Comment author: blogospheroid 11 October 2010 04:50:07AM 3 points [-]

Was he a professor of something other thanDADA? Cos' I think in Canon, Dumbledore had mentioned that they never managed to have a defence professor for more than a year after Voldy's curse.

I wonder what all tests must they have done on that curse. Did they try to alternate professors between two subjects? Did they try semester assignment? After all it has been atleast 12 years or so for that curse, right?

Even in MOR, a string of bad events or bad professors has happened, so I assume not much has changed there.

Comment author: fibby 31 October 2013 08:10:30PM 1 point [-]

I wonder why they haven't simply renamed the course. If it was called "Battle Magic", would V's curse still apply? What if it was something completely new, like "Sunshine Course"? What if the name was changed to, say, "Transfiguration"? Let the students have McGonagall's Transfiguration and Quirell's "Transfiguration". Students might get a little confused on their first week, but the benefit of having the actual education outweighs the cost... (and btw it's legal to have 2 professors of the same subject -- in canon HP they had Trelawny and Firenze both teaching Divination; not to mention that the headmaster is free to create new positions, like he did with The Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts).

Comment author: Alicorn 17 October 2010 12:22:58AM *  15 points [-]

Something that came up in a conversation offsite between me and Adelene Dawner:

Both in canon and MoR, where are all the grandparents and great-grandparents?

Supposedly, wizards have much longer lifespans than Muggles. I'm a Muggle, about to turn 22, and I've still got a grandparent left. Meanwhile, baby Harry managed to be orphaned without any of his grandparents stepping forward to take him in, or even trying to have a relationship with him. Perhaps Lily and Petunia's folks, Muggles both, were dead by this time - they never show up in canon - but what happened to pureblood James's mom and dad? Or their parents, or their siblings - when these people could all easily have lived to be a hundred years old, there should be some many-generation families running around.

The only visible ancestors we have before the canon epilogue are Augusta Longbottom, and, by the end of the series, Andromeda Tonks. Old characters like Dumbledore and McGonagall exist, but seem unmarried, childless, grandchildless. The Weasleys had at least one great-aunt and one great-uncle, but neither Molly nor Arthur has parents coming around for dinner, and they try to be an awfully close-knit family.

Comment author: fibby 31 October 2013 03:03:48AM 0 points [-]

It is possible that most wizards/witches die not of old age, but simply because being a wizard is such a HUGE occupational hazard. If you use magic every day, you can make a fatal mistake eventually; especially if your magical power keeps increasing with age, whereas your memory / ability to concentrate goes down. And there are everyday spells that can easily kill you if you get them wrong, Apparition comes to mind. Yet it is possible that death in a magic accident is so common that it isn't even viewed as big tragedy. You'd have to be either extremely good (Dumbledore), or very careful (Moody, McGonagall), or both to survive to an old age.