[QUOTE=Dogzilla;17074757It is mentioned, somewhere, that Ginny is the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, which makes her particularly powerful. She gets a very few name drops to address how powerful she’s becoming because of this 7th daughter/7th daughter legacy. [/QUOTE]
Um . . . this is never mentioned. In either the books or the movies. I can’t positively say that Rowling never commented on Molly’s family in an interview or anything, but there was never any mention of her having siblings in the books. Besides, Ginny is the 7th CHILD, not the 7th daughter. In fact, she’s the ONLY daughter.
My biggest peeves have mostly been mentioned- Moody actually being Barty Jr the entire time? That was one HELL of an acting job. Also the implied incredibly small school size (if each class only has 10 students, then only 280 students total) given the enormity of Hogwarts itself? But I’ve seen this explained away as a sort of “WWII/Baby Boom” effect- far fewer children were born during the First Wizarding War, so the population during Harry’s school years is artificially small. That makes enough sense for me.
The biggest problem I always had was the Dursleys. I can understand how Petunia would have (partially) hated her sister for Lily being a witch and Petunia not. I can understand Vernon going along to appease his wife, and Dudley because that’s what he grew up with. But why the hell did they agree to raise a child that they knew from the outset they were going to both hate and mistreat? And why didn’t anyone step in? I know Harry was not physically abused, but he was defintely underfed, and that alone is enough to get CPS involved, at least in the states. And everything else, from the slave treatment to sleeping in a cupboard, easily adds up to emotional abuse.
I recall someone in a thread here mentioning that Dumbledore may have kind of shook them down, because Harry’s whole Power Of Love barrier only worked if he stayed with Lily’s family.
I don’t remember that in the books, but it’s possible I forgot about it.
They do, and that’s the whole reason Harry has to stay with her until his 17th birthday, because the magic would end then anyway. But I never got why Pentunia cared. Dumbledore must have had something pretty nasty to hold over her head.
Regulus Black, albeit in the past rather than the present.
tadtoornamental:
It’s true that the Dursleys have no fondness for Harry, but despite Petunia’s jealousy of her sister, there might be enough sentiment to not want the kid to die, which he likely would have without the blood protection.
who says they’re not? there’s mentions and hints of wizards working in the post office and having other muggle jobs, i’d wager there’s someone who works there who’s in the know.
totally agree!
i don’t think this is actually a fanwank. i don’t have the book handy, but i’m pretty sure the cup was in fact a portkey meant to transport the winner out of the maze, and the destination was merely tampered with to send him to the graveyard.
it was fred, and it is vicious, but i understand why it had to be one of the twins. she wanted to kill a weasley. molly and arthur are safe because they act as surrogate parents to harry and provide him with a family at the end, which is what he wanted most of all. ron’s one of the trio, so not him. charlie is barely in the books at all and so we wouldn’t have cared much. percy had just redeemed himself and returned to the family, so his death would’ve made that whole arc feel pointless. bill had just been mauled by a werewolf, and ginny is harry’s future spouse. that leaves one of the twins. it saddens me, but i understand why she made that decision.
i disagree. i would not describe molly as mild mannered, to begin with. we see her go nuts (on a lesser scale) on her kids on a fairly regular basis. she’s a loving mother, a devoted wife, and fiercely protective of her family. she’s a caring person, but don’t fuck with her or someone she loves. it is perfectly consistent with the molly we have gotten to know that she would kill someone who came within an inch of killing her kid, not to mention mocking her about fred’s death.
it is mentioned, in book 5 i believe, that the sorting hat considered putting her in ravenclaw but ultimately decided on gryffindor, possibly due to her wanting gryffindor-the hat takes your decision into account.
why would they have? they weren’t enchanted, they were tortured into insanity. there was no spell that was going to lift when voldemort(or bellatrix) was defeated. the damage was done. sad and unfair, absolutely, but life’s not fair.
