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lunasarielLondon has gotten cooooold! It was -2ºC today, and the weather report said that it snowed last night. I've got the radiator going full blast now, I'm sitting here in my sweater and warm fluffy socks, and hot chocolate just might be in my future.
I've never really been affected by SAD before. In fact, I do like a bit of a nip to the air; muggy summertime does nothing but make me sticky, smelly, and cranky. But I have been noticing that I have markedly less energy the past few days, since it turned really cold, and I'm becoming more and more reclusive. I used to either go out or hang out in someone else's room four or five nights a week, but I'm finding myself more and more content to just sit here and surf the 'net.
Maybe it's not SAD, maybe it's just that we're almost at the end of the term. We're heading back to the States in about two weeks, and while I'll miss the independence, the Tube, and London itself, I do want to see my family, my friends, my books, and my pets (not necessarily in that order) again. I miss having ready access to my library. I miss our quasi-weekly D&D games. I miss reliable internet access. I miss being too far away to reliably keep an eye on all those who need an eye kept on them.
I've heard it said that eldest siblings, especially eldest siblings of single parents, can be a bit...bossy (I don't know if "God complex" is the correct phrase to use), and I do seem to be fitting that mold, at least partially. I've always been the responsible one, the shoulder that's always available to cry on, the one who makes things work. But now that I'm half a world away from all the people I'm used to taking care of, I fear that I'm getting paranoid for them. H&C are in couples counseling, and both Mom's and Dad's emails have sounded distinctly down of late. I'm especially worried about my dad. Both his parents have died this past year, and he took it *hard*. He also recently told me some other stuff in confidence that makes me worry about him all the more. To make a long story short, I wish I was back Stateside to cheer him up a bit. Everybody always gets a little down around the holidays, but it sounds like he could use some extra TLC right about now. Oh, well; I guess that's what his new-ish (I guess I can't really call her "new" when they've been married for about six years now) wife is for.
The nerd news du jour is, of course, the release of Harry Potter and the Neverending Sequels, Part One. I kid, I kid. Of course, I'm as ramped up to see it as the next self-respecting geek. Well, maybe not so much as those who actually classify themselves as Harry Potter fans first and foremost. I've never made any secret of the fact that, while I do enjoy Jo's work very much, it's not my primary fandom. In addition, I'm something of a purist when it comes to book-to-movie adaptions, so I'm sure to find something to niggle at, especially when it comes to a body of work as long and complex as the Potterverse. But I've heard almost all good things about the new movie, so I'll be giving that a shot when I get a chance.
Although I may not consider myself a Potter fan per se, I do dip into the fandom now and again, and the release of the new movie has prompted yet another relapse. As I've said before, my dark, shameful secret in this fandom is that I ship James/Sirius. Hard. James/Sirius is my Maedhros/Fingon of the Potterverse: I would never in a million years presume it to be canon, but there is quite a bit of subtext. Hey, if other fans are allowed to ship Snape/Hermione, I'm allowed my James/Sirius.
The J/S fandom, as might be expected, is...not large. There are two LJ communities,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
jamesandsirius and padfootnprongs , but I don't quite understand why, since there isn't enough activity in the fandom to fill up one community, let alone two. When I first got into J/S, I had a pretty good idea that there wouldn't be much fanfic/fanart/fanstuff for it, given the unpopularity of the pairing. But I had this little, sneaking hope that, since the quantity was so much less, the quality would rise in accordance. Yeah, no. I mean, it's not like all J/S writers/artists are terrible. They're the exact same mix of good, mediocre, and bad that can be found in any other fandom; it's just that it takes me so much less time to work through the good stuff that makes it seem like there's more bad than good.
