But when the series ends, Harry will be right around his 18th birthday. Children’s books main characters are nearly never adults. Would a spin-off series be more likely to be a series of books for Adults, or a children’s series about Harry’s son/daughter/yet-to-born cousin, or neice/nephew/Ron or Hermione’s kids?
It looks like Rowling might be moving away from the “children’s book” genre. Book 4 and book 5 are pretty dark stuff for little kids.
Any theories here on who the person who heard the prophecies is? I think it’s Mundungus Fletcher because
a)We know he was thrown out of the bar (the person who heard the prophecy was thrown out halfway)
b) And we know Dumbledore helped him out of some trouble, maybe he was willinigly, or unwillingly involved with Death Eaters etc.
About Moody, I was dissapointed that he wasn't of more use in the MoM. I mean what was he, the first to go down. I thought he was supposed to be one of the best Aurors ever!They’re sweetness and light compared to the average Robert Cormier book, and he never wrote “for adults” as far as I know…
Balance:
Sure, Barty Crouch was an excellent Defense teacher…but it’s not a one-shot job, it’s meant to be a permanent position, teaching students of all years at the appropriate level. Just because Harry and co. learned what they needed to in their fourth year doesn’t mean that they don’t need a teacher for their sixth year…or that the incoming fourth-years don’t need a teacher for the stuff Harry learned then.
Chaim Mattis Keller
If Harry is not a “pure blood” why did the Sorting Hat say he would be an excellent member of Slytherin?
Because he has Voldemort’s essence within him and remember, Tom Riddle wasn’t a pure blood either.
Granted, they need a new teacher. I just don’t see Moody in the role, although he’d be a good one. While posing as Moody, Crouch said that he was going to teach for one year, then go back to a nice, quiet retirement. I have been operating under the assumption that this was the real Moody’s plan, and Crouch knew it. It would have been a stupid thing to lie about, since it confers no particular advantage and is easily checked. From that, I concluded that Dumbledore persuaded Moody to come out of retirement specifically to teach Harry and company how to handle curses.
Skott: The Hat’s contention that Harry would have done well in Slytherin was covered in Chamber of Secrets. He is pure wizard, born to a witch and a wizard, which would evidently been enough for Slytherin. He’s fairly clever, magically talented, and has a “certain disregard for rules”–all qualities that Slytherin would have looked for, according to Dumbledore. Essentially, Harry could have fit in with any House in most regards (except maybe Hufflepuff–I’m not sure he has the patience).
I think you possibly missed my point. I was trying to counter-point the idea that Harry is a “mudblood” by stating that if he was, he wouldn’t have been accepted into Slytherin, i.e. the Sorting Hat wouldn’t have even considered him:
However, as Amp pointed out, Riddle was sorted into Slytherin and he wasn’t a pureblood, so apparently exceptions can be made (the fact that he was the “true heir” of Slytherin probably had something to do with it). So, it doesn’t resolve the “Is Harry pureblood or not?” debate.
Somehow, I doubt that Salazar Slytherin ever had the concept of “just good enough” go thorugh his mind 
Riddle was sorted in by the HAT. The Hat discerned the qualities that made him a good fit with Slytherin; including, one presumes, his hatred for the father who abandoned him, and by extension, a hatred for ALL Muggles.
Harry: Oh, no! Voldemort is using Crucio on Professor Trelanwey’s head!
Hermoine: That gives me an idea! Is that your best, Voldy!
“And the banker never wears his mak in the pouring rain.”
Thank you! I never fully understood that line from Penny Lane until now.
Yookeroo, wow. Um, that’s quite a picture. At least she can hide them under her robes rather than the taping and Ace bandaging other child stars have to do.
Slight hijack: Is the third movie being made now? Has it been made? Any plans for Goblet of Fire: the movie?
:Walks away muttering “Five more years.”:
Balance:
Good point. Forgot about that.
Two more thoughts I forgot to write earlier:
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Definitely Harry & Luna together. Their meeting under the mistletoe was heavy foreshadowing…even if they didn’t kiss at the time.
