The Alternity Re-Read: November, Year 1

[alt_moderator]

Continuing our re-reading....

The pdf version can be found here.

Also: Happy Birthday, Hermione!

Comments

[gwendolyngrace]

-Dennis Creevey

-The Troll!

-Molly, on Voldemort coming for Hallowirthday: Minerva, think of it as a test which you passed with flying colours. If you can get through dealing with an angry and suspicious Lord Protector after a troll has been rampaging through the castle and threatening his son, then surely you can get through anything. Look at it this way: none of his future visits could ever be so stressful!

(emphasis mine)


Hahahahahaha.

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

I was JUST coming here to post about that! Oh, Y1. What innocent days those were.

[lapin_agile]

Seriously.

[naomikritzer]

It's maybe not surprising that Minerva's alcoholism escalated dramatically in later years...

[naomikritzer]

Ooh, more unintended foreshadowing.

Draco asks if there's a way to get rid of your emotions. Sally-Anne says, "I've read about a potion that does that but the notes said you shouldn't use it for very long.
It's supposed to be for wizards who need to do something that would ordinarily be very upsetting, so they can get on with it. If you take it for more than a day it sometimes backfires and causes hysteria."

This is clearly a description of the potion Bill took in Y5 before going to watch the Dark Rite where Seamus killed his mother. But I'm pretty sure that was not a deliberate callback but something that was invented twice in a non-contradictory way.

[naomikritzer]

Oh, well, except that apparently it had a name in Y1 that was different from the name later on. (But that's OK, because "Draught of Ice and Fire" is clearly the unofficial sort of name, not the thing a Healer or Potions Mistress would call it.)

[naomikritzer]

Aww. Megan is one of those reader who likes spoilers:

"Really. Very really. If I don't know the end, then I have to worry about the characters. Because who knows what awful things might happen? But if I know, then I can enjoy them
getting there. Sometimes I still get nervous for them anyway."

I had a friend who e-mailed me as soon as I was done reading "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" to have me tell her whether Harry died at the end. She said that she could not enjoy books unless she knew the ending, but the problem with flipping to the last page is that sometimes she found out more than she wanted to know, so she really preferred to get the key spoiler from a friend who'd already read it.

[naomikritzer]

And Michael's totally awesome post:

"I'm tired of missing things and I'd like to ask that if people find any trolls, dragons, dogs, frogs with more than the usual number of legs, frogs with less than the usual number of legs, spiders larger than the palm of a hand, anything that will explode, anything that might explode, particularly friendly cats or kittens, birds that talk, fish that sing, any plant that glows, any rock that glows, swans with human feet, eels, talking birds, racing snails, three-eyed newts, books in code, books with secrets, ten-leaved clovers, talking sticks, secret passages, dancing ducks, singing mice, talking rats, rabbits, rocks with holes in them, birds with brightly coloured feathers, feathers from birds with brightly coloured feathers, twelve-leaved clovers, broken monocles, boxes of dead butterflies, lethifolds or opals, please tell me and let me come and see.

Thank you very much."

[gwendolyngrace]

Totally awesome. Which Sally-Anne repeats in her post later about going for a walk outside.

[reenie]

This is where a lot of Draco's anxiety about "getting into trouble" starts to become more visible. He also thinks Hermione is dodgy. Bad stuff happens when she's around! Oh, indeed. He's also very perturbed at the thought that he might've helped "save her" from the troll.

There was no shipping in the works at all, but I knew even back then that if Draco did change, Hermione would probably play a fundamental role in it.

Sally Anne says: "I know girls can go into the boys' rooms, Daphne did." <-- I wonder what non-PC Daphs was up to? She was also short, reportedly (even though I later made her tall), and stole Pansy's shampoo.

Dennis was actually kind of cute, and it's interesting to see how annoying everyone finds him, or "creepy," in some cases (in later months/years Harry is surprisingly hard on Dennis because he can't do anything useful, like help with homework - I thought this was actually a useful way to show that even though he was fundamentally good, Harry was still really blind to his own privilege and really had no problem with the concept of owning a slave for a long time).

