Someone tries to help Harry with a task.Rita Skeeter writes with her Quick-Quotes Quill.Filch sets off the cannon early, signaling the start of a task.Mad Eye Moody looks at someone through his magical eye.There's a shot of all four champions together.Someone asks someone else to the Yule Ball.The Daily Prophet picture of Sirius in Azkaban is shown.Ron asks Harry if he saw Hermione come in to the class."Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" Lucius Malfoy says something condescending.Someone mentions one of the founders of Hogwarts.Professor Lockhart brags about his accomplishments."Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" Hermione says, "Now, if you two don't mind, I'm going to bed before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed, or worse expelled.".Harry, Ron, and Hermione suspect Snape of something.Trevor the toad appears or is mentioned.Someone tells Harry not to say Voldemort's name out loud.Hagrid says, "I shouldn't have told you that".Now, I don’t know if any of that was at all interesting to any of you as it was to me, but if not, you can blame it on the jet lag."Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"
Why is her career not in shambles due to the fact that she isn’t actually doing any work? Why does she get her name on any articles at all? We should just put the quill down as the Daily Prophet Reporter and have done with it.īefore you say it, I do recognize the inherent ridiculousness of me being hung up on this aspect of Rita’s character, and not her many worse and more specifically-outlined faults. What is the difference, I ask you, between Rita using a Quick Quotes Quill and a student cheating on their OWLs with an Auto-Answer Quill or self-correcting ink?I mean, screw her status as an unauthorized animagus, literally everybody ever interviewed by Rita knows that she uses this thing. So as an indignant writer, my question is: isn’t that plagiarism? Isn’t she taking the quill’s work, or at the very least, profiting from the work of whoever invented it? I’ll give Rita credit that at least she does ask the people questions, but since she never writes down their real answers, does that even matter at all? Does it count for anything? Every sentence comes from the quill fully formed. She’s making up utter horsecrap.Īs you all probably remember, Rita uses an acid-green Quick Quotes Quill, which automatically composes articles very loosely based on the interviews Rita conducts. They’re about “real people.” But Rita isn’t telling the facts. The things Rita comes up with are sensationalist drivel, but they aren’t about characters she’s made up. I recognize that she is a journalist, not a fiction writer, at least, in theory. Because something that has always bothered me about Rita, other than the obvious slander, selfishness and bigotry, is this… does she even count as a writer at all? This isn’t so much about the person of Rita Skeeter, but more about the implications of her existence as a journalist. So this post will hardly be of the intense, character-defense type.