Harry had never believed he would meet a boy he hated more than Dudley, but that was before he met Draco Malfoy.
Look, Rowling, I know Draco is a racist, snobby, bullying piece of shit, but you're never going to convince me he's more aggravating than a Dursley after the first few chapters. Anyway, the Gryffindors have flying lessons with the Slytherins, so that's a bummer. Harry, because he's Harry, assumes this means he'll be making a fool of himself in front of Draco.
‘You don’t know you’ll make a fool of yourself,’ said Ron reasonably. ‘Anyway, I know Malfoy’s always going on about how good he is at Quidditch, but I bet that’s all talk.’
Malfoy certainly did talk about flying a lot. He complained loudly about first-years never getting in the house Quidditch teams and told long, boastful stories which always seemed to end with him narrowly escaping Muggles in helicopters. He wasn’t the only one, though: the way Seamus Finnigan told it, he’d spent most of his childhood zooming around the countryside on his broomstick. Even Ron would tell anyone who’d listen about the time he’d almost hit a hang-glider on Charlie’s old broom.
Ron saved many lives that day.
Everyone from wizarding families talked about Quidditch constantly.
Which is weird because it sucks, but we'll get to that.
Ron had already had a big argument with Dean Thomas, who shared their dormitory, about football. Ron couldn’t see what was exciting about a game with only one ball where no one was allowed to fly. Harry had caught Ron prodding Dean’s poster of West Ham football team, trying to make the players move.
I assume this is somehow a metaphor for West Ham being majority-owned by a famous British pornographer.
Neville had never been on a broomstick in his life, because his grandmother had never let him near one.
Probably--
Privately, Harry felt she’d had good reason, because Neville managed to have an extraordinary number of accidents even with both feet on the ground.
...I am enjoying myself a lot, but it's hard sometimes when the book is regularly funny on purpose. Although, that raises a question, could a Muggle or Squib use a broomstick? If not, that'd probably be a decent way of determining magical ability.
Hermione Granger was almost as nervous about flying as Neville was. This was something you couldn’t learn by heart out of a book – not that she hadn’t tried. At breakfast on Thursday she bored them all stupid with flying tips she’d got out of a library book called Quidditch Through the Ages.
I've read the real life version of that. Pretty funny. Shout out to American wizards, who play their own flying ball game with exploding balls. It is definitely better than Quidditch.
A barn owl brought Neville a small package from his grandmother. He opened it excitedly and showed them a glass ball the size of a large marble, which seemed to be full of white smoke.
‘It’s a Remembrall!’ he explained. ‘Gran knows I forget things – this tells you if there’s something you’ve forgotten to do. Look, you hold it tight like this and if it turns red – oh …’ His face fell, because the Remembrall had suddenly glowed scarlet, ‘… you’ve forgotten something …’
The big shortfall of the Remembrall should be obvious, but I wonder how it defines something as "forgotten?" I don't remember most of my classmates from primary school's names off the top of my head, for instance, or most of my life before I was three. What about my old credit card number?
Draco, being a cunt, steals the thing, but is interrupted by McGonagall.
At three-thirty that afternoon, Harry, Ron and the other Gryffindors hurried down the front steps into the grounds for their first flying lesson. It was a clear, breezy day and the grass rippled under their feet as they marched down the sloping lawns towards a smooth lawn on the opposite side of the grounds to the Forbidden Forest, whose trees were swaying darkly in the distance.
One thing you notice watching the films is how much the grounds and castle expand as the series goes on. In
Chamber of Secrets, Hagrid's hut is basically immediately outside the castle walls, and then it's the Forbidden Forest right behind it. Come the third film, you've suddenly got all these new bridges, courtyards, stone circles, a boat house. As I mentioned earlier, if you ever want to feel like you're walking around Hogwarts, the fifth game is as slavishly loyal to the film's Hogwarts as possible. Or I suppose you could play
Hogwarts Legacy, but I haven't played that yet so it doesn't exist.
