All I did yesterday was listen to the Hamilton cast recording, which is streaming in full on NPR. It is perfect. I wish only that you could see Daveed Diggs’ unbelievably sexy/funny swagger, and Jonathan Groff’s…well, here:
You’ll only take a couple losses if you can’t see Hamilton with your own eyes, King George being the biggest. When I saw the show, Jonathan Groff was so absurd he made Leslie Odom Jr., playing Aaron Burr, break with a particularly well-executed shoulder shimmy. Revivifying that guy as a louche party boy, insouciant in the face of his first rejection in life, felt like an actual upset applecart, a way of looking through a historical figure that I’d never considered before. When you listen to Groff sing those lines, just trust he murdered the dance floor. Also Anthony Ramos, as first John Laurens and then Hamilton’s son Philip: When he raps a little something he wrote to his often-absent father, the idea of rap as a form of writing that could be a life’s work surfaces. The respect given there to fathers whose work is rap alongside the empathy for kids missing a parent felt new and necessary and I was grateful.
Excellent roundup of #BaeOfPigs
Do not do this in the workplace:
Cliffnotes: Former partner at the law firm where I am an associate, Jim, left the firm last year. We worked together for approximately a year, during which time he took lengthy FMLA absences. I haven’t spoken to him in the year since he left unless he dropped by the firm to see the senior partner about something. I had heard a rumor Jim was into BDSM, but gave it very little thought. (Whatever floats your boat, no skin off my nose).
Cut to last Friday. He Facebook messaged me asking if he could ask me a question. I thought it would be firm-related, so I said sure. He said nevermind. Two days later, a mutual friend (Sharon) asked if I’d be interested in entering a D/s relationship with Jim. She made the request at his behest, she said. Sharon described it as, “You let someone pamper you and you belittle them.”
The indigenous Aymara women have centuries of experience of knitting and weaving distinctive woollen hats, sweaters and blankets.
Now, they are applying their expertise to a hi-tech medical product – which is used to seal up a “hole in the heart” which some babies are born with.
One of the worst things I’ve ever read:
KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
Tits and Sass does a wrap-up on that gross Mary Mitchell thing:
I’m not squeamish when it comes to free speech, but there are real consequences for sex workers when we face this kind of derision by mainstream journalists. The “unidentified prostitute” Mitchell disparaged should be lauded for her bravery in going to the police. Countless women who aren’t sex workers fear adverse reactions from reporting their rapes, and the risk of being discredited by the cops grows exponentially for those of us who are. When Mitchell writes,“It’s tough to see this unidentified prostitute as a victim,” she is perpetuating what all predators already assume to be true. When I was raped by a client, I was struck by how powerless I felt, how easily he could take from me, secure in knowing I had no recourse to hold him accountable.
My friend Carrie’s puppy has a new duck toy, but she is still not quite right, and continues to need your thoughts:
This is the initiation rite for the other club David Cameron was in at Oxford. Much worse than the pig thing pic.twitter.com/0u2bOth2hb
— Gabriel Roth (@gabrielroth) September 21, 2015
David Cameron was also a member of the Bullingdon Club, a dining club for rich pigfuckers where they rent a dining hall, get drunk and smash the hell out of the place, and then just pay the owner off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullingdon_Club
(edit: this is the same club where you reportedly have to burn a fifty-pound note in front of a poor person; just in case you were wondering what they got up to AFTER they joined)
When I first read about the Bullingdon Club I totally got what Slytherin was supposed to be in the Harry Potter series (which kind of got obscured with all the cool goth iconography). It’s the wizard version of all those old-boy networks.
The problem that I have with it, and the Hogwarts House system in general, is that getting into Slytherin happens because a magic hat looks into your soul and perceives that, deep down, you are a genuinely bad person, rather than Slytherin being an artifact of a corrupt class system built on exploitation of the working classes.
But yeah, other than that I guess it’s in some ways the same idea.
excuse me sir but according to what you are saying harry james potter himself is a “genuinely bad person” because the hat almost put him in slytherin and I will not stand for that sort of talk around here
Yeah, *almost* being the operative word here.
“Harry, you’ve got a lot of the characteristics that make a good Slytherin — but don’t worry! Even though you are like them, you’re different in some key, but not-very-clearly-defined way! Guess what it is!”
(It is that you are not evil.)
Yeah, I love those books but Rowling didn’t build her metanarrative very well. She seems to want to make a point about privilege as that related to the UK class system, but kept undermining it with all this ‘inherent badness’ stuff.
Her class issues are all over the place, tbh. The Gryffindors come off as far more privileged and reliant on an old boy network than anyone.
You’ve got this sneering portrait of middle-class aspiration with the Dursleys, although a lot of the stuff they come out with – judge by appearances; blood tells – is validated by the narrative.
There’s the hilarious thing with the Gaunts and how they’re living this dueling banjos nightmare but it’s all their fault because their innate evil influences their finances (they’re the bad kind of poor who blow all their money, as opposed to the Weasleys, who are the good kind of poor and will therefore show their strong character by getting rich!) and whether or not they can survive childbirth
Oh, and the evil characters who tend to have the scary Slavic names or the ‘common’ accents.
“Well, you DO seem content to let everyone around you, especially women and poor people, do everything for you while you coast along on the strength of your name, so you COULD go in Slytherin…”
*cough*
#notallslytherins
Some of us use connections, ambition, and ruthless political maneuvering as a coping mechanism to protect ourselves from otherwise being ground down by The Man. My high school wasn’t quite as bad as Hogwarts, but getting out alive was still an accomplishment that absolutely required knowing who to talk to about any particular issue, when to push and when to give ground, and when to blow off class to sit in the office until the principal would see you.
Also, all of my coworkers seem to think I have social skills, which is laughable. I’ve just read books about social skills and am better at pretending than they are.
You are a real person, not a fictional character in a book. If you HAD been a fictional character in those books — like if J. K. Rowling had written just one Slytherin kid as something other than a slimy prick who existed for basically no reason except to stop all the kids in Protagonist House from getting things done — I’d probably have a different opinion of them.
I consider the Harry Potter books to be largely from the perspective of Harry Potter, and/or Dumbledore. I do not think either are reliable narrators, especially not when it comes to the “evil” characters.
But then again, I also have been known to give more weight to certain fanfic than book 7, so, I am actually living in my own little fantasy world a bit here.
I think I am also aggressively-sensitive to how kids are treated by the *system* of school — like, I’m sympathetic to being bullied by shit teachers and shitty fellow students, but I’m ALSO sympathetic to kids in what I perceive to be monstrously unjust education systems. I think I am grossed out by the idea of the Sorting Hat in the first place, like what kind of school takes it as their responsibility to, the very first day you show up, actually literally sort kids into the category of people that they are? Urhg.
On the other hand, maybe I am still just really resentful of that time that Slytherin won the House Cup and then Harry Potter did some bullshit and Dumbledore took it away from them in front of everybody like a fucking asshole.
Yeeeeeeaaaah, people are all like “Where’s my Hogwarts Letter?” and I don’t know why, it seems like a pretty terrible school. No teacher training, lots of people barely qualified, no oversight, mind boggling gaps in education, lots of high stakes testing, all the instructors and administrators don’t even bother to pretend they’re not playing favorites, forced to wear strange clothing that doesn’t seem very comfortable or functional.
PLUS there is seemingly no system to prevent kids from running around on life-threatening missions they dream up.
I think the robes are the only part I can get behind.
I’d be so happy if I could wear robes everywhere. I would never shave my legs again. (Not that I shave them frequently now)
I think everyone can agree that Dumbledore is an asshole.
Maybe the worst person to ever come out of Gryffindor House, with the exception of James Potter and all of his asshole friends.
And then in the last book, McGonagall threw all the Slytherins in the dungeon during the battle! Even the first-years! Come on, you can’t tell me the eleven-year-olds were potential Death Eater assets. They’re ELEVEN.
All of them because OF ONE ASSHOLE! One kid says “let’s get him”, and then no one even does anything! They weren’t actually trying to get him!
Those kids were 100% treated like proto-Hitlers from Day One; the school basically acts like Slytherin is a Death-Eater Fifth Column, no wonder so many of them were assholes.
the soft bigotry of evil expectations
*cough* As far as I remember; In the book McGonagall has them escorted from the castle, and states that anyone of age who wants to stay and fight can.
However in the movie (in all its glorious simplification) they’re sent to the dungeons.
#PotterNerdOut.
She also compliments Harry’s gallantry in throwing out an Unforgiveable, I think JKR had just gone ‘Fuck it’ at that point to having any shades of gray left.
And there was probably a Slytherin that year who was trying, really trying, to be a good student and follow the rules and treat other houses with respect, and what that kid learned was that in real life, authority figures can take away your accomplishments on a whim, just because you’re not the golden child.
That kid went on to work at a wizard HMO.
It’s so weird that the only person who ever voices getting rid of the whole system is Voldemort, the ultimate evil.
To be fair, he does intend to replace it with something that is probably going to be much worse.
Definitely, it just sort of enforces how fragile the worldbuilding feels – what’s a terrible thing this mass-murderer could do to society and the children within it? MAKE EVERYONE BE IN THE HOUSE FOR JERKS, MUHAHAHA!
