Learning Disability / The Nimbus 2000 / The Prophecy

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 186795

Marianne wildirishrose wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186744>:

<< If Muggle schools have LD kids in their system, I wonder if Hogwarts would allow LD children in? Would there be some kind of magic to tame down ADHD? I can't imagine Hogwarts could/would ever change a personality of a child. Muggle schools couldn't do it. Or would parents keep their child home. Sort of like the Kendra/Ariana situation. >>

The wizarding folk have Cheering Charms and Calming Concoctions, Love Potions and Memory Charms. I'm sure they have other magic to affect the mind, some of which might ease the symptoms of relevant disorders -- maybe something to focus attention, maybe something to be more sedentary, maybe something to sharpen one's hearing... 

The Memory Charms are actually Forgetting Charms (which, along with Confundus, might be actually useful in treating PTSD) and if they have a Remembery Charm or Memorization Potion, no one has thought to use it on Neville. It could be that Hogwarts never thinks to use these things except as directed by parents...

While I personally wouldn't put it past Hogwarts to use Petrificus Totalus, conjured ropes, and a silencing spell to control disruptive students.

Shaun wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186745>:

<< She pushes through the change because he is that good. Yes, she wants him on the team - but she wants him on the team because he's a truly exceptional player. The two things go together. And, yes, she gets him a broom. >>

I remember when the list used to discuss how that broom was provided to Harry, but I don't recall if there was a conclusion. 

The only suggestion that my bad memory recalls being ruled out by more canon is the suggestion that the school provided one broom to each House team player when they were first admitted to the team, the current latest top general production model, explaining why Fred and George got Cleansweep Fives, Cho Chang got a Comet 260, and Harry got a Nimbus 2000; the school supplied only one broom per player, which is why Harry was expected to buy his own replacement when the Nimbus 2000 was smashed into bits, and why Lucius paid for new better brooms for all the Slytherin team. That was ruled out by Molly buying the broom that Ron used on the Gryffindor team.

Other suggestions I recall were that McGonagall bought it because of her passion for Gryffindor Quidditch, Dumbledore bought it because Harry was his special project, Hogwarts bought it via an endowed fund for providing special equipment for orphan students with special talents, or Harry's Gringotts vault bought it. 

The latter raised fascinating questions about how Gringotts knows who is allowed to take money from which vault - is it just whoever has physical possession of the vault key? When we first see Harry's vault key, Hagrid has it. Hagrid must have got it from Dumbledore. Hagrid handed it to Griphook to unlock the vault. Did Griphook hand it back to Hagrid (thus to Dumbledore) or to Harry? 

How did Dumbledore have Harry's vault key? If the vault had been James's and became Harry's by inheritance, maybe James gave the key to Dumbledore because it wasn't much use to James while hiding under Fidelius. However, it could have been a vault established for Harry, to which the contents of James's and Lily's vaults were transferred upon inheritance. In that case, the simplest way that Dumbledore would have the key is that he is the one who established Harry's vault. That would have been very reasonable for him to do if he was executor or administrator of the Potters' estate and/or Harry's guardian. 

The will named Sirius as guardisn and I suppose it also named him as executor, but that was cancelled out by him being in Azkaban. I believe the wizarding world recognized Dumbledore as executor, administrator and guardian because he started acting as such before anyone gave him permission to do so, and they held him in such high esteem. And wizarding folk hold Muggles in such low esteem that they wouldn't recognize a Muggle for those positions unless the Muggle had been appointed in the will, and maybe not even then. I don't know whether the wizarding folk would bother to get some kind of legal paperwork from the Ministry of Magic stating that Dumbledore was Harry's guardian, or they'd just do it without bureaucratic formalities.

Alla wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/186793>:

<< Were you initially disappointed when prophecy was introduced? Were you happy how Prophecy played out? >>

By then I knew there was going to be a prophecy and I was eager for the details, but I was terribly disappointed that 'for neither can live while the other survives' doesn't make any sense. It STILL doesn't make any sense: even if it applies only to that there duel, then neither could DIE while the other survived.

As for knowing there was going to be a prophecy, at the end of PS/SS, Harry asked Dumbledore why Voldemort cared so much to kill him in particular, and Dumbledore said there was a reason but refused to tell it to Harry. Us readers know that this is literature, so obviously the reason is that Harry is Voldemort's destined destroyer. Like all those Greek prophecy stories like Oedipus and Perseus (where the prophecy only comes true because of the destined murder victim's attempt to prevent it, which turned out to be the case with Harry, but not predicted, at least not by  me, at the end of PS/SS). 

Dumbledore believed it, too, and in those days I doubted whether Dumbledore was gullible enough to believe in prophecies, so I thought it might be something like Harry had a rare genetic mutation that made him immune to certain curses (Avada Kedavra if we had heard of it before GoF) or that his parents had magically concealed a magic talisman in one of his vertebrae... It could have been that James and Lily were carriers of this rare recessive gene and Dumbledore persuaded them to break up with their respective True Loves and marry each other and keep having babies until one hit the double-recessive jackpot.

But Dumbledore being unable to bring himself to tell Harry the reason strongly suggested to me that the prophecy or mutation or talisman specified that he would have to die to kill Voldemort, something like Holmes and Moriarty falling together off the Reichenbach Falls, and DD didn't want to tell Harry he had to die young and voluntarily. And that is more likely to be a prophecy than a piece of made-up magic genetics. For which 'neither can DIE while the other survives' would be suitable.

And on-list we had so much fun with that Prophecy. Did it say only Harry could kill Voldemort but not only Voldemort could kill Harry, so Voldemort would live forever (horrible thought) if someone or something else killed Harry? 

Why Voldemort offered to spare Lily? A prophecy that Lily Potter's son would win the war for his father's side caused Voldemort to want Lily to bear HIS son. Or why Voldemart was determined to kill Lily AND James AND Harry, and also why Harry had no living Potter relatives: the prophecy that 'the last Potter' would defeat the Dark Lord, so LV tried to kill ALL the Potters, including Lily and her potential unborn child, Harry, James, James's siblings if any, James's parents, maybe James's grandparents and uncles and aunts. (And btw I wanted James's parents to be named Claibourne and Clotho, not Charlus and Dorothea.)

And I don't recall anyone but me liking my favorite theory, that the reason there was Draco and so many other children of Death Eaters in Harry's year was that Voldemort had encountered a different, earlier, prophecy that a child conceived under Scorpio in 1980 (or maybe some other specification of the time) would have great unknown powers to win the war, so LV ordered his Death Eaters to procreate in hope that the child would be born and raised on his team rather than the other team, and share its parents' loyalty and serve LV. Or possibly it was Lucius who received this prophecy and gave that order to only his own cell members.

I had a lot of fun with that, such as, Lucius explaining to the senior Crabbe and Goyle what their Master had just ordered them to do. In American, it's 'He told you to go home and knock up your wives', but can anyone figure out how to say it in British? "Impregnate your wives" is too big a word for Crabbe and Goyle to understand. "Put your wives in the family way' sounds too prissy for that gang. "Put your wives up the spout"? A LOT of fun: in my fanfic, Goyle was already married but Crabbe had to be given the teen-age daughter of another Death Eater...