Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen1d ago

I surprised myself yesterday, with ruminations upon my scanty experience with #HarryPotter. I had vaguely recollected that I'd drifted away from the Harry Potter books simply because they were getting to be more of a slog to read, in my opinion at the time: her prose was getting gassier and her plots were getting more contrived and arbitrary, etc.

But I'd forgotten that I had a specific, intense beef with the books, aside from Rowling's useless slaughtering of unicorns in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: Mad-Eye Moody.

I was reminded of him because in the film of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which I've never watched and only read once, Moody is played by Brendan Gleeson, a favorite actor, and memorable for other things of mythopoeic interest to us (e.g. The Secret of Kells.)

I'd forgotten how cheated I felt by Jo Rowling's literary treatment of Mad-Eye Moody. Was that an extreme reaction? Was I alone in feeling as if, by the end of Goblet of Fire, we'd never actually met Mad-Eye Moody at all? Rowling writes lengthy (and moody) scenes for the fellow only to reveal abruptly that he's a fake, a ringer. Am I wrong to think that she was jerking the reader around?

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen

Oh dear. There is a #fictive complication. Have we actually introjected Mad-Eye Moody without knowing it? If there was any character from #HarryPotter who would have found a place in the Pnictogen Wing, it's Mad-Eye Moody, because our system is stacked with headmates with left-eye issues of some sort: Asuka Langley, Undyne, you get the picture. Mad-Eye Moody, at least in the movies, has a wonky left eye.

In our personal conception of Óðinn the All-Father, the old man has his left eye missing—but I must stress that this is our personal notion, and there must surely be those who are equally convinced that Óðinn sacrificed his right eye.

Anyway! it seems that we have unfinished business with the Potter books, unfortunately, at least with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was such a creaky book.

Apr 5 at 1:51amWeb