Fanon VS Canon
This thread shall be used by me and anyone else to share the disputed facts between canon and Fanon portrayal of HP characters.
My source shall mostly be Fanon Vs Canon, but I may specify other sources for my posts when needed.
The Weasley Twins are jolly and harmless.
Fanon tends to paint the Weasley Twins as lovely, jolly boys. In canon, however, when they were little they beat Ron's pet Puffskein to death for fun (it's mentioned in the marginal notes in the original Fantastic Beasts booklet), tried to get Ron to take an Unbreakable Vow which could easily have killed him, burned a hole right through his tongue and traumatized him by turning his teddy-bear into a giant spider while he was holding it. It could be said that they treated Ron rather worse than Dudley treated Harry, with added magic, and they continue to be nasty to him even as adults - they don't even give him a family discount in their shop, or credit, but are rather unpleasant about him having to pay on the spot, and make an obvious and ostentatious show of how much more they value and like Harry than they do their brother. [Could jealousy be a factor here? Do they resent the fact that Ron has captured the loyalty of Famous Harry Potter to a greater extent than they have?]
At Hogwarts they commit criminal blackmail against Ludo Bagman, carry out unethical and unauthorized magical experiments on children and Muggles, jeer at eleven-year-olds just for having been Sorted into Slytherin, and threaten to rape Zacharias Smith with an implement. ["'Would you like us to clean out your ears for you?' enquired George, pulling a long and lethal-looking metal instrument from inside one of the Zonko's bags. // 'Or any part of your body, really, we're not fussy where we stick this,' said Fred." And yes, this sort of thing is sometimes said as a joke but the jokes have a standard pattern, and this seems at least half serious.] George uses a Bludger to launch an unprovoked attack on Snape when he is refereeing a Quidditch match, even though if he had succeeded in knocking Snape off his broom in mid air the man could well have been killed.
Their attack on Montague is particularly vile. They stuff him into a broken magical box too small to lie down in, without food or water or lavatory facilities, and then send him off into wizard space without any idea of how long he'll be gone or whether he'll have any air beyond what's already in the Vanishing Cabinet, or whether he'll still be able to at least use his wand to summon water. It was only good luck that Montague was only missing for around 32 hours and wasn't returned weeks later, dead of thirst, and as it was he was so badly damaged that weeks after his return he was still in the hospital wing being spoon-fed (although he did recover by the end of the year). And all this just for taking a few points, and for being a Slytherin.
Worst of all, according to Ginny the Twins were seriously planning to let off Garrotting Gas - which judging from its name and Ginny's comments is probably lethal - in a school full of children. If the gas really is as fatal as Ginny implies, then what they were planning was a major terrorist attack, in a high school - and not even a terrorist attack done to express some serious political grievance, but just because it amused them, which takes them into the same sort of territory as the Columbine killers. Ginny does not seem to find this surprising.
Indeed, the Twins are so obviously criminal that I wonder if Rowling was inspired in part by the famous 1980s case of the Gibbons twins. Isolated by the bullying which they suffered at school because they were the only black children in a rural Welsh village, and perhaps also a little autistic, the Gibbons girls developed a private language which excluded outside contact, fell into a folie a deux and ended up spending fourteen years in the state hospital for the criminally insane at Broadmoor, after embarking on a campaign of arson.
JK might even - whisper it - have been thinking of our most famous pair of criminal twins, the Kray brothers; murderous gangsters who, like Al Capone, acquired a sort of spurious glamour. She is certainly aware of the Twins' cruelty: in an interview with Today in 2007, she said "Fred is normally the funnier but also the crueler of the two."
The Weasley Twins' attack on Draco and his cohorts on the train at the end of GoF was justified, since they were defending Harry from an unprovoked assault - but having got Draco, Crabbe and Goyle down and helpess the Twins deliberately tread on them. If they were soldiers, they would be the kind of soldiers who ignore the Geneva Convention and beat prisoners. But they get given a free pass for their potentially-murderous cruelty because they have a wholesome appearance and a nice line in humorous patter.
As with most of Rowling's characters, however, there are mitigating circumstances. The Twins were born at the height of Vold War One, and they were three when their mother's brothers Gideon and Fabian were killed. Molly was either about to have or had just had Ginny when her brothers died, with Bill about to start at Hogwarts and five other boys under the age of ten staying at home, and now she had just suffered a traumatic double bereavement. It seems likely that she would have been satisfied so long as her children were healthy and fed and would have had no time or attention to spend on the Twins' moral guidance, just at the age when their worldview was being formed and they were forming a tight, exclusive and somewhat toxic little Gang of Two.