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In the end, the prophecy was much like the Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone…something that was destroyed in the end, and no one was any the worse for it (in Book 1, it didn’t seem that hard to have convinced Nicolas Flamel to terminate his extended life rather than keep the Stone around and risk its falling into the wrong hands). Not to dismiss the enjoyment of the adventure, but why wasn’t destroying the prophecy the first option? Why didn’ty Dumbledore or someone else have Harry go into the Department of Mysteries in a well-supervised, well-protected manner, retrieve and destroy the prophecy, and that be the end of things?
Maybe next time Dumbledore gets the idea that Voldemort wants something, he should destroy it immediately rather than try to keep it and protect it.
(unless the plan was to draw Voldemort out of hiding. That would make some sense, given how radically the politics of the wizarding world changed at the end of the book)
Chaim Mattis Keller
Oh, yes, one more thing…
When Ron made the comment about his tea leaves spelling out “Die, Ron, Die,” was I the only one who thought, “It’s German…it means The Ron, The”?
Chaim Mattis Keller
Nope. Just you and Sideshow Bob.
Nope. Just you and Sideshow Bob.
No one who speaks Parseltongue could be an evil man…
I avoided this thread completely until I’d finished the book, and now it took me another few days to read this thread through!
I’m not sure if I should just bump this thread (will everyone keep checking new replies?) or if I should just ask my question in a new thread… Well, since I’m already here, I’ll try my luck with the obvious Harry Potter afficionados.
No one has yet commented on what I feel was a very poor plan on the part of Voldemort. I guess it’s set up that he initially attempted to have others get the prophesy for him, and only after he learns or realizes that only Harry or himself could get the prophesy does he try to lure Harry into doing the task by planting dreams in his head.
He then plants a specific vision of Sirius being tortured at the MoM to lure Harry there to save his godfather. But this is what I see is a big weakness in his plan, one that the mighty and powerful Dark Lord would never have overlooked. It is only through luck and coincidence that Harry is not able to verify that Sirius is not at home, thus making him believe the dire need to go to the MoM.
Apparently Voldemort did do one thing to ensure this plan would work: he got Kreacher to lie to Harry when HP used Umbridge’s office fireplace to check. But it was only a coincidence that Sirius was not in the kitchen when Harry checked. He was upstairs doing something (I forgot what). If Harry had not been caught by Umbridge in her office and cut off from everyone else in the subsequent events to get free from her, he could have found out from Snape whether Sirius was at home or not. It was only through Harry’s “convienient” forgetfulness that Snape was in the Order that he was even in Umbridge’s office. Not to mention his forgetting about Sirius’s gift. For that matter, how did Voldemort know he couldn’t have just gone to the house himself or whatever? It is made clear that Umbridge and the Ministry are not working for Voldemort, so how would V know about the restrictions that were newly placed on Harry and his fellow students to prevent them from communicating with the outside world as they had in the past?
If the Dark Lord went to all this trouble and planning to give Harry a specific vision at a specific time to get him to rush to the MoM (and have his most trusted Death Eaters waiting for him there to receive the prophesy), wouldn’t he have made sure that Sirius was really out of the house somehow so that Harry couldn’t check? As it’s written, it seems to me only through luck and coincidence that his plan worked.
For that matter, isn’t it only Harry OR Voldemort who can get the prophesy? I guess at some point it is said that Voldemort himself coudn’t risk going into the Ministry of Magic himself and that’s why he must have Harry do it, but lo and behold, who shows up at the MoM but the big V himself! I know this makes for a more dramatic scene and grand showdown between Voldemort and Dumbledore, but if he was going to show up at all, woudn’t it have been a lot easier and safer if he showed up without Harry and his friends there to try and stop him? His Death Eater squad did a fine job of disabling whatever security may have been in place, so they could have gone any night, Voldemort could have followed in when it was safe and then easily gone to get the prophesy himself, without the interference of those meddling kids!
While I’m at it, I don’t really get that “only the ones who the prophesy is about can get the prophesy” thing anyways. Maybe I didn’t read it clearly, but didn’t Harry toss the prophesy to Neville at one point? Didn’t the rest of the gang smash a bunch of the prophesies, which were all then heard (since they all went off at about the same time no one understood them, but they were all heard, nevertheless). Why didn’t Voldemort just send in Lucious Malfoy with a tape recorder, have him knock over the prophesy when no one was around and be done with it?