A prime example of this is![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kubrick_potter . She's one of the most prolific authors in this tiny, tiny fandom; so much that at times it seems like she's the only thing holding us all together. She's generous with praise and feedback, and always can be counted on to dig something up to liven up the comms during slower-than-usual phases. It's just that she's not a very good writer, when you get right down to it. Her main problem is that her characterizations are waaaay of base, to nearly painful levels. It sometimes seems like she created two soft, sighing original characters, made them prone to burst into tears at any moment on the slightest provocation (or sometimes none at all) and make flowery declarations of undying love at the drop of a hat, and called them James and Sirius. Do you know any teenage boys who act like that? 'Cause I sure don't. There's none of the snark, none of the cockiness, none of that slightly repellent self-assurance that defined them in the books. In Kubrick's first chaptered story, "Rock and Freaks Festival," the four Marauders plus Lily and her OC friend (WTF #1) go to a Muggle rock concert (WTF #2) in the middle of nowhere, where they don't use any magic at all (WTF #3), and James and Sirius randomly hook up three chapters in (done so suddenly that it warrants a WTF #4). Yeesh. I had been hoping for a situation like the FAKE fandom, where one of the few active, prolific authors brilliantly captures the feel and characters of the original work while adding her own unique twist, but instead we just end up with situations like the one I just described. Every so often I get so lonely in my J/S shipper's world that I try to get through some of Kubrick's stuff, but then, after a drabble or two, I remember why I stopped reading her work in the first place. It's a vicious cycle, I tell ya.
...Time passes.
It's the next day now, and I've just gotten back from seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One, and I think that for the first time, I can say without equivocation that I really liked a Harry Potter movie. Honestly, they should have started splitting them up around Order of the Phoenix. The music was absolutely phenomenal, the cinematography was…inventive (more on this later), the costuming thing has finally stopped bugging me, and they got to keep so much of Rowling’s wonderful original work than they would have if they had tried to cram the whole thing into two, or even three, hours. The special effects were lovely, but they didn’t make the all-to-common genre movie mistake of relying on flashy special effects to cover for bad acting. Indeed, the scene where the Polyjuiced Harry, Ron, and Hermione sneak into the Ministry was amazing. It honestly seemed like our Power Trio in those bodies. Kudos to those actors whose names I can’t remember for carrying it off so perfectly.
That’s not to say that it was Return of the King, though. The cinematographer used circling, panoramic shots a few too many times for my liking, although this is admittedly a minor quibble. More seriously, I felt that Luna was dealt a very poor hand in this movie. I had been looking forward to seeing that beautiful, heartbreaking scene in the Lovegood house, where the Power Trio sees just what they all meant to Luna, but they cut that out. Also, in the books, I liked how the Hero, the Genius, and the Heart are off on a quest of their own, so it’s up to the Fool, the Lunatic, and the Child to do all the grunt work, so to speak, and they do it magnificently. Now that the Big Three are out of the “defending Hogwarts” game, it was up to the other three, who have been sidekicks and background characters for so long, to finally come into their own.
That was my main problem: Deathly Hallows is supposed to be all about the supposedly weak being revealed as strong through unity and kindness, and the strong being revealed as weak when they stand alone. Luna, Neville, and Ginny, who had previously done nothing but follow Harry’s lead, finally came into their own and organized an effective resistance. In yet another scene that didn’t make it into the movie, Harry was recognized during his big escape by his use of Expelliarmus, his signature spell; an inoffensive, seemingly silly little charm that can defeat even the mightiest of foes, even while all their terrifying Unforgivable Curses fail.
I also would have liked to see the scene where they break into Gringotts, but I can see why they nixed that; the CGI for the dragon alone would have cost a fortune. (EDIT: I obviously haven't read the books in a while. I have just been informed/reminded that the Gringotts heist doesn't take place until after the escape from Malfoy Manor. I stand corrected.) Same goes for bits like Lupin's relationship/daddy-to-be quibbles and Narcissa's descent into madness. It would have been nice to see these scenes, but cutting them was a logical decision, since A) the movie already runs at two hours and some change, and B) they probably would have played merrry hell with the pacing. One tiny thing that I wish they had kept, though, was Ron’s explanation of how Voldemort had keyed his name to act as a searching spell. This would have only been obvious to the hardcore fans, but Harry saying “You-Know-Who” instead of “Voldemort,” when the previous six books had made such a big deal about Dumbledore’s (and Harry’s) big crusade to get people to call Voldemort by his name to dispel some of the aura of fear that it created. Another thing that didn't really bother me when I first saw the movie, but does now that I think about it, is Dumbledore's and Grindlewald's relationship. I'm not saying that the director should have included the entirety of Dumbledore's backstory, because that would have taken too long, and again, played merry hell with the pacing, but mentioning that they were once friends would've gone a long way towards explaining that seemingly random letter between the two, with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows also randomly inscribed at the top, that Hermione seems to pull out of nowhere.
