Subject: We donÂ’t know when the MarauderÂ’s Map was made?
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Posted on: 2014-03-09 13:36:00 UTC
In PoA, Chapter 18, Remus tells that James, Sirius and Peter became Animagi in their fifth year, and then: "Soon we were leaving the Shrieking Shack and roaming the school grounds and the village by night. (...) I doubt whether any Hogwarts student ever found out more about the Hogwarts grounds and Hogsmeade than we did ... And thats how we came to write the Marauders’s Map, and sign it with our nicknames."
Also, we know that the Map doesn’t show the Room of Requirement and that Draco vanished from the Map whenever he entered this room in HBP. The Map’s magic, showing everybody who is in a place the Map "knows", is awesome, but the Map doesn’t show every room and passage that exists. The Marauders didn’t know the castle better than everybody else because they had the Map to show them everyhing, they knew the castle better than everybody else because they explored nearly everything and wrote it on their Map (but they never needed and thus never found the Room of Requirement).
Since the Marauder’s Map still didn’t exist during the Marauder’s third year, and much of the exploration happened only later, it is entirely possible that a child who grew up at Hogwarts knew a secret passage they still didn’t know, and since I’m quite sure that we have never seen all secret passages, it doesn’t matter that this specific passage isn’t canon.
Don’t get this wrong. I really like your first mission. I’m only saying that I might like it even more if there were an in-mission discussion of the possibility that the Sue coincidentally got something right when she tried to show off and upstage the Marauders, but then messed it up when she thought she could use a misspelled greek spell to access her secret passage.
HG