Transcript – Episode 141
[Show music begins]
Alison Siggard: This is Episode 141 of Alohomora! for June 13, 2015.
[Show music continues]
Alison: Hello, listeners, and welcome to our newest episode of Alohomora! This is Alison Siggard.
Rosie Morris: I’m Rosie Morris. And it is my pleasure this week to introduce two MuggleNet staffers as our guests: Lizzie and Ariel. Welcome to the show! Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourselves and how you ended up on MuggleNet?
Lizzie Sudlow: Ariel, would you like to go first?
Ariel Taranski: [laughs] I guess so, okay. My name is Ariel Taranski. I started interning with MuggleNet in March of this year, and [laughs] not even a month ago, I was offered a staff position. So I’m very new staff, but I’ve loved MuggleNet since I was like 11, 12 years old, so this is just a dream come true for me. So I’m very excited to be part of the team.
Lizzie: I’m Lizzie Sudlow, and I’m currently interning on Creative Team. I got started with MuggleNet after doing a convention in Upstate New York this year with another staff member of MuggleNet, and she kept me in touch, so now I’m here. And I actually just got to attend MISTI-Con, for anybody who was there, with the lovely staff, and that was just a great adventure and I’m having the time of my life.
Alison: What Houses are you in?
Ariel: I’m a Ravenclaw.
Alison: Nice.
[Ariel laughs]
Lizzie: See, I’m Gryffindor by the choices from when I was younger. My room reflects a lot of Gryffindor.
[Alison and Ariel laugh]
Lizzie: But I’m Ravenclaw by Pottermore, so I’m trying to…
Alison: Nice. All right.
Lizzie: … make the switch.
Ariel: So like a Gryffinclaw, maybe.
Lizzie: Yeah!
Alison: All right, so I guess it seems like we’re missing Slytherin again this week.
[Alison, Ariel, and Lizzie laugh]
Alison: That seems to be common.
Rosie: It’s always the case. It’s very strange.
[Alison, Ariel, and Lizzie laugh]
Alison: All right. Well, before we get started, we just want to remind everyone that this week we will be reading Chapter 23 of Half-Blood Prince, “Horcruxes,” so make sure you read that before you listen.
Lizzie: Okay, and before we get started, we’re going to go over some recap comments from Chapter 22, “After the Burial,” and we’re actually first going to start with a little snippet from KatieBelleLiquidLuck-Snuffles. And we’ll play her audioBoom clip for you right here.
[Audio]: Hi guys, this is KatieBelleLiquidLuck-Snuffles. In the spirit of my username, I have a quick couple of questions for you, but I was wondering what you would think that liquid luck and Amortentia would taste like. I personally would think that liquid luck would be similar to Amortentia in the fact that it would taste differently for each person depending on what you would consider to be lucky. For me, that would either be birthday cake ice cream or lemon drops. And I’m not sure what my Amortentia would taste like, but I’m just curious what you guys would think. And thanks so much for everything, you guys. This show is amazing. Love it. Bye!
Rosie: I think this is a brilliant question, and I’ve been sat here trying to think what I would use…
[Alison and Ariel laugh]
Rosie: … as my scents or smells or tastes for these two potions. I have no idea what a lucky potion would taste like. I don’t really know what I consider as a lucky flavor or anything…
[Alison and Ariel laugh]
Rosie: … other than the breakfast cereal Lucky Charms or something.
[Everyone laughs]
Rosie: Which, you know, marshmallows, it’s fun.
Alison: Tastes like the marshmallows.
Rosie: Yeah, exactly.
[Everyone laughs]
Rosie: For me, Amortentia… Ooh, I don’t know. I do love old books, so I’d probably have some kind of parchment smell in there. I’m very Hermione.
[Alison, Ariel, and Rosie laugh]
Alison: Same.
Rosie: Definitely have to have some chocolate in there. Maybe some gingerbread – freshly baked gingerbread is a very nice smell.
Lizzie: Hmm.
Rosie: I don’t know other than that. What about you guys?
Alison: I don’t know. I… Well… Man, this is so difficult. Amortentia – probably the book thing because yes.
Rosie: I think that’s going to be a common theme. [laughs]
Alison: [laughs] Yeah. Also, chocolate.
Lizzie: Ooh.
Alison: That was… When you said that, I started laughing because I am a huge chocolate fan.
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Alison: I also… I really like the smell of chocolate chip cookies, too – that’s a big one from my childhood – and probably… Man, I’m going to sound so much like Hermione, but probably grass.
[Ariel laughs]
Alison: Freshly mowed grass. As for Felix Felicis, I don’t know. I wonder if it is different for everyone who drinks it, but I think it’d be quite nice if it tasted like hot chocolate? Peppermint hot chocolate?
Lizzie: Hmm.
Alison: Or another thing. Another happy drink I associate with is Fanta…
[Ariel, Lizzie, and Rosie laugh]
Alison: … but in Europe because it tastes better there. So…
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Ariel: That’s so true.
Lizzie: That’s fantastic.
Alison: [laughs] What about you, Lizzie and Ariel?
Lizzie: I really don’t know what I would think Felix would taste like. I would just hope it would taste really good, [that] kind of thing, because if I want good things to happen in result, I would rather it start off the right way and not…
[Ariel laughs]
Lizzie: … with something foul in my mouth…
[Alison laughs]
Lizzie: … [that] kind of thing. And Amortentia, like I was saying earlier, probably the smell of a new JKR book.
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Lizzie: Maybe a newly painted Broadway set. And…
Alison: Wow.
Lizzie: Yeah, big theatre geek here. And… Oh gosh, I was going to say I just had it. Maybe a glass of wine or sangria.
[Everyone laughs]
Ariel: Oh, man. I think… And this is just my personal opinion, but as for Felix, in the movie at least, it looked like a glittery kind of nectar.
Lizzie: It did.
Alison: Yeah.
Ariel: I imagine it would taste kind of nectar-y in a way, like very smooth but also kind of thick. That’s how it appeared to me.
Alison: Yeah.
Ariel: So I think it would be very sweet, but… Ooh, that Amortentia. I think… Personally, mine are a bit odd as they’re very specific.
[Rosie laughs]
Ariel: I love the smell of theme park rides.
[Alison and Lizzie laugh]
Ariel: Because just going in the Haunted Mansion at Disney World just has this smell that just brings me back, and that would definitely be one of the smells, and I guess my second smell would be a good Florida rain.
[Ariel and Rosie laugh]
Ariel: Because it rains in Florida at 3 p.m. just about every day.
[Rosie laughs]
Ariel: And I grew up in Florida, so that’s, again, just memories. It’s just a smell that I know and love…
Rosie: So it’s petrichor, for all of you Doctor Who fans.
Alison: Oh, I love it.
Rosie: Isn’t it great?
Ariel: I was going to say that, but I didn’t want to be too…
Rosie: Oh, no, geek out!
Ariel: … obvious.
Rosie: That’s what we’re doing.
[Everyone laughs]
Alison: Yes. Always geek out.
Lizzie: I’m piggybacking off of you.
[Rosie laughs]
Lizzie: I’m adding the smell of rain to mine. Ooh. Smells good.
[Alison laughs]
Ariel: And then I guess the third one… maybe Dunk-a-Roos because I miss those.
[Alison laughs]
Ariel: I don’t know. They’re just the best, and I hate that I never see them anymore.
Lizzie: [laughs] They’re out there. I’ve seen them.
Ariel: What? Where?
Lizzie: They’re out there. I don’t know. My freshman year of college, my RAs were able to snatch some up, and people went nuts.
Ariel: Oh my gosh.
Lizzie: It was studies, it was finals, and people went nuts.
[Alison laughs]
Ariel: Oh. I would go nuts.
Rosie: So listeners, we really want to know what your Amortentias and Felix Felicises would smell or taste like. And obviously, if you want to tell us, that’s up to you, but please do comment on our main site and let us know because they’re obviously so varied and personal to everyone, and we’d be really interested to see what things our listeners consider to make them feel in the romantic mood.
