Transcript for MuggleCast Episode #439, Dumbledip (GOF Illustrated Review, OOTP Chapter 6, The House of Black)
Show Intro
[Show music plays]
Andrew Sims: Welcome to MuggleCast, your weekly ride into the Wizarding World. I’m Andrew.
Micah Tannenbaum: I’m Micah.
Laura Tee: I’m Laura.
Andrew: Eric isn’t here this week, but we are joined by one of our Slug Club members, Emily! Hi, Emily.
Emily: Hi!
Andrew: Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, you were just telling us about your great forest life. You should call your wooded area the Forbidden Forest, come to think of it.
Emily: Yeah, it’s a nice idea.
Andrew: Well, welcome to the show. It’s nice to have you on here. Can we get your fandom ID so we can learn a little bit about you?
Emily: Yes, absolutely. So my Hogwarts House is Hufflepuff; highly identify with that. I have not retaken the new test, but I’ve taken it twice other times, and I always get Hufflepuff, so hopefully. My Ilvermorny House is Thunderbird. My favorite book is probably Book 3, and my favorite movie is maybe Movie 4 or 1, because 1 is so nostalgic, but I think 4, I just really liked seeing a lot of the other schools and how they decided to portray them; I think it’s really cool. My Patronus is a porpoise.
Andrew: A porpoise! What a fun word.
Emily: I know! And it’s not even dolphin or anything; it’s a porpoise. It’s really cute. It would bound around the screen because it actually looked like it was diving in the water. It was a cute one.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Emily: And then my favorite Goblet of Fire character is probably Winky.
Andrew: Aww.
Emily: I just found her so interesting to read and adorable, and she has a lot going on. It was very different than any of the other characters, really, we’d ever read.
Andrew: Yeah. The reason we asked you that question is because we are going to review the Goblet of Fire illustrated edition, which came out just a few days ago. So welcome to the show, and thanks for your support.
Emily: Yeah! Thanks, you guys.
Andrew: And we will also do Chapter by Chapter for Order of the Phoenix, so covering two books today. Big episode. But first, Micah, you just got back from LeakyCon, right?
Micah: Yeah, Eric and I were in Boston last weekend for LeakyCon; they were celebrating their ten year anniversary – it’s where it all started in Boston – and we had a really great time. We did a bonus MuggleCast, actually. We were talking before the recording, Andrew; you asked me, “How could it possibly be 45 minutes long?” And I said, “Well, I was recording with Eric, so there you go.”
[Everyone laughs]
Micah: But no, in all seriousness, there was a lot to talk about. We did three really great panels together, and then Eric did an additional one with his buddies over at Hogwarts Radio, and it was just a lot of fun. For listeners who I think maybe joined in the last couple of years, they don’t know necessarily of the playful rivalry that we have with Pottercast, which is led by Melissa Anelli, who is also responsible for LeakyCon. And the first day we did this retrospective panel looking back on podcasting, and there were also two other podcasts that were on that panel: Mike from Potterless, and if you don’t know about Potterless, he had started this podcast having never read the Potter series before, so people were going along on the ride with him. And then also, Ariana and Vanessa from “Harry Potter and the Sacred Text,” which I think is pretty self-explanatory in terms of what they do, comparing the Potter series to different sacred texts. So it was a lot of fun. Saturday, we played this game against Pottercast, and Andrew, you were notably absent. John Noe called you out for not being there.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: He’ll live.
Micah: And you honestly put us at a disadvantage, to be quite honest, because they have three; all three of their hosts were there. And then also, Laura, I’m going to put some blame on you here as well.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: Why?
Micah: Because you could have been there too.
Laura: No, I couldn’t, I had a wedding last weekend.
Micah: Oh, well, yeah. Okay, fine.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Micah: Sounds like a better excuse than whatever Andrew is going to come up with.
[Everyone laughs]
Micah: But anyway, we played three games. We played Heads Up, which was really cool because the audience could also see the character’s name, and then we played Family Feud. And then Fishbowl, and with Fishbowl, you have to pick from two different bowls, and one of the categories was related to Harry Potter, the other category was just completely random, and you had to create a three-minute podcast on the spot. Improvise about whatever the two topics were that you pulled. And we were very lucky to get Louis Cordice, who played Blaise Zabini in the Potter films; he joined us for two of the games, and another one we had an audience member come on and join us.
Andrew: Okay. So what did you need us for? You have Harry Potter movie stars joining you.
Micah: No, his… okay.
Andrew: Woe is you.
Micah: [laughs] He was great at the improv. However, the first game that we played, let’s just say his knowledge of the Potter series and their characters is somewhat lacking.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: Now, quick story: He brought a balloon onto the stage at the very beginning of the game. I think it was left over from the wizard rock concert the night before. It was a yellow balloon, and he brought it on stage with him. And as he was departing after that first round of games, Chris Rankin, who was hosting this, turned to him and said, “I think the balloon would have done a better job.”
Andrew: [laughs] Ouch.
Laura: Oh my God.
Micah: It was a little tense.
Andrew: I’ve got to say, I don’t blame some of these actors, though. They just don’t live and breathe Harry Potter; they came in to shoot the movies, and that was it. So it’s a little awkward when they go to these Harry Potter conferences, because they don’t know their stuff and everybody expects them to. So I don’t blame that actor, [laughs] but maybe he should brush up a little more before his next Harry Potter convention.
Micah: And then on Sunday we did our live show with Chris Rankin, who played Percy Weasley in the Potter films, and that episode is available for people to listen to. A lot of fun; we just really enjoyed ourselves. And of course, our MuggleCast meetup on Saturday night at Hopsters Brewery in Boston, and we had probably close to 35 people show up…
Andrew: Wow, nice.
Micah: … so it was really cool getting to meet all these listeners.
Andrew: Good stuff. Glad you guys had a good time.
Goblet of Fire illustrated edition review
Andrew: All right, so moving on, let’s talk about the Goblet of Fire illustrated edition. This has been… the illustrated edition books have been one of our favorite parts of the franchise in recent years. The books are just so good. They are illustrated by Jim Kay. They were coming out yearly, and then he needed more time for Goblet of Fire, so there was a two-year gap between Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire, and it looks like that’s going to be the case for Order of the Phoenix as well. So I actually want to start with Laura’s thoughts on this book, because believe it or not, dear listeners, this is her first illustrated edition!
Laura: Yep, I’m getting called out twice in one episode.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: What’s your excuse, Laura? Did you have weddings when the first three illustrated editions came out?
Laura: Yep, on all three of those release dates, I had weddings I had to be at, and I just couldn’t recover.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: No, I think the thing is… I, to be honest, had not really paid attention to the illustrated editions. I heard great things about them, but I also have my ratty old copies of Harry Potter that I go back to, and to me, they’re a great sense of comfort that they provide for me, so I guess I never thought about the illustrated editions as being able to supplement that. I was wrong.
Andrew: No, it’s understandable.
Laura: Yeah, I got my Goblet of Fire illustrated edition a couple days after it released because Andrew messaged me and was like, “Hey, you need to order this for the show.” And I did, and I’m really glad I did. It’s gorgeous. I think what strikes me about it is I appreciate that Jim Kay doesn’t seem to be overly influenced by the films.
Andrew and Emily: Yes.
Laura: I don’t know if he’s watched the films or if he’s specifically opted not to, but I really feel like when I’m studying these, this artwork, it’s clear to me that it is based on the text and not on Hollywood, because there are certain things he gets right, like Hermione’s buck teeth. He gets those right.
Andrew: Oh, I didn’t notice those.
Laura: Yes!
Emily: Yeah, Hermione is the best.
Laura: Yeah. I’m like, “Oh my God, he actually gets her right.” And I love the fact that we get a Ginny portrait; I figure Eric was over the moon. Is this a good time to go into my favorite part? I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.
Andrew: Yeah, sure.
Laura: I particularly loved the depictions of the three tasks in this. These were just stunning, full page, multi-page sections where you’re seeing all the different dragons. They even had a page where there was a comparative chart of each of the dragons, which was really cool. Also loved everything under the lake during the second task and seeing the mermaids. And then, of course, the third task, it’s just… I think that was really… I don’t want to use the word “task,” but it was probably quite a task to portray that accurately…
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: … because it is such a bombastic, climactic moment of the book, but I really think that he did it justice. I’m really pleased with it.
Andrew: Yeah. Good, I’m glad. I’m glad you like it so much. I know one of your hesitations as well was you’d said to me, “I thought this was going to be a lot more expensive.” [laughs]
Laura: Yep. Yeah, well, anytime you think about an illustrated edition of a very iconic novel, I was imagining this was going to be $100 or something. [laughs] I was like, “Eh, I already have the Harry Potter books.”
Andrew: Yeah, and they’re bigger physically, and usually bigger books are more expensive, I feel.
Laura: Right. No, this was super affordable.
Andrew: Yeah. Micah, I think you wrote this question down in our doc: How does it compare to the previous three? And I’m not sure I have an answer for that. It’s more of the same, and the same is very, very good.
Emily: It’s heavier.
Andrew: What’d you say?
Emily: I said it’s heavier.