While I still enjoyed it overall, it just seems to me that this book is of less import than the others. It’s all emotions and feelings and much less of substance occurs (other than Sirius getting offed, of course, but even that is an unintended byproduct of the intended events). That the whole “diabolical plan” by Voldemort is just to hear this prophesy seems so… lame.
Oh well… I suppose I’ll have to wait like everyone else to find out the big exciting stuff in the next book that this one obviously sets us up for!
“But it was only a coincidence that Sirius was not in the kitchen when Harry checked. He was upstairs doing something (I forgot what).”
Tending to the hippogryf that Kreature had injured earlier in the day in order to keep Sirius up there and away from the fireplace.
The last part of the book is however more or less complete rubbish that reads like the back of a cornflakes box.
The thing is that Harry didn’t immediately think to check and see if Sirius was at home. He was ready to dash off as soon as he woke up - it was Ron and Hermione who held him back. Hermione even mentions that Voldie is probably using Harry’s “saving people thing” to lure him to the Ministry. I think Voldemort’s plan was to work Harry into a state and have him rush off without ever checking on Sirius. Kreacher was more or less the backup plan.
Iteki - What do you mean, it reads like the back of a cornflake box? I loved it. Especially when Dumbledore cast the “Monosodium Glutamate” spell, that was great.
A few random things I thought of when reading the book.
Notice how Snape never had a chance to answer Harry’s question about why he refers to Voldemort as the Dark Lord? My suspicion is that Snape is a Death Eater spy for Dumbledore and he doesn’t want to get out of practice referring to him that way. I think that’s also why he wasn’t at the rescue at the end of OotP. It wouldn’t surprise me if Snape died in one of the next two books, though I hope it’s after he and Harry reconcile.
Why did Harry say he’d never forgive Snape now at the end of OotP? Is it because he told Sirius what happened and Sirius came to Harry’s rescue? I thought for sure he was going to finally reconcile with Snape this time around. I know that Snape as the adult should be the one to do so, but I would really like to see Harry apologize on behalf of his father. I’d also like to see Snape explain to Harry for once that he has to continue being mean to him to keep up his act. Harry didn’t understand why Snape insulted him in Umbridge’s office after Harry explained that Sirius was missing. He should’ve realized Snape couldn’t just say, “Oh, okay, I’ll take care of it,” right in front of Malfoy and crew. As it was, the Padfoot reference might’ve been suspicious enough if Malfoy had told his father.
In some ways, Umbridge was the best DADA teacher the kids have had, since it caused them to go out and learn on their own. They made more progress this year than they’ve made yet. Umbridge was so deliciously evil, she made Voldemort look as evil as someone who removes the tags from mattresses. I like Harry’s sarcastic remarks that got him detention, though.
I, too, thought Harry was a butt when he whined that Neville, Ginny and Luna weren’t the fellow rescuers he was hoping on, but I guess I can see it from the point of view of a self-centered teenager who doesn’t understand that loyalty and honor are more important than “coolness”.
Oh, and Harry and Hermione together? It’s so Hermy/Ron in the book. All the signs are there. Hermione is much too comfortable with Harry, and her mentions of other boys doesn’t so much as cause Harry to glance up from his book while Ron is always jealous. Even Harry noted that they acted like the Weasley parents.
I thought Ron’s reaction to his baby sister’s boyfriends was hilarious. I hope Dean and Ginny stay together through the first of next year, so we can see Ron’s reaction when they move back to their dorms again.
Things that drive me nuts in the books:
Quills and parchment vs. ballpoint pens and notebook paper
No phones, computers, televisions, or any other bits of Muggle technology. Sheesh, why couldn’t Harry have simply called Sirius on a cellphone?
The wizarding world’s general ignorance of the Muggle world. Don’t these people need to walk into a department store on occasion? Don’t they ever want to watch a movie or buy an ice cream cone? Half their businesses seem to be located in the middle of downtown London.