Notes

Family Inseparable

Author's notes

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Weasley Ages

The ages for Bill and Charlie are hard.
Harry is born in 1980 Per PotterMore1 Ron was born on 1980-03-01. Per PotterMore2 Fred and George were born on 1978-04-01. PotterMore does not list Percy's birth year (his birtday is August 22)3. I'm going to assume a Hogwarts cutoff of September 1. Percy is in 5th year when Harry is in 1st, so Percy is 4 years older - 1976.
Charlie and Bill are harder. I'm going with the https://www.hp-lexicon.org date for them.
Per the lexicon4, Charlie has a birthday of December 12 1972. Per the lexicon5, Bill has a birthday of November 29, 1970. This story starts the summer after Bill graduates, so we are in the summer of 1989, with Harry turning 9 and Ginny 8.

[[!table data=""" Sept 1 of Year ](1971\|1974\|1977\|1979\|1981\|1982\|1984\|1987\|1988\|1989\|1990\|1991\|1992\|1993\|1994\|1995\|1996\|1997\|1998 Bill \| 1 \| 3 \| 6 \| 8 \| 10 \| 11 \| 13 \| 16 \| 17 \| 18 \| 19 \| 20 \| 21 \| 22 \| 23 \| 24 \| 25 \| 26 \| 27 Charlie \| 0 \| 1 \| 4 \| 6 \| 8 \| 9 \| 11 \| 14 \| 15 \| 16 \| 17 \| 18 \| 19 \| 20 \| 21 \| 22 \| 23 \| 24 \| 25 Percy \| 0 \| 0 \| 1 \| 3 \| 5 \| 6 \| 8 \| 11 \| 12 \| 13 \| 14 \| 15 \| 16 \| 17 \| 18 \| 19 \| 20 \| 21 \| 22 Fred \| 0 \| 0 \| 0 \| 1 \| 3 \| 4 \| 6 \| 9 \| 10 \| 11 \| 12 \| 13 \| 14 \| 15 \| 16 \| 17 \| 18 \| 19 \| 20 Ron \| 0 \| 0 \| 0 \| 0 \| 1 \| 2 \| 4 \| 7 \| 8 \| 9 \| 10 \| 11 \| 12 \| 13 \| 14 \| 15 \| 16 \| 17 \| 18 Ginny \| 0 \| 0 \| 0 \| 0 \| 0 \| 1 \| 3 \| 6 \| 7 \| 8 \| 9 \| 10 \| 11 \| 12 \| 13 \| 14 \| 15 \| 16 \| 17 """)

Dumbledore

Musings of Apathy, in writing the original version of this story, envisions Dumbledore as (my words) misguided, and perhaps ruthless, but not evil.[^20180702-2] As I work with this story, he might become a little darker than I think Musings of Apathy originally intended. One of the things that really struck me as I started to really think about the Harry Potter books (as opposed to just enjoying them as stories), is just how valid some of the common fanfiction criticisms of Dumbledore are. In no particular order:

• Harry's scar as a horocrux:

  • Saving the Saviour talks about how Dumbledore didn't have Harry examined at all by a Healer after that fateful Halloween night. Could the soul fragment Riddle left have been detected? Could something have been done about it?

  • I really like the theory from The Thory Rose 2:

    "But if you know about the Horcruxes, then you will know that they can only be destroyed by the most destructive of forces. There is no way Harry could survive that," the old wizard pointed out.

    "What’s the matter? Is your hearing going? As I just said; that would be the case if Harry was a proper Horcrux, but he isn’t! His body was never prepared in the correct manner that Horcrux receptacles are required to be and he wasn’t subjected to a Binding Ritual, either. Voldemort’s sliver of soul isn’t properly integrated with Harry’s," Ginny yelled in anger.

  • More or less a follow up to the previous point, but further consider. Dumbledore states that he did not know that Harry would survive. Dumbledore hoped that Harry would. Dumbledore, by his own admission, knows that Harry will be willing to sacrifice himself. The reason implied is that Dumbledore is well aware of Harry's heroic virtue. But when you consider how much Dumbledore hid from Harry, how calculated the final revelation is, I think there is more to it. Dumbledore is not leaving anything to chance - I agree with fanfiction authors who think that Dumbledore has, in the choices he has made regarding Harry's upbringing, purposefully worked to shape Harry into someone who will make that choice. This does not negate Harry's virtue; Dumbledore is building on Harry's nature, not creating it out of whole cloth. Honestly, if Dumbledore were as calculating about subjecting Harry to abuse as some authors would have him, then he took an incredibly reckless chance. Dumbledore knows how similar Harry's situation is to Riddle's childhood. I think that this plan is something that Dumbledore came to over time, not something he intended from the beginning.

• Dumbledore does not seem to know about the horocruxes until he is presented with the diary. He knew Riddle had survived the Halloween encounter with Harry, but apparently did nothing to investigate this.

• Dumbledore placed Mrs. Figg to watch Harry. She knows she has to be unpleasant to him to retain access to him and thus fulfill her mission. Surely this was reported to Dumbledore over the years. He presumably did not believe her, possibly because she is a squib, and he has some of the pure-blood's unconscious prejudices against them. Alternately, while he does believe her, he is risks both Harry turning evil and Harry's health, because he views the odds that Harry will be killed by a Death Eater and/or a returned Riddle that probable. There must have been some middle ground. Between Dumbledore's civil authority on the Wizengamot, and his experience with and control over magic, he could have dome something to intervene in Harry's treatment.

• Along the same lines, the following two quotes from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix:

  You arrived at Hogwarts, neither as happy nor as well nourished as I would have liked, perhaps, yet alive and healthy. You were not a pampered little prince, but as normal a boy as I could have hoped under the circumstances. Thus far, my plan was working well. and You had suffered. I knew you would when I left you on your aunt and uncle’s doorstep. I knew I was condemning you to ten dark and difficult years.

Against this collection of problems is Dumbledore's friendship with Fawkes. How inteligent are phoenixes? Does the phoenix bond with its partner (popular in fanfiction), or is it more of a friendship thing? A phoenix in the HP world is a highly loyal creature. Would this loyalty persist if Dumbledore started to believe his own legand and allow power to corrupt him? We do not, to my knowledge, have good answers to any of these questions.

Some authors ofsfanfiction have focused in on Dumbledore's talk of "the greater good" in his relationship with Gellert Grindelwald. To what extent did Dumbledore actually turn away from this view of morality, that so long as you act for the greater good, you can cause suffering to individuals? Ms. Richa Venkatraman wrote a defense of Dumbledore on MuggleNet[&20190301-1] in which she seems to express well the view that Harry himself has in the book, that Dumbledore is ultimately a good, if flawed, person. I have trouble with this, it is way too close to "the ends justify the means," and I am far from convinced that it differs in any important detail. Yes you should act to promote the greatest good to the greatest number of people, but you may not do so using means that encompass actual harm to individuals. The ends (the greater good) do not justify the means (cooperating with (in a moral sense) the abuse Harry suffers). I suspect however, that Ms. Venkatraman is right, that Dumbledore suffers in his concience from the pain he causes, and he does intend good. For my purposes, Fawkes recognizes this good intent, but is not inteligent enough (a phoenix is an animal, not a being) to understand the flaws in Dumbledore's execution.

The Wards around Privet Drive

I moved this content to my more generic pages on the magic and culture of the Harry Potter world that this is based on.