[ SECRET POST #5319 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5319 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 09 secrets from Secret Submission Post #761.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

06. https://i.imgur.com/JpAlOd3.jpg

[(Anonymous)]

She's a bit useless for kids in both books and movies. Haven't listened to the trio when they asked for help, left a baby at the doorstep... I feel like I wouldn't like this strict teacher if I were her student.

[(Anonymous)]

Maggie Smith makes everything better! Honestly, I watched Downton Abbey partly because of her, the other characters didn't really interest me at all.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, she's an interesting character but for all her ~Head of Gryffindor House~ when it comes down to it, she always fails. She watches the Dursleys for a day and while she makes a token protest, she follows Dumbledore's lead and leaves a baby on the doorstep in November. (Especially dangerous when you consider that Harry was walking at that age and if he'd woken up, whelp, who knows where he would've wound up?)

She's stern in class and knows her subject well. I'll give her that. But she's a terrible disciplinarian--far too strict and reactionary--and she doesn't do anything to curb the bullying within her own House. Which is literally part of her job, one would assume...

She's also deeply ineffectual at actually aiding at getting rid of Umbridge and supporting her students through the use of an illegal blood quill. ('It unscrews the other way' isn't a meaningful rebellion.) Yes, she tried to stop Hagrid from being forced to leave but running out shrieking about it was literally the worst way to go about handling it.

When she's made Headmistress, her first thing to do is fall back on Dumbledore's plans. She seems to have no vision or plan of her own for how she wants to lead the school and as Head of Gryffindor and Deputy Headmistress, she should have at least considered how she'd want to run the school. Furthermore, in the end, she let children who were her responsibility fight and die while adults cowered and hid.

[(Anonymous)]

your first mistake is bringing real world logic into a fantasy setting of absurd proportions.

The baby on the doorstep thing is neither here nor there; its an outdated trope that JKR would remember but a lot of her audience might not be as familiar with, so any actual logic about orphaned infants and doorsteps has no place in a storytelling trope that relies on some outdated concepts and visuals. Is it dumb? Yeah, it sure is. But it's a storytelling device, not an actual factual means of how parentless infants would be rehomed with relatives in 1980-whatever.

The entirety of HP in the school setting relies on stereotypes, some of which are universal and some of which are endemic to British boarding schools, which people not British who never went to or knew someone who went to boarding school might not quite get. Either way, this is a framework. Logic can take a flying leap. McGonagall's stereotype is Stern Ballbuster Who Is Secretly Really Cool About Some Things and Witty. This isn't a real person, this is a character archetype. Don't bring real people standards into a broad-strokes fantasy where everyone is an archetype or stereotype and nothing makes sense if you stop to think about it for two seconds. It's fantasy. It's ridiculous and over the top. And that's why it resonates with so many people - we're not here for how McG would handle bullying in the real world, never mind how many people have had a teacher ignore bullying in their sphere and know how real this can be.

ANd yeah, of course the Deputy Headmistress serving under Motherfucking Dumbledore would have no real plan! He's supposed to be invincible and everlasting, why would anyone prepare their own secret plan under him??

[(Anonymous)]

I don't really like her, but still +1 000.

I really wish people discussing Harry Potter would understand that. That's also why I hate the whole concept of ~worldbuilding~. It doesn't make any sense from a literary criticism point of view.

[(Anonymous)]

Wordbuilding absolutely makes sense from a literary point of view, considering all it is is developing and expanding a fictional world. It also doesn't require bringing real world logic into the world, because it's just further explaining how the fictional world works outside of the main plot. So it has no bearing to this discussion, and I have no idea why you brought it up. Or why you hate when fiction lets you explore it's setting.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, yes it's a British school stories archetype

But I think that's also a valid line of criticism. Harry Potter as a series basically sticks to British school story tropes when establishing its initial setting and vibes, and that's both a strength of the series, and a really big weakness. The norms and attitudes of Victorian and Edwardian Britain don't necessarily apply for modern readers, and that's not the fault of readers.

[(Anonymous)]

^^^this

[(Anonymous)]

Victorian and Edwardian Britain? No. Try anything up to the 1980s. Hell I went to school in the UK in the nineties early noughties and still found Harry Potter very familiar and relatable. It's deeply rooted in British school life from the 20th century and, of course, stereotypes of stories of British school life.

[(Anonymous)]

To be clear, I think that Harry Potter is largely building on the fictional genre of boarding school stories, which mostly existed in Britain before WWII.

That's not to say that there isn't any continuity in the British educational system, and after all, the original school stories were written by people who had been to British boarding schools. But a lot of the basic model of Harry Potter comes from the fictional stories. (I mean, to a large extent, really just Stalky & Co)

[(Anonymous)]

JKR was in the schooling system herself, so if you think that her experience wasn't incorporated then you're clearly wrong.

Plus, British school culture shares some crossover between state and public schools. Anyone from my generation in the UK reading it is going to recognise bits as being similar to their own school.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a lot of boarding schools still in the UK, though. We even have a top 100! Even the idea of houses is still fairly common outside of the private school arena.

[(Anonymous)]

If you only read the first three books, you could chalk it up to zany British boarding school hijinks and you'd have a solid point. But when the author decides to switch course midstream because she wants her Wizarding World to be Darker and Grittier and Have Real Consequences, then it's not a mistake to start applying Real Consequences across the board. Jo couldn't pick a genre and stick with it, so we got the literary equivalent of a Bugs Bunny cartoon where the real villain is the military-industrial complex. There's nothing wrong with ignoring the tonal shift if you want to, but it does exist and the people who work their understanding of the series as a whole around the bits that are aiming to be more real-world relevant are also valid.

[(Anonymous)]

What are you jabbering about. Voldemort is part of the military industrial complex is he? What utter shite you're talking.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT
Your reading comprehension skills are amazing.

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT but this is just a reading comprehension failure, that's simply not what AYRT said

[(Anonymous)]

You're very angry about something AYRT never said.

[meadowphoenix]

i mostly like her because of maggie smith, but i think most of the adults in HP fail in really realistic but still disappointing ways. there's nothing about mcgonagall that isn't directly a result of the construction of harry potter, so idk, OP, that seems like you don't understand the world of the books.

i actually like the sort of ineffectual nature most of the hp adults have tho. the reliance on traditional structure and power as guiding principals to exclusion of sense or justice reads very uk

[tree_and_leaf]

It's a long time since I read HP, but I feel like McGonagall tries harder than most of her colleagues to protect the students from Umbridge. But yeah - I agree that most of the adults fail (certainly all the teachers do), and in quite plausible and quite British ways).

[meadowphoenix]

I think everyone is actually very hands-off with umbridge, and unfortunately because McGonagall's Harry's head of house, we actually see how much more information she could have access to than the rest, for which she does nothing (i.e. harry tries to explain about the blood quill and she brushes him off before he can say how bad it is, and essentially tells him that if he's going to be non-compliant he should bear the consequences without coming to her, which......). The only time she really stands up for Harry is when Umbridge tells him she'll blacklist him. I'm not so sure as OP that she could do more that wouldn't result in her firing, but the most any of them do is variations of malicious compliance or passive non-compliance. Again, that's very british, lol, so I think it fits.

[(Anonymous)]

I feel the same way about Luna Lovegood.

[(Anonymous)]

Gonna add Neville to the very short list of kick-ass characters who still hold up, but otherwise, yeah. (I also have a soft spot for the Weasley twins, being a twin myself. I will never forgive JKR for Fred.)