[naomikritzer]

I think when Sally-Anne called him creepy, she was trying to express her discomfort with the situation (this tiny little kid who's a literal slave) in ways that would not reveal she held any seditious, blood-traitorish opinions.

[naomikritzer]

Also, with Daphs, I think what we concluded later was that it was less theft and more that she had grown up in a house full of siblings and obviously if your shampoo isn't handy you use the one that is. Pansy was an only child. (As was Sally-Anne, for that matter.)

And, I have no idea why she went into the boys' rooms! Maybe she heard about the slide and wanted to test out whether the boys' rooms did something similar.

[gwendolyngrace]

Maybe she was sneaking in to see Blaise.

[gwendolyngrace]

Harking back to Deb's point in September, here's Lucius again being the voice telling the young generation how to accept supremacy as a status-quo:

And I have told you already that it is not the questions, but the line of thinking behind them, prompting them, that is of concern. If you properly understood the inferiority of Muggles and mudbloods, I daresay the questions you ask would not occur to
you - or at least, the answers would already be implicitly obvious.

[gwendolyngrace]

More on ghosts, from Draco: Of course real ghosts don't look like shapeless people under blankets, and the ghosts at the Manor would probably be offended if they saw us, but we usually played this game at Kensington or the Lord's Palace. There weren't any. ghosts there because muggles used to live there and a muggle never leaves a ghost.

Hydra will contradict that later when she talks about ghosts at St James' Palace. (Also, later we never mention any ghosts at the Manor, either....)

[naomikritzer]

Also, I'm pretty sure that one of the muggles murdered by Carrow leaves behind a ghost. (This actually strikes me as a bit of pureblood bullshit, actually. We are so very, very different from muggles that they can't even leave behind ghosts.)

[reenie]

Very well could be. Deb and I decided later that their friendship was pre-Hogwarts.

[reenie]

The "muggles can't be ghosts" thing was definitely attempt to show how Draco might have absorbed some prejudiced misinformation.

Ghosts at the Manor...either I made that up on the fly, or it was something I discussed with Original-Mix Narcissa.

[reenie]

Who was that directed at, character-wise?

[gwendolyngrace]

Pansy.

[gwendolyngrace]

Good point about prejudiced / bullshit information!

[reenie]

Yeah, I mean, these are things that someone in her position should have grown up absorbing, so having her ask questions and rock the boat within a few months of the game's start was....way too early.

[reenie]

Druella and Pascoal start dating! Funny, I remembered them as already having a relationship when the game started.

The random *jk* and ":)" in comments is throwing me off big time!

Draco and Pansy had their big falling-out which actually made sense, the way things were going. And Harry blows up at her a bit, too (later, Padma and Teddy join in). I do like that the Harry and Draco camaraderie was pretty much consistent throughout the game, even though they did experience their share of tension later on.

I did love how in the height of his frustration with Pansy, Lucius almost calls her "Amanda." Nice little piece of backstory coming through there...

[gwendolyngrace]

Yes, I remembered Pascoal and Druella as a preestablished relationship, too!

And Zach and Lavender's families were close. I'd completely forgotten that.

[naomikritzer]

Sally-Anne, on what you have to do to make a baby: "I read it in a book once. Maybe there's a spell we can use instead they'll teach us when we're older."

[naomikritzer]

Also, everyone could tell that Pansy, Ron, and SA were using a code, but here's what it actually meant, from the e-mail sent by Pansy's original player:
Pansy will present a code to you today for the journals. If she posts a sentence with the word black in it, then that means she wants to meet them at their usual place and time.

Red in the sentence means it's urgent.

Replying using blue in the sentence means you'll be there as soon as you can.

[elisem]

Reading about Amycus Carrow's art made me think of Sarah Yaxley, later on. Somewhere in the Protectorate there was a really creepy art teacher, or cache of books, or collection, or something....

[flourish]

I mean.