Andrew: [laughs] “How does it compare? It’s the heaviest one yet.”
[Andrew and Emily laugh]
Andrew: Yeah, it is. But I mean, it’s also just so beautiful. I love the full page illustrations. Some of them, you just turn the page and you get hit with this, and it just takes your breath away. There’s also illustrations that take up two pages. There’s an incredible scene from the first task on page 230; the entire two pages are engulfed in flames and you see Harry on his broom. It’s just striking. What do you think, Micah?
Micah: Well, I probably put that question in before I got a chance to sit down and take a look at the illustrated edition. It’s probably not even fair to compare them from one book to the next, because I think the task just gets that much more daunting for Jim Kay from one book to the next to the next, especially as they get larger, so I think he did a amazing job. And I’m sure there are things that are on the cutting room floor that maybe somewhere down the line we would get the opportunity to see. But when we got that initial review, it just seemed like maybe some things were not as good as previous books, and maybe that’s what prompted me to put that question in there. But I didn’t really even notice going through where there was chapter art that may have been missing. Maybe in the middle couple of chapters there was just pages of text. But overall, I was really, really impressed with this book. And my favorite illustration, actually, was Dumbledore taking Harry’s name out of the Goblet of Fire, or when it gets shot into the air.
Laura: Ooh, yeah.
Micah: It was just really, really well done. I also really liked a lot of these characters which we have listed here, just the depictions of each of them. I thought Rita Skeeter was really cool.
Andrew: Yeah. Krum really shocked me.
Emily: He was hilarious. [laughs]
Andrew: He looks nothing like he does in the movie! I was like, “Wait, what character is this?” [laughs] He’s super skinny. He’s got dark black hair; it’s falling over his eyes. He looks like an emo punk. He looks like a Twilight character plus a character from Game of Thrones.
Emily: Yeah, he’s like an Edward Ramsay.
Andrew: There you go.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Micah: Wow, that’s a great depiction. But then who is it that’s in the poster? Is that another one of the Bulgarian Quidditch players? Because those two people…
Emily: It looks like him.
Micah: They look a little different.
Emily: Yeah, I think it’s his angle. The hair is more obvious in some of them, because you see him again on 197 and then again at the Yule Ball in 262, and his hair is kind of the same, but you can tell it depends on how they have his body shifted, of how emo his hair gets.
Andrew: Yeah. And then Cedric, he has an incredibly sharp jawline.
Emily: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: He almost looks emaciated. I guess he’s supposed to look extremely attractive? To me, it’s like, “Whoa.” He’s way too bony for my tastes. [laughs] But yeah, so he was kind of surprising as well. You may have noticed on page 36… and this is the only Easter egg I’m aware of. If anybody else notes of others, I would love to hear about them. But on page 36… sorry, I have to move past my mic to look at the book, because it’s quite hard doing this with a mic in your face.
[Emily laughs]
Andrew: But on page 36 there’s a reference to JRR Tolkien. In Ron’s room, you can see on the spine of one of the books JRR Tolkien’s crest, I guess you would call that. Plus, he’s also got Quidditch Through the Ages sitting there, An Ordinary of Arms sitting there too, just a bunch of different books. It looks like a book from Newt Scamander as well, presumably Fantastic Beasts.
Emily: Oh, yeah, I see that. And then the A Snitch in Time just makes me think of A Wrinkle in Time, because that’s what book I would have up on the back of my shelf.
Andrew: I just noticed he has a toy Ford Anglia on his shelf as well.
Emily: Oh my God, cute.
Andrew: Why would he have that? [laughs] And a Hogwarts snow globe, so a lot of different things. Ginny finally appeared. I know Eric already made that Ginny art his iPhone wallpaper.
Laura: Wow.
[Andrew and Emily laugh]
Emily: And she’s beautiful in that picture too. He did a great job.
Micah: I’m guessing he’s probably going to reach out to Jim Kay and see if he can get an original art print for his apartment, have Jim sign it and go through the whole thing.
Andrew: [laughs] Have Bonnie Wright sign it.
Emily: Why not?
Micah: Well, the other thing I really did like about this book was just the fact of him bringing to life some of the characters that you otherwise maybe wouldn’t have seen, especially in the movies, right? We don’t have Ludo Bagman. And I noted that Ludo Bagman looks like a drunk Arthur Weasley who dressed up like a Hufflepuff for Halloween.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: That’s pretty accurate.
Emily: Yeah, accurate.
Micah: And also Hassan Mostafa, who’s the referee of the Quidditch World Cup. Probably never would have thought about him actually getting any sort of art in any book, and yet he’s there. So I just like the fact that there’s a little bit more obscure characters that are brought to life in this book.
Andrew: And it really enhances J.K. Rowling’s story. I know a lot of people critiqued the movies, especially the later ones, because they kind of felt like they were getting away from the magic, the whimsicalness of it all, so to speak. And this, by featuring characters like this referee or Ludo Bagman, we finally get to appreciate every single character in J.K. Rowling’s world. And maybe he is looking at the movies and being like, “Hey, they didn’t feature Ludo Bagman. They didn’t feature Hassan. They didn’t feature the Blast-Ended Skrewt,” who makes an appearance in this book as well. “Maybe this is my chance to show these characters off.” Another character who really shocked me was Mad-Eye Moody.
Emily: Yeah, he’s scary.
Andrew: Looks nothing like he does in the movie. Yeah, he is scary.
Laura: Well, he’s much closer to the actual character description in the book.
Andrew: Exactly, and that’s what also makes the illustrated edition so good. Loyal to J.K. Rowling’s writing.
Emily: Well, same with the Voldemort before he was revived; his little red monster babyness is very different of how they decided to do it, but is just how the text… that’s exactly what you would see in your head if you were reading the text.
Laura: Yeah. And speaking of Voldemort, what I appreciated about this was I didn’t feel like Jim Kay relied too much on serpentine characteristics to portray Voldemort. I mean, certainly he has some of that going on, but my big critique of the movies, especially of Goblet of Fire, was it felt like Ralph Fiennes was trying to move like a snake throughout that whole graveyard scene, and it really took me out of it because he was sticking his tongue out and waggling it around and almost dancing throughout his routine. It really took me out of the moment, because that’s not how I read it in the book; maybe other people on the panel have different interpretations of it. But I felt like, again, this was an area where he really let the text lead him in terms of how he portrayed Voldemort, and I really appreciated that.
Andrew: I agree with that completely. The red Voldemort baby… unreal. Unreal.
Emily: Yeah, so gross.
[Andrew and Emily laugh]
Andrew: I think I gasped when I saw that in this book.
Micah: Yeah, it’s super creepy. It reminded me of the Kappa from Fantastic Beasts, or Crimes of Grindelwald. You get a very, very brief shot of the Kappa coming out of the water in Circus Arcanus, and it just… that’s what it made me think of, quite honestly.
Andrew: Yeah. And once again, Jim Kay will sometimes put text overtop illustrations, which is really cool. For example, they… I guess I don’t know if this was Jim Kay exactly; may have been somebody else who worked on the book with him. But they put J.K. Rowling’s text within the Pensieve, for example; that was a super cool page. There’s another page, 396-397, where Voldemort’s eyes are poking through the text.
Laura: Yes.
Andrew: It’s just so cool. And then, of course, the battle at the end; it takes up six pages. The first two pages are Voldemort casting his spell, the next two pages are all of the wand’s memories because this is Priori Incantatem, and the next two pages are Harry’s side of the duel. So it’s this beautiful six-page spread that emphasizes just how important this duel is.
Emily: They’re gorgeous. The lightning in that one panel is just so pretty.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah.
Emily: I really liked the arrival of both of the schools; they each got a full page. Well, one is, I think, maybe the exit of the Durmstrang, but you got to see their whole ship. And then the arrival of the Beauxbatons, with all their horses and flying over, and it’s just very active, and it looks almost 3D coming towards you, and the color scheme is just so pretty. Their horses are beautiful, and then to think, “Oh, they drink single-malt whiskey.” I just think that’s so funny. That’s my favorite illustration; I think that’s on page 156-157.
Andrew: Anything else that stood out to y’all?
Laura: I wanted to call out that Jim Kay dedicated the book to his departed family dog.
Andrew: Aww.
Emily: I saw that.
Laura: I saw that and I was like, “Aw.” And then he drew her in, so she’s on that dedication page.
Emily: I know. It’s so cute.
Andrew: Oh, that’s so sweet.
Emily: She’s precious.
Andrew: It’s pretty cool to be able to share a dedication page with J.K. Rowling. Pretty dope.
Laura: Yeah, that’s definitely a career moment.
[Everyone laughs]
Micah: I’m guessing J.K. Rowling had to approve that, but given her affinity for animals, I’m guessing it was a pretty quick approval.
Laura: Right.
Andrew: Was there a dog at the fairground?
Micah: I was wondering… no, honestly, I didn’t catch that, so I’m glad, Laura, you just mentioned that because I was wondering, “What is this dog doing just sitting on a stump at the Triwizard Tournament?” So now I know.
Andrew: Or the Quidditch World Cup.
