Harry Potter
Harry Potter! Of course everyone has been looking forward to this freakin’ lesson all semester long. Now, we don’t do scenes until tomorrow so I’m gonna hold off going too far into this until then, but I’ll start you off with a fun little anecdote.
In middle school, I became friends with this guy.. we’ll call him Dan. So, Dan is in a group of friends with me, a girl we’ll call Faye, a girl we’ll call Catherine, and a girl we’ll call Ashley. Dan is in seventh grade, Faye is in sixth, Catherine’s in eighth grade (like me) and Ashley is in seventh. Dan’s new to the school, and as an eighth grader, I decide to take him under my wing. And we bond over the fact that we’ve never had really great friends before and we both used to want to kill ourselves and other emo middle school bullshit.
Dan tells me that once, he went to a concert at the Midsouth Fair with some friends, but they left him behind, and when he wanted to find them, they texted him that they didn’t want to be seen with him in public because he was fat, ugly, and an embarrassment. That broke my heart, because he was my friend and I can’t believe anyone would ever be that deliberately mean.
Fast forward to the second semester of eighth grade, where after I miss school for a couple of days (a death in the family), I come back and.. there’s not as many chairs at our table where we play Uno, and they won’t make room for me. They won’t sit with me at lunch. They won’t talk to me in our study hall class. I’m really confused, because I don’t know what I did.
Then Dan messages me on Facebook that the group (except Catherine because she’s cool as hell) thinks I’m weird and ugly and they don’t want to hang out with me anymore.
And I wasn’t really upset at what a bunch of petty kids (who all decided their anxiety was too much for public school and all but 2 of them were homeschooled the next year) thought about me. What really made my blood boil was Dan, who had confided in me about his insecurities and pain of rejection over small reasons by people who had claimed to be his friends, who should’ve understood while that whole scenario was fucked up, was the first person to ridicule and outcast me.
How does this relate to anything?
Slughorn had described Dolores Umbridge of being an idiotic woman whom he never liked. Ollivander said she had a stunted character. It is hinted at throughout the novel that she wasn’t a Lily Evans type of character, but rather a loner, a nerd, and a bit of a closed-minded and rude person. Her father taught her to be a snob, which doesn’t really help.
So someone who never really fit in with her peers would probably be the first one to cause them trouble. Someone who associated her worse times with Hogwarts (mostly Slughorn, but whatever) would probably grow to resent the headmaster and the teachers and give them grief by getting a position in the school where she has authority over them, even costing some of them their jobs. A woman like this would also love to wield this same authority over children, continuing an abuse-type of cycle, where she can inflict the pain that she felt from not liking her instructor.
How accurate am I? I guess we will find out.
