Chapter Six: The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black
In chapter six of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Harry and Sirius have some heartbreaking talks, Kreacher is hilariously awful, and a Horcrux is casually tossed into a sack.
(Please be advised that this is a reread and I will be discussing book and movie spoilers.)
Mrs. Weasley has apparently hit her head and thinks a bunch of disgruntled teenagers who just received some grade A gossip are going to go to sleep without speaking like good little boys and girls and MOLLY ARE YOU OK, GIRL?
Do you not have seven children?! Of COURSE they are going to gossip immediately, which is what happens amongst the boys the second her back is turned. But Molz hasn’t fully lost it, because she sneaks up and presses her ear to the door to see if PotzWeaz are talking and hold on, I take it back, this is sad and weird. Molly, I hate to be rated x again, but these are teenage boys! Never, ever, listen in on their room unless you want to hear some scarring shit!
Harry joins in on the Weasley family fun summer time: cleaning an old house infested with dangerous magical pests and objects! While I totally get why Harry, who lives with the f’ing Dursley’s would find this fun and refreshing, what is in this for Hermione? Why is she spending her holiday away from the long suffering, frequently abandoned Grangers in order to…spray creatures with pesticides?
Fred and George do me a solid and update us on one of my fave subplots, the research and creation of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, greatest business in the wizarding world.
Molly takes a break to scream at Mundungus, and we get introduced to Kreacher, the third house-elf we’ve met who is just as different as Winky and Dobby are to each other. I have always enjoyed the complexity of the house-elves personalities, even if Kreacher originally is…er…how shall we say it? A bigoted old loon?
Kreacher’s developed this hilarious yet awful habit of muttering the rudest shit under his breath like a crotchety geriatric yelling at birds and clouds and shit and while Harry seems to think Kreacher’s unaware that they can hear his insults I am not convinced.
Sirius pops in and the dynamic between him and Kreacher is a far cry from this talk about Barty Crouch Senior and Winky and yet, I can’t find it in myself to blame Sirius for being short with Kreacher.
Sirius and Harry have a moment of Black family backstory that I find fascinating, starting with the tragedy of Regulus Black being murdered as a teenager after realizing he didn’t really want to be a Death Eater, the disowning of Andromeda Black and her daughter, Tonks, and Sirius’s relation to Narcissa Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange. This is another section I feel makes Sirius such a complicated and dense character. In just a few pages we learn (and can speculate) that Sirius is probably sad and angry at his baby brother’s allegiance to the Death Eaters and death, and disgusted that his family has so many terrible people in it.
But don’t worry, the oddly streamlined Order of the Phoenix movie will not do any of this justice!
It’s here I will overshare a bit more about me. I too have strong, visceral associations to people, things, and places from my past. When I’m around those things, I act very differently, almost against my will. I become sullen and angry and closed off. I don’t like it and I’m not proud of it, but it happens. I think this directly ties into the amount of sympathy I have for angry!Harry and bitter!Sirius in this book. Because while to some their behavior seems awful and immature, trauma can make you act in ways you don’t like about yourself.
Back to the cleaning! So our group casually throws away some dangerous shit in a sack that’s hopefully being buried and destroyed somewhere, including Voldemort’s Horcrux–pardon, I mean a totally innocent locket that has no meaning to Kreacher, Voldemort, or the suspiciously dead Regulus Black–but hey, the movie doesn’t think this ENORMOUS PLOT POINT IS RELEVANT so I’ll skip past it too!
Harry and Sirius have a touching and yet depressing moment together where Harry basically begs Sirius to let him come and live with him instead of the Dursley’s if he’s expelled after his hearing and Sirius is like holy balls that place must be bad if you want to but yet I will not say yes, twist in the wind and suffer, godson!
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Let’s debate: does Kreacher know everyone can hear him muttering insults under his breath?
What do you think about Sirius’s treatment of Kreacher?
What do you think Sirius’s true feelings about Regulus are?
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