Micah: Oh, yeah, sorry. Quidditch World Cup.
Andrew: Yeah. J.K. Rowling, is that canon? Please tell us.
[Emily and Laura laugh]
Andrew: No, that is cool. That is cool. All right, those are our thoughts on Goblet of Fire illustrated edition. It comes out this time of year for a reason, for the holidays. [laughs] Put it on your wish list if you don’t want to buy it ahead of time, if you can wait a little while. It really is fantastic. We all love the illustrated editions so much. Like I said, we probably have another two years to wait before we get Order of the Phoenix illustrated, maybe four years because Eric thinks that it’s going to be two separate books.
Emily: Oh, wow.
Andrew: [laughs] It won’t be.
Emily: No.
Andrew: But next year, I think we’re going to get Quidditch Through the Ages illustrated edition because they released Fantastic Beasts, they released Beedle the Bard, so they’re putting in these smaller books in these off years while Jim Kay works on the Harry Potter series itself. And these other ones have not been done by Jim Kay; they’ve been done by other people, which has been cool to get different artistic takes on J.K. Rowling’s writing. Before we get to Muggle Mail, it’s time for a word from this week’s sponsor.
[Ad break]
Listener Feedback
Andrew: All right, time now for some Muggle Mail. We got a voice memo from one of our listeners who had some interesting thoughts on Sirius.
[Voicemail plays]
“Hey, MuggleCast, Shelby from North Carolina here. So I just had a couple thoughts that I wanted to share about the last episode in terms of how we really view Sirius at this point. You guys talked a bit about how he’s not really acting as the most ideal father figure here, but I don’t think that that’s necessarily all his fault. We see in Goblet of Fire that he really is very parental with Harry. He is writing him throughout the year, he comes back to England, he’s in Hogsmeade… whenever Harry has a problem, Sirius is there with some very solid advice. Whenever Harry gets back from the graveyard, Sirius is right there. He’s with him the entire time as he is relaying the story to Dumbledore, and it’s just very parental. So in terms of who Harry’s parental figures are, I think we do have to take into consideration what James and Lily wanted. They know who Sirius is. They could have chosen Remus; it’s a good thing they didn’t. But they didn’t choose Peter. They chose Sirius. And I think that deep down, he really does have godfather material, it’s just… I mean, he’s regressing back to possibly some adolescent stages. You know how some people, when they come back to their parents’ house, they kind of act the same way that they acted when they were in high school? I think we are starting to see an appearance of what perhaps Sirius was like as a teenager, though I do think this helps make him and Harry kindred spirits, because the key thing that Harry and Sirius really share is that they have both been deprived of something. Harry has been deprived of having a normal life with his parents, and Sirius has missed out on his entire young adult life. He literally spent a third of it in Azkaban, and think of all the maturing that you go through during that time, which you guys touched on a little bit. Anyway, thank you guys so much for everything you do. Love the show. Talk to you later, bye.”
[Voicemail ends]
Laura: I love that.
Andrew: Thank you, Shelby. Yeah, I know I was kind of hard on Sirius a couple weeks ago, so wanted to get that feedback in there.
Laura: Well, I think that it’s right to say that at this point in his character arc, he’s maybe not the best parental figure for Harry, but Shelby is right; there are a number of cases between Books 3 and 5 where Sirius does step up to the plate and behave in an appropriate way, so just good to remember.
Micah: And I also think it’s unfair to compare him to Molly Weasley, especially given that she’s raised seven kids. Not to say that she’s always right in the way that she approaches Harry, but I think if that’s the comparison we’re making, we just need to be mindful of the fact that she’s had a whole wealth of experience in terms of raising children.
Emily: Right, and she also didn’t experience the same kind of trauma that Sirius has very recently experienced. And people are very different humans after they experience trauma, and it takes a long time to heal from something obviously as traumatic as being in Azkaban for a long time, so I think that when we see him here… I really liked her point about being in your parents’ house kind of makes you feel that way, but I think it also reminds him a little bit of just so much of what had already happened that it might be a little, I don’t know, triggering of the trauma that he’s trying to process and heal from.
Micah: Next email comes from Shannon, who said,
“Hey guys, I was just listening to your discussion on Chapter 4 with ALL CAPS Harry, and wanted to add a couple of pop culture references I kept thinking about. In response to Andrew’s question of how do you hear the scene playing out, I always see Darren Criss’s version of Harry in A Very Potter Sequel yelling, ‘I’M IN A RAGE! THIS IS THE MADDEST I’VE EVER BEEN!'”
I don’t know if that’s how he does it.
Andrew: “I’M IN A RAGE!” I don’t know how he did it.
Micah: That’s now, what, Academy Award-winning Darren Chris? Or Emmy award-winning?
Andrew: Yeah, he won something, didn’t he? One of those. Not Academy Award; probably an Emmy.
Micah: Okay. Anyway,
“My other thought was about why Harry needs to react that way to Ron and Hermione specifically, and it made me think about a quote from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I think it’s slightly different in the book, but I don’t have that handy at the moment, and Google is giving me the movie version. ‘Maybe sometimes it’s easier to be mad at the people you trust.’ ‘Why? Why is that?’ ‘Because you know they’ll always love you, no matter what.’ So Harry needed to vent that frustration and anger, and he just happened to come face to face with them first (or second, after Molly), but they’re also the two people he trusted most to love him despite his need to be quite awful to them in those moments. Anyway, just wanted to throw in my two cents. Thanks for all you do.”
Andrew: Yeah, I get that. That’s one benefit of having friends sometimes; you can vent to them, and they’ll take it and deal with it because that’s what they’re there for.
Emily: Yeah, and the text shows Hermione understood that too. They were expecting him to act this way, and you can tell by what J.K. Rowling wrote, how Hermione is acting and the words that they wrote, that she gets it. She knows that he’s not really mad at them as much as he’s just mad and needs to vent to them.
Andrew: Yeah, definitely.
Laura: The next email comes from Gina. Gina says,
“Hi, MuggleCast! I’m writing you all in regards to your conversation about Percy in the last episode. When reading about his row with Mr. Weasley, it made me feel kind of bad for Percy. He’s come from a family that has very little money, where he’s teased by his siblings for being an overachiever and being different. I kind of can’t blame him for wanting success. I always thought Percy was a jerk, but when reading this chapter, my heart was hurting for him. I’d be curious on your thoughts about this (and Chris Rankin’s). Your show has been giving me joy since the start. Thank you for all you do.”
Andrew: Thank you, Gina. Yeah, look, he’s just trying to do what needs to be done to get ahead in this career; I can definitely understand that. He’s just in one of those classic rock and a hard place type of situations.
Laura: It does suck for him because he’s young, he’s a recent graduate, he’s been offered this job that’s too good to be true, and I think anybody at that age and at that point in their career is going to be predisposed to want to think, “Oh, yeah, I did this. I got it. I did this because I worked hard.” But in this case, we know that Fudge is actually taking advantage of him in order to spy on the Weasleys and in turn on Dumbledore, and it just sucks because it puts him in this place of feeling like he’s being robbed of his agency so that his boss is spying on his family, and not wanting to believe that, and also not wanting to believe that this wasn’t something that he actually earned, so it does suck.
Micah: Yeah. It’s interesting that Gina brings this up because Chris actually spoke about Percy at length at LeakyCon in a number of different settings. But I think something that he said is kind of applicable to her comment, in that he has a very strong belief that Percy is, in fact, not as smart as he comes off to be at times in the series, and particularly as it relates to Bill and Charlie, Fred and George, Chris thinks that they’re actually more intelligent than Percy is, and that Percy spends so much of his time shut away from everybody else because he feels the need to catch up with them. He needs to be studying and doing all these things. So a lot of what we see of him, when he does become prefect, when he does become Head Boy, is through a lot of work that he’s put in, because deep down inside, he doesn’t feel like he measures up to his brothers.
Andrew: Interesting.
Micah: So I found that kind of an interesting insight on the person who played Percy in the series.
Andrew: Unlike the Blaise actor, he knows his character and the series, clearly. [laughs]
Micah: Well, Chris… no, I mean, he’s a huge Potter fan. He would have ensured our win in that game.
[Andrew and Emily laugh]
Micah: But I just found that very insightful. Hopefully I did justice to what he said. But it is true; we don’t see a lot of Percy. Or when we do hear about him, he’s always shut up in his room at the Burrow, or he’s off in the dungeons or doing different things in solitary confinement, almost.
Andrew: All right. Well, thanks, everybody who has written in with feedback over the past couple of weeks. We read it all. We can’t get it all on air, but we really do appreciate it, and we are trying to reply to more of your emails as they come in, so thank you for doing that. And if you want to get in touch with us, don’t forget you can just email MuggleCast@gmail.com. Send us a voice memo, send us a voicemail, or use the contact form on MuggleCast.com.
Chapter by Chapter: Seven-Word Summary
Andrew: Time now for Chapter by Chapter. This week, we are discussing Order of the Phoenix Chapter 6, “The Most Noble and Ancient House of Black,” and we’ll start with our seven-word summary. Micah, kick it off for us.
