Transcript – Episode 223
[Show music begins]
Michael Harle: This is Episode 223 of Alohomora! for June 24, 2017.
[Show music continues]
Michael: Welcome back, listeners, to another episode of Alohomora!, MuggleNet.com’s every-so-once-in-a-while global reread of the Harry Potter series. I’m Michael Harle.
Katy Cartee Haile: I’m Katy Cartee Haile.
Kat Miller: And I’m Kat Miller. And our guest today is Alex! Welcome to the show, Alex.
Alex: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here with you guys.
Kat: Oh, we’re so excited to have you! Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, please.
Alex: Sure! My name is Alex. I’m a super Hufflepuff [and] also a Pukwudgie. My wand is ten and three-quarter inches, beech wood, with a unicorn hair core. I forget the flexibility; it’s a little bit or something.
Michael: Oh my gosh, you’re just the littlest angel of the Harry Potter world.
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Michael: Nothing can go wrong with you.
Kat: I’m impressed that you have that memorized. I guess I have mine memorized, too, but you were like, “Boom, boom, boom, boom!” Wow. Okay.
Alex: Well, I remember thinking it was weird… I don’t remember anybody in the books having beech wood, so I was like, “Ahh, I’m cool. I have beech wood.”
Kat: Right. Unique.
Michael: I think beech wood is one of the wands that Harry tries.
Alex: Oh, maybe that’s it.
Michael: It’s a beech wood and dragon heartstring [wand]. But that’s the only time I think beech wood ever came up, so that’s pretty cool.
Alex: Yeah!
Katy: And [James and Lily] sit under the beech tree beside the lake. Aww!
Michael: Oh, there you go.
Alex: Yep. That’s cool.
Kat: That is true. They do do that.
Michael: And Alex, what is your history with Harry Potter? How did you get into it?
Alex: It’s a little weird. So I was kind of at the “perfect age” to start reading them, and I did read Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets within the first couple of years they came out. I watched the first two films – I actually saw the second one in the theaters with my cousins – but then after that, I kind of fell off and I didn’t really follow up with them anymore until college when my now husband was doing a reread right before graduation. He was talking about Horcruxes and I’m like, “What is a Horcrux? I need to figure this out!” And after we graduated I did [a] “read a book, watch the movie” of the whole series, and now I’m a really insane fan. I feel terribly that I got into the fandom so late, but I’m glad I’m here now.
Michael: Kat, you have a friend!
[Alex laughs]
Kat: What?
Michael: You got into the fandom a little later.
Kat: Oh, I did! I was like, “What do you mean? I have several friends, Michael.”
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Michael: Well, yes. I know!
Kat: But yes, you’re right. I did get into the fandom late-ish, I suppose, around [the] Order of the Phoenix movie. So I don’t know. I feel like that’s middle, but yes, on the later side for sure. Not like those people that are like, “Oh, I read it from the minute it hit the bookshelves!” Yeah, okay.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Kat: Sorry.
Michael: Alex, do you have a username on our site?
Alex: I actually don’t. So I’m actually super active on the Harry Potter subreddit. I’m Quidditch Captain. [laughs]
Michael: Oh, cool!
Alex: And my username on there is Feminist_Cat. So if anybody is on Reddit, that’s me.
Kat: Sweet.
Michael: Well, you’ll have to come over and hang out with us on the main pages sometime.
Alex: I really do. The problem with it was I was listening to a lot of backlogged… I actually didn’t catch up with you guys until your Deathly Hallows – Part 2 watch, and after that, I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to go back and comment now because I don’t know if anybody’s going to read it or comment on it.” But yeah, I really should. [laughs]
Michael: Oh yeah, we’ve still got quite a few active commenters in the main pages over at alohomora.mugglenet.com.
Kat: And especially now that we’re going back through the chapters and stuff, we’re re-looking at all those old comments. So yeah, I would encourage those people to go back. If you’re still listening, still comment, especially if you reply to somebody; if they have an account, they’ll get a notification that someone replied to them. So you could restart a conversation, which would be really cool.
Michael: Yeah. And listeners, I’m sure you noticed we have another new voice with us here today stepping in and helping us out: It’s Miss Katy, who definitely has a username on the main page…
[Katy laughs]
Michael: Katy, tell the listeners who you are.
Katy: I am SlughornsTrophyWife…
Alex and Michael: Yeah!
Katy: … which my husband was not happy about, apparently.
[Everyone laughs]
Michael: That is a fantastic username, though.
Kat: It really is.
Katy: Thank you. At first I thought he just did…
Michael: I feel like I vaguely remember the first time we read that out and we thought that one was pretty darn funny.
Katy: [laughs] I’m glad. I am very happy that that gave you amusement. It does me too. [laughs]
Michael: And tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, Katy.
Katy: Well, I’ve been with MuggleNet since January. I was a transcriber first and now I’m moving over to the content team, and I’m super excited about both. I’m a Ravenclaw/Thunderbird. I know my wand is a cedar that’s brittle or something, but I think it’s unicorn hair as well. I don’t remember the length, sorry.
Kat: Well, that suits you, unicorn hair.
Katy: [laughs] Most people don’t get brittle wands, though! I feel like there’s something wrong with me that mine is brittle.
Alex: No!
Michael: That’s really interesting.
Kat: Well, the only brittle wand that we know of is Peter Pettigrew’s.
Alex: Well, don’t say that!
Katy: Aw, man!
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Kat: No, I don’t mean… I just mean that he is a highly controversial and talked about character, that’s all. I don’t mean it in a bad way.
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Michael: That was the best way anybody could possibly spin Peter Pettigrew. That was very well done.
Katy: It was. I’m impressed.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Alex: He’s just troubled.
Kat: He is! He’s very, very troubled. [laughs]
Michael: Luckily, he is not in the chapter we’re talking about today. Katy, can you tell the listeners what chapter we are discussing?
Katy: Absolutely. Today we are doing another chapter revisit, and we are jumping forward from the last one to Order of the Phoenix, where we will be…
Kat: Yes!
Katy: Woohoo!
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Katy: I know Kat is super happy about this. [laughs]
Kat: Always. I’m always happy to jump into Order of the Phoenix.
Katy: [laughs] We’re going to be discussing Chapter 4, which is “Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.” So make sure you give that chapter another read before listening to this episode to ensure maximum enjoyment.
Michael: And listeners, this chapter was picked by you! We wanted to make sure and let you know. This was in response to our fabulous social media team’s Twitter poll that they put up. First they asked you what book you wanted; you said Order of the Phoenix. Then we asked you what chapter, and you said “Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.” So continue to give us that feedback that helps us shape which chapters we choose because we have a lot to choose from and it’s definitely really helpful to know where you guys want to go next.
Kat: I definitely didn’t vote in that poll 12 times for Order of the Phoenix.
[Katy laughs]
Alex: It’s fixed! [laughs]
Michael: Naughty! I was just looking at Twitter this morning because they had put up a poll for Prisoner of Azkaban chapters…
Alex: Yay!
Michael: … and I was like, “I want to click it, but I’m not going to because I’m a host.”
Kat: Yeah, I didn’t vote, guys. I was just kidding.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Kat: And I did want to say, too, if you guys want to listen to our old episode on this chapter, it was Episode 81 from April 27, 2014. So over three years ago, holy cow!
Alex: Totally did that this morning.
Kat: Long time ago. But yeah, Laura, Michael, and Noah were on that episode.
Michael: You’d have to turn that Time-Turner a lot to get back there. [laughs]
Katy: Indeed.
Alex: Three turns for three years, right?
Michael: Sure!
[Everyone laughs]
Kat: We can pretend that’s how it works, yeah.
Alex: They don’t have rules.
Michael: Not anymore.
[Alex laughs]
Kat: No, not if you’re a “Cursed Child is canon” type of person.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Alex: Sorry, Alison.
Kat: Moving on from that whole hot mess of a topic, we want to let everybody know that this episode is sponsored by Kayde Rieken on Patreon. Thank you very much, Kayde; you are awesome.
Michael: [claps] Yay!
Alex and Katy: Woohoo!
Kat: Kisses and claps and snaps for you. Any of you out there listening can become a sponsor for as little as $1 per month. That’s just 100 pennies. I talk about this all the time: Y’all just go on a walk, you can probably find 100 pennies and there you go. There’s your sponsorship for the month. And we have been continuing to release exclusive tidbits for our sponsors, sneak peaks and things like that. So definitely check it out: patreon.com/alohomora, or you can head over to alohomora.mugglenet.com and in the main menu there’s a Patreon button, too, so click it. And thank you again, Kayde. Claps! You’re the best.
Kat an Michael: Yay, Kayde!
Michael: And if Kayde meets up with us at Florean Fortescue’s on September 1, she’ll get some free ice cream…
Kat: We’re going to buy her ice cream!
Michael: [laughs] … because that’s where we’ll be on September 1! We will be at Universal Studios in Florida for “Nineteen Years Later.” We are celebrating properly with a fully immersive experience. Kat, can you tell us more about the finer details of that?
Kat: Yeah, sure. So it is a totally private event. MuggleNet has rented out Diagon Alley, King’s Cross, and the Hogwarts Express, so you will be able to get a round trip experience on the Hogwarts Express, which is a whole lot of fun. There’s going to be a 90-minute buffet dinner and all-free desserts. Every single food item except alcohol in the Wizarding World is free that night: ice cream, butterbeer, the fishy green… No, that’s a beer, right? The fishy green ale is a beer. That’s not free. You have to pay for that.
Michael: [laughs] Is the fizzy orange free?
Kat: The what?
Michael: The fizzy orange?
Kat: Yes! That is free.
Michael: Ahh! That’s my favorite drink.
Kat: All the ice cream… So if you guys have always been in there like, “Man, I want to try every ice cream, but I can’t afford $6 per cup,” guess what? You can get every single ice cream that night and it will be totally free. We’re going to have all sorts of really fun things. Right now we have seven confirmed cast members who will be attending, and it’s no extra charge to meet them and greet them and get photos and autographs and such with them. And we do have one more very special person to announce.
Michael: Ooh!
Kat: Stay tuned for that. That’ll be in the next couple days, probably even before this episode is released, so it’s not much of a teaser. But still, [check out] mugglenetlive.com if you haven’t already seen those details. Basically, it is going to be one giant night of fun. We’re going to have some really fun scavenger hunts, and we have all sorts of great sponsors that we’re working with: Tervis and Funko and Insight Editions and Candlewick Press… all sorts of really nerdy, fun things. We’re going to have midnight trivia in the Leaky Cauldron, which is going to be really fun too. Also prizes! And the entire Alohomora! team, I think, is going to be there. I think we just have still a couple 95 percenters, but Rosie is coming. Yay! I will be there, Eric will be there, and Michael is probably going to be there. Kristen is probably going to be there [too].
Michael: I am confirmed.
Kat: Yay! [claps] Michael is confirmed.
Michael: [laughs] I will be there. I will be there in my “Nineteen Years Later” Harry cosplay.
Kat: Perfect. Everybody can go and get hugs from him. Yay!
Michael: Yes, you can come to Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters and give me hugs. [laughs]
Kat: Right. And I did not leave her out; Alison will also be there. So you guys can definitely come hang out and we will buy you all the ice cream – I mean, it’s free – that you could possibly ever want. So come and party with us. We really want to see you guys there. [There will be] less than 500 people in the park, [and] if you’ve ever been to Diagon Alley on any sort of day, it’s usually pretty gosh darn busy. So it’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences for sure.
Michael: Yes. The thing I keep pushing is you won’t be in Diagon Alley surrounded by people in their shorts and Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops being like, “Oh, I just want to hear about this Harry Potter land, see what it’s all about.” Those people won’t be there.
[Everyone laughs]
Kat: Right.
Michael: Those people are there every day. I actually heard people who said that when I’ve gone to the parks before, so you can actually go there and be surrounded by people who are totally and completely immersed in Harry Potter. It will be a full experience in that way, so definitely join us on September 1. You don’t want to be sitting on the couch wishing that you had been doing something more special. So join us September 1.
Kat: There’ll be no line for Gringotts, if you guys know that at all is a thing. You can get off and get back on, get off and get back on.
[Katy gasps]
[Michael laughs]
Kat: If you wanted to, you could ride… I wonder… I challenge somebody who attends to see how many times they can ride it in a night.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Kat: There’s the challenge: off, on, off, on, off, on…
Michael: And the other thing is you’ll be able to get pictures in front of Number 12, Grimmauld Place because that is one of the locations and that is where we are going in this episode.
[Chapter intro begins]
Dumbledore: Three turns should do it.
Harry: Chapter revisit.
[Sound of Time-Turner]
[Order of the Phoenix Chapter 4, “Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place”]
[Chapter intro ends]
Michael: The Advanced Guard ushers Harry into the mysterious Grimmauld Place, only to send him upstairs and away from a meeting exclusively for members of the Order of the Phoenix. Passing a hallway full of covered portraits and house-elf heads, Harry reunites with Hermione and Ron, but the goodwill is short-lived and Harry loudly and infamously lays out his frustrations. Fred, George, and a noticeably talkative Ginny join the trio to update Harry on what little they can, including Snape’s Order membership, Percy’s betrayal, and Fudge’s smear campaign against Harry in the Daily Prophet. But before dinner can be served, Walburga Black’s portrait rivals Harry for volume in a tirade against Muggle-borns and Muggle sympathizers, and Sirius appears to reveal that Grimmauld Place is, in fact, his childhood home. And here we are, in Number 12, Grimmauld Place. This place isn’t as pretty or nice-smelling or fun as the Burrow or Hogwarts or any of those places. This place sucks.
[Everyone laughs]
Kat: It does.