see, i thought that made total sense. harry has everything that ron wants- fame, money, popularity, and so on. jealousy’s not fun. then this tournament happens that harry should have had no chance at all of being selected for, and lo and behold that’s exactly what happens. it’s completely understandable that ron loses it a little.
this is the first i’ve ever heard of this. someone addressed this upthread but this is never mentioned in the books.
now that i think of it, i don’t think the book ever says what year he is in. a quick google seems to concur and mentions he’s possibly a 7th year. still think it’s weird that we have never heard his name before.
the “merlin’s bread” phrase is still used all the way up til the last book, sometimes getting a little more vulgar (“merlin’s saggy left…”). they celebrate christmas and easter from the first book on. i actually noticed the shift in some of the exclamations they used as well, but i always saw that as a sign of their getting older (see above re: vulgarity), not an attempt to shoehorn in christianity.
yes, and this annoys me as well. the malfoys are redeemed, yes, but i wish a couple of the slytherin students had chosen to stay and fight in the battle of hogwarts.
-dumbledore does rescue umbridge from the centaurs.
-am i really the only one who thinks draco may have had a crush on hermione?
That is what I was going to say. My head canon is that Harry’s year is just an exceptionally low-populated year, maybe due to the first rise of Voldemort killing of potential parents in the early 80s. We don’t know how many kids are in the other years or how many were there in different generations.
To be clear here, my problem with the horcruxes isn’t that I found them confusing or anything like that. (I had encountered the same concept in the Prydain books years before.) My problem was that, by introducing the need to destroy Voldemort’s horcruxes so late in the series, a big chunk of the last book had to be devoted to tracking the damn things down. It was boring. I think Book 7 would have been much improved if there had been only two or three horcruxes left at that point (including Harry himself), either because the others had already been destroyed or because Voldemort didn’t make as many to begin with. IIRC we’re not even told that he’s superstitious about the number seven until Book 6.
Petunia HAD asked Dumbledore for permission to enter Hogwarts, remember. Dumbledore’s letter of 10/31/81 may have played on something she had written in that request. Maybe a threat to notify Vernon about it…
I’m guessing there were SOME Slytherin students who stuck around – maybe only a few, but enough to help out.
Question – when was Christianity introduced? I don’t recall that.
Okay, a lot of this is explained at Pottermore, which is sort of like a Harry Potter encyclopedia. (Some info you have to “unlock” by trying to find certain items, but most of it’s out there) You can also try the Harry Potter Wiki
Now, then, things that bothered me:
Arthur Weasley should know what “eckletricity” is, since electricity is merely a natural phenomenon – I mean, wizards know what lightning is? So why wouldn’t they know what electricity is? Duh.
Harry and Ginny naming their son after Snape. I don’t care HOW brave Snape was, or that they were doing it to honor his sacrifice – Snape was still a dick. And Ginny has how many brothers – maybe she’d like to name her kid after one of them? Hello!
-Killing off Remus and Tonks. They were my favorite couple, Lupin had a really miserable life, he finally gets married, has a kid, then he dies! And poor Teddy has to grow up an orphan. (They were my favorite characters, along with Fred and George, so I cried when they died. Shut up)
Only Slytherin and Gryffindor winning the House Cup. Why not Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff? C’mon now.
-Quidditch would work a lot better without the Snitch.
-Ron not knowing about the Sorting Hat until they got there. You’d think he’d have been told by his parents or someone.
-Hermione trying to free the elves at Hogwarts – did she even have the authority to do so? Dumbledore’s their master, I think he’s the only one who could do it. And they obviously do laundry, so I think their master has to specifically hand them an article of clothing, not just leave it lying around for them.
-For those that brought cats to Hogwarts, is there a rule that they had to be spayed or neutered? Otherwise that place would be knee deep in kittens.
