Hogwarts Exposed Chapter 22 part 2
In which everyone is naked and it's talked about a surprising amount considering that it's supposed to be no big deal.
“It’s not a party, but you may certainly join us.”
Harry yawned and then stretched, his eyes still closed. “Is it time to get up ‘Mione?
Fnarr. Now this is why commas are important.
Did I hear you talking to someone?” Harry opened his eyes. Then closed them, rubbing them before he dared to open them again. He wasn’t dreaming. He had awoken in the middle of a nudist convention.
He'd been in the middle of a nudist convention ever since the fic began.
He suddenly felt extremely trapped and vulnerable.
How did this manifest? What was his actual reaction? This reads as though all that happened was that he thought "hey, I feel extremely trapped and vulnerable!" which I guess makes sense if he's a robot.
He was naked with only the covers between him and the nudist gathering. Harry looked at the girls and then smiled. “Did someone come and steal all your clothes during the night?”
“No,” Caitlin laughed. “I think this may be something you best get used to seeing. I can’t speak for Mum or Jamie, but Emily and I don’t intend to ever wear clothes here.”
“You do realize that makes you both more vulnerable to tickling,” Harry threatened.
From "trapped and vulnerable" to "what kind of idiot lets this guy anywhere near children?" in thirty seconds flat. Quite aside from the implications of these nude tickle fights, which have been exhaustively explored both here and on TVTropes, what's with the continuity in this fic? We can speculate all we want about why exactly the author wrote Hogwarts Exposed, but half the time it reads as though he wasn't even paying attention.
“Only if you can catch us, and I doubt you’ll be leaving that bed dressed as you aren’t.” Caitlin teased.
Caitlin hasn't been established as a character given to snarky one-liners. If this line had been given to Harry or Hermione (or for that matter Ron, Draco, Snape or indeed most of the canon cast) it might have worked. I'm not even going to touch the contaminated connotations of "teased" as a dialogue tag pertaining to a naked underage girl in a fic full of sexualised nudity.
Hermione held her breath, as a few times as it appeared that the girls might kick the covers off of Harry, but by some phenomenon they remained in place. Perhaps Harry had charmed them.
Or perhaps not. It's irrelevant to the plot in any case.
At last the girls had enough.
I can't say I blame them.
Emily sudden got quite serious.
If you have to point out that someone's demeanour has changed suddenly, then maybe there's a problem. Especially when nobody seems to react in any way to the suddenness, so it looks more like an aside than anything actually significant.
“Caitlin and I talked a lot last night and this morning. She told me I was acting more like a little bitch than a witch.” Hermione was stunned that either Emily or Caitlin would use such a term.
The broken record theme of this update seems to be that we're always being told about characters' reactions without actually being shown them. Hermione is stunned at Emily using the word "bitch" (why? She's shown herself to have a bad enough attitude that it doesn't look out of place, ten years old or not) but doesn't say or do anything to convey this.
“I love my parents and no one can ever take their place. But, I’m being unfair to you both. You’re just trying to help Jamie and me. I’m sorry I was so horrid.” Then her mood rapidly changed.
In what way?
“But I’ll never call you Mum and Dad!
“Emily, please come here,” Hermione tenderly said. Emily crawled over to where she as sitting and then Hermione put her arm around the girl. Emily didn’t try to pull away. “Emily, you are correct. No one could ever take your parents’ place nor should anyone try. The situation with you and Jamie is entirely different than that of Caitlin. Caitlin never knew her parents and feels comfortable calling Harry and I Dad and Mum.
For some reason the author gets the grammar right for Emily but not for Hermione. I've no idea why.
“You and Jamie knew your parents. You’ve just suffered a grievous loss, a loss that at any age would be traumatizing, but at your age even more so. Harry and I know we can’t take their place and would never try, but we couldn’t allow the dreams that your parents had for the two of you to die with them. We just want to help you both reach your potential.
“Jamie and I had a discussion last night about our relationship. She intends to look upon Harry and I as an older brother and sister that have taken the two of you into their home.”
She's remarkably eloquent considering she's just woken up and hasn't had breakfast or even a cup of tea yet.
Emily nodded her head in approval. “I can live with that. Not to change the subject, but I thought we were all going running.”
Not to change the subject, but let's talk about something completely different. Wait, what?
“Yes we are.” Hermione answered empathetically. “As soon as you girls vacate the room so Harry can get dressed.”
Emily looked puzzled. “Why doesn’t he just get out of bed and slip something on?” Out of the blue she realized why.
It's completely out of the blue that she came to the obvious conclusion. Is the author trying to tell us she's an idiot?
