Prejudice has a history of being allergic to math, biology and social sciences. There is much 'sneezing at' to be expected.

 

It's off the wiki and there's no source, but I've seen this kicking around for years, and I'm fairly certain it's had offical approval of some sort at one point or another. It makes a certain amount of sense, as much as a system of bigotry can.

 

The HP Lexicon and the HP Wiki are two different animals.

 

There is some valuable information to be gleaned from the Wiki; the trouble is that you need to wade through tons upon tons of article-author conjecture, personal extrapolation, and fanon to find it.

 

That's what I meant- the Wiki was looked down on back in the day because it was indiscriminately mixing book, film, game and interview stuff without making that clear, whereas the HP Lexicon used to be a more reliable resource. Now the balance of reliability is shifting to favor the Wiki, because more participants are moderating the info and still actively maintaining it.

 

JKR based it on the Nazi method of determining whether a person had 'Jewish Blood' or not. Basically, if all of your grandparents were non-Jewish, you had 'clean' blood. If any of your grandparents were Jewish, you were tainted by association with them.

Same applies for muggleborns. If all of your parents/grandparents are wizards, you're a pureblood. If some of them are; halfblood. If none of them are; muggleborn.

 

That does mean, though, that someone who had four muggleborns for grandparents would be considered a pureblood.

I have a feeling they wouldn't be invited to too many pureblood parties.

 

Being technically pureblood is not the same as being a Malfoy. Just like being excessively rich doesn't make you aristocracy. Those guys have old money.

 

Basically
:

 

I may have been thinking of that when I said it.

 

Was it ever elaborated as to why the Weasley family seemed to be the only pureblood family that was poor?

 

They have too many kids and Arthur has a shitty job.

 

Not to mention how they seem congenitally incapable of managing money. In just two of the seven books:

• Arthur wins the lottery and instead of use the money for something useful or save it for some future expenses, they opt to blow the cash on a family vacation to Egypt.
• Arthur is entranced (and baffled) by the whole notion of exchanging Galleons for Pounds.
• He has tons of Muggle stuff in his shed, presumably purchased somehow or traded for. He hasn't a clue what any of it is for or what it's worth.
• Molly mails a letter using an entire book of Muggle stamps, again purchased somehow, presumably by the same person ignorant of the mechanics of currency exchange.
• Ron impulsively blows his life's savings on a Viktor Krum doll worth as much as the wand he couldn't afford to buy through the first two books.
• For that matter, who sends their children to a (presumably expensive) boarding school without giving them a proper wand so that they have at least an outside chance of success in said school? This is the very epitome of "penny-wise, pound-foolish."
• Arthur somehow manages to get a block of top-box World Cup seats worth more than the Burrow (according to Malfoy). Either he bought the tickets (a colossal waste of Galleons for a poor family, though consistent with his prior management of money--see Egypt trip) or else he was gifted them somehow (in which case the smart thing would have been to scalp them, buying cheaper seats elsewhere and pocketing the difference).
• Ron mistakes Leprechaun gold for the real thing, believing that they'll just toss out free money for the hell of it. This is the sort of gullibility that's typical for a Weasley.
• The Twins place a long-shot bet of their lives' savings with a dodgy character over whom they have no leverage. Again with the gullibility.

For all their obsession with money (or lack thereof), the Weasleys are pretty lousy at handling it.

Ah, but what about the WWW you ask? The Twins, genius inventors they are, can apparently think of nothing better to do with their talents than open a joke shop when there's already a perfectly good joke shop (Zonko's) in their insular community. It's testament to the idiocy of Wizards that such a tiny economy would be able to support two major outlets of dungbombs and the like. This is at best a happy accident for the Weasley twins, not evidence of any sort of financial acumen.

 

Personally, I think they weren't as poor as most people think. They had a huge amount of land, they did manage to get seven kids through Hogwarts, and they aren't exactly starving. Yes, they need to buy second-hand stuff and clearly don't have as much money as the Malfoys or Harry, but they still aren't that poor.

Also, how many Pureblood families do we really know well enough to say whether or not they're rich or poor. I could literally count rich pureblood families with one hand (Potter, Malfoy, Black, Lestrange, Longbottom). Can anyone here honestly say if the Crabbes or Abbots are rich pureblood families, or even poorer than the Weasleys?

