Category: The North Tower

The North Tower #35: Albus Dumbledore – Clueless or Calculating?

I know I said I’d be continuing my series of editorials on Snape today, but due to an enormous amount of feedback, there was another question that I felt that I needed to address first… After my last editorial, I got literally hundreds of emails asking and/or protesting about the following statement I made in NT 34.

The North Tower #33: On Blood and Princes

…I admit, I was persuaded that the HBP was none other than Tom Marvolo Riddle, and though I still think that my arguments are quite good, they were based on two main faulty assumptions: 1) that the HBP storyline was connected to CoS (i.e. that it remained inexplicitly in that book and hadn’t been removed altogether) and 2) that the duality of the character Tom/Voldemort was such (in JKR’s mind) that Tom and Voldemort could be considered separate characters of sorts (which would tally with Dobby’s use of “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” in CoS and the Changeling Hypothesis). Clearly I was wrong. It happens.

Today, I’ll look deeper into the mysteries of blood and princes, try to create some sort of base for future analysis, and maybe reach some new conclusions on who the prince might be.

The North Tower #32: Fanfiction and Literary Tradition

I know some people didn’t like the idea of a fanfiction article and have begged me to write a “normal” NT this time. I had planned for my fanfiction/Shipping article to be a two-parter however, and since a lot more people have said they really liked the subject, I’ll go ahead and finish what I’ve started. So, for those of you who don’t like this theme, I’ll have to beg your indulgence until next article, which will be a traditional NT on the subject of HBP.

The North Tower #31: Fanfiction and Shipping

Hi everybody and welcome back to the North Tower. Today’s article will be a bit different from what I’ve done before. I wanted to discuss and analyse the concept of fanfiction with regards both to Harry Potter and to literary genres in general—concentrating on romance fanfiction writing and how it goes together with the whole shipping-phenomenon. It’s thus more about the relationship readers-HP-literature than it’s about HP-analysis in the more traditional sense.

The North Tower #30: The New DADA Teacher

Since everybody seems to be taking a stab at this particular subject, I thought I’d do so myself. But let’s not start with a going-through of possible candidates at the end of OotP. Let’s start by looking back and see what the position has been used for so far.

The North Tower #29: The Future Gryffindor Quidditch Team

Hi everybody! Today, I thought I’d write an article based on one specific question/answer in the World Book Day chat with JKR. The question/answer that interested me was:

“Q: Will Ron ever make it on the Gryffindor Quidditch team?
A: He’s already on the team, the question is just whether the new captain will let him stay…”

The North Tower #28: Neville Longbottom and Peter Pettigrew

Today’s topic is the result mainly of a long running frustration that I’ve been building up since I first started writing here at MuggleNet and people started sending me owls on the matter. I am talking of course about the persistent theories that there’s a link between Neville Longbottom and Peter Pettigrew and that there might be a clue to how Neville’s going to act in books 6 and 7 based on how Pettigrew acted in betraying the Potters.