“Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow, turn this stupid fat rat yellow.”
Setting aside why anyone would possess the drive to turn a rat yellow, this is clearly not a real spell. We know this because a) the rat does not turn yellow, b) Hermione shows up and is like, “That’s not a real spell,” and c) Ron, your parents are wizards! You’re eleven years old! Haven’t you ever heard a real spell before? The spell for turning a rat yellow would be, like, “Rattonius yellowus” because let’s be honest, sometimes the writing in these books is bad.
BTW, Hermione should 100 percent be the protagonist of this whole shit and I cannot wait for this series to root deep enough into the public memory to produce a bona fide literary fiction retelling from Hermione’s POV and I’d like to put pre-dibs on the TV adaptation option for that property, please! Thx! I’m avail!
Thoughts on sorting:
First of all, reminder that Harry Potter presupposes that every witch and wizard in England went to the same high school except for a handful of full-KKK wizards who shipped their kids to Durmstrang. And there are only like fifty children in Harry’s year! Everyone in the country would know each other! There’s this part in book six where Harry holds Quidditch tryouts for Gryffindors only and is like, “Yeah, I don’t know any of these people.” HOW? There are 150 of you tops and you all live in a tower together and eat treacle tart family style every day! You’ve never met Cormac McLaggen before?
Second of all, the Sorting Hat. So it’s a sentient hat, and they stick the kids’ heads up its asshole so it can tell them whether they’re brave, smart, evil, or other (the four genders). What does the Sorting Hat do the rest of the year? Does it have to sit in a cupboard in the dark? That seems cruel and unusual for a living hat. Does it ever get to fuck a woman hat? Freedom for Sorting Hat.
Third of all, I’m sure this is a hacky thing to say in Harry Potter fandom and many of you are sharpening your quills to send me letters about what “cunning” means, but disband Slytherin! Why keep it? Do we need it? Why have one house that’s evil? Especially when your whole society is so scared of evil wizards they can’t even say one guy’s name out loud? Wizard hack: don’t send fully one-quarter of your children to Evil School, and maybe end up with 100 percent fewer evil wizards.
Harry gets sorted into Gryffindor and goes up to his dorm room where he sits in his window seat petting his owl. Does anyone else find it weird how no parents ever come visit Hogwarts? It’s weird, right? These kids don’t even have phones! It is weird to be ten and only talk to your parents once a year, sorry.
Now is the time for wizard school to start!
I know that “Dumbledore trusts him,” and I get the whole Harry’s parents’ backstory, but the way that Snape treats Harry throughout this series is absolutely off the rails and would be illegal in Muggle society (but yeah, wizards are “better”!). You’re telling me the students have absolutely no recourse if they’re being abused by staff? You’re telling me there aren’t any wizard helicopter parents (or as Mr. Weasley calls them, “smellyhopper” parents) who would complain? Harry is verbally and emotionally abused, not to mention held back academically, for six years, because Snape, an adult male authority figure, has such poor coping skills he can’t stop himself from vindictively projecting his resentments onto an innocent child! It’s truly a dystopian vision of an education system with no community oversight!
That said, Alan Rickman!!!!!!! The acting in this movie so vastly outstrips the script and direction it is frankly problematic and I’m telling cancel culture.
I hate how they sometimes crimp sections of Hermione’s hair like that’s part of her natural hair texture like we’ve never seen hair before.
The kids go outside for their first flying lesson. Neville immediately loses control of his broom and crunches to the ground, and Madam Hooch is like, “Oh, weird,” as though that’s a completely unexpected outcome when you give a child a flying machine and no instruction. “Oh dear, it’s a broken wrist.” Yeah, because you did a really bad job supervising them!
She takes Neville to the hospital wing, so Malfoy seizes the opportunity to be a dick. He steals Neville’s Remembrall (a ball filled with smoke that turns red when you’ve forgotten something, more a torture device than a convenience, really, worse than not having one, IMO!) and flies high up into the air with it, taunting Harry.
Harry takes the bait: “Give it here, Malfoy, or I’ll knock you off your broom!” Wow, you’ll KILL HIM???? For Neville’s Remembrall? What a psycho! #Maybe! #Snape! #Was! #Right!
Malfoy throws the Remembrall into the sky and Harry executes a flawless catch to save it and Professor McGonagall spies him out the window. You think he’s going to get in trouble for breaking the rules, but fortunately, the only thing McGonagall cares about more than rules is balls of yarn, and the only thing she cares about more than balls of yarn is laser pointers and the only thing she cares about more than laser pointers is tuna water and the only thing she cares about more than tuna water is SPORTS. She makes Harry the seeker on the Gryffindor Quidditch team. Hermione informs Harry that his dad was the Gryffindor seeker in 1972 because this freak has already memorized every trophy in the castle.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione inadvertently wander into the forbidden corridor on the third floor, and when they’re nearly caught by Mrs. Norris (…a cat), they run deeper and deeper into the forbidden corridor where they’re nearly mangled
