Daniel Radcliffe doubles down

Yes, that's what I thought too.

It was a dig aimed at the people who were upset about the loss of their free movement, something like, "If you believe you are a citizen of everywhere, you are a citizen of nowhere."

But then confusingly the Tories abolished the 15 year voting rule...

I felt like it was aimed at the likes of me - skilled UK workers who were mobile in the EU. We didn't matter because we were clearly Britishing wrong

Wasn't "citizens of nowhere" a Theresa May-ism?

I did not realise that was what 'citizens of nowhere' meant at the time! Thank you, that's cleared up some things retrospectively.

@NonPlayerCharacter - I know he died (he came back from the dead - which you have to be dead to do).

I mean I don't accept it. I have my fingers in my ears and am refusing to listen. He is in his sixties living happily in a cottage with Remus, they have gnomes in their gardens and toads in the pond, a boggart in their coal cellar which Remus keeps driving out and it keeps coming back, and buckbeak lives in their apple orchard. Harry brings his family round for Sunday lunch.

Yep,whataboutery bollocks at it's most pathetic.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

That’s a beautiful analysis, thank you.

@GwenogJones , why don't you think that Sirius died?

Thank you @GwenogJones

I really appreciate your thoughts, though your very first sentence opens up a whole new mystery! 🤣

If you ever start a website with your Harry Potter analyses, please drop me a line.

@PriOn1 I don't accept that Sirius died so I don't have much of an analysis to offer.
But I think the veil is never explained because death is unknowable. It is in the Department of Mysteries and each room represents an element of the universe that the unspeakables are researching: there is prophecy, time, the brains (thought?) I think there might be a locked room where they study love, and then there is the veil - which is death. Whether the unspeakables are studying the veil itself or if they are studying death by using the veil, I'm not sure.

There are never any answers because there can be no answers to death while you are alive. So the loss of Sirius with no body and no explanation represents not just the finality (from this side at least) but also the mystery.

The way Harry and Luna (who have lost people they loved) can hear voices beyond the veil, while those who haven't lost someone can't, suggests a continued connection between those who died and those who still love them. This echoes what Dumbledore tells Harry back in book one and suggests that - while Dumbledore can't know about death - he has one of his very good ideas, which tend to be accurate. And he is proven right in Deathly Hallows, when Harry uses the resurrection stone to bring back his parents and Sirius just before his own sacrifice.

The resurrection stone is the opposite number of the veil, it brings back shadows of the dead to the land of the living. Although the veil represents the unknowable nature of death, the resurrection stone (when used for non-selfish reasons) represents a form of hope. The Sirius who falls through the veil is old before his time and broken, he is frustrated and suffering and has lost almost everything that matters to him. The Sirius who comes back via the stone is "tall and handsome and younger by far than Harry had ever seen him", in death he has been renewed and made whole again - he has found his redemption.

The books are actually very death-positive, if such a thing exists, in that they are very clear on the need to respect the natural order of things and that things that are natural need not be scary. Dumbledore says "to the well organised mind, death is but the next great adventure", but Voldemort has destroyed his soul and committed unspeakable evil in order to avoid dying. The irony being that, in splitting his soul, he makes death something he needs to fear. The importance of a complete soul, gained by living a good life, so that one might "greet death as an old friend and depart this life as equals" is an ongoing moral throughout the series.

Sirius's death and subsequent (very brief) resurrection show us he had nothing to fear, his soul was intact, his death was "quick and easy as falling asleep" and his coming back shows us that death is never truly the end for those who are loved. His return gives us hope.

But at the time, from Harry's perspective stuck on this side of the veil, he only has grief and regret, a sense of unfairness and not being able to understand - and it is to underline how the living cannot understand or comprehend death that the veil is never given an explanation. We can only guess at it, and explain it away in ways that make personal sense to us, without ever knowing if we are right.

Thank you @NonPlayerCharacter and @JudgyGarland

I very much appreciate your thoughts and insight.

Oh and having Nearly Headless Nick telling Harry when he is searching for a way to see Sirius again that such things are studied in the Department of Mysteries, suggests that the veil is there to allow Wizards to try and study what happens after death. Very typical of the ministry to try and control/tame/manipulate death in that way and fits the themes of political overreach pretty well.

