Transcript for MuggleCast Episode #708, How I Met My Father (OOTP Chapter 28, ‘Snape’s Worst Memory’)
Show Intro
[Show music plays]
Andrew Sims: Welcome to MuggleCast, your weekly ride into the world of Harry Potter. I’m Andrew.
Eric Scull: I’m Eric.
Laura Tee: I’m Laura.
Andrew: We are your Harry Potter friends, talking about the books, the movies, and the upcoming TV show, so make sure you follow us in your favorite podcast app, and that way you’ll never miss an episode. This week we are dodging enchanted fireworks and a puffed-up Draco Malfoy as we launch an all-out protest against Umbridge and her regime – anything, really, except preparing for our Occlumency lessons – because we’re discussing Chapter 28, “Snape’s Worst Memory,” of Order of the Phoenix. And helping us with today’s discussion is our friend Julian Wamble. Welcome, Julian, back to MuggleCast.
Julian Wamble: We are back. Thank you so much for having me.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s great to have you. You are a podcaster yourself, right?
Julian: It’s true. Last time I was here, I was just putting it out into the universe that it was going to be a thing, and now it’s actually a thing.
Eric: Ahh, congrats.
Julian: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, it’s called Critical Magic Theory, and basically what we do is they’re just deep dives into characters. So every episode, I put out a survey about a character, people fill it out, we analyze it together, and I read through people’s essays, basically. And so yeah, now I guess next week we are doing Dolores Umbridge, so this episode feels very apropos.
Eric and Laura: Wow.
Julian: It’s kismet.
Andrew: A little appetizer before your podcast next week.
Julian: It’s true, it’s true.
Andrew: And I know you’re a real podcaster now because I think I saw you’re wearing a shirt with your podcast name on it, right?
Julian: Merch, absolutely.
Eric: There you go.
Andrew: Yeah, you’ve got merch. That’s how you know you’re a real podcaster. [laughs]
Julian: Yeah, yeah, it is.
Eric: “Be critical…”
Julian: “… stay magical.” Yeah, that’s my sign-off.
Andrew: Awesome, awesome. Well, it’s great to have you back, Julian. And also, we found you, I think, initially through TikTok. You have a pretty popular Harry Potter TikTok channel at @ProfW, right?
Julian: Yep, that’s it.
Andrew: Cool. What do you do on there?
Julian: Well, I post snippets of my class. I teach a class at GW called “Harry Potter and the Politics of Social Identity,” and I have been posting snippets on there for a couple years now. And I was on sabbatical this year, so I had to take some time and come up with something else, so I’ve also started doing these little skits of what it would be like if the Muggle Studies professor was an actual Muggle, which has been a lot of fun.
Andrew: Awesome.
Julian: And yeah, so it’s just fun stuff like that. Just being nerdy about Harry Potter.
Andrew: Fantastic. Glad to hear that course is still going too.
Julian: It is.
Andrew: We talked to you about that the last time you were on the podcast.
Julian: Yeah, yeah. I’ll be back at it in the fall.
Eric: I was going to say, did you have to appoint a successor for while you were on sabbatical?
Julian: No, the students just didn’t have it.
Eric: Oh man, if I had done everything right and got accepted to GW only to find out that it was the year that you were on sabbatical…
Julian: I know, I know, I know.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: I’d be so bummed.
Julian: I got a lot of emails from people asking to get into the class, and I was like, “There is no class.”
Andrew: Aww.
Julian: But it’s okay, I’m teaching it… well, for the seniors that graduated a few weeks ago, unfortunately, they couldn’t take it, but I’m teaching it again in the fall, and pretty much from here on out, I’ll probably teach it once in the fall and once in the spring, so people will have two chances take it.
Andrew: Oh, cool.
Eric: You mentioned that was happening the last time we spoke to you, about two years ago, that that was your first time doing it in both semesters.
Julian: Yeah, yeah, and so now we’re back. And I like it; it’s fun. It’s always a different group, and they always bring different things, so it’s a lot of fun.
Andrew and Eric: Cool.
Andrew: Yeah, I bet. I imagine you saying to these kids who wanted to go to your class but you’re on sabbatical, you were like, “Sorry, kids, no class this year, but I do have a podcast and a TikTok channel. Why don’t you check that out?”
[Laura laughs]
Julian: Yeah, I’m like, “Well, if this is a thing that you’re interested in, actually a precursor to this might be… I don’t know; I’m just saying it’s there for you, if you want it.”
Andrew: What a great way to promote the pod. [laughs]
Julian: Absolutely. I’m like, “Yeah, we kind of do the same thing. Not really, but…”
Andrew: No, that’s very cool.
News
Andrew: Well, before we get into Chapter by Chapter, there is a bit of news that was just breaking today, Thursday, June 5. Tom Felton is reprising his role as Draco Malfoy in the Cursed Child on Broadway! His performances will run for 19 weeks, starting this November, running through March. I’ve seen a lot of Draco girlies very excited about this. Did y’all see the photo of him as Draco in the Cursed Child?
Eric: Definitely.
Julian: Yeah, the side by side from… was it Chamber of Secrets?
Eric: Oh, of him with the wand?
Julian: Holding the wand in front of his face.
Andrew: Ah, yeah. Something about this photo is giving me an out of body experience too. It’s like, that is Draco, but older. I don’t know. Something about it is freaking me out, in a good way. It’s just bizarre.
Julian: It’s disconcerting how… because I refuse to believe that we’ve aged.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: No, no, we don’t look… no, no, no.
Julian: The idea that somehow he’s able to pull this off, and it’s a convincing thing, it’s strange to me. I refuse.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah. I guess that is the thing; we’re seeing our beloved Harry Potter family members older, and I’m talking about in character. We’re not used to seeing Tom Felton’s Draco older. You know what I mean?
Eric: Here’s what it must be: It must be that the prosthetics got so much better since they filmed the King’s Cross scene – the Epilogue – so the fact that they could age Tom Felton up convincingly… because otherwise he would just look to be 23 like the rest of us.
Andrew: [laughs] Right.
Julian: Exactly. Never underestimate the power of a good wig, you know?
[Eric laughs]
Laura: Right.
Andrew: Well, this is very cool news. A lot of people seem to be really excited about this. I would love to see him. I’m sure the theater is going to go nuts when he comes out on stage the first time every night. I was looking up his history with theater; he’s only dabbled in it in recent years. In 2022 he made his West End debut in the play 2:22 A Ghost Story; he portrayed the character Sam at London’s Criterion Theater. And then he also starred in A Child of Science at the Bristol Old Vic in 2024, so he’s only gotten into theater in the last three years. I guess he was like, “Hmm, what about that Harry Potter show? Maybe that’ll be my next one.”
Julian: “I wonder…”
Laura: Yeah. You know, there are a lot of fans who I think would be willing to sign petition after petition to get him cast as Lucius in the TV show.
Julian: Oh, yeah. The rumors are circulating. That’s what they want.
Andrew: Yeah, this is going to fuel those flames for sure.
Laura: Well, and think about the timing here. His performance runs from November through March. Lucius doesn’t really…
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: We’re not going to see him until Season 2…
Julian: It’s true.
Laura: I’m just throwing it out there.
Julian: Is he old enough to play Lucius?
Andrew: So apparently he’s 37, somebody in our Discord just said.
Eric: He could have an 11-year-old.
Andrew: Yeah, they can age him up a little further.
Julian: Okay, that’s where the wig comes in.
Andrew: He’ll do whatever he needs to get that Harry Potter money, I think.
Julian: True. Honestly.
Andrew: [laughs] So yeah, that’s very exciting. I guess I don’t know if any of us… Micah lives in New York, so maybe he’ll go and see this version of the show, if not one of us. Julian, you’re in DC, right? Have you seen Cursed Child?
Julian: Three or four times, yeah.
Andrew: [laughs] Okay.
Julian: I’ve seen every iteration. The two acts, I’ve seen it twice, and then I’ve seen most recently the one where they’ve condensed it down, made it gayer, and made it just one play.
Andrew: Okay, cool. I’ve only seen the two-part version. I want to see the gayer version.
Julian: Yeah, I didn’t even… when I saw it, I didn’t realize, and I was actually in the audience full on gasping and clutching my pearls, because I was like, “Is it just that I don’t remember this, or did they actively go…?” So then I was Googling it, because I was like, “Did they make this gayer and I just missed that?” And that’s exactly what happened.
Andrew: Oh, man. You just sold me on seeing this.
Laura: Wait, so I have a clarifying question, as someone who hasn’t seen Cursed Child. Am I hearing right now that there are two versions of Cursed Child out there, and one that is the progressive version, and the other that is the “No homo” version?
Eric: Well, I think they’re both progressive versions, because if I’m remembering correctly, what they did is they retracted Scorpius getting shunted with Rose Granger-Weasley at the end of the…
Laura: Oh, okay.
Eric: Or Albus Severus, sorry, was really heavily pushed to Rose Granger-Weasley, and then they made some script edits so that that was no longer the case. And then that ultimately was toned down… or not toned down, but split… or no, combined. The two acts of the show were combined after that first change occurred, so I think all of the versions will have the non-shoe-horned-into-heteronormativity version.
Laura: Okay. Well, that’s good.
Laura: I just wanted to clarify that. I was like, “If they’re actively doing both of those things right now, that’s wild.”
Eric: It’s hard to keep up… no, because on Broadway there’s the one-act version, but internationally, there’s still the two-act, two separate night…
Andrew: In London. Just in London they still have that two-part version. Other parts of the world, I think, is the single-act version.
Eric: Australia? It’s so hard to keep track, honestly.
Julian: It’s true. But in the London version – which is the one that I’ve seen most recently – in the London version, it’s still gay.
Andrew: Okay.
Eric: There you go.
Julian: So they did actively…
Andrew: It wasn’t when I saw it in London.
Julian: Yeah, so I saw it last September, and they condensed it down. And it was still two acts, but it was… they were still much shorter, and then they also gayed it up. So Happy Pride, everyone.
Andrew: Yeah, I was just going to say that myself. [laughs] Cool, thanks for all that information. All right, well, before we get to Chapter by Chapter, want to let our listeners know: If you love MuggleCast and want to help us keep the show running smoother than the surface of a smooth, smooth Pensieve, visit Patreon.com/MuggleCast and pledge today. You’ll get instant access to two bonus MuggleCast episodes every month. You’ll also get ad-free episodes, a new physical gift every year, and a lot more. What are we doing in bonus later this week, Eric?