And the ending of ‘well, all’s good, sure, we still divide our entire community and alternately coddle or bully kids based on which dorms they live in; but the important thing is we stopped that one dark lord, with nothing in place to stop a new one. PS. We are married with kids 🙂 :)’
book 7 is pretty much not canon to me
that and the star wars prequels. extremely well financed fanfic, with some good bits, and some bits that needed a professional editor.
Andromeda Tonks was a Slytherin, as was Regulus Black. Severus Snape is not a saint, but I think it would be hard to argue that he is a genuinely bad person. (Just a genuinely problematic one.) Professor Slughorn, also not a bad person.
None of those were kids at school. None of those characters except for Snape were even introduced before the fifth book, and Regulus Black was dead. Furthermore, it’s not like we know what Regulus Black was like in his regular life — maybe he only did one good thing, and otherwise WAS a bad person.
(Of course, that’s not really possible in Rowling’s world — good people don’t do bad things in this universe, so having done something good is, indeed, evidence of goodness; that’s why we’re compelled to believe that Snape was actually a good person, rather than a cruel, miserable shitheel who happened to be so obsessed with his high school crush that he could occasionally be manipulated into goodness.)
What I am saying is, in the experience of Harry Potter’s life — in the school that he goes to, among the kids he hangs out with, in the world that he lives in — every Slytherin kid is a prick.
True. Though Harry also doesn’t meet/interact with every Slytherin kid? So for all the shitty ones (mostly Malfoy, his goons, Pansy, and some of the Quidditch players), there are a whole bunch of them we know almost nothing about, like Theodore Nott, Daphne Greengrass, etc. Which suggests to me that there is at least some contingent of Slytherins who have better things to do with their lives than harass Harry Potter. But thanks to the mostly third person limited narration, we don’t know what those things are.
Also, Fred and George Weasley were monsters in human form. …just saying.
Yeah, but it’s not like it’s a documentary; Harry doesn’t interact with any Slytherin kids and discover that they’re good kids with just different worthwhile attributes because J. K. Rowling doesn’t write him to do that. And she could have! There could have been one who didn’t turn out to be horrible, just like there eventually turned out to be characters from other houses who had…I guess some kind of bearing on the story.
(Frankly, I think the real problem with the house system is that was ill-considered in the first place, and then Rowling was stuck with it. Like, the way this would make MORE sense, based on how the houses are set up, is either that they are not organized by childhood ontology, and the shitheads in Slytherin are specifically just Malfoy’s friends; or they are organized by ontology, and Ron is a Hufflepuffle and Hermione is a Ravenclaw, and maybe there’s a good Slytherin around or something. But because of how the first book is, I think, incompletely-worked-out, Rowling put all the good kids in Gryffindor and all the bad kids in Slytherin, and then promptly forgot about the other two houses until she realized she needed to re-incorporate them into the story.)
Well they three main characters are proxies, right? Ron for Hufflepuff, Hermione for Ravenclaw, Harry for Slytherin. There’s not a true Gryff amongst them.
I mean, really, the thing with the houses is that what it’s SUPPOSED TO BE before it got tangled in morals is about what’s the most important to you, not Who You Are For All Time. Not all Gryffindors are brave, or brave in the same way, but they all VALUE it. I bet not all Ravenclaws are naturally academic, but they all value some kind of knowledge. Not all Slytherins are bigoted shitheels, but they all value power – and power’s use and manifestation is as varied as knowledge’s. I bet not all Hufflepuffs are nice, even. “Just and loyal and… unafraid of toil” describes many a tyranical person.
The failing is that the books are only about these three kids and some extras, who, because of the setup, all happen to be Gryffindors. We know almost as little about what Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws and their house cultures are like as Slytherin – there’s barely a kid in the books who is treated as a full human who isn’t either a gryffindor or a slytherin cast as the bad guys. Even Digory is basically a cardboard cutout of ‘Fair Player Person’. It just matters less because he is being used to stereotype the good guys but I bet he was sometimes a dick, you know?
Plenty of good people do bad things in the books! Books 5 and 7 both have major “Dumbledore is kinda awful” subplots. Ron is frequently awful to Hermione, Harry, or both. James Potter and Sirius were awful when they were in school. Percy abandons his family and then sees the light and comes back to them. And so on.
And I think it makes sense, with how the series progressed, to introduce more and more moral complexity as the books go on. It’s about Harry growing up–it makes sense that the world would look pretty black and white when he was 11.
Haha. The secret lesson of the Harry Potter series is, “The older you get, the more you come to realize that literally everyone on the planet is awful.” 😉
Well, that is true but 1) I think there’s a difference between sort of “irrelevant” evil and “plot” evil — like, Ron is awful to Hermione in a way that never really has any bearing on the impending Evil Wizard Cataclysm. He’s not evil, he’s just rude. The same is essentially true for James and Sirius; they were certainly shitlords by any normal standards, but they weren’t really evil evil, not in a world that contains Lord Voldemort. And 2) I don’t think Albus Dumbledore is ever not redeemed by the narrative; whatever terrible things he’s done (up to and including raising a child explicitly for the purpose of letting him get murdered), they were justified by the narrative even if you or I might think they were unjustifiable.
Even Percy — well, I don’t remember anything that he did, my memory is that he just sort of disappears from the books for a while — but I don’t think he ever contributes to the Evil of the story, he just essentially makes minor transgressions; he abandons his family, sure, but he also comes back to them, because unlike the actual Evil wizards, he’s just a dope.
3) I guess it makes sense from Harry’s perspective, but I am reading it from my perspective, and it’s important to me that all the things in my life are the way that I want them and everything that isn’t like that is bad and terrible.
Also, I think all of the book, particularly book 6, set up the fact that the Slytherin kids in Harry’s day are basically all the kids of Death Eaters, and that their perpetuation of magical discrimination comes from them all having bigoted parents. Draco is pretty clearly emulating his father throughout the books, and in book 6, we see that he’s a scared kid who’s been incompetently attempting murder all year just to keep his family safe.
Yessss. Defense of Slytherin for the win. Think about it, just as you are not Elizabeth Bennett, so also you are probably not a Gryffindor. Be honest with yourself and stop throwing shade.
It seems true to me that JK made pretty much all of the Slytherins evil – but she also created a depth of world that gave the story life of it’s own and it seems to me that the Slytherin of the HP fan base presents a far more varied and nuanced view that I have accepted as cannon because I want it to be that way.
hmmm I could talk about harry potter all day and not finish the last panel of this stupid comic strip that sounds good
the “you” above being directed to the general Griffindor-y populace
I definitely would not be a Slytherin because I am no good at maintaining anything like social connections or using them to further my ambitions. I’m not even sure how much ambition I have, to be honest.
Maybe I need to be one of these guys.
Oh my, that is delightful and now I must off to Tumblr to find it and reblog it.
BEARGLOVE! Terry Crews AND it smells good? YES.
Nearly every single sorting hat quiz I’ve taken sorts me into Slytherin and it makes me irrationally sad.
This made me so, so happy. So I will share and validate your humanness: http://seananmcguire.tumblr.com/post/125762013310….
HELP
NO YOU’RE CRYING ON THE TRAIN.
My partner is so clearly 100% Slytherin. And he is a lovely, moral man who is one of the best people I know. He just also knows how to manipulate people if need be – he’s a teacher. He manipulates kids into learning every day. And he’s moral enough to know when to turn it off. But he also gets us good deals on whitegoods, etc, but never rips anyone off. He’s just a good defense against those people who would rip US off.
The people involved don’t think of themselves as “bad people,” I’m sure. They think about it in terms of ambition, connections, tradition, etc. That this is what you do to get ahead, to become part of the elite like your fathers and forefathers. The result is that they end up fucking pigs and behaving like assholes, because they can, because they’re encouraged to, because their friends are doing it and their parents did it and this is what binds you to your group, forever. And then you use those connections in adulthood to be in power and keep your friends in power.
And the wizarding world certainly had a class system as corrupt and ridiculous as ours, even if it does “end” in the pure of heart defeating it. In fact, it makes more sense to think of Slytherin as a wizarding Bullingdon Club, because why else would people still “want” to be sorted into it if all the wizards who go dark (and are eventually defeated) were part of it? It’s the path to real power and influence.
I disagree; I think that hiding the sort of mundane mechanisms of power and ambition behind the morally-simplistic Good and Evil dichotomy of Team of Evil Wizards Who Are Like Hitler versus the Team of Good Wizards Who Are All Good only serves to obscure those mechanisms in a way that’s counter-productive to recognizing and opposing them in reality.
BUT, I mean, that is what fantasy is, I understand how fantasy works, I even like the Harry Potter books okay. I just am not happy with Rowling’s portrayal of what is essentially an ontological condition of Being Evil.
Well, I think that was why I didn’t really “get it” until I started reading things about the Bullingdon Club and things like that (this was even before #baeofpigs), and then it all clicked more for me. The evilness of the Slytherins comes from the structure they were raised in – ingrained hereditary power structures like the pureblood houses who don’t really face punishment for what they did in the war and can raise their kids with exactly the same mentality that lead to it. It’s what keeps the Bullingdon Club running even though we “know” it’s evil. The people in it don’t care that we think they’re evil because they’re still in charge.
