Wand allegiance.

When you can become the master of the elder wand without actually disarming someone who possesses it, or even touching it, something has gone awry.

 

The Triwizard Tournament. Not the existence of it, but the nature of the tasks. Only one of them was of any interest for an audience, while the other two were exercises in playing the waiting game. Sure, as the reader I get to experience the tasks alongside Harry, but still.

 

Werewolves make no sense. In PoA, it is stated that Lupin takes his potion so he can remain rational under the full moon in wolf form and that before the potion was invented it was much worse for werewolves. This is fine, but what happens when they are heading back to the castle isn't. They walk outside when the moon is out and Lupin is perfectly fine and in human form until a cloud moves and moonlight hits him. Why is there a need for a potion at all? Just stay in a room with no windows for the night if that's how this works. It gets even more inconsistent though because when Lupin is explaining about his friends becoming Animagi to accompany him he says werewolves are only a threat to humans not animals, but a few chapters later he tells Hagrid he didn't eat any animals when he was on the grounds that night.

 

I would assume in the cinematic sub-verse, the moon moving out from behind the clouds was a dramatic coincidence, and really the transformation takes place at the same arbitrary time every night. There is no Wolfsbane in the film, because it doesn't really need to be there and was never used again. The book specifically mentions that when he takes the potion, he is a rational werewolf who spends the whole night hiding under his desk in his office because he can't sleep as a werewolf. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that in the books the werewolf can turn even while unable to see the moon.

 

I wasn't even talking about the movies. That happens in the book. "A cloud shifted. There were suddenly dim shadows on the ground. Their party was bathed in moonlight." Lupin is described as going rigid then starting to shake right when the moonlight hits him. Also, when Harry and Hermione go back in time, Harry sees Lupin come out of the castle and we get this quote: "Harry looked up at the sky. Clouds were obscuring the moon completely."

 

It is a bit inconsistent and the way it's written in PoA seems to be for dramatic effect. Lupin is not affected by the boggart turning into the full moon (like Harry is by the boggart-dementor), so it's unlikely that it's the moon itself. Some months we apparently get several days of consecutive full moons, which doesn't seem to happen to Lupin. The explanation I've read that I liked best, is that he transforms when the moon is at a specific angle relative to the earth, one night a month. This means that with the seasons, the time of night will vary and it won't necessarily have to happen exactly when the full moon is first visible in the sky, and it won't matter if he's indoors or outdoors (he always tranforms indoors anyway, in the Shack as a teenager and as a child in a bedroom in his parents house so it can't be as simple as to draw the curtains in front of the windows).

Wolfsbane makes him a sleepy wolf that retains its human senses. Hagrid says something in PS about werewolves not being fast enough to kill unicorns. However, "The werewolf, however, targets humans almost exclusively and poses very little danger to any other creature." is from the pottermore article on werewolves.

 

My point with the quote about Harry looking up to see the moon covered by clouds when Lupin is going from the castle to the shack is that there is no reason to include that if you are just going for dramatic effect. Unless clouds have some sort of magical ability to block the moon which is a weird thought. As for the boggart, it doesn't actually turn into the moon. If it did Hogwarts would have vanished from the face of the earth. This is further backed up in GoF when Harry sees a dementor trip over its own robes and realizes it is a boggart. It seems like boggarts are somewhat limited in their ability to recreate fears.

I wasn't referencing that. I don't even know that I've ever been on Pottermore. "A werewolf is only a danger to people. They sneaked out of the castle every month under James’s Invisibility Cloak. They transformed ." This is the quote from PoA I was referencing where he talks about why they can be around him in animal form.

 

I mean, I agree with you that it's inconsistent. I was merely providing some more material and a possible explanation for how/when the transformation happens.

With boggarts, we're again faced with the conceptual nature of magic and that may or may not be relevant to how lycanthropy works in the books. The idea that a boggart turns into a 3.793×107 km2 chunk of rock and squashes the earth every time it faces Lupin is a great image, though.

As for the second point, I do think it's pretty clear and I don't see why we have to deal in absolutes here. Werewolves almost exclusively go for humans but there have been rare occurances that (magical?) creatures have been hunted by them.

 

I think it is just more comfortable to see it as an absolute when Prongs spent years hanging out with a werewolf that didn't attack him because if a werewolf is going to eat an animal you'd assume a deer would be pretty high on the list. Though in talking with you about this, I think my new headcanon for this is that werewolves don't actually attack animals, but wizards who discriminate against them spread false rumors about them to make them seem even more violent than they are.