Eric: We are playing the fun online drawing game Skribbl with one another. The last time that we played, just a few months ago, Laura was not able to make it, and I know that you, Laura, are a fan of Skribbl, so we will be playing it again with our list of Harry Potter-related words and phrases, and it’s going to be a good time.
Andrew: Yeah, so we play games, talk about other areas of the wizarding world, all kinds of things at Patreon.com/MuggleCast as part of bonus MuggleCast, so please do check that out. Other great ways to support us: You can pick up merch at MuggleCastMerch.com, you can leave us a review in your favorite podcast app, and please do tell a friend about the show. Lastly, visit MuggleCast.com for quick access to all this information and lots more, like our contact form.
Chapter by Chapter: Time-Turner
Andrew: All right, time for Chapter by Chapter, and we’re discussing Order of the Phoenix Chapter 28, “Snape’s Worst Memory.”
Eric: I regret to inform everyone that five years ago, when we talked about this on May 12 of 2020, we came up with what was ultimately the best episode title of all time, and we’re never going to top it. We should have just closed up shop. That episode was titled “How I Met Your Mother.”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: And here’s a clip from it.
[Ticking sound]
Dumbledore: Three turns should do it, I think. Good luck.
Ron: What the…?
[Bell dings]
[Whooshing sound]
Robotic voice: Episode 465.
Andrew: Peter is just kind of a loser, isn’t he? He’s just very…
Eric: He really just doesn’t have an obvious redeeming quality.
Andrew: Yeah, and he’s just infatuated with James catching the Snitch, and he’s a fanboy.
Micah: Yeah, I wonder why he’s a part of this group. Just because he just seems like he’s a tagalong, and he’s just clapping and doing cartwheels for anything that James does.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: He just basically is there to keep James happy, it seems like.
Andrew: And that’s probably why he’s there, yeah.
Laura: For some reason when I read him clapping, I imagine the clap reaction from Animal Crossing.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: “So impressive! Yes, yes!”
[Whooshing sound]
[Ticking sound]
Dumbledore: Mysterious thing, time.
[Bell dings]
Andrew: That’s two weeks in a row where people are hearing me call somebody a loser on this podcast. [laughs]
Eric: Oh, the connections.
Laura: One of them’s fictional, so there’s that.
[Andrew and Julian laugh]
Eric: During the pandemic – or as friends of mine recently called it, the panini – during the panini, we were all playing a lot of Animal Crossing and cozy games.
Julian: As one does.
Eric: Yeah, so these Time-Turner segments are fun little time capsules, as you would. But yes, so “How I Met Your Mother.” I don’t know what we’re going to call this episode.
Andrew: “How I Met Your Father.”
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: “How I Met My Father.”
Julian: Absolutely.
Chapter by Chapter: Main Discussion
Eric: All right. [laughs] Oh God, I’ve got to recover. Okay, so as we delve into this chapter, it may be alarming by which the speed of Umbridge’s ascent into the highest position at Hogwarts is. Of course, Dumbledore is gone, he had his triumphant leave, and all of a sudden it’s all Umbridge all the time. Nothing is holding her back from anything anymore. So we see a new Educational Decree get passed; she is now the Ministry-appointed headmistress of Hogwarts. And my first question would be: Do we think that there was a chance that that role would be given to McGonagall, say, the deputy headmistress, at least in an interim capacity? Or since the Ministry is ordering it, did they say, “No, so much is going on at the school; Umbridge, we need you”?
Andrew: I don’t think they would even want to give another person at Hogwarts a chance. Umbridge has been chomping at the bit for this type of opportunity, and here it is, so she and Fudge are going to move fast.
Laura: I mean, she’s the one that came up with the decree, right? She appointed herself, basically.
Andrew: I was wondering about that, too, because it says, “By order of the Ministry of Magic,” and is it signed…? It is signed Fudge, but she put him up to it. We all know that.
Eric: Well, yeah, she kind of… I think, because especially the circumstances of how Dumbledore left, where they realized he was trying to raise an army, they can no longer trust any of the… even if they did trust – which I don’t think they did – potential allies could be among the staff, and so they’re making it kind of an inside affair. Julian, as a political science teacher concerned with how power is distributed and things, does this track for fascist regimes or anything like that? When you read this chapter, what sticks out to you?
Julian: Yeah, I think that it makes sense that if the government is going to take over one thing, they’re going to have someone in it already, right? Which is Umbridge in this case, and then they’re also going to make it seem as if it’s as smooth as possible, right? It’s a smooth transition. So Dumbledore leaves, and then all of a sudden, somebody who’s already there… like, “How did she get here? How could this happen?” So it doesn’t necessarily alarm people. Now, naturally, everyone is alarmed. And what we see, right, is it’s kind of the same thing that happens in Deathly Hallows when Voldemort takes over, but it’s Pius Thicknesse, right, after Scrimgeour goes, and we see this very smooth transition into Pius Thicknesse. Everybody knows what’s really going on, but it feels fairly seamless. And I feel like when you are overtaking a government, if you want it to feel as not jarring as possible, to kind of mitigate the likelihood of uprising, and so in that way, I think it literally happened overnight. Literally, Dumbledore peaces out, and then the next morning everyone wakes up, and she’s headmistress, and so there’s really no time for dissent. There’s no time for any sort of protest of any kind; it’s done. And I think that if you want to do it effectively, that’s how you do it.
Eric: Got it.
Laura: And also, to your point, Julian, the majority of the school had no frame of reference for what happened that night, so as far as they know, they went to bed and they woke up in the morning and there was a new headmistress.
Julian: Yeah. And I feel like very few people actually recognize McGonagall as the deputy headmistress; it’s not a thing. She very rarely operates in that capacity…
Eric: That’s a good point.
Julian: … so the notion of her being the next person up, I don’t even think it would occur to most students that this would even be a thing, let alone that Dumbledore would just disappear in the dark of night, right?
Andrew: Yeah. And I think for us, our perspective is maybe a little warped because we’re viewing this from Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s view, so we see McGonagall more than the rest of the school probably does, the other three Houses. So maybe that’s partly why we’re asking ourselves, “Why not McGonagall?” Also, McGonagall has treated Umbridge poorly in the book thus far, so Umbridge ain’t about to do her any favors.
Eric: No.
Julian: And she’s so loyal to Dumbledore.
Eric: I think that’s the word for it, loyal, because it’s all about appointing loyalists to the Ministry right now, right? Which is how we get the Inquisitorial Squad, which is the lovely second surprise they get this morning, and it’s that Draco Malfoy and a team of Slytherins exclusively, for some reason, have all been appointed to this role as Inquisitorial Squad members, and they are going around the school on behalf of – they’ve been empowered by – Headmistress Umbridge to kind of… I don’t even know what their stated goal is. To root out… I mean, the only person we see embody this right now directly is Draco Malfoy, and he’s taking points willy-nilly from Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs for pretty much anything that ticks him off. So whatever the… he’s essentially a… like a militia? How would we describe what the Inquisitorial…? They’re spies. They’re like an extended hand of Umbridge around the school, more than she could have had prior to becoming Headmistress.
Julian: Yeah, I like spies. That feels right. Although, it’s not very cloak and dagger, right? Everyone kind of knows. And Draco is just so showy.
Andrew and Eric: Yeah.
Julian: He just wants everyone… he needs you to know he’s got power, which is so annoying. But yeah, there’s no secret about what he’s doing. And so in that way, he’s not the best spy, but that’s kind of what they’re doing, right? They’re just going to see and trying to figure out who’s talking about Umbridge in a certain way, who is giving voice to loyalty for Dumbledore, and things like that.
Eric: Well, and they’re punitive about it, right? So they’re empowered to… any kind of dissent that they see, they can immediately… they’re authorized to punish for, and that will create this environment where people silence themselves because they don’t want to lose House points.
Julian: Yep.
Andrew: I have to say, I can almost empathize with Umbridge’s decision to create the Inquisitorial Squad, because she just found out about Dumbledore’s Army. So yeah, she’s going to put together her own army.
Eric: Oh, this is just a reaction, a totally sane reaction to what Dumbledore did.
Andrew: Squad up.
Eric: Always blame the previous leader for your own insecurities.
[Andrew laughs]
Julian: I don’t disagree.
Laura: I mean, let’s be real; the Inquisitorial Squad existed before this. It’s just been named now. It’s been codified.
Julian: So true.
Laura: But Draco has been doing her bidding for a while now. We’ve already seen that she’s interfered and encouraged the Slytherins to participate in bad behavior.
Andrew: Yes. In Draco’s case specifically, he has very real power now. He can actually deduct House points, and it goes through; the trio are watching the points move in the Great Hall. He did get an extra level of power here. I’m just saying I understand where Umbridge is coming from by putting together this formal squad.
Julian: Yeah, if you want to get people on your side, and you want there to… again, if your goal here is to… you don’t need necessarily loyalty; you just need obedience. So you just need to make sure that there are people in the space who are going to be your eyes and ears, because she can’t do it all the time, and Filch can’t run around either and do all of this. So you need to have eyes and ears on the ground, and what do you do? You give people who are just as power-hungry as you power, and say, “Go do that, and do it against the people that you enjoyed already being antagonistic towards in the first place.” It’s the perfect recipe for her to make sure that her power is seen and felt without her actually having to be there to do it.
Eric: Wow. So we’re kind of talking about the groups that are sensitive. Draco goes straight to his arch-nemesis Harry Potter, and Ron and Neville and Ernie and all these kids that Umbridge would probably prefer weren’t even in the school.
Julian: Yep.