I guess I just would have liked it more, if that’s what it was going to be, if it had been a club that all of the Slytherins were in, rather than a formal part of the Hogwarts system that’s based on a magic hat looking into your soul. The aspect of ontological evil I think only confuses the issue — WAS their evil because of ingrained power structures? Harry Potter could have gone into Slytherin; would he have been a good one? Is the job of the Sorting Hat to find out which kids were raised by cruel and monstrous families and put them all in the same house together? What could possibly be the merit of that?
(I should like to suggest that this is another casualty of Rowling having come up with an idea that she didn’t really see the merit of until later — Harry Potter Sorted into the Evil Wizard House and then needing to develop an understanding of how he could be a Slytherin but that didn’t necessarily make him evil is actually a much stronger character, I think, than Harry Potter Sorted into the Hero House from day one.)
Yeah, I’ve always hated the Sorting Hat. There’s a bit in one of the later books when it suddenly occurs to Dumbledore that maybe Snape is not pure evil and he says thoughtfully, “I think sometimes we sort too soon.” YA THINK? Like, the entire problem with Snape is that he’s been raised in this culture of “we may be poor and shabby but at least we’re racially pure,” and as soon as he has the luck to make one friend who might have a chance of expanding his worldview, he goes off to school and is promptly sorted into White Supremacist House for the rest of his schooldays. What chance does the kid have to not grow up to be a Death Eater?
It’s not just Slytherin that’s a problem, though that’s obviously the biggest problem. What about this business of sorting everyone who’s brave into Gryffindor? Hermione’s smart, so you’d think she’s go into Ravenclaw, but she’s brave, so she ends up in Gryffindor. Ron’s a goodhearted bumbler, but he’s brave I guess, so it’s Gryffindor instead of Hufflepuff. Harry’s got some Slytherin qualities apparently, though what they are I don’t know, but again, Gryffindor. So the result is that Gryffindor gets to be an All-Star team that pulls from the other houses, while Hufflepuff is a dumping ground for idiots, Slytherin is where kids get trained to be evil, and Ravenclaw is for people who are exclusively interested in academics without actually being as smart as Hermione because that would never do. What kind of school policy is this, that takes it as a foregone conclusion that 25% of your student body is evil and then PUTS THEM ALL TOGETHER? And that tells another 25% that they’re dumb and useless, but hey, at least they’re good-hearted?
Yeah, it really seems like it’s meant to be a commentary on bad education practices in England, but if there’s a joke in there, I don’t get what it’s about, and I’m not sure what the punchline is.
Plus, how do they always have just the right number of students for each House? Are there some years when, say, Hufflepuff only has a handful of students and Ravenclaw is overflowing? Or does the student body divide equally into four parts, which is what I suspect happens? It seems unlikely on the face of it that one-quarter of all wizards are naturally evil – that’s a pretty high percentage of evil. Maybe people who would be better off in Ravenclaw or Gryffindor are getting sorted into Slytherin just because the school has to meet a quota.
Also, what happens when students die? And you know, they put all this stuff in about how you don’t have to be a Slytherin if you don’t want to — can you switch houses? Or is whatever combination of prejudices and traits you have when you put on a hat when you’re eleven or twelve just it, you’re stuck with that forever?
My grand thesis on Hogwarts houses: it’s not about traits, it’s about values.
Gryffindor is the house of courage – i.e. taking action for a cause that is bigger than yourself. So, you don’t go to Gryffindor simply for not being easily scared, but for valuing courage and moral integrity above all else. Neville is a great example – scares easily, but has a LOT of heart. Brave doesn’t mean unafraid. Brave is a way of prioritising. Being a Gryffindor means being the person who does the scary thing that needs (or “needs”) to be done, no matter what it costs. Not all of those sacrifices are good or right, but a Gryffindor wouldn’t act unless they at least temporarily believed them to be.
Hufflepuff is the house of community (not stupidity). They prioritise harmony, unity and cooperation. So you don’t go there just because you don’t have any other traits, but because you VALUE unity and harmony more. You may be brave or smart, but you’re unimpressed by other brave or smart people unless they actually serve others humbly without making a big deal out of themselves. Hufflepuffs aspire to keep the world going. They make today be followed by tomorrow. This can make them invisible, which makes others assume they can’t do any “better”.
Ravenclaw is the house of intellect (not intelligence). They value the investigation of ideas, and they prefer to serve the world of thought rather than serve a cause or serve a group of people. Hermione would never go to Ravenclaw, since she prefers to use her brain to fight for causes. She’s incredibly smart, but never spends a single minute figuring out a theory on the nature of magic. Ravenclaw-ness is not about being good at problem-solving or even being knowledgeable – Luna Lovegood isn’t very scientific in her methods, and she’s not interested in facts at all, but she’s extremely interested in philosophy, imagination and discovery. Mind over matter.
Slytherin is the house of the self. Everyone can climb, and everyone can fall. You’re loyal to individuals, not to institutions. You get what you can take, but if you grab it, it’s yours. In Slytherin House, you will get an education in how to acquire what YOU WANT, but it will be completely up to you to make it happen. Money, violence, making deals – choose any strategy you like. If what you want is to be liked and influence people, and your preferred currency is information, be like Slughorn and network. If you’d rather be feared, be mean like schoolchildren, invent curses like Snape or commit violence like Voldemort. If you want to be in command, learn how to balance force and bribes, like the Malfoys. Young teens usually haven’t found a more interesting way to be selfish, use power or get forward than just insulting others when they feel like it, but adult Slytherins are pretty diverse and not all evil. They’ll look out for number one, and they’re basically okay with exploiting others, but they may or may not choose to do so.
Also: Gryffindor and Hufflepuff are collectivist cultures, while Ravenclaw and Slytherin are individualists. Gryffindors and Slytherins value leadership, while Ravenclaw values argument and Hufflepuff values consensus.
Ugggghhh nerd boner. You’ve said all the things better than I ever could
Bless you and this post.
This is a PERFECT comment and I love it so much I am moved to comment on The Toast for the first time in months.
This is amazing amazing amazing and I’m not even really that into HP.
Oh yes! I was saying this up thread but not as well as this! Lovely. As a Ravenclaw myself (honestly it’s as good a way to understand me as any) I am nodding along with that thing about Hermione – that’s what always annoyed me about the books, I now realise.
And valuing a thing is not the same as being GOOD at it. I bet there are plenty of Raveclaws failing out of all but one class, or getting Cs in everything because they keep trying to invent mechanical things, or can’t stop thinking about how bubbles work, or whatever. Mr Weasley should have been a Ravenclaw, is what I’m saying. And there are many many many different kinds of intellect/knowledge. I bet there are Ravenclaws who are utterly terrible at school but know everything there is to know about whatever the wizarding equivalent is of Pokemon, or have good social intelligence because all they want from life is to understand how people work. And there’d be plenty of brave, and loyal, and ambitious ravenclaws, just as there are smart, brave, ambitious Hufflepuffs. It’s not about what you intrinsically are, it’s about VALUES. Which is why you can choose your house because you can choose and emphasise particular values. (And it’s why this Ravenclaw values her Hufflepuff friends so so dearly – I need to be reminded to be collective, otherwise I forget and that way lies terrible things because other people are important.)
The other thing with Slytherin is that that value of Self often extends to family. Obviously this can lead to racial purity theories. But it can also lead to fiercely loyal, protective units working for good. As someone dating a Slytherin, I can tell you it can be pretty great. Hufflepuffs are that but ‘their people’ is just more like ‘everyone’ than specific people.
This is also why I hate that Gryffindor is the ‘hero’ house, as it was perfectly put upthread. There are about one bazillion ways of being a hero. Personally I value the Hufflepuff way of being a hero – quietly getting on with things and making sure there’s no NEED to rush about shouting things.
Also, your last paragraph is PERFECTION.
Also also, I freaking love the toast and all its toasties.
Also your username is amazing.
I think that for one thing, this shortchanges Fred and George, who both lack the requisite righteousness (apparently) and are also 100% the most inventive wizards in all of Hogwarts.
But the thing about this is that I don’t disagree that the houses are about values, so much as the problem that I have with sorting children into communities based on them. In reality we aren’t born with values, or we aren’t born completely with values, we learn values and our experiences guide us in one way or another.
I’ve just got a really hard time accepting the idea that there’s any value in a school that, either by magically looking into a person’s soul to see what kind of things they value or through one of these other ad-hoc methods, determines what kinds of things a child values, and then throwing them in with a group of other kids who think exactly the same way. Not only is that not what I think school is for — I definitely do not accept a value system that suggests that the population should each get a value and be sequestered according to it — but that’s sort of obviously going to be a problem going forward, especially when you know a bunch of your kids come from families of people who basically value evil, and being evil in a group.
What I mean is, even if you separate out this as a system of values from a system of soul composition or ontological goodness, it still overlooks the fact that values come from somewhere — the Bullingdon Club isn’t a magnet for people who have defective souls, it’s part of a set of mechanisms for the creation and conveyance of values. And it is not at all clear to me that the Harry Potter narrative recognizes that, while Harry Potter may specifically be a product of his Hogwarts education, so was every one of the Death Eaters.
Braak am I right in assuming you’re from North America? I think part of your opinion is formed by being unfamiliar with the house/form system common in most schools in the UK, in particular private boarding schools like Hogwarts
For most European readers (in particular Irish and British) its already a familiar system, so it doesn’t seem out of place in HP. Yes its been exaggerated a bit and the sorting is different (unfortunately no magic hats), but the idea is the same; you’re put into a specific group when you start the school, for practical reason first, like class scheduling and dorms and things, but it also forms a group identity, and the different houses compete in school sports etc.
