Golden Snitch / Marriage / HP and LV die together? /Portkeys / Seige

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 55345

"Serena" wrote:

<< Of course they would loose, the only way they could win is if 
you have situation like GoF at World Cup where the opposing seeker 
decides to end the game even though it means his team will lose--And 
how often does that happen? >>

It has been speculated in the past that since these matches are 
school matches, the school authorities might want to prevent matches 
which go on for months and keep students from their studies, so the 
Hogwarts Snitch might be especially enchanted to get easier to catch 
the longer the match goes on. If there were such a spell on the 
Snitch, after the match had gone on long enough, the Snitch might 
forcibly fly into the hand of the nearest Seeker, eve if he/she tried 
to avoid it.

<< I mean could a team even play without a seeker? >>

"It must be possible, Captain: it happened."

Eileen wrote:

<< I have to admit that I've always found it odd that people find it 
odd. Traditional societies don't have the same rate of separation 
/divorce or out-of-wedlock births as does modern society. That's a 
fact. >>

That depends on WHICH traditional societies. In societies in which 
the married household was the economic unit on which people depended 
for their survival, people didn't get divorced. In the much less 
common traditional societies in which the matrilineal family was the 
economic unit -- a 'husband' moved in with his wife's family, but 
still owed filial duty of labor, shares of property, and so on, to 
his birth family -- divorce was easy and frequent, consisting of the 
husband packing up his clothes and moving back to his mother or 
moving in with his new wife, or of the wife's uncles and brothers 
'persuading' the husband to move out. Don't accuse me of believing in 
primordial matriarchies -- men still have the power, but they're 
uncles instead of fathers. (I put primordial matriarchies into my 
fanfic in the spirit of JKR making fables that Muggles believe, such 
as witch's broomsticks, be actual truth in the wizarding world.) 

The relevance of this to the wizarding folk is that magic (I believe) 
makes economic survival very much easier, so medieval people with 
magic could have lived alone, and supported children as single 
parents, as 'easily' as modern people with technology. I believe that 
the absence of divorce in the Potterverse is part of the fairy-tale 
archetype of its genre rather than a piece of realism.

Pip!Squeak wrote:

<< I have actually wondered whether we're going to find that 
marriage in the WW is one of those 'binding magical contracts'. 
(snip) Further, if marriage is a binding magical contract in the WW, 
then Tom Riddle Sr surely suffered for breaking it. >>

I think I suggested something like that long ago, that part of the 
wizarding marriage ceremony is each spouse casting a conditional 
curse on himerself, that dreadful things will happen to himer if the 
marriage ends before death. In order to suggest that what TMR's 
mother died of, is she died of the contract being broken. However, 
Tom Sr would NOT suffer because he is not a magic person so any 
conditional curse that he cast on himself would be only words, not a 
spell. Listies protested loudly at a vow that puts the innocent 
spouse's life in the guilty spouse's hands. 

I thought about it for another year and decided that I believe that 
TMR's parents had never been married in the first place; that was a 
tale told to protect little Marvy-kins from knowing that he was a 
bastard. Rather than having deserted TMR's mother when he found out 
that she was a witch, Tom Sr had never known that she was a witch; 
he simply refused to marry her when she told him she was pregnant. I 
like the irony: if TMR had known the truth, he could have crusaded 
against premarital sex rather than against Muggles. 

Liz Martin wrote:

<< What if his powers transfered from himself to Harry leaving 
Volde with nothing and Harry with everything or at least most of his 
powers? >>

I like to imagine that Harry got his Quidditch ability from 
Voldemort, the same as he got his Parselmouth. That would really 
distress Harry, if he found that the one ability he was proud of 
had come from Voldemort.

<< In turn making Harry his downfall. That possibly if he kills Harry 
that he will also die? >>

I think that Voldemort and Harry got their lives bound together, so 
that the only way either one of them can die is if both of them die, 
but I think that happened when Voldemort used Harry's blood for his 
re-embodiment spell. That's my theory of the gleam in Dumbledore's 
eye: it appeared when Dumbledore heard that Voldemort had made 
himself mortal, possible to be killed, and was replaced by the weary 
look when he realised that it would involve Harry's death. I predict 
that Harry will grab onto Voldemort and push-pull him off the tallest 
tower at Hogwarts so that both are killed by the fall, and the last 
chapter will be Harry's funeral.

Tom Wall wrote:

<< I don't think that we have any evidence to suggest that creating a 
Portkey is a tedious process -- after all, we know that Crouch!Moody 
was able to turn the Triwizard Cup into a Portkey during the trip 
from the Great Hall to the Quidditch Pitch prior to the Third Task. 
So, I don't think it could be *that* difficult. >>

I am one of many who believe that the Triwizard Cup was already a 
Portkey, programmed to transport the first person who touched it to 
the maze's edge next to the judges' viewing stand, and Croody merely 
added an additional 'stop' before that stop. Why do that instead of 
turning, say, Harry's toothbrush into a Portkey and capturing him 
much earlier in the year? My answer: because normally one cannot 
Portkey at Hogwarts any more than one can Apparate at Hogwarts, but 
Dumbledore created an exception for this particular Portkey. Steve 
bboy_mn's answer: because Portkeys are so difficult or tedious to 
make that it is tremendously easier to re-program one that has 
already been made. 

Tom Wall wrote:

<< classical history teaches us that a seige never succeeds unless 
there's a traitor within the castle/city (exceptions being clever 
maneuvering by the enemy, ala Troy.) >>

No. Starvation or running out of water will defeat the besieged city. 
So will disease, which might start on its own or be started by the 
besiegers hurling lague-stricken rat corpses over the city walls with 
their catapults.