Eric: So in that way, they’re kind of outsiders. Here’s another aspect to it, though: We see that Filch has been made certain promises from Umbridge as well. Filch comes to collect Harry, who says, “I didn’t do it,” which is just… that’s the best possible response when you’re being taken to the headmistress’s office. [laughs] But we learn that the old punishments that Filch loves to talk about and reminisce about – and I’m pretty sure he has photos of him doing the old punishments under his pillow every night – but they’re coming back. Basically, Umbridge has told Filch that he’s going to be able to continue the old, long-outdated, I guess I want to say medieval torture methods. Things like chains, right? That he keeps polished just in case, we heard in a different book. And the other thing that Umbridge has promised Filch is that she’s going to remove Peeves. But something you said, Julian, a moment ago about playing to the Inquisitorial Squad’s existing nature to antagonize Harry and his friends, she’s doing the same with Filch here. Filch has a cruelty streak that I think is often overlooked because he’s so ineffectual about it, but if you really gave him exactly what he wanted, you would get a lot of probably torture in Hogwarts.
Julian: I don’t think she’s telling the truth. I think she’s lying.
Eric: Really.
Julian: I don’t think she… it feels like too much work. She’s too lazy to do all of that. I think she’s just telling him what she knows he wants to hear, which is what Umbridge does very well. I know we hate her, but she’s very effective at this. I think she’s very effective at telling people the things they want to hear so that they do the things that she wants them to do. And I think that she’s like, “Yeah, I’ll do all of that stuff,” but none of that is on her radar. She couldn’t care less about all of that stuff. She’s more interested in making sure that, again, she has minions to do the things that she wants them to do, and I feel like she’s just like, “Yeah, whatever. Yeah, Peeves. Sure, torture devices, whatever.”
[Eric laughs]
Julian: Like, “Yeah, whatever you want, I’ll do it. Just go and make sure that the kids stay in line.”
Eric: Well, I’ll agree with you about the Peeves thing. I don’t think she even has the power to do… something where she has to write to the Ministry, she could easily not do it and tell Filch that she tried.
Julian: Right.
Eric: And somebody at the… putting it off on Cornelius or someone else to actually authorize the… because apparently it’s a Ministry affair to remove the poltergeist from the school. That I see never happening, right? Broken promise. But wouldn’t it also serve Umbridge, her best interest, to have chains and things be available for use at Hogwarts? It would actually serve her as a deterrent to students who would misbehave to let them know that the old punishments are back, right? In that way…
Julian: But do you have to do it, or do you just threaten it?
Eric: Threaten it, yeah.
Julian: If you just let Filch run around telling students, “I’m going to get you and chain you up and beat you down,” then it’s like, “Ooh,” and all the students already know that he’s already too keen to do that in the first place, because he’s got something to prove. I think she’s just playing to his ego.
Laura: Yeah, I think so too. Because realistically, how’s he going to pull that off? He can’t overpower any of these kids, not really. So I think the second he tried to actually do it… I think he talks a lot. I agree with Julian; I think it’s all ego. I think if he was actually presented with the opportunity, I don’t think he’d know what to do.
Andrew: That’s interesting.
Laura: I don’t even know if he’s ever done that, or if he’s just trying to wax poetic and be nostalgic about something that never actually happened, not on his watch.
Andrew: Well, I think part of the reason he’s excited is because he is a Squib. He doesn’t have the capabilities to actually punish students through magical means, so finally he’s getting possibly the sign-off to actually use these medieval methods of punishing the students, so he feels like he has power at Hogwarts for the first time. But I just can’t believe Filch is getting this excited about Umbridge taking over, because considering how long he’s been at the school, he should know Dumbledore pretty well at this point. Does he really think this Umbridge situation is going to last? He’s overjoyed at the thought of Peeves getting out of there. I guess it’s fun for readers, but I just don’t know how he could possibly think that this is going to stick.
Eric: Yeah, I think he’s just been suppressed for too long, or his darker natures have been suppressed for too long by Dumbledore’s reign. He sees him as this kindly old man that doesn’t know what it really takes to subdue the criminal element at Hogwarts; that’s his position. So when Umbridge comes along and makes all these promises, he’s absolutely… I’m surprised Filch wasn’t part of the coup against Dumbledore in an earlier chapter.
Julian: It’s fascinating to me, because I think it’s… one thing about Filch that I always have to remind myself is not only that he’s a Squib, but that his presence at Hogwarts stands in the face of how we really understand who Squibs are as people, right? Because it’s like, “Oh, so you are a person who cannot perform magic, but fundamentally you are magical still, because you get to see Hogwarts.” You’re not… in theory, you shouldn’t even be able to be in the space if you weren’t magical, because there’s all these spells and enchantments. So every waking moment that he’s in that place, he’s constantly reminded of the thing that he doesn’t have, which I think could drive a person crazy. And so I feel like what’s fascinating about this moment and his relationship with Umbridge is that there’s a moment where I’m like, “Does she not know he’s a Squib?” When she tells him, “Don’t Stun the fireworks,” and Harry is like, “He couldn’t if he tried.”
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Julian: This is the first time that I was struck by that, because I was like, “Wait, she doesn’t have any idea.” And he’s like, “Oh, yeah. Sure, girl. Whatever.” He completely plays into it. And I think maybe that’s also why he has such an affinity for her, because she doesn’t realize the truth, and he gets to kind of fake and cosplay as a magical person for her in a way that he can’t for literally anyone else in the castle, because she is so ignorant of who he actually is and what he actually is.
Eric: Well, and that ignorance speaks to laziness on her part.
Julian: Oh, yeah.
Eric: She doesn’t even know the people that are closest and what their strengths and weaknesses and potential vulnerabilities are.
Andrew: As long as they’re loyal to her, that’s all she cares about.
Eric and Laura: Yeah.
Eric: So let’s talk about…
Laura: Until they do something she doesn’t like, and then the goal posts will shift, and we all know how that goes.
Eric: And they get into a big Twitter fight about it.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: So what Filch ends up doing is delivering Harry to potentially the worst situation he’s ever been delivered to, which we’ll get to in a minute. But first, let’s hear from our sponsors for this episode. I hope it’s a tea or something.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Like an herbal tea sponsor.
[Ad break]
Eric: Let’s talk about what Umbridge wants to see Harry about, and particularly, following Dumbledore’s flight, Umbridge has decided that she needs to know some things, including where Dumbledore went. I think she still sees – who wouldn’t? – Dumbledore as a threat, as a continued threat to her power, the stability of her reign here, and the stability of the Ministry, and so she wants to know where Dumbledore is. She knows that Harry wouldn’t tell her if he had his agency, so she’s written to Professor Snape and said, “Give me some Veritaserum.” And she makes a blatant, all-out attempt to do nothing short of poisoning Harry and giving him Veritaserum. How wild is this?
Julian: And also, how bad is she at it? That’s really what gets me.
Eric: Well, okay.
Andrew: “Drink up! Drink up!”
Julian: “Are you drinking?” Like, girl, you’re not even trying.
Eric: You know what’s crazy? Is how Harry almost doesn’t realize. He comes so close to…
Julian: It takes a cat that has an eye like Mad-Eye, and he’s like, “Oh, wait.”
Eric: “Uh, excuse me.” She almost succeeds. Unbelievable.
Andrew: “An eye? Keep an eye out? Mad?” Life pro tip for everybody: If anyone is ever telling you to keep drinking something, don’t. Unless it’s water, maybe. That might be the only time. [laughs]
Eric: Oh, yeah. Where you can say, “Keep up,” and it’s not being malicious in any way. [laughs]
Andrew: Or it’s like, “Drink the water to sober up,” maybe. That’s the only time. Make sure it’s real water.
Julian: Or if you’ve had a potion that is making you relive your worst memories, and you’re in a cave full of Inferi, then you also keep drinking.
Eric: Okay, there’s two.
Julian: There’s two situations.
Laura: Right. [laughs]
Julian: But even then, that’s still water.
Andrew: Yes.
Eric: It just… okay, on the one hand, this is a really cool connection to make, because there’s this cat on a plate that has eyes like Mad-Eye Moody on the back wall of Umbridge’s office. Is anyone else thinking of Deathly Hallows when Mad-Eye Moody’s magical eye is on the office door to Umbridge’s office at the Ministry?
Laura: Yeah. Ugh. That’s a horrible moment.
Eric: I don’t think I caught that on the previous read-through.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s an interesting through-line.
Laura: That’s a good catch.
Eric: Something about Umbridge, Mad-Eye, guarding things. Moody-isms. I don’t know.
Andrew: [laughs] Moody-isms.
Eric: Moody-isms. Anyway. So another thing that I wanted to touch on, and this is kind of… I had to go back and forth in my head a little bit because I thought, “Wait a minute, would Snape really give Umbridge Veritaserum?” Most of the chapter really involves… kind of the overarching thought is how Snape feels about Harry, because Harry is about to witness his most private memory. So would Snape, who is also a member of the Order of the Phoenix, really give Veritaserum to Umbridge? And I thought this was a problem, because if Harry were to divulge literally anything about the Order, it would be devastating to not just the Order, but to give it to Umbridge? Umbridge is Snape’s enemy as much as she is Harry’s, right? Because of what she might find out and what she might know. And fortunately, what ends up happening… it’s later confirmed that it was, in fact, Veritaserum that Umbridge asked for, but it also, according to Dumbledore at the end of the book, was not real Veritaserum that Snape delivered. So it’s kind of an interesting thought to think of the many angles that went into Snape first receiving this request and then deciding how to act on it, and what Umbridge thinks he did or didn’t do. So Umbridge is playing it exactly like it’s real Veritaserum. Harry is fearing it exactly like it’s real Veritaserum. It should be real Veritaserum, but because Snape is actually an ally, it’s not. So even if Harry had been forced to drink it, he would have been able to lie.
Laura: Yeah. I think we’re going to see another example of this with Snape later on in the book, where we’re really going to have to see Snape think on his toes, because he’s ultimately caught in the moment in front of Harry and Umbridge, and he has to bluff, right? It’s a really great moment. And in the moment, of course, you’re like, “No, no, where are you going?” But again, he is on the right side of this.
Eric: He did Harry a solid.
Laura: At least, we think so thus far. When we get to the next book, we’re like, “Wait a second…” [laughs]
Julian: Well, and he also has a whole other vested interest in making sure that everything stays under wraps. And it’s not even just with the Order; Umbridge has the potential to really mess up Voldemort’s plans, right? If she knows too much, she can, because… and I think for as evil as she is, I think we have to remember that her trajectory is very different than whatever it is Voldemort is up to. And so there is a way that Snape has to play this, because Voldemort wants Harry, so his protection of Harry is both for the Order, but also because he has to deliver him in some way to Voldemort in some capacity later on, right? And so it strikes me that some of this is also she can’t figure out he’s a double agent, and Harry knows that. So there’s other vested interest in things. If Harry is spilling his guts because of the Veritaserum, Snape is in jeopardy as a result, and so he’s got a lot of vested interest in making sure that Harry in particular keeps his trap shut.
