Headcanon that McGonagall is offended on a personal level that Umbridge loves cats.
This literally got 600 more notes just while I was at dinner what the fuck
How has nobody thought about this before tbh
Ok but imagine McGonagall in cat form prowling around the castle, in strategically chosen places so that Umbridge will come across her.
Umbridge takes the cat back to her office and feeds it a little saucer of milk. The cat starts coming back to Umbridge’s office around the same time every night, until eventually Umbridge gets into a little routine of setting out a saucer of milk for the cat before bed.
McGonagall now has all the best secrets on Umbridge, all of the results of the evaluations, and most importantly, is in a perfect position to spy on the ministry for the Order of the Phoenix.
All because Umbridge is obsessed with cats.
The mental image McGonagall lapping up that milk while full of burning hatred for Umbridge amuses me in ways I can hardly describe.
Step 3: realising as you mature as a person that Snape was actually a terrible person after all and was an abusive bully who didn’t grown out of this stage even into his late 30s and an obsessive person who thought he was entitled to Lily just because she showed him friendship and no matter how many bias memories of his you are shown you will never see him in any different way
unfortunately some people are still stuck in stage 2
Step 4: Realizing Dumbledore was manipulative and abusive as well and not the infallible person everyone believed him to be.
Step 5: Discovering that the only person as golden as their reputation portrayed and knew what the fuck was going on was Minerva McGonagall and she was amazing.
How exactly did they “research” this? Looks like they just pulled a bunch of random figures out of their butts.
It’s stated in the books that tuition to Hogwarts is “free for all children in Britain”. I don’t know why they thought it wouldn’t be – it’s a British high school, not a college. So there, you just saved yourself $42,024.
In Chamber of Secrets, Mrs. Weasley emptied her entire bank account which contained only two galleons [£10 / US$20] and she managed to buy all five children’s entire set of books and potion ingredients with this, as well as Ginny’s robes, hat, clock, cauldron, and wand!!! And we know she bought all of these as she mentioned having to buy them. The fact that she bought all of these with only £10 pretty much proves how absolutely ridiculous CNNs estimation is.
If you want more proof, the actual cost of Harry’s want is far over estimated here, and the exact price in both pounds as US dollars can easily be found right within the books! Harry’s wand is bought for seven galleons, a galleon being worth about five pounds [mentioned by JK Rowling in an interview and in FBAWTFT/QTTA] means that his wand was £35, or US$53. So there’s some straight-out-of-the-books-and-word-of-god proof that the figures CNN have given are way off the mark. Not to mention the fact that even if you don’t go to Hogwarts, as a magical human you’re gonna have to buy a wand anyway if you want to do magic.
As for the school books, I’ve done an approximation based on various prices given through-out the books and on Pottermore. While these prices involve a substantial amount of guess-work, I think you’ll agree that my calculation is far more accurate than CNNs:
The Standard book of Spells costs one sickle [29p / US59c]. On the back of my comic relief copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them it says it costs fourteen sickles [£4.60 / US$8.26]. One Pottermore, all text books are one galleon [£4.97 / US$10.17] – however Pottermore currency only uses galleons so it’s likely they have rounded off. Lockhart’s books, the most expensive in the series, are five galleons on Pottermore meaning that the exchange rate in the books puts them around two galleons and fourteen sickles [£14.60 / US$20.80]. If we put a high average on this and assume that all textbooks are approximately a galleon [they are likely much less], and that each year has around seven required reading books, the entire price for seven years worth of books would be forty-nine galleons, which equals approximately £243, or US$367 – and remember, this is the maximum estimated price for the textbooks.
For the minimum, we need to consider that the Weasleys get a lot of things second hand, with Ginny’s copy of A Begginers Guide To Transfiguration being described as “a very old, very battered copy” – likely no more than five sickles. If they got all their books around that price, it would cost them no more than £14 / US$21 for the entire seven years worth! So school books, far from being US$516, fall somewhere between US$14 and US$367 for the entire seven years at Hogwarts.
Next we have robe, glove, cloak, and hat prices – these are never mentioned in the books or on Pottermore, so I can’t account for that. However I seriously doubt it’s as a high as they’ve got here. Considering books in the wizarding world are generally much cheaper than in the muggle world, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that clothing is as well. Likely a maximum of a galleon for a single set of robes.
They’ve also forgotten a huge number of things – cauldrons, potion ingredients, scales, and star charts, among others.
So yeah, I really don’t know where they came up with these figures. It looks like some guy just wanted to make a story about how expensive Hogwarts would be and put a bunch of American college figures together and thought “yeah, this looks good.”
The Harry Potter fandom doesn’t fuck around
Get your shit together CNN and stick to current events
THEY’RE SUCH BULLSHITTERS OMG
harry potter fandom telling it how it is
Americans trying to reassure themselves that it’s ok to charge students more for normal education than Britain charges for magical education.
I
Meanwhile in Beauxbatons, if you come with your personal wand, teachers will scold you and tell you something like “Is the wand provided by the Republic not good enough for you?”.
I have this theory that Neville is supposed to represent everything that Peter could have been. You know, both of them were the weak link in the friend group, the guy easily influenced. But instead, Rowling made Neville weak to prove the two paths an individual could take. How each of our weaknesses manifest in different ways. Peter’s weakness made him a villain, ultimately worse than Voldemort because he betrayed his friends, while Neville’s weakness made him work harder and in the end made him Harry’s strongest ally.
Harry = James, Ron = Sirius, Hermione = Remus, Neville = Peter, Ginny = Lily, Luna = Snape.
You will notice that none of the six from the old generation survived. The kids each have traits from the old generation but they’re here to fix the past, and thus must survive the series to metaphorically right the past. Some may raise their eyebrows at Luna as Snape, but just as Harry represents James (the popular kid who was good at quidditch, but didn’t become arrogant like his father) or like Peter and Neville (two people who could have been cowards, but Neville rises to life’s challenges) Luna mirrors Snape in being mocked, a pariah, Looney Lovegood and Snivellus. Instead of being resentful, she rose above it, and loved herself regardless.
If you went with Harry to the Ministry of Magic in book 5, you mattered beyond just backing him up against Voldemort. This core six represented the loss and failure of the Marauders generation, and the hopes of a post-Voldemort future.
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