magic9mushroom
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magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
13hr ago
As for Priori Incantatem it also not works. It is established in the book lore that Harry didn't know what Priori Incantatem was, he didn't plan for it, and he didn't trigger it intentionally. He cast a his expiliarmus gimmick out of desperation, and the universe stepped in with a technical glitch of shared cores that saved his life. Harry was not a leader contesting enemy general, he was a drowning person randomly getting ahold of floating beam that fate put there. Relying on your opponent's gun jamming is not a display of heroic military leadership. There was not contest of will like Achilles vs Hector.
Um, yes, there is a contest of wills.
Like, seriously, go reread the scene. They cast, the effect goes off, and they're stuck in a contest of wills with beads of light moving between them. Harry forces the beads into Voldemort's wand, and it makes ghosts of the most recent people Voldemort killed, who then harass Voldemort long enough for Harry to get away (the Death Eaters are also IIRC thrown off-balance by seeing Voldemort lose at anything). If Harry hadn't won the contest of wills, he would not have been able to get away and Voldemort or a Death Eater would have killed him. If Harry hadn't befriended Cedric, Cedric's ghost would have been less willing to go along with it.
The whole DA is laughable.
No, it wasn't. The DA turned out to be critical. There are pitched battles at the end of HBP and DH in which the Hogwarts students are the main fighting force. The DA built camaraderie and at least a decent chain of command; you need that for effective cohesion under fire and without that experience they'd likely have broken and been slaughtered.
You keep noting that Harry is lousy at planning. Sure, he's lousy at it. So is the coach Leaders of Men is about. Harry's strength is not his brains; it's his character. Yes, Harry without Hermione fails. But Hermione without Harry also fails. Character matters, both mundanely and, in HP, magically. This is the whole point of Leaders of Men, which you seem to have missed. Planning helps. It is not the only thing that helps. Unity and morale help. Emotional resonance helps. Harry's open defiance of Umbridge, the very thing you lambast him for, is key to the DA working; he is visibly and expensively committed to the cause, and people want to live up to that.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23hr ago
McGonagall is all for reckless/hardheaded displays of main character aura heroism
I mean, if she weren't, she would presumably have gone insane or turned into Umbridge approximately two weeks after becoming Head of Gryffindor.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23hr ago
· Edited 18hr ago
Okay, so what I was pointing at is that character matters, IRL, and most of the magical feats you call "gimmicks" are a case of character mattering in HP magic as well.
He wins in Chamber of Secrets because of his faith in Dumbledore (summoning Fawkes) and his bravery (allowing him to pull the sword out of the hat) - and while you claim that Hermione's just as brave as he is, the very fact that you also lament his foolhardiness puts the lie to that, because foolhardiness literally is just excessive bravery. He escapes in Goblet of Fire because of his strong will (Priori Incantatem wouldn't have saved him if Voldemort had managed to make Harry's wand reverse itself instead), and to some extent his ability to be a fair winner with Cedric. He's able to kill the Horcrux and come back for much the same reasons as in CoS.
And aside from magic being character-based, his character is also more mundanely what let him run the DA in Order of the Phoenix; Hermione couldn't have done that, because the sort of person who trusts no-one and springs surprise Dark Arts on allies is not the sort of person people follow. As noted in Leaders of Men, you want someone who makes Hermione's decisions and has Harry's character, but someone with Harry's character doesn't make Hermione's decisions.
You might disagree with the character traits Harry is rewarded for actually being good. You might not like, on a stylistic level, character mattering like this. (I'm a Hermione fan too!) But they're not "pure gimmicks"; there is a theme going on here, much the same theme that's hammered in time and again that it's choices, not abilities, that make Voldemort a bad guy.
EDIT: Another Zvi post; will quote the relevant parts this time.
It is a weird and potentially incoherent sentence to say that if I were Putin or Trump I would have been able to make importantly much better decisions. But put me in their shoes and I couldn’t actually play their part at all. No chance. My ability to see that many of their decisions are dumb goes hand in hand with not being able to mimic their general ways of being.
And of course a lot of this has been driving home that character is fate. These things are difficult to fake, so one must choose character and then accept the resulting fate – there mostly is no ‘present as having the X nature and do X-style things when it’s good but secretly have the Y nature instead and use Y-based processes that are better. [sic]
Uhhhh... what? Outplanning each other is a contest of wits, not wills. Yes, absolutely, will is determination.
This... seems like a non sequitur? Running logistics is the quartermaster's job, not the leader's. The leader's job is to get everyone pointed in the same direction and giving 110%. Harry is hilariously better at that than Hermione.
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