Laura: Totally.
Eric: Yeah, that’s a great point. Another insight into Umbridge’s character, though, comes from that later moment when she asks Snape for more Veritaserum, and he says, “What do you mean? Because I gave you a whole vial, and I told you three drops would be enough for Harry the last time. Don’t you still have some?” So she actually poured in a full bit of Veritaserum here. That, to me, speaks to her insecurity, right? She needs this to work, so she went way overboard. Harry could have overdosed. If this were Felix Felicis, he’d be seeing stars for years. [laughs] You just can’t imagine the level of… she can’t afford to take any chances. But it speaks to me to how insecure somebody who just got all the power at Hogwarts is on the inside. She expects dissent.
Andrew: Reminds me of that meme of Kylo Ren from the Star Wars movies. Kylo Ren, he’s like, “More!” Trying to unleash more terror on the good guys.
Laura: Yeah, but I think the thing with Umbridge – and we see it multiple times in this chapter – is that she’s clearly out of her depth. Running a school is not something that she has any expertise in, and it’s one thing to fumble your way through teaching a not-so-great class, but it’s a whole other thing to try and run an entire school.
Julian: Especially when you don’t want to. I think she especially… I shouldn’t say she didn’t want to; she wants the power. But I think her expectation was always, “Well, once I get it, they’ll just listen to me,” which is why I think she is so… I think her biggest fear is dissent, because she actually is ill-equipped to navigate it, which she gets it honest, because so is Cornelius Fudge, right? I think they both are just like, “Well, I have power now, so you will listen to me,” and that’s why she is making the Inquisitorial Squad and promising whatever it is to Filch, because she really does value obedience, because she’s not like Voldemort in so far that if you don’t do what he wants, he just will torture you. It takes her a while to get to that place. I think she really does just believe… if we think about that one line that is her famous line, “I will have order,” I think that that for her is what she believes, just in general. “I will have order because I have power,” and that’s not how power works, and she has no idea how to actually be a person in power.
Andrew: And she also doesn’t realize, I guess, that Hogwarts is chaos all the time.
Julian: Literally.
Andrew: Crazy stuff is always happening at this school, so you’re not going to get this school under order. This is a feature of the school.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: Such a great point. And thinking about the movie, though, briefly, she almost has more power or gets more power and more compliance from the student body at large in the movie. Because if you recall, she uses the quill, the Harry torture quill, on everybody in the school. A lot of them have been subjected personally to her whims, I think, and so I think they’re a little bit more downtrodden in the movie than the students are in the book, when nevertheless, the respite comes from this mischief that we see in this chapter. So it’s interesting to think about her going even further in the movie, because that’s not often what I… what comes up when I think about Movie 5 is montage, montage, montage, but one of those is like, “Oh, Umbridge might have actually been more terrible in the movie.”
Laura: Yeah. I think they had to find a way to escalate her character arc pretty quickly, just because they didn’t have as much screen time as they probably would have needed to do it the way it was done in the book.
Andrew: Yeah, I think… I still can remember how angry I was reading what Umbridge was doing in the book the first time I read it, and part of me also wonders if they wanted to escalate it to kind of recreate that feeling maybe you had the first time you read what she was doing in the books. I literally remember sitting in the living room and punching the pillow; I was so mad at what Umbridge was doing. And maybe they just wanted it to come off really strongly in the movies as well, and that’s why she has her “More!” type of moments.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: Kylo Ren moments.
Eric: So as we mentioned, there is a bit of mischief, and I think that this is the perfect tonic to what is happening. Fred and George, who I’ve been at odds with previously for trying their product out on underage students and a number of other stuff that I’d be willing to forgive, because what they do in this chapter is largely prove that Umbridge, for all of her terrible power, is not infallible, that she can be stood up to in a way, she can be outsmarted, and I think by extension, the thought is she can be toppled. And they do this through a series of fireworks that are really just amazing, and nobody’s ever seen anything like them. And this disruption – really, that’s what it is, is this disruption – you can’t have order when all of these little things are happening that begin to undermine and destabilize the regime’s constant state of messaging and the power that needs to just be stable and that which the Inquisitorial Squad was supposed to protect as well, keeping everything on a level of “Umbridge is all-seeing and knowing and powerful, and you will obey.” Fred and George fly right in the face of that with their fireworks, and really, Fred and George’s efforts give other people, including the teachers, a way to resist. I think their actions today with the fireworks are really instructive in a cool way, to essentially give the teachers, all who don’t like Umbridge anymore – we mentioned McGonagall, also Flitwick, Sprout – a number of them resent, and always have, Umbridge’s position at this school, her very blatant power grabs, and now the fact that the headmaster, that all of these teachers still respect and trust to be on the side of good versus Umbridge on the side of evil, all of this allows them to… eh, not turn a blind eye, but just kind of needle Umbridge a little bit about it, and that is really satisfying to read about.
Julian: Yeah, and it’s also fascinating, because the way that it’s set up with Fred and George is that it seems that they give everyone, but particularly the teachers, permission to dissent, which is very fascinating to think about, because they seem to… it’s not until this moment that the teachers are like, “Oh, this is an actual option,” which I think is a fascinating part of the wizarding world in general. I think that they seem to have a lot of faith in just structures and power in general, hierarchies, and until something upends it explicitly, they will abide by it. And so the fact that Umbridge has been running around doing all of this stuff this whole time, and now is the time where we’re able to see… I mean, McGonagall stands up to her, but then at a certain point also, it’s like, “Okay, I’m recognizing the power dynamic here, and I need to be here to protect the children, so I’m not going to push too hard.” But now that the children are like, “Actually, what if we just took matters into our own hands?”, they’re like, “What if we did?”
Eric: Well, and it’s such a colossal failure on the part of Umbridge to get any sense of control back after these fireworks were let loose that it really… again, like you said, it’s instructive to the teachers that this is an option, but the way in which and the size of Umbridge’s failure goes to show that maybe they could have even resisted sooner. Umbridge is not… even with Filch by her side or the Inquisitorial Squad, these are not trained wizards that are actually good at their jobs. And so in terms of people wanting all power, or people that are in all power, and when the curtain’s pulled back and it turns out they’re kind of bumbling, or they’re not super great at their jobs, it can be a source of glee. And in fact, that’s the takeaway from the first part of this chapter, is that the students are able to all breathe a sigh of relief, because they realize that as terrifying as the situation is, Umbridge is not infallible, and in fact, she’s kind of bumbling at times. This reminds me of the former presidential administration on Four Seasons Total Landscaping day, when they booked this huge conference, but it’s like, “Oops, we called the wrong Four Seasons,” and it’s like, “Wow, this is a day when we can all kind of laugh at it, because the situation is bad, but it’s kind of funny,” and you’re like, “Oh, we’re not dealing with the brightest crayons after all.” It’s giving the side that really would be inclined to fear and shrink away some hope and some emboldenedness, and that’s reminding me of that.
Laura: Yeah, what I love about this is that Fred and George basically make it really easy for the entire school to just gum up the works and to be sand in the gears and say, “Oh, sorry, I would, but I can’t, because I want to follow your rules.” And honestly, I feel like that kind of resistance, that kind of protest, especially when you include something really funny in it like a fireworks display happening in the school that can’t be put out because the person running the operation is so incompetent that she can’t do it and nobody wants to help her, I think that’s the best kind of protest, because it gets attention. It makes people laugh at the Umbridge of the situation, and I think it’s kind of like a real life boggart, if you will. Laughing at her just destabilizes her further.
Julian: Well, and it’s also like, this is what she wanted. That’s what I… it’s so such poetic justice, because she wanted power. She wanted this unilateral, “It’s just all me; all roads lead to me” kind of power. She wanted to be dictatorial. And it’s like, “Okay, girl. Well, now that that’s what you wanted, here it is.” And I think it’s such an amazing way to teach her a lesson about… I mean, clearly she knows she needs people, but I think that she ultimately believes that she could just do this all by herself. It’s giving very much “How hard could it be?” And Fred and George go, “Hold our butterbeer for a quick sec,” and just teach her how hard it is. And I think that it’s an amazing thing to bear witness to, because it’s like, “Well, this is exactly what you wanted, and then you got it and it turns out it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
Eric: Yeah. And I think the kind of people that are loyal to her are also the people that are, I don’t know, less skilled. Because all the teachers are against her, right? So it’s like, eh, okay. There’s a question in who she aligns herself with, or who’s more likely to fall for it. So we are going to get into Harry’s Occlumency lesson, which he ain’t been doing the studying for.
[Ad break]
Eric: All right, welcome back. And Andrew, you have another proposed name for this chapter that you wanted to mention?
Andrew: Yeah, so this chapter is called “Snape’s Worst Memory,” of course, but I think an alternate chapter name for this would be “Harry’s Worst Memory of Dad,” or now the joke at the beginning of the episode, “How I Met My Dad.”
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Because he learns some rough things about James in this chapter. It’s a tough afternoon for Snape and Harry.
Eric: Yeah, for sure. It’s crazy, because how the Weasley twins, who we were just talking about, how they dealt with the Inquisitorial Squad was to shove Montague in a Vanishing Cabinet and send him off to God knows wherever. But it turns out that his trip was actually less extended than I remember, because he comes back just as Harry is attending… first walking in to the Occlumency lessons with Snape, and so just before Snape is going to find out that Harry did not practice, and he can probably break into his mind and learn all sorts of things, including the fact that Harry is now in the Hall of Prophecy when he sees the Department of Mysteries, all of that is saved because Snape has to go and help Draco pull Montague out of a toilet, which is hilarious. [laughs] But anyway, Snape has been using Dumbledore’s Pensieve to pull out the memories he doesn’t want Harry to get access to, and immediately, even though Harry is about to leave, the door frame has a shimmering light, Harry turns around, and is like, “Oh, yeah.”
Andrew: “Ooh, pretty.”