Micah: All right. Kreacher…
Andrew: Ooh, he already knows his answer. Kreacher has…
Laura: … the…
Emily: … foresight…
Laura: Ooh.
Andrew: Well, crap.
Micah: … to…
Andrew: … take…
Laura: Oh, God. We need one more word.
Emily: I know.
[Emily and Laura laugh]
Emily and Micah: Just say it.
Laura: How about heirlooms? Heirlooms.
Emily: There we go.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Micah: There you go. Very good, very good.
Emily: Nice.
Chapter by Chapter: Main Discussion
Micah: So this chapter starts off with everybody heading back up to bed, and I thought that Mrs. Weasley really continues to be in overreaction mode. She’s so concerned that Harry and Ron are up talking about what they just learned, and quite honestly, who wouldn’t be up talking about what they just learned?
Andrew: Right.
Micah: I mean, she has to be a little bit less tense. What would they possibly be talking about that would warrant her going up and listening at the door?
Andrew: Right, and what is she going to get out of it by listening in? Is she going to knock down the door and be like, “Hey, stop talking about that! You can’t talk about that. That’s not right.” I don’t know what her end game is.
Laura: Well, I think in her defense, these are children who, over the course of the last three and a half years, have gone after Voldemort, have gone after Sirius when they thought he was Voldemort’s right hand man, so she’s probably worried that after learning what they’ve learned, they might be up plotting what they’re going to do next, and she might be trying to put a stop to that.
Emily: Yeah, I feel like it’s more like that than it is she doesn’t want them discussing what they’ve just learned as processing, but more that they’re going to start plotting on their own, separately, because they’re not allowed to join the Order yet.
Andrew: Do you think if they started planning and Molly overheard this, she would have stepped in? Knocked down that door?
Laura: Probably.
Andrew: [disapprovingly] Molly.
[Emily and Laura laugh]
Andrew: I was wondering, though, do you guys have parents who would listen in on your own conversations as a child?
Emily: No.
Laura: Not that I know of.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: Any Extendable Ears or AirPods being used to listen?
Micah: Yeah, I don’t think so. Though, I mean, I grew up in an age – as I think all of us did – where you didn’t have cell phones, so a lot of times when you spoke to somebody, you were talking over a landline, and I wouldn’t be surprised if every once in a while, my parents would be listening in to phone conversations.
Andrew: Oh, yeah.
Micah: It was just easy. You just pick it up and…
Andrew: Yeah, you cover the mic side of the phone so they can’t hear you breathing. [laughs]
Micah: Right.
Andrew: Confession time: I definitely spied on my parents when they were on the phone.
[Andrew and Micah laugh]
Laura: Oh my God, Andrew.
Andrew: Pick up the landline very quietly, and then when I set it down, I press the button before putting the phone down so they can’t hear it click off. [evil laugh] No, but… well, this makes a lot of sense. I was just going to say, my mom definitely would spy on us. She’s the type of person who keeps me and my sister and brother’s exes on Facebook so she can keep tabs on them. She’s just that kind of person.
Emily: Oh my gosh.
Andrew: [laughs] Lots of spying going on.
Laura: Yeah, if my parents ever spied, they were pretty stealthy about it, because…
Andrew: You wouldn’t know.
Laura: … I don’t remember anything like that. [laughs]
Andrew: Or your parents just weren’t spies, and good for them.
Laura: Yeah, they were pretty big proponents of “Everybody’s allowed to have secrets, and that’s okay.”
Emily: Yeah, my parents were the same way. And we also only had one landline phone for a really long time because they didn’t want us having one up in our room, just because they didn’t want us ringing in the middle of the night when we had telemarketers and stuff. And so you’d have to sneak downstairs if you wanted to use the landline telephone, and sit quietly in the corner of the living room, talking so quietly so you didn’t wake anybody up.
[Andrew and Emily laugh]
Laura: So I got my first cellphone when I was 14; I was one of the earlier kids in my high school to get a cellphone. I know now kids get cellphones when they’re, like, 8. But I got this little Nokia brick phone, and I used to go in my closet late at night to get on the phone, because if I went in the closet and closed the door, nobody could hear me, so my parents wouldn’t scold me for being up until 3:00 in the morning on the phone. And it was usually with people I met through MuggleNet.
[Andrew laughs]
Emily: Yeah, I used Yahoo Instant Messenger for that, because we had a computer in our room.
Andrew: But so Laura, you saw a parallel between Molly and Umbridge here?
Laura: Yeah, I thought it was really interesting, because both Umbridge and Molly are working to try and restrict the flow of information to these underage wizards. I will say it’s for very different reasons; Molly is trying to actually protect them, whereas Umbridge is trying to protect the Ministry. But it is interesting to see these two female figures in Harry’s life pushing to try and prevent information from reaching him.
Andrew and Micah: Yeah.
Emily: Well, and Dumbledore spent the whole beginning trying to prevent any information from reaching him too. I know we’ll talk more about Dumbledore later, but that’s also such a huge sort of parental figure-ish in his life that is trying to keep him out of the loop.
Micah: You mean Dumbledip? Because he keeps dipping out on him.
[Everyone laughs]
Emily: Yeah, he just dips out on him. Comes and visits when he’s sleeping.
Micah: I also found it interesting that the only information that’s news to anyone – except Harry – is this weapon that they were talking about at the end of the last chapter. So Fred and George also pop down to Harry and Ron’s room during this…
Emily: That was so funny.
Micah: It’s a very brief mention, but it’s also, I think, made to have readers understand that Harry is still kind of on the outs, despite the fact that he just sat in this information session. Pretty much everything that Ron and Hermione and Fred and George learned wasn’t anything new to them because of the Extendable Ears that they had throughout the course of the summer; the only piece that’s new is the weapon. So I still think if I was Harry, I’d be a little bit upset here that everybody knew a lot more than they were letting on. So Molly is really trying to keep everybody busy, and I think keep them from having these types of conversations amongst themselves, and the way that she’s doing that is by having them clean out the Black family house. And I really like the fact that it’s described as if this house is fighting back and not allowing itself to be cleaned…
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: … and it’s just a very interesting parallel as well, because the motto of the Black family is “Always pure,” and the fact that they’re trying to cleanse this house I just thought was kind of cool, the way that it’s all being…
Andrew: But I think J.K. Rowling is also talking about how long it’s been since it’s been cleaned, because it’s like when you let a pot sit dirty for a really long time, it takes forever to clean it in some cases. [laughs] And I think…
Laura: Well, and if you don’t clean things for a long time, they will literally take on a life of their own…
[Andrew groans]
Laura: … like we see here, where there’s literally creatures that have taken up residence in all the nooks and crannies of the house that haven’t been maintained for so long.
Andrew: Not in my place; I’m a clean freak.
[Laura and Micah laugh]
Micah: No dust in Andrew’s house.
Laura: No doxies in your curtains or anything, Andrew?
Andrew: Nope, nothing like that.
Micah: I just thought it was kind of a cool parallel that this is a pure-blood home, and yet they’re trying to cleanse it of all the crap that’s piled up.
Emily: The impurities.
Micah: Yeah, exactly.
Emily: Well, and I found it also… I mean, yes, I can see why Molly is having them clean, but having Sirius do the… I just kept thinking of the Marie Kondo tidying up situation, of how he’s going through each item and like, “Oh, does this spark joy? Is this true to me? Should I throw it away?”
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Emily: Whereas it’s completely different to Kreacher, and just that’s all I could think of. And it’s probably therapeutic for Sirius because he’s been cramped up in here and not allowed to leave anyway, so in order to do something productive, at least he can sort through and throw out a bunch of stuff that has really bad associations for him.
Andrew: Which is pretty much everything in the house.
Emily: Exactly. [laughs] Everything he can remove without being stuck on the walls.
Andrew: Nothing sparks joy for Sirius, except maybe Harry. [laughs]
Laura: So something that I thought was interesting about this whole cleaning sequence is that wand magic doesn’t work on doxies; they have to use that special spray to take care of them, and it just got me thinking about pest control in the wizarding world, and why wand magic that seems to work in countless situations might not work on some of these creatures. Is there anything in Fantastic Beasts lore that would suggest to us why this is?
Andrew: I don’t think so.
Emily: I can’t think of anything.
Andrew: Because I would say 99.9% of the time, wizards can use their wands to take care of a situation.
Laura: Well, when I think about, for instance, the Cornish Pixies from Chamber of Secrets, they’re able to Stun them in midair. Why can’t they do this with the doxies? Why do they have to spray them with this stuff? Is it because they’re all underage, and Molly is just trying to level the playing field so that everybody’s using the same instruments?
[Emily and Laura laugh]
Andrew: Or maybe teaching them the wonders of cleaning supplies.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: “When you guys have a house, you’ll love these too.”
Emily: It made me nervous that they were using Gilderoy Lockhart’s Guide to Household Pests.
Laura: Ooh, yeah.
Emily: I was like, “Oh,” just that they decided to name drop that there. I was like, “Oh no, is it not going to work? Are they all going to have something terrible happen to them?” Because I couldn’t remember that.
Andrew: [laughs] They’re going to multiply when you spray them.
