Colin Creevey: Flint or not? (was Re: Hedwig's death)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 183589

Beatrice wrote:  
> > While it is possible that Colin arrived with other members of the
DA, I think that there are also two possibilities:
>  
> > 1.  That Colin was attending school - McGonnagall actually
addresses him and Peakes in the Great Hall during the evac and tells
them both to leave.  Which sounds to me like he was among the students
and  came down from the tower to hear the announcements.  In this case
it might be a filk UNLESS....
> 
zanooda responded:
> 
> If you believe JKR's interviews (because not everyone does :-)), she
said that Colin was not attending Hogwarts. She answered this question
 in the Web Chat last July. Her exact words were: "Colin wasn't a
student. He sneaked back with the rest of the DA, along with Fred,
George and the rest. He ought not to have stayed behind when
McGonagall told him to leave, but alas - he did".
>
Carol responds:

Right. McGonagall says, "You, too, Creevey," when she's ordering
underage students to go to the RoR and safety rather than fight. Jimmy
Peakes would be a fifth-year Gryffindor, IIRC, so he's definitely
underage and definitely under her authority. But Colin Creevey is
either no longer a Gryffindor and therefore not bound to takeorders
from someone who's no longer his Head of House or he's a sixth year
and quite possibly of age (nearly three-quarters of the students in
any given year would have their birthdays between September 1 and
mid-May, when the battle apparently takes place).


Either Colin is still at Hogwarts and JKR, having forgotten that he's
a Muggle-born (just as she forgot that his brother Dennis was a
third-year, too young to be in Hogsmeade, in OoP), and JKR is just
covering her tracks in that interview (as she did with Harry's
inability to see thestrals at the end of GoF), or McGonagall is
treating a boy who has not been at Hogwarts all year as if she were
still his Head of House and as if she knows his exact age. (Dumbledore
certainly didn't know Hermione's exact age when he refers to her and
Harry as "two thirteen-year-old Wizards" in GoF, at which point
Hermione has been fourteen for nearly nine months.) 

Would McGonagall know that Colin, one of (at minimum) seventy
Gryffindor students who would normally attend Hogwarts (given ten per
year in a normal year; perhaps seven per year in DH, but that's still
forty-nine Gryffindors) had not yet had his birthday? I doubt it. Most
of the sixth years would be seventeen, old enough to fight, just as
most were old enough to take Apparition lessons in HBP. (Only Harry,
Draco, and Ernie attended NEWT Potions while everyone else took the
exam.) Ginny isn't old enough to fight, but she has a summer birthday,
and her family members are there to make sure she remembers that she's
still sixteen.)

Did JKR confuse Colin with Dennis (who seems to have disappeared from
the story), thinking that *Colin* is underage as Dennis would have
been? Or is she thinking, as she did with James in OoP, that because a
kid is in a given year, he's a given age (fifteen in fifth year;
sixteen in sixth year)? (James was sixteen when SWM happened, given
his March birthday, but he's referred to as being fifteen three times,
and not just by Harry, who *is* fifteen throughout fifth year because
of his July birthday.) How would McGonagall know that he was
underage--unless, perhaps, he'd somehow been at Hogwarts all year
despite being a Muggle-born and was too young to take the Apparition
test in April? And even then, he might have turned seventeen in the
weeks that followed the Apparition test.

IMO, and I'm sure others will argue with me, it's just one more
example of JKR's inability to do maths, her general forgetfulness (of
Colin's year in school in DH and Dennis's in OoP, of Colin's status as
a Muggle-born and, possibly, of Dennis's existence), and of her
lamentable tendency not to check the fictional facts in previous
books. If you have a memory like a sieve, it's best not to trust it.
(I've always thought that because JKR shares a July 31 birthday with
Harry and would not herself have changed her age during a school year,
that she somehow forgets that most people are (technically) a year
older at the end of the school year than at the beginning, whether
their birthday is in September like Hermione's or April like the Twins'.

Another thing: Colin is either seventeen or nearly seventeen and yet
he's "tiny in death"? The Creeveys are very small for their age (their
size is as exaggerated as Hagrid's in the other direction, with Dennis
being so short that when he stands on a chair he's not much taller
than the people sitting next to him), yet they can't have Goblin or
House-Elf blood if they're Muggle-borns. Is Colin *that* late hitting
puberty? (I've seen an occasional normal, healthy fifteen-year-old boy
who still looked like a child and was something like four-and-a-half
feet tall, but never a normal seventeen-year-old boy under, say, five
feet three or four. How "tiny" is Colin, and has JKR forgotten that
he's either a man or very nearly a man by WW standards? Is he still,
in her mind, prepubescent, or has she forgotten that the Creeveys are
Muggle-born and, in her imagination but not on paper, given them
House-Elf or Goblin blood?

BTW, I loved Beatrice's little slip of "filk" for "Flint." As someone
who has called Dumbledore "Voldemort," I know how easy it is to think
one thing and type another. I was wondering which tune we could use to
filk Colin Creevey--maybe some Civil War tune about a boy who goes to
war and never returns--or what's that British poem that ends, "And
never home came he"?

Carol, who expected *Dennis* Creevey to be important after all that
fuss about his falling into the lake and being tossed back into the
boat by the Giant Squid