Julian: Shiny things.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: “I wouldn’t have, but should I?” Tell me, guys: Would you be able to resist looking into your arch-enemy’s memories? Secret private memories?
Andrew: Augh. Don’t make me admit this… yeah. I mean…
Julian: So you need to go first, Andrew. [laughs]
Andrew: Well, no, I was just going to… I think I’d have to be really, really sure my Snape equivalent wasn’t coming back anytime soon. I think the situation’s pretty Harry… well, pretty hairy for Harry. I meant to say risky.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: But hairy for Harry. He doesn’t really know how long Snape is going to be gone for. He talks himself into it; “Oh, it’s going to be a while because of the toilet.” No, ethically, this is horrible, as I’ve written in the doc. But… [laughs] I understand Harry’s curiosity, right? You’ve got to understand that. “Why is he taking these memories out?”
Eric: You’re never going to have a better opportunity.
Julian: Well, and to his credit, he says that he’s wondering – and maybe this is just a justification of things – but he says that he is trying to figure out if Snape has some sense or understanding of what has happened in the Department of Mysteries, and that’s why he says he’s going to do it.
Andrew: True.
Julian: So it’s not even… I mean, yes, he is nosy, but it seems to me, at least what he presents in his own mind, is that he’s doing it for reasons that are more in terms of the mission than simply being nosy.
Eric: I mean, it’s self-serving, though, right? Because Harry shouldn’t know all the answers about the mission, and it’s actually been, I think, firmly and fairly established to Harry why he shouldn’t be told all the details. So him breaking into Snape’s memories… there’s also this aspect of the last time he got in Snape’s head, it was not a pleasant thing at all. Snape’s potential abusive home life was witnessed. Harry doesn’t know how to sift memories in the Pensieve from one to the other; he doesn’t know how to choose memories. It’s just the luck of the draw, and so he’s also not prepared, I think, for the downsides or potential downsides of the memories he could go in. I mean, it serves him right that he doesn’t like the memory he does go into, but he could have seen so much worse stuff that had so much less relevance to Harry specifically, and then all that would happen is Harry would just be a nosy person, and he would feel bad after it.
Andrew: Even if it’s true, even if Harry felt that Snape put an answer that he’s been looking for into the Pensieve, that still doesn’t make it okay, right? I personally don’t want to excuse Harry just because of that.
Laura: No.
Eric: Well, on paper or personally?
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Yeah, no, it really… it’s bad and it’s wrong. But I think that the duration of time that Snape is guaranteed to be gone… because he says, “Oh, Snape is the Head of House. He’s clearly going to walk Montague all the way up, personally, to the hospital wing.” It’s like, okay, Harry actually does have enough time to get in and get out; he just doesn’t.
Julian: But also, in Harry’s defense… which is a thing that I normally do not say.
Eric: Oooh.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Julian: In Harry’s defense, Snape has been ransacking his mind for all of these lessons, and has been just ridiculing him left and right. And while I know two wrongs don’t make a right, if I had PTSD like Harry did, and I just got in a fight with a girl who’s mad at me… listen, who knows what I would do? And I think it feels only… it doesn’t feel fair; that’s not right. That’s not the language I should use. But also, it feels kind of fair that, if given the opportunity… because it would be one thing if Snape was being fairly magnanimous about the things that he was seeing, but he’s seeing the stuff in Harry’s mind and then throwing it right back in Harry’s face, and that feels bad to me. And so again, I know two wrongs don’t make a right, and I’m sure that there are going to be people who are going to be very upset with me for this, and I welcome it; it’s totally fine. I also do understand where Harry is coming from in terms of being like, “Hey, you’ve been doing this to me, and what are you taking out of your mind? What are you trying to hide from me? And also, are there other secrets we could get here?” I mean, I’m not mad at it.
Laura: Yeah, and it’s all a consequence of the fact that Harry is not being given a lot of information, and that’s by design, but I think if Dumbledore can find some way to communicate with him, I think Harry wouldn’t feel as desperate and hungry for that information to go looking for it in this way.
Andrew: Yeah.
Eric: I think it… yeah, sorry.
Andrew: Well, I was just going to say, Eric, you mentioned earlier Harry overstaying his welcome in the memory. I think we also do have to remember this is, what, the second time that Harry is witnessing his parents? So you understand why he overstayed his welcome.
Eric: Oh, absolutely.
Andrew: This is an incredibly moving moment for him.
Eric: Well, if Harry had dipped out maybe five minutes earlier, he wouldn’t have seen the bad part of that interaction, and so there’s also that.
Andrew: [laughs] Snape’s almost worst memory.
[Julian and Laura laugh]
Eric: Snape’s… memory.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: But regarding… I think, Julian, something you said really tracks for me, which is the relationship that Snape has already set up with Harry around these lessons. Because if he had been… I think the word you used was magnanimous. If there had been more appropriate boundaries there, instead of, as you said, immediately throwing whatever he just violatingly saw back at Harry… and you also bring up the Cho thing, which is… I almost forgot that happened, but yeah, Harry and Cho’s relationship, it’s dead, it’s gone, it’s not coming back. But it really is a violation, what Snape is doing to Harry, and here’s the way that Harry should handle it: Harry should respond to Snape’s repeated violations of his mind and his sovereignty and his personal agency, etc., by becoming a good student of Occlumency. Harry should study. Harry should actually try, even once, to clear his mind before bed, as everyone keeps telling him to. Harry could become the best student of Occlumency, even with a bad teacher, if Harry cared enough about it. That’s the way to overcome it. That’s the way to resist Snape intruding into your mind all this time, and instead, Harry sees a shortcut. Harry sees an easy way to get back at Snape to actually see into his mind, and it’s just by looking in the Pensieve. So I think there’s two options. Harry still could have walked away.
Julian: But I also struggle with this, because the whole point of Occlumency is you’re supposed to find this emotional equilibrium and just wipe your mind of things, and I don’t know how you pull that off when your teacher is not only just bad at teaching, but actively antagonistic, right? Literally eliciting emotion from you when this is already a very hard thing. They don’t teach Occlumency at Hogwarts; we’re so far beyond the scope of anything that they teach at the school, and you’re asking a student who is dealing with all kinds of traumatic things to do a thing which is already difficult for anyone to do, and then on top of it, you’re like, “By the way, your dad sucked.” It just feels like such a tall order that even if… and I agree with you that Harry should be studying and should be trying, but I’m not convinced that even if he did all of that, that he would be able to pull it off in a meaningful way because of the way that Snape is using these lessons as a means by which to take out his decades old trauma from Harry’s dad on Harry.
Eric: I think that’s fair. Do we think they’d be on more even footing if Snape never used the Pensieve? So it was a possibility that Harry could get his deepest, darkest stuff, if only he worked for it? That would be kind of interesting.
Laura: Yeah. I mean, maybe if Snape didn’t have the safety net of the Pensieve…
Eric: That’s it. That’s what sends them on unequal…
Laura: Right, he would have had to be a little bit… I mean, he still would have been cold and petty.
Eric: The second Harry saw something he shouldn’t have, he would have killed him.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: [imitating Snape] “Avada Kedavra.”
Laura: I think he would have had to tone it down, for sure. But yeah, I think… Harry is 15…
Julian: Also that.
Laura: … and he’s just not been set up for success here. I don’t think there was any way he was going to be successful at Occlumency. I don’t think any amount of telling him, “Harry, Occlumency is super important, and you have to focus on it” is going to help him get there when he doesn’t really understand why it’s important.
Julian: Yeah, yeah. And to Laura’s earlier point, the idea of not having information, right? He’s allowing his mind to stay open so that he can see what’s going on in the Ministry, because he literally has no sense of what’s going on. And so part of it is that there’s an incentive for him to be bad at Occlumency, because it actually gives him answers.
Eric: Yep.
Julian: And I think that makes it even more problematic, because it’s just… everyone went about this all the wrong way, and I feel like Harry is the one who’s ultimately paying the price, because even seeing into Snape’s memories, he doesn’t walk away feeling good.
Andrew: No.
Julian: He has a crisis of conscience.
Eric: He traumatizes himself further.
Julian: Yeah, exactly. It’s like everything he thought and all the stories he had told himself and had been told by other people all became unraveled in this moment, and so it’s like, you don’t even get the reward of being nosy and getting good tea. All you got was just trauma.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Eric: Maybe Harry was feeling the mischief of the day. He’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to see what I can see, because everyone’s misbehaving.”
Andrew: Fred and George opened the watershed, and now here we are. “I need to cause some trouble too.” The tragedy to me about the moment where Snape pulls Harry out is that Snape and Harry actually could connect in this moment over how terrible James was.
Eric: Yes. That is such a point.
Andrew: Yeah, but they don’t, and Snape enters this rage. It’s borderline teenager hormonal type of reaction, like, [in a whiny voice] “I never want to see you in my office again!”
[Julian laughs]
Andrew: And we get his frustration, but at the same time, my heart breaks at this moment, because I want them to bond over this. I want Harry to say, “I feel terrible for what my dad did to you.” And he wants to, I think, doesn’t he? He kind of wants to have that moment with Snape, but he doesn’t get it.
Eric: Yeah, I think he just sees the white hot rage, and he shies away from it a little bit. But yeah, it very quickly could have been more of a teaching moment, I think, if Snape were less reactionary, if Harry were less devastated, just flat-out devastated that… I think Harry is in his head a bit too. Maybe he’s not ready to admit that Snape has been right this whole time, because he still needs to do some processing about it. But if Snape had done anything more violent than just kick Harry out, maybe there would have been a harder conversation that happened, where Harry is like, “I know I wasn’t supposed to see that, but let me tell you, this shocks me, and I don’t approve of my dad’s behavior.” Something like that. But before we get… so let’s get in the memory, but before we get to the confrontation between Snape and the Marauders, what is our take on this read-through of the Marauders and their personalities? I feel like this is the chapter, more than any other chapter, where we do get to finally see what we’ve all been craving since Book 3, when we learn the Marauders existed, was a day in the life, a slice of life from the Marauders themselves. You get good personalities of all of them, a good summary of what they’re all about. What’s our takeaways?
Julian: I think it’s fascinating. To me, I mean, to see Sirius the way that he is, the whole “I’m bored, so let’s go bully someone” vibe is wild.