In the older private schools its pretty common for different houses to have different things they value and children are sorted based on where they might ‘fit in’ best; e.g. some houses are known for music, others sports, others are academics etc.
I’m no expert, but even a passing awareness of the system, made it seem pretty normal in the HP books. I’m not saying its a good system, but it is a common system, Rowling didn’t make it up just for the books
Well, yes, it is true that I am from North America and not familiar with the British school system, but my problem is less that I think it’s weird and more that I think it’s bad. And maybe also some confusion about why people seem so excited about the idea of getting Sorted into a House, though I got theories about that.
In MY school we just tracked people by how well they did on an IQ test in kindergarten.
Though, also like I said…ugh, somewhere in this mess…I am willing to believe that it’s a clever satire of the British school system that just went over my head — like, is it implicit that it’s the House system as much as anything that led to Voldemort and the Death Eaters? Is the ending supposed to be a biting indictment of the bourgeoisie who are happy to settle into comfortable middle-class lifestyles now that Evil-capital-E is vanquished, and stupidly leave all the mechanisms of class and privilege that created the evil in the first place intact?
I don’t know, I think that would be good, I’d be a lot happier with this part of the books if that’s how British people read it.
There is definitely an attempt at a critique of the British class system in there, but I think it all gets lost and muddled because it is a childrens book after all so it had to be simplified and the adventure took precedent over social commentary.
The Slytherins are not meant to be ‘EVIL’, they just represent the ‘Old Sort’, people who rely on status and family connections to get on in life. Its been said already, we only see things from Harry’s POV, and he’s a child for most of the books, so of course its a bit simplified (He may have also inherited a slight chip on the shoulder about posh people from the Dursleys who are very stereo-typically upper-middle class British, they wish they were of the old posh lot, but their not, so they hate them).
Slytherin doesn’t only turn out evil people (but I will admit that all evil people have, apparently, come from Slytherin) it just turns out a very particular sort of person, just like the historic British public schools.
Voldermort was obviously evil, but he was also attracted to a very particular kind of power and had the social skills to maneuver in that environment (Like Slughorn), which is why he is the epitome of Slytherin.
Also I’d well believe that Hogwarts would stick with the House system and no disband Slytherin, even if it had produced the most evil wizards of all time; Its a very typical posh British people reaction to pretend nothing is wrong with the system; ‘Yes it turned out ONE evil wizard, but its always worked like this, so its going to continue to work like this’. To bring it right back to the beginning of this discussion, no one in power would ever THINK of disbanding the Bullingdon Club, even though they get up to despicable things, because the Bullingdon Club has always existed.
(Sorry I just dumped all my opinions into one comment. I adore this thread and have been following it all night! There needs to be a Toast dissertation on the critique of the Hogwarts house system and how it compares to the British public schools its based on)
this is probably near the root of my problem — as an American nurtured on 1930s labor activism (I am not that old, but my father’s father and his father were Union men since Old Times), the notion that you could even HAVE an Old Sort without wanting to chop them up and eat them is confounding to me.
Bourgeois revolution. Rowling thinks she’s against the class system because she’s against the aristocracy, but she’s actually pro a self-interested middle-class and the actual working-class characters (Stan Turnpike, the Creeveys) are minor comic characters scattered around the edges.
See also: I am against racism! The subjugation of non-human magical races is wrong! See the symbolism of the destruction of the Fountain of Magical Cooperation! Oops, I got distracted by Horcruxes and explosions and dragons, let’s agree that yer actual Magical Facism is really, *really* bad, and that a less overtly nasty hierarchy of race is generally OK and perhaps even benevolent if you’re at the top.
(I mean, I like J.K Rowling as a person and I think her actual politics are excellent, but the politics of the books are horrendous and I’m genuinely surprised how many people are defending them.)
That’s the motto of House Bearglove, incidentally: “Eat the Rich”
Harry could have gone into Slytherin because he had the qualities that people who went into Slytherin had: ambition to succeed in the world and an old family name (and a good bank account to go along with it). And what could possibly be the merit of that? Well, we see it in British politics and power circles now- keeping real power in the hands of the elite who have always had it. It’s not a merit in how I would define one, but I’m sure the people who perpetuate the system think it is. I think that’s the whole point of casting them as the “evil house.” The system and perpetuation of the “right sort” of people in control (based on birth and connections) is an evil one. It leads to cruel people and monstrous things happening in society. Voldemort and benefit sanctions.
(I do think the more simplistic look at it does stem from the first books being more straightforward school stories, which did tend to have the “good noble boys” vs the more villainous ones. She does try to show variation later, what with the Slug Club and all, but I’m not sure it ever really comes off right.)
I’m not sure I really believe this, though, because at the end of the Harry Potter books it’s not like they’ve dissolved the House system — even presuming that the evils of Slytherin House are really a metaphor for how pigfucking Tories get ahead in life, and aren’t meant to be ameliorated and essentially undone by later books — the mechanisms that produced that kind of evil are not only all still in place by the end of the books, but they haven’t even been slightly questioned. If the way that Slytherin operates in the Harry Potter universe is really meant to be a critique of that kind of rich-kid expensive school cartel system, I think the narrative has more of a responsibility to at least address why the systems are bad, not just the kids that it produces.
That’s actually my problem with the epilogue compared to everyone else’s problem – I don’t care that everyone got married and had kids with silly names, but they go through all this and the system doesn’t seem to have changed at all. (Although I supposed that can be some unintentional commentary on the British- even with the happily-ever-after, they can’t imagine their systems actually being dismantled.)
Agree; someone — Charles Stross, I think? — suggested once that his fundamental problem with fantasy is that it tends to be conciliatory; it’s always about threats to a way of life that are ultimately resolved into a stable return to either an old order, or a new order that is good by virtue of its resemblance to an even older one. Now that I’m old and cranky, I have a much harder time reading fantasy for precisely this reason.
Yes, there’s always a rightful king to be restored. There’s no concept of there just *not* being a king.
There’s fantasy that deals with exactly that concept, though! Terry Pratchett talks about just that in his Discworld books; Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy deals specifically with that problem as well. Those are just two examples off the top of my head, though, and I’m sure there are many more.
I just did a reread of the Guards books and man. I appreciate that twist so much more as an adult than I did as a teen.
Disagree! Slytherin-ness is not about evilness or meanness, it’s more specifically about being okay with exploiting or harming people to advance yourself. If you think that’s wrong, or basically if you make a difference between “using power” and “abusing power”, you don’t go to Slytherin.
People from other houses may do this too, some Slytherins don’t do it a lot (see: young Snape, who seems to mostly have kept to himself), but a Slytherin is fundamentally okay with that worldview (again, see Snape).
“specifically about being okay with exploiting or harming people to advance yourself.”
I guess I disagree that this is anything other than a pretty solid working definition of “evil”.
No, the point is that “being evil” is a trait of being, like your soul is just bad or whatever, while “thinking that it’s fine to exploit people” is something you DO. You can choose that opinion, you can change your mind, you can decide to exploit people or to not exploit them. So, the Hat doesn’t actually check if your soul is an inherently bad seed, it checks your opinions and actions.
Well, I disagree that the construction of Rowling’s universe, despite its nominal insistence on the idea of choice, is anything other than an ontology of strict predestination.
See, look: you get sorted into the house when you’re twelve. How could it be anything other than looking at your natural spiritual makeup? What twelve-year-old has robust, considered opinions about the morality of power and the nature of harm?
Sure, Harry had the *choice* to not go into Slytherin, because he wasn’t endemically evil, but what actually WAS that choice? Where did it come from? Frankly, within the context of the books, I don’t think that choice is anything other than the fact that he’s an innately good person. He doesn’t bring any experience or lessons learned from his bad upbringing, he didn’t read a book (I don’t think Harry Potter ever reads a whole book in the entire series). Where does his goodness come from? It’s innate, just the way Voldemort’s evil is actually innate, even though it’s always presented as his choice.
Besides THAT, what possible outcome could you expect by using a magic hat to say, “Hey, these twelve-year-olds all happen to have the opinion that it’s okay to hurt people to further your ambitions, let’s put them altogether in the basement with that asshole teacher and a terrifying-murder ghost”?
Note: Harry Potter, completely new to the Wizarding World, had been *told* that Slytherin was a House with only bad people. Had he not been given that information, do you think he’d have still been so insistent about not being a part of it?
(also, not all Slyths are evil, etc.)
Well, even if this is simply a case of irrational prejudice on Harry Potter’s part — a prejudice that, incidentally, he passes on to his own children by saying, “Well, it’s OKAY to be Slytherin, some Slytherins are even good! But don’t worry, you don’t have to hang out with the miserable shit kids if you don’t want to,” — I am not completely satisfied that a house system that takes the irrational prejudices of a twelve-year-old into consideration when it sorts the kids up is necessarily any better.
Can I just say that I love everything about this thread? Braak is on a ROLL.
you should see me when I get going on my apologia for the orcs
WHY IS THE ONLY GOOD ORC A DEAD ORC TOLKIEN why are they the only race that is inherently irredeemable
YEAH, and you KNOW, the orcs are actually the victims of thousands of years of torture and forced breeding programs, way to show some compassion there, J. Ronald Reuel.