[Ariel laughs]
Lizzie: All right. And now moving on to some other comments based off of [the] last chapter, we have a comment from the main site from Rose Lumos and they write,
“I had a ‘little thing’ I found in the episode. When Harry brews [the Elixir to Induce] Euphoria, Slughorn compl[i]ments Harry but then says something that Harry thinks might lead to Slughorn discovering his [P]otions secret. Instead, Slughorn says that Harry must [have] take[n] after his mother in [P]otions. This makes me realize how much this must have been terrible for Snape. Snape clearly had a flair for potion[-]making that made his potions better and more unique than [those of] any other student. Harry repeats these potions, and Slughorn doesn’t even suspect that the book was Snape’s. That means that all through his years at Hogwarts, Snape sat in class, making rather extraordinary potions, without much notice. The books never say that Snape was in the Slug Club. Instead, Lily is credited as the brilliant [P]otions student in her year. In fact, if the two of them were friends it’s possible they sat next to each other in class, and Snape might have helped Lily get such a reputation. I just think it’s sad that after all these years, it appears that Snape and his great potions have been ignored by his professor.”
What do you guys think of that?
[Alison laughs]
Ariel: Ugh. Wow. This is definitely not anything that I thought about. I was just like, yeah, Lily was great at Potions, obviously. I think, in my opinion, she was her generation’s Hermione, in a way: Muggle-born and very intelligent and no-nonsense, and yeah, to think that maybe Snape helped her, and she took all the credit, probably not intentionally, but still.
Lizzie: He probably gave some tricks of the trade to her. She saw him cutting something a different way, and she ran off with the idea.
Ariel: Yeah, because they were friends, obviously, so it wouldn’t have been stealing his ideas or anything. Just friends helping friends.
Rosie: They could have both been very gifted as well. There’s nothing to say they had to be mutually exclusive from each other.
Alison: I was going to say, “I can see them helping each other, each trying different things and seeing what works out best.”
Lizzie: Yeah. That is interesting, though, about how Snape wasn’t in [the] Slug Club. [I] wonder why…
Rosie: That we know of. We don’t really know that much about the Slug Club of his generation. We know Voldemort’s generation, and we know Harry’s generation. We know that Lily was in his Slug Club, and we’ve had a few names dropped through the years, but we don’t really know whether Snape was or wasn’t actually in the Slug Club.
Lizzie: True. All right. And our second comment also comes from the main site. Jaye Dozier writes,
“I disagree with the comment mentioned in the episode that Harry was completely lazy in this book. In fact, I would argue that he was acting incredibly motivated and proactive throughout the narrative, just about the wrong things. Instead of focusing his energy on getting the memory, he channels all of his talent, thought, will and focus into figuring out what Draco is up to. Once he got it in his head that Draco was up to something dangerous, he began to believe (subconsciously, perhaps) that he is saving and protecting the people and the world he loves from the evil he imagines is brewing right under his nose. In this way, Harry isn’t less of the heroic, motivated, proactive Gryffindor-esque character he usually is; he’s just super misguided (even though we should add that his instincts were correct). Although Harry can definitely be lazy and cut corners on some things, I think this speaks more towards his age and less to his character ‘changing’ or Jo doing him a disservice. I don’t think Harry could just turn off his proactive, inquisitive nature, despite the consequences that have come from it – in every book, he has incessantly sought [out] ways to fight back according to his own ideas of what is truly the greatest threat at the time.”
Alison: I’m so glad that we brought this up because, as I was listening last week, I was yelling at my phone because I think one of the biggest things is, Harry is very action-based, and last week, they were talking about him being lazy in getting the memory. But I think it’s more, Harry doesn’t know what action he can take to get this to work, so he doesn’t have anything to do. Whereas in a lot of other situations he knows exactly what action he needs to take, what he needs to do, to get to the point he wants to get to. So I think it’s more of a “Harry doesn’t know what he’s got to do, and Hermione hasn’t told him yet, so…
[Everyone laughs]
Alison: That, I think, is what’s coming across there.
Lizzie: I completely agree. Listening to the past episode, I understood where everyone was coming from, but a lot of this book is just Harry being like, “Dumbledore wants me to do X, Y, and Z, but I don’t really know how I’m supposed to get this done, so I’m just going to follow Draco around for a little bit because I’ve been doing that for 5 years so far, and it’s worked out pretty well.”
[Alison, Ariel, and Rosie laugh]
Ariel: Harry is very much a man with a plan, and for him to have to sit back and wait for these orders from Dumbledore and be really clueless as to what exactly Malfoy is doing… He knows he’s up to something, but the fact that he can’t pinpoint it and really follow him into the Room of Requirement and all these other places that he’s going… It’s a frustrating feeling for someone who’s used to taking action as soon as they see something needing to be “nipped in the bud,” I guess you could say.
Rosie: And I think he’s really, truly worried about what Draco might be up to in terms of the immediate threat from Voldemort. He sees that Draco is that most immediate threat if he is a Death Eater, if he is working on a plan that is from [the] head office, almost. Then that is the most immediate danger to Harry and his friends and his life at Hogwarts, whereas Dumbledore’s thing is much more theory-based. It’s going over the past. There’s no immediate result that Harry can see from getting these memories. Obviously, Dumbledore knows that we’re leading up to getting this next Horcrux and Harry actually discovering what this entire task that he’s about to embark on is all about. But for Harry, he doesn’t know any of that yet, and he really has no solid idea of what Dumbledore is trying to tell him because, of course, Dumbledore being Dumbledore, has yet to tell him anything of great importance. So Harry is just going for the thing that he thinks he can solve most, solve the biggest danger straight away, and he really just wants to work out what that is rather than put himself in the more intellectual, theoretical, proper path.
[Alison laughs]
Lizzie: Absolutely. Well, these were all great comments, so thank you to everyone who wrote in and continue to do so based on the chapter we’ll be reviewing today. So thanks, you guys, for that.
Rosie: But before we do get on to that chapter, we need to do our Podcast Question of the Week responses from last week as well, and there were so many comments and such great conversations happening there. I think you guys all really enjoyed this question. So just to give you a quick recap, the question was,
“The mechanics of Felix Felicis are particularly strange, bringing up issues of fate and multiple conflicts with its use. Even with Rowling’s explanation of the potion’s history, she has managed to maintain the mystery of how exactly this potion implements its effects and how far-reaching they are. So how does Felix Felicis work? Is it capitalizing on pre-determined fate or can multiple paths be taken? And as asked by our guest, what occurs when two people utilize Felix Felicis at once?”
And there’s a very, very good, very detailed conversation between olivia underwood and katiebelleliquidlucksnuffles on the main site, which just goes back and forth and adds detail, and just… It’s a brilliant conversation. I couldn’t possibly select one thing from it, so sorry, both of you, for not actually including your comments on the show. But I urge all of you to go […] read their conversation because it was very interesting to read. But the first comment I will read out comes from minervastartanbiscuittin, and it says,
“To me it always seemed to work like a mixture of amplified [i]ntuition and boosted self-confidence. Intuition can’t always be explained by logic because the feeling comes from parts so deep in our brain or gut that the twists and turns it took to manifest itself are to[o] complex. Felix seems to rely completely on gut feeling and intuition and turns off that nagging doubt the brain always feels necessary to [throw] into intuition[‘]s way. Some people consider intuition some kind of sixth sense. So by enhancing that ‘sense’ the potion almost enables Harry to perceive the world differently and give him the confidence to embrace [that] new perspective. That said, I think two people fighting taking Felix at the same time would make them feel that the other took Felix as well and that fighting against each other would be pointless. So they join forces instead and use their ‘luck’ to create world peace or something like that instead.”
[Everyone laughs]
Rosie: Very Miss Congeniality. It was good.
[Alison, Ariel, and Lizzie laugh]
Alison: I think that’s interesting because I’ve always definitely thought it’s, to some extent, intuition, but I think there’s a little bit more magic there because, just from Harry’s experience with it, why would he have at all chosen to go down to Hagrid’s? It seems like such an odd, random thing that I just feel there has to be something else triggering that first reaction.
Rosie: Yeah, if it’s about turning off the voice that says, “No, don’t do this and follow intuition,” then that would need some voice saying, “Do this,” which I don’t think Harry felt with the letter from Hagrid straightaway. He knew that he had something else to do, and that was his plan. That’s why he took the Felix; that’s why he was going along with that. And then it really did seem to change his mind rather than tap into some nagging story in the back of his mind saying, “You should do this instead.” So yeah, I agree that I can’t really see him choosing to go to Hagrid’s out of some intuition-based thing rather than the potion telling him it would be a good idea.
