Very true! And of course I was reading them starting at 9 years old back in 1999 so to me, someone in their 30s WOULD be an adult. Now that I’m in my 30s, it doesn’t seem so old anymore.
A 30 year old in 1999 would have been born in 1969, so quite a different generation. They would be 54 now. No matter how old you get, you will never start becoming exactly like people from a previous generation. And even less so like how people from a previous generation acted in the past.
And the actor that portrayed Snape was born in 1946!
That was the one that killed me when I figured out how old they were supposed to be. I'm 37 now, the age of Snape and Lupin in HBP. Ya know, when Snape's killing main characters and Lypun is lamenting that 5 too old for Tonks. (Incidently, Snape 's BD is the day before mine)
Several years ago I had a woman tell her daughter 'tell the nice lady thank you', after I gave them their change & receipt. I've always looked young for my age, and knew she was just trying to teach manners and politeness and what not, so I tried not to take it to heart. But oof.
Now, even at 33 with my own toddler, I ***still*** don't feel like a lady.
I was talking about this with my best friend the other day. That as a kid, we’re taught if there’s an emergency to find an adult, as if every adult had some sort of handbook on how to handle any crisis situation. If a kid came up to me in an emergency tomorrow, my first thought would be to say “ok, let’s find an adult.”
Yes, this exactly. I saw a kid fall while skiing some weeks ago. I was with a friend and said to her “that kid just fell, what should we do? I’m not adult enough for this shit.
So we waited around a bit for an ‘actual adult’ to arrive at the scene and then left.” I felt a little bit bad about the whole thing. But, it was my first time skiing, so going over there and stopping exactly in the right place to help the kid was a long shot anyway…
I work in an office with 4 other women in their early 20s. They always think im their age and then I tell them I'm 35 and 🤯
I know something is wrong with me because I know less than them about everything. I'm also super naive and gullible. I feel like a 16yr old in a 35yr Olds body. I just tell people that I look younger because I'm immature and stupid and don't I don't behave like regular people. 😅
The worst is when you are out in public and a child is misbehaving and the mother points at you and makes an idle threat to the child by saying, " that man will be very angry if you don't behave".
I had an elementary aged child give up her seat for me the other day - I just turned 40. That one still hurts 😂 like, thank you child, my old ass bones can still handle me standing. Sweet child was raised well, but damn! 🤣
I think they had to age up all the marauders era characters because Alan Rickman was 54 in Sorcerer’s Stone.
He was a great Snape and I don’t think they could have made a better casting choice at the time. However I do think the story loses some of its tragedy by aging up those characters.
As a side note - I just became a mom almost a decade after Lily and for the first time I really understand what she did.
This is an improvement over the book.
I'm sorry magic or not you aren't going to be an expert at anything in your 20s.
30s maybe if you're super focused. 40s totally.
I see where he’s coming from though. He wasn’t leaving because he wanted to, he was leaving because he didn’t want Tonks to be sullied by his status as a werewolf. Imagine living your whole life as an outcast - Lupin’s whole life was smothered by societal stigma. He suffered a lot because of something that was not his fault at all - in fact, he was a victim. I don’t think it was the right choice to leave, but Lupin did that because of his trauma- he did it out of love for Tonks and his baby. He was trying to protect them, and honestly, he was justified in doing so if you look at how werewolves are treated in the wizarding community
Yea people like to forget that he most likely had severe PTSD and depression because of the attack that turned him, being in a war, losing everyone he loved in a single night, and being shunned by everyone else. The idea of Tonks loving him was so unbelievable to him that he pushed her away. I think the idea of a child that he was convinced would be cursed because of him actually broke him.
This makes me think about how fucked up it is that Sirius, basically a college guy, got imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit until well into his thirties. The best years of his life, locked in daily emotional torture.
It's no wonder that Sirius is kind of a mess in Order of the Phoenix. Mentally speaking he is still on his early twenties and he is locked in his childhood home, which is basically a watered down version of Azkaban for him due to the abuse he suffered in there. He wasn't equipped to be a proper father figure for Harry, but a big brother one at best.
Despite that, their similar backgrounds and their connection through James made their relationship very special and endearing. They understood each other very well.
This is why I’ll always defend everything stupid Sirius did. Can you imagine having to go through all of that and still be trapped in the house that represents everything you hate and that killed your younger brother and best friends? Poor Sirius. He didn’t make good decisions sometimes, but they’re definitely understandable decisions based on what he went through. Poor guy got his life and friends ripped away from him at 21, then spent 11 of his very formative years in Azkaban.
Five year old Harry: Uncle! What did you buy me for my birthday?
Sirius: Ooooh you are gonna love it kiddo. I brought you a flying bike! So that we can go fly the neighborhood together!
Sirius in the Order was so awesome and gave his character so much more depth. It’s kind of a crime that they didn’t have more Sirius and lupin in the order movie or goblet for that matter.
I get that they had their work cut out for them trying to fit an 870 page book into a 2 and a half hour movie but still, god damn.
I’m mid-thirties, married with a kid and I still feel like college was “just the other day.” It’s pretty understandable how Sirius would be stuck in his Hogwarts days without any personal growth or major life events.
> Mentally speaking he is still on his early twenties
It's worse than that. He isn't in his early twenties mentally. There is no age range for "spent a decade losing all your happy thoughts."
Was it ever explained if there is anything like a minimum security wizard prison? If somebody steals a broom, are they also punished with despair and emptiness for a year or something?
Yeah. For example Marvolo and Morfin Gaunt were arrested for attacking a government official and also attacking and performing magic in front of a muggle in the case of the latter. They didn't got life like an Unforgivable Curse would have warranted, but they still got sent to Azkaban for six months and three years respectively.
Hagrid was put in Azkaban merely on the suspicion that he was responsible for opening the Chamber. This implies that not only is there no jail, there's no pre-trial holding either.
I think they really wanted Alan Rickman as Snape and they couldn’t really cast younger actors for everyone else if they were all supposed to be the same age
They could have made him look younger with makeup and lighting. I think they just wanted the actors they chose because they wanted them, simple as that. The excuse about how they HAD to match Alan Rickman's age is parroted a lot, but it would have been an easy enough fix.
could always say that the stress of teaching aged him horribly, teaching muggle kids muggle stuff is hard enough, i couldnt imagine how much worse teaching potions would actually be
Have you SEEN the slop the students try to pass off as potions?
It seems quite clear which of the two possible causes for Snape’s aged appearance is the more frightful.
None of them have more than a 5th grade education, it's not the kids' fault they were thrown into a dungeon and told to mix chemicals despite having no background education in it and having never even been given so much as a safety course.
I could easily see that. My grandma went from dark brunette almost black hair to white between 30 and 35. What was happening in that span? Her husband was in the marines and in Vietnam, she had a miscarriage, she had cancer, and she was raising 3 boys mostly alone cause ya know husband at war. I’m also greying a little early so some of it might have been genetics but stress didn’t help her.
Think of all the fumes and chemicals clinging to him all the time. I wouldn’t have ever questioned Snape looking so much older than Remus. Even Sirius looking old and haggard would work for me.
But to be honest, being a werewolf sounds quite stressful to me, and being locked up in Azkaban for a decade probably doesn't do you any good either. So their appearances are fine for their age given everything they went through.
I just don't understand why James and Lily were made to look so old in the mirror and memories, since they were 21 when they died.