Hagrid is always sweet and kindly.
Hagrid in the books is a strange mix of kindness and spite - a spite which, unlike Snape's, sometimes descends into actual physical attack. This could be the result of his dual nature as a half-giant, or of his periodic bouts of depression - but the simplest explanation is that for quite a lot of the time he's either drunk or hungover.
He's a bit of a bigot who uses "Muggle" in the pejorative way that other people might say "loser" or "mouth-breather", and says that Harry needs to be with "his own kind". He uses "Squib" as an insult when arguing with Filch, and calls the Centaurs "ruddy mules": admittedly they call each other mules as an insult, but it's a bit weird for a half-giant to call a half-horse a horse/donkey hybrid as if that was a bad thing. He tells Harry that there's never been a wizard who went bad who wasn't a Slytherin, even though he knows for a fact that this is a lie, and that one of the Gryffindor Marauders was a Death Eater and mass-murderer who betrayed his friends to their death (even if he's initially confused about which one of them it was).
Right at the outset we see him carry out a vicious attack on a cowering, terrified eleven-year-old child, just because he doesn't like the kid's father, and/or because he regards Muggles as a lesser species. Yes, we know that Dudley is a nasty little bully, but Hagrid at this point does not know this, and the scene where Dudley tries to steal Harry's cake exists only in the film. All book-Hagrid knows against Dudley is that he is fat - for which he verbally abuses and humiliates him - and that his father is a blustering loud-mouth. For this, he tries to turn Dudley into a pig. The book makes it absolutely explicit that Hagrid attacks Dudley and inflicts severe pain and humiliation on him to punish Vernon:
'I AM NOT PAYING FOR SOME CRACKPOT OLD FOOL TO TEACH HIM MAGIC TRICKS!' yelled Uncle Vernon.
But he had finally gone too far. Hagrid seized his umbrella and whirled it over his head, 'NEVER,' he thundered, '– INSULT – ALBUS – DUMBLEDORE – IN – FRONT – OF – ME!'
He brought the umbrella swishing down through the air to point at Dudley – there was a flash of violet light, a sound like a firecracker, a sharp squeal, and the next second, Dudley was dancing on the spot with his hands clasped over his fat bottom, howling in pain. When he turned his back on them, Harry saw a curly pig's tail poking through a hole in his trousers.
Uncle Vernon roared. Pulling Aunt Petunia and Dudley into the other room, he cast one last terrified look at Hagrid and slammed the door behind them.
Hagrid looked down at his umbrella and stroked his beard.
'Shouldn'ta lost me temper,' he said ruefully, 'but it didn't work anyway. Meant ter turn him into a pig, but I suppose he was so much like a pig anyway there wasn't much left ter do.'This wholly unprovoked attacked on a child could, if successful, very easily have resulted in pig-Dudley running away - because we're told in Beedle that people Transfigured into non-human animals become the animal mentally and can no longer think like a human - being mistaken for a real pig and ending up being killed and eaten. As it is, Hagrid inflicts on Dudley a painful and humiliating pig's tail which has to be surgically removed (by a private surgeon iirc, and therefore at great expense), because Hagrid can't or won't reverse the spell and would rather leave a child to suffer than own up to Dumbledore, and he jokes about what he's done and thinks it's funny because his victim is overweight. This despite the fact that Rowling draws Hagrid himself as apple-shaped with a huge belly.
Hagrid loves Harry, but his love is conditional - he turns very cold and rejects him when Harry doesn't elect to continue with Care of Magical Creatures. He seems to have loved James and Sirius, but was easily able to believe Sirius was guilty, without a trial.
He has quite a cavalier attitude to student safety. He sends Draco and Neville, two more frightened eleven-year-olds, unsupervised, into a wood which he knows contains giant man-eating spiders and a unicorn-killer, and is flippant about and dismissive of Draco's fear. A year later he sends Harry and Ron to meet the spiders without any warning, trusting that they won't be killed - this may be the result of too much trust in the spiders, rather than too little care for the boys, but it's still reckless.
