"Michael Way's still living in his parents' house and having their elves watch his halfblood child, if they'd disowned him he wouldn't have been able to run off with a Muggle at all."

"I think you are underestimating Michael Way's capacity to run off. If you'd rather have your children live in hovels should they disagree with you, though..."

"You say that like whether to marry Muggles is something reasonable people can just disagree on."

"Well, if you're sure your children will all be reasonable then you needn't even worry about it, need you."

"I am saying I'd disown unreasonable children who didn't care about their family."

"That's your prerogative, at least if you marry somebody who agrees with you, I just don't think it'll actually help."

Aaron is pleased the questionnaires are provoking so much discussion because it's making people actually fill them out. No one has come up with answers he considers marriageable yet, though.

(Miranda privately advises Stoller that it might behoove her in the long run to look at the questionnaires to know what families are more and less hard-line about this for future reference unless she wants to take a shortcut and attempt to bag a Way twin.)

"I'll take a look. Though honestly marriage doesn't really seem appealing. How old were you when you first wanted -"

"Uh, fourteen, I guess, but I wasn't sure I'd go for it either at first - it's just something where you want the information, it's better to have it and not need it -"

"Yeah." She'll take a peek. 

"The correct answer," he complains to Minor, "is that you can quantify the hit to someone's social standing from a scandal or a dubious association or a Muggle relative by looking at marriage agreements between families trying to compensate for one of those things, and it's quite reasonable to expect someone to compensate their siblings for the damage done to their prospects -"

"So Michael should owe us money?"

"Yes, that would be the way to do it such that Michael incurred the costs of being Michael instead of accidentally spreading them around."

"But he's already trying to save up to move out - wouldn't it be costlier in some ways if he took longer to do that -"

"I mean, if I separately derived value from him not living at home then I could give him money for his house but it really should be separate."

"I feel like if he could get money via you valuing him not living at home you might have a problem."

"- yeah, possibly. Anyway, marrying Muggles should not involve reputation costs accruing to all your blood relatives, that's dumb, so people who know it's dumb mostly just handle it by pretending it doesn't."

"Well, if enough of them pretend it..."

"It'd take people who don't think it's dumb agreeing that it's dumb, it wouldn't be enough for all the people who think it's dumb to ignore it. Ignoring things isn't a great way to make them go away anyway - what you could do is fund a trust of some kind that pays out the reputation cost to everyone involved -"

"If you do enough of that sort of thing it starts looking like a, what do they call it, a dowry?"

"I think dowries are reasonably sensible. Things that are acknowledged to use currency end up less discriminatory than ones that implicitly use currency or mostly use social currency."

"Then people might start marrying rich Muggles. Since the goblins will do exchange."

"If the end result is more Muggle marriages then I think that's probably all for the better."

"Unless they work out badly because they don't actually like each other and then everyone's turned off the idea."