OOP: Flints?

[psychic_serpent]

No: HPFGUIDX 62687

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Heather Gauen 
<miss_dumblydore at y...> wrote:
> Spoilers, of course...
> 
> These may have already been brought up, as I haven't
> managed to wade through all of these posts yet, but I
> just had to get it off my chest and see if these can
> be explained.
> 
> A couple of *possible* mistakes...
> -When Harry is feeling bad about not making prefect,
> he takes comfort in the fact that his father wasn't a
> prefect either. But (and correct me if I'm wrong here,
> but I can't seem to find the reference and I might
> just be suffering from movie poisoning) I thought
> Hagrid said that Harry's parents were Head Boy and
> Girl. Could James have been Head Boy if he was never
> even a prefect?

No, don't worry. You're not poisoned by the movies.  Right there in 
the first book, when Hagrid is explaining to Harry who he is he 
tells him that his parents were Head Boy and Head Girl at school.  
While there could be any number of reasons why Lupin might have been 
stripped of his office and James awarded it instead (the Prank comes 
to mind, and the fact that James saved Snape's life) I feel that it 
is rather Flintish that Remus fails to mention that he stopped being 
a prefect, that James got his act together by seventh year when he 
became Head Boy, etc.  It's also Flintish that Harry, who stores 
away facts about his parents like a magpie stores pretty shiny 
things, does not call Remus on this.  "Hey," I'd expect him to 
say, "how did my dad get to be Head Boy if you were the prefect in 
your year?"

I also think that Remus' speech about his being the responsible one 
amongst the four of them clearly implies that they were all in the 
same house and only ONE of the four could be chosen as a prefect.  
This should put to rest all of the speculation about them being in 
different houses, which never made sense to me given their extensive 
nocturnal activities.

> -When the *heck* did Harry get the Maurader's Map
> back?

The last we see of it is in the DADA office when Dumbledore is 
surprised to learn of the existence of the map and what it does.  
Given that Dumbledore gave Harry back his Invisibility Cloak in the 
first book, with the note saying, "Just in case," it seems 
reasonable that Dumbledore would return the map to Harry, 
also, "Just in case."  It's too bad it happens 'off-screen,' as it 
were.  I'd shy away from calling it Flintish, though, in that we 
have a little history of Dumbledore not withholding things like this 
from Harry and his wanting Harry to have as many defenses and 
weapons as possible right now.

> -In one of the Daily Prophet articles, Lucius Malfoy's
> age is given as 41. If he and the Weasley parents were
> in school together, even if the Weasleys are a few
> years older, isn't that *awfully* young to have
> children in their mid to late twenties?

Where did you get the idea that the Weasleys and Malfoys went to 
school together?  That's not canon.  OTOH, I was pleased to see that 
I actually nailed Malfoy's age exactly in my fanfic world.  I know 
that JKR wasn't as specific as she could have been about this, but I 
assumed when she said that Snape was 35 or so that she meant at the 
end of GoF, which would make him about 20 years older than Harry.  
Thus, if MWPP, Lily and Snape finished school in 1978 they were born 
in 1960.  If Lucius is 41 in OotP then he was born six years 
earlier, and would have been a seventh year when they were first 
years.  I strongly believe that we may learn that he was Head Boy 
during his seventh year--I could really picture him torturing the 
Gryffindor first years.  (He and Narcissa will probably be expecting 
Draco to do the same thing, but I'd be terribly upset if that prat 
got it.) Of course, Lucius is supposed to be going to Azkaban now, 
but it's unclear whether Azkaban can still hold prisoners 
effectively, so he might be an escapee by the time Draco's in 
seventh year.

The Head Boy thing was definitely the first unexplained thing I saw, 
and someone else whose post I read brought up the fact that Harry 
should have seen the thestrals at the end of GoF.  Another possible 
Flint was Hermione's statement that prefects can't take house 
points, in spite of the fact that Percy did this in CoS.  I've seen 
a possible defense of this raised, that a prefect might only be able 
to take points from his own house, for disciplinary reasons, to keep 
the kids in line.  If prefects were in fact able to take house 
points from other houses willy-nilly, that could wreak havoc with 
the house points system, as OotP illustrates.  So the real problem 
could be that JKR had Hermione voice her complaint incorrectly--she 
should have said (if this is the case), "Prefects can only take 
points from their own house to keep the students in line."  If they 
can't take points in general, that certainly contradicts CoS.

Two other Flintish things concerned the Pensieve.  Harry was able to 
detect far too much that was going on amongst the MWPP crowd, 
considering that this was supposed to be Snape's memory.  While one 
could argue that a Pensieve could be a little bit like hypnosis and 
you might be able to examine a memory at leisure in a Pensieve and 
pick out a number of details that you might not have noticed 
consiously when you were actually living it the first time, this 
doesn't explain how Snape knew things he couldn't have known.  It 
doesn't sound like he could possibly have seen James writing the 
initials L.E. on his parchment.  It also seems highly unlikely that 
he could have 'sub-consciously' heard the conversation about Remus 
answering the werewolf question on the exam.  (I think that if he 
had any inkling about the werewolf thing he would never have risked 
his neck and almost been killed.)  

In fact, loads of conversation between MWPP should have sounded like 
gibberish to Snape.  If this was supposed to be a way to let Harry 
see his father being a young prat it was sloppily done.  
Conversations that Snape was able to see, not hear, should have 
sounded garbled to him.  Writing on a paper on the other side of a 
room which Snape never saw should not be visible to Harry, or it 
should also have just looked like chicken scratch, rather than what 
his dad actually wrote.  Considering the way the parchments were 
collected after the exam, there's probably zero chance Snape could 
have ever seen what James wrote.

--Barb

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