 

I don't know about Crabbe, but Blaise Zabini's mom is well-off. Of course, that's 'new money'- in fact, some of it hasn't cleared probate yet.

As for the Weasleys, they are burdened more than most due to their many children, but Arthur in every way operates on the basis of living by his own standards- that Sweepstakes win enabled him to give his whole family a great experience, and right at a time when his youngest could really use an exciting distraction from her recent horrors. I've met a few families that operated that way- acquisition was never more important than experiencing things together. They never wore designer anything or went out to restaurants, but the family itself was more involved with each other, and in general happier (or acted happier, at least).

The World Cup tickets were a gift/arrangement from Amos Diggory, I believe, and I wouldn't be surprised if gaining Harry's presence in the top box was 80% of the reason Amos was able to swing it.

Ron... is 14. A wand is something your parents provide, but his money is for things he desires.

The twins were taking a risk with someone they thought was a greater fool, expecting that a famous man wouldn't dare to not pay his debts. To be fair, the goblins fell for that, too.

Postage stamps aren't in use in their society, and depending on how it was explained to them, it might seem prudent to 'bribe' the postman with extra stamp-money in order to ensure prompt delivery. After all, Harry has had difficulties with receiving post in the past.

As for Arthur's widget collection- I'm not sure he paid for any of it, but if he did it's because he has a particular fetish that he can't seem to resist. I liked the scene (it may be a missing add-on) from DH1 where Harry talks to Arthur in his workshop as he's crafting a whole mess of wizarding wireless-enabled radios for the war effort- one more piece of evidence that Arthur knows a bit more than he ever lets on.

 

I've seen some fics in the past in which the Malfoys adopt Luna (for one reason or another).

How plausible is that?

Let's take a specific scenario:

- When Luna is 2 years old, her mother performs a dangerous experiment. Both parents die and Luna is an orphan.
- Considering that Luna is a pureblood child and too young to know any better, any wizarding family could adopt and raise her as their own child.
- I'm not sure about the creation date for the Quibbler, but let's assume that it existed already when Luna was two. Since there are no (known) relatives, then ownership of the paper goes to Luna.
- Enter the Malfoys. They already have a son, but let's suppose that Narcissa wants a daughter without going through pregnancy again.
- Luna even looks somewhat like a Malfoy (blonde hair, blue eyes).

But is it plausible that the Malfoys would actually want to take her?

 

Not to mention that much of the Weasley "poverty" comes from Ron's or a Malfoy's mouth. Ron's complaints are often about the fact that everything he gets (except his Christmas sweater and wand in POA) is a hand-me-down. To me that's a function of being the sixth of seven children; of course he's going to get hand-me-downs. It's something even a relatively well-off family would do.

And as for the Malfoys you can't expect them to be objective with Weasleys.

I think it could really go either way. They're not so poor they're starving but they're obviously not rich. They certainly have more expenses than most with their seven children. But Arthur was the head of his division of the DMLE (even if it was the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts and the institutional racism of magical society made that a relatively unimportant posting. It's still probably more money than conductor of the Knight Bus, for instance), so there's at least some money coming in.

As for Arthur Weasley's lack of knowledge, really what is the function of a rubber duck?

 

My heart screams no at the idea. It's like Lupin adopting Tonks*. It's just wrong on so many levels.

But from a rational standpoint, it depends on a lot of things. Do the Lovegoods have a reputation for being crazy, did the parents leave a Will that says who she should stay with, does Luna have a relative or godparent, are the Lovegoods and Malfoys even remotely close, and so on.

*One of these days, I will kill nonjon for ruining Tonks/Lupin for me with that story.

 

This is pasted from a fic called "The Amplitude, Frequency and Resistance of the Soul Bond":

 

I wouldn't trust any of the genetic stuff. Magic has been at least around 6000 years, where the Egyptians are implied to have had a society if there works are taken as proof. Even further back if you want Native American's/Aboriginals to have magic. It doesn't make sense that there are so few wizards when magic is shown to have a positive discrimination effect if a Muggle/Wizard couple results in a Wizard being born and that magic is shown to have many biological benefits.