Well... Tom Riddle tries to seduce an old woman to get her valuables. Let's see how Pottermore deals with this after the break.
I can't say I should be disappointed. I mean, sure, this could have been an ideal place to insert a bit on horcruxes. This is the book where we learn about horcruxes and Rowling has more or less said that she knows the process, but none of us know many specifics regarding them. As such this again, would have been ideal. You had not one but TWO horcruxes there. You had an opportunity to explain more about this woman. About borgin and burkes, about anything. I suppose nothing is appropriate given that we are in the past, and can collect nothing there. We cannot collect anything, or learn, nor is there any snippet of chapter to read. I thought, to try and give this chapter the benefit of the doubt, to check the character pages, see what was there.
Pottermore. This is beneath you. I know this is easy but you posted Florean Fortescue's ghost plot. Rowling must have SOMETHING for Hepzibah Smith.
We have four moments to go. This isn't looking impressive, and it goes to show one thing. Pottermore blows its big surprises too soon, and couldn't get enough for us going all week long. How hard would it to be, to think of something else, to code in one or two extra aspects before a book was released and simply allow them to pop in on the slower releases.
So, as always share your thoughts below.
"Well... Tom Riddle tries to seduce an old woman to get her valuables."
ReplyDeleteI laughed for a whole good minute at that one. Come on, the way you worded it you made that poor, hard-working, morally upright Slytherin look like a prostitute! I was pretty disappointed by this one too, especially because Voldemort's story
still has some huge gaping holes in it which I hope will be filled in one day.
We know Jo has got that awesome little butterfly notebook, which she seems very fond of swinging in front of the camera in various interviews, containing the history of the Death Eaters, and how they were once called the Knights of Walpurgis. I think this chapter, which also shows an older Voldemort coming back to request that teaching post, would have been a good one to give us that info.
One thing that still bothers me which was never properly explained is how on earth Voldemort could possibly come back to Hogwarts. Jo said by that time most people were already refusing to speak his name, which means his illegal doings were pretty widely known. I mean, Mad Eye Moody risked arrest for making a few dustbins explode in the vicinity of Muggles, and a man whose name half the wizarding community refuses to speak is a free man who drinks in the Hog's head with his henchmen and applies for kid-related jobs? I mean according to what Fudge told the Muggle Prime Minister, Voldemort did not start being hunted down until nearly three decades earlier. That was when he first began the first war, and he was in his mid-forties by then, which means it was FIFTEEN years after he requested that teaching post. Ministry people have always been represented as a bunch of hard-line, stringent bureaucrats in the books. We've seen people getting swooped down upon by Ministry people because they bewitched a lawnmower, and we are supposed to believe nobody ever checked on a bloodshot-eyed man whose name people refuse to speak? I think we readers should be given a little more info on that subject, what do you think?
I get the sense that Voldemort was not completely the monster he was, and that unlike Moody, he had support from the upper eschalons of the wizarding community (read pureblood) combine that with a few imperius curses that he may or may not have used on officials. >.> And now we know why Voldemort was close to being a teacher with that simple explanation. "Imperius curses... and friends in high places"
DeleteWell, that could do the trick, but still we are talking about a stretch of time of twenty-five years between his job at Borgin and Burke's and the first war. Judging by the way he talked to Dumbledore, he expected his exploits to be widely known, so he wasn't exactly working in secrecy either. The old pureblood guard might have helped, but even influential people like Lucius Malfoy get raided in the books, with all their Ministry contacts. I mean to say that the wizarding community kind of brought the war on itself judging by how they allowed a Dark wizard to run unchecked for so long despite knowing that people feared to even speak his name. And apparently he kept a few horcruxes hidden in his
Deletepocket too.