[Andrew laughs]
Julian: It’s a wild thing to read, because we don’t know him that way up to this moment, right? We’ve only heard tell of that they were messy, right? But the idea that they’re just sitting there, and he’s just kind of over it in general, and so entitled enough to just say, “Eh, let’s go not only wreak havoc,” which is kind of what Fred and George do, “but do it at the expense of someone else, out of boredom.” And I thought, “Wow, you are a jerk of the highest order.”
Andrew: It’s interesting you say that because at the start of this book, he gets himself into trouble because he’s bored and wants to see Harry off at the train station. It’s kind of the same thing.
Eric: Ohhh.
Andrew: He’s putting Harry in trouble, really. And himself, I guess.
Laura: Well, I mean, we also see this reflected in what we know happened at another point in their schooling where Sirius tried to trick Snape into going into the Shrieking Shack while Remus was transformed during his time of the month.
[Julian laughs]
Laura: And James was the one who ultimately had to intervene there.
Eric: I think that’s probably yet to happen in the timeline, which is cool.
Laura: Right, right. But it’s kind of crazy, because I think as the reader and as Harry, that moment catches you off guard, because it’s like, “Wait, I remember Dumbledore telling Harry about this,” and I think we know at this point about Sirius trying to get Snape to go into the Shrieking Shack. We learned that in Prisoner, didn’t we?
Eric: Yeah, I think so.
Laura: Yeah, so we already have that context, and then we get to kind of see a precursor to something that we know happens play out right in front of Harry, and it stops us all because we’re like, “Oh, so Snape isn’t totally wrong.”
Eric: So Sirius is a jerk, canonically.
Laura: Oh, yeah.
Julian: Big time.
Eric: My heart is breaking. Well, and later versions of him, he’s always so stunted, right? We always hear, “He stopped progressing around the time he went into Azkaban, his best friend was murdered,” all this stuff. You peel that back and go back to a time before all that trauma happened, you get to see a purer Sirius, and yeah, just like James, immature, has a few hundred things to learn about how to behave, right? And things he may never learn.
Julian: Well, and it makes sense, though. I mean, he comes from a family… I think at this point either he had just left home or was going to leave home. But he comes from a family where that kind of… I mean, what he’s doing is light work compared to what we understand the Blacks were really about, and I think… it strikes me that to Sirius, nothing is as bad as what his family does, and so everything is innocuous and everything is chill. Flipping Snape upside down is nothing compared to, undoubtedly, what he’s seen and what his parents espouse, particularly for people who aren’t pure-bloods, right? And so for him, he’s kind of like, “I’m bored. Let’s go get into some mischief. What’s the worst that could happen? Let’s find out.”
Laura: Yeah, I think that’s right. I just imagine him being like, “I’m not a bigot, not like them.”
Julian: Right, yeah.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: Yeah, and that’s a problem if you’re equating the two, because there’s full on, with Sirius’s family… I think it is true that everything Sirius hates about Snape, he hates about his own family. I think that it very much… and James, too. Do we see them meet on the Hogwarts Express at the very end of Deathly Hallows, when we see all of Snape’s memories?
Julian: Yes.
Eric: Is one of them the memory of the…? And they’re immediately opposed to Snape. They’re just immediately like, “No, we sense something that we don’t like,” or the Slytherin aspect. I think he’s going on about Slytherin, and that triggers both James and Sirius to react. They both have different reasons for not liking it, but their hatred for Snape… like we just said, for Sirius, it’s self-hatred, and for James, it’s some level of “I’m purer than you,” kind of like “I’m more noble” or something. And they both just can’t get over it, so it’s very interesting. So yeah, I think the one thing I had for the Marauders’ personality that I noticed on this read-through is that Lupin can be funny. Again, these people are all traumatized; we rarely get to see them actually having a good time. But the setup and payoff of “Moony, did you get all those questions right?” Or “How do you like question ten?” And he’s like, “Oh, how to spot a werewolf? Well, yeah, the five ways are he’s in my seat, he’s wearing my clothes…” It’s hilarious! And Lupin, apart from silently allowing this bullying to happen and enabling it – which is awful – moments before, he’s able to crack a joke. And you just know that there were probably some really innocent moments not tarnished in this way that Lupin got to laugh through before everything turned to shit.
Andrew: Yeah. And building on that point, it’s just nice to see the rapport between the Marauders. I mean, we get so few glimpses into the life of these four; it’s been something that we’ve clamored for for a while, so just to have these little moments… you see how quick they are with each other, and just how good their friendship was. Yeah, not a revelatory thought, but it’s just nice to see.
Laura: Yeah.
Eric: So do we think…? Sorry, Laura.
Laura: Oh, I was just going to say, Eric, I was really glad that you brought up his sense of humor, because I think this is a really integral part of showing Remus’s development in his schooling years, his level of comfort at being able to joke about a chronic condition he’s going to live with for the rest of his life.
Eric: Yep.
Laura: It shows that he’s kind of been through the ringer with it, but had time to process it. And say what you will; his friends are bullies; they’re not bullies to him, though. So he does have a good support system in them, and it’s only because he has that that he’s able to make such an off-the-cuff remark like that. I mean, I don’t think he would have made it this long at Hogwarts if he hadn’t managed to make friends.
Julian: It’s also a wild moment in that scene when Sirius goes, “I wish it was a full moon.”
Laura: I know, right?
[Everyone laughs]
Julian: And I thought, “Dude! What a crazy thing to say.” And to your point, Eric, Lupin says, “I don’t.”
[Andrew and Julian laugh]
Julian: I love that.
Eric: Right! Well, what a deescalated way to handle that.
Julian: Oh, absolutely.
Eric: Because your friend pretty much just said he wishes hell on you, living hell.
Julian: And he’s just like, “I don’t.” And it, to me, I think speaks to, too, your point, Laura, about the comfort that he has with them, that he could say something that is high-key offensive, and your response is, “Yeah, no.” It speaks volumes about the relationship that he has with them, and the level of comfort that he has with them, and also how adjusted he is to absurd statements like that.
Laura: Yeah, I mean, I have to think that Remus’s bar for tolerance has to be a lot higher than any of his friends, because he has to deal with so much crap just because of who he is, right? So there are just difficult aspects of life he’s going to have to navigate that his friends never will. They’ll never experience that. And I think because of that, he does kind of have to take the higher road in so far as not having a screaming fight with his friends every time they say something dumb, but using it as an opportunity to kind of smack ’em down a little bit verbally.
Eric: And I wonder, too, because they’ve been practicing at becoming Animagi for years, and ostensibly it is to spend time with Lupin. And by now, he realizes that it helps him chill out when he’s a werewolf, too, to have them all there and do that. But so he’s long become used to this idea, I think, that for him, what is awful is something that for them, they not only worked really hard to achieve, but can be proud of. And thus their attitude of “We’re really looking forward to this” probably isn’t as crazy as it would seem if anyone else had said something like “We can’t wait till the next full moon,” knowing what he was.
Laura: True.
Eric: Because there was some level of collaboration where they all worked toward that same goal. But yeah, it’s just wild. And as far as Peter Pettigrew, yeah, there are no answers. He kind of just sucks, and we don’t know why.
Julian: The whole point where he’s like, “I think I got this part right,” and Sirius is like, “Dude, we literally are running around with one once a month, and you couldn’t get the answer?”
Andrew: That was crazy.
Julian: Yeah, that’s… I’m a person, I just don’t do well with that kind of incompetence, and I probably would have lost my mind in that moment.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Julian: I’d have been like, “Are you…?” I don’t know… how is that even possible?
Andrew: He’s the odd man out. I don’t know how else to explain it.
Julian: Sad state of affairs.
Andrew: Emphasis on “odd.”
Eric: They needed to have somebody to betray them eventually.
Julian: [laughs] It’s true.
Eric: But it is actually… I think we come down to this, that his clapping and dancing and somersaulting whenever James does something is the ego stroke that James desperately needs that not even Sirius will give him reliably.
Julian: Oh, yeah.
Eric: So James looks worse off coming off of this chapter, when you look at Pettigrew and the fact that he kept him close enough by him to know where his whereabouts were and stuff all the way to the end, because even though he reformed, he still needed Peter to be there, I guess, as a sick joke. So it’s kind of crazy. But do we think once they spot Snape that there’s any going back or anything that could deescalate? Because pretty much Sirius is like, “I’m bored,” and James says, “You’ll love this; here comes Snivellus.”
Julian: It’s interesting because it strikes me that in some ways, what Peter is to James, James is to Sirius. Because in that moment when James is playing with the Snitch, and Sirius is like, “Cut it out,” and James says, “Only because you asked,” and it doesn’t strike me that he’s being facetious. I think it’s a legit… I think there’s something about the way that Sirius operates that James really… he wants to keep Sirius happy in some capacity. And so it is an interesting dynamic, and maybe the analogy is not the best. People will probably yell at me about it, fine. It’s cool. But I do think that there’s something about that particular dynamic in this memory that really struck me, because I felt like, “Oh, James is doing this for Sirius.” And I think he doesn’t like Snape too, but I think that if it had been any of the other Marauders, I don’t think it would have escalated the way that it did. But I think because James wants to please Sirius in some capacity and keep him entertained, he goes and engages this in this way, and that’s what leads it to the escalation.
Laura: I really like that read, that James is just performing for Sirius, ultimately. He’s showing off to Sirius. It’s not so much… I mean, it is about Snape because they hate him, but it’s more about what it says about James to Sirius than it is anything else. I think that’s spot on.
Andrew: And I think that’s what kids do, right? They want to impress each other. They want to live up to their other friends’ expectations to continue to be a part of these friend circles.
Julian: And that’s why when Lily shows up, James is kind of thrown by her reaction to what’s happening here, because in his mind, it doesn’t carry the gravitas, because he’s like, “I’m just trying to keep this guy entertained.”
Eric: Yes.
Julian: It doesn’t feel as weighty to him, because it’s such a kind of, “Oh, whatever, Sirius is bored so we just did this thing, and I’m getting validation by behaving this way from him.” And she’s like, “No, that’s unacceptable.” But I think that there’s a emotional disconnect because of the way that she’s perceiving it and the way that he’s perceiving it.
