Catching up: Lestrange's child?/ Robes

[GulPlum]

No: HPFGUIDX 45703

At 21:27 20/10/02 -0500, Richelle Votaw wrote:

>But do we have any canon at all that the Lestranges are indeed Harry's
>parents age?  If they were even a year older they could easily have a child
>Krum's age.  We are, I'm sure, to assume they were part of Snape's gang of
>Slytherins as well, but surely all of them couldn't have been in the same
>year?  Some must've been at least a year or two older.

I'm not insisting that they are - indeed,we know next to nothing about the 
Lestranges. I honestly had never thought about whether or not they may have 
had kids; it was just the suggestion that they could be of the same 
generation as MWPP, Snape etc (which isn't exactly a huge leap; a lot about 
the "current" Hogwarts generation appears to be paralleling their parents) 
which got me to connecting them to the equally mysterious past of my 
favourite shadowy Gryffindor. :-)

I'm a million miles away from creating any kind of consistent theory about 
Dean, and in particular, I can't make my mind up about whether he's 
ultimately going to end up being a "goodie". The fact that all of Harry's 
Gryffindor year are currently perceived as such (and the fact that Dean has 
less of a role to date than of the other boys) makes me suspect that there 
could be something in suggesting that he could turn bad. But on the other 
hand, if he's the Lestranges' child, it would make his badness hereditary, 
which is something JKR shies away from (except for Slytherins).

> > Boys' and girls' uniforms are different in TMTSNBN. The girls wear skirts.
> > Even when in mufti, Hermione's costumes were always dresses or skirts. Are
> > trousers for girls outlawed at Hogwarts, in accordance with the other
> > old-fashioned attitudes of the WW? ;-)
>
>But the robes would still be the same, regardless of what went under them.
>Does Ginny have a hand me down robe or a second hand one?  Or do we know 
>for certain?

I think you're confusing "robes" and "cloaks". The first year requirements 
list makes a distinction, and the cloak/cape is the only element of the 
uniform which both MTSNBNs have kept, replacing the robes with a tasteful 
standard British school uniform, which gets on my nerves something rotten. 
Oh, and on that topic, apart from Dumbledore, all the male teachers wear 
trousers and jackets (in some cases, capes) rather than robes.

The distinction has also been lost to the books' cover illustrators, all of 
which imagine Harry & Co in modern kids' clothing with nothing but a cloak 
to indicate a hint of Hogwarts. The way I imagine the intended look is 
something akin to the French cover illustrations (the only ones I've seen 
which actually put the kids in *robes*, and not just cloaks). Whether or 
not anything other than underwear is worn beneath the robes is worthy of 
debate, although Archie at the QWC likes a "breeze around his privates" and 
thus presumably wears nothing at all. The fact that he considers a (Muggle) 
women's night-dress as appropriate attire indicates to me just what 
wizarding expectations are like.

--
GulPlum aka Richard, who's got a real bee in his bonnet about Hogwarts 
uniforms...