturally - means I am really cool and not dorky at all.)

Several of your favourite Harry Potter (TM) Chums are there to celebrate, including Hagrid (wearing the "hairy brown suit" he has donned before; I can't help but wonder, whenever we hear about the suit, if maybe Hagrid's just naked, but nobody notices because he really is that hairy), and America's Sweethearts themselves, Lupin and Tonks. She looks happy ("radiant", presumably because she's up the spout already); he looks utterly miserable, which is probably because he's a gay alcoholic trapped in a pointless marriage, but then again, it could just be that he's at that stage of drunkenness where you can't be bothered to have any expression on your face whatsoever, so you just sort of unfocus everything and then some smug bastard who's only had one glass keeps asking you if you're OK. A bit of present-giving and reminiscing goes on, during which Hagrid presents Harry with a pouch for holding things. It has a special power, which is that nobody but the owner can open it. As we will see, Harry entirely fails to use this especially useful item in this dungeon. If this were a real video game, he'd have to use the dungeon item just to carry on with the game! So why has JKR bothered writing about it? Jesus H.

They all pop some wizarding E, Mrs Weasley puts on Celestina Warbeck's new record, "My Red Roses for the Devil's Whore (Let Me Show You Them)" and the party gets going, but just as Tonks is discreetly coming up, a patronus arrives informing the gathering of the imminent arrival of Rufus Scrimgeour. Lupin and Tonks immediately peg it, leaping the fence. True story: once, evil_underlord and I went to a goth/punk club to drink snakebite and black; the Underlord, who had spent the entire day playing Mario 64, ended the evening stuck in a hedge with a twig up his nose having attempted to perform the extra-high triple jump over said hedge. That's sort of the theme of this chapter, actually - shit we do when pissed or under the influence of Nintendo.

Turns out Scrimgeour wants a chat with our intrepid trio. He wants to speak with them one at a time, but the Phoenix Crew (as they sometimes call themselves) doesn't take that kind of shit from the Man, so they stay put. He explains that Dumbledore left them certain items in his will. Hermione flips out about how long it's taken to get these items, and Scrimgeour mentions the Patriot Act or something. Hermione continues pwning him, so he changes the subject and asks Ron why the hell Dumbledore left him anything. Ron doesn't know; Hermione makes it out that Ron and Dumbledore were close; finally, Ron receives Dumbledore's deluminator, a.k.a. the Put-Outer we've seen in previous books. The thing that turns the lights out, that thing. Later in this book, this is useful, but I'm not sure if I think this is effective or not. We (i.e. fans) have wanked ourselves silly over various potential Chekhov's Guns in the series - was the room with the veil where Sirius died going to be revisited, could X/Y/Z object be a horcrux, the whole Mark Evans thing - Mugglenet even had (has? Can't be arsed to check) essays about the potential significance of the number 12, the colour purple, and socks. The deluminator is pretty much the only thing I can think of that didn't get wanked over in this way and it totally turns out to be important. I can't decide if JKR hid it really well, or just didn't foreshadow it well enough (after all, it becomes important at least partly by doing something we have never seen it do before).

Moving on. Hermione's been left a book of kids' stories, while Harry gets the snitch he almost choked on way back in book 1, and feels a "definite sense of anticlimax", because he's an ungrateful sod. We knew that, though - at the start of the last book he inherited a house from Sirius (whom he didn't bother to mourn because he was too busy masturbating or something) and he hasn't even been back there. Anyway, Scrimgeour asks Harry a bunch of questions about snitches and cakes and stuff and then, exposition time, Hermione explains that snitches have "flesh memories", so they respond to the touch of the first person who ever caught them. I see absolutely no reason for this except that it's necessary for the plot - why would snitches need to have that ability, really? The book does say it's so that if both seekers grab for it in a match, the first person to touch it can be identified, but why does that need to be a single-use thing? Anyway, it doesn't open when Harry touches it. (Having gone away from the computer for a while, I came back and glanced at that sentence out of context and it sounds kind of rude, and in a really tenuous way too. Yes, I am twelve.)

Moving on, Scrimgeour tells Harry that Dumbledore also left him the sword of Gryffindor, but he can't have it, so there. They fight. Harry is all, "Why don't you run Voldemort through with a sword, and leave me the hell alone?" and Scrimgeour is all like, "STFU n00b" and blims a hole in Harry's t-shirt with his wand. Then he's all, "Respect my authority!" and Harry is all, "STFU!" and then Molly and Arthur turn up and throw a bucket of cold water over them. Scrimgeour calms down and tries to say that he thinks they should be working together. Harry tells Scrimgeour he doesn't like his methods and then gives the black power salute. Oh no, my mistake, he's showing Scrimgeour the scars on his hand that spell out "4 REAL" (or something about lies, I forget) from that one time Umbridge forced Harry to be emo.

Dinnertime, during which nothing of interest happens, then our intrepid trio head back inside to discuss the crap they appear to have scored. Harry points out that he caught the snitch in his mouth way back in book 1, so he brings it up to his mouth. The phrase "I open at the close" appears on it, and they all ponder what it means. Having read the book, we know it means it'll open when Harry is about to die, but it's still way too cryptic - and not in a cryptic crossword way, where it suddenly clicks and makes perfect sense, but in the sense that it's almost meaningless. I wouldn't have got it.

Anyway, none of them really get why they got given that stuff. Neither do I. Well, I do, because I've already read the book, but it's a bit random. The deluminator I can deal with, as it's quite useful in general, and I suppose it's possible to fanwank that Dumbledore knew Ron well enough to guess he might storm off and need to find his way back. The book, less so - Dumbledore gave them absolutely zero information on the deathly hallows before this book, and their finding out about them comes about partly due to coincidence (e.g. Xenophilius Lovegood wearing the symbol to the wedding in the next chapter, the fact that they bother to read Rita Skeeter's book and hence spot the symbol in Dumbledore's letter). The snitch, as we know, contains the resurrection stone, which is also somewhat useful, but again this assumes they are going to find out about, and fixate upon, the hallows in this book. If they hadn't, Harry might have opened the snitch on the way to die to find... an already-destroyed horcrux. The TV Tropes Wiki calls this a Xanatos Roulette, by the way - a scheme whereby a villian (or, as in this case, a hero) is able to manipulate events, even those dependent on chance, to an absurd extent in order to achieve their goal. I'd find this easier to swallow if we'd had any indication before now that the hallows were significant, or useful, or in fact existed. As is is I find it all a bit too convenient.

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