One thing I've always liked about the later Potter books, and that thankfully translated well to film, is the whole "La Resistance" idea: a covert band of loyal, trusty allies waging a guerrilla campaign against the increasingly frustrated, seemingly all-powerful Big Bad Government of Evil. Both the Order of the Phoenix and Dumbledore's Army are concepts that I enjoy immensely, and not only because they feed so nicely into the idea of ordinary people doing extraordinary things through unity and friendship that I mentioned above.
I've been working this concept into my own little ficverse, which is Marauders-era, and mostly post-Hogwarts. In it, James and Sirius, as well as Remus and Lily, are secretly couples. They keep their various relationships a secret for various reasons, most of which I'll get to later, but partially because they've been ordered to do so. Dumbledore has heard Trelawney's fateful prophecy of the birth of the Chosen One to parents who have each defied the Dark Lord three times. James and Lily are the only two eligible, breeding-age members of the Order who fulfill all the requirements, so Dubledore orders the two of them to fake a relationship, and eventual marriage, in order to avoid Death Eater suspicion when a man and a woman who are obviously involved with other people get together only long enough to conceive a child so that he or she can be born at a specific time.
The other reason they choose to keep their real relationships under wraps is, basically, Barty Crouch Sr. At this point in history, he's just now started to go off the deep end, and has been implementing more and more stringent policies to ferret out Death Eaters. Worse than that, he has begun to see everything different as bad, a lá V for Vendetta. Peter and James are safe from the Ministry's ire, being two purebloods of good family (or so I'm guessing, in Pettigrew's case). Lily, also, is in the clear, being a Muggle-born witch, and so the very embodiment of the wizarding community's reason to fight. Sirius and Remus, however, are in a more precarious position. Remus is known to be a werewolf, and so hardly first on the Ministry's list of People We Like. Despite his gentle nature, the actions of Greyback and his like won't have made it any easier for the quiet scholar to find acceptance. Sirius carries a similar stigma of being a Black, one of the most prominent and bloodthirsty Dark wizarding families, but he doesn't have Remus' friendly and diffident attitude to mitigate this. No, his approach to life, and especially to the large portion of life that doesn't like him very much at all, is more rebel than Raffi, and coming out as queer as a three-dollar bill wouldn't have helped.
As things stand, the two couples are living together, although hardly advertising this fact, and giving their all for the Order. The Order itself is enjoying a healthy amount of public support, mostly due to Dumbledore's (I accidentally wrote "Gandalf's" the first time, lol) reputation and the fact that, quite frankly, so many of the Order's "face" members just look heroic. Dumbledore is fully cognizant of this fact, and purposefully assigns pretty young things like Sirius Black, James Potter, Emmeline Vance, and Lily Evans to posts where they can be seen defending the weak, defying the Dark Lord, and generally saving the day, while keeping less photogenic agents largely behind the scenes.
The end result of all this is that more and more people are seeing the situation as the Ministry helping the Order, and not the other way around. Barty Crouch is not at all happy with the level of power and public support the Order has, especially when several members of the Order are also Ministry-paid Aurors. Crouch, much as Cornelius Fudge will many years later, starts to get the idea into his head that Dumbledore is building some sort of secret army that he intends to use to take over the Ministry. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but Crouch starts sniffing around for ways to put as many members of the Order out of action as possible. He moved to fire all Ministry officials who professed allegiance to the Order, but since they included some of his biggest names and heaviest hitters (Alastor Moody and the Longbottoms, among others) he found that doing so would virtually neuter the Aurors, and so let them stay, albeit under duress.
That move having failed, he went after Order members like Remus and Sirius, who he might be able to get away with summarily throwing in Azkaban. He began conducting "inspections" of the Order's headquarters and closely questioning its members. By this, he hoped to provoke a fight that would give him grounds to arrest as many members as he could; failing that, his interrogations might dig up something suitably illegal towards the same result.
