Eh. This is actually one of the things that are easy enough to deal with. They work on an apprenticeship system. A wannabe healer or an Auror spends years studying under an experienced master. Indeed before the mid nineteenth century that was the norm for most professions rather than university and for the medical and legal fields, still exists, though after formal qualifications.
I agree with that. I am fine with Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny since we’ve seen their relationships evolve. But it would be a bit too pat and unrealistic to have EVERYONE we knew pair up for life with someone they met in high school.
In fact, that’s exactly what many fans were saying before J.K. made her announcement about the characters’ futures: “does EVERYONE in the Potterverse marry their high school sweetheart? That doesn’t happen in real life!” Then J.K. stated that Luna got married (a bit later than her friends) to Rolf Scamander and suddenly everyone was all, “how DARE she pair Luna up with someone we never ‘met’!”
I like the idea of Luna/Rolf because, as you said, it’s a nice idea for her to have a soul mate that shares her career and her interests. Also because I think J.K. was right…that Luna and Neville might have been cut out for a youthful summer fling but that their personalities were just too different to make it work in the long term. Finally, I like the idea that Rolf’s a blank slate, so if I want to imagine that he looks like Christian Bale and calls Luna “moon-maiden”, it can be so until J.K. says otherwise. 
Oh, it goes back farther than that. There’s a fairy tale trope in which the evil wizard has hidden his heart/soul somewhere and you have to destroy it to vanquish the wizard.
This shows up in the Russian tales of Koschei the Deathless–his heart/soul/essence is hidden inside an egg, which is inside a casket, which is inside a rabbit, which is inside a duck…or something similar depending on which version of the tale you read. Mercedes Lackey made use of this for her novel Firebird.
She revisited the concept in Fairy Godmother as well.
Yup, I remember. I hope she’s not going to stall on the Five Hundred Kingdoms series too much longer–it’s my favorite of hers. I’d also love to see her do more stand-alone, self-contained novels that riff on fairy tales or ballets, like Black Swan and Firebird did.
It really bothered me that Rowling when she started the series was inventive, built a quirky world with interesting detail and set good clever plots in it, but slowly lost it and by the time book 5 rolled around the series had devolved into having cookie cutter magical ‘duels’ that seemed to have been written as a screenplay(coloured bolts of magic! Statues flying around!) and teenage angst.
I concur with the earlier comment on HPMOR. It suffers from making Harry into too much of a badass at age 9 or 10 or whatever it was when he was starting out at Hogwarts, but apart from that, it’s a pretty good read. Since it applies modern muggle sensibility to the wizarding world, many of the people commenting here will find themselves nodding along.
I know I am going to get all the details wrong, but this is from reading the last book 6 or 7 years ago. The part where Ron and Harry and Hermoine are camping by a river or something and they literally have no idea what to do next, until quite conveniently some of Voldemort’s followers walk by in the middle of the night and are discussing the very thing they need to know. I am sure there is something wrong with my description but I distinctly remember reading that and saying out loud, “OK, that is just TOO convenient.”
Yes, Umbridge has some of the same problems, but I think I’m less bothered by her because ultimately her behavior is recognized as being something a teacher shouldn’t do. Snape seems to get a pass.
And I suppose we can pretend that Snape’s treatment of Potter is just a ruse as part of his cover, but I’m still not totally satisfied with that as an answer. There’s still an awful lot of “I hate you because your dad was mean to me” leaking through, such as Snape’s refusal to continue Potter’s occlumens training.
Oh, yeah, Umbridge - how’d she escape the centaur gangbang?
Maybe they finally forced her to leave.
Dumbledore rescued her, remember?
dracoi:
I think, ultimately, the answer is simply that Snape is a jerk. He may have been an anti-Voldemort jerk rather than a pro-Voldemort jerk, but he’s no less a jerk. At least his hatred of James Potter (and Sirius) seems to be quite well-founded. From all appearances, James and Sirius were total bullies while at school.
With Snape, I think you kind of have to assume he had pretty amazing job security. As long as he stuck to “jerk” and didn’t move into “actively abusive”, Dumbledore would have kept him around because he needed him. And, honestly, I’ve had worse teachers in high school. At least Snape didn’t abandon the class while they were brewing dangerous potions to go get fast food off campus.
I seem to recall Dumbledore going off to fetch her, although I’m likely wrong.
