Quote from Naaga on May 13, 2023, 11:20 pm

The Salem Witches' Institute is a school.

Most American readers initally assumed that the Salem Witches' Institute, mentioned during the World Cup sequence, was a school - especially as Rowling has said that she mentioned an American school in the books. However, that must refer to the South American school in Brazil, at which Ron says Bill had a penfriend.

In May 2015 JKR confirmed that the Salem Witches' Institute isn't a school, but is, as I had long assumed, a piss-take on the Women's Institute (thanks to maidofkent for spotting this). Here in Britain the Women's Institute is an English and Welsh network of women-only social clubs dedicated to charitable works, self-improvement, amateur dramatics etc.. At the time Rowling was writing GoF they were in the news because a group of elderly WI members had just raised money for a leukaemia charity by appearing in a tasteful and entirely naked calendar - later the subject of the mostly-true film Calendar Girls.

[As at summer 2015 a similar but discrete Scottish organisation, the Scottish Women's Rural Institute, is in the process of changing its name to the Scottish Women's Institute.]

In June 2015 Rowling went on to announce that the forthcoming Fantastic Beasts film would feature an American magic school which is not in New York, and which had a name given to it by settlers but was founded with a considerable input of indigenous, Native American magical practices. This turned out to be Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, located on Mount Greylock in Massachusetts. The written screenply for Fantastic Beasts is considered to be book canon and the existence of Ilvermorny is also supported by Pottermore and by a statement by Rowling outwith the films, and as such is now canonical.

Quote from Heatherlly on May 14, 2023, 4:18 am

Fair enough, though I'm never going to see the American stuff as canon. No shade on JKR – it just feels too unrealistic/inaccurate, basically a second rate knockoff of British magical society. It does little to reflect our cultural differences, and at times, is downright ignorant (e.g. the way she handled Native Americans).

Quote from Naaga on May 14, 2023, 2:07 pm

The stag and doe symbology means James and Lily were perfectly compatible.

In canon Harry associates the fact that his Patronus is (as he thinks) a stag with the fact that he knows his father's Animagus form was nicknamed Prongs, and Remus (not the authorial voice) confirms that yes, Prongs was a stag. Snape's Patronus is described as a doe, and one which apparently represents Lily to him and to Dumbledore in some sense, since when Dumbledore sees it he asks about Snape's continuing attachment to Lily's memory. Harry later says that Lily's Patronus was also a doe but it's never explained how he knows this. He doesn't recognise the doe as connected with Lily when he first sees her, although she does seem familiar in some way, so it's not clear whether his later assertion that she is the same as his mother's Patronus is because he has now genuinely remembered seeing his mother cast a Patronus, or whether he is just guessing based on what he saw of Snape and Dumbledore's conversation about it in the Pensieve.

I gather that in the U.S., stag and doe are generic terms for male and female deer. For this reason it is widely assumed, at least among American fen, that the fact that James is represented by a stag and Lily by a doe shows that they were perfectly romantically compatible, although there's nothing to say which came first. It may be that that was what Rowling intended - and that she was let down by a lack of biological knowledge.

Be that as it may, this is a British story using British terminology, and here in Britain a stag, a.k.a. a hart, is a male red deer (whose mate is called a hind), and a doe is a female roe or fallow deer (whose mate is a buck). Even if they are foreign deer - and I suppose there's no reason why they shouldn't be - so far as I know British English would still only pair stags with hinds, and does with bucks. James's and Lily's symbols are different species, so the message seems to be "They may look superficially compatible, but really they aren't."

Roe buck, Capreolus capreolus, in Czech Republic August 2005, from NaturePhoto

If you really need them to be the same species, and assuming that they are British deer, we can probably rule out the roe deer,

Muntjac buck, Muntiacus muntjak, from Real Big 5 (distressingly, a hunting website telling you how to kill them)

which is not much bigger than a fox terrier and therefore noticeably smaller than the other two, meaning that it's very unlikely anyone could possibly mistake one for a stag - although they do have quite prong-like antlers. We can also be 99.99% certain they aren't muntjacs, an Asian deer which is in the process of going native in Britain but which is not only very small but often has visible fangs, and has tiny, backwards-pointing antlers which grow from a long pediment, giving them the appearance of being partially enclosed in a kind of furry sleeve. For Prongs and Lily's Patronus to be the same species we have to assume they are either both fallow deer (a buck and a doe) or both red deer (a stag and a hind), and that a mistake has been made.

