A note in my email inbox from this April:
Dear HP Team,
Rubedo: Is it possible that the Weasley family is part of the Rubedo stage along with Hagrid?
I was listening to an old podcast where the guest speaker was lamenting that not much of Hagrid was in the 7th book, and he should have been since he represents “Rubedo”.
However, all of the Weasley family has shockingly RED hair. I would think this intentional. JK Rowling makes a big deal of their red hair throughout the series. If, in fact, they are part of the Rubedo stage, then we do have a significant representation in the final book as they all play a dramatic part, including Percy.
I am curious what your thoughts are on this idea?
Sincerely,
Joy
Three Rubedo notes, Joy!
(1) Rowling said she had to promise her sister not to kill Hagrid in the finale; little sister had threatened never to speak to her again if everyone’s favorite Half-Giant died. As the character with the most obvious ‘red’ name, though, he seemed the most likely character not to survive. The model of Sirius Black dying at the end of the alchemical black book, the nigredo of Order of the Phoenix, and Albus Dumbledore also taking a dive at the end of Half-Blood Prince, the series albedo, made things look real grim for Rubeus in the run-up to Deathly Hallows. We didn’t know about The Presence’s promise to her sister.
(2) But Rubeus wasn’t the only character named ‘red.’ There was Rufus Scrimgeour, right? In Who Killed Albus Dumbledore? (Zossima Press, 2006), I collected the essays and predictions of six Potter Pundits about what had really happened in Half-Blood Prince and what we would learn in Deathly Hallows. Three of us made ‘Live or Die’ predictions for major players in the finale — and all three of us predicted five characters would die: Lord Voldemort, Bellatrix La strange, Rufus Scrimgeour, and, well, Draco and Narcissa Malfoy. All three of us, though, thought that Rubeus would live. We thought Rufus was going to be the Big Red sacrifice and that Hagrid was a red herring. Good for us.
(3) Not to brag, but I was the only one of the three who said Nymphadora Tonks and Severus Snape would die. I also predicted Fred Weasley’s death as well. This might sound like great prescience and insight, but it isn’t. Like Joy, I was thinking alchemically so I thought every red head in the book was possibly marked for a rubedo death; I marked off every one of the Weasleys, to include Fleur, as doomed. I was also the only Pundit who thought Peter Pettigrew would survive. I had some impressive direct hits — and a lot of misses.
Sorry to go off on that nostalgia tangent, Joy, but what a lot of fun the two years between Prince and Hallows were in fandom!
To answer your question at last: YES, the Weasleys as a family of redheads play an alchemical role through the whole series but especially in the two last book. Harry winds up with Ginny after dating Black-haired Cho and White-haired Luna, fRED Weasley dies, Percy rises from a sort-of worse-than-death, separation from his family, and Molly dispatches the witch who killed Sirius in the rubedo climax of the Battle of Hogwarts. They do everything an alchemist expects in a rubedo and, with fRED’s death, satisfying the color scheme formula of the stages in the last three novels.
Thanks for writing!
I know you do not particularly care for the HP movies and frankly I don’t like most of them as adaptations myself. Just a thought, maybe fans have been going about this all wrong when placing blame at the feet of Yates. I was guilty of this also in the past. I now believe the fault lies with Heyman and WB. They are the true “bosses” of the entire film production. They are the “money men” as it were. 
As soft spoken, thoughtful and humble as Heyman seems when interviewed, he is ultimately who approves of the dailies. As much as he professes to adore Rowling’s stories, it is he who allows Yates the freedom to audible out of canon and change the plot (dumb it down) such as he did in HBP with the “setting the burrow on fire” scene. 
It is such a shame, as someone whose company specializes in adapting books to film, that Heyman doesn’t have the guts to let the canon stand on its own. It is such a shame he doesn’t feel audiences are intelligent enough to follow the canon in a film version. Maybe he should finally have the wherewithall to follow Rowling’s FB scripts instead of fiddling with them. 
(1) You’re right that, of the two Davids, director David Yates and producer David Heyman, I tend to focus on the director as the bad guy who films the agreed on ‘shooting script’ and then cuts it into the prescribed formula of the studio. This is a mistaken application of 
(2) It’s probably best to think of the two Davids as the right and left hands of Warner Brothers, though, rather than assigning more responsibility to Heyman than to Yates. Each of them is a studio mechanic rather than free-wheeling artist; both answer to the studio chiefs who answer to stock holders looking for the greatest possible return on investment. The money required to put together and to market these extravaganzas means the age of auteur directors who create films largely unsupervised is long gone.
(3) My biggest mistake is not the proportion of blame that I routinely assign here for the train wreck of the Fantastic Beasts films. [Warner Brothers took what Rowling offered when she said she would write the screenplays and that hasn’t worked out as hoped; I doubt she is interested in returning to the franchise winning formula of novel-first-then-film-adaptation but that is the go-with-your-strengths and division-of-labor solution to the problem.] Where I go way wrong here is the absence of charity I exercise in criticizing Yates and Heyman for something over which they really have no control, i.e., studio film length requirements that allow so many screenings per day at the cine-plex, without mentioning all they do very well. Each of their remarkable skills and their team work as a pair with respect to team building, shot selection, budgeting, lighting, actor coaching, musical score inlay, as well as scene and film editing contribute to the final product and magical experience in the theaters. 