“Oh! Isn’t he a nudist like you, Aunt Hermione?” Caitlin and Jamie looked at each other and burst into laughter as did Harry.
The characters provide a laugh track for the author's feeble attempts at humour.
Hermione was astounded.
Apart from Hermione, who doesn't get a proper reaction at all.
Emily thought she was a naturist.
Did she really? I'd never have figured it out from such an ambiguous piece of dialogue.
Jamie entered the Gryffindor common room looking for both Amanada and Alex. She wanted to update them both on the arrangements that had been made for her and Emily. She didn’t see Amanda anywhere, but Alex had seen her come in to the room and was already heading towards her.
“Hi Jamie,” Alex said shyly. He didn’t precisely know how to approach Jamie today. It was Valentine’s Day and they were supposedly a couple. Not that they had been “alone” together often since Christmas. It had been a terrible seven weeks for Jamie. First Professor Granger had been kidnapped, and then Caitlin began to suffer identical injuries and was confined to the infirmary. Even once they had found Hermione, both she and Caitlin remained in comas. Then finally, just when everything seemed to be on the verge of returning to normal, Jamie’s parents were killed.
Well, there's an interesting sequence of events. If only we'd had a few chapters dedicated to the full story. They could have gone right before this one, perhaps numbered 16 to 21, and then we'd have had no need for this summary. But that's crazy talk.
Alex didn’t blame Jamie. He realized all those things certainly took precedence over their budding romance, but still he missed her. Alex had tender memories of the kisses and hugs they had shared in the Zacherleys’ bathroom on the day of the Yule Ball. He could still feel Jamie’s naked breasts squeezed against his bared chest.
However realistic these thoughts admittedly are, they're not exactly conducive to a message that nudity is nonsexual. At least he's her age. And don't think I haven't noticed the POV bouncing indecisively back and forth in this scene. It's less bad (not better, but less bad) that the author seems to be confining these shifts to paragraph breaks, unlike this clusterfuck of a sentence:
Jamie looked like she wanted to say more about Tony and Amanda, but decided to hold off and instead changed the subject.
This could be fixed in one of two ways:
Alex's POV: Jamie looked like she wanted to say more about Tony and Amanda, but held off and instead changed the subject.
Jamie's POV: Jamie wanted to say more about Tony and Amanda, but decided to hold off and instead changed the subject.
Continued...
“It’s not a party, but you may certainly join us.”
Harry yawned and then stretched, his eyes still closed. “Is it time to get up ‘Mione?
Fnarr. Now this is why commas are important.
Did I hear you talking to someone?” Harry opened his eyes. Then closed them, rubbing them before he dared to open them again. He wasn’t dreaming. He had awoken in the middle of a nudist convention.
He'd been in the middle of a nudist convention ever since the fic began.
He suddenly felt extremely trapped and vulnerable.
How did this manifest? What was his actual reaction? This reads as though all that happened was that he thought "hey, I feel extremely trapped and vulnerable!" which I guess makes sense if he's a robot.
He was naked with only the covers between him and the nudist gathering. Harry looked at the girls and then smiled. “Did someone come and steal all your clothes during the night?”
“No,” Caitlin laughed. “I think this may be something you best get used to seeing. I can’t speak for Mum or Jamie, but Emily and I don’t intend to ever wear clothes here.”
“You do realize that makes you both more vulnerable to tickling,” Harry threatened.
From "trapped and vulnerable" to "what kind of idiot lets this guy anywhere near children?" in thirty seconds flat. Quite aside from the implications of these nude tickle fights, which have been exhaustively explored both here and on TVTropes, what's with the continuity in this fic? We can speculate all we want about why exactly the author wrote Hogwarts Exposed, but half the time it reads as though he wasn't even paying attention.
“Only if you can catch us, and I doubt you’ll be leaving that bed dressed as you aren’t.” Caitlin teased.
Caitlin hasn't been established as a character given to snarky one-liners. If this line had been given to Harry or Hermione (or for that matter Ron, Draco, Snape or indeed most of the canon cast) it might have worked. I'm not even going to touch the contaminated connotations of "teased" as a dialogue tag pertaining to a naked underage girl in a fic full of sexualised nudity.
Hermione held her breath, as a few times as it appeared that the girls might kick the covers off of Harry, but by some phenomenon they remained in place. Perhaps Harry had charmed them.
Or perhaps not. It's irrelevant to the plot in any case.
At last the girls had enough.
I can't say I blame them.
Emily sudden got quite serious.
