I was reading Prisioner of Azkaban again, and I forgot that in canon you can have an overpowered spell. Always thought that was fanon. Here, during their Charms exam:

 

Each spell seems capable of going wrong in innumerable interesting ways... in some senses, the way spells go wrong is more interesting than how they go right lol.

 

True, some of the best spells were the ones that went "wrong", really, some you can't even call them gone wrong, just incredibly right in a different way.

Edit: Apparently being an Animagus makes you immune to the werewolf "disease", at least in your animal form. So, something very useful in being an animagus.

 

How does someone exactly earn a Mastery in one of the fields of magic (Defense, Charms, Transfigurations, etc.) in HP? A decent fanon explanation would suffice if there isn't a canon one.

 

Masteries are fanon.

In traditional British boarding schools, the "master" (e.g. boarding master, history master, etc) is the teacher in charge of a specific function. Snape is Hogwarts Potions Master because he is the teacher in charge of Potions at Hogwarts.

And to show that this is indeed the system Hogwarts uses:

 

Yup.

The relevant definitions, for anyone curious, would probably be 1a(1), 2a, 2d(1), and 4a. There could be staff members at Hogwarts fitting any of those definitions: Mainly the first one, though.

Hagrid could just as easily be called "Master of the Keys" as "Keeper of the Keys."

A lot of people see the word "master" in canon and automatically seem to translate it into the master/apprentice definition. It didn't take long at all to pervade fanon.

That's probably mostly because people like to use any chance they can in fan fic to give people titles, levels of authority, categories of skill onto which they can easily slap a label (hurr, 'He's a 2506 on the Merlin Scale!') and so on... and, (to a much lesser extent) at least a few people probably like to throw the term around because of the implications of pervy, abusive, master/apprentice relationships. Probably (blessedly) confined to fics that involve someone actually becoming an apprentice/apprentess.

Because if something weird gets latched onto by fan fic community, it probably doesn't take a master detective to eventually trace the reason back to something sexual(ly deviant).

--
And, worth noting is definition 3a(2), in regards to calling young boys, "master," since this seems to mystify a lot of people.

I signed my name as "Master Jason..." in a thank you note to the woman who was in charge of the class Halloween party in 4th grade. Weeks later, her son (who was not a person I spoke to nor, indeed, who spoke to me) walked up to me and asked, out of the blue, "Do you speak English?" Of course, since his question was completely out of context, by that time, it struck me as a remarkably idiotic thing for one white-bread American boy to be asking another one.

You know a guy's got a complex when he tries to pull rank on a piece of parchment.

Edit:

Does it make one immune, or is it simply that werewolves are only compelled to violence against humans, and mostly ignore other animals, unless provoked?

I don't remember that one being terribly clear. I guess if it's the latter, Sirius was kind of playing with fire, when he tried to stop Remus in PoA.

 

I always assumed werewolves didn't have any natural aggression towards other animals, it was only for humans. Otherwise Pettigrew had bigger balls than he was credited for.

 

I always thought there was more to Pettigrew than meets the eye. I mean, it's been debated to death that it was quite an accomplishment for Marauders to become animagi by their fifth year and Peter might have been a rat, but an animagus nonetheless. I it's the perception of his being a timid sidekick, but the same could be said about Neville in his younger years. Sure, he cowardly hid as a rat for 12 years, scared shitless of Sirius, but once he found his way back to Voldemort's side, his role in Voldemort's return was no less vital than Crouch's. Peter needs another wizard to follow to maximize his potential.

 

You're thinking of the Transformers.

Oh, shit, wait! An Animagus is a transformer!

 

Now someone who knows Transformers better than just from Bay's films (like me) should match known HP animagi with their robo-counterparts.

 

Are Invisibility Cloaks actually against Hogwarts' rules? If so, why didn't Snape confiscate it?

 

I suppose they aren't against the rules. After all, Dumbledore gave it to Harry.

And if they are against the rules, it is still Harry Potter, you don't just confiscate his things.

 

Invisibility cloaks, as I understand them, are so rare, valuable, and decay-able, that no one in their right mind would give them to a Hogwarts student, meaning they felt like they wouldn't need to ban it.

 

That's true, but 1000 years is a long time to accumulate rules against doing highly unlikely things things that nonetheless happened once.

 

Especially in a world where the appearance of a water buffalo is just one mispronounciation in the first lesson away.

 

Perhaps invisibility cloaks are banned, but Harry's Invisibility Cloak isn't.

 

In fanon that sort of thing gets waved off with some vague rule about family heirlooms.

 

I wave it off with the interpretation of rules because it's more Marauder that way.

 

Most likely, it's waved off because Dumbledore is the one that gives it to Harry in the first place.