I agree the archway is a metaphor for death, the sudden and irreversible nature of Sirius' death reflects this, I think.
Red can
Just before he goes through the beg archway, Sirius is hit by a spell, so could have been dead before he goes through the veil. It's a neat way of not having a body, a funeral or any closure for Harry. Bellatrix is both to blame and not to blame, and you can see this in both Harry's searching for a villain in Snape, and also in that he later tries to use crucio on her because he hates. (Although at that point he doesn't quite manage it as 'You've got to really mean it". That tells me Harry is still blaming others, himself, Snape and Dumbledore for Sirius' death in book 6. By book 7 he refers to it as the wand that kills Sirius so I believe that's him coming to terms with his own guilt and what happened to Sirius. It also implies to me that she was more culpable than him simply falling through the veil.

The veil itself follows in the footsteps of veils as gateways to the other world/unknown across literature and myth. I don't think that's an accident because JK is well read and into symbols and origins. Romantic poets, classic literature etc. The hearing whispering and yet not seeing, being unreachable reflects death very accurately as well. Having Luna, who has experienced loss and is open to the supernatural being the other character who hears the voices is a nice touch too.

I find Sirius death really hard to cope with because of all the reasons above. As I said above, it's a lot more real and raw than Cedric's death in the books. Harry is somewhat removed from Mr and Mrs Diggory's grief in the books as they are numb and he doesn't see all the stages of grief. With Sirius he very much experiences all the stages of grief himself, with the added burdens of guilt and no closure. If it were a Mumsnet thread it would come with a trigger warning!

Abhannmor · Today 11:03

I thought it was an 80s coinage from the US right wing?

No, it was probably mis-applied by them, however.

The Frankfurt School did actually exist of course, as you can see on earlier versions of the wiki article, though whatever weird crap is coming out of the universities today doesn't seem to have much to do with the theories of Theodor Adorno.

Yes, Ed Miliband got a rough deal, and I sometimes wonder how much of that was low key antisemitism. It was very noticeable because this wasn't long after those Labour posters depicting Michael Howard as Fagin, which seem to have been completely memory holed.

It's rooted in antisemitism and perpetuates the ongoing antisemitic idea that Jews infiltrate, undermine and suppress other cultures that they live in.

Don't use it.

I thought it was an 80s coinage from the US right wing?

In Britain antisemitism is more often conveyed by North London Cosmopolitan, or ' citizens of nowhere ' - all used by the right wing UK media during Ed Millibands leadership of Labour.

I read the first five HP books to the kids. JK is a top plot writer . The Agatha Christie of our times. I love the clever use of puns and palindromes . Also Latin which got my children enthused for that language. After the Prisoner of Azkaban I thought the writing was overlong and a bit tired in parts. Not surprising maybe? She needed an editor but when you're making the company billions , who's going to do it 😂

I thought the actors did alright until the later films.Perhaps they were going through teen angst in real life though. They are going to feel like right chumps after all this nonsense is over. It's a good job their money is made already .

As an adult, I saw that archway as a symbol of death on a level suitable for a younger audience.

Every character in Harry Potter who dies and whom he loved or cares for reappears in some form to him afterwards.

I feel like Sirius was so devalued by JKR and other characters after his death. We hear a passing remark towards the beginning of HBP that there’s going to be an investigation about his wrongful conviction, but if there is, we never see it. No one gives Sirius a memorial service. It seems like pretty much every time a character mentions him after his death, it’s in the context of his flaws - Sirius was rash, Sirius wasn’t nice to Kreacher. Harry had more angst and nightmares over Cedric’s death than he does over Sirius’s death.

I haven’t read the books in a long time, but I always felt there was a mystery about Sirius’ death that was never resolved. He fell through an archway from which Harry could hear whispering, as far as I remember (sorry, I’m away from home and don’t have the books to hand, so apologies if I get any details wrong). Reading it, I wondered whether JK Rowling was leaving it open as to whether he could return as it didn’t seem absolutely certain he was dead. I don’t think it was ever explained what that archway was, which for me, felt like a loose end.

I’d be interested to hear what others made of it, or if I missed something later that made sense of it. @GwenogJones @JudgyGarland @YankSplaining

He gets parts because he's still a Name. Producers believe casting Names brings in the paying punters.

See also casting singers and comedians of varying acting ability in stage and TV shows - some of them absolutely hopeless.

(Carefully reread and rewritten to remove bad language.)

My comment was meant regarding awards = good acting.

Anyone very rich can pretty much buy into anything they want, they don't have to have talent (Jack Reacher 2012).