This, to put it mildly, does not go well. The inspections and interrogations begin shortly after Crouch authorizes Aurors to use the Unforgivable Curses more or less whenever they feel like it, so many members of the Order are afraid that Crouch will use this opportunity (to the Order's discomfort, he insists that each member be questioned alone, behind closed doors) to slip somebody under the Imperius Curse.
As it turns out, he has something even worse in mind. One one of these little visits, Dumbledore and Crouch are sitting in Dumbledore's office, pretending to make nice with each other, when an alarm sounds throughout the building, indicating that an Unforgivable Curse has been activated somewhere on the premises. Since this is usually the signal for a Death Eater attack, Order members flock to the alarm's origin point. Here, they find Crouch's Aurors torturing Sirius with the Cruciatus Curse, Sirius having A) proved somewhat recalcitrant when it came to certain aspects of his personal life, and B) pissing off the attending Aurors. The Order is predictably displeased with this, James especially, and only Dumbledore's arrival stops things from devolving into a full-blown battle.
Sirius' reluctance to tell all convinces Crouch that he has something to hide (which, technically, he does) and sparks a conflict halfway between sibling rivalry and a civil war between the Order and the Aurors. Beyond that, things are extremely nebulous, and I'm extremely tired, so g'night. Oh, and happy T-Day to all of you who celebrate it.
I've never really been affected by SAD before. In fact, I do like a bit of a nip to the air; muggy summertime does nothing but make me sticky, smelly, and cranky. But I have been noticing that I have markedly less energy the past few days, since it turned really cold, and I'm becoming more and more reclusive. I used to either go out or hang out in someone else's room four or five nights a week, but I'm finding myself more and more content to just sit here and surf the 'net.
Maybe it's not SAD, maybe it's just that we're almost at the end of the term. We're heading back to the States in about two weeks, and while I'll miss the independence, the Tube, and London itself, I do want to see my family, my friends, my books, and my pets (not necessarily in that order) again. I miss having ready access to my library. I miss our quasi-weekly D&D games. I miss reliable internet access. I miss being too far away to reliably keep an eye on all those who need an eye kept on them.
I've heard it said that eldest siblings, especially eldest siblings of single parents, can be a bit...bossy (I don't know if "God complex" is the correct phrase to use), and I do seem to be fitting that mold, at least partially. I've always been the responsible one, the shoulder that's always available to cry on, the one who makes things work. But now that I'm half a world away from all the people I'm used to taking care of, I fear that I'm getting paranoid for them. H&C are in couples counseling, and both Mom's and Dad's emails have sounded distinctly down of late. I'm especially worried about my dad. Both his parents have died this past year, and he took it *hard*. He also recently told me some other stuff in confidence that makes me worry about him all the more. To make a long story short, I wish I was back Stateside to cheer him up a bit. Everybody always gets a little down around the holidays, but it sounds like he could use some extra TLC right about now. Oh, well; I guess that's what his new-ish (I guess I can't really call her "new" when they've been married for about six years now) wife is for.
The nerd news du jour is, of course, the release of Harry Potter and the Neverending Sequels, Part One. I kid, I kid. Of course, I'm as ramped up to see it as the next self-respecting geek. Well, maybe not so much as those who actually classify themselves as Harry Potter fans first and foremost. I've never made any secret of the fact that, while I do enjoy Jo's work very much, it's not my primary fandom. In addition, I'm something of a purist when it comes to book-to-movie adaptions, so I'm sure to find something to niggle at, especially when it comes to a body of work as long and complex as the Potterverse. But I've heard almost all good things about the new movie, so I'll be giving that a shot when I get a chance.
Although I may not consider myself a Potter fan per se, I do dip into the fandom now and again, and the release of the new movie has prompted yet another relapse. As I've said before, my dark, shameful secret in this fandom is that I ship James/Sirius. Hard. James/Sirius is my Maedhros/Fingon of the Potterverse: I would never in a million years presume it to be canon, but there is quite a bit of subtext. Hey, if other fans are allowed to ship Snape/Hermione, I'm allowed my James/Sirius.