Andrew: And another parallel we see in this chapter is how James reacts to Lily, and being unable to understand her is what happened with Harry and Cho earlier in this book.
Eric: Wow.
Andrew: James cannot read Lily and doesn’t get it. Can’t figure out women. I mean, he says in this chapter, in the scene, “What is it with her?” He asks the other Marauders.
[Eric and Julian laugh]
Andrew: Um, you’re being a bully?
Eric: This reminds me of Harry’s “Women!” after the last time he goes out of Madam Puddifoot’s. [laughs]
Andrew: It’s basically the same thing, yeah.
Eric: Well, I love this connection between Harry and James.
Laura: I think we see where Harry gets that particular deficiency from.
Eric: Wow.
[Laura laughs]
Eric: It’s genetic. Yeah, a complete ignorance toward women. I also love… so if we’re talking about that excellent comparison between James and Harry, there’s one between Lily and Harry that Micah actually made on Episode 465. I’m going to quote it here. He says,
“… and Lily, who tries to step in and make a difference. I see a lot of connection between Harry and Lily here, because I feel like Harry would do what Lily does in this moment and step in to try and rescue the person, right? He’s got a saving people thing. So actually, outside of looks and being good at Quidditch, he’s much more his mother’s son than he is his father’s.”
And I think that’s really key, is to see how Harry, personality-wise, is so close to Lily too.
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Andrew: I was thinking it would have been interesting to see Harry instinctively try and step in to stop the bullying from happening, because you would think it might take multiple times experiencing a memory before you don’t instinctively try to take part in a live scene. It reminds me of when we get emails from listeners sometimes like, “Oh, I love you guys. I always talk back like you can actually hear me.” [laughs] Yeah, I’m surprised. I think I would do that. I would try to talk or hide or something because I’m assuming I’m live in the scene.
Julian: I think he was too shocked. I think this is one of these moments where he was just kind of frozen, because it’s like watching a trainwreck. You feel like… and I think for him, he’s like, “I’m literally watching this man who’s my dad and my godfather and my teacher really kind of engage in behavior that I can’t understand, because this is not how I saw them in my mind’s eye.”
Eric: Right.
Julian: But I do think it’s interesting, because I do think Harry is such a defender of Luna and all of the bullying that she experiences. And in many ways I do love what Micah said when you all were looking at this episode before, because I do think that part of that feels like such a solid parallel in these moments, is the way that he is such a defender of Luna to everyone.
Laura: He really is. I mean, he does it for Neville, too, as far back as Book 1.
Eric: Oh, definitely for Neville, yeah. And it’s like, “Well, if they would be in different Houses…” I mean, I think back to what Andrew was saying; this could have gone way differently coming out of the Pensieve, because Harry is clearly appalled by it. And I think there is a level of shock that comes, because things were going so well. Things were going so well, Harry was finally getting the time with his dad, all of his friends, until they weren’t. So I have a question, because we’re looking ahead to the TV show, and I think that the inevitable Snape’s Worst Memory scene in the TV show will be so much better than in the movie. If they have at least one word of dialogue, it will be superior, so the bar is subterranean, honestly, from the adaptation of the movies.
[Andrew and Julian laugh]
Eric: But what do we think we will see? How do we think the TV show, Season 5 or so, will adapt this scene?
Andrew: I feel like there’s fake information out there that it’s going to be a scene where Snape gets hung, and that’s just not true. Or is that…?
Eric: Oh.
Julian: Yeah, people are really, really worried about this scene as it pertains to the fact that they’ve cast a Black person to play Snape, and that it changes the dynamic of what we as viewers are going to be taking in, and that it moves us from a place of “Boys will be boys,” into a place of a hate crime. And so I think that concern… I think it’s valid, but I also think… well, there are a couple of things that are at work here. One, I think it only reads that way if all the Marauders are cast as white people, which I don’t know why they wouldn’t make that particular decision, given the way that they’re doing things. But also, it just doesn’t work that way in the magical world. And again, to your point, Andrew, the image isn’t going to be, I think, what people are conceptualizing. But also, and this is my response – has been to many people on social media who have brought this to bear – is it better? Would it be better? Is bullying bullying, and it’s just bad in general, and adding this racial component, which has no bearing in the world that we’re looking at, but bearing in our own as viewers, which I understand. But bullying is bullying, and so is it better to…? If everyone was white, would we be like, “Oh, okay, cool, no problem,” and is that okay? And I think that’s the thing that people are struggling with. I think the scene should work out exactly like it is in the book, personally. I don’t think there should be any change.
Laura: I agree.
Andrew: People seem to be forgetting, I think, how this scene played out in the book, and then one person says how they think it happened, and then it just spreads like wildfire online.
Julian: Yep.
Laura: I think also, a lot of people are kind of conflating this, because the imagery is Snape being held upside down to expose his underpants. I mean, that is the scene, and it’s terrible, right? No matter who it’s happening to. But I think a lot of people might be conflating that with some more charged historical imagery, and I think that’s where people are getting stuck. And yeah, like you, Julian, I get it, but I’m also… there’s nuance here that I think is being missed.
Julian: I agree, yeah.
Eric: It’s such an interesting point that the racism that people are worried about doesn’t exist in the world that we’re talking about. It exists in our world, absolutely, but in the wizarding world, the race aspect is not a component. It’s all to do with what blood status, right? So I don’t know. That’s an interesting…
Julian: And I understand the nuance and the weirdness of it, because I think that there’s a lot of discomfort, and I also think that a lot of people in the fandom who are fans of the Marauders are very invested in seeing their baby boys look as squeaky clean as possible, and that it’s really hard to allow for the “Boys will be boys” justification – which is what we tend to use for them in this moment – it’s hard to do when the person that the boys are being boys to doesn’t look like them. And so now it’s introducing a new piece that has been there before, I would say, because bullying is bad, regardless of who’s being bullied, whatever identity they have. I think that part of what’s happening here is that people are afraid that their baby boys are going to look exactly like who they were written to be in this moment, and they don’t like that.
Laura: That part. [laughs]
Julian: And some people are not going to like what I just said, and also, I said what I said. It is what it is.
Eric: I want to say on the record, too, I think that the discomfort and sitting in the discomfort is good and healing, and it’s how we reflect, right?
Julian: 1,000%.
Eric: So if it’s every bit as terrifying as it is written in the books, that alone will be enough for us to sit with. And probably, I would say the episode should end… back to the question of “How will they adapt it?” I think maybe the episode should end with Snape kicking Harry out, and Harry just escaping, because it’s such a huge book-sized bombshell, I think, that everything Snape has been saying to Harry for years is true.
Andrew: My heart still breaks reading it, like I was saying earlier. To follow up on what I said before; I found this one tweet, 243,000 likes on Twitter. “So I guess the scene where Harry’s dad hangs Snape from a tree is not going to be in the new adaptation.”
Julian: Geez Louise.
Andrew: That’s not what happens!
Julian: That’s literally not it.
Andrew: There’s a screenshot in the movie, and they’re messing with him by a tree. But people see that, and I’ve seen so many variations of this on TikTok and Twitter. People see it once, and they’re like, “Oh, that must have been what happened.” It’s the Mandela Effect, or people just believe everything they see. So yeah, people are looking for a reason to complain about this show, and they’re going to take any shot they can get.
Eric: I think that was a reason that was being used as a reason to not cast this actor as Snape at all. And like before, we’ve seen anything that he can do, which was not a concern. And so this comes from, ultimately, a place of wanting our media to be as concerned as we are with some of these difficult aspects of our society that we’re only, let’s be honest, just beginning to confront about society. So I think that, in that way, comes from a good place, but Internet forums and comment threads and tenth largest social media site discourse can ultimately be flawed, I think, as you’re pointing out, Andrew.
Julian: But it’s also fascinating because the casting has come out; Hermione is a girl of color, and the discourse has not remotely been the same about Draco, about what we know is going to happen, what Draco has to say. Very few people have said anything about it, and so I just find it fascinating. It’s an interesting thing to think about, because again, I think there’s a very particular section of the fandom who love the Marauders, who are wanting to protect the image of them. And I think…
Eric: So Hermione can’t be Black and Draco can’t be white, because in the second book… in theory, yeah.
Julian: In theory, yeah, that would be the argument, that we’ve not heard.
Eric: Because he’s going to call her a slur.
Julian: Right.
Laura: That has nothing to do with her race.
Andrew: I think two things. First of all… right, but I think one reason you might not be seeing any comments about that is A, this is a child, so I feel like people are holding back from making remarks about this young girl who’s been cast to play Hermione. And B, it’s just going to take one person going viral for that to start going crazy online. We might be able to already find it; we just haven’t seen it personally.
Julian: That’s true; maybe my algorithm’s just very well-tailored.
[Andrew and Julian laugh]
Laura: That does make me think about the SPEW storyline as well, and I know that’s something we’ve chatted about before. If they do cast Hermione as a person of color, how is it going to play out when that storyline comes up? And honestly, I think it’s just going to open up more avenues for analysis, so I wish people weren’t so scared of it. I think this gives us more, not less.
Eric: Of sitting in that discomfort, yeah.
Andrew: Another factor is that we’ve already had a Black Hermione, so I think that… we had this debate, unfortunately, ten years ago already.
Julian: That’s true, yeah.
Andrew: And people just don’t want this show to happen, so they’re complaining in any way they can because of the J.K. Rowling of it all.
Odds & Ends
Eric: So the end of the chapter happens. As we discussed, Snape throws Harry out. Do we have any odds and ends? I think, Andrew, I see one from you.
Andrew: Yeah, real quick. I just wanted to call out that when young James attacks young Snape, Snape’s wand flies specifically 12 feet into the air.
Eric: It’s nice that Harry was able to bring the measuring tape with him into the Pensieve.
[Julian laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, how does he know that? But Julian, in case you don’t know – you’re very well read with Harry Potter – but we like to call out the times that the number 12 is used across the series, because it’s actually a lot. It’s quite often. So always got my radar tuned for the number 12.
Julian: Okay.
Andrew: That and the number seven, of course.
Julian: Well, yeah.
Superlative of the Week
Eric: So what do we think is the best moment of mayhem on Umbridge’s first day?
