#Neville is the worst both in terms of morals and like ability

[stealerofthe2ndbraincell]

I tend to view Riddle of the Sphinx and Misdirection as kind of partner pieces: familial revenge plots deeply involved with Steve and Reece's own interests - with the main communicator of the topics being arrogant arseholes who clearly know a lot about their craft, but obtained their status in shifty and immoral ways (to paint a VERY broad brush of things ofc).

However, I rewatched Misdirection yesterday and, in comparison to Squires at least, god Neville is horrible at all of this.

He really pulls out all of these very ominous and purposeful bits that only he'll get and can find amusement in, such as claiming that "not another living soul" knows "his" trick or that, to him, the theft of an idea is "worse than murder"...

... And then he gets rattled and completely squirms at the ever so-slightest threat from Gabriel. At the mere mention of him having a Grandad as an inspiration for his own interest in magic, Neville is so clearly on edge.

He also immediately folds at Gabriel's Mountweazel note and burns his secret of nine years - turning off the security camera so that there's no proof of anything happening. This is what leaves him with no alibi at the one point he actually needs it.

(Although I do think he could have come up with literally almost anything else to say when questioned about why he removed his security footage other than "no reason". It might not have helped much but it would have made him at least a bit less suspicious).

I think it's clear that Gabriel's plan relied on Neville's unyielding arrogance, but I think it's his paranoia that ultimately ruined him.

Plus, his own lack of creativity - literally keeping the name "A Chair Raising Experience" - also didn't help AT ALL.

Neville's security set up is honestly a really good reflection of himself and ultimately what dooms him. He has the security cameras set up at every angle to protect "his" ideas within the safe that he himself stole, whilst actively bragging in his published book about how well kept a secret he has. He wrote down the secret years ago and yet keeps the original copy and sets up this entire system around a point of potential exposure that does not even need to exist. He's paranoid at every opportunity at the idea of being exposed and yet cannot help himself but to show off.

Arguably, Squires does the same. He was ultimately pushed into a corner by Jacob when he had created a crossword about the current circumstances that easily acts as his own murder confession. Why? "A bit of fun" and to "teach" the girl who he knew was planning to kill him. It's to show off. However, this display of arrogance was done through a belief that he was in control of the situation. He was "aware" of the plan to kill him prior and so felt he could act in complete security and without consequence.

Squires' arrogance that got him in the end was without any nervousness or insecurity. Meanwhile, Neville's arrogance and desire to show off was in spite of his own insecurity.

[hogwartswelcomesyou]

The Mods Fix HP!: Scripting (by Tory)

Hi guys! This is the first in hopefully a series of posts where the Mods attempt to fix what they saw as major problems with the Harry Potter film adaptations. Of course, to be clear, we all love the movies, but I think all HP fans have those little (or not-so-little) bones to pick with the finished result, so that’s what these editorials will discuss. Hope you enjoy them!

~The Mods

Harry Potter was a series of books magically transformed into a series of movies. Adaptation is always a tricky tight rope to walk, but coming from someone who has actively studied film and television, adaptation cannot and should not just be literally copying everything on the page and slapping it up on screen without any thought. Some things have to change, both due to practical reasons like cost as well as for more story-driven reasons like making the plot follow a three-act structure. Although yes, all things considered, the Harry Potter films are rather good adaptations compared to many other book-turned-movies (*eyes Percy Jackson beadily*), I would still argue that there are quite a few things I would personally fix in regards to the screenwriting of these adaptations.

Let’s first knock out what I believe are the Harry Potter film series’ top four biggest problems, just in the script alone –

1)      The lack of continuity from film to film.

2)      The scissoring-out of important details needed to understand the scene(s) in question.

3)      The “trope-ification” of each character.

4)      The lack of moral grayness.

To tackle the first one, there are a LOT of changes made to locations, casting, and such made from film to film thanks to the many directors and extraneous factors on set (for example, the actor playing Crabbe ended up in prison and was unable to perform his role in the last film, hence why Goyle ended up being the one to die in the Room of Requirement instead). But again, just focusing on the script-writing perspective, the changes made writing-wise were made for a different reason. The main rationale for most of these scripting changes is that the filmmakers didn’t know what little details would be important later, as they were making the films as the books were still being written, and so therefore they had to play catch-up (with varying degrees of success) with all the information we should’ve already known from the previous films, but don’t because it wasn’t written in.

For example, let’s take a look at Harry seeing the thestrals in fifth year. Now, of course, in the books, the reason Harry can see the thestrals this year, and no other, is because he saw Cedric die in the Little Hangleton graveyard the previous school year. But in the movies, the filmmakers made the artistic decision to give Quirrel a marvelous death scene at the end of Philosopher’s Stone – which somehow didn’t count, I guess, since Harry saw Quirrel die and yet didn’t see thestrals until three years later? This sort of change follows the books’ continuity, but not the films’, and so film-only fans will be lost and confused.

