jk rowling’s reasoning as to why fenrir greyback turned remus into a werewolf: remus’s father insulted him so he did it as an act of revenge
the actual reason greyback bit remus: the temptation to succumb to the fact that biting remus whose name literally means ‘werewolf mcwerewolf’ would be the greatest feat in lycanthropic irony the world had ever seen
Schlagwort: harry potter
Okay so, the marauders map can see people even when they’re hidden underneath the cloak of invisibility, right?
Yet Death can’t find people hidden under that cloak…
HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?
JUST HOW DID A GANG OF TEENAGERS MANAGE TO CREATE THAT MAP??????
Remus Lupin is a genius, Sirius Black doesn’t like rules, James Potter thinks he can do anything, and Peter brings them snacks and encourages their combined insane genius, that’s how.
Seven Things the Movies Forgot About Hermione
In the original books, Hermione was a clever, kick-ass character made highly relatable by her imperfections. The movies erased most of her flaws, making her a better ‘role model for girls’, but a far less interesting person: a typical weakly written strong woman. So here are a few things we should remember about Hermione:
1. She is an outsider. Just like Harry, she is often clueless about the unspoken rules of wizarding society, but unlike Harry she has no illustrious parentage and pretty green eyes to compensate for it. This goes beyond the blatant racism she is shown for her muggle-born status, and means that assimilation is a constant conscious struggle for her.
2. She has bad social skills. She is a good friend, but not always good company. Hermione isn’t called a know-it-all just because smart girls tend to be bullied, she is a know-it-all. She can sometimes ‘manage’ people when she tries, but when she doesn’t pay attention she is often blunt and tactless. She alternates between showing off her knowledge and assuming everybody knows what she knows, and she talks a lot about things only she is interested in. Remember how she introduces herself to Harry – it is far more awkward than cute, and she doesn’t outgrow it entirely. I know that opinionated women are often put down for opening their mouths, but Hermione is a more interesting character for having moments where she is genuinely grating and arrogant.
3. She is authoritarian. She has a worrying authoritarian streak, repeatedly choosing the rules over her friends in the first few books, such as the time when she lets Harry’s new Firebolt be confiscated. She was still unwilling to disobey an instruction in a textbook in book six, when she had already organised resistance against Umbridge and broken into the Department of Mysteries. This of course means that every time she chooses to break a rule is emphatically more awesome. When she perceives herself to be in a position of authority, she expects the same obedience from other people. She often makes decisions for people, speaks over them. Sometimes this is a positive trait, her friends often ask her to do their homework for them, and the planning she does for DA actually pays off. But she often assumes – that Harry’s broomstick is cursed, that house-elves want freedom, that Trelawney is a fraud. One of the most interesting aspects of her character development is outgrowing this to learn to break rules and actually listen to people.
4. She has a habit of obsessively focusing on things. Again, sometimes this is productive, such as when she takes off to the library for hours and comes back with a solution, but sometimes it is silly like her crush on Lockhart or harmful like the entire S.P.E.W. fiasco. Combined with her monologues, her hit-and-miss social skills and her adherence to rules, I am surprised the internet isn’t flooded with headcanons that put her somewhere on the autistic spectrum.
5. She is not pretty. I know that casting couldn’t predict Emma Watson growing up to be model-gorgeous, but I remember watching 11-year-old Hermione and already thinking she looks far too polished. It’s not that book Hermione is ugly, it’s just that she puts no effort into her looks. The point of the ball room scene is that she proves to herself that she is capable of presenting traditionally feminine and attractive if she tries really-really hard, not that she has always been beautiful without trying. Her unprettiness was actually one of the factors that made her so relatable, and while I didn’t expect the movies to actively make her ugly, they could have just at least chosen less flattering clothes and put slightly less product in her hair.