Michael: We’ll start by throwing it back a little bit to Episode 81, where we originally talked about this chapter, with a few questions about Grimmauld Place and its physicality and how it works. Because one of my questions was raised from Rowling, actually, with one of her little Twitter reveals. This was so funny because for the life of me, I knew that she had said something about how the Black family had acquired this house, but I could not remember where it was from. And I was like, “I know it’s not in the books. Is it in Pottermore?” So I went to Pottermore and it wasn’t there…
Alex: Of course it wasn’t. [laughs]
Michael: Of course not. Is it in those Pottermore books that she released, those ebooks? And then I was like, “No, it’s not there.” And then finally I found the reference for it on the Wiki. It was a tweet; of course it was a tweet. I could not remember for the life of me that it was a tweet. But Charles Estrada asked her on Twitter, “Why is 12 Grimmauld Place in the middle of a Muggle house complex?” And Rowling said, “A Black ancestor coveted the beautiful house, ‘persuaded’ the Muggle occupant to leave, and put the appropriate spells on it.” That [kind of] answers the question of why it’s there, but it doesn’t [really] answer the question of why it’s there. [laughs] Because the thing I was curious about was why do you guys think the Blacks would choose this location? A family who is so strictly anti-Muggle, why would they want to live here?
Kat: Just so that they can split the housing apart because they’re [number] 12. Just for the cool effect of having the buildings expand.
[Michael laughs]
Kat: No, I don’t really know. I think this is one of those times in the series where it is just chalked up to convenience.
Katy: Yeah. Maybe that particular Black family member that purchased the house was not so pure-blood crazy. Most of them are, we know, but not all. So just maybe that one had a different ideology and didn’t care as much.
Michael: Maybe this is one of the Blacks who got blasted off of the family tree.
Katy: [laughs] Maybe so.
Kat: Maybe, yeah.
Michael: [laughs] I didn’t think of that. I was just thinking in terms of… I was especially thinking of the Malfoys, who we know have this grand mansion out ostensibly in the countryside. They don’t really live amongst Muggles, so I thought that was interesting that the Blacks – who I think are just as, if not in some cases, more extreme – would decide to center themselves smack dab in the middle of a highly populated Muggle area. I just couldn’t think of any other reason myself. I thought that was really interesting.
Katy: And in the book – I just read it this morning, of course, but I’m already forgetting – is it like it’s portrayed in the movie, where it’s these houses that are connected to each other like a townhouse type thing? Why would you covet that? I’m sorry. That’s not beautiful.
[Michael laughs]
Kat: Maybe they just really wanted property in downtown London, like, central London. You know that is hard to come by.
Katy: Sure. But right beside that, if you go to that location near London to see the inspiration for it… I’ve been to that street, and right across the street there is actually a proper house with a proper yard and a fence. If I wanted a property, I would take that one, not the one that looks like a townhouse. But that’s just me. Other people have other tastes. [laughs]
Kat: Right.
Michael: That’s interesting because the way that it looks in the books is not necessarily what’s in the films. It just says that they’re houses. It says that they’re kind of grubby; it doesn’t seem to be a nice part of town. But that’s really it, as far as a description goes.
Alex: But I guess maybe back when they purchased it, it was a beautiful house in a wonderful part of town and it just went downhill later.
[Michael laughs]
Alex: You know how neighborhoods change.
Michael: Now they’ve got so many Muggles in town… those Muggles overrunning everything.
[Alex laughs]
Katy: Driving down property values. Stupid Muggles.
Alex: Neighborhood is going to the dogs!
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Kat: Well, I mean, there are a lot of wizards that don’t live in [a] necessarily wizard settling because if you think about it, we only know of a couple, right?
Katy: That’s true. Isn’t Hogsmeade the only entirely magical settlement in Britain? So the majority of them really live among Muggles, even the crazy pure-blood purists.
Kat: Right.
Michael: I think the only ones that have higher populations but aren’t completely wizards are Godric’s Hollow and… is it Ottery St. Catchpole?
Kat: Catchpole, yeah.
Michael: Yeah, where the Weasleys live. Those are the two more highly-populated wizard areas, but they’re not completely wizarding families.
Kat: Right.
Michael: But we also have some questions about the more magical aspects of Grimmauld Place. Alex, do you want to present your questions here?
Alex: Sure. So when I was listening to the previous episode on this chapter… I don’t even know why I listened to it because I can’t even remember what you said about the Fidelius Charm, or if you did at all.
[Michael laughs]
Kat: The story of my life, girl.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Alex: So it seems like it’s protected by a Fidelius Charm because they have to tell each other the location very specifically or else you can’t see it. And if I recall correctly, this would be the second instance that we really witness of the Fidelius Charm. Again, I’m not counting the Potters’ house because we don’t really see that until Deathly Hallows, but since the Leaky Cauldron. And the way the Leaky Cauldron is revealed is a little different than this because Harry just follows Hagrid in, but he remarks that he would not have noticed it if Hagrid hadn’t led him straight in. Now Harry stares at Grimmauld’s Number 11 and 13 [and] doesn’t see anything. Everybody’s looking up [and] he’s like, “What are you guys looking at?” Lupin reminds him to “Reread that little piece of paper I gave you,” and then he internalizes the address, looks again, and it starts to appear. So it’s kind of a “Now you don’t see it; now you do.” But it kind of calls into question, how does the Secret Keeping work? How does the Fidelius Charm really get revealed? I don’t know. It’s all very complicated.
Michael: It’s interesting that you brought up the Leaky Cauldron in this conversation because when we just did our recent chapter revisit – I think that was our first chapter revisit – for Diagon Alley…
Alex: It was an awesome chapter revisit. I loved it!
Michael: Oh, thank you! And that was a lot of fun. We don’t get to go shopping in this chapter.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Kat: Sad.
Michael: But I guess we could go shopping for horrifying objects if we were Mundungus Fletcher. But the Leaky Cauldron was brought up in that chapter in our discussion too. And I actually asked, “Is the Leaky Cauldron under the Fidelius Charm?” Because the way that Harry notices the Leaky Cauldron is [that] Hagrid is with him and Hagrid tells him where it is as he sees it. So I didn’t know if that counts as a Fidelius Charm. And I linked us in our Document… and listeners, you can look it up on Pottermore because this one was actually on Pottermore. There’s a whole piece about the Leaky Cauldron on Pottermore, which I had completely forgotten about. This piece does not necessarily mention the Fidelius Charm. It actually talks about how the Leaky Cauldron, back when it was opened in the 1500s, was actually a place for wizards and Muggles to hang out. And when the Statute of Secrecy was put in place, it just says they put charms on it, but it doesn’t necessarily say that the Fidelius Charm was one of them. So that’s kind of an iffy example of the Fidelius Charm.
Katy: Maybe it was just “Repel Muggletum” or whatever Hermione does in Deathly Hallows. [laughs]
Michael: Yeah, because I do think that it’s been stated somewhere that Muggles just see some kind of run-down, closed building when they go by it, if they see anything at all. So in the book Harry makes it sound like they don’t even see anything because he says that he sees their eyes just passing from one place to the next.
Kat: Yeah, and Harry says he wouldn’t have even noticed it if it hadn’t been pointed out to him, right? Something like that?
Katy: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah. The Fidelius Charm has always been kind of an iffy charm to me. It’s a charm of convenience in some of the story.
Kat: I know, yeah. Sometimes I’m like, “Did you need to use a Fidelius Charm?”
Alex: Then there [are] other times like, “Why didn’t you use one, Hermione, in the forest?”
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Kat: Right.
Katy: Well, it’s supposed to be super complicated magic. And as talented as Hermione is, I could totally get why she wouldn’t have that. But then – I know this is jumping way ahead and this is not in this chapter – why doesn’t the Taboo break the Fidelius Charm? It breaks everything else!
Kat: That’s true. No, you’re right.
Michael: I think we talked about that with Deathly Hallows, and that’s where the Fidelius Charm gets really messy, especially that… and even just the thing with how Secret Keepers work and all of that blabbity-blah in tandem with the Fidelius Charm. It’s cuckoo. I don’t understand. It’s that whole thing of… they all scram from Grimmauld Place before Deathly Hallows.
Alex: Oh, yeah!
Michael: Because Dumbledore died and they’re like, “Well, secret’s out. We’ve all become Secret Keepers.” Basically, I guess the idea was, “Now we’re all at risk because more of us have this information that can be taken out of us,” I think.
Katy: And somebody like Mundungus has it, so…
Michael: Yes.
Alex: But then Harry, Ron, and Hermione are like, “What’s the secret? Who cares? Let’s go anyway.”
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Michael: Yeah. It’s very confusing. There seems to be some discontinuity in there. And I’m sure, listeners, you’re probably saying to yourselves, “That’s not how that works.” Please tell us how it works! Because we have forgotten – if anything, we have had a Memory Charm clearly put on us – if there is something we’re missing about how these charms work.
Katy: The Leaky Cauldron, in my own opinion, I don’t think is the Fidelius Charm. I think, like you said, it’s kind of a Muggle-repelling where their eyes just pass by it. But if a Muggle-born [were] walking by it with their parents, maybe they would see it and their parents wouldn’t. I don’t know.
Michael: And that raises the whole…
Alex: Mr. and Mrs. Granger!
Michael: Yes! You just said the big thing. We do know that Muggles can get in, and is that something that involves the Fidelius Charm? You can’t just take a Muggle charm off for a particular set because then everybody’s going to see it. So yeah, how does that work?
Alex: I don’t know, because these stereo-playing Muggles in Grimmauld Place don’t care. They don’t notice, so who knows? [laughs]
Michael: Exactly. So we step in, and Alex has noted a few of the decorations that were around the place.
Alex: [laughs] Yeah, as soon as they get to the door, a serpent door knocker… Oh, weird, where do we see that? Certainly not yet, but at the Gaunt shack. You get inside and there [are] candle holders serpent-shaped, and everything’s just serpents everywhere. So you’re like, okay, clearly this is a super Slytherin house.
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Michael: Yeah, it’s interesting that Harry… I forgot that Harry is not informed that this is Sirius’s house.
Alex: Yeah, he’s just like, “This is a derelict, gross building.”
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Michael: Yeah, why are they here? Although at the same time, it does also seem weird that nobody bothered to tell him, “This is your godfather’s house, by the way. Also, it’s going to be your house someday, so good luck with that.”
Alex: Moody doesn’t let them tell him anything, so I’m not totally surprised that he has no idea what he’s walking into. He’s like, “Ahh, it’s fine. Just go with it.”
Michael: That’s true. When you have Moody in your company, that’s true. You’re not going to find out anything. Well, we have a few other ornaments hanging around, so to speak.
Alex: Oh, yes! We have two darling paintings. One of them is more speculation, on my part, anyway. We hear that there’s a sniggering painting and I’m like, “Is that the first time we hear from Mr. Phineas Nigellus Black?” Probably. He’s pretty snarky and he just loves making fun of everybody in that house, including Sirius.
Katy: It’s right after Harry says something, too, I think. So I’m almost positive it’s him.
Alex and Michael: Oh, yeah.
Alex: He was getting to the beginning of CapsLock!Harry. What does he call him in Deathly Hallows? A puffed-up poppin-blue jay or something? I don’t know. He calls him a bird.
[Katy laughs]
Michael: Yeah, Phineas Nigellus is interesting in that we know that he was a former Hogwarts headmaster, and it’s funny because he seems to have a great distaste for teenagers.
Kat: He does.
Michael: [laughs] So I think his laughing is coming from Harry being what he would consider to be a stereotypical teenager. It is almost definitely him, and I think we hear him snigger a few more times before he actually makes an appearance. So that’s not his [last] snigger; he’ll come back.
[Alex laughs]
Michael: But we’ve got one portrait [whom] we do meet.
Alex: Walburga Black. Something I noticed a little more closely this time where she’s in her tirade [is when] she says, “The house of my fathers,” and you’re like, “Wait a minute, traditionally Noble and Most Ancient House of Black; that’s your married name, Black. But oh, wait, it’s also her maiden name. Oh, wait, her husband’s her second cousin.” So we get the pure-blood incest, and I want to say it was either… It might have been Sirius that says something along the lines of, “Oh, all the pure-blood families had to marry each other or they would have died out,” because I think Harry remarks, “Oh, you’re related to the Malfoys. Oh, you’re related to the Weasleys.” And Sirius is like, “Well, of course, because there’s literally, like, five families left.”
Kat: I’m really excited. Obviously, there’s totally incest going on here. But I’m excited to learn about [the] Black family tree in Fantastic Beasts. Obviously, we’re going to meet Leta, who is a Lestrange and also, ergo, a Black. I just have a feeling that J.K Rowling knows so much more about this family and their history than she even has on the family tree, and maybe exploring Fantastic Beasts has allowed her to expand that a bit, and I’m excited to learn about that because I think the Blacks overall are a really fascinating family, personally. Even if I don’t like most of the people. [coughs] Sirius.
[Katy laughs]
Kat: I’m excited to learn more about that, and I hope that we don’t have to wait four more movies to get it.
Alex: Oh my goodness.
Michael: Speaking of, we have in our Doc… and listeners, you can easily find this online; I found it through the Harry Potter Lexicon. But Rowling did a mock-up of the Black family tree back in 2006 for the Charity Book Aide International, and I think it was purchased, actually, on behalf of Daniel Radcliffe.
Alex: That sounds right.
Michael: Yeah! But it is a hand-drawn little tree of the Blacks, and yes, it definitely does reveal some pretty gross stuff [laughs] about who they married.
Katy: This is really interesting stuff. There’s a Potter on there! I’d completely forgotten that. And a Longbottom. It’s like, what the…?
Alex: And someone called Hesper Gamp. Gamp’s Law?
Michael: The Yaxleys are in their family. The Burkes. The Bulstrodes.
Alex: Oh, the Crouches! I never noticed that before.
