Oops 1973, Animagi flint, Misty Myrtle the Magnetic Minx

[Tabouli]

No: HPFGUIDX 28849

Slon:
> no way Snape and MWPP could have started Hogwarts in 1983.  Did you perhaps mean 
1973? 

AAARGRRGHGHghjh, yesyesyes, 19 **7** 3, I realised this approximately two minutes after sending it, but thought that after sending something so loooong an added "Oops sorry" post would have been excessive.  After all the research I put into that biography I lose concentration for the very first sentence!

(Tabouli bangs herself on the head with her mouse and accidentally activates Microsoft Outlook)

--jenny from ravenclaw, feeling long-winded

I know how you feel...

Amanda:
> > SEVERUS SNAPE
>
>Didn't read this part, sorry, too much like fanfic....

(Tabouli, though buoyed by Amanda's support,  is mystified.  Oy?  How did Amanda manage to comment on its contents without reading it?  Anyway, a thought: all you fanfickers out there, at what point does something stop being speculation shaded in around known facts and become a fanfic?  Was my Snape biography fanfic?  I wasn't intending it to be a fanfic - if I had been I'd have written it very differently.  I meant it as a sort of loosely descriptive/narrative article-ish piece of writing, not a story told as a story.)


OK, time to don my pink coat and join the Flint Hunt.. here's a contender:

Back to my ol' Animagus gripes.  When animagi are injured in animal form, do they retain their injuries when they go back to human form?  We seem to have conflicting evidence here.

- Wormtail bites off his own finger after his 13 Muggle murder and goes rat, but is ever after recognisable by his missing claw.  The answer here would seem to be yes (which presumably means that as a rat now he would have a misty silver paw!  Cool...)

- When Lupin transforms into werewolf form and tussles with Sirius in dog form, Sirius is badly wounded and bleeding ("gashed across the muzzle and back").  However, when Sirius transforms *back* into human form, it appears that all of these wounds mysteriously vanish.  Surely if man-Sirius was not only "pale as death" but covered in bleeding bites and scratches for the rest of the evening we would have heard about it.  Neither has he been werewolfed.  The answer here would seem to be no.

OK, so perhaps you only get werewolfed if you're in human form when you're bitten.  We can crush that Flint.  But how to crush the other?  Do we try to let JKR off the hook by saying that errrr, changing form magically heals all wounds but can't regenerate lost body parts??

Susanna:
> Well, if he goes on like that, he sure as hell will need a lot of money to get his teeth redone (imagine if that had happened to Gilderoy- he would have fainted from the shock)

Well, they managed to magic Hermione's teeth down to size, why not reparo or densaugeo back Percy's teeth?  Hermione's dentist parents would be out of business in the Wizarding World with all these spells around.  I wish JKR would introduce us properly to the Grangers...

David puts the Moan back in Moaning Myrtle:

> Tbuly wrote, in House-elf language:

Sirs and misses can call me Tinky, if they is wanting to... (Tooli?  Tobby?)

> (Moaning Myrtle's burgeoning babe-a-rama rating is) as much by contrast with the other characters, rather than any absolute level of erotic powers. (...)
> she acknowledges that her sexuality is part of her character (and though she) is not a paragon of virtue, (...) she is clearly a feisty person, a 'strong female character' despite her limited screen time.  (how's that for economical snipping?)

Yeahhhh, none of this coy Ginny simpering stuff for Myrtle, no, she goes straight for the jugular with an invitation to Harry to share her toilet, sneaks up through the taps to check out his bod in the Prefect's Bathroom, asks him straight out why he hasn't come to see her... you go, ghost!

> Surely the reason Fawkes doesn't catch the Basilisk's eye is that it is in fact a very difficult thing to do.  Consider the evidence... 
(...)
But to actually look into its eyes takes someone of real magical skill and strength, perhaps as rare as Harry's unique way with Avada Kedavra.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...

tada

...Moaning Myrtle<

What more can one say?

In all seriousness, I kinda like Myrtle.  I can relate to her mood swings, and her acne problem (I still get pimples and I'm well out of high school).  Now David mentions it, the female characters in HP all *do* seem a bit prim and untouchable.  Even Fleur, who is part Veela and gets down to business with Roger in the roses, seems an aloof, untouchable beauty rather than smouldering teen sexpot.  Surely among several hundred teenage girls, even in a stuffy old-fashioned wizards boarding school, there'd be a least a few whose greatest joy in life is flirting and boyfriends and figure-hugging robes and tempting young wizard boys into frenzies??  Perhaps Lavender and the Patils are a bit this way, but JKR fastidiously avoids dwelling on them. Perhaps this is because the Trio mostly dismiss them as silly and girly, but I can't help wondering if this gives us some interesting insights into the mind of the author herself.

JKR says that she was a plain, plump, swotty teenager with thick glasses whose saving grace was being clever (cross between Hermione and Myrtle?).  Under the circumstances, she'd probably have wanted to dismiss the pretty, flirty girls as silly and shallow, wouldn't she?  It's a very very common tactic for girls who need to protect their self-esteem from the Popular crowd...

Tabouli


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