Emily: Right, yeah, because he’s not very good at his information.
Micah: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I just think it’s also for us reading it; it’s just kind of like, “Oh, they have to get some elbow grease in there, too, just like we would if we had to clean our home.” It’s not all just magic and everything goes back to being nice and pristine and clean. They have to get in there; they have to do some work. Take that.
Andrew: Yeah. [laughs] Also, it’s noted in this area that… well, Sirius says that he’s got Buckbeak in a room upstairs, and since the first time I’ve read this, I’ve always had a very hard time picturing that. Buckbeak is a very large creature, and for him to be in one of these bedrooms at Grimmauld Place, that poor thing’s all cooped up.
Laura: Maybe it’s like one of these New Age floor plans. It’s open; got a big old walk-in closet.
Andrew: Ooh, love an open floor plan. Me and every person on HGTV’s House Hunters.
[Emily laughs]
Andrew: But we also got this email from Lindsey that I thought was pretty funny. She said,
“Sirius is feeding Buckbeak rats. In Goblet of Fire, Sirius gleefully said he himself was sustaining himself on a diet of rats. I guess this is how Sirius fulfills his need for revenge and lives out his fantasy of killing Peter.”
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: Genius.
Micah: That’s really funny.
Laura: Yeah, well, and I think Buckbeak typically eats ferrets, right? But I think rats are probably in greater supply in London.
Andrew: Probably. Yeah, right. And in this dirty old house.
Emily: Yeah, it’s not a good place for a stoat to hang out.
Andrew and Micah: No.
Andrew: But I’m now subscribing to this idea that Sirius just wants to feed him rats because he’s pretending that they’re Peter Pettigrew. [laughs]
Emily: That’s a great idea.
Micah: Well, we get a formal introduction to Kreacher in this chapter, and he’s quite the opposite of the other house-elves that we’ve been accustomed to in this series. Dobby is definitely other end of the spectrum; Winky is maybe somewhere in between. But I thought it’d be cool to just compare Kreacher to Dobby and to Winky. It’s clear that he is really just not in his right state of mind, and this is actually brought up a couple of times, most notably by Hermione, and I thought that was rather insightful into Kreacher as a character, saying that he’s not of his right mind, given what we know he’s been through.
Laura: Yeah, and that made this whole sequence of Kreacher in this chapter that much more heartbreaking to read, because you know what he’s been through. Not only has he suffered the psychological and physical abuses of being a slave, he was also damaged by Regulus Black when he was forced to… what was it, he wore the locket? And then also drank potions. So it really does hurt to read that. Of course, when you’re reading that the first time, you’re like, “Well, of course we feel sympathy and a lot of empathy for him because of the situation he’s in that he was born into, and this is the only thing he knows.” But then you get that added layer of extra level abuse that he got at the hands of the Black family, and it makes this all make so much more sense.
Micah: Yeah, and Sirius has that line initially about Kreacher, saying, “You’d be surprised what Kreacher can manage when he wants to,” and I thought that to also be very foretelling for what’s to come later on in this book.
Laura: Yep. Also makes me frustrated with Sirius, because I’m like, “So you know what he’s capable of…”
Andrew: And you still treat him this way.
Laura: “… and you did it anyway.”
Micah: Yep. So while they’re going through cleaning the house, there’s a mention of a boggart, and they say, “Oh, well, Mad-Eye can take a look and just make sure that that’s actually what it is, because who knows? It could be something a little bit more sinister.” And I remember there was always a lot of debate as to whether or not Moody could see the boggart in its true form or if it was going to just take up the shape of what he feared the most. And I tried looking and seeing if J.K. Rowling ever answered this, but I do remember there was a lot of discussion around this for a while, and I don’t know that we ever got an answer, so I’m curious as to what you all think.
Laura: I mean, his eye can see through the back of his head and he can see through closed doors, right? So maybe he has the special ability to see obscured magic, kind of like I think about in Half-Blood Prince when Harry and Dumbledore go to the cave, and Dumbledore is able to sense magic just by touching the walls and things of the cave. And so I wonder if there’s something that’s maybe a little more deeply ingrained with Moody because of the abilities he has with that eye.
Andrew: Yeah, I would think that he is able to see the boggart as well, because if he can actually look through walls and drawers and whatnot, he should be able to see it in its neutral state, so to speak.
Emily: Because it hasn’t seen him seeing it yet.
Andrew: Right, exactly.
Laura: I wonder what a Boggart looks like in its natural state.
Andrew: Didn’t we kind of get a sense of this in the movies when it was transitioning?
Laura: I mean…
Andrew: I’m just picturing a fuzzball type of thing that’s floating.
Laura: Yeah, I guess I just wonder if that was a movie-ism.
Andrew: Yeah. Jim Kay, give us an illustration. We must know. [laughs]
Micah: There you go. Book 5, coming up. Boggarts.
Andrew: You’re right, Laura, it probably was a movie-ism.
Micah: Yeah. I mean, I would almost imagine just Moody looking up through the ceiling and into the cupboard and just seeing this glow or this aura, and he’s just able to identify that as being a boggart. Harry also overhears Kingsley when he shows up at Grimmauld Place, and he hears him say, “Hestia’s just relieved me, so she’s got Moody’s cloak now, thought I’d leave a report for Dumbledore.” I felt like this was just enough information for us to get an understanding that the Order are clearly taking turns at doing something, and it’s obviously very important if a member of the Order requires a Invisibility Cloak to be able to do it. And Kingsley is also leaving a report for Dumbledore, so they clearly need to be filling him in on what’s going on.
Emily: And it’s not just taking turns watching Harry, which is what at the beginning they thought he was doing, because Harry is now here, so they’re obviously also watching something else.
Micah: Clearly, it’s more important than Harry if they’re sending Hestia and Kingsley to guard it, or watch it.
[Andrew and Emily laugh]
Andrew: Well, maybe it’s related to protecting Harry. Could it be sneaking through the Ministry trying to get a…? Because they were reviewing those floor plans, right, in the previous chapter or two? Could they be trying to get a better idea of how the Department of Mysteries is laid out? Or they’re trying to figure out where Voldemort’s followers are at the moment?
Laura: I think they might be standing guard at the Hall of Prophecies, because isn’t that what Mr. Weasley is doing later in the book when Harry has the dream? Sorry, spoiler alert.
[Andrew and Emily laugh]
Micah: Spoilers.
[Laura laughs]
Micah: We should have a little button… oh, wait, hold on. I got something for a spoiler alert.
[screaming goat sound]
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: What is that, Micah?
Micah: Laura, did you hear about that?
Laura: No.
Micah: So really quick story: When I was at LeakyCon, Eric gave me this gift that apparently a listener sent in over a year ago and he’s just now getting to me.
[Everyone laughs]
Micah: So that aside, it’s actually a screaming goat, and what you do is you just push down on the goat – it’s just standing on a little pedestal – and it makes this noise when you do it.
[screaming goat sound]
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: But it’s really…
Laura: Is that from the goats that yell like people video?
Emily: Yeah, I think it is. It sounds just like that video.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: I think so. It’s really cool. I enjoy it a lot.
Andrew: [laughs] He enjoys it a lot.
Micah: It’s great. So if you were the listener that sent it, please let me know. But anyway, yeah, we can use that as our spoiler alert sound from now on.
Andrew: Sure.
Emily: Or anytime the portrait screams, of his mother, you can just keep pushing it.
Andrew: Oh, there you go. [laughs]
Micah: There you go. She’s screamed a few times in this chapter, thanks to Mundungus.
Emily: The doorbell.
Micah: Yeah, the doorbell.
Andrew: Laura, that makes sense, though. Right answer, Laura.
Laura: Ding, ding, ding.
Micah: Well, speaking of screaming goats, I wanted to talk about the Weasley twins.
[Emily laughs]
Micah: Nothing related to them. But yeah, I guess as an adult going back and reading this book, I was just really impressed by their business savvy.
Andrew: Yeah, why can’t we do something like this?
Micah: Yeah, and they’re just on the ball. Even in this chapter, they’re stuffing things into their pockets and looking to test things out. They’re actually serving as their own test subjects, which they tell Harry about. They’re putting the Triwizard winnings that Harry won last year to good use. We learn that they’re running a mail-order business, and this goes back to what I was talking about earlier with what Chris Rankin was saying about Percy; you really get to see how smart the Weasley twins are, and I don’t think they often get enough credit for how smart they are to be able to do a lot of what they’re doing. I think it takes a lot of advanced magic to make a lot of the things that they’re creating, and yeah, I just wanted to give them their kudos.
Andrew: And they’re just so handy. And of course, credit to J.K. Rowling for coming up with these types of things. The Skiving Snackboxes are so genius, but I was thinking they would absolutely be abused by Muggle students; Muggle students would be using them every day. Would Hogwarts kids not?
Laura: I mean, do we think Fred and George care?
Andrew: Well, I just… but if people are using them every day, then they’re going to get banned from Hogwarts, probably. They’re going to find out what’s going on at some point, and then it’s a wasted product.