Michael: The Crouches. Crabbe.
Kat: Rosier. Burke. Yaxley. Bulstrode. Everybody.
Alex: Harfang Longbottom. Now, that is a name.
Michael: And the neat thing, too, is she actually put notes next to all of the relatives who got blasted off the tree. So we know that we have a few. Later on when Sirius starts telling Harry about what’s on that family tree, you can actually go to that family tree that Rowling made and see who he’s talking about. Interestingly, there apparently is one family member that he notes who’s not on the tree in the one that Rowling drew that he notes in the books, so we do know… It would seem that this tree that she has put out is not complete, so we probably will be finding out a little more about them. And listeners, the other thing I want to make sure and point you toward, too – because once again, this was another piece I totally forgot was on Pottermore now that you can’t find anything – a whole wonderful piece on pure-bloods that Rowling did, and it explains a little more about pretty much how the Black family would have come to be and what their mentality was and why a place like Grimmauld Place would turn out the way it did. So make sure and check that out on Pottermore; I just want to make sure to point you all toward that. But with all of these portraits that we’ve been talking about, I think it was also worth noting a small discussion we had in Episode 81 of how portraits work, and now we have some more information on that. I do not believe we had this information when we did this episode about Hogwarts portraits, or if we did, we didn’t have a thorough knowledge of it at the time. But there is, yet again, another piece on Pottermore about how portraits work. But one of the things that was interesting to me that I had forgotten about [in] this chapter is that when the portraits start screaming… and you may not remember, listeners, but not only does Walburga start screaming, but once she starts, the whole family starts screaming all down the hall. And one of the passages notes that Mrs. Weasley runs up and down the hall Stunning the portraits, and I thought that was fascinating because I was like, “Okay, that’s a new level of how the real world interacts with a portrait. Is she really Stunning these things that ostensibly don’t have life?”
Kat: Think about Hermione. Hermione puts a blindfold on Phineas in Book 7.
Katy: That is super interesting.
Kat: I feel like it’s weird because they live in that other dimension.
Katy: So can they be Avada Kedavra‘d? Can you burn a portrait and it’s just gone?
Kat: I bet you can burn a portrait. I’m sure that that’s a thing. I don’t know if you can A-K, because there’s no body there.
Michael: [laughs] Does it feel pain?
Alex: Well, they can certainly have pretty regular emotions. If you think back to Prisoner, the Fat Lady has to “be restored,” which… I still don’t even know what that means, “restored.” She ran away to another painting, but I thought you couldn’t go to other paintings because you had to be in another painting of yourself. I don’t know. But the Fat Lady was scared of Sirius enough to ditch her painting somehow.
Kat: Yeah, I have a feeling that the Hogwarts paintings – the ones that hang in the hallways – have some sort of special connection between them which allows them to flip between portraits.
Alex: That’s totally right because Sir Cadogan – I think it’s during the Battle of Hogwarts – follows them down the hallway and is yelling awesome things at them.
Kat: I’ve always thought about the restoration, because doesn’t the painting get ripped? I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re referring to. The actual canvas gets ripped.
Alex: True. I wasn’t sure if that was a movie thing.
Kat: It might be.
Michael: It says in the piece that “Hogwarts portraits are able to talk and move around from picture to picture and behave like their subjects. However, the degree to which they can interact with the people looking at them depends not on the skill of the painter but on the power of the witch or wizard painted.” So part of how much they can interact with people in the real world is dependent on the power they had as a real person in life.
Kat: So what does that say about Sir Cadogan, then?
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Michael: I guess that explains why he’s so limited in what he does.
Katy: I wonder… since a wizard has to train their portrait if it’s painted before they die, if you were to paint, say, a portrait of Voldemort after he’s gone, would it still be a very powerful, accurate portrait even though he wasn’t around to train it?
Michael: That’s interesting because the piece talks about how traditionally these portraits are done when the subject is alive. It says here, “When a magical portrait is taken, the witch or wizard artist will naturally use enchantments to ensure that the painting will be able to move in the usual way. The portrait will be able to use some of the subject’s favorite phrases and imitate their general demeanor, thus Cadogan’s portrait is forever challenging people to a fight and falling off his horse and behaving in a fairly unbalanced way, which is how the subject appeared to the poor wizard who had to paint him.”
Alex: [laughs] He is so my favorite, though.
Kat: He’s great.
Michael: That’s interesting, too, because it partially speaks to the interpretation that the painter did of Cadogan. So there’s a mix of the individual and the painter and the charms, and it does say here, “However, neither of these portraits – ” that’s referring to Cadogan and the Fat Lady ” – would be capable of having a particularly in-depth discussion on more complex aspects of their lives. They are literally and metaphorically two-dimensional.” And in Phineas Nigellus’s case, because he’s a headmaster, his has been painted before his death and his has been trained by the real Phineas to act like him and to be knowledgeable of things about him. It’s interesting to me, too, that ostensibly his original portrait was painted for Hogwarts and then somehow got connected to Grimmauld Place, because did they paint another portrait and that connected them? Or did they set up an empty frame and then invite him in?
Alex: Oh yeah, that’s bizarre.
Kat: Duplicating Charm.
[Michael and Katy laugh]
Alex: But then you have to think with Dilys Derwent in St Mungo’s. She has a portrait in the headmaster’s office because she was the headmistress, and then she has a portrait in Saint Mungo’s. So yeah, they’re just like, “Ahh, we’ll take important portraits of whoever and put them where they were important everywhere.” Yeah, that’s really weird.
[Michael laughs]
Alex: “We’ll do several backdrops, but, yeah, paint the actual subject once, and they can flip between however they want.”
Katy: I would just think, “Oh, well, certainly the Black family would just have a portrait of him in the house.” But then I realized he’s one that got burnt off the family tree, so not so much.
Michael: [laughs] Yeah. Well, okay, that ended up raising more questions than it did answering anything. Great job!
Kat: Yay! Per usual.
Michael: [laughs] Thanks, Rowling. Your portrait piece really didn’t work at all.
[Everyone laughs]
Michael: That’s fine, though. We don’t want everything answered. That wouldn’t be any fun.
Katy: Exactly.
Alex: He said begrudgingly.
Michael: [laughs] Yes! But we have a particular denizen of Grimmauld Place who we don’t see physically in this chapter, but he’s mentioned quite a bit. Alex, you want to talk a little bit about him?
Alex: He’s my favorite! Well, really not until Deathly Hallows. He’s a jerk now.
[Michael laughs]
Alex: They mentioned Kreacher, saying, “Well, Molly mentions that he does odd things like throwing Dungbombs at doors,” which, sure, and how he’s always saying rude things to everyone. And Ron, being awesome Ron, is like, “Oh, he’s mental; don’t pay any attention to him.” And then Hermione, being Hermione with SPEW, comes in then saying they have to be nice to him. And at the time, near not having read the whole book, you’d think that’s more of just Hermione being Hermione, but it’s actually more of a foreshadowing of “Oh, this is going to be big later,” and it’s really indirectly eventually how Sirius meets his death, unfortunately, where he didn’t make Kreacher feel like he was wanted – where obviously, Sirius’s mother did – and Kreacher just didn’t feel like he was part of the family anymore, so he had no problem going to pretty much anybody else who would even feign niceness to him.
Katy: Even Dumbledore says to be nice to him, but everybody else seems to ignore that, even though it’s Dumbledore. They should be listening to every word he says.
Alex: So the funny thing about that is I feel like everybody expects Dumbledore to say stuff like that because Dumbledore is so tolerant and he’s usually the voice of reason, very similarly to Hermione and Lupin, and I feel like, unfortunately, those characters tend to be discounted when they say things like this because it’s like, “They’re just trying to be fair to everyone again, shush!” Especially with Ron; he kind of sees it with Hermione like, “I love you, but you’re a Muggle-born; you don’t know these things,” even though Ron didn’t even meet a house-elf until he met Dobby in Goblet, so I don’t know where he gets off being an expert on house-elves.
[Everyone laughs]
Michael: We talked about this more at length when we were in our Deathly Hallows reread, but I was always kind of bewildered why everybody shot down Hermione on this one. It’s not like she’s usually wrong, and she’s basically running the equivalent of a human rights campaign. It doesn’t seem illogical on her part, but it’s funny to go from Goblet of Fire, where she really wasn’t wrong and there wasn’t really anything to indicate that she was wrong about her belief in Goblet of Fire because of what happened with Winky, and then we carry that over to Order of the Phoenix, and everybody’s still treating this like she’s wrong. That’s a little confusing, I guess, to me because she doesn’t really… She doesn’t cite that, and nobody seems to really find that to be a credible example of why they should maybe be changing their views anyway.
Katy: But Kreacher is also really, really horrible.
[Michael laughs]
Katy: I can understand how it would be difficult to be kind to him. I would still make the effort, I feel like. I would hope. But I kind of get it, why it was difficult for them to heed her warnings.
Alex: He’s just crotchety.
Katy: Very! He’s like your old racist uncle that you don’t want to talk to.
[Alex laughs]
Michael: He makes you slightly uncomfortable.
Alex: Like Drunk Uncle on SNL! Bye-bye, Drunk Uncle.
Michael: We’ll leave Kreacher for now because he’s not even seen in this chapter; we’ve just heard about him. I’m sure we’ll come back to him at another point in these chapter revisits. But we do have something that is… We’ve seen a few of the members, and we keep hearing whispers about it: the Order of the Phoenix. And before we get into some of these characters who we know are members of the Order and some of our friends that we know, one thing I wanted to ask you guys was: If you can remember anything about the first time you read Order of the Phoenix, did you have any idea of what the Order of the Phoenix was? Or what its part in the story was going to be?
Kat: Hmm.
Alex: I guess I thought it would be related to Dumbledore because “phoenix.” Outside of some sort of anti-Voldemort movement, I don’t think I had any other thoughts. Like, “Oh, this is just a thing.” I didn’t think of the Order as being a group of people, but I figured it was related to Dumbledore.
Katy: Is that more of a British thing? To call a group like that an “order?” Because I don’t think I had ever heard of that term used in that way.
Kat: I don’t know. We’d need a British person to answer that.
Alex: Rosie!
Michael: Rosie, help!
[Everyone laughs]
Katy: Yeah, I had zero idea of what that meant going into the book.
Kat: It meant nothing to me. Nope. Now it means everything because it’s my favorite.
Katy: I was thinking earlier, too, this book also could have been called Dumbledore’s Army and would have been just as accurate. Because it would have applied to both the Order and Dumbledore’s Army.
Michael: The interesting thing, and why I asked that is because I remember in my first reading of this that I was surprised – in a way, sometimes continue to be surprised – at how unimportant and ineffective the Order of the Phoenix is. [laughs] And granted, Rowling frequently titles the books after the MacGuffin, and actually the MacGuffin isn’t so much the Order as it is the thing that they’re protecting. Of course, I suppose Rowling couldn’t call the book Harry Potter and the All-Knowing Prophecy.
[Alex laughs]
Michael: Might have given something away. So you go for the thing that they’re protecting, and that makes sense. I was surprised that the Order as a larger thing didn’t really end up having as much as an impact on the story as I was expecting it to. By Deathly Hallows, they disband [laughs] pretty much, and there’s even a point where they’re like, “Yeah, we give up. We can’t do this anymore. All hope is lost.” And I was like, “Good try, guys, you gave it the old college try.” But we have a few members of the Order that, Alex, you wanted to note?
Alex: Yeah, so I’m in Michael’s camp. Lupin love all day long. Something I do actually remember listening to in the episode about this chapter last time is how it was noted that Lupin is the only person from the Order in the Advanced Guard that Harry actually knows, because he doesn’t really know Moody. He kind of half met him once, but Lupin… It’s really very poignant that Lupin is the one who leads him into Grimmauld Place, tells him to look at the parchment to read the Fidelius Charm or whatever we decided it was, and is like, “Okay, step inside, we’re going into this.” And Harry is like, “You’re Lupin. Okay! Let’s go in.”
Michael: That is true. And one of the reasons I love Lupin’s character is because he does guide Harry. Of course, I would probably say this is the last book where he gets to do that.
Alex: Oh, right.
Michael: He’s pretty useless after… Well, not useless, but he’s in the background after this.
Alex: He’s so angry in Half-Blood the whole time because Tonks wants to be with him, and Molly is like, “Why don’t you be with her?” and he’s like, “I don’t want to!”
Katy: This is the angsty Harry book. The next one is angsty Lupin.
[Everyone laughs]
Michael: Yeah, one of the things I like most about Lupin is his relationship to Harry. I feel like it’s actually not that common that Harry puts that much trust in an individual in the books…
Alex: Oh, not at all. That’s totally true.
Michael: … which I suppose is what makes it even more, perhaps, surprising when they butt heads in Deathly Hallows.
Alex: Oh, yeah!
Michael: Perhaps that’s what makes it more shocking, because it’s the first time that Harry is like, “No, I can’t tell you that.”
Alex: And who’s at the root of that? Dumbledore!
Michael: Yes. Well, I believe that the narration in that book does note that it’s one of the first times Harry feels uncomfortable not telling somebody the information. It’s definitely nice to see Lupin being still really close with Harry, and I miss that so much in the movies, because they just ditched him after the third one. He doesn’t go in the Advance Guard.
Alex: I feel like they did a lot in the Prisoner movie in its deviations from the book to really drive home “Aww, man, Lupin and Harry are besties.” And then saying that he had a really special relationship with Lily and how they were close and she understood him, Steve Kloves was reading between the lines to build more of a personal relationship with Harry and Lupin. And then [in] the rest of [the movies] they’re like, “Nope!”
Michael: “Never mind.” Yeah, they don’t even bring him on the Advance Guard in the movie, which is funny.
