Fluffy's new home

[sunnyskywalker]

I was searching Accio-Quote for something else entirely when I stumbled across a reference to Fluffy's whereabouts after Year 1:

[Y]ou tend to find at Hogwarts that, erm, anything that's dangerous ends up in the forest ... so that's where Fluffy was released, so he's roaming round in the forest ...

Exactly how many dangerous things has Hogwarts released into the Forbidden Forest over the years? We know about Aragog and Mosag. The Ford Anglia might count, and Grawp. Now there's Fluffy. But that wouldn't be enough to make a trend. So...what else?

Is that where the Blast-Ended Skrewts ended up after the Triwizard Tournament? Were the Thestrals another of these "dangerous" releases? Have Hagrid and maybe Kettleburn spent fifty years tossing new creatures into the ecosystem? (We're probably lucky Norberta didn't end up there.) Do students regularly raise dangerous pets and abandon them in the Forest once they get too big?

No wonder the centaurs don't trust humans...

Also, we know Hagrid introduced Mosag so Aragog wouldn't be lonely. Did he sneak a Mrs. Fluffy while we weren't looking?

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

It could be really interesting! She set up so many things so well, and then it just...fizzled.

Like, yes, the potion riddle and that comment of Hermione's in the first book seems like it ought to be a hint for a major theme of the series. Also at least 75% of the Marauders backstory (they sailed through life thinking they could fix everything, until ZAP). And of course Severus realizing that his decisions contributed to his best friend getting murdered. How did he keep enough awareness of cause and effect to feel any responsibility for that? Does potions as a subject have anything to do with it? You can fix some potions mistakes, but if you don't do things right the first time, you might wreck your potion and melt your cauldron. So getting it right the first time is a better plan.

[chantaldormand]

From what we have seen in HBP Severus was modifying potion recipes and either coming up with new spells or modifying them for his own purpose. Perhaps those activities require a good understanding of cause-effect connection?
Granted we see almost everything from Harry's PoV, but we don't really see characters successfully creating spells/new potions.
We have Seamus in PS almost successfully creating a spell... and oh, wouldn't you know it? Seamus is also the character who asks questions. In fact, in OotP he asks Harry for his side of Cedric's death story instead of blindly believing what MoM writes in the newspapers.
Other than that we have only Severus and Voldemort. And in Voldemort's case, it's hard to say what was his creation and what he found in obscure magical tomes.

[sunnyskywalker]

Yeah, the spell-hacking and potion-modifying also seem like good candidates for reinforcing that kind of thought process. "If I do X, then I think Y will happen...whoops, it didn't, Z happened instead! Okay, don't do X if I don't want Z!"

Is that the water-to-rum spell which ends up with Seamus making weak tea instead of rum? Did he invent the spell? I thought it was maybe a traditional folk spell passed down which he just couldn't quite manage yet, being young and not fully in control of his magic. The fake(?) spell the Twins give Ron to turn Scabbers yellow also rhymes, which makes me think there's still some vestigial cultural memory of "old spells" or "spells like in fairy tales" which are formed as rhyming phrases instead of Latinish words. (Ron's spell might not have worked because he can't control his magic well enough, or because Scabbers isn't really a rat.) But Seamus inventing a spell which almost works in his first year, maybe using those old rhyming spells as his model for a new one of his own, would also be pretty cool.

[chantaldormand]

I checked out PS and unfortunately the water-into-rum scene only happens in the films, so this one depends heavily on how much influence Jo had during when this film was created.

Mind you, I suspect that there are two schools of spellwork creation. Wizards are not very in touch with modern scietific methods so I imagine most of them are "oooo I wonder what happens if I do this?" with occasional muggleborn who would plan out the whole procedure and trial groups

[sunnyskywalker]

Darn, that was actually a cool bit. I think they did consult here more for the early films, though, so they might at least have asked, "Hey, could Seamus try a rhyming spell like Ron's too for comedy?"

"oooo I wonder what happens if I do this?" is a method with good history behind it. I seem to recall early chemists basically going, "Okay, what if I taste all of these chemicals, and then set them on fire and look at the pretty colors? Does that tell me anything about their natures?" Also my little preschool-aged nephew's understanding of what scientists do is "mixing things and going ahahahaha!" So it's a fine old tradition ;-)

[chantaldormand]

"oooo I wonder what happens if I do this?" Is pretty much how I got in to most scientific (or close to scientific) subjects, so I can attest it's useful approach. Heck even nowadays I use it when I'm out of ideas :)

But the difference between "oooo I wonder what happens if I do this?" and "the testing group should be this big..." shows civilizational difference. The second one tends to have more rapid development than the first one. Which doesn't speak well for Statue of the Secrecy in the XXI century

[sunnyskywalker]

Yeah, they are going to have some trouble. Even if they can switch to a more organized testing mindset, it's going to take time and cultural upheaval.

And I think a big part of their problem is that they simply have a much smaller population than we do. The total world population of magic-users strong enough to control wands consistently is probably in the hundreds of thousands, maybe the low hundreds of thousands. Even if they could switch to a scientific experimentation mindset instantly, how many of them will be good at solving complex magical problems and inventing society-altering magic? Of those, how many can afford to do that instead of working in a Diagon Alley shop to pay the rent? Against our staggeringly larger population and thus staggeringly larger number of people inventing stuff? Yeah, they're in trouble.

long time no see, folks!

