queerastronauts:

I feel like we, as a fandom, have been glossing over something for a very, very long time: What the hell was up with the Prefects’ Bathroom?

So. Two prefects are chosen in the fifth year in every house and stay prefects till they graduate. That means there are 24 prefects at any given time (2 prefects x 4 houses x 3 years), and 4 quidditch captains at any given time, who also have access to the bathroom. Additionally, any kind of other student leader* (as demonstrates by James, a quidditch captain) can be head boy/girl. That means there are up to 30 people (24 prefects + 2 possible external head boy/girl + 4 quidditch captains) with access to the Prefects’ Bathroom at any given time.

Moving on. It’s been a while since I read GoF, but I remember Harry’s description of the Prefects’ Bathroom to be one very large bath. He doesn’t mention any side rooms, or that this is one room among many. So, unless there is room-of-requirement type of magic going on (and that’s implied to be very unique, very old magic, while the plumbing was put in, iirc, at the end of the 19th century), there is no privacy in the Prefects’ Bathroom.

24-26 prefects, as well as 4 quidditch captains, all teenagers, one bathroom. Unless that year’s prefects and captains were all in a polyamorous relationship with each other or extremely confident about their bodies, this strikes me as problematic.

Okay. Say, for some reason, all 28-30 students with access do want to go to an incredibly unprivate bathroom. Why the hell would the go to one that is nowhere near any of their dorms? I lived in a boarding school during high school. There was no way I would’ve gone anywhere but the bathroom right there in my dorm. In my dorm only four/six people had access to my bathroom (including me, rooms varied in size), I knew exactly what they were doing there (cause nobody was going to use the bathroom for anything but showering and pooing with the thickness of our walls), and should somebody leave a mess or not clean up after themselves, we all knew who was responsible.

If, as jkr says, there are 1000 students at Hogwarts at all times (the math is wonky, but she wrote her books with that assumption, and jkr isn’t the best at math), there are probably bathrooms in every dorm room (ie, no communal showers, but instead a bathroom for Harry, Ron, Seamus, Dean, and Neville to share). That means they, like me, have the comfort of a bathroom that is shared by relatively few, and along with showers at the quidditch pitch (which I am, admittedly, assuming are there, for a variety of reasons), there is no reason for anybody to ever venture so far out of their way to take a bath on the Fifth Floor, of all places.

The third question is: why is there a Prefects’ Bathroom in the first place, and who put it there? Who decided that they need one? Why did they design it in such a peculiar, unpractical manner?

And last question. This one is probably the most important, most confusing one of all:

Why, in the name of all that is holy, isn’t it used more often for fanfiction sex?

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* we don’t know what other kinds of student leaders count but there are plenty of other school-sanctioned activities, which makes me wonder if the leader of the chess-club could be a head boy/girl.