Ariel: Yeah, I think it’s an involuntary pull. Something is just taking him along, really. That’s the way I saw it. I understand the intuition comment. It just… for Harry, it seemed more like a lightbulb went off, and he’s like, “Here’s where I’m going to go.” It wasn’t so much – I don’t know – thinking too hard about it or even thinking about it all at. It just suddenly struck him to do these things.
Lizzie: It’s just that little voice in your head, and all of a sudden, that potion goes through you, and the little voice just goes, “You know what would be a really good idea right now?”
[Ariel and Rosie laugh]
Lizzie: “You know what would be a lot of fun? Going to Hagrid’s. That’s definitely… yep. That’s where I’m supposed to go right now. Do it. Just do it.” And then he’s just like, “All right, off I go.”
[Alison, Ariel, and Rosie laugh]
Rosie: It’s interesting that you mention the little voice in our head because when we have seen a little voice in our head like that, it links quite nicely into what acciopotassium is saying in our next comment. And they say,
“I think Felix Felicis works like a self-inducing [I]mperius [C]urse on the consumer of the lucky potion. The potion acts like a puppet master to the drinker, giving valuable insight [on] how to manipulate the people around the user to get to their desired final destination. The potion also seems to give the user a feeling of euphoria and great confidence, which is quite similar to the sensation of someone under the [I]mperius [C]urse. The creepiest part of Felix Felicis would have to be how it removed Harry’s emotional attachment to the death of his parents, almost making Harry a lifeless puppet to the effects of the mysterious potion. The conceivable immoral applications of the potion are rather disturbing. This is mainly because of the very nature of the luck[-]based potion. The potion seems to be indifferent to the questionable needs of a person, seamlessly giving the absolute best outcome to whatever the current wishes of the user [are]. Not only does the potion make sports competitions completely unfair, but the potion can also easily manipulate people to do unwanted or immoral acts. We see in this chapter that Harry was able to completely take advantage of the new Potion[s] Master, which includes playing with Slughorn’s known greed of valuable potion ingredients, actively trying to intoxicate him, and emotionally blackmailing him with the death of Lily Ev[a]ns.”
Alison: I think that’s… oh, man. So I never thought about how detached emotionally from talking about his parents’ deaths Harry is until I was listening last week, but I think that’s fascinating to compare it to the Imperius Curse and not having control, but you also do kind of have control. Huh.
Rosie: That moment where we do see Harry under the Imperius Curse in Goblet where we do… he tells us all about that sense of euphoria where he can just float, where he’s really happy, and he can just listen to the voice and do what the voice says, and it’s not until he questions that he actually takes some control. And I can see that, yeah, in a very similar way to this feeling of being under Felix, so he’s listening to the voice. He’s happy to let it take control, and he’s not questioning at all the actions that it’s asking him to do because they are the actions are going to benefit him in the best way. Yeah, it is quite creepy.
Ariel: I’m not sure I entirely agree that it was emotional blackmail.
[Alison, Lizzie, and Rosie laugh]
Ariel: I don’t know. Because to say Harry would do that with his own mother, that’s a stretch to me. Obviously, Slughorn has a certain sense of pride over the students [whom] he’s taught and had in the Slug Club, and to have had Lily, his mother, in the Slug Club and to speak so highly of her, Harry knows that connection, and he draws on it just like he draws on Slughorn’s, like they said, known greed of valuable potion ingredients. I think it’s not so much hit him where it hurts the most as it is he has this information, and he’s using it to his advantage, not so much in a blackmailing sort of way, but Harry does know that this information is important enough to potentially take down Voldemort.
Lizzie: Yeah, I agree with you about it not completely being blackmail because I feel like with this potion, Harry was experiencing the right pushes. He knew how to push Slughorn to get the information and what he needed, and he knew what to say, but I would believe there were moments where he knew where to hold back too much, not to go too far kind of thing. So it seems like this potion was really a nudging force, so the self-confidence thing really kicks in there.
Rosie: Our next comment comes from griff, and it says,
“Two people taking Felix Felicis and fighting each other would lead to a pretty epic battle! The people would be at their best, [and] the potion would eliminate the little bits of chance that are normally peppered throughout a fight, and it would really [be] ‘let the best man win.’ Of course, I imagine this as more of a Gryffindors wrestling each other in the common room thing than a Harry v[s]. Voldemort thing. I’m not sure if I can really see [D]ark wizards taking [F]elix [F]elicis – an almost optimistic [and] charming potion – to enable them in battle. Voldemort would definitely prefer to rely on his own cunning and skill than luck. Luck seems a lot like love, a positive, whimsical concept that [w]ould generally be looked down upon by [D]ark wizards.”
What do we think?
Ariel: I love that.
Alison: That’s… yeah, no, that’s so interesting to think that. Because it is. It’s one of those more whimsical all-problem-solver things. And yeah, interesting to think that Dark wizards would say no.
Ariel: I personally just could not picture any of the Death Eaters or Voldemort in this super bubbly, happy mood that…
[Alison, Lizzie, and Rosie laugh]
Ariel: … Felix Felicis induces. It would just… Voldemort just prancing around. “I know how to kill Harry now.”
[Alison and Lizzie laugh]
Ariel: It would be… you understand what I’m trying to say.
[Alison, Lizzie, and Rosie laugh]
Ariel: Just the image is hilarious in my mind.
Rosie: Almost as good as pincers. [makes sound effect]
[Alison, Ariel, and Lizzie laugh]
Rosie: I love that bit in the movie.
[Alison, Ariel, and Rosie laugh]
Ariel: Yeah, me too.
Rosie: Okay, the next comment comes from iseethestrals, and they say,
“I would say the first step of the mechanics has to do with the potion’s ability to process the current desire of the drinker’s mind. By delving into the mind, the potion would have a read on the drinker’s environment, abilities, and memories and therefore is better able to […] judge the best course of action for the drinker to make. I feel [a] bit of [S]eer magic also went into the creation of Felix Felicis, though Felix does not share any actual foresight with the witch or wizard. It then proceeds to encourage and raise the confidence and intuitiveness, possibly to further bind both drinker and potion and better allow Felix to guide the witch or wizard on the correct path.”
Do you agree?
Ariel: That’s an interesting theory for sure. It would make you think, “What would happen if someone – say Trelawney – were to drink it, who does actually have Seer magic ability.
Rosie: Maybe she’d finally be able to prove that she actually…
[Alison and Lizzie laugh]
Ariel: Hey! That breaks my heart. Let’s give her a little Felix Felicis, guys, so that everyone can know she’s for real.
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Rosie: Just need to hide it in her sherry.
[Alison, Ariel, and Lizzie laugh]
Ariel: She’ll never notice. Maybe that’s what it tastes like to her.
Rosie: Yeah, it tastes like sherry.
[Alison, Ariel, and Rosie laugh]
Rosie: And our final comment comes from caputmalfoyness, and it says,
“I wonder if, during Tom Riddle’s time as a Hogwarts student, Slughorn had the same contest for [l]iquid [l]uck as he did during Harry’s time at Hogwarts. If he did, maybe Tom won the potion and used it when he asked Slughorn about the Horcruxes, causing him to receive the answer he wanted [and/or] needed from Slughorn. This could be another reason Slughorn [why] feels so guilty about it because maybe he knows Riddle used the potion, and therefore Slughorn basically just handed Tom the tool he needed to get the answers out of him. If this is the case, then even though Harry was unsuccessful in getting the memory when he imitated Riddle verbatim, then he still got the information the same way Riddle did – by using [l]iquid [l]uck.”
Alison: That just blew my mind, and I think I just accepted some new headcanon because that is… oh my gosh!
Lizzie: That makes way too much sense for me. It’s all clicking. Oh, gosh. My head hurts. Oh no.
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Ariel: I don’t know, though. I feel like that’d be such a risky game for Slughorn to play. “This turned out terribly the first time, but hey, let’s just do it again for giggles.”
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Ariel: The first time, he essentially handed over information to Tom Riddle, who would eventually become Lord Voldemort and split his soul into these Horcruxes, and “Oh, but it’s fun for the kids. Let’s give it out as a prize.”