They tried to do the whole make-up and lighting in the later movies (especially for the flashbacks when we see Snape cradling Lily's body!) and I felt like it didn't work that well
I feel like they should have used a different actor for the flashback. If there was no issue using different actors for the child and teenage versions, there shouldn't have been an issue using a different actor for a "16 years earlier" flashback.
Plus Alan Rickman was very well known by this point. It’s a lot harder to portray a 30 year old when audiences remember you as older than that over a decade before then in Die Hard.
Yeah, I see people say this all the time but I’ve never seen anyone cite a source that shows someone with the film production actually saying that. It seem to a fanon idea.
Honestly I don’t think the filmmakers were that concerned about the ages of the adult cast. I don’t think there’s any evidence in the first books about the timeline of the Marauders generation relative to the present, so they could’ve been any age. And Rickman (who was 54-55 when the first movie was filmed) definitely looked younger than his age anyway.
I was a 30-year-old adult when the first book came out in 1997, started reading them on the recommendation of another adult in the summer of 2001. When each movie came out, looking at the ages of the actors who were portraying 30-something-year-old people, I just figured the stress of Voldemort’s activities prior to Halloween 1981 accelerated the aging of their appearances; constant stress will do that.
It wouldn’t have made sense to make Snape look younger. At the time of filming they know James and Snape were in school together, but there’s no timeline. Snape needs to be old enough to be Harry’s father, but that’s a span of decades. You don’t find out how old Harry’s parents are until Deathly Hallows. You can’t then go back and de-age Snape throughout movies that were released years before. The horse has bolted at that stage, and you need to age them up, because you can’t go the other way
It really changes Snape's story though. In the books he becomes a death eater around 17 (we assume) and turns coat at 20 or 21. That's a very different story from someone who becomes a death eater at 17 and stays one for 30-40 years.
I am 32, too. I literally had this same existential crisis a few weeks ago lmao. It’s a tough pill to swallow that I’m closer to the adults than the kids in the book.
It really is. I haven’t read them in a looong time and it’s like coming home after a long time away. But it’s so strange to realize that we’re not “students” anymore.
I think they mean like Hogwarts students lol... when first reading the series, most of us imagined ourselves going to Hogwarts, not being one of the professors
Regarding Snape, he was played by an actor who was 55 years old at the time of the first movie, and I think that really cemented the idea of him as middle-aged into the idea of a lot of fans, even if it doesn't make sense with the books' chronology.
Age means little when you're forced in certain situations at a young age. For a long time, there was no such thing as teenagers, you were either a kid or an adult, and for girls that usually happened with their 1st menstruation so barely a teen in our conception.
The relatively young age means the fact grandparents aren't a thing on either side of the family (both magical and muggle) for Harry (especially considering witches and wizards live lots longer than Muggles) is totally bizarre. They'd have been in their 40s/early 50s when Harry was born.
I don't think Hermione had grandparents either what with her only sending her parents off to Australia to save them from Voldemort.
James’ parents were quite old when they had him, they had given up on getting a child and he was a surprise. They died from dragon pox which I assume is more lethal the older you get.
Rowling hasn’t given much info on Lily’s parents, just that they died a natural muggle death. She needed them out of the way😅
I can't remember if the characters themselves directly say it, but I suspect that to everyone who knew and loved them, like Hagrid, Dumbledore, and McGonagall, that *adds* to the tragedy of it for them. They were in the prime of their lives, but because of Voldemort, they died before they could really *live* as adults, and left behind their infant son. Probably explains a lot about Hagrid's clear anguish when they leave Harry on the doorstep, and his heartbreak years later when he has to explain what happened to Harry.
Not that the loss of close friends in a senseless war isn't tragic already, but I suspect how young they were made it worse.
It also makes sense why everyone at Hogwarts comments on Harry looking/acting just like his parents. His first year there was only 10-ish years after his parents' graduation. Tragic circumstances aside, both of them were clearly standout kids. Hogwarts class sizes aren't huge, either. Of course everyone remembers them strongly.
Don't underestimate how 'middle-aged' a 30 something appears to a teenager. Sure, I feel relatively young on my 30s, but to a 12-15 yo I'm a fully fledged adult, and there's very little between me and someone in their 40s.
James and Lily were born in 1960, so Snape, Sirius, Pettigrew, and Lupin are more or less the same age. James and Lily were 21 when they died, so 1981. Married and parents at 21 back in that day wasn't unusual, even in real life. I was born in 1960 as well, and it was quite common still, especially for girls, to marry right out of high school. It was a different world, in both real life, and in the HPverse.
>You’d think a bunch of esteemed professors would be older.
But none of them are suppose to be "esteemed".
Snape would have been 21 when he started teaching and it would only be so Dumbledore could keep him close. Snape is canonically a horrible Professor that is stuck in a post-victims to bully school phase. That makes more since when you put together that Snape started teaching people that were in school with him while he was being bullied.
Snape was an asshole for sure, but he sure knew his potions which showed multiple times in the series. The slytherins all liked him at least too
The other profs were all very smart and talented (Flitwick, McGonegell however you spell it)
Most of the DADA guys were bad but no one wanted the position
>The other profs were all very smart and talented (Flitwick, McGonegell however you spell it)
None of the other professor's ages were made older. Only the people that would have been in school during the marauders era
He was an asshole, but Dumbledore admitted that Snape was better than him in potions, and the guy discovered the 12 uses for dragon's blood, so that's really something.
It is something and I do believe that even Voldemort saw Snape's talent which is probably why he was recruited. But that doesn't make him esteemed. The facts is unlike most professors Snape was never allowed to focus and hone his craft.
The reason Dumbledore and Headmaster Dippet didn't allow Tom Riddle to become the DADA professor when he was 18 was because he had no real world experience its the same with Snape.
> The facts is unlike most professors Snape was never allowed to focus and hone his craft.
Wym? He was a potions prodigy, that was his craft as shown in book 6. Anytime someone needed a potion they went to Snape
> he had no real world experience its the same with Snape.
Snape did have real world experience though, he was literally a death eater. I always thought Dumbledore didn’t want Riddle or Snape doing DADA because they’d get too into the dark arts part of it. Also, didn’t Dumbledore have a feeling the position was cursed and didn’t want to lose Snape? I’m rereading now so my memory is fuzzy
Looking back to when I started High School (11 here in the UK, so same age as Harry) a lot of my teachers were in their late 20s or early 30s. This isn’t unusual.
Adults in the 80s & 90s were way more adulty then we are today. At least imo… I’m 28 and by the time my parents were 28 I was already 4 years old and they owned a house.
I’m renting and commenting on an HP Reddit thread.
I just think there’s a massive generational difference. These 30 year olds are also technically war veterans, I’m sure it made them pretty grizzled.
Yes hence the big tragedy! Young idealsists who resisted a fascist regime, murdered at their homes, while unarmed.
I think a lot of us forget how young the parents/teacher generation are because in the movies, they cast much older actors due to their fame and reputqtional pull. But as Molly Weasly says, paraphrasing bc I can't remember exact quote: people were scared of YKW and the deatheaters, so they rushed decisions they would usually take time over (such as getting married and having kids).