Alex: Right? Ahh! Sad.
Michael: But it is funny that you brought up, too… because they go with him being like, “Well, I know Moody.”
Alex: “I know Moody’s body.”
Michael: Well, kind of. Yeah. To be fair, though, I can’t really see much difference in the Moody we meet here. Crouch was doing a pretty good acting job.
Katy: Yeah, no kidding.
Michael: He’s pretty much exactly the same.
Alex: Moody Inception.
Michael: But there’s another character we run into [whom] we know pretty well.
Alex: Mrs. Molly Weasley! “Overbearing Weasley” [or] “Interrupting Weasley,” as she’s been called, I believe.
Michael: Yes, yes. I think Eric termed her that.
Alex: Yes, “Interrupting Weasley.” That’s a great episode. But Molly sends Harry straight upstairs; she goes, “Ahh, yes, the Order of the Phoenix is having a meeting.” He’s like, “The Order of the what?” She goes, “Never mind. Bye,” sends him upstairs, and he has no idea what’s going on. She goes, “You’re sleeping in there. Don’t worry about the paintings. Be quiet. Don’t trip over things. Bye.” And it makes me think, did Molly not know that Harry was being kept in the dark? Because I feel like Molly is so protective of not telling Harry about the weapon and what the Order is actually doing, that it makes me think if she knew that he was being kept in the dark about what even the Order is and what headquarters is, then she wouldn’t have said anything.
Michael: We see later in the meeting that Harry does attend – well, not so much the meeting, but the unofficial talk around the table – that Molly does not seem comfortable with letting Harry know anything. And she is a member of the Order, so I’m assuming she was aware.
Alex: I guess she just was kind of flippant about how she was mentioning things. And I’m like, “But he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”
Michael: I feel like she did know, but she probably just… In this particular moment, she seemed quite frazzled anyway.
Alex: Yeah. Poor thing.
Kat: I think Molly is just overprotective of Harry anyway, and I don’t say “overprotective” in a bad way. It’s just that she has very much taken him under her wing from that first moment on Platform 9 3/4, and I think that regardless of what she did or didn’t know, she would be reacting in this manner because she wants her kids, and that includes Harry, to stay kids as long as possible. Because don’t forget: Molly was really young the first time Voldemort was in power, and so she’s very familiar with being thrown into that situation at a young age.
Alex: That’s really true.
Kat: And I think that she doesn’t want any of her children to experience any of the things that she went through, so she’s trying to protect them and shield them from that as much as possible.
Alex: Yeah, and I think she does it at the cost of infantilizing them at certain points because she’s so concerned about them losing their innocence and their childhood maybe, like you’re saying, in the way that she did and seeing the way her brothers did. I don’t really know what the age difference is there. But yeah, she becomes the overbearing mother. But I guess we don’t really think about why she does it that much. And that’s a totally good point.
Michael: Yeah, well, the thing that the books never really actually explicitly say – she touches on them in Deathly Hallows, but they’re never really spoken of again – is that she lost both of her brothers to the war, so that does have quite an effect on a person. And with a family as large as hers, as we’ll talk about with just recently losing Percy to the Ministry, I’m sure she’s just in a tizzy right now.
Kat: Yeah. And they were apparently really very good wizards, too, because if I remember correctly, it takes five Death Eaters to kill them.
Katy: Yeah, I think you’re right.
Alex: Yes.
Kat: And that is crazy. You have to be an incredibly accomplished wizard to survive something like that. And I think we see that in Molly later on, too, that even though she’s a little bit of a… She likes to sit in the backseat more often. She takes down Bellatrix, so there’s clearly some power in that family.
Michael: And speaking of the family, Molly has a relationship with a certain young lady that’s a little more cantankerous to begin with.
Katy: Yeah, right?
Alex: So I thought it was really interesting… because I’ve definitely read Half-Blood Prince more recently than Order of the Phoenix…
Kat: Boo. Just kidding.
[Michael laughs]
Alex: It’s the order of the books, Kat. I haven’t gotten there yet.
Michael: Yay!
Kat: Okay.
Alex: But you forget how annoyed Molly is with Tonks in this book because in Half-Blood she spends the whole time bringing her around to tea [and] trying to get Remus to talk to her. [She] wants her as a daughter-in-law. But she actually is like, “Damn it, Tonks, you’re knocking over the troll leg again.” And she just is so irritated by everything she does, and Tonks is like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I want to help,” and Molly is like, “Sit down!”
Kat: Yeah. I’ve actually always thought that Molly should be a Ravenclaw because she is an intensely judgmental person and takes everybody by their first impression almost always and will keep that for a really long time until she stands undisputedly corrected. Look at the way she treats Hermione in Book 4.
Alex: Oh, with the sad Easter egg.
Kat: Right, exactly.
Katy: Oh, yeah.
Kat: So I don’t think that that’s out of Molly’s personality. As caring and loving and giving as she is, she is an incredibly judgmental person. And I also think that she probably, a little bit, maybe sees herself in Tonks, in a way, because I think that Molly is a different person. I always got the feeling that Molly is a different person as an adult than she was as a teenager, like a 180 type of flip. And I think that she probably was a little more reckless back in the day.
Michael: Well, we get a hint of that, I believe…
Kat: You do.
Michael: … in either Prisoner or Goblet when she’s talking to Hermione and Ginny about love potions.
Kat: Yeah. Exactly.
Alex: Oh, and sneaking off with Arthur at one o’clock in the morning and how the Fat Lady gave her a telling off. Yeah, Molly was a scalawag.
Kat: Yes. So I think that anybody that she deems to be too young or whom she sees herself in, she tries to push them out and keep them away from harm. And I think that she’s feeling a bit maternal here for Tonks, even if Tonks is kind of a pain in the butt.
Alex: I love that.
Michael: Well, yeah. Because obviously we’re going to see that 180 again with Fleur Delacour coming up.
Kat: Exactly. Same thing! Look at it. Molly is so judgmental. Ugh. I love her a lot, but she is so judgmental.
Alex: Judgy Weasley.
Michael: Well, and that point you guys brought up, too, about how she might have been a completely different person in her youth… that also, I feel, might be a contributing factor to how she raises her children.
Kat: For sure.
Michael: That’s definitely, I think, a thing with parents. They want to raise their children to not do what they felt were mistakes when they were young. Sometimes the piece that’s forgotten by parents is that you have to experience those things in order to learn why you shouldn’t do them.
Katy: Precisely.
[Michael laughs]
Kat: Yeah, there’s a saying that all parents leave scars on their children, and I think that’s exactly what you’re speaking to there. It’s that they try to correct whatever mistakes they think they made in the past and not let their children make them, even though they really should let their children make them.
Michael: Turning to some of the business that the Order is actually discussing, we don’t get much, but we do know something they’re talking about behind closed doors, thanks to Ron on page 68 of Order of the Phoenix. It starts with,
“Some of them are standing guard over something,” said Ron. “They’re always talking about guard duty.”
“Couldn’t have been me, could it?” said Harry sarcastically.
“Oh yeah,” said Ron, with a look of dawning comprehension.
But that’s not what they’re talking about! They are talking about something entirely different. Granted, yes, Harry might have been part of that topic of discussion. But I think that might have just been our first hint drop about the Prophecy, correct?
Katy: Could have been.
Kat: I think so.
Alex: Has to be.
Michael: I’m betting on that. I feel like that actually is meant to be one of those fun Easter egg go-back-and-read references.
Kat: Double meanings. It could be either. It could be both.
Michael: Mhm. But I feel that one stood out to me this time as, “Oh, that’s one of those things that she doesn’t do by accident.”
Kat: Right. No, no. You’re right. I agree.
Katy: Yeah. Because I feel…
Alex: There’s so much of that in this book.
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Katy: I feel like as soon as Voldemort got his body back, that would have been his number one priority, to get that prophecy. So he probably started that immediately after Harry escaped, [but] that didn’t work out. Next plan.
Alex: That’s because his first priority is apparently monologuing long enough for Harry to get away.
Katy: Right.
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Michael: Well, I suppose that might be one of the main reasons that Dumbledore formed the Order then, to protect the Prophecy, since he had people on “the inside” probably fast acting to be like, [as Dumbledore] “Better get some people down to the Ministry right away since Cornelius [Fudge] went cuckoo pants…”
[Everyone laughs]
Michael: … which he did, which we will get to in just a moment. But we do have one more important member of the Order to bring up. He just appears briefly at the very end, but we are in his house. Alex, do you want to talk about Sirius a little bit?
Alex: Yeah! Yeah! Sorry, Kat. I love Sirius.
Michael: Kat, hold it in as much as you can for just a moment, and then we can get into it.
Alex: [laughs] All right. Sirius is the first instance… we really see that he is different from the rest of his family because Harry is really surprised that this is even Sirius’s house and he’s conducting the anti-Voldemort movement in it, or allowing it to be conducted there because he can’t really do much else, unfortunately. And this is where I thought it would be interesting to compare Sirius to Draco because… well, Draco is also part of the Black family, which is point number one. Point number two: They both seem to have grown up in pretty much the exact same environment because Narcissa is in this family, very closely related, and Lucius is equally pure-blood crazy. So it would seem that Draco and Sirius had very similar upbringings, but a lot of people defend Draco, saying, “How on Earth could he turn out differently in that environment?” Well, Sirius did it. And to tie it back to Dumbledore…
Kat: Ding-ding! Sorry.
[Kat and Michael laugh]
Michael: I knew she wouldn’t be able to hold on long.
Kat: I tried really hard!
Alex: No, she did really well because I’m almost done. But it echoes Dumbledore’s quote of “It’s time to decide between what is right and what is easy,” and it seems like… not to blame Draco, but he kind of took the easier route and Sirius took the “right one,” I guess. Kat, go. [laughs]
Kat: Nope, that is a whole other episode, kids. If I give you all of my arguments now, this is going to turn into a Sirius discussion.
Michael: Very serious discussion.
[Everyone laughs]
Michael: Which is coming up, listeners. A few of you have already sent in your auditions for it.
Alex: Me too.
Michael: I’m sure it won’t be the last Sirius discussion we have…
Kat: Today, also – the day of recording – it’s been 22/23 years since Sirius died. Boo-hoo.
Alex: Boo!
Michael: Oh, bummer; that’s sad.
Alex: Try not to throw a party, Kat. [laughs]
Michael: Also, we’re recording on Father’s Day, so happy Father’s Day.
Katy: Happy Dead Godfather’s Day.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Kat: Yeah, 21 years. Sorry.
Michael: Oh, goodness.
Kat: So it’s been 21 years on Father’s Day, today, June 18. Oops.
Michael: So we shall not speak of the fictional dead in a negative way.
Kat: But as far as I’m concerned, I do agree that there are some similarities there to Draco. However, for me, simply put, Draco is redeemable. I’m not 100% sure that Sirius is, but again, we’ll get there. So that’s all I’m going to say.
Alex: Fair, I’ll take that. But yeah, I like the comparison because a lot of people say there’s just no way Draco could have done it. Eh, he could have. Lucius sucks, but he could have. [laughs]
Michael: I like the comparison you made there, Alex, because it’s in line with Rowling’s themes of choice. I think the more and more we’ve gone through the books, the more it is fun to pick characters who line up against each other and say, “Well, they both have this similar background, but one came out normal and good and bright and the other one came out a little damaged comparatively.” And it’s interesting to see what factors, because… obviously, that was a big discussion, I know, Kat. Last episode with Riddle, you guys got into that larger conversation of [how] he was conceived under a love potion and deciding how much that should factor into our reading of Riddle.
Kat: Right.
Michael: So I thought [about] how that conflicts and works with Rowling’s themes, [and] I think this is a great example of Rowling’s themes in action, especially in the next chapter right at the beginning when Harry says, “You’re related to Malfoy?” And Sirius is like, “Yep.”
[Everyone laughs]
Michael: So that’s kind of a “choose your relatives” situation. But it’s really interesting how these parallels keep cropping up throughout the series. But let’s get to somebody who’s been brooding in the corner for a long time waiting to have his say, and he will have his say, by God, in all capital letters…
Alex: In dulcet tones. [laughs]
Michael: … our good friend, and maybe one of Kat’s favorite characters in the entire series…
Kat: More than Sirius. Oh!
[Everyone laughs]
Michael: It’s All Caps Harry! And he wants to talk so badly! God, he’s got so many things to say! And I feel like here in this episode it can’t help but be discussed. The question we asked in Episode 81 was, “Is Harry’s yelling justified?”
Katy: Yes! [laughs]
Kat: Well, I didn’t even have to say it. Wow. Thank you.
Michael: [laughs] I mean, I didn’t say no…
Katy: It’s all right. I have feelings about this. [laughs]
Kat: Well, tell us your feelings. Let’s hear it.
Michael: Let’s go into that, Katy. Go for it.
Katy: Okay. I took notes because I have feelings! I read the first four chapters just to completely get up to speed and remember what had happened previous to this and…
Alex: Ravenclaw.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Katy: I can’t help it! By the end of it, I was like, “Are you serious?” He went an entire month at the Dursleys with next to zero contact with his friends, and even that contact was so useless, and this kid just witnessed one of his friend’s murder. He just saw Lord Voldemort come back to life in a body and was attacked by him and barely got away with his life. Well, he doesn’t know yet that nobody believes him, but he’s just gone through some serious trauma and then he’s just shoved off to the Dursleys like, “Okay, see you next year.” No! And I was trying to remember the shortest amount of time he had spent with the Dursleys in the entire series, and I’m pretty sure it’s in Half-Blood when he was only there for two weeks.
Alex: Yep.