The Slytherins were already there, and so were twenty broomsticks lying in neat lines on the ground. Harry had heard Fred and George Weasley complain about the school brooms, saying that some of them started to vibrate if you flew too high, or always flew slightly to the left.
Fun fact, in some folklore, only witches use broomsticks for flying. Wizards (or warlocks, if you're feeling spooky) used pitchforks, because gendered labour. What I'm saying is--someone out there writing an angry trans answer to
Harry Potter--you have an easy way of validating your character's identity. Then of course there's the idea that broomsticks were
actually used to apply hallucinogenic drugs vaginally, but that's another story.
Their teacher, Madam Hooch, arrived. She had short, grey hair and yellow eyes like a hawk.
Me: Fuck is up with her?
Rowling: Not even Pottermore cares.
Harry glanced down at his broom. It was old and some of the twigs stuck out at odd angles.
‘Stick out your right hand over your broom,’ called Madam Hooch at the front, ‘and say, “Up!”’
‘UP!’ everyone shouted.
Harry’s broom jumped into his hand at once, but it was one of the few that did. Hermione Granger’s had simply rolled over on the ground and Neville’s hadn’t moved at all. Perhaps brooms, like horses, could tell when you were afraid, thought Harry; there was a quaver in Neville’s voice that said only too clearly that he wanted to keep his feet on the ground.
I'm pretty sure it's mentioned somewhere that flying broomsticks come with a cushioning charm so they aren't hellishly uncomfortable, especially for boys, but Dan Radcliffe can tell you, the film props definitely did not. I'm guessing this is part of why the makers said "fuck it" and had most of the older wizards basically be able to fly on their own.
Madam Hooch then showed them how to mount their brooms without sliding off the end, and walked up and down the rows, correcting their grips. Harry and Ron were delighted when she told Malfoy he’d been doing it wrong for years.
Hooch: I'm afraid your bloodline ends with you, boy.
‘Now, when I blow my whistle, you kick off from the ground, hard,’ said Madam Hooch. ‘Keep your brooms steady, rise a few feet and then come straight back down by leaning forwards slightly. On my whistle – three – two –’
But Neville, nervous and jumpy and frightened of being left on the ground, pushed off hard before the whistle had touched Madam Hooch’s lips.
‘Come back, boy!’ she shouted, but Neville was rising straight up like a cork shot out of a bottle – twelve feet – twenty feet. Harry saw his scared white face look down at the ground falling away, saw him gasp, slip sideways off the broom and –
WHAM – a thud and a nasty crack and Neville lay, face down, on the grass in a heap.
Again, flying carpets, much better.
His broomstick was still rising higher and higher and started to drift lazily towards the Forbidden Forest and out of sight.
I assume it flew into space and caused the plot of
Gravity. Neville's wrist is broken, so Hooch takes him to get that sorted, telling the rest of the class anyone who gets on a broom while she's gone is expelled.
No sooner were they out of earshot than Malfoy burst into laughter.
‘Did you see his face, the great lump?’
The other Slytherins joined in.
‘Shut up, Malfoy,’ snapped Parvati Patil.
‘Ooh, sticking up for Longbottom?’ said Pansy Parkinson, a hard-faced Slytherin girl. ‘Never thought you’d like fat little cry babies, Parvati.’
I'm sure the Patil twins are also evidence Rowling is a terrible racist. That's the Catch 22 of wokeness in books, if you write your magical school as all white, you'll get shit for being exclusionary. If you include British kids from many backgrounds (Ben Aspen summarises it "Britons of every kind" which I think is a lovely sentiment) and treat them like everyone else, you'll get shit for... using common Romanisations of common Chinese names, but we'll get at that.
‘Look!’ said Malfoy, darting forward and snatching something out of the grass. ‘It’s that stupid thing Longbottom’s gran sent him.’
The Remembrall glittered in the sun as he held it up.
‘Give that here, Malfoy,’ said Harry quietly. Everyone stopped talking to watch.
I put a Remembrall in a newborn's hand once. It turned blood red. Old eyes stared at me.
Malfoy smiled nastily.