(I used to think that this “Unused Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky on the Lord of the Rings” was a joke, but the more I think about it the more sympathetic I find it: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/unused-audio-c…
Braak, you’ve read “The Last Ringbearer”, yes? Essential reading for Orc apologists!
I know about it, but haven’t read it. I am, frankly, a little surprised there aren’t more books like that.
YES PLEASE MORE OF THIS please write more is what I am saying, I would subscribe to this newsletter, maybe pitch it to the toast idk. Also what Hogwarts house are you, asking for a friend?
Ravenclaw. But the kind of Ravenclaw with a lot of discipline problems and that loudly and strenuously objected to the idea of a Sorting Ceremony in the first place as the worst kind of performative classism, in case you are wondering how I got along at school.
I am here for this.
It’s about choice. The eleven-year-olds DON’T have “robust, considered opinions about the morality of power and the nature of harm”, of course. But they have opinions. And they get to choose. Choosing who to be when you’re twelve is unfair, unlike looking into a kid’s deepest soul (a deep soul truth would always stay the same, presumably, and tell the true facts about who you are).
At 11, you get to have the most private conversation you’ve ever had – but in public. Everyone can watch you have it, but no one hears what’s being said. You talk inside your head to someone who can see all your thoughts and memories. Who are you then? Who are you the one time when you can REALLY be yourself, with someone you can’t fool? It’s incredibly mean to do this in front of the entire school, so I think that maybe it’s a cultural myth that the Hat “reads” something secret about you, while actually it just talks to you. You get to choose, but you believe that the responsibility is someone else’s. YOU think that the Hat sorts you, but actually you sort yourself based on who you believe you might be and who you want to be.
It’s absolute bullshit to do this at age 11, but the wizard culture is really harsh and unfair, so, why not.
edit: also, you don’t need to read books to be uncomfortable with bullying. Harry’s been abused, he knows what misuse of power looks like. Rowling uses the stupid “mother’s love” excuse waaay to much (what, like Harry’s the first kid in history who had a loving parent?) but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.
I’m not sure what this means; are you saying that it IS unfair, because the Hat actually just asks kids what their opinions on evil are, and if the kid thinks evil is okay, they put them in the Evil house? That the House system is unfair precisely because the Hat does NOT have magical access to the individual soul?
While I agree that this is somewhat different from the moral structure I asserted before, I’m not sure that it’s actually any better. Or that a system in which “choice” is rendered so arbitrarily really emphasizes the value of choice in terms of moral decision making.
Like, I am suggesting that in Rowling’s world, people are by nature good or evil, and this informs all or most of their decision-making in a way that paradoxically makes choice irrelevant. But in this world, wouldn’t choice be equally irrelevant? If you’re bound to just follow whatever dumb thing you believed at twelve?
Also, he doesn’t want to be in Slytherin because all of his new friends have told him that Slytherin is just, like, the worst. It’s not even that he doesn’t want to be evil; he wants to stay with his new friends, rather than losing face by being put in the House that he just learned is terrible. “Don’t make me sit with the weird kids” is not actually evidence of innate goodness.
I mean, in reality it isn’t, but in the world of Harry Potter, that is an intuitively correct choice. He shouldn’t sit with those kids, those kids are evil! I feel like this is a sort of secondary testament to the idea that Harry Potter is actually innately good, rather than he’s a person with a considered morality — an evil person would be presumably tempted by what he thinks Slytherin has to offer, but Harry Potter rejects it out of instinct.
That’s a really good point. What does Slytherin have to offer, really, at that point in the book? Hogwarts has already dumped a whole bunch of opportunity in front of Harry – he gets magical powers! He gets a community! He gets an apparent reprieve from his life of abuse and neglect! What more does Slytherin have to offer at that point that can offset the fact that, as Unreadaethel points out, that’s where the weird kids are? It’s not like Harry’s being shown all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. He’s being shown a table full of obnoxious rich brats.
I just can’t get over how static Hogwarts is. A decent school, if its house system had resulted in something like Slytherin, would disband the houses and reorganize. Even a bad school would probably reorganize once they’d ended up with an actual war between Slytherin and the rest of the school. But not Hogwarts. It’s like the system creates the school rather than the other way around – like these divisions are intrinsic to wizarding society, rather than being largely shaped, or at any rate maintained, by Hogwarts itself. It kind of implies, to me, that the only appropriate response to huge divisions within your society is to do your best to represent and perpetuate them within your institutions – which is NOT a message I want the Harry Potter books to carry.
And his Slytherin-esque qualities are only an infection from Voldemort’s curse, anyway. He’s only got secondary evil, not primary evil, like when Buffy came back from heaven and Spike could hit her suddenly.
The morality of HP is very medieval, really.
I don’t really see how a person’s opinions and actions can be considered separate from the condition of their soul. The things you believe and the things you do are pretty much just more specific manifestations of what your soul is like.
No, not in the Harry Potter universe. The soul is its own “thing” that exists inside you.
It’s never said that the soul is separate from a person’s opinions and actions–just that it’s separate from the body (unless I’m forgetting a passage).
I was referring to the Harry Potter universe and I still think the point stands. Even if you think of a soul as an entity in and of itself, the condition of the soul directly connects to one’s beliefs and actions. You cannot have an innately bad soul and have kind/loving opinions and you can’t have an innately good soul and torture kittens for fun in your spare time. Cruel opinons/actions are the symptoms of having a bad soul.
But Dumbledore is okay with these things – he does it constantly, to everyone, but especially to Harry (who was, after all, a pig raised to slaughter – if Snape is unequivocally right about one thing it is that). And he’s a Gryffindor.
There is no such thing as inherent evil in a bunch of eleven year old kids. There is no looking in their heads and predicting that they are okay with ‘abusing power’ and therefore should be stuck in Villainy House. They’re KIDS. The sorting hat should be tossed out back in the garbage.
Dumbledore doesn’t abuse power to advance HIMSELF, but to advance a CAUSE. Which isn’t okay, just different. No one said that the other houses are nice! Not me, at least 😛
Kids are generally all okay with abusing power, because they don’t understand the consequences of their actions. It’s just a reality of their developmental stage.
Yes, but the thing is, that Dumbledore is THE WORST
See, I’d see it more as the Potterverse as a Jerkass world, with everyone in it willing to harm others, the only difference being why. The Hufflepuffs seem to be the pitchfork and torches backup crew to the other masculine house Gryffindor; the Ravenclaws fit in with the sneery tone the narrative takes to intellectualism, where they don’t seem quite passionate enough about identifying the Right Sort (Cho not ditching her friend when Harry turns against her, and Luna with her ‘uncomfortable truths’); Slytherins are obvious; and Gryffindors motivated by either righteousness or just self-righteousness.
Like we get six books of how Harry has a pure heart in comparison to Malfoy being a shit, but when it comes down to it, JKR kind of has her cake and eats it – it’s Malfoy who has to be ‘forced’ to cast Unforgiveables and Harry who ends up lightly tossing them out with badass movie quips.
Due to the influence of this site’s obsession with the Mitford sisters, I’ve decided that the subtitle of the Harry Potter series is “we haven’t quite gotten over the War”.
Which is to say; the war ended, and all those fascists went back to being upstanding citizens who occasionally fuck pigs.
I just know every single Mitford was a Slytherin, except Decca who was a Griffendor.
That a comment about an English political scandal devolved into a serious Harry Potter / social class discussion ……. I just freaking love you guys. Good job Toasties.
DEvolved?
I stand very much corrected. You are absolutely right. EVOLVED.
I don’t know how well-attested the £50 note thing is. I would really like it to be true of Cameron, but it seems to be mostly urban legend.
I do think it’s both astonishing and notable that Number 10 hasn’t formally denied the pig allegations, though.
According to a spin doctor in the Guardian, they either can’t deny it because its true, or they can’t deny it because then they have to respond to other allegation in the book, like Lord Ashcrofts tax status and other things, which could put them in even more hot water. Best to just let it play out
The Damian MacBride piece? Yeah, I saw that. But then, he’s got scores to settle too, so who knows what to believe?
GOD DAMN IT I am trying to upload a screenshot of the Bullingdon Club wikipedia article where someone changed David Cameron’s name to “David Hameron” but I can’t get the stupid thing to embed so you’ll just have to imagine it I guess
am here for a script that just perpetually logs into Wikipedia to change “David Cameron” to “David Hameron”
Dang, can I just say that I have been longing for a serious discussion of the morality of the Hogwarts House system for years, and I am glad that I have finally found people to talk to about it.
I would also like to say I am so glad this happened today and that you pursued this discussion with such fervor, because I am stressed out for a number of reasons today, but having really in-depth discussions about Harry Potter is one of my favorite things in the world. Thank you. (I regret only that I do not have the time at work to write exhaustive rebuttals to some of your claims)
I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS
check my wall of text reply to nausikaa above (unless I actually replied to you? I don’t remember)
Honestly I feel like it’s practically all that people on tumblr talk about (and I am here. for. it.)
You’d think it’d be difficult to come up with something more repulsive that the thought of David Cameron penetrating a dead pig. But no, as the story about burning a 50 pound note in front of a beggar shows.
