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as appealingly angsty as Sad Albus Who Doesn't Date Anyone Else After Gellert might be, I think it would be just as funny to have Sad Albus Who Dates A Lot of Men, Actually, and gets more and more disappointed/disillusioned each time, until he finally hits gold with the hot time-traveler with the lightning scar

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[muttering feverishly] I need to chase that man around my gothic manor in a silk nightgown

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me, logging into ao3 5 minutes before bedtime: WAITER! bring me your finest enemies to lovers!

ao3 tag search function: excellent choice, sir! how would you like it cooked?

me: explicit. with a side of hurt/comfort

ao3: lovely! and may i suggest a drizzle of mutual pining?

me: of course, and can you add a spritz of angst? make it a 100k slowburn for good measure

ao3: coming right up, sir

me: thank you. oh, and waiter?

ao3: yes, sir?

me: make it gay

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ok well now I cannot stop thinking about harry being the result of jilypad birthday sex. that timing is fucking amazing.

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prisoner of azkaban: sirius & harry

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Wisteria 🌿

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Hey!

My main takeaway from your unhinged ships series - which provides me with limitless entertainment btw so thank you for your service - is how intricate your knowledge of the HP series is!

I'm kind of in a weird limbo rn where I have a great love for this world and the series but JKR's behaviour in recent years has completely turned me off the whole thing. I've been too disheartened to engage with the canon material in any real sense for years, but your exploration of it is kind of rekindling my interest. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Also, is HP like your niche or do you possess an encyclopaedic knowledge on any other works of literature or pop culture phenomena? This is just pure curiosity on my end.

thank you very much for this anon! it's extremely sweet.

how to reconcile being a part of this fandom - and, especially, how to be in a corner of the fandom which places more emphasis on the text than others - with jkr's decision to become a bigot is a question i'm sure we've all spent a lot of time on, and it's one which is going to have an inherently subjective answer.

my personal view is that she'll never get another penny out of me - i'm persevering with my original copies of the books, judiciously sellotaped; i won't engage at all with the upcoming television adaptation; i've not seen the fantastic beasts films; i wouldn't go and see cursed child; i wouldn't play hogwarts legacy; i don't buy merch and so on - but that writing my little stories and yapping away on my little tumblr is fine, because it's an engagement with the series which, no matter how much it focuses on the text she wrote, is still mine rather than hers.

but - of course - there are entirely reasonable arguments against this position, in either direction. someone who does engage more with jkr's post-radicalisation output could justifiably say that - since i've written stories involving delphini, who only exists because of cursed child, the fact that i've never seen or read the play is irrelevant and my insistence that there's a meaningful distinction between enjoying the expanded world of the series and enjoying the expanded world of the series in a way jkr materially benefits from is performative nonsense. someone else could justifiably say that jkr benefits [directly and indirectly] from all fandom engagement, even if that fandom engagement is critical of her and even if it doesn't financially support her - the upcoming television adaptation, for example, wouldn't have been greenlit if hbo didn't think it would get an audience, and the continued vitality of the harry potter fandom undoubtedly contributed to their belief that it would.

neither of these arguments are wrong - although neither is objectively correct either. each of us has to form a subjective opinion, be ok with it, and be open to changing it as time passes.

and i do genuinely think that engaging with the text as a text - something else i bang on about all the time - is helpful when it comes to reconciling everything.

i know it sounds very pretentious [and i also suspect that many people think the series isn't "well-written" enough to justify such pretension...] to say that the fandom needs to get better at embracing a variety of methods of reading the text and understanding the author's relationship to it.

this isn't me saying that anyone who wants to get into fandom needs to be able to rattle of the names of literary theorists, or be able to give an answer to "the series is historiographic metafiction: discuss".

[although if anyone would like to try and argue in favour of that proposition... i'd shriek.]

what it is is me saying that the dominant way of reading the text in the fandom - which is to focus on the reader's emotional response [and, above all, the reader's emotional response in childhood] - can end up giving jkr quite a bit more authority in how we engage with the series than she deserves. it's why many of us might say that we feel she's "betrayed" or "taken something away from" us, for example - and it's why many of us might feel that she's forced us into approaching the series in ways which decentre the canon material.

