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]

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).