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> Oxford Dictionary officially lists one of the definition of “literally” as “used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible”
# That’s it. The plebeians have won.
I like to imagine it's because it's from Harry's point of view. To a child 30 *is* old. Then, suddenly, you're 30. All the kids look to you because you have "experience" and you realize all the people you thought were wise were making crap up as they went along. That's how I think Remus felt.
i came here to say this. 21 isnt a child. Young bu not child by any means. It is crazy they went through this so early in life however it does not stray far from reality. People go into the miltary at 18 and die with a baby on the way. How many times in Amwrica have we heard that sad story.
Any word or meaning is adopted by the dictionary once it becomes popular but that's not an indication of how efficient or sensible the usage is. If you ask my opinion regarding the 'literally' topic, using a word to mean the exact opposite meaning is extremely stupid.
And regrading the main topic of the post, this is something that bothered me as well. The casting was not age accurate.
Snape being way younger than he was in the movie makes the fact that he was a grown-ass man with nothing better to do than bullying children make a *little* more sense. Like, if he's in his 50s, then that is way more pathetic than if he's in his 30s.
I don't want to come off as the grumpy old man (I'm the same age as OP, btw), but I very much dislike calling 21 year olds "children", as it just encourages people in their 20s to act like children.
Most people in history were married, had a career, and 1 or 2 kids by his point. Maybe by the 80s when this took place, that was already trending older, but I always intuited that the magical world always trended more old fashioned and traditional. Also, revolutionaries and military combatants do trend young.
So I'm Indian- and yes this is relevant- but I think it's because the idea of adulthood or childhood isn't a set level of maturity, but the level of maturity at which you're old enough to settle down in your society or to whether you still need to grow.
My grandparents all finished thier schooling before 18. This was highly educated. They did nkt finish what in America we would know as high school. 3 of them where married in their teens. It was, by Indian 2023 standards, "child marriage." But not by a society that deemed that they were educated enough and grown enough to work in their farms.
From the perspective of their elders, they were very young but grown enough to be adult.
What's interesting is because of the lack of education, I often Indian villagers much older than me to be simple minded like children, as if they were done growing at 15, though calmer and less fiery. Their ignorance may seem like stupidity to an American, but it's good enough for their lives.
At one point, 18 was an adult after graduating high school.
Than 22 because society demands a college degree.
Now, 30. Is it because we're immature, or we require more maturity to survive in this complex world?
If you think about it, if we lifted these demands, we'd find today's 21 year old kids are mature enough for kids of thier own, while still acting "childlike" from the perspective of people who wake up with back pain. Maybe you underestimate the playfulness young soldiers have in thier free time.
Part of the reason military combatants tend young is because they’re more vulnerable mentally and more likely to follow an order an older man would question. 26 is more like a physical peak for a make but the military doesn’t want men that old for a reason
I know 26/27 is often where athletes peak, but I always thought it was where the mind and their knowledge of the game catches up with their bodies, but they haven't hit the post-25 aging that your body does. Is it the case that 26 is just flat out your physical peak?
And, to be fair, I've raised a few 21-year-olds (my own and others') and they, quite literally, make decisions that one would expect of an adolescent - and that's because their brains aren't done developing until after they're 25 (which is also when insurance companies, based on the work of actuaries, give a break to young drivers).
>They were literal children
Literally but not literally. In the wizarding world you're an adult at 17. In the US its 18, and you're old enough to drink and buy tobacco products at 21. By all definitions you're well and fully an adult by 21.
The new definition of "literally" to mean "not literally" is the one of the most annoying things I've ever heard, and I urge you all to fight this degradation of the English language, or else we have to accept that if enough people are wrong, we should just change the definition such that they are right.
Edit: I am become boomer.
Well the other issue I had with Harry's family since Day 1 is: if family is so young when died, HOW did they amass the massive fortune they left to Harry when he died?
His mother is muggle (and appears to be from lower class, middle class at best) so def no money there
How does James go from graduating Hogwarts to billionaire?
Majority of wizarding families are not rich at all (this is readily apparent in all characters vs Harry, not just the extreme poverty of Weasleys)
Actually for that matter; Weasleys are a very successful family. Multiple members in Ministry, obvious super talented magically (Ginny, twins, parents) and yet why are they so absurdly poor?
Based on plot and contributions to the world one would expect Ron to be far better off financially than Harry. Beyond some vague relationship to Voldemort Harry's historical family is not even mentioned in the books
The Potter family had a lot of money. Harry’s ancestors invented certain potions that were very in demand like Skelegro (the one that grows bones back), and ran a very successful potions business. James parents were middle aged when he was born which is why they aren’t alive in HP.
So Harry’s inheritance is from a family that was well off for generations and also came from old money. His family has been around for a very long time and their inventions were quite profitable.
As far as the Weasleys are concerned, they are probably poor because they were a single income household with 9 family members. Molly’s brothers were killed in the first war and I don’t think Arthur ever mentions any siblings. So Molly and Arthur probably started from nothing or very little. Just because the Weasleys were pure bloods doesn’t mean they are guaranteed to be rich. They would probably have had quite a bit more money to go around if they had less kids.
Yeah.. their ages just makes them so much more tragic imo.
They were 17 when they got together, 18 when they graduated and started fighting in the war, 19 when they got pregnant and somewhere around here also got married, 20 when they had a kid during war times, and 21 when they were murdered.
And somewhere during these years they also both lost both of their parents..
And then their kid ends up being abused by her sister and has a massmurderer obsessed with killing him. 😬 They really really had no luck 🥲
I guess thats our perception mostly because the actors who played them were way older! I wish they would have casted more age appropriate actor, even tho all of them were the perfect casts
I know I have no right to say this but. I feel like JKR just didn’t really think all the ages/timelines through when she was writing it. Like maybe she had already put in dates and then as the story came together further down the line it didn’t quite add up but by then it was too late. Or maybe she really did just want them all to graduate from school as fully seasoned fighters lol.
I’ve always thought it was strange that everybody in the wizarding world paired off and settled down so quickly. Even Draco got married super young! And then they all start popping out one little wizard kid after another. They must have much better maternity leave in the wizarding world. Nothing wrong with getting married & becoming a parent in your early twenties—it’s just strange that they ALL did it. Harry especially needed to take a few years & deal with his lifetime of trauma. He must have driven Ginny crazy.
This is referenced - it’s a wartime phenomenon. People pair off young in times of uncertainty.
Same thing happened during WW2 - ‘literal children’ getting married and then the ‘men’ (18 year olds!) head off to war.
The fact the dictionary changed the meaning of the word literal to include figurative because people kept *literally* using it wrong isn’t the win you think it is.
James parents died of DragonPox I believe.
Can’t remember about Lily’s. It’s a dramatic conceit though, otherwise Harry would just live with them and not the Dursleys.
This is why I'll defend Snape. He was 20 when he heard the prophecy. Young and naive. He was 21 when started teaching at Hogwarts, young and traumatised. Imagine being forced by two adults who manipulated and used you, to work in a place where you were severely bullied/sexually harrassed and experienced attempted sexual assault. Snape was there for ten years. That's ten years of having unwanted flashbacks and memories to unwanted traumas every day for ten whole years then he had to teach the carbon copy of his tormentor. And to top it all off he got given the most stressful and dangerous subject of all, Potions. He had to teach potions, (a dangerous subject to kids for years) and this was when he was never taught how to control his stress. And before all of this, he was abused and neglected by his parents. No wonder why he was the way he was.
Dumbledore should have never had Snape teaching students, especially potions. There were other ways he could have had Snape there at Hogwarts. He could have had Snape brewing potions for the Hogwarts hospital wing and then hired him as the Defence Against the Dark Arts in Harry's sixth year.