When Draco is injured by Buckbeak he does show proper care and sprints with him to the hospital wing, but he himself bore some of the blame - he ought to have known that many teenagers are idiots, and have had the students approach the Hippogriffs a few at a time, so that he could keep a close eye on them.
Like Snape with Harry after the Pensieve incident, he then allows his personal dislike of Draco to influence his classroom behaviour. In OotP he tells the class they have to do extra-curricular work with the Skrewts in the evenings, and when Draco objects Hagrid humiliates him by bringing up the ferret incident, and allows the class to jeer at Draco.
Draco I suppose began the war between himself and Hagrid by spying on baby Norbert, but he was eleven, and Hagrid mocked him for (or at least teased him about) being frightened of going into a midnight wood full of dangerous predators with just another child and a dog for company. This is at least as unhelpful as anything Snape does to Neville, with the added twist that Hagrid is sending Draco into serious danger, whereas Snape is trying to keep Neville out of it. It's not surprising Draco doesn't like Hagrid.
Hagrid is not even as kind to animals as he's usually assumed to be, since he gloats over the idea of setting his giant boarhound Fang on the cat Mrs Norris. In the first book he advises Harry against getting a cat because he, Hagrid, doesn't like cats because he's allergic to them - a very shallow and self-centred reason actively to dislike an animal, as opposed to just wanting to avoid it.
The fact that he supposedly feeds Buckbeak on dead ferrets is peculiar. It is not, as I first thought, some sort of symbolic revenge on Draco, since Draco wasn't turned into a ferret until the following year. Nevertheless, if these really are ferrets then they are little trusting, loving, playful domestic pets, piled up like dead wood. It seems most unlikely that Hippogriffs actually need to eat ferrets as opposed to, say, venison, so there isn't a ferret-breeding industry designed to produce Hippogriff chow. They're not animals who might have needed to be killed anyway as pest-control, as might happen with rats or rabbits, or of which there is a surplus needing to be culled, ditto, or which are reared for meat and sold ready-killed. Hagrid would have to be going round the pet-shops and buying up ferrets intended as pets or cable-guides or rabbit-controllers, and then killing them himself. He might as well be feeding Buckbeak on dead puppies.
As with the horned toads, and the winking python (snakes have no eyelids!), and the fact that James's stag and Lily's doe are different species, there's a possibility that this is a case where authorial intent has been sabotaged by Rowling's poor knowledge of biology. It may be that Rowling intends Hagrid to be feeding Buckbeak on polecats, the wild cousins of ferrets - an animal which a gamekeeper might well need to cull. That still doesn't work very well, though, because it's unlikely he would need to cull polecats in such large numbers in a short-enough time frame to generate a stack of bodies. We see Buckbeak eating in a single meal the number of polecats Hagrid might expect to kill over several months.
One possibility which could make sense is that Harry doesn't know one mustelid from another, and Hagrid is feeding Buckbeak the skinned carcases of mink discarded by a fur farm. On the one hand, that would be a sensible use of by-product meat which would otherwise have gone to waste, removing the necessity of killing more animals to feed to Buckbeak: on the other hand it would mean Hagrid was collaborating with a cruel industry. Or he could be culling feral mink, which have become a damaging invasive species in many areas of Britain - but as with polecats you wouldn't really expect him to catch that many all at the same time, although it's possible he's been storing them in a fridge for some reason.
No major human characters in the Potter books are wholly pleasant, except Arthur Weasley, Cedric, Neville and Luna and maybe Tonks - and even Arthur is mildly corrupt, since he doesn't himself keep the rules about Muggle artefacts which he enforces on others (and Cedric has been sabotaged by The Cursed Child, if you accept that as canon, which personally I don't). Hagrid has many good points and is on average probably a good man (or giant or whatever), but like many of the Potter characters he's nothing like as nice as fanon (or the films) paints him.
There may be a good reason for this, of course. Hagrid was born in 1928 but he still seems slow and rather childlike. Grawp must be several years old at least (his and Hagrid's mother "Died years ago"), but acts like a barely verbal toddler. I suspect that the reason that Hagrid behaves like a teenager and Grawp like a toddler is that giants mature very slowly, and in giant terms they are a toddler and a teenager.
Hogwarts charges school-fees.