[Alison and Ariel laugh]
Ariel: I don’t know. I like the theory. I think it’s really interesting and definitely well thought out, but I think if Slughorn really did feel so guilty, he wouldn’t offer it again as a prize essentially.
Lizzie: But what if that was the only way for Slughorn to give over the information a second time? Because he felt so much guilt from how he handed over the information to Tom Riddle. He was very certain that he was not going to give Harry the information or the memory that he so was looking for, so maybe this was the only way that Slughorn could cope with it, was knowing if Harry did earn this potion, that he was able to get [it] the same way Tom did, then maybe he didn’t have as much blame on himself kind of thing. I mean, I don’t know.
Ariel: That’s kind of playing off Slughorn’s confidence of Harry a little too much, and someone else could have easily won the Felix Felicis.
Rosie: Yeah. I think the fact that Slughorn was so relaxed in giving out the Felix as a prize suggests that there was no bad result that he knows of [that] he had in the past. I really don’t think he would run it again and be so relaxed about it without so many warnings as to what not to do with it if he did link it with Tom being successful in any way. But I do think it’s likely that he was holding this competition back then and that Tom may have won it or that maybe Lily or Snape or someone won it during their time, but I don’t know that I would link the Horcrux conversation to Felix as well. I think Slughorn would have been happy to talk to Tom as a student [whom] he liked about that subject, even if it was worrying. But I do wonder if Tom, perhaps, used it on a different occasion, perhaps to find the Chamber of Secrets. Because we don’t really know how he stumbled across that, to unlock the Basilisk the first time, and maybe that was when Hagrid got expelled. Maybe that was his lucky moment, where he had someone [whom] he could blame instead of taking the blame himself for the Basilisk.
Alison: Maybe he used it when he made his second Horcrux, to make sure he was lucky enough to not have anything terrible happen so he could make sure it would work.
Rosie: Yeah. There'[re] plenty of things that Voldemort might have needed that for, but we don’t know. But thank you all so much for so many interesting comments, that you’ve really gone into so much depth, so far beyond the books, with this simple little potion, that I’ve loved reading through all of those comments, and I do urge you to go to the site and read through what else is there because they are so detailed and so amazing. So please go […] check those out.
Alison: And now we’re going to move on to our chapter discussion for Chapter 23.
[Half-Blood Prince Chapter 23 intro begins]
[Sound of a memory]
Tom Riddle: Sir, I wanted to ask you something.
Slughorn: Ask away, then, my boy. Ask away.
Dumbledore: Chapter 23.
Tom Riddle: Sir, I wonder what you know about… about Horcruxes.
Dumbledore: “Horcruxes.”
Tom Riddle: I won’t say a word, sir.
[Voldemort laughs menacingly]
[Half-Blood Prince Chapter 23 intro ends]
Alison: All right, so in this chapter, Harry’s Felix-induced luck is running out, but he has finally secured Slughorn’s memory. We learn what Horcruxes are and what Voldemort’s could possibly be. The journey to destroy Voldemort once and for all begins, not, as Dumbledore explains, because of the prophecy but because Voldemort has created his greatest enemy in Harry. And we now know just how Harry can possibly defeat the greatest Dark wizard of all time. Everything in the past five books has been leading up to this, and the path that Harry will take from here to the remainder of this book and the next will turn because of this chapter. So this is a really big one. This is…
Lizzie and Rosie: Whew.
[Lizzie laughs]
Rosie: Here starts Act 3.
[Lizzie and Rosie laugh]
Alison: Yes. This is a huge turning point in the whole series. But we’re going to start with just some of the little things that happen at the beginning of this chapter. So Harry, of course, is running back to Gryffindor tower, and his luck is running out.
[Alison and Ariel laugh]
Alison: And they talk about Hogwarts’ security being tightened. But I was wondering how secure is it, really, if the Fat Lady just ends up yelling the password down the corridor?
[Lizzie and Rosie laugh]
Rosie: The Fat Lady has always been a law of her own, though.
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Lizzie: She’s never been afraid to be loud either.
Alison: And in that same corridor, Harry runs into Nick, who says that Dumbledore has had business to attend to before he goes to bed. So do we think Dumbledore knew Harry was trying to get the memory and hoping Harry had succeeded, or do we think he was doing something else?
Ariel: It almost makes you wonder if, on the way back from wherever Dumbledore went, […] he spotted Hagrid’s hut, and the lights were on and Hagrid, Slughorn, and Harry all like sitting around a little bit drunk and…
[Lizzie and Rosie laugh]
Ariel: … maybe Dumbledore was like, “All right, Harry! You’re getting it this time! You’re going to get that memory!” It’s not totally impossible.
Rosie: He seems surprised when Harry gets there, though.
Alison: That’s true.
Rosie: I’m just wondering if he knew anything else that was going on. Maybe he’s aware of what Draco is currently doing, and that’s what business he was attending to. Or maybe there’s a conversation with Snape reminding him what he has to do if everything goes bad tonight. I wonder if Dumbledore is aware of the other businesses around the school, where Harry is not. And why can’t we just sent ghosts to spy on these bad things?
[Alison and Lizzie laugh]
Rosie: They could easily just trail Draco around.
Alison: Well, Dumbledore’s business – whatever it was – has been interrupted, as we know. Because we get to see Slughorn’s real memory. And a lot happens in this. I mean, we’ve seen part of it already. But a lot happens in the actual memory. And the first thing I picked out was that Slughorn predicts that Tom Riddle is going to become Minister [of] Magic within 15-20 years. So I did the math, which I’m very bad at, [laughs] but if I calculated this right, I think that would’ve put him in office around the late 1950s, early 1960s, which is actually pretty close to when he started his reign of power that they talk about. So in some ways, Slughorn wasn’t wrong.
Ariel: Yeah. He definitely saw his potential as Tom Riddle, even to bring him into the Slug Club because, as it’s been said before, Slughorn usually invites people whose names really have a lot of power and prominence. And here comes Tom Riddle, a boy who’s an orphan, and he obviously doesn’t have that strong, powerful name, as far as – I think – Slughorn knows. With the way they talk later on, like the boys giving him the side eye when he says something about his ancestry. Clearly, the others know that he is a descendant of Salazar Slytherin, but I don’t know if Slughorn knows that necessarily? And even if he did, I don’t know if that would influence his decision to bring him into the Slug Club, so yeah, I think Slughorn knew there was power there, but I think he severely underestimated what kind.
Lizzie: Yeah. Had Tom Riddle not had all this evil going through his brain, and was just following his cunning determined self, I could easily have seen him becoming Minister of Magic. Had he just been cunning, determined, sophisticated, all the qualities that Slughorn was seeing in his young Hogwarts-self kind of thing… but obviously because of that power and desire for revenge, it didn’t go that way.
Rosie: I wonder what it was that actually made him part of the Slug Club, then, if he didn’t have all of this name and all of this power behind him at the very start. What was his equivalent of Ginny’s Bat-Bogey Hex?
[Alison, Ariel, and Lizzie laugh]
Alison: Yeah, I wonder what he could have done. So another thing that Slughorn mentions in this memory as we get to the heart of it is that to make a Horcrux, you have to commit murder, which is the supreme act of evil. So I thought that was interesting. I mean, murder is an evil, terrible, horrible thing, but is it really the supreme act of evil?
Ariel: I think so. [laughs] I don’t really know how much worse it can get, especially with someone as sadistic as Voldemort. I don’t think his murders… I don’t know. Some of them seem to be fairly quick, but it almost seems like he would put a lot of weight on killing these people, especially his real father and his grandparents on that side of the family. Killing them feels very… revenge… I don’t know, revenge-filled? [laughs] I don’t think that’s the proper word I’m going for. But it does feel like the ultimate evil, especially… I mean, that’s killing somebody. How much worse does it get, really?
Lizzie: I feel like – at least in the wizarding world – murder is probably the supreme act of evil because when we’re introduced to the Unforgivable Curses, the Killing Curse is the last one we hear of. It’s the build up.
Rosie: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say as well. [laughs]
Lizzie: And it’s this awful, terrible curse that cannot be reversed, and the act is just awful and in order to commit it you have to really feel it and have that power inside of you, kind of thing. So I feel like because of the weight of these Unforgivable Curses, it is the most supreme act, at least in the wizarding world, as far as they’ve seen so far.