In any case, the centaurs are proud, but not stupid. They’re not likely to kill a wizard merely for insulting them. They don’t need a war.
D&D is the particular reason why this trope is so familiar to me. I haven’t actually investigated where Gygax et al. ganked it from, but here you’ve given me a good start on that. In a way that is typical of Gygax in particular, the assigning of the word phylactery to this concept is characteristic of his tendency to slam mismatched things together. Rowling at least came up with a new name for it.
Ultimately, the psychology of Snape doesn’t quite gel. He loved Harry’s mother, but he hated the son, but he was willing to protect Harry to honor the woman he loved, but he wasn’t willing to ever be kind to him. Clearly, this owed a lot to Harry resembling his father too much in both looks and behavior. I’m willing to chalk it up to Snape ultimately being a complicated mess, as real people are, but often writers are able to make people driven by contrary impulses feel whole and real, and Snape in the end did not. It especially didn’t make sense in all places that him taking browbeatings by Dumbledore was consistent with him being moved to honor Lily.
However, Snape is not comparable in his abuse of Harry to Umbridge. She used brutal magic that drew blood. She used what you might call Kafka-esque institutional psychology to manipulate and punish, that is if there were no Kafka scholars around to lecture you about how you don’t really understand Kafka. I had a lot of trouble getting through that book, and it almost killed the whole series for me. It was misery porn. The series got a lot better once you got through that whole indulgence in glass-eating-by-proxy.
Personally, I’m glad that we never saw Luna pair up with anyone. Up to that point in the books, all of the Ravenclaws we saw were solely and exclusively love interests. I was pretty annoyed that we never got to see any of them as characters in their own right, rather than extensions of others. Luna was that.
On the topic of cooperation between the houses, I thought she was setting it up for the four Marauders to be one each from the four houses: James of course was Griffindor, and it’s strongly implied in the earlier books that Sirius was Slytherin (“Every wizard who went bad was from Slytherin”, and at that time everyone thought Sirius was the worst of the lot). Remus and Peter, meanwhile, seemed like good matches for Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff. I was quite disappointed when she clarified “Oh, no, all the important good guys were all from Griffindor, because the other houses don’t matter”. OK, it wasn’t phrased that way, but that’s the way it comes across.
There is a play and movie called “The Browning Version,” which is set at an English boys’ boarding school in the 50’s, and they have a big assembly with speakers and academic prizes at the end of the year. I gather this is, or at least was, rather common. Although it’s not for graduation per se, it does mark the milestone of another academic year. Does Hogwarts have anything like that?
Note that I am not a fan and have never read the books, so I am only asking for clarification.
Roddy
They do have that last dinner where prizes are awarded and the House Cup winner is revealed, but that is seen only in the first book/movie.
The Marauders are all from the same house because they’re “family.” They all eat, sleep, study and hang out together. That’s what the House Cup (and the Quidditch teams) are all about: we’re going to behave ourselves and study hard so that our house/team can win. My question is: how in the world did Pettigrew get into Gryffindor?? Makes no sense at all. Hufflepuff I could believe, Slytherin I could certainly believe, but Gryffindor? Gryffindors are the activists and the hell-raisers who wear their hearts on their sleeves and look before they leap and insist on “freeing” house-elves when the house-elves are just fine the way they are, thanks!
Are there really only five boys and five girls in each year in each house? So the entire student population numbers about 280?
Johnny Angel:
He wasn’t protecting Harry in her memory for the sake of his being her son. He was protecting Harry in her memory for the sake of fighting Voldemort, who killed her.
That said, he’s seen to be abusive toward pretty much all Gryffindors, he’s constantly belittling Neville and Ron, and even Hermione, who’s practically a perfect student where book-learning is concerned, doesn’t escape his sarcasm. Snape’s love for Lily and consequent protectiveness of Harry no doubt SAVED Harry from some truly horrific abuse after the escape of Sirius at the end of book 3, and after the thefts from his private stores of potion ingredients when Harry’s egg and map were spotted in the middle of book 4. Hell, Harry tried using Unforgivable Curses on Snape at the end of book 6, and Snape did no more than defend himself and flee.
Ah, of course you’re right. And that explains his behavior better. But did he really believe that following Dumbledore’s plan, and staking all on Harry Potter managing to do the deed, would actually work? He thought little of Harry’s abilities, and Dumbledore didn’t really have much of a hold on him aside from having helped him escape justice.