The Phantom Librarian

Ack, just trying to follow the timeline here... I'm starting to think Harry might have a point with being annoyed at Snape. By the apparent sequence of events, he must have waited hours before deciding that, gosh, they sure seemed to be taking a long time getting back from the forest.

:brain hurts from painful timeline:

Anyway, Dora, Remus, and Sirius are at Grimmauld Place. Kreacher has injured Buckbeak and Sirius is already in a huge temper over it (they don't yet realize that the noise and rushing around masked Harry's call in the kitchen). A silvery-white image of Snape appears and ascertains that Sirius is not, in fact, being tortured in the Department of Mysteries.

Table of Contents and Summary So Far

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Sorry. Before, I was trying to figure out who did what when. Now, I have to burn some time, so I'm trying to figure out what all is there.

There are a dozen doors in the circular room (p771, U.S.: "Meanwhile, the door through which they needed to proceed could be any of the dozen surrounding them"). Of these, we see:

The Brain Room (presumably representing the Mystery of the Mind)
The Death Room
The Locked Room (Mystery of Love)
The Time Room (with prophecies and Time Turners)
The Planet Room (Mystery of Space? The Universe?)

Another door is obviously the exit.

That leaves six doors in the circular room unaccounted for, unless I'm missing some that Harry runs through. I suppose they could be offices, but seems like each of the divisions has offices of its own, and it's the divisions that are accessed through the circular room.

So... what could the other six Mysteries be, and what would be in them? The ones we see are among the biggies--Mind, Death, Love, Time, Universe. What else? Life? Faith? The appeal of reality television?

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I ranted on this a bit at SQ, but I thought a full-blown rant here would be good.

I don't mind working in imagery from the movies from time to time. The ties aren't an unreasonable addition. Heck, you could make an argument that there's a choir, and, if you're being charitable, you could give them toads. Why not? There's no indication that there is such a thing, but no particular reason for there not to be. Harry missed a good chunk of the early feast in PoA; maybe he missed the show. I don't like Lupin's moustache, but guys try facial hair sometimes, and we can just shave it off in fics and art.

But what gets to me, largely because it's appearing in more and more of the Remus art I see, is the BIG HONKING CLAW SCARS ON HIS FACE.

These just aren't things that wouldn't have been mentioned. Harry studies Lupin's face pretty closely for us while he's sleeping on the train. When Harry sees Moody, he notes all the facial scars. Are we seriously to believe that he wouldn't have mentioned big ol' claw marks across his favorite teacher's face?

Even more to the point, facial scars are very obvious, and schools are gossipy places. Lupin has a lot of suspicious behaviors in PoA--disappearing around the full moons and so on--and if he had the Claw Marks of Doom, speculation about animals would certainly have come up, and Hermione would not have been the only one to say, "Hmm. I wonder..."

So the facial scars neither exist in canon nor make sense as an addition to canon.

So why are they freaking everywhere? It's not like David Thewlis's face has replaced the many fan art versions (thank heaven; good actor, but he just never claimed the role in such a way that I could see no other face), so it's not a case of the movie overwhelming visual imagination. Why pick up this nonsensical tic?

Meme, klepted from jiminyc.

Ask any of my characters, canon or OC, a question (or more than one question) and said character will answer your questions honestly.