Harry Potter After 2020

LK:  We know, from him having put three memories in the Pensieve, that Snape has his own important things at risk here.  JC: My first read with it was that there were things that he didn't want Harry to know, but now I'm like, 'Oh, there's things he doesn't want the Dark Lord to know.' He's not worried about Harry knowing. LK: If Voldemort sees things, he doesn't have the emotional intelligence to...

LK:  We run into Neville and his grandmother Augusta visiting Neville's parents in the long-term care ward. JC: Hermione has the sudden horror that Kreacher has a picture of her in his little den. LK: This is the human cost of family separation. The people who knowingly do this and enjoy the results have lives and emotional connections, too. For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the ho...

JC:  We were in a theater full of people who were there because they wanted to see Tom Felton, and like you said, they queued for tickets, they paid a lot of money, they clearly are fans. I heard people crying around us, people were laughing... Everybody in that theater was thrilled; people leapt to their feet at the end to clap. For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or suppo...

JC:  What I would like Sirius to have said is, "You've told Dumbledore, and Dumbledore's on it. You need to sit tight, and let's see what Dumbledore comes up with. I know this sucks, and thank you for telling me. Can I hug you?" Anything like that is what would have made a difference. There are things that happened to Harry later that I think he ended up making choices because he thought nobody wa...

LK:  The hope with Voldemort is that there is part of his own mind that he doesn't understand, and there's hope of being able to get to him that way. The problem with Umbridge is that she doesn't have that kind of empty spot. JC: Yeah. She's choosing it, she knows what she's doing, and she's unreachable in the same way that we talked about before and that others have talked about: the author is un...

Dumbledore sent Hagrid and Madame Maxime off to approach them, but he had to tell them what to do. It makes me think about stories of people whose parents were immigrants who then had lost this piece of their parents' culture and have a hard time reconnecting to it again. They were having to rely on what Dumbledore had told them about what giant culture was like, even though they're both half-gian...

Harry feels so empowered by knowing that he's doing something to make a difference in the background. That's really cool and also just very relatable, because I know that I've had feelings like that in the last few years. 'These are the things that are happening, but here's what I'm doing through my work to make it a little bit better.' For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts o...

The hurt that he's accruing by being isolated and ignored by Dumbledore -- that hurt of not having his needs heard and met -- are doing more to turn him into somebody who can understand Voldemort's feelings and how Voldemort became who he is, starting from being an orphan who had nobody to hear him when he cried out for help and nobody to connect with. For full show notes, transcripts, ways to con...

This is part of the instruction manual. Support your own confidence by doing something and carry that within you. People believing Harry and letting him know that they have a high opinion of him has taken such a burden off of him.  For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show, and more, visit  hpafter2020.com .

Ernie -- bless Ernie -- points out the thing that has to be said: "We are prefects." He is verbalizing the risk that they have all agreed to take if they go on this path, and that is, in fact, what they're all deciding, and he himself has made the argument for why they should: that this is even more important than O.W.L.s. For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the...

JC:  I went into reading this chapter thinking when I read it before, this seemed so incredibly super dark and hard to imagine. It did not feel that way this time; it was even funny to me in ways that it would not have been funny before. I'm starting to wonder if the rest of this book is going to feel that way to me. I remember this book being so dark, and now I'm like, 'It doesn't feel quite as d...

Harry's thinking he had known Percy for four years, had stayed in his house during the summers, yet now, Percy thought him 'unbalanced and possibly violent'? That was a feeling that was really powerful in the fandom during the first disbelief of TERFpocalypse. That vertigo when you realize that somebody has made you into a monster in their head, even though they had human connection with you that...

LK:  Your friends and allies are the ones who will hear you, so you have to be mindful of how you direct the anger that you're constantly being provoked to feel. I remember, in 2016, I had to be schooled. I had to be taught, "Do not make small hands jokes. The only people who are going to hear you are your trans-masc friends." That's true. Shoot, sorry. JC: Similarly, when people mock his weight o...

They're all sitting there and it's just like *groans* and everyone's falling asleep… It's intended to be that the room is quiet. The appearance of learning is there, but no learning is actually happening. This is exactly what Umbridge wants. Then Hermione's hand goes up and stays up, and then slowly, everyone starts to notice, and it's this building and building and building. It's so good. For ful...

I would love to go through some of what Umbridge is saying here. First of all, the jargon that she's using…the words that she used to me as an educator were like red flags. The emphasis is not on creating thinking human beings that can reason and question things. No, we want them to have a very specific set of skills that they can apply, then, to whatever we tell them to. For full show notes, tran...

Luna's final words to him are such a masterful end to this chapter, because she's smiling faintly when she says it; she knows. She is in charge of this moment. It's not one of her thoughtless things where she doesn't realize the effect she has on people, and I think she's chosen these words on purpose to be unsettling. "Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am."  For full show notes, transcripts,...

She is a resistance fighter who's already lost family and now has children; the more people you love in life, the more they have on you. This is just a fact. Snape is the opposite, of course; he deliberately prevents himself from having attachments so that he doesn't have that liability. But Molly… she went all in on giving birth to resistance fighters, so yeah, this is the price she pays.  For fu...

This way that Harry is being set up here -- drawing more blame to himself in proportion to how well he could defend himself from attack -- the only way for Harry to be virtuous in Fudge's eyes is to let himself get killed? There's no winning. There's no way to be a good victim that gets approval. For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show, and more, visit hpaft...

Harry, looking at the layers and layers as he goes down, he's learning how to operate in this world that's built on secrets and hidden agendas and subversive speech, whether it's subversive because it's wizards trying to hide, escaping detection by Muggles, or whether it's members of the Order pretending in public not to know each other for their own safety. For full show notes, transcripts, ways...

When Sirius looks around at how they're refitting the house for the Order, he says, "If my parents could see the use it was being put to now…" I thought, 'Oh, that's actually honest and hopeful,' because one of the words that came to my mind was 'reparations.' For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show, and more, visit  hpafter2020.com .

Everybody thought more highly of Harry's achievement than Harry did. He didn't realize what an advantage he's just given everybody and what a giant defeat he handed Voldemort, because as Harry has been rightly complaining, nobody's saying "Good job, Harry." And it's good for all these adults to realize, "Wait, Harry, you don't know what you did?" "No. If anybody would talk to me, maybe I would hav...

In Korean, there are no capital or lowercase letters, so when I got this volume of Harry Potter in Korean translation, I checked to see how they did Capslock Harry and it's in boldface. If you're familiar with Capslock Harry, you don't have to read Korean to know what chapter this is; you can just see it and know. For full show notes, transcripts, ways to contact the hosts or support the show, and...

The moment he starts flying, he feels like himself again. This is something that we've really needed in this political landscape. The respite it gives your whole system to get back in touch with who you really are… That is something that anybody who's struggling should keep in mind like this. We actively want to reconnect to that feeling as much as possible, because it just resets your body if you...

Sometimes, there's a fantasy where you think, 'Well, if you could just make contact with somebody who's prejudiced and get them to see the common humanity, then they wouldn't be able to say to somebody's face, "Well, I hope you die."' But no, Vernon is fully aware of who Harry Potter is and has said right to his face, "Do your lot have the death penalty?" For full show notes, transcripts, ways to...

There is no getting away from knowing that for nine and three-quarter years, Dumbledore let him live a hopeless childhood with the Dursleys, never contacted him until he was eleven, never let him know "somebody knows about you," never gave him any reason to think his life would be anything other than that. When Dumbledore ignores or abandons Harry in this novel, that triggers Harry beyond anything...