Andrew: Oh, I thought you were going to ask about Lady Gaga’s Mayhem album. I was going to say “Perfect Celebrity.” [laughs]
Eric: What is the best track on Lady Gaga’s Mayhem? What do we think? Let’s speculate.
Andrew: Eric, you called out my favorite moment earlier, actually; the Weasley twins pushing Montague into the Vanishing Cabinet for God knows how long, and God knows where he went.
Eric: They do it so forcefully that it breaks the Vanishing Cabinet. Well, maybe it broke when Peeves dropped it, but still, it’s a damaged, busted Vanishing Cabinet.
Andrew: Yeah, and I just love the Vanishing Cabinet, and I love that they have no clue where he went, so I thought that was fun.
Eric: That’s really fun. My big thing is when they’re being besieged by fireworks and Umbridge shouts to Filch, “Don’t Stun them!” because it just blew up miserably in her face, and for all the chaos that moment is.
Laura: I’m going to give it to Flitwick for being sassy as heck. And I love the malicious compliance in him having to get Umbridge to come and dispense of the fireworks in his classroom, and he says, “I could have gotten rid of the sparklers myself, of course, but I wasn’t sure whether I had the authority.” Love that. I love it when I get to do that.
Julian: Oh, it’s the best feeling.
Laura: I love it when those moments present themselves.
Julian: So good. It’s so, so good. It’s very much giving “As per my last email.”
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Laura: Oh, yes.
Julian: It’s very much in the vein of that, and that just feels amazing. My moment of mayhem was just reading Umbridge trying to get Harry to drink this tea, and how bad she is at it. It’s just… there’s nothing worse than a villain who’s so clumsily villain-ing… you know what I mean.
Andrew: That works, yeah.
Julian: Yeah, we’ll go with it. But I love how bad she is at it, because she’s so desperate. For reasons that we don’t understand, she’s so desperate to try to get the truth out of him, because I think she wants to be the one to, I don’t know, find Dumbledore, catch Sirius Black, bring down Harry. She just wants to be the hero of the day, but she’s so inept at getting him to do it, and it’s just so funny to me.
Eric: It gives you hope. Like I was saying earlier, it gives you hope seeing these people falter, because they’re otherwise so imposing.
Julian: Yeah, it’s true.
Lynx Line
Eric: All right, well, we have a Lynx Line question next, and here is this week’s question: If you could select a team of students – your very own Inquisitorial Squad – and empower them to fill a void at Hogwarts, what would you have them do? What would their purpose be? It should be something that there is an obvious need for which existing Hogwarts school structure just doesn’t provide. So that was our question, and our Slug Club members on Patreon have replied.
Andrew: Carlee says,
“Definitely an anti-bullying squad. They see someone being teased or bullied (which happens a LOT in these books!), then they surround the person, heaping affirmations and pretty spells on them to drown out the insults. I’m picturing something like the ‘angels’ who used to show up at the Westboro Baptist protests to shield the targeted folks from the vitriol.”
Laura: Oh, I love that.
Eric: That sounds really nice. Like an anti-bullying… yeah.
Laura: Stand around them and chant “Shame.” [laughs]
Eric: Basically a bullying Patronus, right? To just shield you. Alex writes,
“Some sort of exercise club. While the books and canon seem to indicate that magic takes a tremendous amount of energy, exercise is really healthy for developing teens. With the amount of mountains and forests around Hogwarts, the hiking has got to be great. Getting together with friends or other students and going for a hike or a run sounds incredible in that type of environment. Plus, when the Room of Requirement is open, you can imagine the best gym of all time, and the Room of Requirement will deliver.”
Oh my God, I’m going to have all my favorite machines in there. This is great.
Laura: Definitely something we’ve also noticed throughout the series is the lack of showers that people seem to take, so it really does seem like the lack of physical activity is also an invisible activity that you have to think is happening at Hogwarts; we’re just not seeing it on screen. Noelle says,
“Maybe a homework help/tutoring center. It doesn’t really seem like professors have office hours for extra help, so there needs to be some way to help kids when they’re struggling, especially since we can assume they arrive at Hogwarts with inconsistent levels of literacy and other skills. When I started at Hogwarts late as a fifth year, I only went to like a dozen classes and ended up just casting Unforgivable Curses on everyone after robbing every nearby town.”
So this is Noelle speaking to her experience starting in Hogwarts Legacy as a fifth year.
Andrew: Sounds like it.
Laura: Which, hey, that was all of us. And honestly…
Eric: Well, speak for yourself, Miss Avada Kedavra, okay? Miss Crucio.
Andrew: Yeah, Eric claimed they weren’t doing those spells. Please.
Laura: Listen, the Unforgivable Curses are so fun. Sorry.
Andrew: They are.
Laura: They’re a fun game mechanic. [laughs]
Andrew: Eric, I’m going to watch you play Grand Theft Auto 6 next year. We’ll see how that goes for you without…
Eric: Oh, I’m going to kill everyone.
Andrew: Oh, there you go.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: All right, Mev said,
“I would put a bench in the courtyard, and any student who needs a friend to talk to would sit there, and the members of the squad, or any student who wants to help, go sit there and listen. No judgment, just listening.”
Eric: I love this.
Andrew: “We listen and we don’t judge.”
Eric: That sounds kind of like therapy, which would be a great Inquisitorial Squad.
Julian: Truly.
Eric: Zachary says,
“In pure satirical fashion, I’d have a joke squad led by none other than Peeves himself with the help of our favorite twins, Fred and George. The objective of the group would be to lighten the mood of stressed out students and to teach laughter as a healthy alternative. Giving Peeves and the twins a sense of responsibility would tone their behavior down quite a bit and let them get out their antics in a constructive and controlled fashion.”
Laura: John says, “Therapy and counseling. Too much trauma, and the kids are all away from home for the first time.”
Eric: That’s right, their support structure is gone. It’s back at home.
Andrew: Rachel said,
“I think there need to be more opportunities for inter-House mingling. They have some classes together, but that seems to be it. A student committee to plan events for the school or coordinate more clubs or student organizations that aren’t divided by House would be great.”
Julian: I love that.
Eric: And finally, Nicole says, “Hogwarts needs an orientation team. A group to help out new students learn all the quirks of Hogwarts (hidden steps, moving staircase, poltergeist, etc.” And Nicole adds, “This is coming from a former college ‘O-Team’ member.”
Laura: I did that. [laughs]
Andrew: All right, great feedback as always. Don’t forget, everyone, you can participate in the Lynx Line every week by becoming a patron at Patreon.com/MuggleCast; there will be a link in the show notes as well. If you have feedback about today’s episode, you can contact us by emailing or sending a voice memo that you record on your phone to MuggleCast@gmail.com, and next week, we will be discussing Chapter 29 of Order of the Phoenix, “Career Advice.”
Quizzitch
Andrew: And now it’s time for Quizzitch.
[Quizzitch music plays]
Eric: This week’s question was: The fourth planet in our solar system is Mars, named for the Roman god of war. What did the ancient Greeks call their god of war? Julian, do you know this one?
Julian: I do.
Eric: And it is?
Julian: Aries.
Eric: That’s right.
Julian: Nailed it.
Eric: Correct answer was Aries. Hey, listen, 94% of people with the correct answer did not look that up! This was one that nearly everyone knew, which is very exciting for me personally, because it rarely happens. And similarly, because people all knew the answer, we got a lot of winners, which this week include A Healthy Breeze; Abby; Amanda; Are Centaurs’ Shoes Lucky; Ares Ears Sear Rase Eras Are Sera (Anagrams); Bort is bright tonight; Buff Daddy; Christa; Countess Cassatelle; Dapperwon; Desperate House-Elves; Do you guys remember “Ahoy, Y’all”?; Dobby’s Lunch List; Dragonscript; Elizabeth K.; Grawp Tuah; Hagrid’s Missing Secret Filter; Half-Blood Queen; Hannah loves Wolfstar and Jily, if you like Jegulus, don’t talk to me; Hem Hem Headmistress; I finished finals; Dobby is Freee!!!!; I throw tens for Firenze; Ima Nerd; Julie Anne Fae; Lumos Knox; Maisy; Nathan G.; Nerdy Gryffindor; Okay, I looked up the spelling because ancient Greek class was a decade ago; Patronus sewer… is that right? Yep, that’s literally somebody’s name. Rita’s overworked Quick Quotes Quill; Skibidi Fanum Tax Sizzler Gurt; The Sherry Bottle Professor Trelawney threw away; The Tribe Has Spoken; Tofu Tom Loves Y’all; Umbridge’s Umbrage; Voldemort is President Snow???; and Voldy the red-nosed reindeer. Here is next week’s question: What band had a song at the top of the UK music charts for every week of May 1976? Which is the month that the Marauders sat their OWL exams, which we saw during this chapter. This is a multiple choice question, because again, I want those fun names. Was it A. Abba, B. Billy Joel, C. Aerosmith, or D. David Bowie that had a hit song the month that the Marauders sat their exams? Submit your answer to us on the Quizzitch form on the MuggleCast website, MuggleCast.com/Quizzitch. If you’re already on the website, checking out transcripts or our must listens page or what have you, click on “Quizzitch” from the main nav.
Andrew: Julian, thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure having you on, and damn, you know your Harry Potter and your analysis.
Julian: [laughs] Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast.
Andrew: Yeah, so excited to have you on again. Where can we find you online? Plug all your things, please.
Julian: Sure. Okay, we’re going to do this rapid fire, Instagram: Prof.jw. TikTok: ProfW. CriticalMagicTheory.com, CriticalMagicTheory@gmail.com, Patreon.com/CriticalMagicTheory. There, I did it. And then Critical Magic Theory wherever you cast your pods.
Andrew: Okay, we’ll have links in the show notes as well, everybody. Please go check him out; he is a delight to follow on all platforms, and of course, to listen to on Critical Magic Theory. And yeah, we’ll talk to you again in the future, Julian.
Julian: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew: Thanks, everyone, for listening. Don’t forget to visit Patreon.com/MuggleCast to support us, and also, please leave us a review in your favorite podcast app, and tell a fellow Muggle about the show. I’m Andrew.
Eric: I’m Eric.
Laura: I’m Laura.
Julian: And I’m Julian.
Andrew: Bye, everyone.
Julian and Laura: Bye.