Hermione/Crookshanks / Molly/Ron / Tom Riddle/his parents / Cho's Name

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

No: HPFGUIDX 35977

NOTE:
First, a note: Last night I quoted: "Harry could see that they 
contained details of every pupil Filch had ever punished. Fred and 
George Weasley had an entire drawer to themselves." I should have 
realised then that if it were EVERY student Filch had punished, James 
Potter and Sirius Black should ALSO have an entire drawer to 
themselves, and Harry would have been interested if he had seen the 
name James Potter.

HERMIONE/CROOKSHANKS:
Marina Rusalka wrote:

> This is actually one of the things I admire most about Hermione. Of 
> all the kids in the school, she's the only one who's consistently 
> compassionate, helpful, and totally non-judgemental toward Neville.

Shannon wrote:

> I certainly don't think Hermione is insensitive or heartless. At
> least, not in general. But she's surprisingly stubborn in the whole
> Crookshanks/Scabbers drama, even when all the evidence is against 
> her. (snip) Frankly that was my biggest problem with her during 
> that period as well. After numerous instances of Crookshanks trying
> to get at Scabbers, she STILL simply will not admit that the 
> probability is that her cat killed Ron's rat. We all know of course
> that's not what happened, but in any ordinary circumstance it 
> probably would have been exactly what happened.

Eric wrote:

> Buying a _cat_ when one of your two best pals has a rat that he's
> had for years, and not taking precautions to make sure that your
> pet doesn't come into contact with his pet, is a bit ... 
> unHermione-ish. Could her purchase have been meant to be, for some
> reason? I don't have a copy of _Fantastic Beasts,_ and can't 
> remember how magical Kneazles are, but her buying Crookshanks after
> he'd been in the petstore for so long does strike me as slightly 
> fishy, somehow.

I agree with all three of the above quotes. As someone who has lived 
with cats since my mum's dear old Foggy slept in my crib while I was 
getting ready to be born, it is second nature to me to protect rat, 
parakeet, and snake pets from the cat family members, and that is not 
assuming any malice on the part of the cats, just curiosity, 
playfulness, and instinct. (Someone who loves to pounce on string 
could mistake a snake for an automated string!) (Btw, Foggy lived to 
almost 21 and died while I was in high school.)

Hermione went into the Pet Shop to buy an owl, so she could send mail 
without borrowing Hedwig or a school owl, and abruptly changed her 
plan when Crookshanks jumped up. "Poor Crookshanks, that witch said 
he'd been in there for ages; no one wanted him." I thought she fell 
for him due to that compassion that Marina and Sandi mentioned, her 
sympathy for underdogs like Neville AND the House Elves. (By the way, 
"Marina and Sandi" sounds like a very Potterverse name for a pop 
music group consisting of two beautiful mermaids.)

However, it could be that some characters, not just the Author, meant 
to provide Harry (via Hermione) with a useful half-Kneazle. Then 
Hermione's uncharacteristic refusal to acknowledge what both book 
learning and experience say about cat nature could be explained by 
whatever love-at-first-sight Charm had caused her to fall so much in 
love with Crookshanks that she forgot about owls. I guess the pet 
shop witch would have been in on this conspiracy and cast the Love 
Charm...  Mrs Figg would have provided the half-Kneazle... did 
Dumbledore orchestrate the the plot, or was it cooked up between Mrs 
Figg and the pet shop witch... is the pet shop witch Mrs Figg's 
sister? 

Shoot, PEN ROBINSON posted that while I was typing this!

I think I read a fanfic that had Crookshanks being James & Lily's cat 
who was put in the pet shop after being found alive in the same 
wreckage as baby Harry, who recognized Scabbers by smell as the 
(human) wizard who had accompanied Voldemort to the murder, and 
recognized Harry by smell as a member of his (Crookshanks's) *real* 
human family, and therefore jumped in to protect his human from the 
villain. That theory does not explain why Hermione fell in love with 
him (FB doesn't say Kneazles can cast Love Spells) -- if Mrs Pet Shop 
had told Hermione that Crookshanks was James and Lily's cat, Hermione 
would have told Harry; also Sirius would have mentioned it when he 
said that Crookshanks was exceptionally intelligent.

MOLLY/RON:
Pippin wrote:

> Besides, Molly probably thinks Ron looks darling in maroon (it 
> shows off your Weasley hair!), and gets maroon stuff for him 
> because she thinks it's his color and it makes the laundry easier 
> to sort.  

