No Story - Skeeter - Ron's grades - Prosecutors - Prefects - Torture - More

[Catlady]

No: HPFGUIDX 17218

Morag Traynor wrote:
> And an unspoken rule in all stories about magic (snip)
> You have to have priorities. Otherwise there's no story.

Even if there is no limit to the magic, there can still be a story. Just
have the mage conflict with an equally powerful mage or yearn for the
unforced love of someone who loves only a different person. Or struggle
with hiser own burdened conscience.

Jenny from Ravenclaw wrote:
> Rita Skeeter is as annoying as her mosquito name implies.
>  (snip) (was she in Slytherin once?),

Skeeter (how DARE she steal MY name?) MUST have been in Slytherin: It's
pretty clear that her ambition is to get a lot of front-page ink (which
in turn leads to financial rewards, fame, and a certain degree of
power), and that she doesn't let any details like ethics, truth,
anti-trespassing laws get in between her and her ambition. That's the
Slytherin stereotype in a nutshell.

Florence asked:
> Incidentally how in the world did Hermione communicate
> with Rita - I've always assumed that animagi in animal
> form couldn't speak themselves.

Presumably Hermione spoke and Beetle Skeeter tapped her antenna on the
glass, once for No and twice for Yes.

Demelza wrote:
> We are told that Hermione has the highest marks in that
> year, but we aren't told where  Ron or Harry stand.

"To their great surprise, both he and Ron passed with good marks;
Hermione, of course, had the best grades of the first years."

Heidi wrote:
> For me, Javert, in both the musical and the book, is the reason
> I  have never had any interest in being a prosecutor. I cannot
> see the world in pure rules and clear black and white, and I
> have no sympathy with those who always do.

>From listening to Deputy DAs and US Attorneys on the news, it's even
worse than seeing the world in pure rules. The prosecutor's job is to
get the defendant convicted even if innocent, to get the defendant the
heaviest sentence possible even if there are many extenuating
circumstances (such as innocence), and to prevent the convict from
getting a new trial even if new DNA evidence proves someone else did the
crime. The defense attorney's job is to get the defendant off even if he
is as guilty as sin. The adversarial method of law seems to me about as
valid as medieval trial by combat: might makes right.

Bugg wrote:
> I suspect three prefects from each house. A 5th, 6th, and 7th
> year. Head boy and girl may or may not be prefects first/still.

Last year it was proposed that there are six prefects per House: one boy
and one girl for each of 5th, 6th, and 7th years, with the Head Boy and
Head Girl still being prefects. Some people said that at *their* schools
(but those are Muggle schools) there was no arbitrary limit on the
number of prefects: the more prefects, the more to share the work.

Christian wrote:
> I once read a fic pairing Snape and Filch together - the
> premise was a shared fascination for the use of above-mentioned
> chains, and other implements.  It *was* a somewhat tongue-in-cheek
> fic, but very well written.

Long before I read that fic, Pippin had posted evidence  from canon of
Snape and Filch being an item and I thought it over and decided what
they have in common is a desire to hurt students -- Filch physically and
Snape verbally. I don't think they could get away with doing what they
want (in this scenario) to do to students, so I imagined that they
fondle their toys and talk about what they wish they were doing with
those toys, not using them on each other.

Katie Kearns wrote:
> I bet [Hermione] does [go to Bulgaria]. I mean, come
> on -- a change to see somewhere else in the  world?
> Other wizarding people? My gosh! The education
> experience is simply something she couldn't pass up!

That depends on whether her parents would allow her to go.

Lyda Clunas wrote:
> Rather OT, but anyhoo, regarding that interesting image... How long
> does it take you to figure out how to do something like that? Or do
>  you pick this sort of thing up on the net somewhere?

I swiped mine from someone else's sig, but Joywitch created her own.

Marianne Zarleycat wrote:
> is there any other source of news for the wizard
> world besides the Daily Planet?

Daily Prophet, Evening Prophet, Witch Weekly, Transfiguration today.
Also presumably there is a News Hour on Wizarding Wireless Network, but
if WWN is like BBC, its news is influenced by the government (altho' it
seems to me that BBC news is Not Very Much controlled by the gov't).

Clairey wrote:
> I just couldn't believe that someone could kill their own father so
easily.

A girl in my high school, a very nice girl, pretty, and a top student,
killed her father -- she just picked up the family gun and shot him one
evening when he was beating her younger sister. That was 1972 or 73, and
I remember her name but not her sister's.

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