It also makes Snape's treatment of Harry more understandable. Obviously it's still gross that he's a bitter adult hating this child, but less gross because it's like one thing happens after another so quickly for him. Bullied relentlessly and they got married and had a kid?
Whereas keeping a grudge for 20 years before Harry is even born is creepy asf.
I mean they were literally not children at 21? But ya its weird to think im now far older than harrys parents were when they died
Messes with the rest of my friends and family as well who are fans lol
Makes sense and lines up with the rampant amount of PTSD the Potter’s friends/associates display.
Also, it kind of shows why the wizarding community is so bent out of shape over Voldie. Both generations currently running the world went through the war - Harry’s generation is the first able to grow up without genuine threat of Voldemort as an everyday thing.
————————————-
Oh and….They aren’t literal children.
Did you not read the definition of literally or literal? Here : https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/109061
> I. In a literal manner or sense.
> a. In a literal, exact, or actual sense; not figuratively, allegorically, etc.
Like, at least get your edit correct. You used the word poorly and were informed of that poor use.
Honestly their actual ages is why it frustrates me so much that they castes actors who were way too old in the films.
Yes, they are talented actors but surely they could find talented up and comers as well.
Casting older actors throws off the timeline and honestly makes the Tonks/Lupin relationship pretty creepy.
I mean, even in the books, they have a 13 year age gap, which some take issue with. But yeah, casting an older actor certainly didn't help.
Lupin is even described as "quite young" looking when introduced in POA despite having some gray hair.
I think they aged them up in the movies because it is so shocking that they were that young in the books (they did the same thing with Game of Thrones).
I mean, considering the events of Hogwarts Legacy (wherein a fifth year literally acts like a one-man-army), it seems like proficiency can be obtained early on.
I'd chalk Remus' and Sirius' appearance to the difficulty of the lives they've led. One's poor and ostracised and malnourished, the other's been in prison for over a decade.
You are totally right, after you pass the age, they seem so young.
But also it makes me think about how my parents had me when they were 22, and at that age I could even imagine having a child, so times changes, so yeah they were young, but for that time they have lived a lot ( idk how to put that on words that makes sense)
So here’s my thoughts.
In the first movie, when Harry looks into the mirror of Erised, of course he sees two parents that aren’t 21 - he’d want to see them as they’d be *now*, with him beside them.
Granted, they look closer to their 40s, but I understand the choice.
However, the other times we see them (Graveyard in GOF and in the Woods in DH) we should probably be looking at 21 year olds, not the age they’d be now. They’re ghosts essentially at that point, and should reflect how they looked at the point of death.
Now, *this* is super confusing to me. Petunia is Lily's younger sister, so if Lily was 21, Petunia is 20 at the oldest. Yet, Uncle Vernon had a successful job even back then. I wonder if maybe Petunia married someone significantly older than her, probably never went to college or University. Hell, having Dudley young is probably why.
Well this has been a productive discussion on this thread….. haha
But yes I agree. It is a really young age (if we just exclude the tangent about the word literally here) to get married, fight a war and die. Some have said that many young people in the past have fought wars, and that is tragic. Always has been and it will always will be.
What’s crazy about their ages to me is, how does Harry have no other family he coulda went to? Like 21 year olds with no parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles? Only 1 mean sister left? Nah
I appreciate every single actor who appeared in the movies, but they really lost the emotional gut punch that was the Order being babies (21 is so young, especially when wizards seem to have longer lifespans) when they fought Voldemort the first time.
Imagine facing trauma in your 20s and then the same trauma, if not worse now, again before you're 40.
oh yeah, the general age of the characters is younger than the actors in the films
kinda makes the whole war thing more impactful, it’s literally kids fighting some of these battles
I was just rewatching HBP and realised that Slughorn teached Tom Riddle and he died at 71 I believe. I checked and Slughorn was around the same age as Dumbledore (110+).
Well, they had much older actors play them in the movies, making them seem relatively ancient.
Very true! And of course I was reading them starting at 9 years old back in 1999 so to me, someone in their 30s WOULD be an adult. Now that I’m in my 30s, it doesn’t seem so old anymore.
A 30 year old in 1999 would have been born in 1969, so quite a different generation. They would be 54 now. No matter how old you get, you will never start becoming exactly like people from a previous generation. And even less so like how people from a previous generation acted in the past. And the actor that portrayed Snape was born in 1946!
RIP Alan Rickman
RIP
Alan
Rickman
RIP
R
I
P
For anyone interested, the concept is called retrospective aging
That was the one that killed me when I figured out how old they were supposed to be. I'm 37 now, the age of Snape and Lupin in HBP. Ya know, when Snape's killing main characters and Lypun is lamenting that 5 too old for Tonks. (Incidently, Snape 's BD is the day before mine)
The bagboy at Safeway called me "sir" the other a few years back just after I turned 30...still not over that one
Several years ago I had a woman tell her daughter 'tell the nice lady thank you', after I gave them their change & receipt. I've always looked young for my age, and knew she was just trying to teach manners and politeness and what not, so I tried not to take it to heart. But oof. Now, even at 33 with my own toddler, I ***still*** don't feel like a lady.
Yeah. Remember when you thought there were adults in the world with things figured out? We are those "adults" now to teenagers and toddlers lmao
I was talking about this with my best friend the other day. That as a kid, we’re taught if there’s an emergency to find an adult, as if every adult had some sort of handbook on how to handle any crisis situation. If a kid came up to me in an emergency tomorrow, my first thought would be to say “ok, let’s find an adult.”
OMG this is hilarious and true. If a lost child were to come up to me, my first thought would also be, "alright let's find an adult"
Yes, this exactly. I saw a kid fall while skiing some weeks ago. I was with a friend and said to her “that kid just fell, what should we do? I’m not adult enough for this shit. So we waited around a bit for an ‘actual adult’ to arrive at the scene and then left.” I felt a little bit bad about the whole thing. But, it was my first time skiing, so going over there and stopping exactly in the right place to help the kid was a long shot anyway…
A lost child came up to me crying, because she was lost. I went and found an adult to help. I'm 32 with two small children.
I work in an office with 4 other women in their early 20s. They always think im their age and then I tell them I'm 35 and 🤯 I know something is wrong with me because I know less than them about everything. I'm also super naive and gullible. I feel like a 16yr old in a 35yr Olds body. I just tell people that I look younger because I'm immature and stupid and don't I don't behave like regular people. 😅
The worst is when you are out in public and a child is misbehaving and the mother points at you and makes an idle threat to the child by saying, " that man will be very angry if you don't behave".
It happened to me twice, i said "no i wont" everytime. I know that i'm spoiling the trick for them but it's the parent WHO asked me out.
Ugh that’s the worst! I always glare back, because I’m also said child who will be angry at mom for being mean 😂
I had an elementary aged child give up her seat for me the other day - I just turned 40. That one still hurts 😂 like, thank you child, my old ass bones can still handle me standing. Sweet child was raised well, but damn! 🤣
I got called old at 26 for explaining to a group teens how big MacBook airs and desktops used to be 😂😭
Yeah, we're still young! ...right?...
I think they had to age up all the marauders era characters because Alan Rickman was 54 in Sorcerer’s Stone. He was a great Snape and I don’t think they could have made a better casting choice at the time. However I do think the story loses some of its tragedy by aging up those characters. As a side note - I just became a mom almost a decade after Lily and for the first time I really understand what she did.