Fallow doe at Gaziantep Zoo, Turkey, photographed by Nevit Dilmen, 31st October 2009, from Tom Clark: Beyond the Pale

Fallow buck at Weald Country Park, from Essex Country Parks

Fallow deer are medium-sized; come in a free assortment of colours from black through a range of browns to skewbald (patched brown and white, equivalent to US "paint"), cream or white;

Fallow deer, Dama dama, from Royal Horticultural Society

if brown or skewbald usually have silver spots all over their backs, at least in summer; have a cute, short and sometimes slightly "dished", Bambi-like face with big, winning eyes and ears; and have palmate antlers - that is, their antlers have a central flat plate with spikes sticking off it like fingers, similar to the antlers of a moose only not quite so exaggerated.

Red hind, Cervus elaphus, from "In the Wild" - British Wild Animals, photographed in Surrey by Edward Johnes

Red stag, from Paw Patrol Fanon Wiki

Red deer on the other hand are quite big (smallish pony size), have spots only as babies and are nearly always orangey-brown shading to beige underneath, although white, black and grey-brown individuals are occasionally seen. They have tree-like antlers; a long, straight, narrow face like a cross between a racehorse and a very refined sheep; and the adult males have long shaggy fur on their necks.

Juvenile red stag above Loch Ewe, Aultbea, Wester Ross, from flickriver, photo' by David May

Remus says that Prongs was a stag. However, we can surmise that Prongs was quite a young deer, with very small antlers. To begin with, he was apparently able to get down the low, narrow tunnel under the Whomping Willow, which he would surely not have been able to do had he had a wide rack.

Then there's Harry's Patronus, which Harry and Dumbledore both believe to be a representation of Prongs - although as neither of them has seen Prongs, and Dumbledore had only caught a brief glimpse of Harry's Patronus during the Quidditch match in which Draco's gang faked being Dementors, this is more of an informed guess. If it is an accurate representation of Prongs it's further evidence that Prongs had little teenage-boy-deer antlers, because when Harry first sees his own Patronus clearly he thinks it's a unicorn or a horse, and Aberforth is able to convince the Death Eaters that it's a goat, suggesting the antlers are not very noticeable and that they don't project very far to the side.

It's conceivable, therefore, that Remus might be wrong to say that Prongs was a stag, and Harry may also be wrong to think that his Patronus is one. Prongs might in fact have been not a stag but an unspotted chestnut fallow buck, with antlers too small and new to tell whether they were going to be palmate or not.

Two hinds, from South West Deer Rescue and Study Centre, photographed in Surrey by Edward Johnes

It's also possible that Prongs might genuinely have been a stag, and Harry might be wrong about Snape's Patronus being a doe, and be thinking of her as a doe just because he doesn't know the word "hind" - and there's certainly something to be said for Snape's Patronus having the long nose and supercilious expression of the red deer, rather than the wide-eyed cuteness of the roe or fallow. Either of these errors would make it possible for Prongs and Snape's Patronus to be the same species.

It's also possible that both Dumbledore and Harry are mistaken in thinking that Snape's Patronus is identical with Lily's, and that they are merely very similar. It's possible that Snape's Patronus is a doe - big eyes, cute nose and all - but Lily's was a hind.

Quote from Naaga on May 17, 2023, 4:32 am

Hermione is the brightest witch of her age.

In PoA Remus says that Hermione is "the cleverest witch of your age I've ever met". In fanon this is often taken to mean that she is the brightest witch of her era - but in context it seems fairly clear that Remus means she is the brightest fourteen-year-old witch he's ever met. Otherwise, he would probably have said "... of our age". He's saying that she's very advanced for her age, but not necessarily that she's some over-arching genius.