Rosie: Yeah. I think especially with having magic around the world, if you have a wound, it can be healed. If you’ve got bad memories from something, the memories themselves can be removed. Whereas killing someone is final. You can’t bring back the dead.
Alison: Yeah, that makes sense.
Rosie: So that is really the only thing you can’t fix in some way in the magical world, so it would be their ultimate evil.
Alison: That’s a good point, yeah. All right, so this is the closest we ever get to knowing how to make a Horcrux. Slughorn mentions that it’s a spell, but Jo has said that we’ll probably never actually know what it is because she said that when she told one of her editors, it nearly made them sick.
[Everyone laughs]
Alison: And in some ways I’m very glad; I don’t think we need to know that.
Lizzie: Yeah, especially if it made her editor sick? I don’t want to know.
Alison: Yeah.
Ariel: Yeah, but it makes you so curious. Wow! What did she come up with? [laughs] What is going on?
Rosie: Jo has a very dark mind.
Ariel: Apparently!
Alison: Oh, yeah. I wonder how it… I feel like that would just eat at you, though. To at some point have figured out how to do that, and be like, “Never going to tell anyone else. No.”
Rosie: Yeah.
Ariel: It’s just one of those secrets to me about Harry Potter that I would want to know, but once you know there’s just no going back.
Lizzie: I feel like her editor asked her just casually, “So what does it take to actually make this thing?” And then Jo…
Rosie: She was not prepared for the answer.
[Everyone laughs]
Lizzie: Jo just went into it and laid it out play-by-play, and the editor probably walked out and was just like, “I never… I just should not have asked. Nope, nope.”
[Everyone laughs]
Lizzie: And she was probably torn. “Never… don’t tell anybody that, please. Oh, no.”
Ariel: That poor editor.
Alison: Yeah.
Rosie: Well, we know from The Casual Vacancy and from her Robert Galbraith novels that she has a very dark mind when it comes to murder mysteries and to crime novels. So Voldemort is a very dark character and does these dark things, so we have to think along those lines there as well.
Ariel: I did some digging on Horcruxes and noticed something interesting. Apparently, the wizard that created the first successful Horcrux, Herpo the Foul, was actually the first wizard to hatch a basilisk.
Alison: Oh, yeah.
Lizzie: Oh! That’s interesting.
Ariel: Which I thought was so interesting, in terms of even just Voldemort’s history. That’s a huge thing. It almost makes me wonder if that’s how Voldemort got to the point of finding out about Horcruxes, is that maybe he already had this thing going with the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets and wanted to read more about it.
Rosie: Well, aren’t they something around the same time?
Ariel: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.
Rosie: Myrtle dies in Tom’s fifth year, and then he asks Slughorn around the same time.
Alison: About the same time, yeah.
Rosie: So maybe the hatching of a basilisk is some part of the spell of creating Horcruxes.
Alison: Whoa.
Lizzie: Maybe Nagini is the son of that basilisk.
[Everyone laughs]
Rosie: I think we’ve… there are so many theories about Nagini and there are so many ways of…
Alison: Yeah.
Ariel: Oh, so many. She’s just not an ordinary snake, that’s for sure.
Alison and Rosie: No.
Ariel: Yeah.
Alison: All right, and then the last thing I picked out of this memory was that “Horcruxes” mentions that Dumbledore is particularly fierce about Horcruxes. And it made me think: Do we think that maybe in his time with Grindelwald, Dumbledore has discussed them? We do know that Grindelwald was a very powerful dark wizard and that Dumbledore took a long time to go duel him, so do we think Grindelwald himself maybe could have had a Horcrux at some point, and that could have been part of the reason why Dumbledore didn’t want to face him?
Rosie: I don’t know if he would have had one. I think Dumbledore would have recognized Voldemort having them earlier if that was the case; if he had fought against someone who had them before.
Alison: Ah, yeah.
Rosie: But I do think they might have discussed them before. Dumbledore seems to have a knowledge of them and yeah, a ferocity against them but that might be due to his personal loss as well, I guess.
Lizzie: I could see them definitely having a conversation about it and Grindelwald trying to say, “For the greater good, to make sure that we stay around to make sure everything is going as planned,” kind of thing, and that definitely causing Dumbledore to be highly even more opposed than he probably was beforehand about it. Definitely learned more.
Rosie: Wouldn’t it be horrific if that conversation happened sometime around Ariana’s death?
Alison: Oh, man.
Ariel: Ooh, gosh.
Rosie: And that might be a point of their split completely because of some kind of connection to that.
Alison and Lizzie: Yeah.
Rosie: Creepy. This is a dark episode. Sorry, guys.
Alison: Oh, even… yeah.
[Everyone laughs]
Alison: We’re getting into the…
Rosie: It was always going to be, though, with Horcruxes.
[Everyone laughs]
Alison: Oh, that just sounds awful. I just had a really awful thought of if at some point Grindelwald did make a Horcrux, what if it was Ariana that was the death in that? But that just made me very sad.
Lizzie: Oh.
Alison: Yeah. All right, moving on. [laughs]
Ariel: No more.
Alison: So we finally, now… we’ve talked about this before but we finally now have a more holistic list of what Voldemort’s Horcruxes are. And I don’t know if we’ve gone through them all and the deaths that Voldemort used for them, so I decided to include them. So we know we have the ring, which was created by Tom Riddle, Sr.; the diary, which was created by Myrtle’s death; the cup, which is connected to Hepzibah; the locket, which is connected to a Muggle tramp; in this chapter, they just call it something of Ravenclaw’s but, of course, we know later it’s the diadem, which is created with an Albanian peasant; and Nagini, which is created with Frank Bryce. So some of these things I found really interesting, especially, for example, a Muggle tramp used for the locket, which seems odd because this is actually something that is connected to Voldemort’s family and his mother, and his heritage, to Slytherin.
Ariel: Ah.
Alison: So why some of these deaths that seem more insignificant?
Ariel: Honestly, I think the Muggle tramp… maybe that’s how he viewed his mother.
Alison: Hmm.
Ariel: I’m saying hopefully not but honestly it’s Voldemort we’re talking about.
[Alison laughs]
Ariel: And he very well could have viewed that whole history as, “Well, my Muggle tramp of a mother coerced this…” oh, wait, no, she wasn’t even a Muggle. I’m so sorry; that was ridiculous. Well, maybe he sees her as a lesser witch because of her inability to properly use magic because of the way her father and brother treated her, so maybe that’s just how he viewed her.
Alison: Yeah. He does say in that first memory that we see him in as a kid that he doesn’t think his mother is magic because she died.
Ariel, Lizzie, and Rosie: Yeah.
Lizzie: He also could have referred to her that way just because a Muggle tramp, as in she was attracted to a Muggle rather than, what? She couldn’t find some wizard kind of thing.
Alison: Oh, yeah.
Lizzie: Had to fall in love with a lesser half.
Ariel: Yeah, and Tom Riddle, Sr. couldn’t even fall in love back with her or anything, so he clearly disregarded this relationship as anything of importance with [laughs] killing his own father in order to create the ring. And then for the locket, maybe he saw something in this Muggle tramp that he maybe viewed as his mother. Something in this woman just reminded him of what he probably envisioned being his mom despite the fact that she was magical and coming from a very established – eh, in name – family, so…
Rosie: Yeah. I’m not sure if the deaths themselves are actually symbolic in any way. I mean, Tom Riddle, Sr.; you could read the revenge and the… he’s using that symbolically to end his abandonment in early life. But the other deaths… whilst Myrtle could represent the end of his school days, but then he always wanted to return to the school; Hepzibah is some link to this token aspect, but then he had to get rid of her to get the actual items. The fact that the deaths are so small scale other than Tom Riddle, Sr… it’s just another girl; it’s just an old lady; it’s just a tramp; it’s just a peasant; it’s just the gardener or the housekeeper, whatever Frank was… I can’t quite remember what his job title was. [laughs] But they’re so small scale in comparison to Hufflepuff’s cup, Slytherin’s locket, Ravenclaw’s diadem, that you just… it says something more about Voldemort’s character if he just doesn’t care who he kills to get these items. It means absolutely nothing to him to destroy or to separate a part of his soul on the death of no one. The only one he really, really cares about is killing Harry…
Ariel: Yeah.