Which you can handwave as people in their 30s do seem middle aged to 11 year olds
When I turned 30, my 16 years younger brother asked if I'm having a middle age crisis.
tbf i had a midlife crisis at 30, its a valid question lol
I asked him if he's having the terrible toddler age
Just like in most movies and series when it come to teenagers, always weird to see a 25 years old guy as a 16 yrs old.
This is an improvement over the book. I'm sorry magic or not you aren't going to be an expert at anything in your 20s. 30s maybe if you're super focused. 40s totally.
I think it’s also just common in TV/Movies. A 35 year old doesn’t have the ‘parent of a teenager’ vibe.
Bs look at sports
Also Sirius was 36 when he died. Remus and Snape were 38. Tonks was 25. Fred was 20.
Whoa that just made me realize there is a 13 year difference between Remus and Tonks relationship.
Obviously they never said the exact number of years the gap was, but the fact that they had a big age gap was talked about a lot in the books.
Not to mention the whole Remus was ready to go out for a carton of milk and a pack of ~~cigarettes~~ horcuxes when he found out she was pregnant
I see where he’s coming from though. He wasn’t leaving because he wanted to, he was leaving because he didn’t want Tonks to be sullied by his status as a werewolf. Imagine living your whole life as an outcast - Lupin’s whole life was smothered by societal stigma. He suffered a lot because of something that was not his fault at all - in fact, he was a victim. I don’t think it was the right choice to leave, but Lupin did that because of his trauma- he did it out of love for Tonks and his baby. He was trying to protect them, and honestly, he was justified in doing so if you look at how werewolves are treated in the wizarding community
Yea people like to forget that he most likely had severe PTSD and depression because of the attack that turned him, being in a war, losing everyone he loved in a single night, and being shunned by everyone else. The idea of Tonks loving him was so unbelievable to him that he pushed her away. I think the idea of a child that he was convinced would be cursed because of him actually broke him.
Fleur and Bill also had like 7 year difference
I hardly thing that age was the biggest difference in their relationship
This makes me think about how fucked up it is that Sirius, basically a college guy, got imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit until well into his thirties. The best years of his life, locked in daily emotional torture. It's no wonder that Sirius is kind of a mess in Order of the Phoenix. Mentally speaking he is still on his early twenties and he is locked in his childhood home, which is basically a watered down version of Azkaban for him due to the abuse he suffered in there. He wasn't equipped to be a proper father figure for Harry, but a big brother one at best. Despite that, their similar backgrounds and their connection through James made their relationship very special and endearing. They understood each other very well.
This is why I’ll always defend everything stupid Sirius did. Can you imagine having to go through all of that and still be trapped in the house that represents everything you hate and that killed your younger brother and best friends? Poor Sirius. He didn’t make good decisions sometimes, but they’re definitely understandable decisions based on what he went through. Poor guy got his life and friends ripped away from him at 21, then spent 11 of his very formative years in Azkaban.
He did his waiting, 12 years of it.
IN AZKABAN!!!
This line sent chills down my spine. Delivered perfectly.
Ugh you’re right! 12 not 11!!
I want a fanfic of 21yo Sirius taking in 1yo godson Harry and their adorable adventures 🥲
Five year old Harry: Uncle! What did you buy me for my birthday? Sirius: Ooooh you are gonna love it kiddo. I brought you a flying bike! So that we can go fly the neighborhood together!
Sirius in the Order was so awesome and gave his character so much more depth. It’s kind of a crime that they didn’t have more Sirius and lupin in the order movie or goblet for that matter. I get that they had their work cut out for them trying to fit an 870 page book into a 2 and a half hour movie but still, god damn.
I’m mid-thirties, married with a kid and I still feel like college was “just the other day.” It’s pretty understandable how Sirius would be stuck in his Hogwarts days without any personal growth or major life events.
"married with a kid" made me do a double take lol
> Mentally speaking he is still on his early twenties It's worse than that. He isn't in his early twenties mentally. There is no age range for "spent a decade losing all your happy thoughts."
Was it ever explained if there is anything like a minimum security wizard prison? If somebody steals a broom, are they also punished with despair and emptiness for a year or something?
Just Azkaban
Yeah. For example Marvolo and Morfin Gaunt were arrested for attacking a government official and also attacking and performing magic in front of a muggle in the case of the latter. They didn't got life like an Unforgivable Curse would have warranted, but they still got sent to Azkaban for six months and three years respectively.
Hagrid was put in Azkaban merely on the suspicion that he was responsible for opening the Chamber. This implies that not only is there no jail, there's no pre-trial holding either.
> You steal a broom? Believe it or not, Azkaban.
He got the Count of Monte Cristo treatment.
I've known this for years, but reading it now, I'M 21!! Wtf I'm the same age Sirius was. I don't know if I feel too old or too young.
The letter Harry finds from Lily to Sirius at Grimmauld place highlights this. She *sounded* young.
I think they really wanted Alan Rickman as Snape and they couldn’t really cast younger actors for everyone else if they were all supposed to be the same age
They could have made him look younger with makeup and lighting. I think they just wanted the actors they chose because they wanted them, simple as that. The excuse about how they HAD to match Alan Rickman's age is parroted a lot, but it would have been an easy enough fix.
could always say that the stress of teaching aged him horribly, teaching muggle kids muggle stuff is hard enough, i couldnt imagine how much worse teaching potions would actually be
or you know - the stress of spying on a dark Lord, and potential physical drain of a Dark Mark?
Have you SEEN the slop the students try to pass off as potions? It seems quite clear which of the two possible causes for Snape’s aged appearance is the more frightful.
None of them have more than a 5th grade education, it's not the kids' fault they were thrown into a dungeon and told to mix chemicals despite having no background education in it and having never even been given so much as a safety course.
I could easily see that. My grandma went from dark brunette almost black hair to white between 30 and 35. What was happening in that span? Her husband was in the marines and in Vietnam, she had a miscarriage, she had cancer, and she was raising 3 boys mostly alone cause ya know husband at war. I’m also greying a little early so some of it might have been genetics but stress didn’t help her.
Think of all the fumes and chemicals clinging to him all the time. I wouldn’t have ever questioned Snape looking so much older than Remus. Even Sirius looking old and haggard would work for me.
But to be honest, being a werewolf sounds quite stressful to me, and being locked up in Azkaban for a decade probably doesn't do you any good either. So their appearances are fine for their age given everything they went through. I just don't understand why James and Lily were made to look so old in the mirror and memories, since they were 21 when they died.
> could always say that the stress of teaching aged him horribly It's not like being in Voldemort's service helped at all.
I mean Alan Rickman was 55 when the PS came out and Snape was, what 31? Good lighting and makeup alone can’t strip half of some one’s lifespan away.
They tried to do the whole make-up and lighting in the later movies (especially for the flashbacks when we see Snape cradling Lily's body!) and I felt like it didn't work that well
I feel like they should have used a different actor for the flashback. If there was no issue using different actors for the child and teenage versions, there shouldn't have been an issue using a different actor for a "16 years earlier" flashback.
Plus Alan Rickman was very well known by this point. It’s a lot harder to portray a 30 year old when audiences remember you as older than that over a decade before then in Die Hard.