6. She has fears. She is extremely brave, but she is still human, and there are moments when she loses control. She panics when the Devil’s Snare attacks her, and Ron has to snap her out of it. She shows visible fear when faced with hippogriffs, with centaurs, with Grawp, and one time she fails to defeat a boggart. She is afraid of flying, and as a result she isn’t simply uninterested in quidditch, she actively sucks at it, but still gets onto a hippogriff, a thestral and a dragon. She is all right at Defense and duelling, but despite all her work lacks Harry’s raw talent. This doesn’t make her weak – a perfectly brave person is much less motivational than a person who is terrified but does her best.
7. She has a near-pathological fear of failure. This is partly due to her outsider status, partly her personality, but she is a nervous wreck and an overachiever. One of the first things she says is that she knows all textbooks by heart and hopes it will be enough. This isn’t mere intellectual curiosity, this is sheer fucking terror. She isn’t that smart merely because she’s gifted, but because she relentlessly overworks herself. In the third books she uses time-travel to get to all of her classes, and she spends most of the book looking half-dead with exhaustion. She is often described as frazzled or otherwise nervous, and for god’s sake, her boggart is a failed test! Again, she starts to grow out of this around book five, but it still remains a part of who she is. In the case of movie Hermione, her fear gets minimised into a generic smart-girl personality.
Hermione is awesome, but the more perfect she is the less she has to do with us, smart unpretty girls looking for someone to relate to. Or just people in general, looking for someone to relate to. Let the movies keep their superhuman super-clever Hermione who stares danger in the face but is upset that her hair looks bad from behind. I want book Hermione, a girl with flaws, a woman with issues who has to work and learn in order to overcome her inadequacies and become the good friend and great witch she is.
Seven Things The Movies Forgot About Ron
Book Ron was an interesting, attractive and relatable character, and I feel that the movies really unfairly relegated him to the position of comic relief. The dynamics of the trio had to be simplified into hero + heroine + mascot, and that robbed us of a truly fascinating character. So here are a few things you should remember:
1. He really is poor and it matters. HP may have huge issues when it comes to representations of race and sexuality, but deserves a round of applause for having a character come from a low-income background, with the fact of their poverty not glossed over but made into a plot point. JKR is really consistent about this – about the things Ron eats and wears and buys and doesn’t buy, the way he reacts when Harry unwittingly flaunts his own wealth. Poorer kids who have to go without brand name clothes will see themselves in Ron, and richer kids will learn that poverty isn’t something you deserve. Kids who empathize with Ron because he can’t afford to replace a broken wand are less likely to grow up to be assholes who complain about the extravagant lifestyle of people on welfare.
2. He has knowledge about the world. Out of the trio, he is the only real insider in wizarding society. Hermione is the one who knows magical theory and basically everything that can be found in a library. But when it comes to wizarding society and all of its habits, rules and unspoken assumptions, he is the one who can fill the other two in. Throughout the course of the septology, he does almost as much exposition as Hermione.
3. He is actually quite intelligent. Despite what the movies would have you believe, he is not dumb. He is mediocre in most of his schoolwork, and lacks Hermione’s booksmarts, but he is an excellent chess player, meaning he possesses good strategic abilities. He is the one who keeps a calm head while throttled by Devil’s Snare, and he talks Hermione through saving both their lives. He has decent observational skills, after all he was to one to spot inconsistencies in Hermione’s third-year time table. Seeing his common sense and social insight as less valuable than Hermione’s academic knowledge betrays an inherently flawed definition of intelligence. (Especially since academic knowledge tends to be gendered as male, and social knowledge as female, think of Poirot and Miss Marple.)
4. He is loyal. He is the embodiment of loyalty. The movies erase some of the most poignant moments proving this, and hand some of them over to Hermione. But it is Ron who stands in front of Harry, daring Sirius Black to kill them both, despite his broken leg. It is Ron who repeatedly defies Malfoy and even Snape to protect Hermione from verbal abuse. When his mother believes tabloid lies about Hermione, he takes Hermione’s side. When his brother tells him to stop being friends with Harry because of the political risk, he is so furious at the suggestion that he tears up the letter. He is unthinkingly loyal to his friends, this is why it is such a big deal that he leaves in the seventh book – because it contradicts who he really is.