Rosie: … and creating that final Horcrux with that ultimate symbol of his destruction would be a very important thing. Which in turn is interesting because by the time he wants to create that Harry Horcrux, he’s already made the locket. He doesn’t have the diadem, so he has no magical item to put the Harry Horcrux into. The symbolism for that death would be Harry himself rather than the item.
Ariel: Yeah.
Rosie: Or perhaps some item that he could find in the Potters’ house to connect to Harry rather than anything else. So it would be interesting to know what that item would have been…
Ariel and Lizzie: Yeah.
Rosie: … if he would have succeeded in killing Harry in the moment. But the other deaths I think are more important as throwaway deaths than they are as symbolic deaths because it is just so creepy. [laughs]
Alison: Yeah. [laughs]
Lizzie: Yeah, an object of importance. That makes you wonder if he knew about the Invisibility Cloak, because that would be one of the Deathly Hallows.
Alison and Ariel: Oh!
Lizzie: And to make that into a Horcrux, Voldemort would have…
Rosie: But he didn’t know about the Hallows. He only knows about the wand.
Lizzie: Okay, because I was wondering… obviously at that point, James would have had it.
Rosie: Yeah.
Alison: No, no, no, Dumbledore had it. [laughs]
Lizzie: Oh. Well, I’m just full of wrong facts tonight.
[Alison and Ariel laugh]
Rosie: But that just makes it… so Dumbledore was investigating the cloak because he thought it was a Hallow.
Alison: Uh-huh.
Rosie: Voldemort never knows about the Hallows; he only knows about this…
Alison: Unbeatable Wand.
Rosie: … myth of a dead… yeah, an Unbeatable Wand. But to have that kind of connection, that is the main item that you would connect to James.
Alison: Yeah.
Rosie: I wonder if Voldemort was more aware of Lily through Snape.
Alison and Ariel: Yeah.
Rosie: You know, Snape asking Voldemort not to kill her and that kind of thing, maybe he would look for something of hers. I don’t know. But also, because they’re a Gryffindor family, maybe he would think that there would be some chance of getting a Gryffindor item.
Alison: Yeah. That’s true. Well, I think that would go back to what is the timeframe to make a Horcrux?
Rosie: Yeah.
Alison: Because I wonder if he would have saved it and if you can kind of go indefinitely, if he would have saved it for when he found something of Gryffindor’s… but yeah, now I really want to know what he would have used or what he was planning on using.
[Rosie laughs]
Alison: Pottermore, Jo, please tell us!
[Everyone laughs]
Alison: All right, and the other thing about this though is that as much as we have this list, Dumbledore’s still not telling Harry the whole truth. He knows Harry’s a Horcrux, but he’s still telling him at this point that there are only seven, including the piece of Voldemort’s soul that’s still inside of his body. So, it’s these lies, I think, that hurt the most at this point. When Dumbledore said, “I will tell you everything…”
Lizzie: Yeah. It hurts.
Alison: … he’s still not, and it’s so blatent that he’s still not.
Lizzie: Well, I think at this point Harry’s so proud to have gotten this information, to feel in the know. And even when Dumbledore says he’ll include Harry on the next trip, it just kind of goes out of Harry’s mind that even if Dumbledore may have the slightest chance of lying. Harry’s like, “You know what, I feel important to Dumbledore now.” And for Dumbledore to say he’s going to tell him everything and know that he’s not… despite trying to protect Harry, it just cuts deep. It hurts to read.
Alison: So is this Dumbledore’s flaw coming up again? It’s interesting that you say that. It’s this moment of pride for Harry…
Lizzie: Yeah.
Alison: … so I wonder, is this Dumbledore’s flaw coming out again? He sees this and maybe he was going to tell him, but he sees how proud Harry is to have been putting this together. So maybe he changed his mind.
Lizzie: Possibly.
Rosie: I think that… this is me with my Dumbledore issues…
[Everyone laughs]
Rosie: He knows that Harry has to face Voldemort and he knows that Harry has to die and he knows that that bit of the Horcrux needs to be destroyed. And I don’t think Harry would have done it if he knew earlier than “I open at the close.” Dumbledore was fully aware that he was sending off this kid to the slaughter. He just had to get through the other things first. So I don’t think it’s Dumbledore’s flaw that he was loving Harry too much and he didn’t want to hurt him. I think he was the opposite. He was just getting the job done.
Lizzie: Yeah. I really don’t know how Harry would have reacted if he was told all of this, goes through this whole memory, and at the end, Dumbledore is like, “Yeah, and you’re probably one of them, too.”
[Ariel, Alison, and Rosie laugh]
Lizzie: “So if you could hold off on that last bit…”
[Ariel, Alison, and Rosie laugh]
Lizzie: “… that would be great.”
Rosie: Yeah. “Don’t accidentally fall on any basilisk fangs…”
[Ariel, Alison, and Rosie laugh]
Lizzie: Yeah. “Let’s just avoid these things and go down the line.” But I really don’t know how Harry would have reacted and then continued on for the entirety of the next book with that information. I feel like it would have made him go mad or something.
Ariel: Yeah. In this moment, I feel like it would have been a clap on the back and then a slap to the face.
Alison: Yeah.
[Everyone laughs]
Ariel: That’s how it would have felt to Harry: “Good job, but then there’s this.” Harry had enough going on with his emotions at this point.
Lizzie: Yeah.
Ariel: I truthfully think it’s a combination of Dumbledore caring about Harry and also knowing that, like Rosie said, the job needed to be done.
Lizzie: Yeah. And Harry was just so excited that he was finally being included. He knew things finally.
[Alison laughs]
Lizzie: He was waiting so long. He’s like, “I did it! Look!” Like a shiny little puppy.
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Lizzie: “I did it! I did it! Aren’t you proud of me?” And then he gets all this information as a reward kind of thing.
Alison: Yeah, that’s true. All right, and this is kind of where this chapter really kicks off and it goes crazy.
[Everyone laughs]
Alison: So… we start to learn that basicially everything that’s happened in Harry’s time at Hogwarts has lead to this moment, has been connected to this information about Horcruxes.
Rosie: Pre-empting the Obligatory Genius Moment here.
Alison: Yes, yes.
[Ariel laughs]
Rosie: Which is going to be just amazing from now on. [laughs]
Alison: Okay. So, we start in his first year with the Philosopher’s Stone. And Dumbledore says… I will not do voices because I’m not as good as Michael.
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Alison: He says, “Voldemort likes to operate alone, remember. I believe that he would have found the thought of being dependent, even on the Elixir, intolerable. Of course he was prepared to drink it if it would take him out of the horrible part-life to which he was condemened after attacking you, but only to regain a body.” So basicially Harry’s whole first adventure with Voldemort is connected to the fact that Voldemort tried to get a body to put his Horcrux in, but that’s keeping him alive. So, in some ways, Harry’s first encounter with Voldemort is meeting his Horcrux, yeah?
Rosie: A Horcrux, yeah.
Lizzie: Wow.
Alison: All right, Year Two is obvious, of course.
[Rosie laughs]
Alison: The diary.
[Lizzie laughs]
Alison: And… it talks about, in the chapter, how the Horcrux is a diary… or is in the diary, and Dumbledore says that he became suspicious because, “a mere memory couldn’t do the things that the diary does.” So, how do they kind of play off each other? We probably talked about this in Book 2, but we could probably talk about it again a little bit more.
Rosie: See, I’m never sure… I don’t think there was a separate memory and Horcrux. I think the memory was the Horcrux.
Alison: Yeah.
Rosie: And it’s that part of the soul that, because it was created when Voldemort was still at school with Myrtle’s death, that is the age that the Horcrux is; it is that teenager. There’s no sense of him living beyond that and then remembering; he is just stuck at that age. Which is quite interesting in terms of if Voldemort can create a new body, put a Horcrux in that body, and that Horcrux then becomes alive. If he wanted to live forever, then go with the earliest stage of your Horcruxes…
[Everyone laughs]
Rosie: … and then you’d have that eternal youth for at least a much longer time. So, we could have had a young Tom being regenerated rather than the Tom that comes out in the graveyard. But I think that that Horcrux shows youthful playfulness in being that memory, and it is trying to invade Harry’s mind and manipulate him in the same way that Tom was manipulating friends whilst he was at school. And I think it’s quite interesting that each of the Horcruxes have a different quality and a different way of invading the holder…
Ariel: Yeah.