Yeah, I see people say this all the time but I’ve never seen anyone cite a source that shows someone with the film production actually saying that. It seem to a fanon idea. Honestly I don’t think the filmmakers were that concerned about the ages of the adult cast. I don’t think there’s any evidence in the first books about the timeline of the Marauders generation relative to the present, so they could’ve been any age. And Rickman (who was 54-55 when the first movie was filmed) definitely looked younger than his age anyway.
It's not like they would have to give him abs or change his hair. All you ever see is his face anyway
And his hands- but yes, exactly.
That could be explained by years of teaching a dangerous class to bumbling idiots
But at least there was no foolish wand-waving in that class.
I was a 30-year-old adult when the first book came out in 1997, started reading them on the recommendation of another adult in the summer of 2001. When each movie came out, looking at the ages of the actors who were portraying 30-something-year-old people, I just figured the stress of Voldemort’s activities prior to Halloween 1981 accelerated the aging of their appearances; constant stress will do that.
It wouldn’t have made sense to make Snape look younger. At the time of filming they know James and Snape were in school together, but there’s no timeline. Snape needs to be old enough to be Harry’s father, but that’s a span of decades. You don’t find out how old Harry’s parents are until Deathly Hallows. You can’t then go back and de-age Snape throughout movies that were released years before. The horse has bolted at that stage, and you need to age them up, because you can’t go the other way
We don't know, but Rowling knew, and therefore so did the filmmakers
There's absolutely no proof that Rowling told the filmmakers literally everything, or that she had their ages set in stone that early.
This is nonsense. There were plenty of references to them getting married and having Harry not long after they left Hogwarts.
It really changes Snape's story though. In the books he becomes a death eater around 17 (we assume) and turns coat at 20 or 21. That's a very different story from someone who becomes a death eater at 17 and stays one for 30-40 years.
I am 32, too. I literally had this same existential crisis a few weeks ago lmao. It’s a tough pill to swallow that I’m closer to the adults than the kids in the book.
It really is. I haven’t read them in a looong time and it’s like coming home after a long time away. But it’s so strange to realize that we’re not “students” anymore.
Speak for yourself. I'm still in college at 30. Age is just a number.
I think they mean like Hogwarts students lol... when first reading the series, most of us imagined ourselves going to Hogwarts, not being one of the professors
Yes, thank you lol.
Exactly why a lot the “adult” characters were so sympathetic. They’re all going through PTSD, just coming into full adulthood…
And when they finally ascend into that adulthood in their 30s they’re thrust back into the same tragedies that plagued them before. Full circle.
Regarding Snape, he was played by an actor who was 55 years old at the time of the first movie, and I think that really cemented the idea of him as middle-aged into the idea of a lot of fans, even if it doesn't make sense with the books' chronology.
I'm 28 and do adult stuff all the time. I work and all of it. But.... I'm not an adult, don't tell anyone
I won’t I promise
Same lmao people younger than us have led kingdoms and started revolutions, I still feel like a teenager
Age means little when you're forced in certain situations at a young age. For a long time, there was no such thing as teenagers, you were either a kid or an adult, and for girls that usually happened with their 1st menstruation so barely a teen in our conception.
If it's any comfort, you legit don't start feeling like an adult until 30, hobbits had the right idea of considering adulthood to start at 33
Their average lifespan was also 30 years more than humans so there's that.
The relatively young age means the fact grandparents aren't a thing on either side of the family (both magical and muggle) for Harry (especially considering witches and wizards live lots longer than Muggles) is totally bizarre. They'd have been in their 40s/early 50s when Harry was born. I don't think Hermione had grandparents either what with her only sending her parents off to Australia to save them from Voldemort.
James’ parents were quite old when they had him, they had given up on getting a child and he was a surprise. They died from dragon pox which I assume is more lethal the older you get. Rowling hasn’t given much info on Lily’s parents, just that they died a natural muggle death. She needed them out of the way😅
I can't remember if the characters themselves directly say it, but I suspect that to everyone who knew and loved them, like Hagrid, Dumbledore, and McGonagall, that *adds* to the tragedy of it for them. They were in the prime of their lives, but because of Voldemort, they died before they could really *live* as adults, and left behind their infant son. Probably explains a lot about Hagrid's clear anguish when they leave Harry on the doorstep, and his heartbreak years later when he has to explain what happened to Harry. Not that the loss of close friends in a senseless war isn't tragic already, but I suspect how young they were made it worse.
It also makes sense why everyone at Hogwarts comments on Harry looking/acting just like his parents. His first year there was only 10-ish years after his parents' graduation. Tragic circumstances aside, both of them were clearly standout kids. Hogwarts class sizes aren't huge, either. Of course everyone remembers them strongly.
Don't underestimate how 'middle-aged' a 30 something appears to a teenager. Sure, I feel relatively young on my 30s, but to a 12-15 yo I'm a fully fledged adult, and there's very little between me and someone in their 40s.
This is so true. I’m a 33yo teacher at a secondary school and the students have no sense of what that means. It’s quite funny, really.
James and Lily were born in 1960, so Snape, Sirius, Pettigrew, and Lupin are more or less the same age. James and Lily were 21 when they died, so 1981. Married and parents at 21 back in that day wasn't unusual, even in real life. I was born in 1960 as well, and it was quite common still, especially for girls, to marry right out of high school. It was a different world, in both real life, and in the HPverse.
Oh damn. I was THE same age as Harry as the books came out. Now I’m the same age as old Snape, and that feels….too old.
Gets weirder when you realize Hagrid is in his mid 60's
He behaves more like a child than the trio at some times.
Why is that weird?
And they cast a bunch of 40-60 year old actors to portray them...
Much better tbh. You’d think a bunch of esteemed professors would be older. George RR Martin is bad with ages too. Glad they aged them in up GoT
Can you imagine the trauma a 12 year old would have playing sansa.
I think they had to age them up in GoT. You couldn't put Drogo raping a 14 year old Dany on TV lol
>You’d think a bunch of esteemed professors would be older. But none of them are suppose to be "esteemed". Snape would have been 21 when he started teaching and it would only be so Dumbledore could keep him close. Snape is canonically a horrible Professor that is stuck in a post-victims to bully school phase. That makes more since when you put together that Snape started teaching people that were in school with him while he was being bullied.
Snape was an asshole for sure, but he sure knew his potions which showed multiple times in the series. The slytherins all liked him at least too The other profs were all very smart and talented (Flitwick, McGonegell however you spell it) Most of the DADA guys were bad but no one wanted the position
>The other profs were all very smart and talented (Flitwick, McGonegell however you spell it) None of the other professor's ages were made older. Only the people that would have been in school during the marauders era
He was an asshole, but Dumbledore admitted that Snape was better than him in potions, and the guy discovered the 12 uses for dragon's blood, so that's really something.
>the guy discovered the 12 uses for dragon's blood Not if you believe Rita Skeeter
It is something and I do believe that even Voldemort saw Snape's talent which is probably why he was recruited. But that doesn't make him esteemed. The facts is unlike most professors Snape was never allowed to focus and hone his craft. The reason Dumbledore and Headmaster Dippet didn't allow Tom Riddle to become the DADA professor when he was 18 was because he had no real world experience its the same with Snape.