‘I think I’ll leave it somewhere for Longbottom to collect – how about – up a tree?’
‘Give it here!’ Harry yelled, but Malfoy had leapt on to his broomstick and taken off. He hadn’t been lying, he could fly well – hovering level with the topmost branches of an oak he called, ‘Come and get it, Potter!’
Harry grabbed his broom.
‘No!’ shouted Hermione Granger. ‘Madam Hooch told us not to move – you’ll get us all into trouble.’
This is one of the few times Hermione actually is much of a stickler for rules, but we'll get to that.
Harry ignored her. Blood was pounding in his ears. He mounted the broom and kicked hard against the ground and up, up he soared, air rushed through his hair and his robes whipped out behind him – and in a rush of fierce joy he realised he’d found something he could do without being taught – this was easy, this was wonderful. He pulled his broomstick up a little to take it even higher and heard screams and gasps of girls back on the ground and an admiring whoop from Ron.
I'll say this, flying is Harry's only real prodigy level magical skill, and Rowling rarely writes plots so it gets him out of actual scrapes. Harry in general is a very well-done everyman protagonist. He's very good at a few things, average at most, and downright shitty at a few quite important things.
He turned his broomstick sharply to face Malfoy in mid-air. Malfoy looked stunned.
‘Give it here,’ Harry called, ‘or I’ll knock you off that broom!’
‘Oh, yeah?’ said Malfoy, trying to sneer, but looking worried.
Harry knew, somehow, what to do. He leant forward and grasped the broom tightly in both hands and it shot towards Malfoy like a javelin. Malfoy only just got out of the way in time; Harry made a sharp about turn and held the broom steady. A few people below were clapping.
‘No Crabbe and Goyle up here to save your neck, Malfoy,’ Harry called.
The same thought seemed to have struck Malfoy.
‘Catch it if you can, then!’ he shouted, and he threw the glass ball high into the air and streaked back towards the ground.
Yeah, the film kind of beefed this whole sequence up.
Harry saw, as though in slow motion, the ball rise up in the air and then start to fall. He leant forward and pointed his broom handle down – next second he was gathering speed in a steep dive, racing the ball – wind whistled in his ears, mingled with the screams of people watching – he stretched out his hand – a foot from the ground he caught it, just in time to pull his broom straight, and he toppled gently on to the grass with the Remembrall clutched safely in his fist.
‘HARRY POTTER!’
His heart sank faster than he’d just dived. Professor McGonagall was running towards them. He got to his feet, trembling.
‘Never – in all my time at Hogwarts –’
"Why didn't you kill Draco while you had the chance?"
Harry caught sight of Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle’s triumphant faces as he left, walking numbly in Professor McGonagall’s wake as she strode towards the castle. He was going to be expelled, he just knew it. He wanted to say something to defend himself, but there seemed to be something wrong with his voice. Professor McGonagall was sweeping along without even looking at him; he had to jog to keep up. Now he’d done it. He hadn’t even lasted two weeks. He’d be packing his bags in ten minutes. What would the Dursleys say when he turned up on the doorstep?
Nothing when you take their mouths.
Up the front steps, up the marble staircase inside, and still Professor McGonagall didn’t say a word to him. She wrenched open doors and marched along corridors with Harry trotting miserably behind her. Maybe she was taking him to Dumbledore. He thought of Hagrid, expelled but allowed to stay on as gamekeeper. Perhaps he could be Hagrid’s assistant. His stomach twisted as he imagined it, watching Ron and the others becoming wizards while he stumped around the grounds, carrying Hagrid’s bag.
It would of course be absurd to think Hogwarts would really expel Harry over something like this, but I absolutely believe him expecting adult authority to be so pointlessly cruel. But if we humour his naive catastrophism, he should really look on the bright side; he might get a cool umbrella wand.
Professor McGonagall stopped outside a classroom. She opened the door and poked her head inside.
‘Excuse me, Professor Flitwick, could I borrow Wood for a moment?’
Wood? thought Harry, bewildered; was Wood a cane she was going to use on him?