Micah: But this is intentional writing, though, obviously, on the part of J.K. Rowling, because it just becomes another thing that Umbridge is able to ban in this year at Hogwarts. And I think that if Dumbledore is headmaster, I think he lets it slide.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: I don’t really see him cracking down too hard on Fred and George for this side business.
Andrew: No, he probably gets a kick out of all these things. He just won’t admit it.
Emily: I liked your point in the document, though, Andrew, that maybe it’s the price. Maybe they’re really expensive, so you’ve got to save it and wait for a time that’s really worth doing this.
Andrew: And speaking of money… and Micah, you said adult Micah is very impressed by the Weasley twins. Adult Andrew is sad that Harry didn’t negotiate partial ownership of the joke shop before handing the money over. He could have gotten a lot of money out of this endeavor. [laughs] I’m thinking like Shark Tank; you guys watch that show?
Laura: Yeah, but isn’t Harry already pretty well off?
Andrew: Yeah, but… greed. [laughs]
Emily: He would just reinvest. I mean, it wouldn’t really be worth it to him, I don’t think.
Andrew: I just think it should have been like Shark Tank on ABC when the sharks are like, “I’ll give you 100,000 Galleons for 10% of the business,” and then Harry wouldn’t have needed to become an Auror after Hogwarts. He could have just continued to make money, passive income from Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes.
Micah: So I figure we could talk a little bit more about Kreacher, because he makes a couple of appearances in this chapter. He has some nice things to say about Molly.
[Emily laughs]
Micah: Laura, I don’t know if you want to read this, but apparently he’s quite… his sense of smell is very good based on his initial comments about her.
Laura: Yeah, so he says of Molly,
“Smells like a drain and a criminal to boot, but she’s no better, nasty old blood traitor with her brats messing up my Mistress’s house, oh my poor Mistress, if she knew, if she knew the scum they’ve let in her house, what would she say to old Kreacher? Oh, the shame of it, Mudbloods and werewolves and traitors and thieves, poor old Kreacher, what can he do…”
Andrew: [laughs] Laura, you have to read every Kreacher line from now until the end of the book.
Laura: I will, I will.
[Emily and Micah laugh]
Laura: I kind of love Kreacher.
Andrew: [laughs] “Oh, my poor mistress.” Kreacher is just so mean, and he’s doing it right in front of Sirius, and I’m wondering why Sirius doesn’t say, “Hey.” Issue a new command. “Thou shall not insult Mudbloods, or say the word ‘Mudbloods.'”
Micah: Right, do something that would prevent him from saying those types of things. But I wonder if he would listen.
Andrew: He has to!
Emily: Well, he thinks he’s saying them in his own head; that’s what they keep talking about, is he doesn’t really even realize he’s saying them out loud. So he already thinks he’s being polite externally, so I don’t know if it would do anything.
Andrew: Hmm.
Laura: And I also wonder if house-elves even have… if they understand the concept of private thoughts. Because even Dobby in Book 2, when he was bad mouthing the Malfoys, it came out and then he would start beating himself for what he said, and so I wonder if this concept of internalized thoughts is something that even occurs to them, that they’re allowed that level of privacy.
Emily: That’s very interesting.
Micah: Yeah, that’s an interesting point.
Andrew: Maybe Sirius could have asked him, “Delete the word ‘Mudblood’ from your vocabulary. Don’t even think that word.”
Emily: [laughs] Like a computer?
Andrew: Yes, yes. Kreacher is a robot, right?
Laura: I don’t know. It makes me think about… I don’t know if anybody here has maybe an older relative who uses language that is not 2019-approved.
Andrew: Right. [laughs]
Laura: And I think a lot of times when people are dealing with family members like that, they default to the state of, “We’re not going to change anything about this person, so do I even want to have that fight?”
Andrew: That’s true, that’s true.
Micah: That’s a great point. Kreacher is kind of like the dirty old grandmother that has no filter.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: Right. Nonetheless, we’ve been told that wizards can tell their house-elves what to and not to do, and it’s just hard to watch this knowing that Sirius, Kreacher’s master, is right there. I see the point about he doesn’t even realize that he’s saying these things out loud, but there’s got to be something you could do. “Mudblood” is offensive to Hermione and everybody else. It’s not healthy for a child like her to hear it.
Laura: I don’t even think Sirius wants to be Kreacher’s master, though, so I don’t even think he’s in that mentality of telling Kreacher what to do, because he doesn’t want to have to deal with him in the first place.
Micah: And he even says that he would be happy to free Kreacher but he knows too much about the Order, which to me, stood out as another example of Dumbledore overlooking Grimmauld Place as this safe haven for the Order of the Phoenix.
Emily: Yeah, or they should have let him go before they started talking about stuff there. When they were checking it out, one person just being like, “Oh, there’s a house-elf here; he might be a liability. Let’s release him, and then we can move in.”
Laura: I wonder how that would have worked, though, because the only person who could release him would be Sirius, right?
Emily: Ostensibly, yeah.
Laura: And then if he’s freed, then he’s free to go tell whoever he wants, “Oh, hey, by the way, I saw Sirius Black. He freed me.”
Andrew: [laughs] Or he’d just be walking around town, just being like, “Sirius, Sirius, you were so annoying last week,” out loud without anybody prompting him.
[Emily and Laura laugh]
Micah: He also makes a bunch of statements about the relationship between Mrs. Black and Sirius, and Sirius later on in the chapter tells Harry about how he used to go to Harry’s grandparents when he would run away from his own home, and it just shows you that Sirius has had a rough upbringing. He really is not aligned with his family much in any way, aside from a few cousins that we’ll learn about a little bit later on, but for the most part, it seems like he did not get along with his parents. He did not get along with his brother, as far as we know. It’s kind of a sad story.
Laura: Especially knowing what we know about Regulus, that Sirius doesn’t know.
Micah: Right. Yeah, and even when they’re going through the tapestry and looking at all of the names of the family members, he says about Regulus, “I doubt he was ever important enough to be killed by Voldemort in person. From what I found out after he died, he got in so far, then panicked about what he was being asked to do and tried to back out.” And while there is some truth to that, yeah, Sirius doesn’t realize the level of bravery that his brother demonstrated in order to try to destroy a Horcrux.
Laura: Something else that I thought was really interesting when looking at the family tree was Harry asked Sirius if his parents had been Death Eaters, and Sirius said something along the lines of, “Oh no, they definitely weren’t, but they sure thought Voldemort had the right idea. A lot of people thought that until it became clear a lot of the horrific things that he was carrying out, and at that point, it was too late.” And I thought that was a really interesting commentary on the rise of totalitarianism and that passive acceptance that people have historically had in the face of tyrannical leaders.
Emily: Yeah, well, it totally made me think of Crimes of Grindelwald.
Laura: Yep.
Emily: In the same way everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah, I can get behind this,” because he hasn’t started doing crazy, terrible stuff yet that they deem as horrific, and by then they’re already too into the ideology.
Andrew: And might not want to admit that they’re wrong. [laughs]
Emily: Yeah, totally.
Laura: Also, I think a really cool Crimes of Grindelwald connection here is the “Always pure.” I don’t speak French, so I couldn’t pronounce this correctly, but the Black family motto being in French, and knowing what we know about the Lestrange family.
Emily: Yes.
Laura: It just makes me wonder if we’re going to see any connections to the Black family.
Andrew: I think so.
Micah: It’s certainly possible. I don’t see why not. I mean, Bellatrix marries into the Lestrange family.
Andrew: And Rowling’s already got that tree together, so it won’t be hard for her to find a connection somewhere.
Emily: [laughs] Yeah, I was going to say, we already have family trees going on for both of them.
Andrew: What is the French pronunciation, Micah? We’ve been waiting.
Micah: Oh, it’s “Toujours pur.”
Andrew: Oh, that’s easy. “Toujours pur.”
Micah: It’s easy, yeah.
Andrew: Okay. Also the answer to this week’s Quizzitch question.
Micah: Yeah. But I also think “Malfoy” could potentially be a French surname as well.
Laura: I think so too, yeah.
Andrew: So in this scene, Harry, I think, further falls in love with Sirius and a deeper connection between them grows, because Harry finds out that when Sirius escaped Grimmauld Place, he went to James’s. And Harry absolutely loves hearing that, because Harry, too, wants to run away from home, in this case, Privet Drive, and live with Ron or Hermione, or just get back to Hogwarts. And Sirius, too, despises the home that he has grown up in, so Harry just has found yet another reason to love Sirius so much. And you just add that on top of everything else, and it makes the end of this book all the more painful for Harry and the reader.
Laura: Yeah, and Micah, to your previous point about Malfoy, that surname, if you tease it apart, it’s part Latin and part French, but when you do that, it means “bad faith.” So yeah, definitely a French connection there.
Micah: Yeah. And I think Harry is very shocked to learn that all these pure-blood families are interrelated, and Sirius makes the point that, “Well, if you’re looking to keep the bloodlines pure, there’s only really one way to do that.” [laughs] So a lot of these families, including the Weasleys, are related to each other. And Sirius points out that Tonks is his cousin, and he’s related to the Lestranges and the Malfoys as well. And we get a little bit more of character history on Tonks, just learning about her mother and the fact that her mother married a Muggle, and that for that, I believe she was burned off the Black family tree, as was Sirius.