The J/S fandom, as might be expected, is...not large. There are two LJ communities,
jamesandsirius and padfootnprongs , but I don't quite understand why, since there isn't enough activity in the fandom to fill up one community, let alone two. When I first got into J/S, I had a pretty good idea that there wouldn't be much fanfic/fanart/fanstuff for it, given the unpopularity of the pairing. But I had this little, sneaking hope that, since the quantity was so much less, the quality would rise in accordance. Yeah, no. I mean, it's not like all J/S writers/artists are terrible. They're the exact same mix of good, mediocre, and bad that can be found in any other fandom; it's just that it takes me so much less time to work through the good stuff that makes it seem like there's more bad than good.A prime example of this is
kubrick_potter . She's one of the most prolific authors in this tiny, tiny fandom; so much that at times it seems like she's the only thing holding us all together. She's generous with praise and feedback, and always can be counted on to dig something up to liven up the comms during slower-than-usual phases. It's just that she's not a very good writer, when you get right down to it. Her main problem is that her characterizations are waaaay of base, to nearly painful levels. It sometimes seems like she created two soft, sighing original characters, made them prone to burst into tears at any moment on the slightest provocation (or sometimes none at all) and make flowery declarations of undying love at the drop of a hat, and called them James and Sirius. Do you know any teenage boys who act like that? 'Cause I sure don't. There's none of the snark, none of the cockiness, none of that slightly repellent self-assurance that defined them in the books. In Kubrick's first chaptered story, "Rock and Freaks Festival," the four Marauders plus Lily and her OC friend (WTF #1) go to a Muggle rock concert (WTF #2) in the middle of nowhere, where they don't use any magic at all (WTF #3), and James and Sirius randomly hook up three chapters in (done so suddenly that it warrants a WTF #4). Yeesh. I had been hoping for a situation like the FAKE fandom, where one of the few active, prolific authors brilliantly captures the feel and characters of the original work while adding her own unique twist, but instead we just end up with situations like the one I just described. Every so often I get so lonely in my J/S shipper's world that I try to get through some of Kubrick's stuff, but then, after a drabble or two, I remember why I stopped reading her work in the first place. It's a vicious cycle, I tell ya....Time passes.
It's the next day now, and I've just gotten back from seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One, and I think that for the first time, I can say without equivocation that I really liked a Harry Potter movie. Honestly, they should have started splitting them up around Order of the Phoenix. The music was absolutely phenomenal, the cinematography was…inventive (more on this later), the costuming thing has finally stopped bugging me, and they got to keep so much of Rowling’s wonderful original work than they would have if they had tried to cram the whole thing into two, or even three, hours. The special effects were lovely, but they didn’t make the all-to-common genre movie mistake of relying on flashy special effects to cover for bad acting. Indeed, the scene where the Polyjuiced Harry, Ron, and Hermione sneak into the Ministry was amazing. It honestly seemed like our Power Trio in those bodies. Kudos to those actors whose names I can’t remember for carrying it off so perfectly.
That’s not to say that it was Return of the King, though. The cinematographer used circling, panoramic shots a few too many times for my liking, although this is admittedly a minor quibble. More seriously, I felt that Luna was dealt a very poor hand in this movie. I had been looking forward to seeing that beautiful, heartbreaking scene in the Lovegood house, where the Power Trio sees just what they all meant to Luna, but they cut that out. Also, in the books, I liked how the Hero, the Genius, and the Heart are off on a quest of their own, so it’s up to the Fool, the Lunatic, and the Child to do all the grunt work, so to speak, and they do it magnificently. Now that the Big Three are out of the “defending Hogwarts” game, it was up to the other three, who have been sidekicks and background characters for so long, to finally come into their own.
That was my main problem: Deathly Hallows is supposed to be all about the supposedly weak being revealed as strong through unity and kindness, and the strong being revealed as weak when they stand alone. Luna, Neville, and Ginny, who had previously done nothing but follow Harry’s lead, finally came into their own and organized an effective resistance. In yet another scene that didn’t make it into the movie, Harry was recognized during his big escape by his use of Expelliarmus, his signature spell; an inoffensive, seemingly silly little charm that can defeat even the mightiest of foes, even while all their terrifying Unforgivable Curses fail.