McGonagall: A cane? Mr. Potter, we're wizards. We have such
delights to show you....
Wood, as it turns out, is a boy. Now, that might sound worse, but actually, McGonagall is just going to indulge in one of the wizarding world's charming traditions--genile corruption and favouritism.
Professor McGonagall pointed them into a classroom which was empty except for Peeves, who was busy writing rude words on the blackboard.
‘Out, Peeves!’ she barked. Peeves threw the chalk into a bin, which clanged loudly, and he swooped out cursing. Professor McGonagall slammed the door behind him and turned to face the two boys.
And interrupt Rik's poetry session!
‘Potter, this is Oliver Wood. Wood – I’ve found you a Seeker.’
Wood’s expression changed from puzzlement to delight.
‘Are you serious, Professor?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Professor McGonagall crisply. ‘The boy’s a natural. I’ve never seen anything like it. Was that your first time on a broomstick, Potter?’
Harry nodded silently. He didn’t have a clue what was going on, but he didn’t seem to be being expelled, and some of the feeling started coming back to his legs.
‘He caught that thing in his hand after a fifty-foot dive,’ Professor McGonagall told Wood. ‘Didn’t even scratch himself. Charlie Weasley couldn’t have done it.’
Okay, I refuse to believe Harry's been surrounded by Quidditch fanatics for a fortnight, and not even Ron has bothered explaining the basics. There is a reason Harry has a bit of a reputation for being oddly incurious. Still, if this was
Steven Universe, it'd be thirteen years and Harry still wouldn't know the rules, and that's as a pro-Quidditch player.
‘He’s just the build for a Seeker, too,’ said Wood, now walking around Harry and staring at him. ‘Light – speedy – we’ll have to get him a decent broom, Professor – a Nimbus Two Thousand or a Cleansweep Seven, I’d say.’
"Yep, he's definitely a protagonist."
‘I shall speak to Professor Dumbledore and see if we can’t bend the first-year rule. Heaven knows, we need a better team than last year. Flattened in that last match by Slytherin, I couldn’t look Severus Snape in the face for weeks …’
Notice the difference between success and abject failure for the team is exactly one player. This is what we in the business call "foreshadowing."
It was dinner time. Harry had just finished telling Ron what had happened when he’d left the grounds with Professor McGonagall. Ron had a piece of steak-and-kidney pie halfway to his mouth, but he’d forgotten all about it.
‘Seeker?’ he said. ‘But first-years never – you must be the youngest house player in about –’
‘– a century,’ said Harry, shovelling pie into his mouth. He felt particularly hungry after the excitement of the afternoon. ‘Wood told me.’
"I have an affinity for all five minutes."
I said Rowling generally portrays Harry as an average-to-above-average wizard who had the misfortune of getting swept up in great events, but this early spurt of Marty Sue is a sight to behold. Maybe Rowling needed to get it out of her system?
‘Having a last meal, Potter? When are you getting the train back to the Muggles?’
‘You’re a lot braver now you’re back on the ground and you’ve got your little friends with you,’ said Harry coolly. There was of course nothing at all little about Crabbe and Goyle, but as the High Table was full of teachers, neither of them could do more than crack their knuckles and scowl.
‘I’d take you on any time on my own,’ said Malfoy. ‘Tonight, if you want. Wizard’s duel. Wands only – no contact.
This does kind of imply there's such a thing as a full contact wizard duel. I'm going to pretend it's full on magical martial arts like
Kung-Fu Hustle.
What’s the matter? Never heard of a wizard’s duel before, I suppose?’
Kind of self explanatory, innit?
‘Of course he has,’ said Ron, wheeling round. ‘I’m his second, who’s yours?’
Malfoy looked at Crabbe and Goyle, sizing them up.
‘Crabbe,’ he said. ‘Midnight all right? We’ll meet you in the trophy room, that’s always unlocked.’
When Malfoy had gone, Ron and Harry looked at each other.
‘What is a wizard’s duel?’ said Harry.
It's a cooking contest.