Rosie: … or wearer or reactant’s mind and preys on different fears. And at that point, it was that kind of childish learning-how-to-be-cool-at- school frame of mind that Harry had as well. He was just trying to get to grips with being famous and then being famous for the wrong thing, and the diary just played into that very well as the part of the soul that is very manipulative even.
Ariel: Just imagining a 15-year-old Voldemort rising to power again…
[Rosie laughs]
Ariel: At this point in Harry’s life, he would have to go head-to-head with a somewhat younger [person] than him at this point who has been around… Like it just would completely… if that that had ever truly been the turn that the series had taken – Ginny died, this 15-year-old Voldemort has a body and he’s ready to fight Harry – like that would just be so weird to me.
[Rosie laughs]
Ariel: Because we always imagined Voldemort as this older…
Alison: Yeah.
Rosie: Yeah.
Ariel: …evil… like Tom Riddle had a little baby face.
[Alison laughs]
Ariel: Everyone said he was attractive, and it would just be so odd for Harry to have to fight someone so close in age…
Alison and Lizzie: Yeah.
Ariel: … like a Malfoy essentially to him. So, I don’t know. I just can’t stop thinking about that.
Rosie: Would it make it easier or harder for Harry to win?
Alison: Ooh!
Ariel: That’s if Voldemort retained… well, obviously he retained everything he knew because at the point of the Chamber of Secrets, he knew who Harry was. He knew that Harry killed him.
Rosie: But only because Ginny had told him.
Ariel: Oh!
Alison: Yeah.
Rosie: So everyone who writes in the diary adds to the information. It’s a bit like the portraits that we’ve talked about before.
Alison: Yeah.
Rosie: So you have to train the portrait and you have to train the Horcrux to know things that have happened since it was created. So yeah, he knows about Harry because Ginny told him.
Ariel: So if he just knew what he knew at that point, then I think Harry could have handled it pretty well.
[Everyone laughs]
Alison: Would have been easier.
Lizzie: Yeah, I feel like that version of Riddle would also have been more terrified about acting so quickly because that version of Riddle wouldn’t know that there was so many other Horcuxes involved, I would think. He may just think that there’s one or two, and he’s got three strikes and he’s out kind of deal. And that’s what so scary about those Horcuxes, is that they all had such different powers that you essentially didn’t know what was going to happen each time you interacted with one.
Alison: I wonder if… kind of like, Rosie, how you’re saying that they embody Voldemorts personality at the time he made them. I wonder if he could’ve made them to almost have specific jobs if they’re attacked, like specific reactions, so in this case, he wanted the diary planted so that he could open the Chamber of Secrets, so I wonder if there was anyway he could specifically make this Horcrux to get the Chamber open and then carry out what he wanted then. I then wonder if the others are different.
Rosie: Well, I think that’s exactly what it does, so it doesn’t immediately go for Harry. It only does that once it finds out enough information. Its main task is to talk to whoever it is [who]’s talking to it – so Ginny – to take over them and then to open the Chamber and ultimately kill someone in order to resurrect. So Harry is just a side issue for the diary. The diary is focused on Ginny. So yeah, the ultimate thing was to resurrect itself. It wasn’t to kill the Chosen One. It doesn’t really know much about that; all it knows is that there’s this famous kid [who] ultimately killed its original form. So yeah, all it knows is that it wants to resurrect and take over the role that it was meant to be made for. So I think, yeah, Voldemort would definitely have built in some way for each of the Horcuxes to resurrect themselves. Which is interesting when you think about the locket and what it does to Ron. I wonder how that would’ve ultimately created something that would’ve been able to posses and then resurrect.
Lizzie: I was actually thinking about the placement of the locket, how it’s in the cave with all the Inferi. Wondering if it would somehow affect them and essentially put them out into the world.
Rosie: Zombie army!
[Everyone laughs]
Lizzie: Yeah, wreak havoc.
Alison: Oh, that’s terrifying.
[Alison, Lizzie, and Rosie laugh]
Rosie: This is a really terrifying episode! Let’s carry on so we can finish.
Alison: And so skipping over year three, because Voldemort doesn’t come in much, we get a lot of mentions of what happened in the graveyard in Harry’s fourth year, a lot of discussion about what Harry tells Dumbledore. Voldemort said that he had gone further than anyone else. Harry even flashes back himself to how Voldemort described his existence after he tried to kill Harry. And we get a mention of Cedric, which we haven’t gotten for a long time, flashing back to that important moment. And then in Year 5, Dumbledore talks about Voldemort’s posession of Harry, and he says, “You’ve flitted into Lord Voldemort’s mind without damage to yourself, but he cannot possess you without enduring mortal agony, as he discovered in the Ministry. I do not think he understands why, Harry, but he was in such a hurry to mutilate his own soul, he never paused to understand the uncomfortable power of a soul that’s untarnished and whole”. So interesting that we’ve known so much about these things without knowing we know so much about these things for five and three quarter books. It’s been so prevalent that…
Ariel: Classic Jo strikes again.
[Ariel and Rosie laugh]
Rosie: You have to wonder how much she planned out and how much she just “Yeah, that really works!”
[Everyone laughs]
Rosie: But just to hold that amount of information in your mind, in your notebooks, in your plans for this story would just… I can’t even imagine how much work goes into planning that before you even get to the writing. I do think she must have made up links as she went along, and that’s perfectly fine. That’s a brilliant way of writing. The way she manages to iron out the kinks of that are brilliant, especially seeing as she published them as she was writing, rather than writing them all and then publishing them in sequence. So just the skill involved in seeing what you could add to the earlier details that you’ve already written is just brilliant. So yeah, OGM. Just amazing.
Alison: Yeah, this is the Obligatory Genius Moment to top them all, I think. [laughs]
Rosie: Yeah, I wish I hadn’t already made my T-shirt. [laughs]
Alison: All right, and then here, this last point is the point that blows my mind to this day. I’ve read these so many times, but this part in the series is so nuanced. It’s so complicated, and it’s just so beautiful that I have a hard time even trying to break it down into something that is easy to talk about because the prophecy gets complicated in so many ways.
Rosie: It’s always been complicated.
[Lizzie and Rosie laugh]
Alison: Yeah, but it’s turned on itself, I feel like. We learn that Harry’s power that the Dark Lord knows not is love, and… do you think Harry’s reaction is right? Is this a let down after everything that it’s been built up to be, in some way?
Rosie: For a little teenage boy where you’re like, “Yeah, I get superhero powers? That is so cool.”
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Rosie: Yeah, love is a bit of a let-down. [laughs]
Ariel: I just think Harry… I felt bad for him in a way because he does want to be like, “I’m so powerful I can take Voldemort down. But it’s because I can love.” For a guy, I think, in a way, that might be… I don’t know. Like Rosie was saying, you want a super power, and love doesn’t feel like a super power, but in this case, it is the ultimate super power. It is everything.
Rosie: Yeah, it goes back to what we were saying earlier that Harry is a very active person. So he wants an active power that the Dark Lord knows, not some more subtle power. But I think he does come to understand what that means in the next book, and I think that’s actually part of the journey of the next book. So we’ve got the hunt for the Horcruxes, we’ve got the hunt for the Hallows, but the actual story is Harry’s journey of self-discovery and learning what he values the most out of the world, and that is Ron when he goes away and comes back again. It is Hermione when she sticks by him and even goes to the place of his parents’ death by his side and encounters all of these different things and leaves the potential love of her life to stay with Harry and make sure he’s okay. It is sending Ginny back to Hogwarts in the hopes that she would be protected. It is seeing Neville stand up for all of his friends. It is going back to the castle and fighting against the powers that have infiltrated it. It’s all of these things, and that is when Harry really understands what that power is, and that is when he can actually use that as a weapon, which he just… at this moment, he doesn’t have any of that knowledge, and therefore he doesn’t get it.
Lizzie: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I could almost imagine one of his initial thoughts being like, “Okay, so I can love. I would love for Voldemort to get out of here and give me my life back.”
