journals again

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

In the context of Arthur's explanation of the Order Only spell to Kingsley and in the shadow of Sirius' current difficulties, it occurred to me that I don't know whether the Order Only spell completely protects marked entries or not. What happens if an Order member's journal should fall into the wrong hands? Does the spell mean that the entries appear to ANY reader of a journal that belongs to an Order member or are such entries truly only visible if the reader is an Order member?

This would become a significant issue if Sirius (or Alice or Kingsley or others) were to be caught or if Hermione's journal were to be stolen of if Percy were to mix up his mother's journal with his own over the holidays.

Perhaps no journal can be read by a person other than its owner. That would be comforting, but I suspect it's more useful to the game in the long run if a journal can be picked up and read by someone who is not its owner. If so, the question is whether the Order Only spell is powerful enough to recognize and exclude non-Order readers if they should come into possession of an Order member's journal.

Perhaps this will become evident in time. In the meanwhile, I appreciated Arthur's reminder of how the Spell works.

Also. Yay, Kingsley!!

ETA This would be a good place to note that Pansy mentions knowing how to filter the entries she reads in her journal (though she "forgot" to exclude boot's entries from hers as Draco has apparently done in his own journal).

Comments

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

I felt a bit sad that apparently students can filter out entries from people they don't want to hear from. I really like the times when they get their beliefs challenged by what they read, like the Grim Truths, or seeing Muggleborns writing things they can relate to and sympathize with.

I'm sort of hoping, with the journal magic being so difficult to pin down, that Pansy is mistaken about knowing how to block entries.

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of hoping, with the journal magic being so difficult to pin down, that Pansy is mistaken about knowing how to block entries.

I suspect she was not truthful in implying that she blocks posts. Draco, on the other hand, was serious, so I hope you're right that the journal magic will still let posts slide through (or push through in the case of Grim Truth entries).

Speaking of the journal's mysterious magic, Arthur's comment also made me wonder whether the Order Only spell might wane in strength over time. (We've had no indications that this will be the case, but it would be an interesting and threatening twist if it did begin to fade at some future point. What if, after a year or so, the earliest Order Only posts began to appear in non-Order journals. No one would see them unless they went back to look at a post from an earlier time and then browsed what other people were writing in that long-ago moment -- or if there turned out to be Order-only comments on a post of their own. Imagine if, a year from now, Lucius were to look back at some of those posts where Arthur and Molly call him names behind the Order-lock!)

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

Well, if Pansy's just wrong about how the journals work (which wouldn't be that surprising, considering how many times she got mixed up about the rules of the round robin chess tournament), then hopefully Draco just meant that he saw who it was by and then chose to skip over it, rather than that he's figured out a way to entirely prevent it from appearing in his journal.

Your musings about the limitations of the Order Only spell are quite interesting to read!