‘Well, a second’s there to take over if you die,’ said Ron casually, getting started at last on his cold pie. Catching the look on Harry’s face, he added quickly, ‘but people only die in proper duels, you know, with real wizards. The most you and Malfoy’ll be able to do is send sparks at each other. Neither of you knows enough magic to do any real damage. I bet he expected you to refuse, anyway.’
Man, Ron has a very sober outlook for an eleven year old. I'd expect most boys his age to start talking about the totally real Oriental death curses he got from an ad in the back of
The Adventures of Martin Miggs.
‘And what if I wave my wand and nothing happens?’
‘Throw it away and punch him on the nose,’ Ron suggested.
Ron's the fucking best. The only way he could be improved is if he forged 1940s currency and identification papers for Harry.
All the same, it wasn’t what you’d call the perfect end to the day, Harry thought, as he lay awake much later listening to Dean and Seamus falling asleep (Neville wasn’t back from the hospital wing).
Wizards can basically heal broken bones instantly, so I assume Neville somehow managed to get into several much worse accidents on his way to the infirmary.
Ron had spent all evening giving him advice such as ‘If he tries to curse you, you’d better dodge it, because I can’t remember how to block them’. There was a very good chance they were going to get caught by Filch or Mrs Norris, and Harry felt he was pushing his luck, breaking another school rule today.
If flying without permission netted you a spot on the Quidditch team, what would being caught out of bed get you? Headmaster?
‘Half past eleven,’ Ron muttered at last. ‘We’d better go.’
They pulled on their dressing-gowns, picked up their wands and crept across the tower room, down the spiral staircase and into the Gryffindor common room.
Look, if we don't turn up to this stupid duel where neither of you know any propor magic, Draco will tell all the other Slytherins who already hate you you welched on an agreement he and his cronies were the only other witnesses to. The stakes have never been higher.
(To be clear, this is very believable eleven year old logic)
A few embers were still glowing in the fireplace, turning all the armchairs into hunched black shadows. They had almost reached the portrait hole when a voice spoke from the chair nearest them: ‘I can’t believe you’re going to do this, Harry.’
A lamp flickered on. It was Hermione Granger, wearing a pink dressing-gown and a frown.
‘You!’ said Ron furiously. ‘Go back to bed!’
I think we all at some point in our lives want to catch someone sneaking around at night while glowering from an armchair. On the bright side, nobody noticed Mr. Incredible coming back in.
‘I almost told your brother,’ Hermione snapped. ‘Percy – he’s a Prefect, he’d put a stop to this.’
Harry couldn’t believe anyone could be so interfering.
To be fair, Harry's known like, ten people max.
‘Come on,’ he said to Ron. He pushed open the portrait of the Fat Lady and climbed through the hole.
Hermione wasn’t going to give up that easily. She followed Ron through the portrait hole, hissing at them like an angry goose.
‘Don’t you care about Gryffindor, do you only care about yourselves, I don’t want Slytherin to win the House Cup and you’ll lose all the points I got from Professor McGonagall for knowing about Switching Spells.’
I assume Switching Spells are a kind of autism magic involving trains.
‘Go away.’
‘All right, but I warned you, you just remember what I said when you’re on the train home tomorrow, you’re so –’
But what they were, they didn’t find out. Hermione had turned to the portrait of the Fat Lady to get back inside and found herself facing an empty painting. The Fat Lady had gone on a night-time visit and Hermione was locked out of Gryffindor Tower.
I suppose it's not the Fat Lady's fault the kids are out of bed after lights out, but this seems like a grievous safety issue. What happens if one of the kids is sick or there's a fire or something?
‘I’m coming with you,’ she said.
‘You are not.’
‘D’you think I’m going to stand out here and wait for Filch to catch me? If he finds all three of us I’ll tell him the truth, that I was trying to stop you and you can back me up.’
‘You’ve got some nerve –’ said Ron loudly.
‘Shut up, both of you!’ said Harry sharply. ‘I heard something.’
