Hey Lexicon Steve! McGonagall/Riddle SHIP

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 89986

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Erin" <erinellii at y...> wrote:
> 
> > Carol:
> > I can't check this now because I'm rushed for time, but I think that
> > McGonagall is 70, LV is 65, and Hagrid is 62 in GoF. I'm thinking of
> > JKR's interviews plus the fifty-year gap between the first and 
> second openings of the Chamber of Secrets. (I'm taking fifty years as 
> an exact figure based on Hermione's reaction in CoS.) Maybe someone 
> who knows the book and interviews inside out can provide links and 
> page numbers. <snip>
> 
> Erin:
> 
> Tom Riddle opened the chamber in his fifth year at Hogwarts, so he 
> would have been 15 then.  Add 50 years, and he would have been 65 in 
> CoS.  He would then have been 67 in GoF, when McGonagall is 70.  
> Hmmm, so I guess that is three years and not two like I thought.  
> Still doable, I think.  A three-year age difference wouldn't seem 
> like much when you plan to live for 150... or in Tom's case, 
> forever...
> 
> Erin

Carol:
But a fourteen-year-old boy seems like a child to a seventeen-year-old
girl (though not necessarily the other way around). Look at the
relative emotional maturity of Hermione and Harry/Ron in GoF. Yes,
Krum is interested in Hermione (more than she is in him), but he's
eighteen. Ron doesn't have a clue about the source of his own jealousy
and Harry is still fumbling for words when he speaks to Cho. (Reminds
me of a ten-year-old boy I know who thinks that the sign of being "in
love" is having a stomachache.) Fleur, presumably seventeen, refers to
Harry as "a little boy." I think that would have been McGonagall's
attitude toward Tom Riddle in her last year at Hogwarts, if there is
in fact a three-year difference. Add to that that the "little boy" is
in Slytherin and I can't see her being interested in him at all.
Certainly she could not have married him at that point. He was not of age.

Then there are the events of the next three years, during which
McGonagall is absent and Tom is busy creating a diary, getting Hagrid
expelled, and committing four murders. He comes back to Hogwarts as a
supposedly model Head Boy, but McGonagall by our time frame doesn't
see him in that role. And then he disappears on his adventures in
transfiguration and the Dark Arts. IMO, there's no room in the story
for a marriage to McGonagall, and nothing in Tom's character that
would suggest a romantic interest in her or anyone else.

Carol, who is more curious about whether Tom Riddle was a secret
disciple of Grindelwald during his years at Hogwarts