alt_pomona: (close up)
alt_pomona ([personal profile] alt_pomona) wrote in [personal profile] alt_mcgonagall 2012-09-02 09:16 pm (UTC)

On Dolohov, quite. I did get the conversation around to that, easily enough. At least enough to see some of what we might face.

First, all the connections Dolohov has to her Raz and his relations and circle. I couldn’t begin to argue with her reasoning that his good will can make things greatly easier for her there, nor that she’s found herself more than a little adrift. (For all I gather she’s moved to first names with most of them over the summer, she’s still quite tentative.)

Also, in that too-pragmatic way she has (the YPL work did change her, rather) that if we’re going to have a new faculty member, and especially teaching Dark Arts, she would far rather have them be in the best possible mood, and with more than one source of assistance, than have them cranky and difficult with students (or worse). And that if there is a frustration, perhaps she can head it off before it’s a problem to his classes. I do hate when she’s right about that kind of thing. I never spot it myself, and feel horribly stupid once she points it out.

But most, I think, I forget - because she’s so good at making one do so - that she really is a researcher at heart, even more than she is a teacher. And as she pointed out, rather acerbically, it’s not as if she’s ever gotten much interesting conversation in that line here. Gwendolyn’s hopeless on deeper Charms theory even if it weren’t for Rabastan’s missteps, Septima and Bathsheba are well enough, but only interested in their own fields. And I know that you and I, Poppy, are friends, but not research colleagues, in her eyes. Not that she doesn’t also desperately need friends, mind.

Alas, though, for all her good logic - and it is - I do think we need to worry, Poppy. She is rather taken with him, and it may be very easy for him (easier than her Raz, perhaps), to incline her in directions from which there may be no retreat.

As to the rest of our conversation, well. She did ask who young Ellie was. Among other things. (Many of which I'm thinking over.)

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