and this is - obviously - a completely legitimate way of engaging and responding. but there's also a lot to be gained from thinking outside of our emotional responses about things like the genre conventions which govern the series, the tropes and archetypes it uses, its language and syntax, its existence as something standalone, the other works of literature which influence it, and the social and historical context in which it was written. treating the series as "just" some books reduces jkr's authority over our response to it - and while the argument that this doesn't mean anything in the real world, since all she's going to care about is that people are reading her stuff, is an inherently reasonable one, i do think it has real-world benefits to us in how we square the circle of enjoying the text.

more controversially, though, i think it's also worth thinking about the personal context in which the series was written.

for me, the author is dead based on whether or not i need her to be. i don't think that the only valid interpretation of a text is the author's intended one, and i don't think that the only valid interpretation of a text is one dependent on matching parts of the story onto the author's biography. but i do think it's important for readers to know both what jkr understands the text as saying and what has happened in her life that bleeds through into it [such as the way her difficult relationship with her father and her experience of her mother's terminal illness undeniably influences the series' prioritisation of sacrifical motherhood and certain coolness towards fathers]. this doesn't mean agreeing with - or even empathising with - her by any means, it's just another tool in our arsenal when it comes to thinking of the series as no more or less special than any other piece of literature, and jkr no more or less important to our interpretation of it than any other author.

and i think it's worth saying that she doesn't seem to be someone who's bothered when fans say that she doesn't understand her own text or that she's lost the right to speak about it or that the fandom has taken it back from her - which is also why when people say that non-canon shipping [especially of queer pairings] must piss her off i think it's just cope - because she can spin that as these people being childish and unwilling to face reality.

but she does seem to be bothered by people who say "yeah, i know that's what you think and i know that's what you intended... but i disagree and you don't have the right to dictate otherwise".

[this is why - i think - she gets so frothingly pissed-off by daniel radcliffe's immaculate stance against her anti-trans bigotry. he's always very firm in saying "she can think what she wants, but - firstly - this isn't about what she thinks privately, it's about what she does publicly and - secondly - i think she's completely wrong and i'm not going to change my mind just because she wants me to", and she obviously doesn't like the fact that this is much harder to spin into the narrative that she's being "oppressed" and "victimised" than she'd like...]

the text is just a text, and she's just one woman, but our ways of reading are infinite and important and ours. the new horizon in literary theory is "fuck her, we ball".

[when it comes to "do i have a good memory?" the answer is "yes, but for purely useless information". when the question is whether that good memory relates to other pieces of pop culture, i'm either very lucky or very unlucky - depending on where you stand on such things - that the fandoms for hit millennial sitcoms don't seem to be large... otherwise i'd clearly be spending all my time writing epic nick/schmidt or liz lemon/jenna maroney romances and/or being cancelled for being in george michael/maeby nation...]

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I've rarely seen a more validating sentence in my entire life.

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Orgasm denial. Orgasm anger. Orgasm bargaining. Orgasm depression and orgasm acceptance.

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Gellert Grindelwald and Vinda Rosier, Nurmengard Rose Garden.

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Thoughts on Voldemort/Petunia? (Vernon and Bellatrix are forced into an alliance to put a stop to it; Harry takes a well-deserved vacation)

Honestly, I do think there is something interesting here. Voldemort exemplifies the 'freak' label (wink wink) that Petunia uses to tell herself means she wants nothing to do with wizards. But obviously there is a part of her that does want to be a part of that world. Also, mixed up with her feelings about her sister. Voldemort initially sees the whole thing as basically a way to make Harry's life worse (perhaps utilizing a Count Olaf-esque disguise), but then his mommy issues resurface. 

i have been forced, in my time, to back the concept of shipping vernon/bellatrix, and i am similarly forced to back this.

one of the things which is particularly interesting when considering lots of voldemort-centric pairings is how they can be woven into his strange and complicated relationship with social convention.

the wizarding world has an extremely rigid class structure - and voldemort simultaneously plays up to it and delights in undermining it.

[claiming to his elite supporters that his aim is pureblood oligarchy, while making them roll around on the floor calling him "my lord", for example...]

and the class structure by which the wizarding world is organised is also clearly accompanied by pretty restrictive gender roles - especially for the elite pureblood women voldemort is likely to encounter through his death eaters. almost without exception, elite pureblood women don't work after marriage, are almost entirely confined to the domestic sphere, don't socialise openly with men they're not related to, are expected to rely on their husbands and/or sons to protect them, and are expected to give the impression in male or mixed company that they defer to their husbands, in order not to embarrass them.

