@professional_portalArgus Filch is a Squib. That's the detail Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets drops in a scene the theatrical cut left out, and once you know it, every hallway patrol and every bitter glare at a floating feather reads differently. The scene in question has Harry, Ron and Hermione stumbling onto Filch's private Kwikspell materials, which reveal he's enrolled in a Kwikspell correspondence course, an attempt to learn magic he was never born able to do. The film came out in 2002, and the version most people saw keeps none of this on screen. So film-only audiences get the grumbling caretaker without the reason underneath. What plays as a man who simply dislikes children is actually someone scrubbing Hogwarts by hand while students half his age make objects float without trying. The resentment isn't a personality flaw. It's closer to grief. That's the argument here, anyway. A character can be unpleasant on the surface and still be carrying something the cutting room floor took away. The deleted scene doesn't excuse Filch so much as explain him, and it's a small piece of footage doing a lot of quiet work on a character most viewers only ever met mid-scowl.

@professional_portalArgus Filch is a Squib. That's the detail Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets drops in a scene the theatrical cut left out, and once you know it, every hallway patrol and every bitter glare at a floating feather reads differently. The scene in question has Harry, Ron and Hermione stumbling onto Filch's private Kwikspell materials, which reveal he's enrolled in a Kwikspell correspondence course, an attempt to learn magic he was never born able to do. The film came out in 2002, and the version most people saw keeps none of this on screen. So film-only audiences get the grumbling caretaker without the reason underneath. What plays as a man who simply dislikes children is actually someone scrubbing Hogwarts by hand while students half his age make objects float without trying. The resentment isn't a personality flaw. It's closer to grief. That's the argument here, anyway. A character can be unpleasant on the surface and still be carrying something the cutting room floor took away. The deleted scene doesn't excuse Filch so much as explain him, and it's a small piece of footage doing a lot of quiet work on a character most viewers only ever met mid-scowl.