So there’s this science fiction book series called The Culture by the late Iain M. Banks, and one of the earlier entries in the series is the novel Player of Games, which involves an agent of The Culture (think of the Federation from Star Trek, only even more post-scarcity–they create huge habitats in space to avoid dependence on colonizing planets, and are somewhat more willing to meddle in other civilizations) who is participating in this massive, absurdly elaborate board game that is used to select a planet’s leaders. One of the things that’s used to motivate the agent is the revelation that there are three tiers of porn available on this planet. The stuff that’s available to the masses is pretty much standard vanilla porn. The upper class level includes some pretty exotic fetishes. But the stuff that’s available to the ruling class is almost entirely torture and snuff porn, the idea being that the only people who are allowed into that class not only are capable of being cruel, but kind of enjoy it.
That’s what I’m reminded of when I think of a group of people of privilege who burn money in front of the homeless as part of their initiation. I want to believe that not everyone in the higher echelons of power is capable of being that cruel, or desires to be, but I am utterly not surprised that at least some of them are.
Yes Player of Games!!!
The thing is, the pig’s suffering is over at that point, so it’s all absolutely disgusting, but not actively cruel.
I arrived home from work last night all set to listen to Hamilton, and I discovered that Time Warner Cable had a major outage in my area. Which lasted until almost 11. So I have not yet been able to listen to all of Hamilton (got to “Hurricane”), although this is partly because I listened to “Satisfied” three times in a row.
GET WELL SOON CARMELLA. If all she needs is positive thoughts, there should be no problem. I already think about that puppy far more often than is strictly rational, considering I’ve never met her or her owner or anyone in any way connected to her, and am not likely to ever do so.
Me too! I look forward to my morning pupdate AND I feel like I’m cheating on my cat. It’s not normal but at least we’re not alone.
Get well, Carmella! I just found out that my cat does NOT in fact have FIV like previously thought so maybe the good pet news is going around and you’ll get some good news soon.
my current upset about my increased workload is not that i have more work to do but that i am not able to get to the toast as often and am therefor falling behind on Carmella pics and updates. she could be a full grown lady dog by the time i get caught up!
Why are people so awful?
Wanted: a group of bagpipers to follow the Westboro people
This, playing “Shine Jesus Shine” in parallel fifths on loop.
Remember, everytime you write parallel 5ths Bach kills a kitten.
#badmusicjokes
Also, bagpipes are technically a double reeded instrument and we oboists are really neglecting our family tree by not ensuring we learn to play a few.
I may have a shawm around somewhere. No drones like a glorious bagpipe but loud and obnoxious all the same.
My favourite part of the collective history of double-reed instruments is our secret past of being terrifying Saracen battle instruments.
Between that and the old french court orchestras having equal numbers of oboes and violin our history is pretty awesome. I would love to hear an orchestra of 23 baroque oboes, 23 baroque violins, whatever other assortment of lesser instruments and a harpsichord. Can you imagine?
Oh man, I have played in a performance of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks (24 oboes, 12 bassoons and a contrabassoon, nine natural trumpets, nine natural horns, three pairs of kettledrums). It was a GLORIOUS WALL OF REED-SOUND and the trumpets and percussionists cowered before us.
Oh gosh I want to follow them around playing bad-but-earnest 90’s worship at full blast, it would be amazing.
I don’t play but boy oh boy can I turn up my vocal pipes on some 90s/00s Praise & Worship. I remember the hand motions for most of them too.
Also to stand outside abortion clinics to drown out the protestors.
….now I want to start a rogue, bagpipe collective. If only I had ever learnt.
I would learn for this!
It’s never too late to learn.
Social justice pipers!
I think Adam Hills would approve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QosyPyUTag
The bagpiper in the town square happened at my old university, and everyone I know from there is inordinately proud of it, partially because we usually get more press for Bullingdon-type scandals, and instead we finally get a nice story.
I know very little about St Andrews but what I do know makes it sound incredibly fucking weird. And I went to Cambridge so…
We’re so far from anything that it’s hard for news to filter out, and it’s so small and so cold that everything gets magnified.
I heard most of it directly from someone who went there, but then they weren’t going to tell me about the normal stuff. Just the weird initiation rituals.
I don’t remember a huge ton of initiation rituals, just really Raisin Weekend because who can forget an official email going out from the administration telling people to write their first name and residence on their hands with sharpie so when they’re off their faces and being taken home via wheelbarrow or whatever the wheelbarrow driver will know where to drop them.
But then I was also in grad school and we tended to be set apart. I also avoided most of the other grad students like the plague after going to a wine and cheese thing where they ran out of plates so everyone just stood their holding warming slabs of cheese awkwardly and the world’s angriest pub quiz. Like it was if you staged Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in a postgrad bar.
The Debating Society is really quite strange as well.
I only studied abroad there for a semester, but it all seemed normal to me?
It was, for the most part. I’m an American who went for all 4 years, so there was a lot of subtle culture shock, but for the most part it was just a normal university town, with all the different people that that entails.
I’ve had to Nope out of quite a few bits of todays Link Round up. Why is the world so bad. (But I <3 knitting grannies!)
Ugh, people are so disgusting. I don’t know why I associate with them.
This is why we pray for the recovery of a better class of beast, like Carmella.
HAMILTON THREAD? All my friends hate me for the obnoxious Hamilton proselytizing, so I’ve taken to the internet. I listened to the whole thing 2.5 times yesterday and “Satisfied” and “Wait for It” many more times thereafter. Do we think any of these will make it to the actual radio? I feel like Wait for It has a shot. Leslie Odom Jr.’s voice is a national treasure.
I’m freaking obsessed with trying to find little references. I just found one to “tick..tick…BOOM!” in “Your Obedient Servant” and it killed me. Also, sooo much of it is different from when I saw it at the Public, I’m just trying to catalog everything!
OH MY GOD TICK TICK BOOM
YES. HAMILTON SAYS “EVEN IF I SAID WHAT YOU THINK I SAID” IN HIS REPLY TO BURR WHICH IS TOTALLY FROM “THERAPY”. IT TOTALLY IS.
YOU ARE SO RIGHT. And that was a change from the Public Theater, too.
My absolute fav reference is the sly shout-out to 1776, though.
That line made me laugh so hard! “Sit down, John, YOU FAT MOTHERF$&*$#!”
I’m torn between loving that one or the Penzance reference the most. THEY’RE BOTH SOOOOO GOOD
I am convinced that the “nobody needs to know” at the end of “Say No to This” is a reference to “Nobody Needs to Know” from The Last Five Years, mostly because of the key and cadence of the delivery.
It 100% is. He credits it in the Playbill.
Hooray! I was pretty sure, but I was worried that it might be one of those false-pattern things human brains are good at (I listen to a lot of Jason Robert Brown)
The one that kills me: Hamilton singing, “Nobody needs to know,” in “Say No to This” like why don’t you just STAB ME IN THE HEART, LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA.
PERFECT DEPLOYMENT OF A KILLER L5Y CALLBACK TO MURDER MY FEELNGS
Also “South Pacific”, I forget who but they say “you’ve got to be carefully taught.”
It’s in “My Shot”! It’s Burr’s line.
Lol this makes me think of all of the hip-hop references that are undoubtedly going right over my head.
YES. Made even more awesome by the fact that Lin-Manuel and Leslie Odom Jr. starred with Karen Olivo in a production of “tick…tick..” at Encores last summer. (It was so good, you guys.)
JUMPING INTO YESTERDAY’S THREAD to say I found one, which excites me because I don’t know many musicals. But there’s definitely a line in Act 1 where Washington refers to himself as “the model of a modern-day general,” straight out of Pirates of Penzance!
I’ve been hearing all the hype and have sort of been unable to imagine what this show could actually be and how it could live up to it. (I had the exact same thought process with Fun Home, and then I saw it and it was SO GOOD, so I’m totally on board with the idea that it can live up to the hype, it’s just mysterious to me.) Listened to the first act yesterday, will keep going today. First reaction is that it’s more Broadway and less hip-hop than I was imagining. It takes me a long time to process music on its own, so I don’t really have a ton of thoughts about it yet, but I’m excited to get the chance to experience the actual work rather than the chatter about the work.
I was also surprised at the ratio of “traditional” Broadway to hip-hop! But I thought the whole thing was amazing so it’s fine with me! The rap battles were definitely my favorite, although “It’s Quiet Uptown” had me crying at my desk.
I have almost zero interest in musicals, and even less interest in listening to the soundtracks of musicals I’ve never seen.
And yet, I’m listening to the Hamilton cast recording and enjoying it more than…basically any music I’ve heard recently. I’m a convert. Please tell me everything.
Yeah….anybody else end up in a quivering, sobbing mess after listening to the soundtrack? I’ve never even seen the damn show, people. “Wait for It” and “Satisfied” – 100%. Something about both of those songs just destroys me. And don’t even talk to me about “Blow Them All Away” — goddamn it I should’ve wikied the actual Hamilton to get some warning that the show would feature a kid dying. Just wrecked, y’all.
And can we tell Julianne at Jezebel to check her damn geographical privilege when she says that we shouldn’t listen to the soundtrack before seeing the show? If Lin-Manuel Miranda didn’t want people to listen, he wouldn’t have had motherfucking Questlove produce the soundtrack. Give us non-NY-proximal plebians some credit for being able to envision what theater looks like, Julianne.
ME. SO ME. That fucking ending is brutal. ALL THE TEARS.
