Introduction

This won’t be as polemic as my essay on McGonagall. But those darn Pinterest memes keep popping up, and some of them headcanon Lupin as this amazingly sensitive teacher who always spots when students are having a bad time and helps, and adapts his teaching style to any needs, and…sigh. Hogwart students could certainly use a teacher like that. Lupin seems like one of the best—let’s face it, one of the only—candidates. But let’s take a closer look. ( Read more... )

Warning: long and, as the title says, a polemic.( Read more... )

The Star Trek: Original Series episode "Requiem for Methuselah" has got to be one of the best examples of giving the designated "smart" character random knowledge for plot purposes. Okay, Spock can play the piano--that's fine. He already plays the Vulcan lute, and it's not uncommon for musically-inclined people to play a second instrument.

But he not only has seen samples of Brahms's handwriting in a museum or electronic archive or wherever, but is good enough at forensic handwriting analysis that he can recognize it, not just as generally "old-style handwriting that kind of looks like that sample of that Brahms score I saw once," but "looks just like Brahms's handwriting, specifically"? And he knows enough about art that he can say that painting doesn't just look kind of stylistically similar, but definitely is an authentic Leonardo da Vinci? Really now.

But you can't really blame the writers of that episode. Just take a look at Spock's skill set, when you look at all the episodes cumulatively:

• Computer programming (super expert)


• Military game/simulation design (Kobayashi Maru test)


• Astrophysics (super expert; can even invent time travel)


• ALL THE SCIENCE


• Three-dimensional chess (Grandmaster status in AOS, possibly in TOS)


• Ka’athyra (second best on Vulcan, or at least second-best of non-professional musicians)


• Piano


• Forensic handwriting analysis (with bonus knowledge of historical figures’ handwriting)


• Art authentication


• Hand-to-hand combat


• Marksmanship


• Military strategy and tactics


• Espionage


• Management (you just know Kirk leaves most of the paperwork to him, too)


• Warp core repair


• MacGuyvering lasers out of subcutaneous transponders


• Mind-melding (advanced)


• Teaching


• Diplomacy (later in life)


• Emotional control (most of the time)


• Xenolinguistics (in AOS, at a level competent to teach advanced students; unknown whether he studied this in TOS timeline as well)


• Intercultural ethics (in AOS; competent to teach)


• PROBABLY ADDITIONAL MAJOR SKILLS I'M FORGETTING BECAUSE DUDE IS RIDICULOUS

And he can quote poetry and Sherlock Holmes. And is sexy and multiple female characters want to get illogical with him. Oh, and he's also longer-lived, needs less sleep, and is just generally harder, faster, better, stronger.

And nobody complains how unrealistic this is.

Not that I'm saying anyone should! Spock is awesome, even if he is also a jerk sometimes because the writers couldn't quite envision a future without lines like "I have never understood the female capacity to avoid a direct answer to any question." I just think it's...interesting that some characters can get away with so much, while other characters get slammed if they so much as play one instrument while being sexy scientist military commanders.

This also is why I don't accuse characters of being Sues just for being ridiculously talented; sometimes, that works! To be Sues, to me, they have to warp the fabric of their fictional universes so badly that my suspension of disbelief snaps and and flings me off the metaphorical bridge.

But mostly, I just find that list of skills hilarious and had to share.

Haven't written about HP lately, so here we go. And it's not a gripe, either! I know, shocking after DH, but there you are. It wasn't all bad.


It's funny. I have plenty of things to complain about in DH (hello, disappearing Justice for Magical Races subplot!), but Remus Lupin's behavior isn't one of them. In fact, this was one of the things I found entirely believable and consistent with the entire backstory going back to the Marauders era. Since I find I'm in the minority in this opinion, I thought I'd do a write-up of my reaction, for my own increased understanding if nothing else.( Read more... )

So yeah, of all the things in DH, this is one of the ones I'm okay with. (Lupin and Tonks's deaths, on the other hand... are for another day.)

I recently started wondering whether Hagrid is supposed to be yet another example of an adult who hasn't managed to overcome his (or his parents') flaws in HP. Maybe sistermagpie's essay on Lucius inspired it; I'm not sure. Anyway, he has a few flaws that keep getting him in trouble, and I think they're connected to his father.