one of the most compelling things about bellamort is the way that voldemort's authority gives bellatrix permission to defy the expectations forced upon her by her gender and social class. and it's also really interesting to me to take the established dynamic we see on the canon page - where we only encounter bellatrix once her rejection of gendered convention has already happened - and think about how that point was reached, both with bellatrix and with women like narcissa, who conform much more rigidly to social convention.

which is where petunia comes in.

petunia is one of the best characters in the series to use in an exploration of gender and class conventions - both in terms of what she shows about jkr's understanding of both of these things and what she can be used to show about them outside of the doylist text's perspective.

and that's because she's an amazing combination of someone who is simultaneously restricted by the rigid boundaries of class and womanhood which society imposes upon her, imposes additional restrictions upon herself to soothe her ego-wound and is proud of herself for doing so, clearly longs to break free of these restrictions but refuses to because she can't get over her jealousy of lily, actively chooses to collude in her own and other women's oppression because of this, lives an enormously male-centred life and has no solidarity with other women, and yet clearly has a secret inner world which none of the male characters in the series ever really bother to notice.

[after all, if she could send lily a vase for christmas 1980, then vernon is wrong in philosopher's stone when he says that petunia and her sister hadn't been in contact for "several years"... which means that she didn't tell him she sent it.]

i really like the fact that petunia finds herself in a prison of her own making. everything about her life is pretend - pretending that she isn't related to a witch; pretending that she didn't long to have magical powers; pretending that she doesn't miss her sister; pretending that harry doesn't live in the house; pretending that she was born into the middle-class life she lives with vernon, instead of someone who has married "up" and needs to maintain that status by conformity; pretending that dudley isn't spoiled and unpleasant...

and - of course - pretending that she is the ideal wife. which means she's neat and feminine and delicate and so on. the ideal wife doesn't like magic, and she also doesn't swear or shit or sweat or piss or bleed or break stuff.

with this in mind, petunia's understanding of her own embodiment must be pretty complicated. she's aware she lives behind a mask... but she's been living that way for so long that she doesn't have any real idea who she is when the mask comes off.

and who else lives his entire life like this?

everything voldemort does in the series is pretending too - pretending that he didn't grow up in an orphanage; pretending that he doesn't have a muggle father; pretending that he's not upset that his muggle father didn't love or want him; pretending that he doesn't miss his mother; pretending that he doesn't care about other people; pretending that he's never scared or lonely or anxious...

i think that there's the potential for a really fascinating mess in the premise that voldemort would attempt to worm his way into petunia's life in an effort to circumvent the blood protection and have a clear shot at killing harry... only to become infuriated by the mundanity of her existence and determined to murder her... only to discover that both he and petunia love gossip and consider everything which has ever gone wrong in their lives to be a combination of snape and dumbledore's faults...

what follows is either a spiral of mutual delusion, which each of them trying to convince the other that they're genuinely happy in their little boxes and becoming incandescently furious that the other doesn't believe them and won't adopt their way of living...

[voldemort doesn't give a fuck about what canapés to serve at christmas because he grew up in the 1920s and hasn't got a clue what pesto is. petunia doesn't respect murder and torture because of how difficult it is to get blood out of carpets.]

or, entirely by accident, things work out.

and a man who has never had a home or a family ends up being able to understand why petunia cares so much about hers, but without the obsession with middle-class performativity which vernon has, meaning petunia gets a chance to breathe [and to admit she has a regional accent and isn't adverse to the odd findus crispy pancake and a packet of b&h] for the first time since she was sixteen... while also being the sort of champion yapper who would love to get the tea about the next door neighbour's tacky new sandals [whereas vernon would clearly consider that to be chat for women alone]... and also being capable of understanding the way that grief often manifests itself in ways which are neither healthy nor sympathetic [even if his advice would probably be "no babe, repress it even more"]... and also telling the missus in no uncertain terms to stop worrying about what people think about her, because if anyone tries to say that her new dress makes her look common or that it's classless for her to sit in her garden in a leopard-print thong bikini, or to start taking the mirror instead of the mail, or to love a weekend at butlin's, or to encourage dudley to learn a trade, he'll solve the problem with ease by murdering them.

[of the rest of the interested parties, vernon is headshot and buried in the grunning's carpark, harry is won round by voldemort's searing contempt for dudley, and bellatrix ruins mr and mrs mason's marriage for fun and profit, which the evans-riddles spend all two weeks of their all-inclusive on the costa del sol gossiping about.]

