Hi! Sorry for the delay with answering, had lots of things to do lately... Now, answering your points: 1. Severus emphasizing with Narcissa. Well, maybe you are right here. I'm still not as convinced as you appear to be, but it is at least a possibility. 2. Eileen Prince. Of course we are not sure of anything, just speculating:) Anyway, I do think that it's highly probable that she was a pure-blood. First, quite contrary to the common opinion, the pure-bloods seem to be the majority of the wizarding population (at least if you take the wide meaning of "pure-blood" - the one whose both parents are wizards at least in the first generation), and the mixed wizard/nonwizard families seem to be routinely disfunctional (all 4 examples we now - Riddles, Snapes, Hagrids and Thomases - seem to be). Second, it may be premature to think so but it looks like there is kind of a pattern - extremely able sorcerers seem to routinely come from half-blood families, not quater-blood ones. 3. Hagrid. IMHO, people - especially these sentimental and infantile types, like Hagrid - tend to have prejudices towards those they do not know, like foreigners or Muggles but this prejudice is often easily discarded immediately after they get acquainted with one. I mean, I never noticed Hagrid being too prejudiced against Madame Maxime, did you? His neglect of children safety is a manifestation of his lack of proper sense of danger, another example of his infantile character. And I never noticed him being cruel towards Draco, though I noticed enough cruelness in the opposite direction, can you please give reference to what you are meaning here? Then, in case of Dudley one may argue that a little bit of cruelness is exactly what he was craving for, after all these year of abuse by absolute permissiveness. On the Hagrid's Slytherin prejudice I'm with you, though. I understand, of course, that, after all, it was one Slytherin Riddle how have broken the Hagrid's fortune for several decades, so we can understand his bitterness. Understand, not justify. Anyway, I don't see how any of these objections undermine the fact that Hagrid loved Potters. And we can suppose he did - for all his sentimentality he, as far as we know, haven't run around crying and telling anybody who would hear him how he loved Cedric Diggory or Sirius Black, and with Potters he seems to do exactly that.
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Now, answering your points:
1. Severus emphasizing with Narcissa. Well, maybe you are right here. I'm still not as convinced as you appear to be, but it is at least a possibility.
2. Eileen Prince. Of course we are not sure of anything, just speculating:) Anyway, I do think that it's highly probable that she was a pure-blood. First, quite contrary to the common opinion, the pure-bloods seem to be the majority of the wizarding population (at least if you take the wide meaning of "pure-blood" - the one whose both parents are wizards at least in the first generation), and the mixed wizard/nonwizard families seem to be routinely disfunctional (all 4 examples we now - Riddles, Snapes, Hagrids and Thomases - seem to be). Second, it may be premature to think so but it looks like there is kind of a pattern - extremely able sorcerers seem to routinely come from half-blood families, not quater-blood ones.
3. Hagrid. IMHO, people - especially these sentimental and infantile types, like Hagrid - tend to have prejudices towards those they do not know, like foreigners or Muggles but this prejudice is often easily discarded immediately after they get acquainted with one. I mean, I never noticed Hagrid being too prejudiced against Madame Maxime, did you? His neglect of children safety is a manifestation of his lack of proper sense of danger, another example of his infantile character. And I never noticed him being cruel towards Draco, though I noticed enough cruelness in the opposite direction, can you please give reference to what you are meaning here? Then, in case of Dudley one may argue that a little bit of cruelness is exactly what he was craving for, after all these year of abuse by absolute permissiveness.
On the Hagrid's Slytherin prejudice I'm with you, though. I understand, of course, that, after all, it was one Slytherin Riddle how have broken the Hagrid's fortune for several decades, so we can understand his bitterness. Understand, not justify.
Anyway, I don't see how any of these objections undermine the fact that Hagrid loved Potters. And we can suppose he did - for all his sentimentality he, as far as we know, haven't run around crying and telling anybody who would hear him how he loved Cedric Diggory or Sirius Black, and with Potters he seems to do exactly that.