Harry Potter and the Order of Idiots

[mindstalk]

Man, this book is painful to re-read. Dumbledore's an idiot for not explaining anything, Harry's an idiot for forgetting Sirius's communication mirror, Snape's an idiot about Harry, Sirius is an idiot about Kreacher, James was a big bully... plus Fudge being an idiot and Umbridge just being so utterly horrible.

And yet dim memory makes me fear that #6 will be even worse on the smart people being dumb front.

On the upside, I remember when I read #7, at the end I kind of wondered who Ginny was and why Harry was hooking up with her. She hadn't made much impression, with books years apart by the end. Re-reading the books close together though, yeah, she's there a lot, not part of the Holy Trinity but in the penumbra, and often in the plot.

I still kind of ship Harry and Luna, though. Ginny's a nice girl and all but I don't really care about her; Luna made a much bigger impression, back in the day, and seems to have more chemistry with him on page. I'm tempted to look up Luna fanfic, except I also fear how bad it could be.

Huh, I have a Harry Potter tag already. I wonder why? *checks* Oh, Methods of Rationality.

Comments

[kitharding.wordpress.com]

I read a fanfic once that commented that both Dumbledore and Voldemort had been playing tag with causality-- there's never any good reason for Dumbledore not to explain everything other than "because it makes the plot work," and there's never any good reason for Dumbledore not to step in sooner. That's why there's such an abundance of fanfic assigning him ulterior motives. The idea of tag with causality is my favorite-- Dumbledore isn't explaining things for the primary purpose of orchestrating events so that Voldemort will end up dead. I liked one fanfic that theorized that the death of Sirius actually accomplished multiple goals for Dumbledore at a stroke, since it got rid of one of the go-do-something-reckless influences on Harry in such a way that Harry blamed himself for it and was more likely to obey later on, got rid of someone who was likely to go do something stupid later that risked getting stuff pulled down on them, and did it in such a way that they got to keep the house. I think that's crediting Dumbledore with a *little* more omniscience than is possible, but they're on the right track. Certainly Dumbledore's excuse for not teaching Harry Occlumency rings very false and it's easy to intimate that he wanted to use the connection, which is why he never told Harry anything-- it went two ways, and he didn't want Voldemort seeing any of the real plans.

And Snape is a very poorly-written character. He needed to be ominous and mean for story purposes, and seem ambiguous, but she doesn't give enough detail about why. Had it been written such that he needed to show the Death Eaters that he wasn't on Dumbledore's side despite teaching at the school, or that he was trying to make it very clear to Harry who the enemy was (since Slytherins will follow the lead of their Head of House and tormenting Harry meant they'd also torment him), it would make more sense while still allowing for the same ambiguity.

Honestly, I find the fanfic more interesting than the originals at this point-- and there's usually at least one or two good fics in every pairing, but you have to do a lot of digging to find them. I'm ridiculously fussy and can spend hours reading the first few paragraphs of fics without finding one that looks good, and I've managed to find several very good ones. (Admittedly, my chosen pairing is considerably more popular with the writers than Harry/Luna.)