i LOVED that book as a kid and in retrospect it made me think living through a plague would be way more interesting than it really is
It helps to have strange magic people are still figuring out and be somewhat involved in the development for a cure.
Whether anyone is being chronologically accurate is beside the point. I meant to refer to this specifically: That is not an attitude congruent with American Protestant sexual mores. Protestants holding religious positions are not prohibited from marrying. That attitude is in opposition to Protestant ideas.
You'd be surprised! Nobody actually isolated a vitamin until 1913, and until that point the idea that there were undetectable trace substances in food that you'd get sick if you didn't eat was considered pretty wacky. That's why people kept dying of scurvy on Arctic expeditions for a century and a half after the cure was discovered- without knowing what a vitamin is, it didn't make any sense that citrus cures scurvy, but some varieties work much better than others, and citrus juice works, but not if you store it in a copper container, and some meat works, but not all, and not if you preserve it, and all bets are off if you skim the cooking fat off the top of your copper stew pots. Actual wizard medical professionals would probably all know, but it's entirely plausible that a classist pureblood family who refuse to speak to Muggleborns and don't have real jobs might not have heard of it or think it's just a silly credulous Muggle superstition, like that dragons aren't real. I'm sure someone in the HP fandom has written something about wizard snake oil potions, and whoever they are, I wish them godspeed.
American Protestant ideas of what pre-Protestantism Christianity was like, then. That's not a problem unique to that setup, but it's one I've noticed before; people will assume that other groups are exactly like their own except for the few obvious differences they know about. In this case, they know Catholic nuns and monks don't get married, and think that applied all throughout the history of Christianity too.
While I'm here, a separate rant; pretentious manchildren (it's always guys who do this) who claim Harry Potter's name is short for Hadrian, at least one of whom I've seen persist in calling him Hadrian in casual conversation. It doesn't make him cooler, it makes him have a reason to hate his parents, and it results in readers not knowing who the fuck you're talking about. The person in question also enthusiastically bashed Ron. I gotta say, even if you hate Ron, at least he gets Harry's name right.
Fail-Fandom Anon once did a poll of everyone's favorite awful Harry Potter renamings. The winners were "Hippocampus Potter" in the female category, and "Nizar Hariwalt de León, Casa de Deslizarse de Castilla y Moravia" in the male category. Runners-up included "Epitome Kearn Snape," "Alstroemeria (Mia) Lestrange," "Lord Harry Potter-Gaunt-Travers-Beaufoy-Peverell-Hufflepuff-Ravenclaw-Gryffindor-Slytherin-Merlin-LeFay," and "Valaena Targaryen." The Harry Potter fandom has always been weird, so I don't know if the modern incarnation is actually any more bizarre on average or if it's just that I've been self-selecting to see the most of the most unhinged bits, but everything I hear out of it these days is wild.
Alstroemeria (Mia) is absolutely something i would name one of my characters, nickname and all. I just named one poor fuck Zinnia, after considering Wisteria. Increase the range of Flower Names. Edit: my flower sense was right, Alstroemeria is a pretty yellow one.
I mind it less in fanfic than when this guy was talking about the mysterious "Hadrian" in the reviews of a fanfic which just called him Harry. I had no idea who the hell he was talking about. (My nan used to be a teacher, and once taught a child with the name of Hadrian Crump. That poor kid.)
I’d argue that Hadrian would be one of the less bad names in that ‘verse, given that Narcissa and Nymphadora are canon names...
I once saw someone say that they appreciated the HP fandom's weird renaming fetish because it was practically a rating scale for how bananas the fic was going to be. Harry and Harriet at the top, followed by Hadrian (it's so widespread in fanon that apparently some people legitimately don't know it isn't canon), followed by other things beginning with H, and anything else you know exactly what you're in for if you click.
And sometimes it's a very enjoyable bananas! But having the forewarning is useful, especially if the fic's premise is one where it doesn't seem like it would work out. Or, in metaphor: I happen to love banana bread. But I don't want to use banana bread for a tuna sandwich.
Wow, the only thing like that I've seen is one fic where his name was Harry but Bill liked to call him Hal.
