Where are my dragons?

cassandra clare:

Goodreads: “This book will destroy you”

BookTube: “This book will destroy you”

Me: Nahhhh… No it won’t

The book: *destroys me*

Me:

the veela thing or, alternatively, jkr is the worst in too many ways to count, so here’s another one.

fleur delacour is one of my favourite characters in harry potter and her treatment in canon hurt my lil’ feminist heart so fucking much.

here’s a girl who is obviously someone who is capable and smart and a powerful witch but let’s reduce her to the fact that she’s beautiful. let’s also ignore her massive bravery in getting involved in a foreign war while she’s barely out of school. let’s ignore the huge misogyny behind the belief that a girl can’t be beautiful and smart/capable. that if she’s pretty, it must mean she’s shallow and not good enough.

jkr’s treatment of veelas is just another show of misogyny on her part and honestly, it’s very uncomfortable to read.

veelas at the world cup - arthur’s casual comment: ‘and that, boys, is why you should never go for looks alone’ implies there’s no other value to being a veela than being some thing that’s pretty, and i’m using ‘some thing’ very deliberately here because throughout the hp books, they’re reduced to pretty, shiny things. it also, once again, heavily implies that beautiful girls are nothing more than their looks.

the veelas are also reduced to…animals and female hysteria in their moment of anger, acting completely wild which is… pretty fucking terrible. especially when you put it into perspective on how angry women or women with opinions on literally anything have been treated throughout history, and, what’s worse, still today.

let’s get back to treatment of fleur - maybe 80% of what we see of her in goblet of fire is …variations on how beautiful she is and how men behave around her and interact with her. which is, frankly, a fucking awful way on jkr’s part in treating a badass female character who is a triwizard champion. she’s always shown as being the weakest in the tournament and in the second task, the only one who fails…oh silly girl, right? later - strong female characters like molly, ginny and hermione treat fleur like garbage for absolutely no reason except that they don’t consider this beautiful, shallow girl as good enough?! and then the male weasley family members are your standard ‘ogling her and drooling over her’ type of people. men, who, up until their interactions with fleur, were mostly acting like normal human beings towards women.

ugh.

let’s just abuse women’s sexuality and also let’s reduce it to manipulation.

are girls worthy of badassery and respect only when they’re not feminine and/or beautiful?

it is of course possible that Draco would have gotten the Death Eaters into the school some other way if the Vanishing Cabinet hadn’t created the perfect opportunity, but it wasn’t looking likely.

so like, it’s reasonable enough to assume that Dumbledore’s death (at the hands of Snape specifically, obviously I know he was going to die soon enough from the curse, but the timing does make a difference so I’m still focused on this) occurred because of the Death Eaters getting into the school. the reason the Death Eaters were able to get into the school was because of the Vanishing Cabinet in the Room of Requirement, which Draco repaired.

the Vanishing Cabinet ended up in the Room of Requirement over the summer of 1996, presumably (reasoning for this is in the next paragraph), and Draco discovered it there sometime in his 6th year. but the only reason he had even known what it was, and what it could do, was because he had spoken with….

Graham Montague, a Slytherin who was in 7th year in 1995-1996 (when Harry & co were in 5th year). Montague was shoved into the Vanishing Cabinet in that year by Fred and George Weasley, because he was a part of the Inquisitorial Squad and was presumably about to take points from the Weasley twins for doing something disruptive. and we know that Montague got stuck in a limbo between the two connected cabinets, due to one of them being broken - he could hear things being discussed in Borgin & Burkes, which is how he was able to let Malfoy know that the other “end of the tunnel”, or basically the other cabinet, was in Borgin & Burkes (which, Draco would already have seen as a 12-year-old, in the summer before his 2nd year, when he visited the shop with his father - fun fact, Harry hid in that exact cabinet while Lucius Malfoy was transacting with Borgin).

Montague would never have had this experience at all if the cabinet hadn’t been broken in the first place. but in fact, we know exactly how, when, why, and by whom the cabinet was broken.

it was in the fall of 1992, when Nearly Headless Nick observed that Harry had gotten in trouble with Filch, and prompted Peeves to drop that very same cabinet from a large height in order to cause a distraction for Filch, allowing Harry to get out of trouble.

why was Harry in trouble in the first place? because he was “tracking mud” in the corridors.

why was he tracking mud in the corridors? because Oliver Wood had had him out on the Quidditch pitch all day even though it had been literally storming outside. so Harry came into the castle drenched and splattered with mud.

Dumbledore literally died because of how obsessed Oliver Wood was with winning the Quidditch Cup.

to clarify:

the bits about the Vanishing Cabinet being the only real way he had to get the Death Eaters in, having heard about it from Montague and how that made him realize he could use them as a passage, etc - that was all clearly laid out in HBP, chapter 27 (The Lightning-Struck Tower).

Montague being shoved into the cabinet takes place in OOTP, chapter 28 (Snape’s Worst Memory).

Draco seeing the cabinet and Harry being in the cabinet is all in CoS, chapter 4 (At Flourish and Blotts).

and the entire situation with the Quidditch practice and the mud and Harry getting in trouble and Nick getting Peeves to drop the cabinet is in CoS, chapter 8 (The Deathday Party).

Voldemort died because Harry was the master of the Elder Wand that Voldemort was trying to use.

Why was Harry the master? Because he overpowered its previous master, Draco, and won its allegiance.

Why was Draco master of the Elder Wand? Because he disarmed Dumbledore in the precise sequence being discussed, which relied on the vanishing cabinet.