Katy: So obviously, he could have left by now. Why didn’t they take him to Grimmauld Place before this? Why did they wait for freaking Dementors to come out and try to ruin his life [and] get him expelled from Hogwarts before they did anything about it? Why did nobody come and give this kid some counseling, some love, something? I’m surprised Mrs. Weasley wasn’t showing up knocking on their door like, “I just need to give Harry a hug and make sure he’s okay because I love this kid.” Where was she this whole time?
Alex: Also, he’s not eating enough.
Katy: That too. [laughs]
Michael: Take everything Katy just said, put it in all caps, and you basically get All Caps Harry.
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Michael: Those are all wonderful… Katy, you noted in the notes here that Dumbledore tells Harry when he started suspecting the Voldemort connection between the two of them, but that’s not until later.
Katy: Yeah, that’s when Arthur Weasley was attacked by Nagini and Harry saw it in his dream. I don’t remember how many months into the school year that is, but that’s a ways away.
Alex: That’s December.
Katy: Yeah! There’s zero reason for Dumbledore to already be suspecting that Voldemort is going to try to read Harry’s mind. And even if he could, he’s not going to get anything because they’re not telling Harry anything; he’s not invited to the meetings. Even with the Extendable Ears the kids have only gleamed small bits of information, so there’s nothing that Voldemort could get from Harry’s mind that would matter at all! So what’s the point? I’m so mad at Dumbledore! I just want to smack him.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Michael: Well, obviously this comes up in that chapter, but this is a representation of Dumbledore’s greatest failing of practicing what he preaches about love. Because if he so believes in love, why doesn’t he recognize that love would be the thing that could shut Voldemort out from Harry’s mind? Even if that was the thing that he was concerned about, which he suggests that it was, why on earth would a summer’s worth of neglect fix that?
Katy: Right? He took all of his love away.
Alex: Did 11 years worth of neglect fix it?
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Katy: And then Ron and Hermione… I agree [Harry] went over the top with what he said to them. No, he did not do all of those things single-handedly; he had help a lot of the time. That was a little mean. But the people that we love and are close to, those are the ones we say stupid [censored] to because we know they’re going to forgive us, even though we suck at that moment. They understand the place we’re coming from and they will forgive us. So maybe he shouldn’t have said what he said, but I get why he did. And he legitimately has a beef with them, too, because yeah, they wrote to him two sentences, apparently. But why didn’t Hermione send him a book on grief and how to deal with it? Ahh! So many feelings! Why didn’t they write more to him? I know they couldn’t talk about the Order [and] they couldn’t talk about Voldemort, but there are so many other things they could have talked about. They could have at least checked in on his well-being as a human and said, “Are you okay?” Ron could have tried to make him laugh because he’s good at that. Write him a poem about how stupid Dudley is and…
[Michael laughs]
Kat: Ron, do extra work?
[Katy laughs]
Alex: Ron, do any work?
Katy: I think they dropped the ball. Even they deserved what they got, in my opinion.
Kat: No, I agree. I’m totally 1,000% with you, Katy. Order of the Phoenix is, as you all know, my favorite book. It’s the one I read the most often, and I listen to it the most often. I get frustrated more and more every time and I understand where Harry is coming from more and more, not only as I read but as I get older as well, and I do think that they could have been and should have been better friends to him. However, Harry would still be this frustrated because he would write to them asking them what’s going on and they would write back, “I read this great book today,” or Ron’s little poem. Harry would be just as mad because they would be avoiding all of his questions because they had to and they couldn’t tell him why. It’s not like they could say, “Oh sorry, I can’t answer this. Dumbledore told me not to.” So he’d be in the same place no matter what happened.
Katy: Couldn’t they, though? Would it really matter if someone intercepted a message that said, “Dumbledore said we can’t tell you anything”?
Kat: Yes, because then whoever intercepts that would know that they could possibly know what’s going on, and they could be in danger.
Katy: Okay. Fair enough.
Michael: And I think what Kat is saying is exactly why Ron and Hermione probably didn’t end up writing very much. I think they were probably – and we see it in this chapter – quite guilt ridden. I think more than anybody they had their hands tied, and what I think is interesting about this – and I brought this up when we first talked about this chapter – is that when Harry gets information that Dumbledore says, “Don’t tell anybody,” he doesn’t tell anybody! He’s really strict about that, and the only reason he tells Ron and Hermione is because Dumbledore said that he could tell them.
Alex: Wow! Never thought of that. [laughs]
Michael: And so I do think that part when that comes in is just a titch unfair.
Alex: Just a smidge. [laughs]
Michael: Just a smidge… because of how Harry holds to Dumbledore’s word so loyally in that respect. Hermione and Ron were doing just what he did in Deathly Hallows, and they get his wrath for that.
Kat: You’re right.
Alex: Hypocrite Potter. [laughs]
Michael: Now, granted, that’s the only part about Harry’s ranting that feels over the top to me. Otherwise, I feel like he totally has a right to say pretty much everything else he says. It’s quite cathartic to actually read his side of it now. But that is another question I have, and all of us as older readers of Harry Potter – more of the original group that read it – might have a different perspective. Maybe some of us recall how we felt when we first read it, too, because this version of Harry bothers people so much that he got a name: All Caps Harry. This isn’t Harry; this is All Caps Harry to the readers. Why does this strike readers so much? Why does this bother readers so much? And have we seen a change in how the Harry Potter community now sees All Caps Harry, or is All Caps Harry still the butt of the joke? Is All Caps Harry still, to the fandom, Potter Puppet Pals Harry smacking his face against the wall going “Angst, angst, angst”?
[Kat and Katy laugh]
Michael: Or has that evolved to something more for the fandom? What do you guys feel?
Katy: I do feel like it still gets brought up a lot. I seem to still hear that pretty regularly.
Michael: It’s a good tumblr joke. It seems to be still a joke on tumblr, so it’s an easy go-to to reference All Caps Harry in that way.
Kat: I think in order to answer that question, you have to look at the audience of the people who like Deathly Hallows and the people who dislike Deathly Hallows and why that reason is. And this may or may not be true, but I’ve always… I mean, obviously, besides the fact that people who generally don’t like All Caps Harry have a problem with Order of the Phoenix in general [is] because it is so much an introspective book where Harry is dealing with much more personal emotion than he does in any of the other books. I think that for the reader there has to be a level of understanding of self and having gone through anything that would make you look inside yourself and understand where Harry is coming from. So I feel like this book and the reason I like it so much is that it makes me, at least, really look at myself and my own actions and think about things that I’ve experienced in the past and where I’ve gone and where I’ve come from and where I’m going and how I react to those things. Because I’ve learned a lot about how to react, not only from going to therapy several times throughout my life, but also taking into account the way Harry reacts to things and why he does it and the emotion behind it, but also how he physically reacts to something, not just emotionally. So I’ve always connected it to that feeling of self-worth or self-love and the introspection that if somebody’s not really into that and they aren’t quite in touch with that in themselves, that’s not for everybody. There are some people who will happily go through life just accepting who they are and not really ever wanting to grow or change or learn to become a different person, not necessarily better or worse or whatever, just different. And I think in order to really enjoy this book, you have to have that desire for yourself in order to fully appreciate Harry’s journey in this book. So is it more or less of a thing? I don’t know. It’s hard to say, but I would think that as the Potter generation gets older, people might start to look at it differently.
Michael: Yeah. That perfectly touches on how I feel about it because my personal experience with this aspect of Harry has changed completely with age. Because I was about Harry’s age when I was reading the book the first time and I didn’t like any of this at all because it was way too… I don’t feel like I necessarily connected that at the time, but everything that was being written in Order of the Phoenix about Harry’s emotional journey was like, “This is way too realistic. This is exactly what puberty is and it sucks! I didn’t read Harry Potter so I could read about puberty! That’s not fun.”
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Alex: “I don’t do this!”
Michael: “I’m already doing this in real life and it sucks!” But then I guess, again, as you get older and you get away from that and your frontal lobe develops in your brain, you can look back and see just what… It’s always amazing to me just how good Rowling is at getting into the head of a teenager. That can’t be easy to remember every detail so vividly and clearly the way she does. And not only that, she does it pretty darn good for a teenage boy. Not just that she’s remembering how to be a teenager, but she’s actually looking at it from the perspective of the other gender, and she’s doing it quite accurately. So that’s always amazed me. It would be interesting to me, though, to know [if] teens who read Harry Potter [are] still reading it that way and having difficulty with these passages. Or because they’re digesting Harry Potter differently because they have all seven books, unlike we did, does that affect how they read Order of the Phoenix and how they internalize this part? Does this just come as a huge even bigger shock because they’re going through all of them so fast? Or did they just skim by it?
Kat: It’s a good question.
Alex: This is why I need my niece to be older. I need to be able to ask her these questions. [laughs]
Kat: I think that’s part of the reason I connected with Order of the Phoenix right away as well. I did read it when I was older and wasn’t a 13- or 15- or 16-year-old or whatever. I was in my twenties, and I think that that makes a big difference as far as how this book is digested and understood: the maturity level of the reader, and not just maturity in the way we think about maturity, but everything I said before… the internal self-maturity, so to say.
Katy: Yeah, All Caps Harry never bothered me when I very first read it. I was just like, “Yeah. Dude, you’re angry. Get it out. I feel you.” I didn’t have this many feelings like I do now because I’ve read it all over and over and over, so I have much more info to form the feelings, but it never bothered me. And then when I started seeing people mad at him and calling him “All Caps Harry” and talking down to him like he was this jerk, I’m like, “Why? Why are you mad at this? I don’t understand.” So yeah, I was like you, Kat. I was in my twenties, so I just read it from a completely different standpoint. And yeah, the thing I don’t like about this book is Umbridge. It’s nothing to do with Harry. I just really hate Umbridge, and she makes me so angry.
[Michael laughs]
Alex: [coughs] And Grawp.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Michael: Well, it’s funny now, hearing your guys’ perspective on it and thinking back to the time of the books still coming out. Because of course, the Internet was a little different back in the day, in the early 2000s. And Potter Puppet Pals was one of the earlier and more ragingly popular Harry Potter parodies, and Angst Harry – that particular parody- became so famous in the fandom that you could pretty much talk to a Harry Potter fan and go, “Angst! Angst! Angst!” and people would go, “Oh my God, yes!” So I wonder if the parodies and that burgeoning Harry Potter discussion community online wasn’t what shaped a more… especially because [in] that discussion group, the majority was people Harry’s age… if that’s what shaped this vision of Harry that’s become so well-known, like a quickie parody version of this Harry.
Katy: Solved it. It’s the Puppet people’s fault. It’s all them.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Michael: It’s Potter Puppet Pals Harry. It’s all his fault.
[Katy laughs]
Michael: Well, and speaking of – with all of this “Whose fault is it?” – this goes back a little bit to the similar discussion you guys had about Tom Riddle and the love potion and how that affected his behavior. This is a question that I don’t know if we can necessarily answer, or maybe it goes from person to person how much you use this as a reasoning behind it: How much of this All Caps Harry – this version of Harry that we see in this chapter in Order of the Phoenix, but focusing specifically on this chapter – maybe or maybe not is Voldemort?
Kat: I think at this point, this chapter, zero.
Katy: I agree.
Alex: Yeah, because has he had any dreams yet? Any Voldy-vision dreams? Because if those haven’t…
Katy: I think he’s had at least one. I’m pretty sure.
Alex: Oh, okay. Because I was going to say, if those haven’t started yet, then I tend to agree with Kat and say, “Oh, this is basically Harry.” But even so, if he’s had only one or two, they’re not very frequent yet, so I’m on Team Harry’s Fault.
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Kat: Yeah, Voldemort doesn’t know about the connection quite yet. I think this is 100% Harry.
Michael: Well, the interesting thing is [that] even with Voldemort not knowing the connection, the thing about him that affects Harry – regardless of the knowledge of the connection – is how heightened Voldemort’s emotions are getting. If he’s feeling particularly – as I think the narration puts it at some point – murderous or angry or even joyful… in the best way that Voldemort can be described as joyful…
Alex: Elated.
Michael: There we go.
Alex: I like “elated” because I don’t think he’s capable of joy. [laughs]
Michael: That’s a much better word for Voldemort. With any heightened emotion from Voldemort, that affects Harry. And I can’t remember if there’s anything in the timeline. I think people, including the Lexicon, have actually mapped out what Voldemort is up to this year and when, so that we know when Voldemort’s emotions peaked in a way that might’ve affected Harry. And I don’t know if there’s any particular knowledge about the prophecy or anything that Voldemort might’ve gotten at this point that would make Harry this way. Personally, I don’t like associating a lot of Harry’s behavior with Voldemort because putting the blame on Voldemort ruins the analogy about puberty to basically be like, “Oh, it’s just an outside source.” No.
Alex: But I think Voldemort’s heightened emotions tend to manifest themselves in scar pain, not usually changing Harry’s emotions themselves until he really tunes into the pseudo-possession that he’s doing.
Michael: Yeah, the biggest example as we probably cited a little bit before is the snake moment, when he feels like he is a snake and he wants to bite Dumbledore. That probably would be closer to that.
Kat: I’m looking at the calendar now, and there [are] no notes at this point as to where or what Voldemort is doing.
Michael: Okay, good. Well, the other thing is that the movie really takes that idea and pushes it really hard. And actually, the funny thing about the movie is that Harry is really not at fault for anything in Order of the Phoenix, where he’s at fault for everything in the book.
[Alex laughs]
Michael: So he gets a lot of passes in the movie. And interestingly, it’s so funny because the big joke in the fandom is Michael Gambon taking that calm line from Dumbledore in Goblet of Fire and screaming it at Harry, but you take that and flip it backward and now we’ve got the lines that Harry is supposed to be screaming, and Radcliffe says them pretty restrained in Order of the Phoenix. He does not yell them. He does not really strain his relationship with Ron and Hermione by saying what he says, and he does not say all the things he says here.