On the other hand, Rowling would later say that Hermione's Chocolate Frog Card would indeed describe her as "the brightest witch of her age", but whether this is accurate, or the result of somebody in the Wizarding World also misinterpreting Remus's comment (which they might have learned about by interviewing Harry or Ron) is moot.

Canon Hermione genuinely seems to have a great gift for Charms and is able to adapt existing concepts in original and ingenious ways, although we do not know whether she can invent new spells from scratch. In Potions, however, she is far from the genius she is often portrayed as. She's very precise and produces good results by following the text-book, but she shows no innovation and is reluctant even to try out the mysterious Half-Blood Prince's suggestions. Snape complains that she parrots the text-book, rather than demonstrating her own understanding of the subject. If she is the brightest witch of her age it doesn't bode all that well for the IQ of the wizarding population, as it means there are no witches alive in the late 20^thC who have true genius and who would be capable of being a high-ranking research scientist or mathematician or artist.

[Plus it's a bit weird, given that JK ultimately wrote this claim and she says Hermione is herself.]

Quote from Krystal on May 17, 2023, 7:31 am

Hermione is the brightest witch of her age.

I interpret this a fair point. While Hermione often sticks to books, she was able to use that knowledge in the flexible way. She feats were not comparable to Severus and marauder at same age but she far surpassed the witches of her age so that claim is true considering only witches for contest.

Quote from Naaga on May 17, 2023, 3:21 pm

Padfoot is a Grim.

In canon Padfoot, Sirius's Animagus form, is initially assumed to be a Grim - a supernatural black dog the sight of which is an omen of death. This is an actual creature from British and Scandinavian folklore where it is usually called a Church Grim or Kirk Grim, although the "real" Grim (unlike most traditional black dog spectres) isn't an ill-omen. Many fen assume that Padfoot actually is a Grim and on one level it's hard to know what to make of this, since in the Potterverse a Grim seems to be just a big black dog and you could say that any big black dog was a Grim. All we can say is that nobody seems to suffer death as a direct result of seeing Padfoot.

In folklore the Grim is a guardian spirit who protects the church it is attached to - believed in Sweden to be the ghost of a real black dog who was buried alive in order to create such a guardian. Nothing about Padfoot suggests that he is a ghost. The Swedish Grim also appears as a goat-headed man and the English one as a cockerel, raven, ram or horse or as a small dark humanish creature - you could make a case for it being a house-elf who is an Animagus, and who serves a church and vicarage.

Barghest, from Inkwell Inspirations

There are many British legends about spectral black dogs, and there is archaeological evidence of a Bronze Age cult which sacrificed dogs and put their bodies into water at sacred sites along with offerings of gold or bronze. Generally speaking these spectral black dogs have abnormally large (saucer-sized), burning eyes and where their type is described they are always or nearly always hounds.

Padfoot is described as bear-like, which suggests that he is too heavily-built to be any kind of hound, not even a boarhound.

Yellow-eyed black Newfoundland, from Information About Dogs

Personally I think that Padfoot is a Newfoundland - and is probably intended to be. Newfoundlands are very big and hefty and one of the colours they come in is solid black with yellow eyes, which is how Padfoot is described. They've been bred to be assistants and even lifesavers to Newfoundland fishermen, trained to jump into the sea and tow drowning men and even small boats to shore,

Black Newfoundland, from askIDEAS

and so they have webbed feet and a heavy double coat which acts as both waterproofing, insulation and flotation device, which would go a long way towards explaining how Sirius/Padfoot managed to make it to shore from Azkaban.