If you have to point out that someone's demeanour has changed suddenly, then maybe there's a problem. Especially when nobody seems to react in any way to the suddenness, so it looks more like an aside than anything actually significant.
“Caitlin and I talked a lot last night and this morning. She told me I was acting more like a little bitch than a witch.” Hermione was stunned that either Emily or Caitlin would use such a term.
The broken record theme of this update seems to be that we're always being told about characters' reactions without actually being shown them. Hermione is stunned at Emily using the word "bitch" (why? She's shown herself to have a bad enough attitude that it doesn't look out of place, ten years old or not) but doesn't say or do anything to convey this.
“I love my parents and no one can ever take their place. But, I’m being unfair to you both. You’re just trying to help Jamie and me. I’m sorry I was so horrid.” Then her mood rapidly changed.
In what way?
“But I’ll never call you Mum and Dad!
“Emily, please come here,” Hermione tenderly said. Emily crawled over to where she as sitting and then Hermione put her arm around the girl. Emily didn’t try to pull away. “Emily, you are correct. No one could ever take your parents’ place nor should anyone try. The situation with you and Jamie is entirely different than that of Caitlin. Caitlin never knew her parents and feels comfortable calling Harry and I Dad and Mum.
For some reason the author gets the grammar right for Emily but not for Hermione. I've no idea why.
“You and Jamie knew your parents. You’ve just suffered a grievous loss, a loss that at any age would be traumatizing, but at your age even more so. Harry and I know we can’t take their place and would never try, but we couldn’t allow the dreams that your parents had for the two of you to die with them. We just want to help you both reach your potential.
“Jamie and I had a discussion last night about our relationship. She intends to look upon Harry and I as an older brother and sister that have taken the two of you into their home.”
She's remarkably eloquent considering she's just woken up and hasn't had breakfast or even a cup of tea yet.
Emily nodded her head in approval. “I can live with that. Not to change the subject, but I thought we were all going running.”
Not to change the subject, but let's talk about something completely different. Wait, what?
“Yes we are.” Hermione answered empathetically. “As soon as you girls vacate the room so Harry can get dressed.”
Emily looked puzzled. “Why doesn’t he just get out of bed and slip something on?” Out of the blue she realized why.
It's completely out of the blue that she came to the obvious conclusion. Is the author trying to tell us she's an idiot?
“Oh! Isn’t he a nudist like you, Aunt Hermione?” Caitlin and Jamie looked at each other and burst into laughter as did Harry.
The characters provide a laugh track for the author's feeble attempts at humour.
Hermione was astounded.
Apart from Hermione, who doesn't get a proper reaction at all.
Emily thought she was a naturist.
Did she really? I'd never have figured it out from such an ambiguous piece of dialogue.
Jamie entered the Gryffindor common room looking for both Amanada and Alex. She wanted to update them both on the arrangements that had been made for her and Emily. She didn’t see Amanda anywhere, but Alex had seen her come in to the room and was already heading towards her.
“Hi Jamie,” Alex said shyly. He didn’t precisely know how to approach Jamie today. It was Valentine’s Day and they were supposedly a couple. Not that they had been “alone” together often since Christmas. It had been a terrible seven weeks for Jamie. First Professor Granger had been kidnapped, and then Caitlin began to suffer identical injuries and was confined to the infirmary. Even once they had found Hermione, both she and Caitlin remained in comas. Then finally, just when everything seemed to be on the verge of returning to normal, Jamie’s parents were killed.
Well, there's an interesting sequence of events. If only we'd had a few chapters dedicated to the full story. They could have gone right before this one, perhaps numbered 16 to 21, and then we'd have had no need for this summary. But that's crazy talk.
Alex didn’t blame Jamie. He realized all those things certainly took precedence over their budding romance, but still he missed her. Alex had tender memories of the kisses and hugs they had shared in the Zacherleys’ bathroom on the day of the Yule Ball. He could still feel Jamie’s naked breasts squeezed against his bared chest.
However realistic these thoughts admittedly are, they're not exactly conducive to a message that nudity is nonsexual. At least he's her age. And don't think I haven't noticed the POV bouncing indecisively back and forth in this scene. It's less bad (not better, but less bad) that the author seems to be confining these shifts to paragraph breaks, unlike this clusterfuck of a sentence:
Jamie looked like she wanted to say more about Tony and Amanda, but decided to hold off and instead changed the subject.
This could be fixed in one of two ways:
Alex's POV: Jamie looked like she wanted to say more about Tony and Amanda, but held off and instead changed the subject.
Jamie's POV: Jamie wanted to say more about Tony and Amanda, but decided to hold off and instead changed the subject.
Continued...