small_gifts | Countdown to small gifts 5/7: Back to canon

as an r/s shipper, this may be obvious, but, PoA for both! i love the book because of how perfectly encapsulated it is, how tight the plot is, and how much remus lupin there is. he really is the star of the show!

the movie is not (IMO) a great adaptation of the book, but i think it's a fantastic film in its own right. the directing is very strong and i do love the acting. (unpopular opinion?)

I thought Cuaron was far and away the best director in terms of really letting the actors act and keeping the special effects from overshadowing the performers (dumb not!werewolf beast thing notwithstanding). I wish he had done more of the films. Apparently he was offered Book 4 but he was too overextended and exhausted.

oh, i hadn't heard that! what a pity. and i agree; putting aside the uhhh "werewolf" the film really felt more like a film than any of the others and less like it was a series of related events that just happened to be on screen :P

(i'm... not a huge fan of the movies, haha)

i love the book because of how perfectly encapsulated it is, how tight the plot is, and how much remus lupin there is.

That's an excellent summary of the strengths of PoA right there. :) The first time I read the book, I remember reaching the final chapters and realizing (for the first time, right then) that every book we would get a new DADA professor, and so Lupin had to go. I was soooo disappointed.

And not an unpopular opinion at all, it seems! M.

yeah oh my gosh i distinctly remember that feeling too. lupin truly was the finest.

and it's great to find so many people agreeing with me on this point! when i talk to people IRL about it they're so quick to judge... guess they just haven't latched onto the wolfstar lifestyle yet...

And another one — I remember feeling, “oh no, wait, there has to be a way he stays in this story!” I agree with the tightness of the story and, of course, the scene in the shack. I loved that scene before I was a shipper as well because I loved the characters and finding out the whole story. There’s also such a sense at the end of POA that this is it — this is when things get much more serious. Not that they weren’t before, but the shift to much more sinister content happens there, IMO.

oh yes definitely, PoA is the point where you start to worry. GoF puts the nails in the coffin, but i love the creeping unease of PoA. the public vs private sirius is great foreshadowing for how unreliable the wizarding media becomes later in the series.

POA. It's the book that gave us Remus and Sirius, for one. Also, to my mind it's the best-constructed novel of the series. It's got a very complex plot (especially that time turner stuff) but it's never draggy or bloated (I'm looking at you, camping chapters in book 7). Also, I think I like it best in part because Voldemort's not in it. Some of the later books are pretty damn frightening in a horror-genre way (as opposed to a political allegory way) and I have trouble with horror.

Also, POA the book gave us POA the movie, and without movie!POA I would not even be here in fandom at all.

:) It IS the book that gave us Remus and Sirius. I agree about the plot and content as well. It’s the last one that seems less sinister. Definitely agree that POA is the best movie.

Can I pick JKR's short story about Sirius and James battling Death Eaters? ;)

You can pick whatever you want! I want one of those t-shirts. :)

So, PoA is the short answer, the easy answer, and mostly the full answer. I'll really say probably the first three, though. I love all of them, or I wouldn't be here, but the first three are when Harry and company are still young, so the books aren't as heavy. I understand that they grew with him, but I liked the lighter tone and more playful moments in between where everything wasn't just gloom, doom and everyone is going to die soon.

As for PoA specifically, I could go the easy route and say it's the book that gave us the boys, and that's true, and a large part of it. But it's also the book with the most detail about classes and exams. We get details about Hogwarts, we get introduced to Hogsmead, there's just a lot of Wizarding culture in that book. Hagrid gets to be a teacher! It just gives us a lot of the good things that help carry through the darker stuff later.

The movies? I haven't seen them. I've seen small snippets of the first three, but that's as far as that goes. I was so put off by some of the decisions made (costumes... the costumes killed me... how do you make all the Muggle clothes jokes if they wear Muggle clothes!!! A lot of the incidental humor was going to go away that way.) that I couldn't make myself sit through them. Now that I'm more patient and could probably watch and enjoy them I rarely have the time for movies anymore.