However, Sirius is definitely playing with the idea of the Grim, even if he looks more like somebody's lolloping pet, and so is Rowling. "Padfoot" is one of the names given to the spectral hounds of British folklore, variously called the kirk grim, barguest (and dozens of variant spellings thereof), Black Dog, and (as listed on Inkwell Inspirations) "Black Shuck, Hairy Jack, Skriker, Padfoot, Churchyard Beast, Shug Monkey, Cu Sith, Galleytrot, Capelthwaite, Mauthe Doog, Hateful Thing, Swooning Shadow, Bogey Beast, Gytrash, Gurt Dog, Oude Rode Ogen, Tibicena and Dip". One possible interpretation of "barguest" is "bear ghost", the Black Dog does occasionally manifest as a bear, and Sirius, of course, grew up in Grimmauld Place.

Quote from Naaga on May 18, 2023, 1:43 am

The Horcrux which is in Harry is in his scar.

Yes, I thought so too, and yes it seems a perfectly reasonable assumption - but there isn't actually any canon evidence for it, other than the fact that it is the part that hurts when Harry is tuned in to Voldemort. Somebody told me recently that Rowling had said, either at interview or on Pottermore, that the Horcrux is not located in the scar, although I can't find the reference. Rowling's pronouncements outwith the books are only tertiary canon, so it's up to the reader whether you think that the fact that in the books the scar is the part of Harry which resonates with Voldemort's presence and actions is or is not evidence that that's where the Horcrux is, strong enough to overrule Rowling's later statements.

Quote from Naaga on May 20, 2023, 1:34 pm

Draco is either very saintly or very evil.

Draco is commonly portrayed in fanfics as having a heart of gold, and/or as a pathetic abuse survivor and Tormented Soul. Some fanwriters then react against this by declaring that an IC ("in character") Draco must be a little monster.

Canon Draco is an openly racist bigot - yet, it would be difficult for him to be anything else when we first meet him. He has probably never been away from his father's influence for more than a few days before, and Lucius is such a bigot that he wrote to Dumbledore demanding that he purge from Hogwarts' library any books which mention magic-to-Muggle marriage, for fear they might encourage Draco to sully his pure blood (it's in Beedle).

It seems unlikely that Draco has been abused: the Malfoys seem to be a very close if slightly warped family, and when we first meet Draco he boasts of his ability to extract presents from his father. At the same time, Lucius seems quite short and irritable with Draco and is very critical if he fails to outperform Hermione, so Draco may feel - like Neville - that his family's love is conditional on his performance. Later on, knowing that his father is in Azkaban and he can't help him must be horrible, although at least by that point the Dementors have left. It may be that Dumbledore's concern for Draco during HBP is powered partly by fellow feeling, since his own father died in Azkaban.

Draco is rude and a bigot and snob from the outset, sneering at Ron for his shabby, Muggle-loving family. Yet, when we first meet him he has probably never been away from home before, or even been to school (it's interview canon that Purebloods are usually home-schooled), and is probably quite nervous and out of his depth, and hoping to curry favour with Famous Harry Potter. That he wants to curry favour with the boy who disembodied Voldemort suggests an admirable lack of loyalty to the Dark Lord, and he may in fact be jealous of Ron, who is probably more of a Pureblood than he is, and already has an in with Famous Harry when they encounter each other on the train.

Draco it is who starts the war between himself and Hagrid by trying to shop him over Norbert, but Hagrid then fans the flames. Draco has every right to resent a man who sends him into a midnight forest full of giant man-eating spiders, with nothing but another child and a nervous dog for company, and then jeers at him for being afraid. Draco continues their war in a nasty, snidey, gloating way with a strong admixture of racism, and blames Hagrid and Buckbeak for the consequences of his own stupidity, but Hagrid also holds Draco up to ridicule in front of the class just because he doesn't want to do extra work with the Skrewts, and mocks him over the ferret incident, so Draco's spite is not wholly without reason.

At the World Cup, Draco racially abuses Hermione, calling her Mudblood etc. and appearing to gloat at the idea that the Death Eater wannabees may kill her. But while he is gloating, he is incidentally giving her a useful warning which protects her from danger.

