This week, we discuss: animal descriptions; Albus Potter is an asshole even when he’s not around; things have gone to shit when you miss Draco Malfoy; the Harry-Dudley relationship; why Americans fail to grasp the subtleties of pudding; BAD DOBBY is good at time management; Vernon, Petunia and Brexit; what exactly was that Japanese golfer joke?; child abuse on Privet Drive; Weasley serenades outside windows; German vs. Scandinavian elves; racial implications of elves; add Christianity and it becomes all about the Devil; Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Dobby’s clothes; American slavery meets Gosford Park; beasts vs. beings; internalized slave identity; Ben Carson can go fuck himself; implied world expansion; why Fred and George are the SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THIS SERIES; Malfoy misdirection; wtf is a warlock anyway; Mr. Weasley identifies with Dexter and Walter White; also, his favorite movie is The Little Mermaid; Professor Creed is a secret Weasley; Kitty Forman, Molly Weasley and fierce motherhood; a wild Ginny appears; Professor Seraphine is being Muggle-baited; and please join us in singing our new Advanced Muggle Studies anthem.

Welcome back to Advanced Muggle Studies! We know you missed us. I am Professor Seraphine, and today we are going to be starting a new book!

C: Woot!

S: One that I hope you find less boring than Sorcerer’s Stone?

C: I might today, and do you know why?

S: Why?

C: In honor of not being able to fully participate in our Drunk Potterwatch, I have fixed myself a drink of Jameson and Coke.

S: Definitely less boring! Good. You deserve it. Nice way to end a weekend. Plus it’s your turn to be drunk and ramble about geography.

C: Your lack of knowledge about the UK was startling.

S: Only when drunk. And the next day I thought about it: “Weird that I forgot that!”

Professor Seraphine’s comprehensive grasp of British geography, illustrated

Today we are looking at the first 3 chapters of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which was the first book I read in the series. Chamber of Secrets was the first book I read because my sister kept telling me to read Sorcerer’s Stone, but then wouldn’t give me the book to read. So I read out of order, which, oddly enough, I’m glad I did because this book really hooked me.

C: This is why you never struggled with the beginning of Sorcerer’s Stone like I did, because everything from that book gets summarized in a page and a half in the first chapter of this book, and you don’t get all that boring Muggle stuff.

S: I wonder if my perception of it would have been different. I love the beginning to Book 1, but then again, I came in to it already interested.

Chapter 1: The Worst Birthday

S: Depressing! Once again, we begin with owls. This time it’s Hedwig, who is bored and locked up in Harry’s room. And we get the marvelous image of Uncle Vernon yelling at Harry about Hedwig, shouting, “Do I look stupid?” whilst he has a bit of fried egg dangling from his mustache. So yes, Uncle Vernon. Yes you do.

Harry is dealing with being back in the Muggle world now that he’s been at Hogwarts. He’s come back owl and magic books in tow, to the Dursleys, who seem quite terrified to have him back. Meanwhile, Dudley is stocking up on bacon while he’s here. We begin the long journey of Dudley being massively obese and Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia being totally fine with this.

C: You know, he’s a growing boy.

S: He’s growing into the size of a small whale if the descriptions are to be believed. I feel like Rowling feels very strongly about parents that baby their children, aren’t honest with themselves, don’t discipline or do what’s best for their kids because they’re convinced their child is perfect.

C: Your little darling can do no wrong.

S: I think this bugs her. Comes through in the subtext, maybe.

Dudley asks Harry to pass a dish at breakfast, and Harry says, “You forgot to say the magic word,” which causes instant chaos because you can’t say the M-word in the house!

C: Not the M-word!

S: Vernon: “I warned you! I will not tolerate mention of your abnormality under this roof!” Then he sits back down, “breathing like a winded rhinocerous.” These descriptions kill me.

C: I noticed in these chapters that she describes people as animals a lot. It’s very effective.

S: This first chapter is a lot of recap. I like how she weaves in the way Harry is feeling about all of this with the recap, while packing a lot of exposition into those graphs. Which, again, is useful if you read it out of order.

C: Can I take us on our first tangent?

S: I LOVE TANGENTS!

C: Talking about things he misses: “Visiting the game keeper, Hagrid, in his cabin next to the Forbidden Forest and the grounds.” It made me think – the only time we ever see Hagrid in Cursed Child is in that flashback, and I assume that Hagrid still is a gamekeeper at Hogwarts when the trio’s kids go through. So is Albus so determined to hate everything and such a fucking prick that he’s not even friends with Hagrid?

S: That’s a good point! They don’t mention him at all.

C: He hates literally everything about Hogwarts other than what’s-his-face whose name I can’t remember.

S: Scorpius. How could you forget the love of Albus’s life? I don’t understand how you could dismiss Scorpius so completely.

C: I tried to block it out. There’s the argument that there’s not room for it in the play, sure, whatever. But he’s already such a masochistic little twat that he won’t even go to Hogsmeade and get candy because “OTHER KIDS ARE THERE OH MY GOD HOW DARE I HAVE TO BE AROUND OTHER KIDS.” I know I’m already dragging this off track, but…

S: That’s a really good question though. Because at the end of the Epilogue in 7, I specifically recall Harry, or one of the adults, telling the kids not to forget about tea with Hagrid. So the original intention at the end of 7 is that Hagrid is there still and is friends with the kids, or at least they’re trying to go that way, and he’s a close friend of the family

So all I can think is that, like everything else of even moderate importance from the original series, the weirdos who wrote Cursed Child decided to throw it out the window for their own little twisted psychosexual story.

C: I’m thinking either Albus quits going because it’s such a trial and he basically sees Hagrid the way Malfoy from the original series saw him – dumb, stupid, slow, beneath him – which, you would hope Harry and Ginny’s kid would not feel that way,