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Lizzie: “I would love to finish him off today, preferably before breakfast.” But it’s, as you said, in that next book when he realizes how special that bond and that ability is, is what makes it so special, and that is what gives it the real power.
Ariel: Yeah, I think…
Rosie: [sings] All you need is love.
[Alison and Lizzie laugh]
Rosie: I’ve sung that so many times in these [unintelligible]. I’m sorry, everyone.
[Alison, Ariel, and Lizzie laugh]
Ariel: It’s a staple now.
Alison: Oh. Well, I am trying not to cry now because that is… not to jump ahead, but that’s why I love Book 7 so much.
Ariel: It’s so beautiful.
Alison: It’s just… oh! Okay.
Rosie: Yes, there is so much that goes on in that book.
Alison: Well, anyway, getting back to that prophecy, we… it gets flipped on its head from how it was described last year, that it was destiny, that it was the way things were supposed to happen. But I never really thought of it this way before, but it reemphasizes the idea of choice, where your choice is more important than anything else. However, that being said, because Voldemort has chosen to follow the prophecy, Harry has to. So it doesn’t really give Harry much choice at all. Or does it?
Rosie: He can still choose to run and hide, but that would be going against the power that he has. He has the power the Dark Lord knows not, and that power is the bravery and the love and all of that stuff that would mean that he would never choose not to fight this thing. So I guess that comes under luck and faith and all of that stuff we were talking about earlier as well. But ultimately, that free will is there; it’s just that Harry is the kind of character that would always, always choose the right path, and that’s what he does.
Ariel: I think that’s why Harry… because he does have this all-encompassing love, for him to just run and hide and essentially let Voldemort take over… Harry couldn’t let that happen to, I guess, all of humanity. Because Voldemort would. He would completely eradicate Muggles and Muggle-borns and just anyone he didn’t see fit to live in this world, and it’s because of Harry’s love for anyone, really, but especially those close to him that he does have to fulfill this prophecy, and he does have a choice, but he obviously chooses right and to stand there and fight rather than “Oh, I’m not going to do it.” He’s a Gryffindor. He’s got the bravery. He has to. He just has to, and he does.
Lizzie: Yep, I would agree with all of that.
[Ariel, Lizzie, and Rosie laugh]
Alison: And as we wind down, this is really one of the first times we see Dumbledore so adamant about something. And it’s strangely surprising. I feel like we should have known he could be this passionate about things, but we don’t, really. And as I was reading, I was thinking, “This sounds so much like Jo channeling herself through Dumbledore in this moment.” More than, I think, any other time in the series, that this is her.
Rosie: This is the moment where she gets to show off. The fact that she has layered all of these things in there and that she can reveal things all in this one chapter, this is what everything’s been building up to. And yeah, I do think that this is the moment where she’s closest to being herself through Dumbledore. And yeah, it’s her voice that’s saying, “Look at what I’ve done. Look at the amazing layers of detail and how much we know already and what Harry now has to do.” And it is her kicking it into the next gear and saying, “This is where the end begins” and “Strap in. Let’s go.”
[Alison, Ariel, and Rosie laugh]
Alison: Yeah. There’s just so much… anyway. Yeah.
[Alison and Rosie laugh]
Rosie: There’s so much.
[Lizzie laughs]
Rosie: That’s all we need.
Alison: That we can’t even talk about it all.
[Alison, Ariel, and Rosie laugh]
Alison: All right. Well, just to wrap it all up, then, this chapter ends, I think, with one of my all-time favorite passages from the entire series. It’s beautiful writing, it’s a beautiful sentiment, and it’s the last paragraph. And it says, “But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with you head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew – and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents – that there was all the difference in the world.”
Ariel: Ugh. That just tugged at my heart when we read that. I even put a little sticky note next to it because I was just like, “It’s so… ugh.” It just makes you feel. [laughs] And especially knowing what you know now. The first time reading this book, I didn’t know that’s what it would really come to, is Harry walking into the arena with his head held high. And for him to be surrounded by those loved ones that he did lose, walking into the arena, it just… it brings so many emotions, and it just makes you so proud that you are along this journey with Harry, because he is the hero. He is who[m] we’ve all come to love.
Lizzie: See, this is the part where we’re making up for all the darkness earlier in the episode.
[Alison, Ariel, and Rosie laugh]
Lizzie: Now with all this fluff and happiness.
[Alison, Ariel, and Rosie laugh]
Lizzie: Just love!
Rosie: Well, today’s episode will be called “Darkness and Mush.”
[Alison, Ariel, and Lizzie laugh]
Alison: I can support that a hundred percent.
[Rosie laughs]
Alison: All right. And with that, we’re going to wrap up this discussion of this chapter. So let us know your thoughts on anything we discussed on the site.
Rosie: So all that remains is for us to ask you guys our Podcast Question of the Week for this week. And we’ve had so many things to talk about this chapter that you can really… we definitely won’t need to delve into any of those on the main site, but I think I’m really quite interested to know your theories on this question that had us stumped a bit earlier on. And we came up with a couple of suggestions, but I think you guys could be really inventive and really tell us some things that we haven’t really thought of before. So our question this week is “If Harry had died in Godric’s Hollow and Voldemort had made that sixth Horcrux, none of the books would have happened, none of the story we know would have happened, but what item would Voldemort’s Horcrux that was created when Harry died have been? Would it have been something of Gryffindor’s, would it have been something completely unrelated, would it have been the Invisibility Cloak? Although he didn’t necessarily know the significance of that at the time.
[Ariel laughs]
Rosie: Let us know your thoughts in our Podcast Question of the Week thread over on the main site. I’m really interested to see what you guys come up with.
Alison: So as we end this episode, we just want to thank Lizzie and Ariel again for stepping in and hosting with us. You guys were great.
Lizzie: Thank you for having us.
Ariel: Thank you.
[Alison and Ariel laugh]
Rosie: And if you guys would like to be on the show, just like our colleagues here at MuggleNet, you can go to our “Be on the Show!” page at alohomora.mugglenet.com. You need maybe a set of Apple headphones. That’s not brand deal or anything. [laughs] We just think that they’re quite good because they’ve got a microphone on them, but any microphone will do. No other fancy equipment needed. And while you’re over on the site, you can download a ringtone for free.
Lizzie: And we would love to hear more from you guys, so feel free to tweet us @AlohomoraMN, or you can find us on Facebook at facebook.com/openthedumbledore, and feel free to check us out on Tumblr at mnalohomorapodcast, and if you’re feeling really adventurous, please feel free to give us a call or leave us a message with our Skype number – 206-GO-ALBUS, which would be 206-462-5287 – and your last opportunity for contact would be to send us an owl to audioBoom, which you can find at alohomora.mugglenet.com. It’s free. All you need is a microphone.
Alison: And while you’re over on alohomora.mugglenet.com, make sure you check out our store, where we’ve got all sorts of things, including House shirts, Desk!Pig, Mandrake Liberation Front, Minerva is my homegirl, and so many more.
Ariel: And while you’re at it, check out the smartphone app, which is available on this side of the pond and the other. Prices vary, however. Transcripts, bloopers, alternate endings, host vlogs… just so many things you don’t want to miss.
Lizzie: All right. Well, this has been a pleasure. Thank you, guys, for having me today. This is Lizzie, heading out.
Ariel: This is Ariel heading out.
Rosie: I have been Rosie Morris.
Alison: And I’m Alison Sigard.
[Show music begins]
Alison: And we want to thank you all for listening to this dark and mushy Episode 141 of Alohomora!
[Ariel and Rosie laugh]
Rosie: Open the Dumbledore.
[Show music continues]
[Dialogue echoes]
Rosie: Oh, there’s a lot of echoing going on. Someone has got their headphones unplugged or something like that.
Lizzie: No, hopefully not.
Rosie: Can I still hear myself? Oh yep, bit of an echo. So I’m going to hand it over to Alison to do the countdown because being in the UK, mine lags behind, so we’ll be completely out of sync. [laughs]
Alison: [laughs] Okay. All right. One, two, three.
[The hosts clap at different times]
Alison: Sorry! That was my bad.
[Ariel and Rosie laugh]
Alison: Because I started hearing myself echoing, so I was like, “What?”
Rosie: Yeah. I heard the echo as well.