He's a bully to Neville and the Trio but not, that we see, as vicious as the Marauders were to Snape, and in attacking Harry he is fighting three on three, not four on one. If anything, he is challenging Harry from a position of weakness, since Crabbe and Goyle are less handy lieutenants than Hermione and Ron. That he physically attacks Harry and breaks his nose at the start of HBP is bad, and twice before he has launched largely-unprovoked attacks on Harry on the train - but then both of those previous attacks had ended with Draco, Crabbe and Goyle warped by what must have been painful and humiliating hex injuries, being brutalized by the Twins and then stuffed into the luggage rack and left there by the Trio for eight hours without medical assistance or, so far as we know, food or water or a lavatory break, so he has reasons to hate Harry and his friends.

He is willing to kill at a distance, by leaving poisons or curses lying around, but is unable to kill Dumbledore face to face. His attack on Harry on the train, where he stamps on and breaks his nose, may seem brutal - but it was written against a background of a spate of real-life incidents in Scotland where attackers jumped up and down on their victims' heads until their skulls burst and they were left dead or permanently brain-damaged, so Draco's assault on Harry is comparatively small beer.

Generally speaking Draco is a brat, a bit of a little shit - yet, it is understandable that he tries to Cruciate Harry when Harry catches him weeping in the boys' lavvie, because his previous experience does not suggest that Harry will show him any pity when he is in pain. He behaves like a total arse after Harry rescues him from the Fiendfyre during the final battle - yet, a few months beforehand he had taken a considerable risk in not betraying the Trio's identity to the Snatchers. Dobby says that he is a bad master to house elves, but he has learned that from his father and he is clearly not happy about being ordered by the Dark Lord to Cruciate a prisoner. "Moderately unpleasant, a bit of a bigot and a bully but not iredeemable, with some good points and reluctant, when push comes to shove, to seriously injure anybody" probably sums him up fairly well.

Quote from Naaga on May 21, 2023, 12:44 am

Hermione is always sweet and kindly.

Hermione cares, usually, about people who she feels are downtrodden, although sometimes in a rather patronising way. She assumes that she must know what is best for the house elves better than they do, perhaps because their small size and fractured way of speaking makes her see them as child-like, without regard to the fact that they are from a different culture and even a different species from herself, and may have quite different needs. It seems to me that the house elf bond is a kind of marriage between a house elf family and a wizard family: it's reasonable to campaign for elves to have the right to divorce their wizard counterparts if the relationship has gone irretrievably sour, and to be given some pocket money, but by attempting to trick the Hogwarts elves into receiving clothes without their consent Hermione is in effect trying to force divorce onto partners who are happily married; and they regard being formally paid for their contribution to the "marriage" roughly the way most human women would react to the idea that their husband ought to pay them for sex. You might possibly get them to accept a little money by saying "You are a member of this family so you are entitled to a share in its income", but to pay them is to say "You are not a member of this family, but just a servant".

Hermione thinks about ethics more than the boys do - not that that's hard - and wants to help Montague, when he is seriously injured by the Twins, by telling Madame Pomfrey and his parents exactly how he was hurt so that they will be better able to treat him. But she lets the boys talk her into leaving Montague in medical danger, rather than risk getting the Twins into trouble for their near-fatal cruelty and recklessness. I'm not sure whether she's better than the boys, because she at least knows that she should help Montague, or worse than them, because she knows what the right thing to do is, but doesn't do it.

Her intrinsic nature is quite aggressive. When Draco is nasty about Hagrid, her response is to hit him. In the Shack, she kicks Sirius hard enough to make him let go of Harry even though he's fighting for his life, and she bombards Ron with little birds for seeing other girls.

She is capable of being quite cold: when Peter is grovelling for mercy at her feet she tugs her robe out of his hands and steps back from him, and doesn't protest at the idea of Sirius and Remus executing him in cold blood - although she does make some effort to establish his guilt first, and turns her back so as not to see him die. When she and Harry and Ron accidentally knock Snape out her immediate concern is whether they will get into trouble rather than whether Snape is seriously hurt. She does later at least ask "in a small voice" what they are going to do with him, which is more interest than anybody else shows in his fate, but this is after he's been unconscious for about twenty minutes (unconsciousness due to head trauma and lasting more than ten minutes is considered to be potentially life-threatening).