Start with the big question: how did Hagrid's father get together with Fridwulfa the giant? (Not even getting into the physical aspect of that.) We don't know much about her, except that she left when Hagrid was a toddler. We don't really know why she left, but it seems Hagrid thinks she was "not really the maternal type," and that that's normal for giants. We don't know whether that's true; it might be something Hagrid told himself to make the fact that his mother abandoned him easier to bear. But what we have seen of giants doesn't paint them as the types to have warm, tight-knit family groups. So what was Fridwulfa doing with a tiny little human man? And what did Mr. Hagrid see in a 20'+ giantess? That sounds like some pretty extreme dating. Maybe Mr. Hagrid had a thing for "interestin' creatures." (Maybe she did too.) Hagrid said his dad was heartbroken when Fridwulfa left. That's normal for someone whose spouse has just run off, but I keep picturing him as being like Hagrid when he had to send Norbert to Romania, or when Aragog died. Hagrid never seemed to get that no matter how interesting and loveable Norbert and Aragog were, they were also dangerous. Norbert bit Ron, and the fire wasn't exactly safe. Aragog was perfectly happy to let his kids eat Ron and Harry. And let's not forget the skrewts. Was Hagrid's father the same way - seeing something fascinating about Fridwulfa, but just not getting that she was not going to settle down with him and a picket fence and babies? I can't prove it, obviously, but I could see it.

So little Rubeus grew up to share his father's hypothetical fascination with dangerous creatures. Maybe he also felt some sort of kinship with them, or felt like he had to prove that they really were just cuddly and harmless to convince himself that he wasn't dangerous like everyone said giants (and half-giants) were. And that keeps getting him in trouble, or almost. Maybe someday one of those spiders will eat a kid, or a new creature will smash the castle, or turn on Hagrid and tear him to pieces. It's a constant risk, because Hagrid keeps collecting interesting creatures.

It also occurred to me how depressing Hagrid's life must have been for the first few decades. First, how did Hagrid's father keep his affair with a giant woman a secret? They can't have been living in a very populated region. Little Hagrid would have known since an early age that he could never, ever mention the family secret if he didn't want to be ostracized. That's rough on anybody, let alone a kid. Then his mother left. Then his father was heartbroken - and since I doubt Hagrid was remembering the actual event when he was three, I'd bet his father was still down about it for at least a few years. Maybe even the rest of his life, which was only eight or nine more years. (Where did Hagrid go on summer holiday after his second year, I wonder? Did he have friends who stayed at school with him over Christmas?) Then he got expelled and had his wand snapped, which meant second-class citizenship forever. And then - well, it seem so nice of Dumbledore to let Hagrid stay on as the gamekeeper's apprentice, doesn't it? It's a job Hagrid likes, and it keeps him from being tossed out who-knows-where alone. But he also would have been surrounded by his former fellow students for most of the year. People who thought he had done something terrible enough to get his wand snapped. Maybe they even knew that he was suspected of causing Myrtle's death. How many of them thought it would be fun to hex the kid who couldn't hex them back, I wonder? Or called him Muggle or Squib? How long did that go on? No wonder he was so distraught when the secret of his heritage came out - he was probably having flashbacks.

And Hagrid has been there for three generations now. He was there when Tom Riddle started reeling in the first generation of Death Eaters - and most likely when McGonagall, Dumbledore's second-in-command, was a student. He was there when the second generation of Death Eaters started joining their fathers, a new crop got sucked in (eg Lucius), and when the Marauders were students. And now he's there for the third generation of DEs and the Trio. And he's still making the same mistakes he made when he was a kid and had an Acromantula hidden in a box, just as each of those generations of DEs kept making the same (or at least equivalent) mistakes.

You know, this reminds me of the alchemical theory I've seen floating around. I think it goes as follows: the last three phases of making the Philosopher's Stone are the black, the white, and the red, and each phase must be destroyed to move on to the next, more perfect stage. OotP is the Sirius Black book; he dies (after spending most of the book not getting over his teenage flaws, like old grudges and rashness) at the end. HBP is the Albus Dumbledore book; he dies (after spending most of the book still not teaching Harry how to act independently - how do we destroy Horcruxes, again?) at the end. So maybe Book 7 will be the Rubeus Hagrid book, and he will die at the end after showcasing his flaws. (To make way for Harry?)

Obviously it's a very loose analogy, because I think it would be difficult to make a case for Hagrid being more perfect than Dumbledore. Maybe more perfect at The Power of Love^TM? And I'm not wild about the idea of a Hagrid-centric book, either. But I thought I would try to get these ideas down so I could think about them better.