5. He is genuinely funny. In the movies we are more likely to laugh at Ron than laugh with him, and the jokes he makes tend to be somewhat juvenile. But in the books his sense of humour evolves with him and with the reader, leading to this dry, snarky, irreverent tone that is genuinely very enjoyable. Ron is fun to read, and he sounds like someone who would be lots of fun to be around. He jokes a lot, but it is rarely spiteful, and often meant to comfort or distract someone – a proof of emotional intelligence.
6. He is kind. I don’t really how to put this, other than the fact that if Ron was a girl, he would be immediately defined as a caretaker. He stays in Hogwarts over Christmas so that Harry doesn’t have to be alone. He often acts oblivious and selfish on the surface, but ultimately he really obviously pays attention to the wellbeing of his friends. From his words and actions and body-language we can piece together the sort of person who can make life suck less just by showing up, who is always there for his friends even if he cannot do anything specific to help.
7. He has a huge inferiority complex. The movies hardly touch on it but in the books it is his main character arc. He feels inferior to his brothers’ achievements, to Harry’s chosen status, to Hermione’s intelligence. It is explicitly stated in book four that he doesn’t understand how can someone not want to be chosen. The books are far more clear in implying that he gets together with Lavander because he’s insecure about romance. The Horcrux doesn’t get to him through his love for Hermione like it does in the movie, it gets to him through the nagging suspicion that he has never been good enough for anything or anyone ever, including Hermione. And the movie laughed off the scene after the destruction of the Horcrux, when Harry finally gets how much Ron suffered of this fear of being second best and Ron gets that Harry never chose to be chosen. But fear of being inadequate is the primary driving force of Ron throughout the septology, and the movie fails to see value in Ron just as Ron fails to see value in himself: his caring, his loyalty, his wealth of non-academic knowledge and his awesome sense of humour are not tangible achievements, and they are not something somebody notices about themselves.
Movie Ron is the person book Ron is afraid of being in his lowest moments, an incompetent oaf who makes rude jokes and chews with his mouth open, somebody their friends only keep around out of pity and habit, somebody Hermione would have to settle for out of a lack of better options. But book Ron, for all his flaws, is a loyal, funny and warm person with many valuable practical skills. Also: I can imagine Hermione regularly thanking her lucky stars for ending up with someone as amazing as him.
Tumblr Harry Potter Posts
no but seriously imagine being a muggleborn wizard at hogwarts and then when you learn to conjure your patronus it turns out to be a pikachu
#and everyone’s like ‘ooooh what sort of magical creature is this’ #meanwhile the muggle borns are laughing their asses off going ‘PIKA! PIKA’ at you #not but srsly how come muggle borns don’t have a super secret club making inside jokes and snarking right back at elitist purebloods
#i fully support this #muggleborns writing with pencils and pens instead of stupid quills #using muggle slang to answer to insults #teaching their housemates about muggle culture and introducing them to tv shows and books and movies #you have no idea how much i want this #hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home
I mean as a person who’s had to integrate in a foreign culture (which is think is similar to how muggle borns would initially feel in the wizarding world) I know how you, despite wanting to become part of the community, seek out people like you by instinct. Tbh, all the European kids in my town would spend at least the first thirty minutes of any conversation with each other talking about how seriously no Communist is like a dirty word here and why don’t they have Kinder eggs in this fucking place is2g. So it makes sense to me that muggle borns would seek each other out and make inside jokes and dude the new Pokèmon came out bloody hell I’ll have to wait for summer to play it ugh and shit please tell me your mum sent you ballpoints again I seriously cannot deal with all this ink I keep staining everything.
Sorry I vomited words on here omg sorry I just realized
MALE HUFFLEPUFF LOOKBOOK
The Light in the Sky 