Ok, as I prefer pureblood supermacy fics, I have to ask what happened to family magics? I remember some fics from a few years ago that had them, they depicted purebloods as more than just inbreeds, but familys with special affiliation and even some special powers. I remember a fic that had the black flame - black family magic ( something akin to fiendfire that only the blacks could use. ) It would be fun if more authors started using something original pertaining to certain pureblood families ( like i don't know.. family magics being banned for the past few hundred years because of the ministry, and muggleborn rights. or for a few years because of dumbledore. ) etc. etc. guys be creative! and write more pureblood!Harry ( cleansing rituals, upbringing etc. ).

Ps. Methene you should definetly do it in your 10000 sons of mariscal potter, harry banding up with purebloods and using magics that no muggleborn can neither comprehend, nor recreate, show them why purebloods ruled the wizarding world.

 

Muggleborn rights? Since when do they have any?

Besides, the way the purebloods seem to rule the wizarding society, they would never allow such law to be passed, and the ministry wouldn't dare to alienate his power base.

Why would Dumbledore fight against it either? Not all purebloods are his enemies, and he would love to study those magics or use them against the dark lord if he could.

 

What few depictions of them that there are were bad ones.

It makes sense that families might have a few secret spells that they keep to themselves. All it would take would be one Severus Snape-like member of the family to make a few spells and not publish them to the world at large, and hey-presto! You have family magic.

One version of this that was almost good was one of Disobedient Writer's one-shots, featuring the Potter Family Grimore. However, it was massively overpowered and thus lame.

Magic that anyone can use but families keep secret is far more believable in my opinion than simply giving some families genetic gifts (Parseltongue excluded). Not only is it more believable, but it's simply better. It doesn't change the feel of the entire HP magic system as a plethora of X-Men-esque unique family gifts does, nor does it go off into the crapfic genre that is one giant fanboy jerkoff over Pureblood society.

It is also, in my opinion, a far more elegant way to arrive at the idea of family magic, rather than the blunt tool that is simply making up a load of new powers.

Since when did they lack any? I can't remember any instance of discrimination in the books (except of course in the Voldemort-ruled world). Prejudice from some quarters, yes. Discrimination, no.

The impression I got from canon was always that the approach of the general population towards Muggleborns, and the way the general population percieved anti-Muggleborn feeling, was very similar to the way the Western world feels towards black people and racists.

For example, "Mudblood" is clearly analogous to "nigger", and treated like a dirty word.

The only difference is that the direction of the wizarding world can be affected so massively by lone powerful wizards like Dumbledore and Voldemort. And since Voldemort happened to hold anti-Muggleborn views, the movement had much more strength than it would otherwise have had.

 

This.

Fact is, within a few generations you belong to scores of families. If the traits got passed along by blood, then very soon it would not be family magic but 'pureblood' magic. Then, as the Weasley's themselves point out, there is no such thing as a pureblood, so it degrades once more to just 'magic'.

Having Hermione incapable of doing a particular spell might be lulzy, but it seems rather pointless and utterly against any sort of canon. Taure is correct that the much better approach is to have Snape-like members write spells, come up with a sort of 'family grimoire' and then have it passed on down a direct family line. Hell, let the more paranoid families through a few charms on the book so whoever opens it can't share the information and bam! family magics.

Parseltongue is an exception, and a really fucked up at that. If it's truly a unique magic, then Ron shouldn't be able to imitate it. End of story. That though is a rant for another time.

 

Well, it's easily explainable, it just requires a change in our assumptions.

From CoS onwards we always thought Parseltongue was a magical language - that is, not just a language spoken by magical people, but the words, grammar, syntax etc. were all somehow magical.

Ron being able to speak it in DH seems to indicate that it is a normal language like any other - and the Slytherin hereditary gift is merely insta-speak ability of this language. Like one might have a magical ability to speak French.

Of course we perceive this as a retcon, but when you think about it I don't think we were ever actually told that Parseltongue was intrinsically magical - we just presumed it from the fact that Harry could speak it magically.

 

I just assumed that the spells on the chamber of secrets were unable to tell the difference between parseltongue and gibberish. I doubt that Ron could get a snake to understand him no matter how well he mimicked the language.

Also, it would be pretty impossible for there to be certain magic gifts that only one family has, if only because of the high levels of inbreeding. The only reason not everyone in the wizarding world is a parseltongue is because the Gaunts apparently never married outside their shack.

 

I've always wondered about this though.

In canon we never see Harry having a conversation with a snake as we do in fanon.

The only time we see him properly converse with a snake is in the Zoo, and most of that is body language, not spoken words. When we do see a snake speak "words", they're very simple and in a way mindless (the Basilisk).

Voldemort converses with Nagini apparently, but Nagini is one of his horcruxes, so hardly a normal snake.

All other wizard-snake interaction was simple giving of commands.

I much prefer canon depiction of parseltongue to fanon, personally. The idea that a snake could hold a conversation with a human is stupid. Snakes are pretty dumb. Even if we could communicate with them as Harry can, they wouldn't have anything to say that we'd be interested in.

Maybe you could say magical snakes are super-intelligent, but so far magical versions of animals don't seem to have super-intelligence, with the possible excpetion of Fawkes.

 

I don't know. Hedwig seems pretty smart.

 

Also, snakes don't have ears. And while Ron can mimic parseltongue, he can't hear snakes. I feel that the hissing has to be 'tinged' with magic so to speak, and it annoys me that someone can copy that just by making hissing sounds.

