This week, we discuss: awkward crushes; our favorite Lockhart books; the Hogwarts prefect at home; we’re pretty sure someone is Neville Chamberlain; how many bacon sandwiches does it take, really?; linguistic puns; Dan’s accent is broken; fabulous Lucius Malfoy; Drarry fanfic; what exactly is in Lucius’s basement; wizard race porn; adventures in sex shops; the Hand of Glory; sexism in livestock; why Borgin and Burkes hasn’t been shut down; Knockturn Alley and Diagon Alley; ley lines and Ancient Aliens; flat earthers and how geometry works; please sue Alex Jones; Angela Merkel and the Anti-Smite Shield; Cabbage Patch Mandrakes; how we know that Gilderoy Lockhart escaped St. Mungo’s to reinvent himself as Dan Brown; Malfoy v. Weasley; treacle is disgusting; this entire book is Arthur and Molly’s fault; Hedwig abuse; the Restriction of Thingy; the Whomping Willow and the Evening Prophet; and WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET EXPELLED FROM THIS EFFING SCHOOL?!

S: Welcome back to Advanced Muggle Studies! We’ve been gone for so long.

C: It seems like it, doesn’t it?

S: And I still haven’t seen Beauty and the Beast.

C: For shame! It’s so good!

S: I was prepared for – even if it wasn’t that good – I want to see it just for Luke Evans’ Gaston. That’s perfect casting.

C: See, Beauty and the Beast is my all-time favorite Disney movie, so I was not only pleasantly surprised, I was pretty much delighted from beginning to end. Emma is great as Belle, she’s feisty. Belle in the animated movie is a pretty tough cookie for a Disney princess, and I think she manages to ratchet that up, her agency, which is fantastic. I look forward to discussing this with you when you see it because I think you’ll have things to say.

S: I saw a review online from a couple of writers who went in cynical but once the music started, they were sold.

C: It’s so classic! It’s nostalgic, and it’s awesome.

S: I think my husband and I are going to do a trade off. I’m going to see Power Rangers with him and he will see Beauty and the Beast with me.

C: I have such mixed feelings about Power Rangers. I am so attached to them from our childhood.

S: I’m one of the few from our generation that did not get attached to them at all. All I knew about them was that there was one of each color and everyone thought the Pink Ranger was hot.

C: She was a total babe.

S: I have zero emotional investment whatsoever. So going in to this I know that this may be mediocre at best, but it might be good. I doubt it. I really am not expecting anything above the grade of a Fantastic Four movie.

C: I think mediocre at best is generous.

S: It might be. But I have sat through enough Transformers movies for that man, and I will continue to do so, so it’s fair.

C: It has to be better than Transformers.

S: I hope so. Then I’ll hopefully get to see Beauty and the Beast soon and he will love it, refuse to admit it, gripe about it, and it will all work out.

C: It will be good.

S: So today we have chapters 4 and 5.

Chapter 4: Flourish and Blotts

S: The best named book store ever to bookstore.

C: I didn’t understand what that meant until I started writing with a fountain pen.

S: We started off with Harry back at the Burrow. He’s having a great time. The Weasley’s house bursts with “the strange and unexpected,” including a mirror that yells at you, a ghoul in the attic, and regular small explosions coming from Fred and George’s room, which are perfectly normal. I dig the Burrow. I could totally live there.

C: I don’t know how much I would like that.

S: Too much?

C: Bit too much, yeah. I’m not a people person.

S: If you were a Weasley it might not be an option. Or else you’d be like Percy hiding in your room.

C: I’d probably be like Percy.

S: This is a nice line: “What Harry found most unusual at life at the Burrow wasn’t the talking mirror or the clanking ghoul, but the fact that everybody there seemed to like him.” It’s so strange!

C: Bless his heart.

S: It’s lovely! And as someone who is married to someone who grew up in an abusive household, when we got together and he spent time with my family, I do remember that he found it incredibly weird and did not know at all how to handle it, because my mother was mothering him and baking him cookies, and he was like, “I don’t know how to react to this.”

C: It’s sad, for your husband obviously, but just sad in general that you and I had unique childhoods in that our parents were happy together and we were happy with our parents.

S: True, as I get older I realize that it really was. He takes advantage of it now, though. When he’s having a bad day he just calls my mom because he can cry on her shoulder. She should just start a company where people pay to call her and be sympathized with.

C: Sounds good to me.

S: I would pay for it, if she wasn’t my mom. Mrs. Weasley is fussing over him, and Mr. Weasley can’t stop interrogating him about Muggle things because he is the wizard Little Mermaid and can’t stop being fascinated by plugs and the postal service.

Really, these burning questions must keep him up at night

C: What won’t they think of next?

S: And poor Ginny seems to knock things over whenever Harry is in a room, which much make it extremely inconvenient to have him staying there for an entire summer.

C: They must go through a lot of butter.

S: Poor Mrs. Weasley has to get good at mending dishes. Harry knows she has a crush on him – everybody knows she has a crush on him – but in general nobody teases her about it, and Harry certainly doesn’t. Which is so nice beca