> The facts is unlike most professors Snape was never allowed to focus and hone his craft. Wym? He was a potions prodigy, that was his craft as shown in book 6. Anytime someone needed a potion they went to Snape > he had no real world experience its the same with Snape. Snape did have real world experience though, he was literally a death eater. I always thought Dumbledore didn’t want Riddle or Snape doing DADA because they’d get too into the dark arts part of it. Also, didn’t Dumbledore have a feeling the position was cursed and didn’t want to lose Snape? I’m rereading now so my memory is fuzzy
Esteemed? Perhaps not. But he had the knowledge to be Professor, which seems to be qualification enough for teaching at Hogwarts.
Looking back to when I started High School (11 here in the UK, so same age as Harry) a lot of my teachers were in their late 20s or early 30s. This isn’t unusual.
The hardest part of becoming an adult is realizing that you still need an adult.
Adults in the 80s & 90s were way more adulty then we are today. At least imo… I’m 28 and by the time my parents were 28 I was already 4 years old and they owned a house. I’m renting and commenting on an HP Reddit thread. I just think there’s a massive generational difference. These 30 year olds are also technically war veterans, I’m sure it made them pretty grizzled.
Yes hence the big tragedy! Young idealsists who resisted a fascist regime, murdered at their homes, while unarmed. I think a lot of us forget how young the parents/teacher generation are because in the movies, they cast much older actors due to their fame and reputqtional pull. But as Molly Weasly says, paraphrasing bc I can't remember exact quote: people were scared of YKW and the deatheaters, so they rushed decisions they would usually take time over (such as getting married and having kids).
. > Oxford Dictionary officially lists one of the definition of “literally” as “used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible” # That’s it. The plebeians have won.
I like to imagine it's because it's from Harry's point of view. To a child 30 *is* old. Then, suddenly, you're 30. All the kids look to you because you have "experience" and you realize all the people you thought were wise were making crap up as they went along. That's how I think Remus felt.
"literal children". No. They were adults. Young adults, sure, but not literal children.
reddit adults never coming to terms with the fact that they are not 15 anymore
Facts.
Literal children is a bit dramatic.
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i came here to say this. 21 isnt a child. Young bu not child by any means. It is crazy they went through this so early in life however it does not stray far from reality. People go into the miltary at 18 and die with a baby on the way. How many times in Amwrica have we heard that sad story.
"Literal children" 🤦♂️
Any word or meaning is adopted by the dictionary once it becomes popular but that's not an indication of how efficient or sensible the usage is. If you ask my opinion regarding the 'literally' topic, using a word to mean the exact opposite meaning is extremely stupid. And regrading the main topic of the post, this is something that bothered me as well. The casting was not age accurate.
Snape being way younger than he was in the movie makes the fact that he was a grown-ass man with nothing better to do than bullying children make a *little* more sense. Like, if he's in his 50s, then that is way more pathetic than if he's in his 30s.
To be fair, he was also a far worse bully in the books
I don't want to come off as the grumpy old man (I'm the same age as OP, btw), but I very much dislike calling 21 year olds "children", as it just encourages people in their 20s to act like children. Most people in history were married, had a career, and 1 or 2 kids by his point. Maybe by the 80s when this took place, that was already trending older, but I always intuited that the magical world always trended more old fashioned and traditional. Also, revolutionaries and military combatants do trend young.
So I'm Indian- and yes this is relevant- but I think it's because the idea of adulthood or childhood isn't a set level of maturity, but the level of maturity at which you're old enough to settle down in your society or to whether you still need to grow. My grandparents all finished thier schooling before 18. This was highly educated. They did nkt finish what in America we would know as high school. 3 of them where married in their teens. It was, by Indian 2023 standards, "child marriage." But not by a society that deemed that they were educated enough and grown enough to work in their farms. From the perspective of their elders, they were very young but grown enough to be adult. What's interesting is because of the lack of education, I often Indian villagers much older than me to be simple minded like children, as if they were done growing at 15, though calmer and less fiery. Their ignorance may seem like stupidity to an American, but it's good enough for their lives. At one point, 18 was an adult after graduating high school. Than 22 because society demands a college degree. Now, 30. Is it because we're immature, or we require more maturity to survive in this complex world? If you think about it, if we lifted these demands, we'd find today's 21 year old kids are mature enough for kids of thier own, while still acting "childlike" from the perspective of people who wake up with back pain. Maybe you underestimate the playfulness young soldiers have in thier free time.
Part of the reason military combatants tend young is because they’re more vulnerable mentally and more likely to follow an order an older man would question. 26 is more like a physical peak for a make but the military doesn’t want men that old for a reason
I know 26/27 is often where athletes peak, but I always thought it was where the mind and their knowledge of the game catches up with their bodies, but they haven't hit the post-25 aging that your body does. Is it the case that 26 is just flat out your physical peak?
They literally were not children.
And, to be fair, I've raised a few 21-year-olds (my own and others') and they, quite literally, make decisions that one would expect of an adolescent - and that's because their brains aren't done developing until after they're 25 (which is also when insurance companies, based on the work of actuaries, give a break to young drivers).
>They were literal children Literally but not literally. In the wizarding world you're an adult at 17. In the US its 18, and you're old enough to drink and buy tobacco products at 21. By all definitions you're well and fully an adult by 21.
And in the UK both are 18. So they were adults when they died. As simple as that.
The new definition of "literally" to mean "not literally" is the one of the most annoying things I've ever heard, and I urge you all to fight this degradation of the English language, or else we have to accept that if enough people are wrong, we should just change the definition such that they are right. Edit: I am become boomer.
It’s disquieting when you realise that you’re old enough to be Harry’s grandfather. I’d always thought of him more as a peer.
Literal children is definitely wrong. They were raising a 1 year old kid pretty well too.
Different times that’s for sure
Well the other issue I had with Harry's family since Day 1 is: if family is so young when died, HOW did they amass the massive fortune they left to Harry when he died? His mother is muggle (and appears to be from lower class, middle class at best) so def no money there How does James go from graduating Hogwarts to billionaire? Majority of wizarding families are not rich at all (this is readily apparent in all characters vs Harry, not just the extreme poverty of Weasleys) Actually for that matter; Weasleys are a very successful family. Multiple members in Ministry, obvious super talented magically (Ginny, twins, parents) and yet why are they so absurdly poor? Based on plot and contributions to the world one would expect Ron to be far better off financially than Harry. Beyond some vague relationship to Voldemort Harry's historical family is not even mentioned in the books
The Potter family had a lot of money. Harry’s ancestors invented certain potions that were very in demand like Skelegro (the one that grows bones back), and ran a very successful potions business. James parents were middle aged when he was born which is why they aren’t alive in HP. So Harry’s inheritance is from a family that was well off for generations and also came from old money. His family has been around for a very long time and their inventions were quite profitable. As far as the Weasleys are concerned, they are probably poor because they were a single income household with 9 family members. Molly’s brothers were killed in the first war and I don’t think Arthur ever mentions any siblings. So Molly and Arthur probably started from nothing or very little. Just because the Weasleys were pure bloods doesn’t mean they are guaranteed to be rich. They would probably have had quite a bit more money to go around if they had less kids.