My boss came over to talk to me right as Philip was dying and I was straight up teary eyed and sniffling as we talked about insurance
Yeah, I can handle the longing for someone you can never have, but “Dear Theodosia” and “Blow Them All Away”/”It’s Quiet Uptown” are what had me tearing up at my desk. That second act is a killer.
Those songs DESTROYED me. I had the day off yesterday, and just sat there in my pjs crying all afternoon.
Yeah, something about the swelling chorus in Wait for It chokes me up and I can’t listen to It’s Quiet Uptown if I’m going to be around people. That said, there are other, sneakier moments that caught me off guard. There’s a cello line towards the end of That Would Be Enough that gets me more than the lyrics. And the straight-up hymnal quality of History Has Its Eyes on You.
Just as many triumphant, just fun parts too though. I was strutting down Broadway today blasting “HERE COMES THE GENERAL” and every time Daveed Diggs sings anything. I guess I’m saying that I love the whole thing.
I saw it at the Public Theater and loved the musical but Burr was my least favorite during the first act — and then I heard “Wait For It” and I was transfixed. It is my absolute favorite in a show full of amazing songs.
Yesss, both of the death scenes made me tear up BOTH times I listened to it today. (On my third time now.)
I CAN’T STOP LISTENING, even if I need to take a break several times in the last 45 minutes because I don’t want to be crying at my desk all day. Ideas on best songs to recommend as entry points for people who haven’t seen the show/aren’t sold on just starting at the beginning of Act 1 (which has been my recommendation so far)?
WAIT FOR IT. I maintain that it’s as good as any pop song out right now. It’s probably the most accessible. But also the first song really sets things up wonderfully. You’re doing the good work.
I haven’t listened to the whole musical yet, but I can’t listen to You’ll Be Back without breaking into the biggest grin. I have a weakness for that catchy, mincing thing the piano does. Instant mood boost.
(But really, they should just start at the bigging of Act I. So many chills going up my spine.)
Honestly, starting at the beginning is pretty damn persuasive. I hadn’t listened to any of the musical before today, but I loved that introduction of Hamilton, where he comes from, his ambition as an immigrant.
My SO and I listened to the first act together yesterday and I listened to it again this morning – with Yorktown playing as I walked past Hamilton’s grave on my way to work. I haven’t been able to get through all of act 2 (since seeing the show in August I had an unexpected death in the family and I know I’m going to cry even harder the first time I hear It’s Quiet Uptown).
Listening to it OVER and OVER and OVER. It’s so brilliant. And listening to it on repeat I’m picking up on way more of the melodic connections – like, “Blow Them All Away” pulls the melody from the counting/piano in “Take a Break” and makes it EVEN MORE HEARTBREAKING.
ALSO the counting/piano melody is a version of the counting in Ten Duel Commandments. THEY SET IT UP SO EARLY AND IT BREAKS MY HEART
The music is just SO SMART. All of it is SO SMART. I was listening to Act Two this morning on my commute and when Angelica calls back to “Satisfied” with her “I know my sister like I know my own mind” it’s just so heartbreaking. Just – until you get to listen to it, you don’t realize how brilliant this show is. It’s brilliant when you see it. It’s even more brilliant on second/third/fourth listen.
Not only is it smart, it’s historically accurate, too. I read Chernow’s bio after seeing it — off the top of my head, the biggest changes are that Angelica and Hamilton didn’t meet until after Angelica was married, Hamilton was more actively anti-Jefferson than portrayed here, and James Monroe was among the Republicans investigating part of the Reynolds affair and is suspected to have been the leak. (Eliza snubbed President Monroe her whole life because of his role in it.) Also, Hamilton was even more accomplished than Miranda could fit in the show: his final rank was inspector general of yhe US Army.
My absolute favourite moment in the whole thing is when Hamilton tries to welcome Angelica back from London after the scandal breaks- “someone who knows what I’m trying to do-” and she immediately cuts him off with “I’M NOT HERE FOR YOU.” Team Schuyler Sisters, always.
I am also a shameless proselytizer. I played it all day for my 11-week-old and she only cried twice: once during a King George reprise and then when Hamilton’s son is shot. I am so proud of the budding musical theater geek I have.
I can’t stop listening. What an incredible achievement for musical theatre and for American history. Being Canadian, I’ve always thought the founding fathers worship to be kind of over the top. It’s amazing how Miranda romanticizes those early politics without putting the men responsible on a pedestal. The scope is breathtaking.
I can’t stop singing “Washington on Your Side.” I know it’s not the most emotionally resonant song, but the hook omg. And I’m officially obsessed with Daveed Diggs. And Leslie Odom Jr! “This man will not make an orphan of my daughter” — GOOD LORD.
ALSO I really wish the Tony Awards would just create a category for best ensemble already because there are way too many standouts in this cast. Like I know it’s going to sweep regardless, but I can’t deal with knowing that any of these people might not get a Tony. Plus, I mean, it’s not as though there aren’t tons of great ensembles that deserve praise!
Yes! I’m American, and I gave Hamilton the side-eye for SO LONG because I thought it’d be more of the same Founding Fathers propaganda I’m already surrounded with.
It’s true, “Washington On Your Side” has an amazing hook. Plus it’s nice to mix things up with a song that doesn’t reduce me to a lump of feelings.
I also love that song because it’s so much fun to shout “Southern motherf**kin’ Democratic Republicans!”
So I have no idea what is happening (Canadian) but I’m listening to Hamilton I’m still crying.
Still have not made it past Act 1, just because Wait For It is so good and must be played over and over.
So, I was doing some genealogical research on the Schuyler sisters as I am diiiistantly related to them (#humblebrag) and I came across a description of Angelica as a “muse, confidante, and thief of hearts,” which I promptly stole for my twitter bio, but I thought other Toasts might also be into.
Oh man, I love that, that is beautiful and fantastic. I am also very fond of this interview with Renee Elise Goldsberry where she has that if Angelica had grown up with the advantages of a man in that era, she would have been George Washington. Damn straight. http://playbill.com/news/article/a-womans-world-h…
Renee Elise Goldsberry for ALL THE AWARDS. Also, cried at my desk three times yesterday (Satisfied, Stay Alive, and the finale) even know I’ve seen it and knew what was coming. Guyssssss.
Also, The Room Where It Happens. Can’t stop won’t stop.
If Renee Elise Goldsberry does not win a Tony I will RIOT. I will be very sad if Phillippa Soo does not also win, but I NEED Renee Elise Goldsberry to win.
After Stay Alive I pretty much bawled through the entirety of It’s Quite Uptown.
I cannot function during It’s Quiet Uptown. I can only sob. When I saw the show, I think I was shaking with crying during that song. It’s only gotten worse with every new listen of the soundtrack.
Okay this has nothing to do with anything but I have zero mental or emotional bandwidth for taxing things lately thanks to my life being a fretful gong show BUT has anyone else seen that American Girl has anyone new historical doll? Except her name is Mary Ellen and she is from 1954!!!! What????? Why????? Their 70s doll was a tragic flop and they already have an excellent 40s doll in Molly and whyyyyy what a WEIRD CHOICE. Like I realize that they have gone way downhill since Mattel bought them and they started cashing in on all the modern stuff but really! 1954!
NO.
I REFUSE TO ACCEPT THIS.
They, er, archived Molly. Sorry.
Yeah I know, but like…even so, they did this already! Molly could quite literally be this girl’s sister, I find this so weird.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Oh man they also archived Kristin and Felicity. I was such a big Felicity fan as a kid and now I feel old.
I had the Kirsten doll, she was fantastic. Also Addie.
That doll could be my aunt – literally, my Aunt Mary was born in 1954. While it could be cute for her grandchildren to have, if they want to learn about growing up in that era they could just, you know, talk to her
So basically Sally Draper.
also she’s another white, blonde one! There have plenty of those American Girl dolls already!
When the first catalog came out it was the mid-1980’s. Molly’s year was forty years ago.
The 1950’s are now sixty years ago.
I also wish it had been a girl of color, but the year itself is not a problem.
Here are two people telling the story of how they met, Drunk History style. This is the best twelve minutes that I’ve spent in a long time.
I saw that! It annoys me that I don’t have talented friends like them.
Scott Walker dropped out of the race!
need. moar. hamilton. gifs.
I found this out yesterday when I accidentally clicked the news live feed in my browser and it arbitrarily opened up the breaking news that he had just left the race. Best accidental click in my life thus far!
Did Scott Walker have an affair and then write a pamphlet about it?
Unfortunately, he’s nowhere near that interesting.
Best news of the morning!
Mixed feelings here because that also means he can focus on being my fucking awful governor again.
I read that awfulawfulawful NYT article about the military yesterday and I was going to comment about it but the roundup was already sad enough. It’s gut-wrenching.
If you want to get extra mad at the military and the awful men in charge of it: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2015/0911/W….
Do NOT read the comments on the original op-ed, though, bc you will be glaring at every man for (at least) the rest of the day.
Between the bagpipes and the rogue tuba player at that pro-Confederacy march I am loving the activist musicians these days.
#baeofpigs just made me laugh out loud
I can’t decide if I prefer that or #hameron to describe that debacle.
#snoutrage
It probably says something about my headspace these days that my first reaction to that heartwarming piece on Bolivian knitters was to grumble that I hope they’re getting paid a fair wage for their labor.