This one is fairly weakly represented and as such I'm not sure if it really qualifies as fanon or not, but it does quite often turn up in fanfics by American authors, maybe because they have an idea of Britain derived from old films. This issue is discussed in more detail in my essay on British cultural references, but basically all the canon evidence indicates that Hogwarts is a state-run school which admits all students who are able to do magic (although there's a suggestion you can get thrown out of you're really bad at it), and which is not only free at point of use but actively subsidises poorer students and gives them grants for books and clothes. If you accept interview canon, Rowling actually stated in July 2015 that at Hogwarts "There's no tuition fees! The Ministry of Magic covers the cost of all magical education." It is conceivable that very well-off parents such as the Malfoys contribute towards their offspring's upkeep - food, blankets, laundry etc. - but if so we never see any evidence of it. We do see Lucius donating equipment to the school, and since nobody complains that this gives Slytherin an unfair advantage, it may be a regular thing that the Ministry provides the basic minimum of equipment, and the extras such as good brooms and luxurious couches are paid for by grateful (and successful) former students.
We are never told how the school is financed, other than this brief comment by JK - which isn't a whole lot of help because we're never told how the Ministry or St Mungo's are funded either, and we don't know whether the Ministry pays for the entire running of the school or just for the tuition aspect (= teachers' salaries and class materials). One possibility is that the school is funded out of a combination of bequests from former students and the revenue from lands and patents which it owns. Another is that the Ministry pays for the lot, and raises the money from a combination of taxation and using magic to cheat on the Muggle Stock Market.
Weird. I've never seen anyone suggest that Hogwarts charges tuition.
I used to think school supplies had to be paid out of pocket, but when I was re-reading HBP for Tom Riddle's memories, I saw that Hogwarts has a special fund for poorer students
Quote from Heatherlly on May 3, 2023, 1:45 amWeird. I've never seen anyone suggest that Hogwarts charges tuition.
I have actually read some fics where writers make Hogwarts charge tuition fee in some of marauder era Snape fics and even Harry fics. That's why I posted that coz some people actually think that's true.
Quote from The Gestalt Prince on May 3, 2023, 1:59 amI used to think school supplies had to be paid out of pocket, but when I was re-reading HBP for Tom Riddle's memories, I saw that Hogwarts has a special fund for poorer students
I think school supplies are subsidized by a school fund for poor students otherwise people like Tom Riddle and Snape who couldn't have bought affordable supplies for school without it.
McGonagall is Dumbledore's Second in Command in the Order.
As Deputy Headmistress, McGonagall is Dumbledore's Second in Command when it comes to running the school. It's clear she is a member of the Order of the Phoenix in OotP, and judging by the fact that she met up with Dumbledore and Hagrid to deposit baby Harry on the Dursleys' doorstep, she probably was one during Vold War One as well. The fact that she isn't (or isn't mentioned as being) in the VWI Order photograph isn't necessarily suspicious: Moody says that the meeting where the photo' was taken was the only time he ever met Aberforth, and we know Arabella Figg and Mundungus Fletcher were part of what Dumbledore calls the "old crowd" whom he sent Sirius to alert to Voldemort's return at the end of GoF and yet they aren't mentioned as being in the Order photo' either, so clearly not every member went to every meeting.
Mackerel tabby, from Savvy Pet Care: The Glorious Tabby Cat
If you accept Pottermore as canon, however, Pottermore says that McGonagall was not a member of the Order during VWI but that she used her Animagus form to spy on the Death Eaters for the Ministry, who regarded the Order as dangerous mavericks - phrased in a way which implies that she didn't join the Order because the Ministry regarded them as dangerous mavericks. This is one of those things on Pottermore which seems not to have been very well-thought-out. That sort-of explains what she was doing at Privet Drive at the start of the first book - she was making some kind of liaison with the Order - but it raises big questions about how much she actually trusted Dumbledore. She'd been his deputy, first in the Transfiguration Department and then as Deputy Headmistress, for twenty-five years and according to Pottermore they were so close that Dumbledore actually revealed some of his past to her, yet it also implies that she chose not to work with him in the Order because the Ministry didn't trust him. This despite the fact that Pottermore also says that she left the Ministry in part because she didn't like the anti-Muggle-born prejudice there.
It also means she worked for the Ministry at the very time that it was torturing and killing suspects and imprisoning them for life without a trial and that it was she, not Dumbledore, who was probably in a position to ensure that Sirius at least had a trial, and she did not do so. And what had changed - what happened between 1981 and 1995 - to convince her to trust Dumbledore and the Order, when nothing which had happened between 1956 (when she started working for Dumbledore) and 1981 had done so? Maybe it was just Fudge's incompetence which caused her to throw in her lot with the Order, but it puts a new spin on her willingness to believe Snape was a traitor at the end of HBP. The fact that he was an Order member of long-standing wouldn't necessarily cut any ice with her because she was already dubious about both the Order and Dumbledore's judgement.
