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Lilac found evidence for Lily being short!
(Since there's an absence of any textual evidence at all for Lily's height, even I, Enemy of Authorial Hegemony Extraordinaire, am willing to accept JKR's drawings as Good Enough For Now *g*).
She also wrote:
This goes along with Elkin's theory that Harry is more like his mother than his father. Yeah, he got his dad's hair, but he got his mum's height.
Oh, dear. Thank you, Lilac, but although my inner Lockhart is going to be absolutely furious with me for admitting this, it was actually Pip's theory, not mine.
I only really wish that I'd written that post.
About which, just a few additional thoughts to add to Pip's, which I hope might save me from just mouthing 'me toos' like some stupefied Imperius victim.
Pip wrote:
Subtle indications suggest that Lily may have been the more dominant partner. Hagrid and McGonagall both refer to Lily and James as - well, as 'Lily and James'. [Ch 1 and Ch 4 in PS/SS]. In the UK people tend to put the male name first in a partnership (James and Lily) unless the female name is the person they naturally think of first.
There's also the fact that the text strongly suggests that Lily was the one who cast the Fidelius Charm. The only people who knew about the Secret Keeper switch seem to have been Lily, James and Sirius. JKR went out of her way to establish that Lily's wand was particularly suited to Charm work. I think that this combination of factors does serve to imply that Lily was the one to cast the Fidelius, which given that she was only 21 or so at the time, and given that even Flitwick describes the spell as "immensely complex," does suggest to my mind that she was one seriously formidable witch.
Harry is not like his father in an extremely important way. The Marauder's map [PoA] suggests strongly that its inventors made mischief for the fun of it. Its codewords are 'I solemnly swear I am up to no good', and 'mischief managed'. When Snape tries to break its secrets, it insults him.
It's also really hard for me to imagine Harry enjoying programming a magical artifact with quite the same sort of insults that we see the Map deliver. It's really not his style at all. He's quite skilled with the verbal zingers, Harry is, but he rarely initiates verbal battle, and his style of put-down is rather different. It tends to be more dismissive than straightforward, and more reactive than active.
Not that this is so enormous a difference, mind you. But it does speak to a difference in personality and verbal style between father and son.
Harry really isn't his father's sort of prankster. He plays games (duelling with fake wands with Ron in GoF), but any practical jokes usually have a serious purpose behind them. The firework in the cauldron in CoS [Ch.11, p140 UK paperback] is to create a diversion, not just to enjoy the chaos.
Harry isn't much of a prankster at all, actually, is he? He appreciates pranks a good deal when others play them, but do we ever see him planning one himself? When it comes to pranks, it seems to me that Harry is always playing the role of appreciative audience, never of performer.
And finally. . . .
James isn't real. He's a character in a book. You don't need to feel sorry for him.
Careful, Pip! The meta-thinking bunny might hear you!
I do disagree on the subject of Lily's role in the Prank, though. But I think that's another post.
—Elkins (who thinks it quite possible that James really might have "strutted" from time to time, but is willing to withhold judgement on that until either canon confirms or denies it, or Book Seven comes to an end)
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on January 31, 2003 2:19 PM
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