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Episode 44: J.K.'s Magical Meltdown
🕑 Added 2019-01-11 15:01:00 +0000 UTCGoblet of Fire chapter 27. JK Rowling decided to just have a full on twitter meltdown right as we were about to record this week, so we spend a lot of time talking about her bizarre takes on income inequality. This casts kind of a long shadow over our reading, but we manage wring a lot of discussion out of this one very strange catch-up chapter. Finally, we celebrate Snape's birthday with a Liz-led lecture on his strange place in the fandom.
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Geardirector
The whole thing about how Sirius is always described in ways that reference his animal form kinda stuck out to me, in this re-perusal through the series, and I noticed something. I noticed there's an interesting dichotomy in the way that the series describe characters who are animagi. Sirius and Peter, they both get descriptions that reference their animal form a lot. You get a lot of reminders of what animal they turn into from how the text describes them. But on the other side of this divide, you have McGonnagal and Rita Skeeter, who I think are the only other Animagi characters we meet in the story. When you read descriptions of McGonnagal, does the fact that she can turn into a cat ever come up or get referenced at all? I can't think of any moments where it does. In fact, for her it's the opposite: The way her cat form is described references features of her human form, Cat McGonnagal has stripes in its fur that match the shape of Human McGonnal's glasses. Rita Skeeter is the same way, there are colored patches on her beetle form that reference her clothes and apparel. The Marauders became Animagi at an unusually young age. Did that have physical consequences that don't show up if you achieve the Animagus transformation at the "correct" age? James Potter really fucks up this thesis because he doesn't have this, but I suspect the reason for that is because he is the archetypical "good father" figure of the story.