I also would have liked to see the scene where they break into Gringotts, but I can see why they nixed that; the CGI for the dragon alone would have cost a fortune. (EDIT: I obviously haven't read the books in a while. I have just been informed/reminded that the Gringotts heist doesn't take place until after the escape from Malfoy Manor. I stand corrected.) Same goes for bits like Lupin's relationship/daddy-to-be quibbles and Narcissa's descent into madness. It would have been nice to see these scenes, but cutting them was a logical decision, since A) the movie already runs at two hours and some change, and B) they probably would have played merrry hell with the pacing. One tiny thing that I wish they had kept, though, was Ron’s explanation of how Voldemort had keyed his name to act as a searching spell. This would have only been obvious to the hardcore fans, but Harry saying “You-Know-Who” instead of “Voldemort,” when the previous six books had made such a big deal about Dumbledore’s (and Harry’s) big crusade to get people to call Voldemort by his name to dispel some of the aura of fear that it created. Another thing that didn't really bother me when I first saw the movie, but does now that I think about it, is Dumbledore's and Grindlewald's relationship. I'm not saying that the director should have included the entirety of Dumbledore's backstory, because that would have taken too long, and again, played merry hell with the pacing, but mentioning that they were once friends would've gone a long way towards explaining that seemingly random letter between the two, with the symbol of the Deathly Hallows also randomly inscribed at the top, that Hermione seems to pull out of nowhere.
One thing I've always liked about the later Potter books, and that thankfully translated well to film, is the whole "La Resistance" idea: a covert band of loyal, trusty allies waging a guerrilla campaign against the increasingly frustrated, seemingly all-powerful Big Bad Government of Evil. Both the Order of the Phoenix and Dumbledore's Army are concepts that I enjoy immensely, and not only because they feed so nicely into the idea of ordinary people doing extraordinary things through unity and friendship that I mentioned above.
I've been working this concept into my own little ficverse, which is Marauders-era, and mostly post-Hogwarts. In it, James and Sirius, as well as Remus and Lily, are secretly couples. They keep their various relationships a secret for various reasons, most of which I'll get to later, but partially because they've been ordered to do so. Dumbledore has heard Trelawney's fateful prophecy of the birth of the Chosen One to parents who have each defied the Dark Lord three times. James and Lily are the only two eligible, breeding-age members of the Order who fulfill all the requirements, so Dubledore orders the two of them to fake a relationship, and eventual marriage, in order to avoid Death Eater suspicion when a man and a woman who are obviously involved with other people get together only long enough to conceive a child so that he or she can be born at a specific time.
The other reason they choose to keep their real relationships under wraps is, basically, Barty Crouch Sr. At this point in history, he's just now started to go off the deep end, and has been implementing more and more stringent policies to ferret out Death Eaters. Worse than that, he has begun to see everything different as bad, a lá V for Vendetta. Peter and James are safe from the Ministry's ire, being two purebloods of good family (or so I'm guessing, in Pettigrew's case). Lily, also, is in the clear, being a Muggle-born witch, and so the very embodiment of the wizarding community's reason to fight. Sirius and Remus, however, are in a more precarious position. Remus is known to be a werewolf, and so hardly first on the Ministry's list of People We Like. Despite his gentle nature, the actions of Greyback and his like won't have made it any easier for the quiet scholar to find acceptance. Sirius carries a similar stigma of being a Black, one of the most prominent and bloodthirsty Dark wizarding families, but he doesn't have Remus' friendly and diffident attitude to mitigate this. No, his approach to life, and especially to the large portion of life that doesn't like him very much at all, is more rebel than Raffi, and coming out as queer as a three-dollar bill wouldn't have helped.
As things stand, the two couples are living together, although hardly advertising this fact, and giving their all for the Order. The Order itself is enjoying a healthy amount of public support, mostly due to Dumbledore's (I accidentally wrote "Gandalf's" the first time, lol) reputation and the fact that, quite frankly, so many of the Order's "face" members just look heroic. Dumbledore is fully cognizant of this fact, and purposefully assigns pretty young things like Sirius Black, James Potter, Emmeline Vance, and Lily Evans to posts where they can be seen defending the weak, defying the Dark Lord, and generally saving the day, while keeping less photogenic agents largely behind the scenes.