Another good example is the portrayal of the Patronus Charm. Whereas in Azkaban it’s established that only a corporeal Patronus can drive away a dementor, in both Order of the Phoenix and Deathly Hallows Harry’s Patronus is nothing but a flare of indistinguishable light. It’s made even worse in Order when Harry uses a stunning charm on a dementor (which shouldn’t work) and Luna references Harry’s ability to perform the Patronus Charm, even though in the films we’ve only seen it take the form of a stag once. In Order we even see almost all the other students (except Neville) producing corporeal Patronuses with apparent ease and in the second Deathly Hallows film we see Snape’s Patronus is in the form of a doe -- the spell is supposed to be “advanced stuff,” but if Harry can only make bright white light a lot of the time anyway, why is it a big deal that he can perform it? He was already able to do that much in his very first lesson with Lupin, so it is clearly established not to be that hard to conjure up some light -- what is supposed to be hard is making that light have a form, but the films don’t really take the time to show the magic itself or even to re-establish how difficult and unique it is to do.

There are errors that are worse, though. What about the opening of Prisoner of Azkaban that infuriates me like few other things in this world, where Harry consistently uses underage magic to light up his wand (more than once, may I add, when in no other film does the charm need casting that many times!)? And then, no joke, just two scenes later, Harry’s running away scared because he used underage magic on his Aunt Marge! Wait – so – underage magic is illegal, but if you just use it to light up your wand, it’s totally okay?! It not only defeats the emotional punch to the stomach that Harry using magic on his aunt would’ve given the audience, but it also trivializes the entire scene and makes it nonsensical and confusing.

This also leads into the second problem – the cutting out of important details. How were the filmmakers to have known that a character only mentioned in a few throwaway lines like Mrs. Figg was going to have a role in Order of the Phoenix? How were the filmmakers to have known that the two-way mirror Sirius gave Harry and that Harry broke upon it not working would be important in Deathly Hallows? They couldn’t, honestly. But there are a few things they did know were important, but chose to leave out or just glossed over, and most if not all of those details boil down to one thing –

Backstory.

The Harry Potter films really, really do not like putting in characters’ backstories if they can help it – from simple things like Fred once turning Ron’s teddy bear into a spider and in the process causing his severe arachnophobia to really important stuff like Barty Crouch, Sr. being an ambitious man on the cusp of becoming Minister until his own son was discovered amongst the Death Eaters and Crouch was disgraced and then saving his son from Azkaban as a favor to his ill wife and keeping him prisoner in his own home, only to have his son get rescued by Voldemort and kill him when he got too close to telling Dumbledore what was going on.

Yeah – this isn’t just something you can blame on people making these movies as the books were coming out. Knowing a character’s history is not only a very good way to understand where they are now, but also a very good indicator of future behavior. Knowing Severus Snape was the one who leaked the contents of Trelawney’s prophecy about Harry to Voldemort sets up why Harry distrusts Snape, as well as gives the audience a good reason to agree with Harry. Knowing Dumbledore’s sister died because of an argument that broke out between Aberforth, Dumbledore, and Grindelwald explains why Aberforth and Dumbledore aren’t on speaking terms and why Dumbledore has never talked about his family to Harry, or likely to anyone. Knowing that Remus didn’t stand up to his friends at school when they were bullying Snape not only gives Snape good reason to hate Remus, but it also foreshadows his adversity to conflict shown in his relationship with Tonks and in his confrontation with Harry during the Second Wizarding War.

Now of course backstory can be difficult to weave in smoothly. Sometimes it can come across as stilted or as a detour, if done poorly. But the nice thing about filmmaking is that you only need images, and not a lot of words or time, to translate this information to your audience. By depicting a little more of Snape’s Worst Memory, we would’ve seen Remus not standing up to his friends. By having Harry listen in on a conversation between Snape and Dumbledore in the Headmaster’s office a little longer, it could’ve been slipped out that Snape had been the one who told Voldemort the prophecy. Even Riddle’s backstory with Merope, Morfin, Marvolo, and Tom Riddle, Sr. could’ve been done with a lot of images and not that many words – the Pensieve scenes in Half-Blood Prince were already very stylized, so you could’ve gotten across a lot with very little.

The best way to fix both the first and second problems, honestly, was to have waited for all of the books to come out before adapting them, so that it would be easier to weigh what details would be important and which ones wouldn’t.

But now we get onto the problem of characterization, in the script-writing sense. Almost every character in the Harry Potter movies is a shallow representation of their book incarnations…not just because of the stuff the filmmakers left out, but because of deliberate additions and visual choices.

The most notable example that everyone brings up is Ron. Ron, in the books, is quite honestly the best friend most anyone could think up – he’s loyal, he’s funny, he’s laid-back, he’s incredibly generous despite his lack of wealth, he’s noble, he’s sensitive, he’s insightful, and he’s always ready to jump in and help when his friends need him. But in the films, he’s honestly more remembered for trailer-worthy one-liners and being a tag-along sidekick. In Prisoner of Azkaban especially, Ron is just dead weight, when the Golden Trio was always supposed to be just that – a trio, balancing out the flaws of the others.

