"Rionach, the youngest of James and Isolt’s daughters, taught Defence Against the Dark Arts at Ilvermorny for many years. Rionach never married. There was a rumour, never confirmed by her family, that, unlike her sister Martha, Rionach was born with the ability to speak Parseltongue and that she was determined not to pass on Slytherin ancestry into the next generation (the American branch of the family was unaware that Gormlaith was not the last of the Gaunts, and that the line continued in England)."

....

I'd laugh, if I weren't so busy smashing my furniture with a baseball bat. What the fudge?! "she was determined not to pass on Slytherin ancestry into the next generation". Was that woman somehow retarded?

 

Unfortunately there is a real life precedent for such nonsense. Some of Hitler's cousins decided they weren't going to pass on his "legacy" like some inherited guilt rubbish.

 

Bad enough she serves this pile of rubbish as the story for Illvemorny, but to also make sure we can't extract what's potentially good about it and use it in RPGs is just plain old mean.

 

That's not what I got from my reading. The original quote is something along the lines of "the phoenix who gave the feather for your wand gave just one other", and from that I got the impression that it was unusual not because most wands have a core from an individual animal and no other wands are made from the same one (I mean, how many phoenixes must there be considering that somewhere in the realm of 1/3rd of the British wizards will have phoenix feather core?) but for exactly the opposite reason, because usually they are used in dozens of other wands. The reason Ollivander made a big deal about Fawkes having given 2 feathers was that Fawkes had ONLY given 2, and they'd ended up in the wands of Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, which is a pretty big deal.

I can see how either reading could work, though, and I guess it depends on your headcanon preferences/what you need for a fanfic which you prefer.