It really annoys me ...

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 163830

Inge wrote:
<snip>
> I'd still like to know about other reader's irritation-points as to 
> where stuff doesn't make much sense.
>
Carol responds:
I'm annoyed by the inconsistencies, particularly "the legendary
Charlie Weasley." How can it be that Gryffindor has not won the
championship since Charlie left, which would be the year before SS/PS
if he's the age JKR says he is (three years older than Percy), yet
they haven't won the cup for seven straight years in both SS/PS and
PoA (which should make it nine years, if she's going to be
consistent). Now, granted, I could pretend that Charlie is really
seven years older than Percy, so that he would have left school the
year before Percy entered, but then JKR has Bill, who's two years
older than Charlie, say that he hasn't been to Hogwarts for five years
(GoF). That would make *him* 22 or 23 and Charlie 20 or 21--two or
three years older than Percy, as JKR said in an interview--which makes
nonsense out of "the legendary Charlie Weasley" who could have played
Quidditch for England. 

And then there's the stuff about Ogg, the gamekeeper before Hagrid
whom Molly Weasley remembers, and Apollyon Pringle, Filch's
predecessor, who punished Arthur Weasley so badly that he still has
the scars. If those two were at Hogwarts when the adult Weasleys were
students, how could the Weasleys have married just out of school when
VW1 was beginning? We know that Filch was the caretaker when the
Marauders went to school the year after the Weasleys supposedly left,
and we know that Hagrid became gamekeeper soon after he was expelled.
He would certainly have been gamekeeper by the time the Weasleys were
in school if they're only seven years older than the Marauders (he'd
have been in his forties by then), and even if he were still only the
gamekeeper's assistant, how could Molly not have remembered seeing
someone that big on the school grounds?

Carol, wishing that JKR had worked out a pre-Harry chronology and
bought a calculator before writing the books