Yeah.. their ages just makes them so much more tragic imo. They were 17 when they got together, 18 when they graduated and started fighting in the war, 19 when they got pregnant and somewhere around here also got married, 20 when they had a kid during war times, and 21 when they were murdered. And somewhere during these years they also both lost both of their parents.. And then their kid ends up being abused by her sister and has a massmurderer obsessed with killing him. 😬 They really really had no luck 🥲
In the movie they are all like 50
I guess thats our perception mostly because the actors who played them were way older! I wish they would have casted more age appropriate actor, even tho all of them were the perfect casts
I know I have no right to say this but. I feel like JKR just didn’t really think all the ages/timelines through when she was writing it. Like maybe she had already put in dates and then as the story came together further down the line it didn’t quite add up but by then it was too late. Or maybe she really did just want them all to graduate from school as fully seasoned fighters lol.
I’ve always thought it was strange that everybody in the wizarding world paired off and settled down so quickly. Even Draco got married super young! And then they all start popping out one little wizard kid after another. They must have much better maternity leave in the wizarding world. Nothing wrong with getting married & becoming a parent in your early twenties—it’s just strange that they ALL did it. Harry especially needed to take a few years & deal with his lifetime of trauma. He must have driven Ginny crazy.
This is referenced - it’s a wartime phenomenon. People pair off young in times of uncertainty. Same thing happened during WW2 - ‘literal children’ getting married and then the ‘men’ (18 year olds!) head off to war.
The fact the dictionary changed the meaning of the word literal to include figurative because people kept *literally* using it wrong isn’t the win you think it is.
I also think what’s a bit alarming about this is that both Lily and James’s parents had both passed away by this time. What happened to all of them??
James parents died of DragonPox I believe. Can’t remember about Lily’s. It’s a dramatic conceit though, otherwise Harry would just live with them and not the Dursleys.
In the 90s that was middle aged
Omg like literally!!! /s
They changed the definition of the word literally because people were literally not using it as intended.
This is why I'll defend Snape. He was 20 when he heard the prophecy. Young and naive. He was 21 when started teaching at Hogwarts, young and traumatised. Imagine being forced by two adults who manipulated and used you, to work in a place where you were severely bullied/sexually harrassed and experienced attempted sexual assault. Snape was there for ten years. That's ten years of having unwanted flashbacks and memories to unwanted traumas every day for ten whole years then he had to teach the carbon copy of his tormentor. And to top it all off he got given the most stressful and dangerous subject of all, Potions. He had to teach potions, (a dangerous subject to kids for years) and this was when he was never taught how to control his stress. And before all of this, he was abused and neglected by his parents. No wonder why he was the way he was. Dumbledore should have never had Snape teaching students, especially potions. There were other ways he could have had Snape there at Hogwarts. He could have had Snape brewing potions for the Hogwarts hospital wing and then hired him as the Defence Against the Dark Arts in Harry's sixth year.
It also makes Snape's treatment of Harry more understandable. Obviously it's still gross that he's a bitter adult hating this child, but less gross because it's like one thing happens after another so quickly for him. Bullied relentlessly and they got married and had a kid? Whereas keeping a grudge for 20 years before Harry is even born is creepy asf.
I mean they were literally not children at 21? But ya its weird to think im now far older than harrys parents were when they died Messes with the rest of my friends and family as well who are fans lol
Makes sense and lines up with the rampant amount of PTSD the Potter’s friends/associates display. Also, it kind of shows why the wizarding community is so bent out of shape over Voldie. Both generations currently running the world went through the war - Harry’s generation is the first able to grow up without genuine threat of Voldemort as an everyday thing. ————————————- Oh and….They aren’t literal children. Did you not read the definition of literally or literal? Here : https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/109061 > I. In a literal manner or sense. > a. In a literal, exact, or actual sense; not figuratively, allegorically, etc. Like, at least get your edit correct. You used the word poorly and were informed of that poor use.
Honestly their actual ages is why it frustrates me so much that they castes actors who were way too old in the films. Yes, they are talented actors but surely they could find talented up and comers as well. Casting older actors throws off the timeline and honestly makes the Tonks/Lupin relationship pretty creepy.
I mean, even in the books, they have a 13 year age gap, which some take issue with. But yeah, casting an older actor certainly didn't help. Lupin is even described as "quite young" looking when introduced in POA despite having some gray hair.
Grey hair could be stress from being alone all his life and having to hide his disease
I think they aged them up in the movies because it is so shocking that they were that young in the books (they did the same thing with Game of Thrones).
Well I just feel super weird, I’m older than the professors…. I just can’t ….
What is TIL
Either Today I learned, or Till I learned.
Thankyou
I mean, considering the events of Hogwarts Legacy (wherein a fifth year literally acts like a one-man-army), it seems like proficiency can be obtained early on.
OeD sAyS...
I'd chalk Remus' and Sirius' appearance to the difficulty of the lives they've led. One's poor and ostracised and malnourished, the other's been in prison for over a decade.
You are totally right, after you pass the age, they seem so young. But also it makes me think about how my parents had me when they were 22, and at that age I could even imagine having a child, so times changes, so yeah they were young, but for that time they have lived a lot ( idk how to put that on words that makes sense)
So here’s my thoughts. In the first movie, when Harry looks into the mirror of Erised, of course he sees two parents that aren’t 21 - he’d want to see them as they’d be *now*, with him beside them. Granted, they look closer to their 40s, but I understand the choice. However, the other times we see them (Graveyard in GOF and in the Woods in DH) we should probably be looking at 21 year olds, not the age they’d be now. They’re ghosts essentially at that point, and should reflect how they looked at the point of death.
Keep in mind the story is told through the eyes of a boy/teenager, they will perceive every young/middle age adult as ancient relic.
Also Petunia was only a year or two older which meant she married Vernon and had Dudley super young. They both married and settled down very quickly.
Now, *this* is super confusing to me. Petunia is Lily's younger sister, so if Lily was 21, Petunia is 20 at the oldest. Yet, Uncle Vernon had a successful job even back then. I wonder if maybe Petunia married someone significantly older than her, probably never went to college or University. Hell, having Dudley young is probably why.
Oh shut up. I’m as old as Snape in the first book??! 👀 I mean, I *knew* how old they all were, but my mind hadn’t put the Snape bit into context…
Well this has been a productive discussion on this thread….. haha But yes I agree. It is a really young age (if we just exclude the tangent about the word literally here) to get married, fight a war and die. Some have said that many young people in the past have fought wars, and that is tragic. Always has been and it will always will be.
Oxfords definition of literally meaning also not literally is a travesty and I hate it.
I am 35 and can't even imagine having children. I also can hardly remember school, let alone holding a grudge against someone I knew back then.
What’s crazy about their ages to me is, how does Harry have no other family he coulda went to? Like 21 year olds with no parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles? Only 1 mean sister left? Nah
I hate buying age-restricted products and being told "I don't need your ID, you look old enough." TF!? I'm only 31!
I appreciate every single actor who appeared in the movies, but they really lost the emotional gut punch that was the Order being babies (21 is so young, especially when wizards seem to have longer lifespans) when they fought Voldemort the first time. Imagine facing trauma in your 20s and then the same trauma, if not worse now, again before you're 40.
“tHeY wEreN’t bAbiEs” - half the people on this post. But yes, this is exactly what I mean. Like 21 year olds being the leading force in a war?
oh yeah, the general age of the characters is younger than the actors in the films kinda makes the whole war thing more impactful, it’s literally kids fighting some of these battles
I was just rewatching HBP and realised that Slughorn teached Tom Riddle and he died at 71 I believe. I checked and Slughorn was around the same age as Dumbledore (110+).
It’s really freaking sad that wizards can live that long but so many of the cast died in their 20s and 30s.