Against this, Kelly Chambliss of Loose Canon has suggested that the Ministry may have approached McGonagall even before the Order was formed, because she was an Animagus who had worked for Magical Law Enforcement years beforehand, and she may have shared information on both the Death Eaters and the Ministry with Dumbledore without actually joining the Order - making her not exactly a double agent like Snape but a sort of forked one, who genuinely served her official masters and unofficially served another who had the same enemies as the first lot, if not quite the same friends.
In VWII, the fact that Dumbledore clearly hasn't told McGonagall that Snape might have to kill him, or that Snape was still acting for the Order in DH, doesn't prove he doesn't trust her on an inter-personal level: just that he knows she's not an Occlumens so he has to be careful about what Tom might see in her mind if he chose to examine her. Nevertheless, the fact that she isn't an Occlumens means she's kept somewhat "out of the loop", so it's unlikely that Dumbledore treats her as his 2inC even though many people - me included - have tended to see her that way.
In the doorstep scene in PS, for example, she doesn't seem to know about the Blood Protection or much about what's going on, and when she tries to find out Dumbledore wants to talk about confectionary instead. There are some hints that Aberforth and Hagrid both know Snape's true loyalties: Aberforth talks about how Dumbledore (mis)uses his agents, and in my opinion Snape's strategy of sending Neville, Ginny and Luna to Hagrid for a detention which must have been more like a Potter Appreciation Party and then putting it about that they'd thereby been cruelly punished probably wouldn't work unless Hagrid was in on the joke. Indeed, an in-depth Pottermore essay entitled The chapter which made us love... Severus Snape says that "we learn that he had to kill Dumbledore for noble reasons that barely anyone knew about" which suggests that more people than just Snape himself and Dumbledore knew (although I suppose it's possible this refers to the headmasters' portraits). Yet McGonagall apparently isn't in on it - there's no suggestion that she's acting when she turns on Snape, so she is less "in the loop" than Hagrid.
Again this need not mean that Dumbledore doesn't trust her, just that as a half giant Hagrid is resistant to magic, possibly including Legilimency, and she isn't. But it does mean that Dumbledore cannot freely discuss his plans with her. He doesn't even tell all of them to Snape, the Occlumens, because Snape has to spend time close to the Dark Lord. It's not clear btw whether that's because Dumbledore fears that Tom might doubt Snape's loyalty some day and rip into his mind, even overriding Snape's Occlumency skills, or whether it's because he wants Snape to be able to show Tom, truthfully, the memory of a conversation which indicates that he, Dumbledore, hasn't entrusted him with his secret plans, so that Tom won't expect Snape to tell him those plans and doubt his loyalty when he doesn't.
It's not really surprising that Dumbledore appears to make most of his important Order decisions without consulting anybody - the fact that Tom is a powerful Legilimens is really a game-changer - but it does mean he can't really have a 2inC except Snape, the Occlumens; and even Snape is only allowed to know part of what's going on.
Incidentally, in my own Mood Music/Sons of Prophecy fanfics, which are AU from the end of HBP, I have Flitwick and Poppy Pomfrey having joined the Order, but in the books we have no evidence that Flitwick is a member, and Poppy certainly isn't as at the end of GoF, where Padfoot has to wait for her to leave the ward before he morphs back into Sirius.
James and Sirius were Aurors.
There's a common assumption in the fandom that James, Sirius and perhaps Lily were Aurors, like the Longbottoms. There is no evidence for this in the books, and what little evidence we have from Pottemrore suggests that James lived on his inheritance.
Indeed, it's impossible that James and Lily could be working Aurors. We're told in OotP that Auror training takes three years, so the earliest they could have qualified as Aurors would be three years after leaving school, in June 1981. Lily's letter, written shortly after Harry's first birthday party, so in early to mid August 1981, makes it clear she and James have already been in hiding for long enough for James to get bored and frustrated. So even if she and James had trained as Aurors - a thing for which there is no canon support at all - they could never have worked as qualified Aurors, since the latest they could have gone into hiding would be just after finishing training.