Katy: That’s a good point.
Michael: Yeah, so it’s funny that we get so on the case of Gambon for Goblet, but take it and reverse it, and you’ve got a very watered down Harry in the movie compared to what we see in the book.
Kat: Yeah, I wish he had really screamed. That would’ve been awesome.
Katy: Agreed.
Michael: And the one time he screams in the movie, we don’t hear it. [laughs]
Alex: Oh yeah.
Kat: Ugh, that moment is so beautiful. Ugh, I love that moment and not just because Sirius just died. It’s just a beautiful moment.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Alex: Oh, stop.
Kat: Sorry, I had to make the joke. It was laying there right in front of me. I had to do it.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Michael: But in tandem with Harry, we have a revelation from the group that the Ministry and the Daily Prophet have not been very kind to Harry. Did you want to speak a little bit about that, Alex?
Alex: Sure. So we don’t even have Umbridge yet, but you can already see [that] Fudge is laying out the groundwork to discredit Dumbledore. And I think it’s either one of the twins or Ron that says that Fudge is basically rounding up people who support Dumbledore, like Dumbledore, [or] have ever thought about Dumbledore, telling them to pack up [their] desk and get out. So Fudge is looking to sanitize the information that circulates within the Ministry. And simultaneously, he’s leaning on the Daily Prophet to not mention what happens at the end of Goblet of Fire, which is a month ago, and what happens with the Dementor attacks. I think Hermione points out that they don’t even mention that Harry gets yanked for underage magic. And she says, “Well, that would’ve played really well into you being an attention-seeking pain in the butt, and they didn’t even do that,” so yeah. Fudge is an architect of destruction here.
Michael: And what’s so interesting to me about how this is built up is [that] Hermione says, [as Hermione] “They’re taking from the groundwork of Rita Skeeter.” [back to normal voice] And that’s really interesting in how that’s built, because remember that Rowling added Rita Skeeter in her rewrite of Goblet of Fire. She wasn’t originally a character in Goblet of Fire. It was supposed to be the second Weasley cousin in Rita’s place. So where would this book be, where would this major commentary be, without that buildup? What brilliant buildup that came through a huge writer’s block that Rowling was going through with Goblet of Fire. And I’m going to be flat-out open with my views and say, my God, if this isn’t the most relevant thing ever right now.
Kat: No kidding.
Michael: It’s astonishing. Here in the US… and I know that some of this is going on in the UK, too, so this is a thing that’s being shared, actually, across the world right now with a lot of leaders, it would seem. But literally – listeners, if you haven’t heard – the US president at the time of this recording, Mr. Donald Trump, actually had a Cabinet meeting where he went around and had everybody tell him how great he was before they actually got to the meeting. And there is definitely a major crisis going on between our president and the news that is being released in the world and how we as the public perceive news [and] where we get our news from. And we literally have a new phrase for it, called “alternative facts.” And isn’t that great?
Katy: [laughs] It’s terrifying.
Michael: There was a piece, Kat… I don’t know if you remember where this piece came from. It was an article but I don’t remember where from, where somebody actually wrote a whole thing about, “Stop using Harry Potter as a teaching tool or an analogy for what’s going on right now.”
Katy: What? Stop.
Kat: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody posted that in one of our Facebook groups.
Michael: Yeah.
Kat: Right. I think I posted that, didn’t I? I think I shared it. I’m going to find it while you continue to talk.
Michael: The fascinating thing about that post was [that] when you boil down to the basics of the post, it was essentially saying, [in a pompous voice] “Use high-end literature. Don’t use this pop culture crap.”
Katy: Gracious.
Michael: [laughs] And I think just this chapter alone hits on the theme so much, and it really almost hurts to read right now.
Alex: Yep.
Michael: Because it’s exactly what’s happening in the current time. It’s amazing just how much influence people in power have over the press and how much those people in power have to influence the public about what the press is saying. And of course, the major problem in the wizarding world is that basically people can either read the Daily Prophet or they can read the Quibbler.
Alex: [laughs] So there’s one paper.
[Michael laughs]
Kat: I found the article. So it’s on [the] Washington Post…
Michael: Oh, it’s a Washington Post article.
Alex: Oh no!
Kat: And the title of it, if anyone wants to find it, is “If you’re going to use books to resist Trump, pick better ones than Harry Potter.”
Katy: Who wrote it?
[Michael makes buzzer sound]
Kat: It is by Sonny Bunch.
Alex: Oh, good, because I was going to have an identity crisis if it [were] a particular writer from the Washington Post. [laughs]
Kat: No, I remember looking her up on Twitter, and I was going to clap back at her, but I decided not to. [edit: Sonny Bunch is a man]
[Michael laughs]
Kat: Because I want to work sometime in the future, so…
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Katy: Yeah, we’ve got to pick our battles.
Michael: And listeners, we do not encourage… The thing we are not trying to say is “Go harass Sonny Bunch on Twitter.” Please don’t do that. That’s not what we’re saying. What we’re saying is, you should read the article because it is fascinating, and it is always worth looking at articles that don’t necessarily share your viewpoint to look at the other side of an argument. It makes you more fully informed. Hermione definitely would advocate for that because she does tell Harry in this chapter, “Read the whole paper. Don’t just read the front page.” Which [is] also important.
Kat: Harry is a dumb-dumb. It’s fine.
[Michael laughs]
Alex: As a student of journalism, I would tend to agree with Hermione: Don’t read the headlines. Don’t read the bylines. Oh, for good lord, read the whole thing.
Michael: Yes, yes. Of course, the headline is the thing that’s just trying to pull you in to read the rest of the paper, but they’re going in with the thought that you may not read the rest of the paper. And in this day and age, you’re not reading a paper; you’re reading online. You’re reading facts – and perhaps “alternative facts” – that are coming from your Facebook feed because we don’t have time for the paper anymore. Things have changed so much. But Hermione even notes that to Harry, to be wise about what you read and how much you read and where you get your sources from and to be well-read about issues that are going on. So make sure you read that article, listeners, and think about… The best way to build up an argument for why Harry Potter is a good text in this way is to read arguments for why it’s not and then counter them. Because obviously, we have a whole generation who grew up with these stories and another generation who is growing up with these stories and still taking these stories in. The Harry Potter phenomenon does not seem to have gone away at all. And that definitely speaks to where our culture is at a certain point, how we feel about things, and that this text, yes, probably can make a difference. Pop culture should not be just thrown away because it’s popular. I don’t know who got that idea, but pop culture has value. And I’m so glad that we’re talking about the importance of it here on Alohomora! And I guess the one thing I can only say is that, having talked about this chapter in 2014, I’m a little disappointed that this is how we have to talk about it in 2017.
Alex: Yeah.
Michael: So hopefully the next time this chapter comes around, we’re talking about it in a different way.
Katy: Grimmauld Place 2020!
[Kat and Michael laugh]
Michael: We might have to schedule that.
Katy: Oh, dear lord.
Michael: But yes, listeners, definitely keep thinking about that as we touch on… We won’t be going in order, but if we get to these chapters again about the press, definitely keep thinking about that and think about how you can use Harry Potter in these discussions. But we’ll jump off of the Daily Prophet‘s back for now. They’ve had their fun. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the other characters before we finish up with this chapter. Go for it, Alex.
Alex: Yeah! So this is really minor, but I always find it really weird how Hermione winces, just like everybody else, when Harry inevitably brings up Voldemort’s name and brings him up by name. She winces like the rest of them, and the only thing I can think of is [that] she’s already obviously smitten with Ron and wants to align herself more with his family [and] fit in more in the wizarding world. But she’s a Muggle-born. Why in the heck is she having some physical reaction to this name?
Kat: I think that because Hermione has thrown herself into “magic culture” for the last five years wholeheartedly… I mean, she never goes home. I think she goes home once for Christmas, right?
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Alex: I think they mentioned that in the other episodes, that she never goes home.
Kat: She cancels vacations with her family to stay at school and study. I just feel like Hermione has totally 1,000% ingested every inch of wizarding culture, and that includes that silly wincing at the name. I think that it is just an automatic reaction for her because Harry is almost the only person who doesn’t do that, really. Because she doesn’t have a lot of interaction with Dumbledore.
Alex: Yeah.
Kat: So I think that it is just… She’s probably not even aware that she’s doing it at this point.
Katy: Maybe it’s also because Voldemort is more real to her now. She always knew and believed Harry, I’m certain. But now that he has a body and he’s gaining power again and gaining followers and starting up this war again, maybe it’s really starting to hit home, like, “Oh. You weren’t kidding. This is for real. He’s not just coming after you. He’s coming after all of us.” So perhaps she actually has more fear for Voldemort than she ever did before.
Kat: That’s a great point.
Alex: The movie kind of drives that home, too, because it’s very dramatic; it’s thunderstorming out. I think it’s right before they form Dumbledore’s Army and she’s looking out the window and she’s like, “He’s out there, isn’t he?”
Kat and Katy: Yeah.
Michael: And they do use that Hermione doesn’t like saying the name in the Order film, too, when they’re all meeting in the Hog’s Head.
Katy: Even though she says it in Chamber, I think. [laughs]
Michael: Yes. And she’s the one who steals the line, I believe, and does the whole…
Alex and Katy: “Fear of a name…”
Michael: And it’s like, you didn’t say that. [laughs] So yeah, that does seem strange to me, too, but I’d be inclined to agree with Kat. I feel like Hermione has thrown herself into this world more than perhaps we get a sense of. There is still that bizarre mystery of Hermione’s relationship with her parents. As much as she misses them and feels bad for what she does to them in Deathly Hallows, she does certainly seem to have a strange relationship with them, as far as leaving home and not being home very often. So yeah, perhaps… And she hasn’t encountered him face-to-face. She’s done a lot of crazy stuff to keep Harry safe from him over the years. [laughs] So it probably would seem more real to her than to a lot of people, when you think about it that way.
Kat: Do we know where Hermione went to primary school?
Michael: No.
Kat: See, because I just wonder if her family is just a boarding school family [and] if that is just something that Hermione grew up doing.
Michael: It’s possible.
Kat: And so it’s not a big deal that she’s gone all year.
Michael: Could be.
Katy: They are dentists, so they probably have the money for that.
Michael: We have some other characters here who are two favorites who show up with something new.
Alex: Yes, Fred and George Weasley [are] inventing things really fast. [laughs] It’s also in the next chapter – maybe the one after – but they have Harry’s money for maybe a month and they’ve already invented so many new things. They’re making deals with Mundungus and picking up, so to speak, cauldrons fallen off the broomstick or whatever Mrs. Figg says. But Fred and George have been really busy, and it’s cool that they’re already coming up with stuff like this.
Kat: You know what I think? My headcanon is that they had all of these ideas at 90%, and then there were these items that they couldn’t afford to buy and it had to wait. And they were like, “Well, somehow we’ll figure out – someway, someday – how to get this, and we’ll finish this.” So now that they have the money, they’re like, “Oh, we can buy this and this and this and this… and we’ll have an entire line of product, just because now we have the money to buy these expensive items.”
Alex: Right, because they had those trick wands already the previous year. I’m guessing the materials for those weren’t hard to come by. It was really more just their magic. So I buy that.
Kat: Oh yeah, I think.
Michael: Not only that, but they were already doing tests on a couple of their products in the previous year. So yeah, they’re good to go, pretty much, at this point. It was funny because I remember the last episode, our Podcast Question of the Week for that episode was actually about “How do the Extendable Ears work and what are they made of?”
[Alex laughs]
Michael: It’s funny because I think the movie has changed our perception of that. Because in the book they’re just a piece of flesh-colored string; in the movie there’s a whole ear at the end.
Alex: Like a canal.
Katy: [laughs] The cat!
Kat: Because they had to make it a speakerphone-type thing. That way they could have the audio boom out so everybody could hear it. Because if it’s just a string, it’s stuck in somebody’s ear. That’s not as cinematic.
Michael: Well, yeah. What’s more visually interesting? What’s going to communicate to the audience the information they need to know without using the dialogue to explain it? Are you going to have them take out a string and explain the string that you’re only going to see once in the movie? Or are you going to just put an ear on it and be like, “An audience knows what an ear does”?
[Everyone laughs]
Katy: And bonus, you get to see a cute cat.
Michael: Yes.
Alex and Kat: Yay!
[Michael laughs]
Kat: Jinx.
Michael: You get some Crookshanks love.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Alex: Well, the great thing about the Extendable Ears from the previous iteration of the chapter analysis… Noah basically implies that Fred and George have this weird black market of ears.
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Alex: There’s an organ market and they’re just going and buying a bag of ears. But hey, in Diagon Alley, there’s a thing of fingernails, is there not?
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Michael: True.
Katy: You’re not wrong.
Kat: Although if that were the case, wouldn’t George replace his own [ear]?
Alex, Katy, and Michael: Aww.
[Everyone laughs]
Michael: Well, we have another Weasley who’s definitely worth talking about. Somebody marches into the room and has a lot more to say than she’s ever had to say pretty much in the collected four books prior.
[Katy laughs]
Kat: Yeah, that’s true.
Alex: She does, and I think this would be the beginning of Michael and his Thor cup, because it’s Ginny. Woo!
Michael: Yes! Another! Smash!
Alex: I love that I got to reread this chapter specifically for this and do a closed read because in a regular reread I don’t think I would’ve paid attention to how much Ginny actually talks in this chapter. I posit – and so did Noah, Laura, and you, Michael – that Ginny seems to be fresh off her girl-to-girl convo with Hermione when she says, “You need to relax around Harry and he’ll come to you.” [laughs] So she’s walking in and she’s cheery and she’s talking… Oh, I love it. It’s great.
Michael: And one of the things about these interactions that she has with Harry… Unfortunately, I feel like you can still count her and her actions and her contributions to this chapter on one hand.
