Thought some of you may enjoy the read - I just came across
this essay on Dumbledore that pleased me greatly. The facts are nothing new to us, of course, but they're outlined in a lovely cohesive discussion of his many flaws that fans tend to excuse or overlook
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Read more... )
He also teaches that it's a good thing to look down on Slytherin in COS when he suggests that Harry's rejection of Sorting into Slytherin was a good thing and a mark of good character.
/Harry did not learn anything important for the later Horcrux hunt there, it was not an experience he needed to have./
I'm surprised that the writer didn't mention that Albus didn't tell Harry anything about how to destroy a Horcrux.
/we learn that Dumbledore tasked Snape with killing him without telling a single Order member about it./
And told Harry to only tell Ron and Hermione about the Horcrux quest. What's the point of having the Order if you don't tell them anything?
/Literally, it’s only Draco and Pansy (and Crabbe and Goyle, I suppose, but they simply follow Draco’s orders) who had done anything to Harry by the end of book one/
Actually, did Pansy even do anything to Harry in the first book? She insults Neville and argues with Parvati during the flying lesson, but I don't remember her doing anything to Harry.
/But…there are lives of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy on one hand, whom are both adults and far from being innocent, and on the other hand there are the lives of children he is responsible for./
Which calls into question why the headmaster of a school is also the leader of the war front.
/I’m willing to give Dumbledore a break for the Defence ones./
Yet was anything done about the curse that Voldemort had put on the position?
/Moody tortures Draco as punishment?/
I'm actually surprised that the writer acknowledges that what "Moody" did was harmful instead of funny.
/And I just really, really wish Harry had called his son Cedric Colin. Or, you know, Dobby./
James Jr. would probably make fun of him for being named after a house elf, and Harry found Colin annoying and wasn't that close to Cedric when he was alive. So, I'm not sure if either of those names would be much of an improvement.
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I don't think DD did bother to do anything. We never got any indentation that the great Dumbles tried and failed to break the curse. Or tried changing the class to get around the cures.
It would have been nice to see something showing Ginny had an input on her children's names. Like James being James Arthur. We do get Lily Luna - but were Ginny and Luna really that close? Why not Lily Molly?
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I remember an excellent fanfic re-do of DH in which Harry’s second son was named Arthur S. Potter. It was left up to the reader to decide what the middle initial stood for. And yes, he was a Slytherin, but it was not any sort of “issue.”
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When I try to do my family tree it seems like reusing name use to be more common. There would be a large family like the Weaslys for example and you would see Bill having children - including an Arthur and a Molly in some form. Than Charlie have a large family - children including an Arthur and a Molly in some form. Than Ginny having a large family - including an Arthur and a Molly in some form and so on. Than they have different nicknames in the family they go by. It than gets to be the challenge of figuring out which of the similar names is which person.
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OTOH Ashkenazic Jews avoid having living people with identical first names in the family (especially if they are in different generations) in order not to confuse the Angel of Death - the fear is that a child might die when it was time for the older relative to die.
(All these superstitions are a reminder that not-too-long ago people did not take it for granted their child would live to adulthood.)
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It ended up manifesting as recycling of first initials, so when a child was born they'd be given names that shared first initials with recently-deceased family members (and ideally if the first name was after a paternal relative, the middle name would be after a maternal relative). So I ended up getting Mitchell Cole after Milton and Carl, a great-grandfather on either side.
Different families end up with different systems even within the same culture (I have cousins who don't follow the pattern perfectly, or who only had one of two names decided like this, etc).
I honestly don't blame Rowling for recycling familiar names, because I think it ends up easier on the reader (especially when the children are basically an afterthought in the main narrative), and it is something that happens in many actual families. But it does become a problem, and an indication of sexism, when all of the names chosen because they're meaningful to only one parent.
There are actually a few different patterns for names, even just amongst the Weasleys (Fred and George actually seem to follow the pattern my family used, in a way, sharing initials with Fabian and Gideon, though we don't know how early their uncles died or what their middle names were). But we did see Harry James, William Arthur and Ginevra Molly (all having the middle name of the matching-sex parent), Percy Ignatius (who was Ignatius?), Ronald Bilius (after an uncle)... do we actually know any other characters' middle names? This does seem to establish a pattern of "use the matching parent's name for the middle name of the firstborn child", which I think a lot of fans use to try to extrapolate names for other characters (how many people assume Draco's middle name has to be Lucius, or Hermione's mother must be named Jean/Jane, etc?) but there isn't any canonical support for that...
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It seems they died during the last year of the war - so after Harry was born and so, obviously after the Twins were born.
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Ignatius Prewett appears on the Black Family Tree, he married Lucretia Black, Orion Black's sister, thus he was Sirius' uncle (by marriage). This is why Molly and Sirius are considered 'cousins by marriage'.
I think Charlie would have been named after Molly's father, but I am surprised nobody is named after Arthur's father (Septimus, according to comments on the Black Family Tree), they go directly to Molly's uncle. Maybe Molly dominated the naming in their family.
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Does anyone know on which side of the family Uncle Bilius was?
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The one "Ignatius" I can recall from canon is Ignatius Peverall, a.k.a. the Third Brother who asked for Death's invisibility cloak.
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In fact, I think this is my new headcanon. The third brother in the story had been called Ignavus, because the original message of the tale was that living your life in hiding is a cowardly act, not a noble, philosophical one. A publisher belonging to the Potter family slipped a name-change into an edition of Beedle back in the 18th century that went on to become the most popular version of the book, and the headstone in Godric’s Hollow is a 19th century re-creation by Potter antiquary.
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