Blood on DD face again WAS: Re: Is Snape good or evil?

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 149075

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:

> 
> I ask you, how could the blood have dried if it's a  trickle?
> How could it have dried if Harry wiped it with his sleeve?
> 
> It feels really strange to find a non-ambiguous
> clue in the text, almost like cheating. But I just don't see any
> any ambiguity there.
> 
> You could say that she meant a 'dried-up trickle' and that she 
> forgot blood already dried in Dumbledore's beard wouldn't
> wipe. Or that she forgot blood would dry in half an hour.
> But that's Flinty, IMO. 
> 

Hmmm.  I don't find anything strange about it.  It may well be that 
this isn't very much in keeping with how blood acts/dries/whatever in 
the real world.  But I'm not very knowledgable about how fast blood 
dries, under what circumstances one would or would not expect blood to 
be expelled from a very recently dead body, or how easy it is or is 
not to wipe blood in a particular stage of coagulation from human 
hair.  And here's the thing, I very seriously doubt that JKR is 
knowledgable on these issues, either.  She isn't a mystery writer in 
the police-procedureal subgenre, who might reasonably be expected to 
have knowledge of modern forensics.

Here's a related issue:  What can be fairly called a Flint?  I would 
say that a Flint is "a fault or contradiction of fact that any 
reasonably careful and knowledgable person would see as a fault or 
contradiction."  I would argue that a Flint is NOT "a fault or a 
contradiction requiring specialized or unusual knowledge to 
appreciate, nor is it a fault or contradiction that requires 
extraordinarily careful reading to appreciate."  Sort of a "reasonable 
man standard" to invoke a legal analogy.  Thus the fact that a 
character is described as a seventh year student two years in a row is 
a Flint.  The fact that Harry relinquishes the Marauder's Map in one 
book and suddenly has it back in the next is a Flint.  The facts that 
some of JKR's spells are not phrased in grammatically correct Latin, 
that the speed of owls varies tremendously from one message to 
another, or that blood does not act in forensically correct ways are 
not, I think, Flints as all require specialized knowledge or 
extraordinarily careful readings to catch.


Lupinlore