At first I thought that Molly color-coded the Christmas sweaters, so 
she'd know whose sweater it was by the color, so Ron was stuck 
with maroon because all the other colors were already taken (except 
girly pink, which must have gone to Ginny, which probably clashes 
with her hair as much as Cannons orange does with Ron's, and which 
she probably hates, too). But my first problem with that theory is 
that emerald green wasn't already taken, because she used it for 
Harry's sweater, and my second problem was that color-coding doesn't 
work in a house of hand-me-downs -- if Ron's baby and infant clothes 
(the ones they outgrow so fast) had formerly been Bill's and Percy's, 
they wouldn't have been Ron's maroon. 

So I fall back on the poverty theory and assume that Molly makes the 
sweaters out of whatever color of yarn was on close-out sale cheap, 
and therefore likely to be hideous colors that NO ONE wanted to buy, 
and he should be glad it was maroon instead of goose-shit green or 
baby-puke yellow.

TOM RIDDLE/HIS PARENTS:
Whirdy wrote:

> By the way, who told him about the relationship between his mother
> and father? Riddle says his mother lived just long enough to name 
> him and his father sent her away because she was a witch, before he
> was born. How, exactly, does he know he is a "half-blood. Muggle 
> father, witch mother"? 

In response, Kyli wrote:

> I thought of a theory that he hated Muggles because his Muggle 
> father left his witch mother to die, and he was bitter about it, 
> saying all muggles were a nuisance unto the world.

Canon suggests that Tom Jr was told his backstory by the orphanage 
people. CoS says: ""My mother died just after I was born, sir. They 
told me at the orphanage she lived just long enough to name me - Tom 
after my father, Marvolo after my grandfather." The orphanage people 
would have been told by whoever brought newborn Tom Jr to the 
orphanage: maybe it was hospital people, if Tom's mother had been 
taken to (Muggle OR wizarding) hospital when her labor went wrong; 
she could have told some sympathetic hospital person about the baby's 
father before the baby came out. It does, however, seem unlikely that 
Muggle orphanage people would tell their charge that his mother was a 
witch and he was half-wizard. 

I prefer to believe that Tom Jr's mother had returned to her parents 
and that is where he was born and she died, and of course her parents 
knew her story. I like to think his grandparents raised him to the 
age of three or four (old enough to remember what they told him about 
his parentage) before they died. (I believe that Tom Jr was not above 
lying to Headmaster Dippet about who told him about his mother's 
death in childbirth.) I like to think that the grandparents were 
killed by Tom Jr's already strong, already evil, uncontrolled magic, 
combined with a toddler temper tantrum. I assume they were the only 
wizarding family in a Muggle village and the Muggles took the child 
to the orphanage before wizarding folk figured out what to do with 
the unwanted orphan. Also, I like to think that Tom's mother was 
named Mirella or Miranda, as her father's name was Marvolo -- I feel 
SURE that Marvolo was the given name of a wizard grandfather, not of 
a Muggle grandfather.

Whicheverway, I have always suspected that the story of "a foul, 
common Muggle, who abandoned me even before I was born, just because 
he found out his wife was a witch" is not exactly true, altho' 
believed by Tom Jr. In my theory, either whoever told the story to 
Tom Jr euphemised it to spare his feelings or his mother euphemised 
it when she told whoever told the orphanage people, but really (in my 
theory) Tom's mother  was never MARRIED to Tom Sr. Tom Sr didn't (in 
my theory) dump his wife because he learned that he was a witch, he 
merely refused to marry the girl he'd gotten pregnant and he never 
even knew that she was a witch. Since I agree with KYLI's theory of 
why Tom Jr hates Muggles, I consider it pretty ironic that it is 
based on a false fact. If he'd been told the truth, he could have 
campaigned against premarital sex rather than against Muggles. (I 
suppose it would be talking politics if I mentioned Tom Unz in this 
context?) 

UncMark wrote:

> 'Cho' might be an anglicized nickname for a much longer given name

Chocolate? 
I went to a poetry reading by a woman named Chocolate Waters; when 
she walked out to the lectern, I really was surprised that she was a 
blonde white woman and whispered to my companion: "I didn't think 
someone named Chocolate was *white*" and my companion flattteringly 
thought I was making a joke about the color of chocolate candy.