So,
Mad Magazine movie parodies are a bit infamous for the writers often going on trailers and such rather than watching the actual film, and the one for
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Philosopher's Stone was no exception. You can tell they didn't watch the film because the parody included this whole sequence, which was cut. It's a bit like if the parody of
The Fellowship of the Ring included Tom Bombadil.
It was a sort of snuffling.
‘Mrs Norris?’ breathed Ron, squinting through the dark.
It wasn’t Mrs Norris. It was Neville. He was curled up on the floor, fast asleep, but jerked suddenly awake as they crept nearer.
‘Thank goodness you found me! I’ve been out here for hours. I couldn’t remember the new password to get in to bed.’
I would point out that a password is sort of pointless when you have a sapient door which knows the children and teachers by sight, but this is the sort of setting where a molester or whatever could probably steal a kid's appearance or something.
‘Keep your voice down, Neville. The password’s “Pig snout” but it won’t help you now, the Fat Lady’s gone off somewhere.’
‘How’s your arm?’ said Harry.
‘Fine,’ said Neville, showing them. ‘Madam Pomfrey mended it in about a minute.’
So why were you gone all day?
‘Good – well, look, Neville, we’ve got to be somewhere, we’ll see you later –’
‘Don’t leave me!’ said Neville, scrambling to his feet. ‘I don’t want to stay here alone, the Bloody Baron’s been past twice already.’
It's a fucking ghost, Neville, he can't do shit.
(Because I definitely would've been so brave at that age if a murderer's ghost was floating around)
Ron looked at his watch and then glared furiously at Hermione and Neville.
‘If either of you get us caught, I’ll never rest until I’ve learnt that Curse of the Bogies Quirrell told us about and used it on you.’
Hermione opened her mouth, perhaps to tell Ron exactly how to use the Curse of the Bogies, but Harry hissed at her to be quiet and beckoned them all forward.
That spell's horrible, it turns you into a person shaped pile of snot!
They flitted along corridors striped with bars of moonlight from the high windows. At every turn Harry expected to run into Filch or Mrs Norris, but they were lucky. They sped up a staircase to the third floor and tiptoed towards the trophy room.
Malfoy and Crabbe weren’t there yet. The crystal trophy cases glimmered where the moonlight caught them. Cups, shields, plates and statues winked silver and gold in the darkness. They edged along the walls, keeping their eyes on the doors at either end of the room. Harry took out his wand in case Malfoy leapt in and started at once. The minutes crept by.
Shock twist, Draco set the lads up to be caught by Filch, who the children escape by narrowly ducking into a locked door.
‘This is it!’ Ron moaned, as they pushed helplessly at the door. ‘We’re done for! This is the end!’
They could hear footsteps, Filch running as fast as he could towards Peeves’s shouts.
‘Oh, move over,’ Hermione snarled. She grabbed Harry’s wand, tapped the lock and whispered, ‘Alohomora!’
I have to assume most locks in the wizarding world are warded against this spell... except this one door that happens to lead to a dangerous magical artifact. Kids book. Also, it probably won't surprise you that Alohomora turns up a lot in the vidya. Like most spells, you can usually tell something in the environment will respond because its sigil appears when you point your wand at it. I kind of wish we kept that up when we were adapting later books for edgy spells like the Killing Curse. Have its symbol appear over people's chest like laser sights in an action film.
They weren’t in a room, as he had supposed. They were in a corridor. The forbidden corridor on the third floor. And now they knew why it was forbidden.
They were looking straight into the eyes of a monstrous dog, a dog which filled the whole space between ceiling and floor. It had three heads. Three pairs of rolling, mad eyes; three noses, twitching and quivering in their direction; three drooling mouths, saliva hanging in slippery ropes from yellowish fangs.
Okay, maybe we didn't ward the door properly to save on dog food.
They didn’t stop running until they reached the portrait of the Fat Lady on the seventh floor.
‘Where on earth have you all been?’ she asked, looking at their dressing-gowns hanging off their shoulders and their flushed, sweaty faces.
Side note, I really hope there's a lav in Gryffindor tower.