Alex: Yeah.
Michael: But you can probably fill up your hand rather than the thumb…
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Michael: … which they usually do for the rest of the books prior. But that said, I think one of the most worthwhile things… It’s fun that finally she gets a personality. She’s a little bit of a jokester, but she’s framed as a slightly different jokester than Fred and George. She actually seems to be more tactful in her approach than Fred and George.
Kat: She’s more sarcastic than she is practical, if that makes sense.
Michael: Yes. But I feel like she’s better at dodging Molly than Fred and George are.
Kat: Oh, yeah.
Alex: Oh, they walk right into her.
Katy: She is a skilled liar. Oh my God.
[Michael laughs]
Katy: She lied right to her mom’s face.
Alex: Yep, unblushingly. She says, “Oh, Crookshanks did it. It was fine.”
Michael: [laughs] Yeah.
Katy: I love it.
Michael: Not a beat missed. But I think one of the things you can miss that’s one of those “Another!” moments is in Harry’s ravings about the Prophet as Hermione is telling him about that and saying, “I don’t want anyone to worship me. Why would they do this? Wouldn’t they know it was better if my parents were alive and that’s not what I want?” And Ginny says to Harry, “We know, Harry.” But the narration notes that she says it earnestly. And I think that’s beautiful and lovely, and why isn’t there more of that?
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Michael: It’s nice because we’ve just come off of an argument with Ron and Hermione, who I think have been confused about how to interact with Harry and a little hesitant. Because the one thing I forgot to read was an excerpt from the section where he yells at them, where on page 64 it says,
“Harry glanced up just in time to see Ron and Hermione exchanging a look that told him he was behaving just as they had feared he would.”
So Ron and Hermione are already going into this conversation with Harry expecting the worst. And they are, as we’ve talked about already, guilt-ridden about what they’ve had to do to Harry.
Katy: As they should be.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Michael: They have the scars from Hedwig to prove that. Then you’ve got Fred and George, who are treating everything very sarcastically. You know, [as Fred and George] “Oh, we thought we heard your dulcet tones, Harry,” and all of that. So you’ve got the sarcasm. You’ve got the guilt. And then you have Ginny, who reaches through all of that and is trying to be earnest, and is the one person in the room who is almost reaching her hand out and patting him on the head and being like, “It’s okay. We understand.” And we’re going to get more of that from Ginny in this book, even. I think the big one that people cite is the possession moment when she reveals that she was also possessed, like, “Hey, maybe you should’ve thought of that.”
Alex: [laughs] I love it. [as Harry] “I forgot.” [as Ginny] “Must be nice.”
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Michael: But it is that genuine nature from Ginny, and I feel like that’s something that a lot of people speak to as a positive – one of the few – from Cursed Child. There seems to be that kind of affection between Ginny and Harry in certain moments that people wanted to see in the series that are a little lacking. But it’s there; you’ve just got to be paying really close attention for those one or two lines that she gets. But yes, it is definitely nice to notably see the change going on here. And like you said, Alex, now we have that context of Hermione having had a talk with Ginny, the girl-to-girl talk. Speaking of relationships, there’s another budding romance going on in the background.
Alex: Yay, Bill and Fleur! And damn it, they’re not in the movie.
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Michael: They’re there, [but] not this movie.
Alex: Three minutes into Deathly Hallows: “Oh my God, everyone got married, everyone’s having babies, bye.”
Michael: Yes, and so eloquently set up here. So well done. Just a nice little hint; the first hints of the transfer from Egypt to London and all of that jazz.
Katy: Oh, please say her line, Michael. I want to hear you say it.
Michael: Oh.
Katy: Like, “to learn English,” or whatever.
Michael: Where is it? What page is that? I’ll read it. Let’s see…
Katy: Oh, I don’t know.
Michael: It’s around page 60.
Alex: It’s not her actual lines in Goblet, but yeah, Fred and George are making fun of it.
Michael: Oh yeah.
Katy: Right. But I still want to hear him read it. [laughs]
Michael:
“‘Is Bill here?’ Harry asked. ‘I thought he was working in Egypt.’
‘He applied for a desk job so he could come home and work for the Order,’ said Fred. ‘He says he misses the tombs but,’ he smirked, ‘there are compensations…’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Remember old Fleur Delacour?’ said George. ‘She’s got a job at Gringotts to eemprove ‘er Eeenglish.'”
Alex: Sorry, France.
[Kat and Katy laugh]
Michael: Yes.
Katy: That was beautiful!
Michael: J.K. Rowling’s writing, not mine. [laughs]
Alex: Oh no, I know that. I just think it’s funny anyway.
[Katy laughs]
Michael: I’ve already insulted the French enough on our book wrap episodes where I try to…
[Katy laughs]
Alex: I actually just listened to the Deathly Hallows book wrap because I was looking for a random episode to listen to while I was on a walk with my dog…
[Michael says something in French]
Alex: … and I just got to that part where you’re reading all the titles and Eric is hanging you out to dry.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Michael: I did this to myself. But we have one more character that’s definitely worth pointing out who gets quite a lot of discussion in this chapter, way more than I remembered. He actually takes [up] a pretty good chunk of this chapter, and that’s Percy. So on this particular panel today, where does everybody fall on their feelings with Percy?
Katy: Mine changed on this reread, I can say.
Michael: Really?
Katy: I had forgotten what Arthur said to him that set him off. And when I read that again, I was like, “OMG, Arthur, not cool!” You don’t say that to your son. He’s on cloud nine because he just got this promotion. He’s so proud; he’s trying to share that with his family. And [Arthur] just completely undermines it and says, “They only gave you that job to spy on us.” Obviously, Percy is going to be mad and just flip tables and run off after that; I would too! And it’s so out of character for Arthur too. I mean, I realize emotions were high; he probably didn’t even mean it. He probably regretted it later… but oh, that hurt. It doesn’t forgive everything Percy does going forward, obviously, but it made me at least understand a little more why he just said, “Peace out.” Because that was not cool.
Michael: That’s so fascinating that you pointed to that line in particular because I think that is a major part of it that people skim over. And we’ve talked about this a little bit on the show before, that the books really show, to me, prior to this part, that Percy’s biggest hero is his dad. I think coming home and hearing that from his father, regardless of whether it was correct or not, was definitely a big factor in how he reacted. Because we’ve noted before on the show that Percy is surrounded by… Other than his parents, his family is shockingly not supportive of him. And to have, I guess, that last bit of encouragement and faith that he looks to fizzle out… I imagine that would have a pretty large effect on you in that moment.
Kat: I’m surprised that you think that that is slightly out of character for Arthur. Because I don’t necessarily think that it is, because Arthur is an incredibly honest, blunt person. And even if that did come out in a moment of anger, there’s an old saying – well, I don’t know how old it is, but it’s a saying – that there’s an ounce of truth in everything that we say. Whether we we say it mistakenly or we pretend to be lying or we are telling the truth, there’s an ounce of truth in everything that we say. And I think that there’s truth in that and that Arthur… maybe he didn’t mean to say it, but he believes that.
Katy: You’re probably right on that.
Kat: And he’s not afraid to say it, even if he does regret it later. I think that it was an important seed that needed to be placed in Percy’s head. And I don’t blame Percy for the way he reacted to that for all the reasons that Michael said, but I do also think that Percy is redeemable, for me. Because I think that his ambition gets the better of him, and I think that his need for power and that Slytherin side of his Gryffindor is overtaking everything else. Because he’s given so much responsibility so quickly, and he firmly believes that he deserves that because he has worked so hard and so diligently that he doesn’t necessarily think about the implications of right or wrong in that moment. He’s just so happy to be needed, to be wanted, because as Michael said, his family is not very supportive of him. And I think that he’s finally in this family at the Ministry of his coworkers, and even if he has menial tasks, they need him and they want him to be there and they are relying on him, which is something Percy has never really had before. And I think Percy is fully redeemable for me because he has to be. If we can’t make bad choices and then be redeemed in the end, what the hell is life all about?
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Kat: Seriously.
Katy: Yeah, I totally think he’s redeemable. And I guess it was just a shock to me because I can’t think of another example where Arthur says something quite this blunt or just… typically, it’s a buildup. He tries to convince characters with logic and with order of events. I feel like he should have said, “Okay, Percy, that’s great. I’m happy that you’re happy. Can we talk for a minute about what I see going on in the Ministry and what I see in the Daily Prophet and our confidence in Dumbledore and Harry and why you disagree with it?” instead of just saying, “No, it’s crap. You didn’t deserve that promotion.”
Michael: Well, perhaps the other thing to keep in mind is that we are in the brewings of a war, and perhaps sensible talk like that isn’t really the go-to anymore, especially in times of frustration when… I mean, we’re even seeing that now in our current political climate, that people on opposite sides are finding it harder and harder to have a dialogue with each other.
Katy: That is a very good point. Okay, I take it back.
[Everyone laughs]
Katy: At least part of it. That’s a very good point.
Michael: No, I think that you’re right that Arthur did approach it wrong. But that said, it’s a perfect storm because I forgot, this is yet another perfectly built-up piece from Goblet of Fire that flows so well into Order. Percy made a huge screw-up in his job, [laughs] a catastrophic screw-up. And in that span of time between Goblet and Order, he got a promotion, which was probably something he didn’t think was going to happen, based on what a big screw-up he made. But in addition, the political climate allowed for Percy to be subverted by the Ministry because there were ideas being put in his head because of who he was working with. Fudge used him so perfectly by feeding him this idea that his father… Because they say here – Fred, George, and Ginny – that Fudge and the Ministry were telling Percy that his father wasn’t very valuable at work and that he’s in this lower department. And Percy has always felt that his father could aspire to a better department, but obviously there’s something about Arthur’s work at the Ministry that Percy admires to have followed in his father’s footsteps to the Ministry. So it all just combines so perfectly that this argument would happen the way it does and that really both sides have value in their perspectives. But one side has so perfectly been taken in by the propaganda, unfortunately, and been a little brainwashed, and the other side is a little too aware of what’s going on and too passionate about what’s going on to properly communicate it to the other person.
Katy: Good point. I’m just glad Molly didn’t get mad at Arthur over it.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Katy: Because if I had a kid and my husband said something that set him off and then we had no relationship for years, I’d be kind of mad at my husband. [laughs] I’m just saying.
Kat: I mean, she probably is.
Katy: Maybe. Yeah, we just don’t see that.
Michael: Alex, where do you sit on the Percy fence?
Alex: So I also forgot what Arthur actually says to him. Messed up, okay?
[Michael laughs]
Alex: So [I] definitely see where Percy is coming from. And I mean, yeah, I’m Team Percy. Shout-out [to] Alison. Team Percy. Love Percy.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Alex: And Chris Rankin hasn’t heard it yet either; he’s definitely [in my] top five of my favorite guests you guys have had. [laughs]
Michael: Oh yeah. He was great.
Alex: Judging by how many times I’ve listened to the Deathly Hallows book wrap. But yeah, no.
Katy: He’s amazing.
Alex: Chris aside anyway, but I do really enjoy Percy. And the sweet moment that he and Fleur have in Deathly Hallows, however awkward and clumsy it is, is adorable. “Oh, you’re my sister-in-law now.” “Oh, yes.”
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Michael: Yes, he will be appearing at MuggleNetLIVE [on] September 1, so…
Alex: I know.
Michael: Definitely another reason to pop by. But obviously, just like we’ve said, we’ve got the Sirius episode coming up. We should really schedule a Percy episode down the line because we’ve touched on him multiple times at this point. I think he’s prepped and ready for a full episode pretty soon here.
Alex: Yeah, and Alison will be there with bells on. I can feel it.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Kat: Me too.
Michael: The other thing to note that I was actually thinking about that made me “Aww” just a little bit is with how sad the Percy story is, and we get the full details of Molly going to his place in London to talk to him and having the door in her face and all of the details. As rushed as it was, how nice that must’ve been for her to see Harry, her other son. That just warmed my heart a little bit because that must’ve… if not made her completely whole again, it just maybe made her feel a little better inside.
Katy: And maybe that’s a good excuse for her to not have tried to reach out to Harry during that month he was at the Dursleys’. She was preoccupied with what was going on with Percy. So maybe I just answered my own question.
Michael: Yes. She can’t go knocking at every door trying to hug people.
[Katy laughs]
Michael: She’s got a lot of hugging to do. And as a final note, Alex, you noted some foreshadowing in this chapter.
Alex: Yeah, so Hermione is basically just researching laws and everything already. I think it’s no sooner than Harry walks through the door [that] she’s like, “They can’t expel you if they follow their own laws because of this, this, this, and this.” And we get that in Deathly Hallows when Scrimgeour shows up with the will, and she’s like, “Uh, yeah, why do you have that? Because according to clause blah blah blah of the section of this, you can’t do that.” And she’s being her encyclopedic self and it’s just great.
Michael: Well, and of course, the great irony of that scene is that Hermione says she would never go into law because she wants to actually help people.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Michael: And she goes into law.
Kat: Hermione had to have something to justify, in her mind, why she hasn’t been writing to Harry. She needed to give him something to say, “Look, I’ve been thinking about you, even if I haven’t been writing to you.”
Alex: Right.
Katy: That’s a good point.
Kat: And I think her way of saying, “I support you and I love you and I care about you” is by vomiting information all over Harry.
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Michael: And Ron was just in the chair next to her while she was doing that, just being like, “Yeah, great. Whatever. Good.”
[Katy laughs]
Kat: Exactly.
Alex and Michael: [as Ron] “I watched her read it.”
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Michael: “I learned way more about law than I care to.”
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Alex: “I’m just going to eat a sandwich.”