 

That's a good one, I quite like it!

I believe Remus, in telling the story about them as teenagers, emphasizes that Sirius and James turned into big enough animals they were able to keep him in check. I also think that it's in character for both James and Sirius to do something this reckless and dangerous, likely they wouldn't know for sure until the first time Moony meets Padfoot and Prongs if he'll be cool with them or not. Possibly he did try to fight them the first time and they overpowered him, or he decided immediately that these were the friends he had been looking for all his lonely werewolf life. Likely the latter, since I think Remus mentions that he became calmer and the tranformation less bad with them around. As for Wormtail, I imagine he might have run the most risk of getting eaten.

And yes, I too have spent way too much time thinking about this part of the story

 

Welcome to the club.

 

Is it weird though? It could be argued that the conceptualised nature of magic means that trying to be too literal about it leads to problems.

I'd suggest that the moon doesn't actively do anything to cause werewolves to transform. Instead, it is a property of the magic of the werewolf curse that causes the transformation on nights of the full moon. With that being the case, there's really no reason why the curse could not simply have a tendency towards theatrics. It doesn't 'activate' simply because the moon is on the other side of the earth to the sun, it doesn't have to be so mechanistic. Instead, the werewolf curse 'activates' on specifically on nights where the full moon is visible. And I don't mean it has to be visible to the werewolf (no hiding in buildings), it's a property of the night itself; if it hits all the creepy, sleepy hollow full-moon vibes, then evil things are afoot, and werewolves can stalk the woods.

A night with light snowfall, and thick clouds obscuring the full moon? No werewolves.
A stormy night, with wind and rain lashing the trees, as lightening flashes overhead, and thick clouds still conceal the full moon? Quite possibly werewolves.

To be honest, I like that interpretation more than the mechanistic one. However, I do doubt it was the original intention. I suspect the original intention was simply to allow for maximum drama and atmosphere in the story.

 

I both like and dislike this particular idea of magic. I think it definitely holds weight in some forms of magic especially when it comes to some of the concepts that Dumbledore seems to touch on. I'm just not so sure it applies to all magic. I think at least in my headcanon some branches of study are fairly literal and logical and those tend to be what I associate Hermione being best at in the books.

I do generally dislike the idea that the moon doesn't do anything to cause the wolf to transform though. I think the fact that Hogwarts has an astronomy class since the first year and in second year we see that fluxweed for the Polyjuice Potion has to be picked on the full moon should be enough to indicate that there is some sort of effect from the moon, planets, and stars on magic.

 

When speaking about werewolves we shouldn't forget that Hagrid apparently tried to raise werewolf cubs under his bed. Begging the question of whether those cubs are the offspring of a werewolf with a real wolf, or a werewolf with a human?

 

According to Tom Riddle when trying to get Hagrid kicked out, you mean

I think I've read that one of the two (?) times transformed werewolves managed to mate and produce wolfcubs, said cubs were released into the Forbidden Forest. Could be these that were referred to, although of course that begs all sorts of different quetions...

 

That might just be Tom M. Riddle being a bigoted bastard.

Ninja'd...

Also, Lupin tells Hagrid that he didn't eat any animals because Hagrid was worried about Buckbeak (if the incident referred to here is from PoA). I doubt whether it was any indication of werewolves actually eating animals. Lupin was simply reassuring Hagrid Buckbeak's fine.

 

Good point! I think Hagrid also says in PS that werewolves aren't fast enough to catch a unicorn when the unicorns are getting killed in the Forest. But some things in PS get outdated in the later books so this could be another instance of that.

 

Eh...the conversation in question is between Tom and Harry, and he's just giving Harry examples of things that weighed against Hagrid in Dippet's mind when Tom accused Hagrid of being behind the attacks. He says "big, blundering Hagrid, in trouble every other week, trying to raise werewolf cubs under his bed, sneaking off to the Forbidden Forest to wrestle trolls." So either he's flat out making things up (fair enough, but also...pretty bad writing by JK in that case) or he's relating actual incidents that had taken place.

 

Could be that it's all true, of course, that's open for interpretation I think. Out of interest, do we think Hagrid is immune to the bite because of his giant blood? Or could he have become a massively oversized werewolf if he got bitten?

 

"Making things up" is pretty consistent for Voldemort's big, evil speech though. In Philosopher's Stone, he tells Harry his parents begged for mercy (and then promplty reveals the truth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Also, trolls are supposed to be 12 feet tall. I don't think 13 year old Hagrid can wrestle them.

May be true, but it doesn't match with what we generally know about werewolves.