I haven’t written about this since the publication of Lethal White, however, and I think some facts about the series that the fourth book largely nailed down may interest the uber Potter-phile. Here, then, is my list of three things about the Cormoran Strike novels that might encourage the most hesitant Rowling-reader and Wizarding World fan to give them a try.
Rowling has since allowed in an interview about her BBC adaptations of the mysteries that the books are obviously a series. There may turn out to be more than seven. The four books we have, though, in their structure and relationship one to another, are almost certainly a seven book set that may or may not run on from there.
If that weren’t sufficient evidence, Rowling/Galbraith inserts a page at the half-way point of Lethal White that reads ‘Part Two.’ That book, however, does not have a page in either its hard cover or paperback editions that says ‘Part One.’ As if to confirm that this is the second part of the series rather than just this novel, i.e., “we are half way through the seven books,” the story line in Letal White that begins in Part Two is a repetition of the opening chapters of Cuckoo’s Calling, i.e., Cormoran accepting a case from a berieved relation of the deceased who does not believe that the death was a suicide. See
A Guest Post from David Martin!
Example #2:
So, why are such weddings so popular? A few reasons are obvious. 
But I suspect that there is another deeper, unspoken and perhaps unrecognized reason beyond these obvious reasons, that may apply for some couples. If we review examples 1 through 6 above, there is something missing: In none of these weddings was the officiant a clergy person. (True, the officiant in example #3 calls herself “Reverend D” but a quick look at her website shows that the only license she has is from the city of New York as a wedding officiant.) None of these weddings was done in a church, a synagogue, or a temple. In particular:
In example #1, the couple had a civil wedding.
These couples appear not to be particularly religious or to be currently affiliated with a house of worship. (Yes, I chose these examples deliberately to make a point. There are also Harry Potter themed weddings that are in a church and where the officiant is a clergyman. See, for example,
For some couples, in response to the officiant’s traditional wedding question that begins with “Will you have this woman/man to be your wife/husband, to live …” they answer not with the traditional “I will” but with the single, potent word “Always.” And sometimes at the end the officiant declares the couple “bonded for life.” These are serious weddings.
I’m a member of a church on a main highway in a “nice” suburb of Philadelphia. We regularly get inquiries from people who ask about using our church for weddings and funerals. Also, sometimes, about baptisms. Those seem to be the three ties which are the last to break as people pull away from the church: baptisms, weddings, and funerals. When confronting the wonder of new life, the ecstasy of love, and the mystery of death, people sense that they are dealing with the numinous. Then they sometimes want the support of faith. So in the context of what I have written above, this raises an obvious question: Are people involving Harry Potter in those other big events, birth and death? Actually, they are.
The use of Harry Potter to celebrate new life is easiest to document. Just search for “Harry Potter” “birth announcement” (Again, for best results, place the quote marks as shown.) When I did that search just now I got 5,380,000 hits. There are more millions of hits if we change that search slightly and look for “pregnancy announcement” or “baby shower.” Clearly many people are involving Harry Potter in the celebration of the birth of a child.
More often, however, Harry Potter shows up in connection with funerals indirectly. The web site Legacy.com collects obituary notices from many different newspapers. Doing this Google search “Harry Potter” site:Legacy.com searches Legacy.com for all occurrences of the words “Harry Potter.” Doing that search just now, I got 3,800 hits. The obituaries found by this search report, for example, that the deceased loved the Harry Potter novels, or that perhaps the deceased took the grandchildren to one of the Harry Potter theme parks. Apparently someone thought that this was an important thing to have recorded about the deceased. I also suspect that some of the well-known quotes about death from the Harry Potter novels (e.g., “You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us?”) show up in a lot of eulogies. 
Last week, after posting my disappointment about the
And Suzanne Collins? What is she up to? Is she living the private life a la Rowling, dedicating her focus to family and craft? Or is she working hard on projects few people care about?
Back in 2013, Suzanne revealed at a book expo that she was working on a much anticipated new series. But that was nearly five years ago, and she’s had no new publications.
For Collins fans, this is a must read. The information she shares in the staged exchange with her editor about Just War Theory (which pretty much nails down the idea
I throw this link on the page for the uber Hunger Games fan and serious reader who wants to peruse what passes as criticism today in the New Media and what they have to say about Collins’ trilogy. A clue? It isn’t Hunger Games that is shocking but the pedestrian, political, PC, and provincial posturing to be found here that doesn’t even begin to explain what made these books resonate so profoundly with readers. After reading this article of sound bites, I had to spend an hour or so with Lana Whited’s 
My hope? That this departure from any kind of celebrity activity and publicity seeking is testimony to the author’s determination to avoid Gamesmaker status and to duck the seemingly unavoidable appearances as a citizen of The Capitol her status as best-selling author entitle her to. It’s possible that she has taken the money — and as the Kindle book best-seller world champion ten years on, there’s lots of money, not to mention film and theme park residuals — and done with it what she will out of the public eye and to build the necessary walls to protect her and family’s privacy.
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