My thought was “boy, I can’t wait until some asshole patents this in the US and increases the cost 4000%.”
I spent all night listening to Hamilton too to the point where I was singing “You’ll Be Back” at the top of my lungs and my roommate just walked out of the room when we got to the
LA DA DA DA DAAAA DA DA DA DA DIIIII YI YI DA
bit. I love Jonathan Groff so much ugh I want one.
Everyone in this is so good, but Jonathan Groff is the one that gets me, because I ALSO have the Spring Awakening soundtrack, and he just sounds SO DIFFERENT.
I was in yoga last night and during savasana I just kept hearing snippets from the show in my head (especially “I’m not throwing away my shot”).
for me, it’s Anthony Ramos. I can only see him as Justin in 21 Chump Street, my favorite Miranda work.
WHAT THE HECK I GOTTA DOOooooOOOO
Omggggg 21 Chump Street is perfect. I can’t even tell you how often I walk around singing the back-up guys’ part in that song – the “lololol” part.
ROFLOLOL
ugh that made me cry just as much as this.
Oh nooooooo 21 Chump Street will now be stuck in my head all day (which frankly, isn’t actually a bad thing).
I tried to get my now ex boyfriend to ask me out to prom like Justin did. Alas, he was football captain and not about that musical theater life.
Hence the now ex.
HAVE YOU SEEN JONATHAN GROFF DOING SPRING AWAKENING AS KING GEORGE??
https://twitter.com/Lin_Manuel/status/63272739670…
It is magnificent.
OH MY GOD.
I had not seen that, and watching it basically made me hyperventilate with glee at my desk.
I have died. That’s all. I’m dead and there’s no coming back from this.
HE IS SO HYSTERICAL IN THIS ROLE.
I first saw it at the Public with Brian D’Arcy and thought that Groffsauce might not be able to compare and HE IS BETTER.
Bolivian knitters!!! I was born with a hole in my heart in the early 80s. I’m not even sure an operation was available at the time, but I was in an incubator in the hospital for quite a while before I was released. I was incredibly fortunate, in that mine slowly closed up (it’s microscopic now, and you can no longer hear the murmur when you listen to my heart), and the only lingering side effect is my annoying asthma. What a wonderful, incredible thing these women are able to do! Hooray!!!
I am not above sniggering at #baeofpigs (truly a gem among hashtags), but I also think that Rob Fahe’s essay on power, networking, and why this kind of hazing persists is insightful.
…what’s also different about this kind of ritual in elite circles is the calculation behind it, the power and control it affords, and the self-perpetuating network of influence it creates. Consider this scenario; at elite institutions, those earmarked – by wealth, by title, by connections – for future leadership roles are forced, as impressionable young people, to carry out humiliating acts in order to gain acceptance by an in-group. That same in-group will, over the course of their lives, help advance their career massively in ways both overt and covert; membership of that group essentially secures their success in life. The cost of entry, paid by all members of the group, is participation in humiliating acts; acts which will forever wed them to the group, because should they later act in a way contrary to the group’s interests or desires, their “indiscretions” can be brought back to destroy their careers or personal lives.
This articulates everything I’ve been trying to say about this whole thing! The nerve that these elite men have to do this so publicly too, but unfortunately it is likely that a lot of people won’t notice that this is how a lot of governments run!
So the real question to ask here is: what the eff did Cameron do to earn the wrath of the other people in his group???
There’s probably more to the story, but the essay does note, “Lord Ashcroft [in whose bio the claim appears] feels snubbed and sidelined by Cameron, who seemingly declined to offer him the cabinet position to which he felt entitled; the billionaire’s revenge is to dig up this singularly humiliating moment from the prime minister’s past and ensure that it is splashed on the front page of the Daily Mail, the preferred scurrilous tabloid rag of the very heartland of Conservative voters.”
Not that this tactic doesn’t work, because it clearly has, but I don’t quite understand the whole “revealing humiliating acts” bit. I kind of assume that if David Cameron has stuck his dick in a dead pig as part of some weird hazing ritual, then he is definitely not the only person to have done so and that revealing this information to the public is a tacit admission that you have done the same thing.
Oh thank goodness. I refuse to read anything related to this story because ugh, but I’ve been vaguely aware that it was a hazing situation and more-than-vaguely uncomfortable at the level of pig-centered snarking taking place without any commentary on how sexual hazing fits into broader narratives about cishet male sexuality. Like, sure, this is a gross story, but it’s not a story about this one man.
So thanks for the link and thanks for quoting so I don’t have to click through to the link. 🙂
In a much more serious and tragic note, the link about the US soldiers and what they have had to suppress is extraordinarily traumatic. I know of at least one person who had to do this, and who was not given any semblance of appropriate attention after coming home. The extent to which these men and women are told to bury and ignore horrific things, in an already horrific atmosphere, shows how desperately needed better care for soldiers and veterans is in the US (and everywhere, I’m sure – mental health care is so slow to be picked up anywhere). Ugh, my heart just goes out to all of them. And I want to rescue all those boys and put them in better situations, which is very white savior-y of me, but I don’t care. They deserve better.
Remember when we were told we were going to Afghanistan in part to fix the human rights crisis there? And remember when our military swears all sorts of oaths about honor and freedom and doing the right thing?
And then we ask them to be complicit in the sexual abuse of children! FANTASTIC.
I’m with you, my heart is breaking for those kids and for the (honestly not that much older, much of the time) soldiers and Marines who were put into a helpless situation. I know America can’t fix everything and white saviorism is not usually so productive, but how can we ask people to stand by and witness that without doing anything? We become no different than the Catholic Church or Boy Scout hierarchy that looked the other way when child abuse was going on.
Yesterday on r/ottawa: someone posted about a fundraising activity for local women’s shelters.
First comment was “I’ll help out a local men’s shelter first, OH WAIT THERE ISN’T ONE” and then there was all sorts of wank about how it’s so unfair to the men that there are more women’s shelters than men’s (apparently nobody considered the possibility that there’s a greater need for women’s shelters because women are more likely to find themselves temporarily homeless due to domestic abuse?????) and it was just such an awful shitstorm and nobody paid any attention to the original message.
I really hate that subreddit sometimes. I get paid tomorrow and I’m going to make a donation to a women’s shelter just to spite those repulsive neckbeards.
And if they’re so wound up about it: WHY DON”T THEY START ONE THEMSELVES! But that would be actual tangible action and they just like to whine on the internet about stuff.
There…….are……….men’s shelters…………..
I mean, I don’t know about Canada? But in the US, there are absolutely men-only homeless shelters.
Also, I mean, a lot of homeless shelters are often de facto more men than women, because they don’t feel very safe for women.
I think about those tiny little heart top hats and what an incredible piece of medical machinery they are.
And I think about the cost of healthcare in the US and what a hospital would likely charge a patient for a device like that.
And I hope these women are being compensated on a level that is more “Advanced Military-Grade Medical Technology” than “Grandmotherly Indigenous Knitted Handicrafts.” This seems like a scenario that is perfect for under-valuing the incredible work that’s being done specifically because the work is being done by women. Women who are “knitters” and not scientists or engineers.
There is a letter at Captain Awkward. It is, possibly, one of the worst things I’ve ever read. If you are triggered by suicide, please do not go over there to read it; I am not even going to link it. I just want to sit down and shake for a little while with a blanket and my cat.
OH I KNOWWWWW. I thought about linking that one but it was too rough.
WHY DID I CLICK THE “NEXT POST” THING????
Holy fuck.
I have needed to read that reply for eleven years.
Holy shit. I think we all need to commune with this dog for a few minutes:
Ugh, I’ve been reading CA for a million years (seems like), and this is the first one that made me straight-up ugly cry. So awful.
Send Jim my way, we do not work together and belittling men is my favourite thing in the world.
I imagine it’s only a matter of time before the David Cameron/Black Mirror memes make an appearance
Huh, it’s like that kid I knew who grew up up to be an Army Ranger and die in the Afghanistan war didn’t die for nothing; he died for less than nothing.
Can’t wait to find out who will be the last person to die for a mistake!!!
Somewhat ironically, bagpipes actually go very well with impassioned shouting speeches.
Reading the comments too fast; starting to mix up Hameron and Hamilton.
That bagpipes story makes me very happy, and doubly so because at first all I could read of the link was “Bagpipes used to drown…” and I thought it was going to be about a murder.
In other icky news: [first story deleted b/c various reasons]
And meet Martin Shkreli, who recently raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50/dose to $750/dose. The medical industrial complex at work.
http://mic.com/articles/125619/hedge-fund-manager…
I think this is not the point of the David Cameron story, but I have the most sympathy for that poor pig. Where did they find him? Did they kill him specifically for the purpose of . . . these purposes? Even people who are not animal rights people should not be okay with this.
I mean, they probably got the pig from a butcher. I know you can get whole pigs that way.
oh, baby pup! Keeping her in my thoughts and sending all the pets and snuggles.
(also idk if she’s still wearing a cone, but in my experience an airplane pillow is a much comfier and less obtrusive alternative. also it looks much cuter.)
I’m only part of the way through Hamilton but who should I be shipping here? I am shipping them all together. Have I spent too much time on the internet?
I mean, Hamilton/Laurens is pretty much canon.
That's the motto of House Bearglove, incidentally: "Eat the Rich"
NO YOU'RE CRYING ON THE TRAIN.