Intelligence wise, Hedwig does indeed seem to be smarter than your average owl. Also, Crookshanks, and all of the kneazles.

 

I don't know, I think that the idea of family magics is okay if it has a proper explination behind. Perhaps wizards and witches can craft rituals that knit a certain ability to their bloodlines, or maybe just their first borns. The ability may be talking to snakes, but it could also be having red hair and freckls.

The fun thing about that strategy is that there is nothing to stop Hermione from performing some of this rituals herself. There wouldn't really be anything the seperating mudbloods and purebloods, expect that most of the purebloods had a skilled ancestor.

 

What about Aragog and his family of Acromantula? At the very least Aragog seemed intelligent for a magical....animal if you call him that. Kneazles show some intelligence too. Crookshanks was able to cooperate with Sirius to attempt to take down Pettigrew. If a magical cat can at the very least understand and carry out very complicated orders from a Dog then who is to say magical snakes can't have a conversation of sorts? I just checked the Lexicon too and a Kneazle is described as;

I understand what you are saying though in regards to parsletounge being a learnable language but, to me at least, there is no way that a witch or wizard's ear can discern one hiss from another. I highly doubt it can be taught. Ron just randomly tried to hiss his way and luckily (with a little assistance from JKR) gets it right. I still think that magic has something to do with the ability to speak parsletounge, or at the very least understanding it.

As far as family magic goes...I mean as a fanon concept it is kind of interesting but outside the one instance of Slytherin's direct blood line carrying the parsletounge ability it should be strictly spells developed by the family and kept secret.

 

I agree with Taure. Particularly with wanting an interesting and unique depiction of Parseltongue, like we got in PS - I might include something like that in one of my stories sometime, I like it so much (I enjoy fanon-concept reversals).

However, I believe JKR stated that Dumbledore also taught himself to understand Parseltongue from Pensieve memories of the Gaunts and Tom Riddle - though he couldn't talk to snakes, or something like that. So it seems there is a bit of magic in Slytherin's ability.

And yes, from the kneazle bit, it seems there's a bit of precedent from Animagi (or even normal wizards) communicating a bit with intelligent creatures.

A BeastLord!Harry (Druid!Harry?) that worked in a non-retarded way (retarded way - he speaks English to them) would be fun for a light read.

 

As we saw from Canon, Harry thinks that he's just talking English, while everyone else hears Parseltongue. Yet this is only when he has a snake in front of him or has a picture of a snake to think about. I'd guess that his magic has the ability (known as Parseltongue) to translate both what he hears and what he says into the other language when any snake medium is introduced to him. This would be the reason that no one else can understand what the snake says -as they don't get the translation into English, and why no one else can understand what he says -as they get the translation into Parseltongue.

 

That would be Delauny's Enemy Mine I think. It's about an endless battle between Bellatrix and Harry eventually leading to them shipping. Go figure Was a nice read before the author stopped updating though.

 

No it's Only Enemies by leave this world and the author just started updating again.

 

Ron did spoil it a bit, but I still consider Parseltongue to be a highly magical ability. From what we've seen of it, through Harry and the Gaunts, it is an entirely intuitive language. People are born knowing and understanding it, without ever receiving tutoring in it of any sort. That alone is magical. While Ron is able to imitate a sound he heard before, he neither understands nor speaks it. Dumbledore learned to understand it, but apparently still cannot speak it, and if anyone could do it, it would be him.

 

You've got me with Aragog, but I wouldn't count animals like Kneazles and Hedwig as intelligent. Sure, they're smarter than your average animal. But they're still not intelligent in the way humans, centaurs, merepeople, house-elves, goblins etc. are intelligent.

With regards to the parseltongue language, the way I like to think of it is thus:

Parseltongue is almost like 2 different languages/skills in one. Firstly you have the ability to understand snakes - not just what they mean by their hissing, but also their body language (e.g. the Boa at the zoo). Secondly you have the spoken language of parseltongue, which I never imagined as simply hissing sounds, but rather simply a language that sounded "snake-like". This spoken language allows a wizard to communicate in a rudimentary way at snakes (and, if two wizards know the language, with each other), but you need the other ability - the ability to understand snakes - to converse with a snake.

The human part of the language would be able to be learnt, but the ability to understand snakes could not (you might be able to learn some of it, but not all).

 

So you are meaning how parseltongue sounded in the CoS film? Actual words formed, just quite sibilant and sounding rather strange. Thats in line with how I imagined it, which makes sense if Ron was able to copy it, since he didn't copy a random hiss, he actually had a word to work with.

 

Yeah, and also how it was shown in the GoF film in the first scene with Nagini.

 

Taure, even in Nazi Germany, there were people who risked their lives to hide out Jews. Aside from the Order of the Phoenix members, how many people didn't instantly buy into the Voldemort!Ministry propaganda? People like Umbridge, whom we can assume to be a representative of ordinary non-dark Purebloods, were fully aiding the genocide. Remember that non-Death Eaters didn't know Voldemort was controlling the Ministry behind the scenes, so it wasn't because they were afraid of him. You don't get this kind of behavior with just some mild-prejudice, it takes some ingrained hatred. To use one of your comparisons from the real world, this would be like Jimmy Carter ordering the return to slavery of all blacks, and the entire population of Massachusetts cheering him along.