-Lupin says there are no wizard princes, but surely there have been members of various royalty who ended up being wizards or witches. (I know what he meant, but still)
-Someone already mentioned leaving out the part about the Marauder’s Map in the POA, so I’ll mention that I was disappointed when they didn’t have the part where Arthur and the twins come to get Harry for the World Cup in GOF. I LOVE the part when Dudley eats the Ton-Tongue Taffy the twins leave lying around, and I was so looking forward to that. Also annoyed that Tonks never said “Wotcher!” or that Harry didn’t refer to Voldemort as “Tom” in their final battle.
Not stuff that bothered me, just things I wondered about:
I the only one who thought that Luna’s dad was so obviously a pothead? Especially in the movies – he’s definitely growing more than dirigible plums, that’s for damned sure.
Speaking of Lupin and Tonks: Jo goes into a LOT more detail about his feelings for her at the above mentioned Pottermore. I just wish she would’ve put a little bit of it in her books – it might have made it look less like he was pressured into the marriage. Also, I believe the director of POA told David Thewlis to portray Lupin like a “gay junkie” for some reason.
(Oh, and even if Ron and Hermione didn’t end up together, having her end up with Harry wouldn’t be a good idea either – I didn’t see any chemistry between the two of them.)
Also, Rowling said that Ginny WAS the first girl born into the Weasely family in generations. (Can’t remember how many)
I totally hated how Neville’s parents were treated. They lost their sanity in the wizarding war and they end up on a mixed ward in a high rise hospital? It really shows up the shortcomings of the wizarding world! They should have been in a nice country assylum with their own apartment and dedicated attendants. Of course mental illness was being played for laughs with a little bit of pathos mixed in.
Another thing that irritated me was that with Hogsmeade right by there were no day pupils. Apparently no one who lived in Hogsmeade had any school age children.
Given the situation, I thought his reaction was understandable but Dumbledore should have gotten Harry another teacher. I was surprised that Dumbledore never mentioned that he wanted to let Harry know more about his plans but had to wait until Harry’s mind was secure.
If Jo Rowling knew what the books were going to become, and how much scrutiny they would get, and how the movie adaptations would have opportunities to portray things in a new way, subtly improving some sequences and situations, and could somehow retroactively rewrite the books so they’d be more consistent and considered and written better, she would gladly do so.
But she started out making a typical kids book with a fairy-tale idea of relationships and situations (an orphan living in a cupboard who discovers he’s really a wizard; a bad guy who has serious racist views; a nasty teacher who is secretly a good guy) that grew into more sophisticated ideas very quickly, and she wasn’t really equipped for it when writing a first book she thought might only get a few thousand sales.
Oh, how about in the HBP movie, when Dumbledore asks Slughorn if he can take one of the magazines with him when they leave his house? Technically, it’s not Slughorn’s, since he’s just hiding out at some Muggle’s house. So Dumbledore’s okay with stealing!
Yes. And that’s one of the biggest things about Quidditch that bothers me.
Krum deliberately (and the text makes it very clear that it is deliberate) catches the snitch, thus ending the match, at a point when his team is trailing by more than 150 points. That is, he deliberately causes his own team to lose. In real life, that’s called throwing the game, and it is highly illegal.
In a properly regulated sport, the officials would immediately be demanding to know which mobbed-up gamblers had paid him off. At the very least, he would be banned from the sport for life. Maybe he could manage to claim that it was a mistake, in which case he’d always have an embarrassing black mark on his record, like poor old Fred Merkle or Bill Buckner (baseball players who made humiliating mistakes that cost their teams important games, for those of you who aren’t sports fans).
Instead, he is hailed as some kind of hero.
This is the point in the books where I think it’s most clear that Rowling just isn’t that interested in sports. The major reason that incident is there, storywise, is to give Fred and George something to bet on which wins them a lot of money. That money is what allows them to open their own shop later in the series. I just wish that she had come up with a more plausible scenario for Krum to do something unexpected but flashy.