The end result of all this is that more and more people are seeing the situation as the Ministry helping the Order, and not the other way around. Barty Crouch is not at all happy with the level of power and public support the Order has, especially when several members of the Order are also Ministry-paid Aurors. Crouch, much as Cornelius Fudge will many years later, starts to get the idea into his head that Dumbledore is building some sort of secret army that he intends to use to take over the Ministry. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but Crouch starts sniffing around for ways to put as many members of the Order out of action as possible. He moved to fire all Ministry officials who professed allegiance to the Order, but since they included some of his biggest names and heaviest hitters (Alastor Moody and the Longbottoms, among others) he found that doing so would virtually neuter the Aurors, and so let them stay, albeit under duress.
That move having failed, he went after Order members like Remus and Sirius, who he might be able to get away with summarily throwing in Azkaban. He began conducting "inspections" of the Order's headquarters and closely questioning its members. By this, he hoped to provoke a fight that would give him grounds to arrest as many members as he could; failing that, his interrogations might dig up something suitably illegal towards the same result.
This, to put it mildly, does not go well. The inspections and interrogations begin shortly after Crouch authorizes Aurors to use the Unforgivable Curses more or less whenever they feel like it, so many members of the Order are afraid that Crouch will use this opportunity (to the Order's discomfort, he insists that each member be questioned alone, behind closed doors) to slip somebody under the Imperius Curse.
As it turns out, he has something even worse in mind. One one of these little visits, Dumbledore and Crouch are sitting in Dumbledore's office, pretending to make nice with each other, when an alarm sounds throughout the building, indicating that an Unforgivable Curse has been activated somewhere on the premises. Since this is usually the signal for a Death Eater attack, Order members flock to the alarm's origin point. Here, they find Crouch's Aurors torturing Sirius with the Cruciatus Curse, Sirius having A) proved somewhat recalcitrant when it came to certain aspects of his personal life, and B) pissing off the attending Aurors. The Order is predictably displeased with this, James especially, and only Dumbledore's arrival stops things from devolving into a full-blown battle.
Sirius' reluctance to tell all convinces Crouch that he has something to hide (which, technically, he does) and sparks a conflict halfway between sibling rivalry and a civil war between the Order and the Aurors. Beyond that, things are extremely nebulous, and I'm extremely tired, so g'night. Oh, and happy T-Day to all of you who celebrate it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-11-28 07:07 pm (UTC)I'm sorry to hear you're so cold. British houses and buildings are cold. They're either not insulated well, or cost a fortune to heat, so everyone just puts on extra sweaters and lives with it. It was exactly like that in the winter in Japan when I lived there. I spend many an evening huddled against my expensive electric heater saying to hell with the cost. I hope it will be a little warmer wherever your home is in the States.
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Date: 2010-11-29 06:35 am (UTC)I feel a bit bad for whinging about the weather. I'm a weather-spoiled California girl, so all weather that isn't perfect seems horrendously cold or burning-hot to me. You lived in Japan?! The revelations are coming thick and fast these days...How long ago, and for how long? Did you like it? (My stepbrother is doing an internship there right now, and he loves it.)
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Date: 2010-11-29 08:13 am (UTC)I went back for a week in 2006 and found it quite different. Everyone I met from bus drivers to calligraphers, to people who worked in convenience stores could suddenly speak English, which was certainly not the case years earlier. There were also a lot more English signs around, although I still found big train station complexes to be daunting. I would love to be able to go back again for a longer time than a week-- say, three months. Whereabouts is your stepbrother?
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Date: 2010-11-29 03:37 pm (UTC)Your stay in Japan sounds...character-building. A travel writer I adore, Dave Barry, went to Japan (actually, I think he was there about the same time you were- mid- or late 90s?), and his observations of Japanese culture are *hilarious*. It took him a while to figure out that saying "no" straight up was incredibly bad manners. XD