Although she appears initially to be more concerned about school rules than the boys are, her attitude to the rules becomes more lax as soon as she becomes friends with Harry and Ron, and by second year she is conspiring with Harry to steal from Snape while Harry creates a distraction by causing a Potions accident which could quite easily have killed or permanently maimed one of his classmates (swelling somebody's head without the rest of them, for example, could easily have broken their neck). By fourth year she's become actively criminal, kidnapping a journalist and holding her prisoner for weeks until she agrees to stop writing for a year - with no apparent provision for how Skeeter is meant to feed herself for a year if she can't work. If she had shopped Skeeter to the Ministry for being an unregistered Animagus you could call it a citizen's arrest - but as it is she's a blackmailer who is complicit in covering up Skeeter's crime.

She sets up a spell which will scar for life (JKR has implied at interview that it's permanent) the face of any student who betrays Dumbledore's Army, and she doesn't warn them in advance - so it seems intended to be a malicious punishment, not a deterrant. And facial scars are especially psychologically damaging and traumatising. It's not even a good way of identifying anybody who may be spying on the group long-term, since anybody who finds they have "Sneak" branded into their face will know at once that they've been rumbled, and will cut their losses and shop the group at once. Had she really wanted to identify traitors in their midst she would have been better to curse them to develop e.g. a small crescent-shaped pimple on their left earlobe - something which she would recognize, but they wouldn't even notice.

As it is, she afflicts Marrietta Edgecombe with major facial scarring which will require her to use makeup or a glamour every day for the rest of her life, to punish her for being more loyal to her own mother and her mother's employer than to a friend of a friend whom she barely knows and has no reason to trust. There's no suggestion that Hermione ever feels a moment's guilt about this. Rowling was asked about this scene and seemed to be gloating about the idea of a "traitor" being punished so probably Hermione, who is Rowling's self-insert, also thinks that she did a good thing by ruining a girl's face for life for being loyal to her mother. Translated into the real world I suppose the equivalent would be an acid-attack - the sort of thing which would earn the girl that did it a couple of years in prison - or primitive punishments involving branding letters on people's cheeks.

Of course, the wizarding world is primitive. Although Hermione's behaviour here is barbaric, it's taking place in a world where interpersonal violence and duelling are accepted in the way they were in the 18^thC, and people are doing well if all their body parts are still human and nothing is sprouting tentacles.

Wiping her parents' memories shows a disturbing ruthlessness, although it's arguably justified. If they love her, her parents might well be willing to lose even their memory of her, at least temporarily, in order to be sure that they can't be forced to betray her.

She's also not very good with animals. She loves Crookshanks but doesn't seem concerned at the idea that he might have killed her friend's pet; she states that she doesn't like horses; and when false!Moody is showing them the Unforgiveables, she is concerned about the fact that the spider's agony under Cruciatus is upsetting Neville, but doesn't seem to have any pity for the spider itself.

Also, to dismiss Firenze, a fully sentient person, with a casual remark about horses is rather speciesist - even if she's making a joke about the common enthusiasm of teenage girls for all things equine.

This is not to say that Hermione is a bad person - just that she's a long way from the wholly good angel of mercy she's often portrayed as in fanon. One of her best characteristics is that when she does decide to care about somebody downtrodden, her caring does not depend in any way on whether they are grateful to her, or even reasonably pleasant. We see this in her unfailing tolerance and kindness towards Kreacher, even when he is racially abusing her and calling her "Mudblood". It is possible that Rowling intends this to contrast with Lily's rejection of Severus and show that the present-day students are better than their predecessors, just as Harry's care for oddball Luna, his sorrow over the way people pick on her, contrasts with Sirius and James's persecution of oddball Severus. Hermione is also nice to Molly Weasley and very concerned about her when she may be in danger, even though Molly has not always been nice to her.