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Alex: But the other call-out to Deathly Hallows is [that] we see a preview of Harry’s doubt of Dumbledore, his anger at Dumbledore, and how hurt he is that he didn’t tell him things. In Deathly Hallows, it’s “We grew up in the same village and our families’ graves are next to each other. What the heck?” And in this, he’s like, “My life’s in danger. I saw it all happen, and you’re not telling me anything. What the heck?”
Michael: Yeah. With the way that Order of the Phoenix was built up… I can only speak from the US perspective; we’ve examined a little bit of the promotional material from the UK, but over here in the US… I mean, it’s even, I think, on the jacket with the [as Dumbledore] “I’m going to tell you everything.” [back to normal voice] That quote was just slapped in a lot of different places from Scholastic to get us really hyped. And the thing that I remember so much about this book, and I think a lot of my disappointment for this book, was this book doesn’t really tell you everything. That moniker, I feel, could actually be properly saved for Half-Blood Prince. That said, I think that’s a great thing to point out, Alex: Really, what’s going on in this book isn’t so much the “Tell you everything,” information-wise. I think there’s more of a tone for Deathly Hallows that’s being built in Order of the Phoenix. It’s not so much the “Tell you everything” as it’s the “Prep you for everything.” Because that parallel of Harry’s anger with Dumbledore, the parallels we’ve talked about already with the corruption of politics [and] the corruption of people, this chapter actually has a lot of the groundwork for what we’re going to see carry through the rest of the series.
Kat: See, I think the “Tell you everything” implies to the fact that Harry is continually asking, “Why me? Why do I have this scar?” All of that. So I don’t necessarily think it’s like, “We’re going to tell everything about everything about everything.” It’s about Harry’s, I guess, relationship to Voldemort and why this is happening to him. Because obviously, we don’t know about Horcruxes or Hallows or any of those things. So I mean, I understand, and I see what you’re saying, but also – not that I want to debate the movie in any way, shape, or form because the movie is not good – I think that in some way it’s applicable.
Michael: I guess for me, I’m thinking everything more in terms of logistical things like “Hey, Horcruxes, this stuff.” And everything ends up being a more intangible thing, I guess. And the big thing with Order, of course, is [as Dumbledore] “Hey, you’re going to have to fight Voldemort, and one of you is going to have to die.” [back to normal voice] And as a reader you go, “Uh-huh. And…?”
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Alex: Duh.
Michael: I know. But of course, the story has to do that because the story has to come up with an in-world reason for why they have to fight, other than the fact that of course there’s this duality between them that’s been built up. But there has to be a specific thing that ties them together, and so she does that here. She finishes up the puzzle and that piece of it. And definitely, Kat, like you’re saying, the “Why me?” of Harry’s journey is answered in this book. And what’s built on from there is “How do I do this now?” Half-Blood and Hallows are the “How do we do it, now that we know it has to be me?” But yeah, I guess, even still now when I open Order of the Phoenix, I’m like, “Okay, well, I’m not looking for everything. I’ll just wait for Half-Blood Prince. That’s fine.”
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Michael: But I do like that idea of looking at what this builds up for Deathly Hallows because there [are] definitely more parallels there than maybe I even saw before. This is where that tone really starts. It’s not even so much the end of Goblet of Fire as it really is Order of the Phoenix that begins the tone that carries through the rest of the series. But with that, well, I mean, Harry is going to stay at Grimmauld Place, but we don’t have to because it’s dusty.
Alex: It’s smelly.
Michael: It’s moldy. We’re breathing in something that’s not good for us.
Katy: It’s got Doxies in it, and not the cute ones.
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Michael: But I think before we leave, Kat has something to ask about this place.
Kat: Yeah, so our Podcast Question of the Week this week is about a spell: the Fidelius Charm and exactly how necessary is it. Because we touched on this a little bit, but I would like to explore it more in depth here. So our question to you, listeners, is why exactly is Harry brought into the Fidelius Charm and given the information regarding Grimmauld Place? We see in Hallows that Yaxley is brought into Grimmauld Place because he clasped onto them when they Disapparate, and therefore, he can get into the house, but he’s not specifically brought into it, so that’s where I see the fuzzy area. And wouldn’t it be safer for Harry not to be given the explicit information in case he were captured or questioned in any way, shape, or form? So I brought this up earlier before the show because it was something I was really thinking about when I was reading this chapter, and I’m really interested to hear what you guys think about it because I think there is some fuzzy, wonderful gray area there. And I think it’s going to [get] interesting responses. So go over to alohomora.mugglenet.com, pop into that post, and [typing noises] type your little hearts out please. Thank you.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Katy: Well, Alex, we want to thank you for joining us for this amazing episode. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had a blast, and most of it is because of you and all of your amazing notes that you vomited into our document.
[Everyone laughs]
Alex: Well, thank you guys so much for having me, and sign me up for fisticuffs with Kat. I love Sirius Black. Come at me.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Kat: Ooh, them’s fighting words. I think there’s probably a line of people that are ready to go at it.
[Alex and Michael laugh]
Alex: I will shout with my keyboard.
Kat: Yeah, I know I’m not the only one out there that doesn’t like Sirius. We’re getting there. That’s several episodes away.
[Alex laughs]
Kat: So you guys can still go be on the show, and if you want to be on the episode, by the way, which is coming up… I tried to make that transition work.
Michael: I know, but you jumped a little bit. [laughs]
Katy: So close.
Kat: I know. I was going to have you go back to it after, but it wasn’t really working.
Michael: I see your opening, but what I think we should do, too, is make sure and thank Katy for hopping in on this episode and doing a fantastic job because of course, who would have expected otherwise from Slughorn’s trophy wife?
[Katy laughs]
Kat: Right, indeed.
Michael: Such a prestigious member of the Slug Club. [laughs]
Katy: Aww. [laughs]
Kat: And you’re on a few other podcasts, too, so you should definitely tell our listeners where they can check you out on the web.
Katy: Well, before I talk about my podcasts, I just want to say I apparently have now won the tri-podcast cup because I have now been on Alohomora!, SpeakBeasty, and MuggleCast. All of the MuggleNet podcasts.
Kat and Michael: Wow.
Michael: You made the rounds.
Katy: I did, and it’s all been within the last two months. It’s crazy.
[Michael laughs]
Kat: You must be pretty dope.
Katy: I’m psyched. I don’t know how dope I am, but I’ve been having a blast. [laughs]
Kat: I can speak to your level of dope-ness, and it is high.
Katy: Aww. Well, yours is out of the stratosphere, girl. Yeah, so I’m super happy to be here, so thank y’all so much for inviting me. And yeah, I am on a couple of other podcasts. One for He-Man and She-Ra called Masters Cast. We have not been active over the past year – I will warn you now – but there are some back episodes that you can listen to if you are interested in that ’80s cartoon. And also, me and a friend of mine do a podcast for Rainbow Brite called Brite Cast, and we do that one very regularly because we are obsessed with Rainbow Brite. [laughs]
Michael: She may have something for the ’80s, I gather. [laughs]
Katy: Just a bit. A tiny bit. You know, I was born at the end of ’79, so I got to experience every single moment of the ’80s and loved every bit of it. And I am completely obsessed with ’80s cartoons, as you can tell, and those are my two favorites. But yes, so masterscast.com is where you can find that one. And then thebritecast.com is for Brite Cast, and you can check out my Rainbow Brite site at rainbowbrite.net
Michael: Fantastic. And once again, Katy, thank you for hopping in and filling in as a host for us. We really appreciate it. I know you had wanted to be on before, and you’ve been such [an] active, long time listener, and now that you’re with MuggleNet, I was like, “Ah, now is her chance!” So I was so thrilled that you were able to hop in so last minute. So thank you again for doing that.
Katy: You are welcome.
Michael: And we were talking earlier about pulling out the fisticuffs for Sirius, but listeners, get those fisticuffs out and shined up a little early because our next topic will be…
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Michael: You can’t see. My arms are over my head. I’m just like, no.
Alex: They’re fistier cuffier. [laughs]
Michael: Yeah. [laughs]
Kat: I will not be on this episode.
Michael: We will be discussing the great Snape debate, part two. We pulled a Hallows movie on this one.
[Alex and Kat laugh]
Michael: Moving into a part two, that’s how big it was. And really, in a way, it’s a part three because we ended up doing a part two on Skype just to do some damage control.
Kat: Aww, pssh. Sorry.
Michael: These episodes, this topic, will be something to discuss. We have a lot of auditions for it already. But that said, you can still audition for that, including other topics as well. It doesn’t just have to be Snape. Kat, tell them more about that.
Kat: Yeah, so if you guys want to be on a future episode of Alohomora! or suggest a topic or a chapter for a future episode of Alohomora!, you can do that over at alohomora.mugglenet.com. There are two tabs there: one that says “Be on the Show!” and the other says “Submit a Topic.” Click on either one of those, submit your writing or your recording and all of that jazz, and you could be on a future episode of Alohomora!, or we could discuss your topic or your favorite chapter. If you decide you want to be on the show, you don’t need any fancy equipment; just a set of headphones that have a microphone in it is really all you need. Nothing super fancy. We look forward to getting those, guys. Keep sending them in. We love getting them. Every single topic that we’ve discussed so far, with the exception, I believe, of Sirius and obviously Snape, has come from suggestions from our listeners, so keep sending those in. We really want to hear what you guys think because this podcast has always been and will always be about you guys, so keep sending them in: alohomora.mugglenet.com.
Michael: I feel like we might have to have a topic episode where we talk about the comparisons between Trump and Cornelius Fudge. [laughs]
Alex: Oh, sweet Jesus.
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Michael: I think that might be necessary at this point.
Kat: Actually, after this discussion, I really want to have a Hermione episode.
Alex: Oh yeah.
Michael: We should have a Hermione episode. I’d love a Hermione episode. That would be very nice.
Kat: Yeah, but every episode is a Harry episode, so we don’t need one of those.
[Alex, Katy, and Michael laugh]
Michael: And also, pro tip, listeners, a little new thing we learned – thank you, Alex, for bringing this to our attention – when you audition, make sure your headphones are plugged into your computer because that might be affecting you.
Alex: I did it, so you don’t have to.
[Everyone laughs]
Michael: That might be affecting your microphone. It is a rare instance, but it is possible. So make sure that when you audition, you have your setup pretty much as you would for when you would be on Alohomora!. But our “Be on the Show!” page gives you more details about what that’s going to look like. And if you don’t want to be on the show, but you do want to talk to us, there are plenty of ways to do that. You can find us on Twitter at @AlohomoraMN, at Facebook at facebook.com/openthedumbledore, our website alohomora.mugglenet.com, or you can email us at alohomorapodcast@gmail.com.
Kat: We should give a little shout-out to our new social media team. They’re awesome and they’re killing it. Taylor, Sonja, and Renae. Snaps.
[Everyone snaps]
Michael: We are checking on social media, but we are not the ones who are posting all that fantastic stuff. Because we devote so much time to the podcast itself, unfortunately, we don’t have the time to also do social media. So we have a wonderful team who’s taking care of that for us. They are the ones who are putting out those polls that you guys see on Twitter for chapter discussions and topic discussions. So keep paying attention to those because we had, I think, over 200, almost 300 votes for this chapter to be discussed, which was really great. So keep helping us out with that.
Kat: Yes, please.
Katy: And one more reminder to check us out on Patreon. That is patreon.com/alohomora. You can support the podcast for as low as $1 – or 100 pennies – a month.
[Everyone laughs]
Katy: Taking on your little saying there, Kat. And yeah, it’s just a great way to support the show, keep it going, and participate even more with the hosts and have more input on what goes on. So you should definitely check that out if you have not.
Kat: And another claps and rounds for Katy.
[Everyone claps]
Michael: Yeah, Katy. Thank you for helping us out on this episode, Katy. It’s because of supporters like you and our supporters on Patreon that we can continue to do separate chapter discussion, topic discussion, and recap. And all of these different piles of posts that were posted up…
Kat: Oh my God, so many episodes.
Michael: [in an exasperated voice] Oh my God. It’s exhausting, but we love doing it.
Kat: Thank God it is so fun, right?
Michael: Yes. Thank goodness. And thank goodness that you listeners continue to help us out with that. We really appreciate your support. I know you’re still wondering where that video game video is, supporters. It’s coming. I am so close. If you ever watch communitychannel, listeners, and you know Natalie Tran from Australia, she has a whole joke about how she was going to show people how to make lamingtons, and then she never did it, and that’s the joke. This is not the joke. I will do this video. I have already recorded it once, but I didn’t realize that the video wasn’t recording. But you don’t want to hear the audio of me playing, you want to actually see it, so I am very close. I think I have found a program that is going to do the job for me. A few of you listeners actually helped me find something that might work and helped me hunt down a few things, so I think I’ve finally got the one that I need. And I’m going to test it out very soon, and hopefully, we will get you a proper play-through of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Finally. But for now, we are heading out of this asbestos-ridden Grimmauld Place.
[Alex and Katy laugh]
Michael: It’s nasty in here, and nobody has cleaned it yet. That’s not for another chapter or two, so we’ll leave them to that. But for now, I’m Michael Harle.
Katy: I’m Katy Cartee Haile.
[Show music begins]
Kat: And I’m Kat Miller. Thank you for listening to Episode 223 of Alohomora!
Michael: [as Hermione] “Harry, tell them to open the Dumbledore.” [as Harry] “Fine. OPEN THE DUMBLEDORE!”
[Show music continues]
Michael: There we go.
Katy: Yes. That was amazing.
[Kat and Katy laugh]
Alex: That’s exactly how caps lock Harry would do it.
Michael: Yes. I think I hear my roommate laughing out there. She must have taken her headphones off.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
Alex: Well, as caps lock Harry, she wouldn’t have needed to take her headphones off.
[Katy and Michael laugh]