Hermione has the exact opposite problem. Because she is the main female character, the filmmakers made a lot of choices that put her more in the spotlight at the expense of the rest of the cast. Because Hermione was the most important female character in the narrative, she suddenly had to represent all women, like most main women from films have to do – even if, yeah, the only reason many film women are put in that position is because they’re the ONLY developed female character in the story, and there are many strong and different female characters in the Harry Potter books, like Luna, Ginny, McGonagall, Molly Weasley, Fleur Delacour, Narcissa Malfoy, Tonks…even villains like Bellatrix Lestrange! But to follow film convention, Hermione was made into a “role model” more than a character, having all the flaws that made her relatable scrubbed away so as to make her more of an “Action Girl.”

Even Harry is given the short end of the stick. In his case, he becomes the wide-eyed, innocent, stock “Everyman Hero” that every audience member is supposed to jump into the shoes of for most of the film series, when Harry in the books had a very definitive personality. He was a hot-blooded, emotional, introverted, academically lazy, courageous, selfless young man who loathed the spotlight of fame and was well known for having a “saving people thing.” In the movies, however, a lot of his snark and temper is toned down and his disdain for fame is downplayed except when it is convenient (i.e. when his name comes out of the Goblet of Fire and he claims he doesn’t want eternal glory – even though in the books, he’d actually off-handedly fantasized about being Champion a few times).

This isn’t even touching a lot of the other “trope-ification” we see – Fred and George as the comic relief (even if they had angry and dramatic moments too in the books), Cho Chang as the (wrong) bland love interest, Ginny as the (right) bland love interest, Fleur as the pretty blond airhead (seriously, what does she do in the movies?!), Lavender Brown as the jealous girlfriend, and Neville as the klutz (in every movie except for the very last one, honestly!). Even Seamus is mostly just known for being the subject of one recurring joke throughout the entire series. As much as we can’t expect that every side character will get a lot of focus, as they shouldn’t, there are ways to hint to deeper character development in these people in the background, rather than just making them stock set pieces. Even in the Harry Potter films themselves, there are examples of how to do it right! Although we never learn everything about Sirius in the films, we do get a lot of who he is simply through a few well-written scenes seasoned with some backstory and some good acting on Gary Oldman’s part. We see this again in the character of Slughorn, who only really appears in one movie – again we feel we know this character better than ones like Ginny or Seamus, even if he’s a side character, because of some well-written scenes and some good acting. It’s just when those scenes become one-note or don’t add or expound upon the established character that it creates a problem.

This particular bullet point also has links to the final problem, and that is the stark black-and-white morality of the film series, which is a huge departure from the moral grayness depicted in the books. As Sirius says, 

“We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.”

But unfortunately in the films, we do not see that theme expressed very well. Whereas in the books we have Severus Snape viciously bullying his students and taking every opportunity he can to put Harry down, in the films we have him occasionally growling at his students for their cheek and indulging in slapstick routines where he smacks Harry and Ron over the head for talking during an exam. Whereas in the books we show Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy running to try to find their beloved son during the Battle of Hogwarts, in the films we see Lucius whacking Draco with his cane. Whereas in the books we have Marietta choosing to defend her mother’s job over keeping a secret about an illegal student organization that she hadn’t want to join in the first place, in the films we have Cho Chang being drugged by truth potion by mean old Umbridge, so it wasn’t her fault that she told…and yet she’s still shunned for telling anyway, for some reason – seriously, what’s up with that?

In the films, the good guys are pretty solidly that – the good guys – and the bad guys are pretty much the exact same way. One of the ways this damages the entire series for me is how the film version of Half-Blood Prince depicts Tom Marvolo Riddle. Now in the second film, Riddle is actually handled pretty well – his resemblance to Harry is played up and the performance radiates charm as well as coldness. But then when we got to Half-Blood Prince, it seemed that the filmmakers suddenly thought they were making a movie geared for toddlers and so had to make the past version of Voldemort as friggin’ obvious as they humanly could, sucking out any potential charm or charisma that anyone could’ve seen in Riddle and blinded them to his darker side. The creative decision not only makes Dumbledore and Slughorn and everyone else who didn’t see Riddle as a threat look like idiots – it not only cheapens this menacing villain that you’ve spent the last five films building up – it not only ruins any real-world allegory you could make about real-world monsters that lure followers to their demented causes – but it also defeats one of the central themes of the story, that of choice. Harry at several points in the story is reminded of how similar he is to Riddle, but what makes him in truth nothing like Riddle are his choices. Harry has chosen to save lives, rather than take them. Harry has chosen to love, rather than hate. Harry and Riddle may have gone through very similar traumas and so both have light and darkness in them, but Harry chose to act on the light part of himself, whereas Riddle chose to act on the dark part. This, in the end, is what dooms Riddle and saves Harry.

Honestly, if I had my way, I would wait a few more years (2021, to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the events starting?) and then remake Harry Potter as an HBO miniseries with a huge budget and a more diverse all-star cast. I think we’re ready to tell this story again now…hopefully with more of the detail and themes that we loved in the original books.