Laura: Yeah, and I mean, reading something like this definitely is jarring, and I think we can see why it’s jarring for Harry, because you’re like, “But wait, if you’re all related, then there’s some weird chromosomal stuff at play here.” But the interesting thing is that in the world and in many of our cultures, this was not uncommon up until relatively recently. I mean, even if you look at European royal families…
Emily: Oh, yeah.
Laura: … they’re all related to each other; everybody is descended from Queen Victoria. So this is a pretty common thing with well-to-do families.
Emily: Pure-bloods.
[Everyone laughs]
Micah: Yeah, and what about this idea of being an outcast or being shunned from your family for…? Whether it’s marrying somebody who is not like you, or for going against the status quo of the family and deciding that they didn’t want to have anything to do with your way of thinking. I think it’s still, even, very relevant to today’s society.
Laura: Oh, yeah. I think that happens all the time.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s awful. It’s sad.
Micah: And Andrew, when you were saying this is one of those things that a good character hates but fans love, is this just going through the family tree, or…?
Andrew: Well, so we were speaking a few months ago about the Dark Mark, and we had a little debate about why do people get the Dark Mark as a tattoo, or buy clothing with the Dark Mark on it and whatnot. Here’s another thing, the Black family tree, that people absolutely love, and it’s kind of an awful Black family heirloom. We’re looking at this family of pure-bloods, and we’re looking at this family tree where if somebody defects, they are burned out of the family tree, and people love this thing. I mean, MinaLima just turned it into wallpaper that you can buy for $100 a roll. [laughs] People are going to decorate their whole house in it.
Emily: Oh my gosh.
Andrew: Or you can buy the graphic artwork, and it’s featured in a ton of places. It’s just… everybody loves this family tree just because of how beautiful it is, and yet it’s so bad. [laughs]
Laura: Yeah, I mean, I think that just goes back to the discussion we had about “This is fiction,” and it’s important to be able to draw the connections between these books and the real world instances that have inspired them. But at the end of the day, it’s also important to be able to reconcile fiction from reality, so I don’t think that… it goes back to the discussion where it was like, I don’t think that people who have Dark Mark tattoos even are saying, “Yeah, I’m all about murder.”
Andrew: [laughs] Right.
Laura: I don’t think that’s what that means.
Andrew: Right, they like how it looks. They like having an emo side to them, a dark side to them.
Laura: Hey, I have an emo side to me, so I understand.
Andrew: I know. When are you getting a Dark Mark or Black family tree wallpaper?
Laura: I would not. [laughs]
Andrew: Oh, you’re not?
Laura: I would not. I would be more likely to get the Deathly Hallows than that.
Andrew: Fair, fair. And then towards the end of this chapter, Harry is thinking about his hearing, and he’s like, “Oh, gosh, what if I have to go live at Privet Drive forever if I’m kicked out of Hogwarts? I don’t want to do that. Sirius, can I come live with you?” And Sirius doesn’t give Harry a firm “Yes”; he doesn’t really give him any answer. And I thought that was kind of terrible, because Harry is really down in the dumps right now. He is dreading the hearing, and he needs some support right now. He’s not getting it from Dumbledore. He’s looking to the next best guy, Sirius, who he sees as a father figure; he just bonded with him over this story of running off the James’s. He’s like, “Can I stay with you?” And Sirius is just like, “Hm.” Why couldn’t have Sirius just said, “Yeah, you can,” just to make him feel a little better?
Laura: Well, I don’t think Sirius wants to tell Harry a lie, because what if this hearing turns out badly, and then Harry has to go back to Privet Drive at least once a year to seal his protection? So I think this is actually a moment of Sirius exercising some restraint that’s maybe not characteristic of him at other points in this book.
Andrew: But he still could have gone back to Privet Drive once a year while living at Grimmauld Place, just to check in with the Dursleys. “Hey, you guys. Brought you some Christmas gifts. Vernon, got you a birthday gift. How you doing? Good to see you. Okay, bye.”
Laura: Do we think it’d be that easy? If the Dursleys thought he was living with his godfather, would they open their door willingly to him?
Andrew: Just to step in for an afternoon, have some tea. Some foreign tea.
[Laura and Micah laugh]
Laura: Do you think they would offer him anything?
Andrew: Harry could bring the foreign tea. [laughs]
Micah: There you go. Well, also, we learn from Sirius that Grimmauld Place has every security measure known to wizardkind. It’s unplottable, and Dumbledore added his own protection to it. So what place is safer? Privet Drive? I don’t know.
Andrew: Right.
Micah: Could have saved Moody’s life if they would have just went to Grimmauld Place.
Andrew: And Sirius also said, “I am sure that this hearing is going to go in your favor tomorrow,” so just lie anyway. “Yes, you can come stay with me.”
Micah: Just make him feel good.
Andrew: Yes! That’s all I’m asking for. Make poor Harry feel good in this moment.
Laura: I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t want Harry to set the bar too low. A little bit of anxiety is okay in situations like this; that little bit of anxiety is what pushes you to perform, right? And so if Harry was going into this thinking, “Oh, well, worst case scenario, I still get to be part of the wizarding world,” that might impact how he behaves during this hearing. So I think it’s probably a good thing that Sirius didn’t dangle the carrot of “You can come live with me. We can basically just be bachelors together.”
Micah: [laughs] There’s a very, very, very, very, very brief mention of “a heavy locket that none of them could open” when they are cleaning out one of the rooms at Grimmauld Place, and nobody paid it any attention. Except for Kreacher; Kreacher paid it a lot of attention. But a very quick mention of a Horcrux, which we’ll find out more about later on in Half-Blood Prince. But yeah, I mean, laying the groundwork early, J.K. Rowling.
Emily: I know. It’s cool.
Laura: I wonder if handling a Horcrux is like radiation poisoning. They don’t know that this thing is radioactive, and they’re all handling it. Did they all get some slight amount of Horcrux poisoning if they touch this?
Andrew: Well, being around it, you feel different, right? So yeah.
Emily: That may take longer than a second, because they had to wear it for a little while before they start feeling it.
Andrew: That’s true.
Emily: Kind of like the ring. You just put it on once, it’s not going to affect you, but if you keep having it around, it’s going to get worse and worse.
Andrew: Right.
Micah: All right, well, I think that kind of wraps up the chapter. The only other thing that we had here was that Harry learns that Dumbledore came by in the middle of the night and decided once again not to say anything to him, especially at a moment when he could have really needed him.
Andrew: Right.
Micah: He has his hearing tomorrow, and Dumbledore nowhere to be found. At this point, why would anybody even say the name Dumbledore to Harry? Don’t even mention the fact that he was here.
Andrew: Yeah. [laughs]
Laura: It’s so rude.
Andrew: And boy, for the reader, that’s a punch to the gut as well, right? I still remember feeling really down knowing that Harry was let down by Dumbledore once again.
Laura: Yeah, we even saw McGonagall briefly in this chapter.
Andrew: Yeah, in Muggle clothes!
[Emily laughs]
Andrew: But I guess that makes his appearance at the hearing all the sweeter, so worth it for the temporary amount of pain that we and Harry go through?
Micah: I guess so. It just kind of ends the chapter on a down note knowing that he has this hearing coming up that’s going to be a really important event to him – he’s already extremely anxious about it, as we’ve mentioned – and we find out that Dumbledore stopped by and didn’t bother to even talk to Harry.
Andrew: Yeah. “Hey, good luck tomorrow. Hey, you got this, champ. Hey, we’ll go party after the hearing so you have something to look forward to.” [laughs] “I’m going to sit you down and tell you everything after the hearing.”
Micah: Right. So that kind of wraps up this chapter. It’s one, I think, that’s loaded with a lot of different nuggets, a lot of different little pieces of information, especially with the Black family tapestry and then the Horcrux and Kreacher.
Emily: And there’s a lot of foreshadowing.
Andrew: Do you think J.K. Rowling was trying to make people pay attention to the locket by calling it heavy? I feel like there was a little hint there. It’s not just any locket; it’s a heavy one, heavy with importance.
[Emily laughs]
Micah: It’s got a piece of somebody’s soul in it.
Emily: Super heavy.
Andrew: That weighs 20 lbs., at least. How much does a part of a soul weigh, I wonder?
Laura: I think it depends on the substance of the soul.
[Emily laughs]
Andrew: So Voldemort’s soul?
Laura: I think it’s probably…
Micah: Pretty light.
Laura: [laughs] You think so? I think Mundungus Fletcher would have a very light soul. Maybe Percy, too.
Andrew: I don’t know, but I think there was a little clue there by calling it heavy. It just kind of stands out.
Micah: Yeah, but at this point as a reader, we have really no clue as to the fact that Voldemort created Horcruxes.
Laura: And this is so brilliant because over the last few chapters, we’ve seen so much crap like this. I mean, this is literally like an episode of Hoarders.
Andrew: Yeah, these hippies, they’ve got everything.
Emily: Totally.