That's so true about the clothes! Whoever chose the Muggle sweaters for the golden trio seemed to be wishing, at times, that they were actually designing Wesley Crusher's sweaters on TNG.

One of my degrees was in costume design, I'm really picky about movie costuming. That just threw me so badly I couldn't watch them! I mean, that's half the fun of Arthur Weasley, making fun of his attempts at Muggle clothes. You lose so much of the small nuances that way.

Oh, I can totally see how having a degree in costume design would make it hard to watch all kinds of movies! You have a fascinating backstory, MIA!

It's funny, I can totally ignore things like historical inaccuracy, but I have s really hard time ignoring things that effect the story.

And I swear I'm not really that interesting.

And I swear I'm not really that interesting.

I don't believe that for a moment.

I'd never thought about it in quite the way you put it, but you're so right--the movies didn't capture a lot of the incidental humor. In some cases it just didn't translate from the page, but in others--the costumes, parituclarly, as you say--they didn't work very hard at capturing the quirky humor in the books. Thanks for pointing that out! M.

I know I'm upset for the wrong reason here, but I still feel betrayed that they didn't at least go all the way and give us ~~horrible~~ 90s Muggle clothes.

I mean, not wrong. I hate the Muggle clothes altogether, but if you're going to make that bad choice at least commit to it!

Solid life advice, generally. :) M.

LOL, that is very good life advice! I often say that aloud to other drivers.

When I was reading these to my son, I took a break after POA. I had read them before and knew I should wait until he was a little older to keep going. There is definitely a feeling of a cliff at the end of POA — stuff about to get serious. I agree about POA and the detail about the school and culture. I also love it because it introduces use to the previous genderation is such a more detailed way. The clothes really are an issue.

You're right about that feeling of a cliff, of the rest of them getting darker. And I mean, you have to have read them all to really notice it, but the first three, the trouble the trio get into is their own. They did things that put them where they were. From there on out the trouble is something external done to them. That's a huge difference. Someone intentionally trying to hurt them rather than them just making choices that put them in dangerous situations. I mean, someone wanted to hurt Harry in both SS and CoS, but the high danger points of the books were not caused by someone else, but rather by the trio thinking they could fix it.

Wait, no OotP? Joint gifts? Grimmauld Place? "Sirius, sit down?"

I love OotP for the politics and for Umbridge and for Grimmauld Place as a setting more generally, and the fact that's it's also got (apparent) queer domesticity just makes it that much better. Queer domesticity must be my thing--that's how I started shipping Holmes/Watson back in the day.

(Wow--I've never put it that way before, and now I'm shocked by how accurate that is--queer domesticity is totally my thing. Hm. Good to know.)

Like others here, I'm not such a big fan of the movies--PoA was stylish and fun and my favorite among them. But I loved the queer sensibility of PoA. M.

Edited 2017-11-30 02:14 (UTC)

Here’s an OotP fan! Where would we be without “Sit down?” The phrase that launched a thousand fics.

I read through OotP before I was involved in fandom and this is the one where I started to see Remus and Sirius as partners. Hooray for queer domesticity. For me, well the joint gifts are there of course, but I think it was the scene where Harry goes to Sirius for comfort about James being an arse and Remus and Sirus — all homey and domestic — reminisce and reassure Harry. That scene felt so loving, both between them and to Harry. In some ways, the fact that Harry is perplexed by how they can be so forgiving of James’ behavior made it even better for me because of the connection and happiness it showed between them. I have no idea if that makes any sense.

Edited 2017-12-02 18:58 (UTC)

I read the books twice before I was into fandom. I was always so sad when Sirius died. I was heartbroken for Harry that he lost him so soon after finding him, I was sad that Sirius would never be exonerated in his life, I was crushed for Remus. I was sure at first that it was a misunderstanding and there was a way back through the veil (even thought I knew Remus must know). It was sad and felt it, but I was just sad for a character in a book. And then when I read it again after being in fandom, I sobbed like a baby, like uncontrollably. Once reading it with the kiddo he looked at me and said, “Are you really crying?” I am grateful for Bring Back Black fics and art and AUs. :)

Countdown to small gifts 5/7: Back to canon

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