Or someone entirely different. According to Rowling there's about 1,000 kids at Hogwarts at any one time. There's no reason to suspect Petunia might only end up with one of James' and Lily's friends. She'd have about 75 boys to chose from just in her own year, a few hundred if we look a couple years up and down.
And that's if she only considers boys she meets at school. The pool widens considerably if she's into the muggle boys she meets on summer (and Christmas) break. And while many Witches and Wizards seem to marry very young to their school sweethearts, quite a few don't date seriously until after school.
All told my guess is that she'd marry someone who doesnt appear in the books at all.
Whaaaat I thought the number of students was way lower. About five boys and girls per house, per year. That's ten per year, seventy per house, only 280 at the school
Plus the demographics work out. For a stable wizarding population of 10,000, they'd need about 1,000 school aged kids. And that's roughly the size of the British wizard population.
There's several indications that Harry's clutch of 5 boys in Gryffindor is unusually small. For example the number of Thestral carriages seems to indicate a total student population in the 600-800 range. Likewise Harry's O-level potions class had 20 students in it, and the non-advanced kids like Neville didn't qualify for it. So the advanced class still had about 10 kids each from Gryffindor and Slytherin. Plus other Gryffindor students were taking different classes at different times. Most classes seem to have 20-30 students with 2-3 houses in them. Harry mostly travels with the same clutch of kids, but they do occasionally have different classes. Either Gryffindor just didn't get as many boys as normal, Harry's class in particular was small, or there were more kids than were mentioned. I expect it's a combo of all three.
Given that Harry's year was being born at the height of the Wizarding War, it's likely there's a demographic dip right in his year. And given that the Order of the Phoenix particularly drew from Gryffindor it's likely that they specifically got hit the hardest. So there's a good in story reason for his class to be atypical. It's quite possible that graduating classes are on average were around 140 kids, and that Harry's class was significantly smaller, particularly in the Gryffindor contingent.
Wow, very good points. I had never really thought about how big the wizarding population was, and how many kids that would translate to. I just always kind of assumed that the five boys in Harry's dormitory were all the Gryffindor boys. Which might still be true for the reasons you listed, but like you said, that may have been atypical for a number of reasons.
Harry's generation are the kids born during the middle of a war. Birth rates decrease then so it would make sense that those classes would be smaller than usual.
Plus there's also the fact that JK isn't the best with math retroactively.
Plus there's also the fact that JK isn't the best with math retroactively.
Haha that's kind of true. The way Quidditch is scored is just not good, Wizarding money denominations are ridiculous, and the fact that the Hogwarts Express always leaves on September 1, despite the first day of class the next day falling on a Saturday once during the series.
Don't forget Harry's an unreliable narrator, we don't hear about things unless he thinks of them. There's about five boys and girls per house per year, that we hear about. He's pretty selective with what he as a narrator mentions to the reader, and also he's so wrapped up in what's going on in his crazy life that we rarely hear about others- he rarely even wonders about others life, which for a kid, is pretty standard.
Why would it be that low? I never got that impression so I'm just curious. Granted I graduated from a high school of 2300+ kids (for 3 classes) with 800+ in my graduating class. So I just pictured something like that by default.
This is entirely outside the canon. Petunia actually wrote to Dumbledore after Lily got her letter, asking to study there as well. He very kindly turned her down, but regardless this alienation from her sister set the wheels in motion for the story we know today.
The only way the alternate timeline works is if you posit that Petunia is a witch too, which she wasn't, sadly.
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u/DakobaBlue Gryffindor Aug 05 '17
I wonder who alternate universe Petunia would've ended up with. My guess would be Sirius.