Andrew: A heavy locket, who cares? Not a big deal. All right, so the Umbridge Suck count remains unchanged at three. This toll will skyrocket next chapter, though, hopefully.
Laura: Yep.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: Hasn’t been moving.
Laura: Oh, I think we’re getting there.
Connecting the Threads
Andrew: Laura, what threads did you find?
Laura: So there were a few in this one, which is actually pretty cool because at first glance, this chapter comes across as a pacing chapter, but knowing of what all we know, J.K. Rowling actually set up a lot in this chapter. So a really fun thread – and Micah, I think you noticed that too – is Buckbeak. Buckbeak was introduced in Chapter 6 of Prisoner of Azkaban, “Talons and Tea Leaves.”
Andrew: Whaaat!
Laura: And in Chapter 6 of Order of the Phoenix, this chapter, we learn that he is in Sirius’s room, so we’re introduced to him both times in the sixth chapter, which is pretty cool.
Micah: Yep.
Laura: We also see this continuing theme of Sirius as a prisoner. Throughout Prisoner of Azkaban, he of course escaped Azkaban, but he had to live his life in his Animagus form as a dog, and now he’s having to live his life imprisoned in the family home that he never wanted to come back to. Something else that I think is an interesting connecting the thread, but it’s also a bit of a contrast: In Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry has pretty easy access to Dumbledore, whereas in Order of the Phoenix, he does not. But in Prisoner of Azkaban, he has limited access to Sirius, and in Order of the Phoenix, he has almost unlimited access to Sirius. So Sirius and Dumbledore’s roles kind of flip here between the books, which is pretty cool. And this goes along with Dumbledore being really open with Harry in Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry being in a place where he’s willing to accept pretty much anything Dumbledore tells him; now that Dumbledore is limiting access, Harry is questioning him hardcore. Also, just a little fun thing: Draco is pretty prominent in Chapter 6 of Prisoner of Azkaban, because this is the chapter where he’s attacked by Buckbeak. And in Chapter 6 of Order of the Phoenix, we learn that he’s related to Sirius, who is also storing Buckbeak in his house.
[Emily and Micah laugh]
Emily: In the bedroom.
Andrew: Where he definitely doesn’t fit. It’s like a orca whale at SeaWorld type of situation.
Laura: I know!
Andrew: Very poor treatment.
Laura: Well, and imagine all the poop.
Andrew: Oh! Well, we have Evanesco for that.
[Laura laughs]
Emily: Well, they know that they have that… I was just going to say, yeah, we just saw that spell.
Andrew: I wonder if he makes Kreacher clean it up.
Laura: Oh.
Andrew: [laughs] Too mean? Too far?
Laura: I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.
[Emily laughs]
Andrew: Yeah. “Stop talking shit; start cleaning up shit!” [laughs]
Micah: Poor Kreacher.
MVP of the Week
Andrew: Time now for MVP of the Week. I’m going to give it to the tapestry for giving Harry what Sirius never could: his backstory.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: I’m surprised it just took this long to come out, but that’s one reason that I love this chapter. Hearing about all these connections, this pure-blood family and its history.
Micah: I’m going to give my MVP to Kreacher for saving the locket Horcrux. We don’t know yet that he’s done it, but we will very far down the line. But yeah, Kreacher.
Andrew: Good job, from future Micah.
Laura: Yeah, except for the part where he lets Mundungus steal it, but we’ll leave that. I said Hermione, because clearly, if everyone just listened to her, a lot less bad beep would happen.
[Andrew laughs]
Emily: Like always. I gave mine to Marie Kondo…
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Emily: … because I just literally couldn’t not think about that when I was watching it. I even watched it recently, and it’s just the same; they were doing the same thing, but in the magical world. But not just because it’s helping Sirius’s mental health, I think, to throw a lot of the stuff away, but also because at the end it’s saying Harry’s mind was off his impending doom so much during all the cleaning because he was so busy that it allowed him to have fun for the first time all summer, and so even though they were doing crazy gross cleaning and things were trying to attack them and hurt them – and the robes trying to strangle Ron, which I found hilarious – but overall, this cleaning spree helped take his mind off all of his trauma from the previous year and impending possible terribleness.
Andrew: Now I’m just picturing Sirius sitting in Buckbeak’s room watching Netflix, scrolling through. “Oh, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo? This looks like a good show.”
Emily: Right, “I need to clean my house; I could watch this.”
[Andrew laughs]
Emily: Because she would just be so cute coming there, being all adorable, telling them to love the mess.
Andrew: I love mess, too, Marie.
Emily: Yeah, it would be so cute.
Rename the Chapter
Andrew: Now let’s Rename the Chapter. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 6, “Pure-bloods ONLY!”
Micah: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 6, “The Ramblings of a Demented House-Elf.”
Andrew: Aww.
Laura: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 6, “The Nazi Wizard House.”
[Emily laughs]
Micah: Oof.
Emily: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 6, “The Doorbell.”
Andrew: The doorbell.
[screaming goat sound]
Emily: Which was mentioned… yeah, right? It was mentioned like, 100 times in the last two chapters, and it was always important stuff going on that Harry isn’t partial to. So I felt like he just kept getting reminded about it.
Andrew: I noticed that the word “undertone” was used three times in this chapter as well. It was like J.K. Rowling just discovered that word and really wanted to use it.
Emily: She didn’t Control + Find for that word in this chapter.
Andrew: [laughs] If you have any feedback about today’s discussion, send it on in via MuggleCast.com; there’s a contact form there, or email MuggleCast@gmail.com. Or call us, 1-920-3-MUGGLE; that’s 1-920-368-4453. Or if you really want to be on the cutting edge, you can send us a voice memo. Just record it on your phone and then send it to MuggleCast@gmail.com. We’ve actually gotten a few over the past week. It’s so cool. It’s kind of surreal to hear our listeners in such high quality, so thank you to everybody. No matter how you contact us, we really appreciate it. It’s really great to hear from you, because this is a very one-way street when we’re recording; we don’t hear back from you instantly. So it’s really nice to hear the feedback throughout the week.
Quizzitch
Andrew: Time now for some Quizzitch. Last week’s question was: The Black family tapestry reads “The Most Noble and Ancient House of Black,” but what is written directly beneath that line? It was “Always pure.” Or what, Micah?
Micah: “Toujours pur.”
Andrew: Yeah, see, it’s not easy, right? That’s why I passed it to you.
Micah: Thanks.
Andrew: This week’s winners included MereMuggle13, Jason King – I won’t say his Twitter handle, BuffDaddy1969. Not entirely appropriate for the show.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: And Bookworm62442. And Micah, what is this week’s Quizzitch question?
Micah: This week’s Quizzitch question is: At what time does Harry wake up for his Ministry hearing?
Andrew: Okay, so you can tweet us the answer and use the hashtag Quizzitch. Thanks to everybody who participates. Twitter.com/MuggleCast; be sure to follow us there if you have Twitter. You can also follow us on Facebook, username MuggleCast, and Instagram, also username MuggleCast. Oh, and don’t forget our LinkedIn, right, Micah?
Micah: That’s right. It’s exciting.
Andrew: [laughs] It’s going great. We would also appreciate your support on Patreon; Patreon.com/MuggleCast is where you can pledge today, and you will receive instant access to tons of benefits. We just hosted a Slug Club meetup prior to this week’s episode; Micah and I hung out with a bunch of our listeners for about a half hour. Just talked Harry Potter, talked about our new Goblet of Fire illustrated editions, talked about where everybody was living, stuff like that. Good times; it’s fun to hang out with the listeners face to face. You will also have access to ad-free MuggleCast, our exclusive Facebook group where there’s always a lot going on, we also have a feature called the Links Line, where once a month you will be able to answer a question that we post on Patreon, and we might read your answer on the air. You’ll also get a physical gift every year. You’ll also get bonus MuggleCast. You get so, so much. Truly, so, so much. And if you pledge at the…
Micah: And even the opportunity to co-host the show. Oh, sorry, was that what you were going to say?
Andrew: Yeah, I was just [through gritted teeth] getting to that.
[Emily laughs]
Andrew: If you pledge at the Slug Club level, you can be like Emily and join us on the show at some point. Thank you so much, Emily. I hope you’ve had a good time today.
Emily: Yay! Yeah, it’s been awesome. So fun.
Andrew: Micah, Laura, and Emily, it’s hard to believe, but we’ve had close to 80 people co-host the show with us now.
Laura: Really? Wow.
Andrew: The time has flown.
Laura: It really has.
Andrew: Yeah. I’m really proud of that, and I know it’s a benefit that people really enjoy, so very happy that we get to do that. So again, Patreon.com/MuggleCast; we really appreciate your support. If you do listen, by the way, and you’re not subscribed, please do that. Just hit that subscribe button no matter what podcasting app you use, and if you use iTunes, we would really appreciate a review. Just a quick, honest review. We would appreciate that because it helps new people discover the show. All right, that does it for this week’s episode. Thanks, everybody, for listening. I’m Andrew.
Micah: I’m Micah.
Laura: I’m Laura.
Emily: And I’m Emily.
Andrew: Bye, everybody!
Laura: See ya.
Emily and Micah: Bye.