[vermouth1991.livejournal.com]

"...I don't think I'll ever stop being amazed at just how destructive to the local ecosystem Hagrid can be."

Or how his "Ooo magical creatures are misunderstood" stance is taken so surface-level by so many fans, who wouldn't hesitate to think of how Hagrid and Newt would be friends. Newt would in fact be HORRIFIED at the lack of self-awareness that Hagrid has as a magical creatures handler Remember, that much as Newt espouses "Humans are the most dangerous animal," he knows that some of the creatures inside his TARDIS-Suitcase are dangerous -- When Jacob got bitten by that thing, Newt blithely told him about how the venom would kill him before administering the antidote*. Hagrid would totally want to set an Obscurus free because freedom, too.

*Honestly, Hagrid's lack of self-awareness is like that scene in "Airplane!" where that guy is being absolutely mauled by the big dog, and the lady of the house is like "Oh stahp it!--Isn't he an adorable scalawag?"

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

Potions is the closest thing wizards have to science, and Severus is the closest thing Hogwarts has to a science teacher.

[sunnyskywalker]

It does seem like the only subject where they both learn theory and perform reproducible experiments.

Astronomy has some science component, but not so much with the experiments. Learning that Europa is covered in ice is more memorization of factoids about the solar system. Observing through the telescopes and drawing star charts--depends on what they're doing, exactly. It could involve geometry, trigonometry, and algebra, or it might not. But that might be the closest they have to a math class.

[jana-ch.livejournal.com]

There is arithmancy, whatever that is.
Herbology seems to be mostly practical gardening rather than scientific botany.

[sunnyskywalker]

I so wish we knew more about arithmancy. Or anything, really. But it's "the toughest" subject, so I guess Rowling wasn't even going to try.

Yeah, herbology does seem mostly practical. If only we'd had one throw-away line from Sprout like, "This plant is part of the same genus as the venemous tentacula, so it shares certain characteristics..."

[chantaldormand]

Real life arithmancy is just a branch of divination. But considering Hermione's behaviour I imagine it's more like "theoretical physics" of magic. Then again the way initially astrology was handled you would think it was important for practical magic :/

[sunnyskywalker]

It makes it baffling that Hermione loves arithmancy but thinks divination is a crock. It must be easier to verify and replicate whatever arithmancy does. Somehow. We get a tiny hint of numbers being important for some magic when Tom talks about three and seven being magically powerful numbers, but how? "This number is powerful" isn't a tough calculation, so there's got to be a lot more involved.

I think Terri's onto something with the idea that astronomy is useful for complex ritual magic, much or all of which is now considered Dark magic. They still teach it out of tradition and because certain influential families still find it useful (and it would be annoying to have to impart all that to their kids through private tutoring over holidays), even though it isn't much use for Hogwarts-level magic. Or maybe just for OWL-level magic and they would be using it a bit more in NEWT years, since we only saw one of those and Harry told us very little about most of his classes that year, including DADA for some reason. (Missed opportunity there for Jo to lay on the irony thickly by having Harry gripe about how Snape is such an awful teacher, unlike that fun Half-Blood Prince fellow...)

[chantaldormand]

Maybe Arithmancy is used to calculate results of spells' effects?
Or perhaps this is a very simplistic understanding of programming mapped onto universe?
A lot of people liked numbers 3 and 7 so using them in magic left impact on universe. Those numbers are powerful due to all leftover energy left from previous spells using this function?

That... is possibly very sneaky way to introduce people whose family doesn't follow the traditions to more questionable magic.

[sunnyskywalker]

I wonder if it accounts for why so many spells use the first-person indicative form rather than the imperative? (For example, I think "evanesco" just means "I vanish." And I think "evanesce" would be the command: "vanish, [thing]!" Except it's still weird because I think "evanescere" is intransitive, so really you should be vanishing instead of the object, oops.) Maybe using "o" instead of "e" makes a difference somehow.

But it's weird to think it would always work out better that way. Or that the letters in the words would have such a strong effect. I expect it's more subtle, like the laws of wandlore were supposed to be.

Adding up the numbers represented by letters also just isn't very hard, so either Hermione and the other students are really bad at math, or the hard part is something else. Studying charts of possible meanings and choosing the correct one based on a bunch of factors, maybe. I mean, I imagine that working out what the number 9 means for a person's future is different from what it means for the number of stirs of a potion, and there must be fuzzy cases where it's hard to work out which meaning applies.

But it is also required for curesbreakers, and how would it be useful for that? Can you also work backwards somehow? Like, "Okay, they used a design with seven interlocked circles to make this protective enchantment, so here are the possible words which could be reduced to the number seven, and these are the ones which would resonate with the property of circularity, which gives us our first set of possible counter-curses to undo this deadly trap..." Trying to work out all of the possible combinations of numerical values which could be added up to make your number, and how that translates into letters, could be tricky. Though possibly mostly in the sense of being a real grind, unless they have equations to speed it up (and I haven't taken a math class in way too long to remember if I ever learned such a thing).

[nx74defiant.livejournal.com]

I figure Arithmacy has more in common with Numerology then Algebra.