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Chapters: 1/10 Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Pandora Hearts Rating: Teen And Up Audiences  Relationships: Albus Dumbledore/Harry Potter Characters: Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore, Other Character Tags to Be Added

Summary: Harry shivered. It wasn’t often people spoke to him without malice. Dumbledore hadn’t seemed threatening, but not everyone did, and misinterpreting those people was most dangerous of all. - Some people find each other in every universe, not because of fate, but because they choose one another. Again and again. This is how Harry and Albus found each other before, and this is how they will find each other in every lifetime after. (Harrydore Pandora Hearts AU)

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Pandora Hearts Setting, Mystery, Murder Mystery, Cults, Angst, Romance, Angst and Romance, Trauma, Childhood Trauma, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, (not Harry or Albus), Age Difference, Harry is in his early to mid 20s, Albus is in his mid 30s, Implied/Referenced Sex, Morally Complex Characters, No character bashing, No Albus Dumbledore Bashing, Ariana Dumbledore haunts the narrative, Lacie Baskerville Haunts the Narrative, POV Alternating, POV Multiple, Past Tense, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rating May Change, No beta we die like Ariana and Lacie

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you can like tom riddle without uwu'ing his every action

prev I reblogged decided to block me from replying (while also tagging me in their reply??) but my points stand, whether they want to read them or continue to live in fanon world.

Tormenting children (whether or not you are also a child) is wrong. Tom Riddle tormented his peers from an early age.

Tom Riddle DID mean to scare his fellow orphans by killing their pets and dragging them off to places to do who-knows-what, and he DID mean to hurt them.

It's clear from the orphanage memory that he has no remorse for his actions.

There's no proof that the other children "did anything" to "justify" Tom Riddle's treatment of them. That's fanon.

Tom Riddle doesn't have a "side" of the story that isn't him tormenting and manipulating people from an early age

I do not, in fact, think Dumbledore is a saint; I think he's a good man who's made terrible mistakes, which is what we are shown in canon.

I also happen to think Albus Dumbledore deserves better than having yet another "uwu tom riddle is so misunderstood in his fascism and he deserves better" stan going for his throat

It's not possible to really like a character if you are constantly excusing their worst actions instead of accepting them and diving deeper, actually

I can, in fact, fucking read (lol), and I can also separate canon from made-up fanon.

Anyone posting about how Dumbledore was biased against Tom Riddle from the start when Dumbledore talks in the same chapter about agreeing to give him a fresh start at Hogwarts and not mention any orphanage shenanigans is not reading.

I am once again saying, for this person and for the fandom as a whole, that it is possible to like Tom Riddle without bashing other characters to justify why he's Not That Bad, Really.

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[on the one hand, I firmly believe that tumblr is eternal and you should be able to dip from your blog for fifteen years, come back, and start posting again like you never left. elite. queen shit.

on the other hand, I want to claim your blog name as my own, stranger, so either come back and post or let me haaaaave it.]

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It was critical for Harry (and the reader) to understand Tom Riddle because only by understanding Tom Riddle could Harry defeat Voldemort.

The wizarding world's fear of Voldemort stemmed from the fact that 99% of the people did not know him. They did not understand him. They just knew that if they didn't believe the same things as him and his followers, he would torture, indoctrinate, and kill them.

Dumbledore's query about Harry's sympathy for Tom Riddle isn't passive aggressive. He knows what kind of person Harry is, and consistently points out how remarkable and admirable Harry's compassion for others is. He is just surprised at Harry's concern for Merope. As anyone would be, if Person A said something to the effect of "why couldn't the mother of the man who literally killed my parents stay alive long enough to take care of her son".

Dumbledore went into the meeting with Tom Riddle completely neutral about the new student he was recruiting for Hogwarts. It was Tom's sociopathic behavior and the things he was told by the orphanage matron that put him on edge. It can be argued that his attempt to frighten Tom into not mistreating the other orphans anymore completely backfired, but that's because of Tom's nature, not some pre-existing bias that Dumbledore had against Tom from the womb. (And it would be impossible to argue bias or obsession later, because Dumbledore didn't interfere with Tom during his school years, and he didn't start looking into Tom's family history until after Harry temporarily vanquished him as a baby 40+ years later.)

All of that to say: Voldemort doesn't fear Dumbledore because Dumbledore set his wardrobe on fire. He doesn't even fear Dumbledore because they are so closely matched magically. He fears Dumbledore (and continues to fear him, well into adulthood) because Dumbledore intimately understands him in a way that no one else on earth does... until Harry comes along.

Despite all of the masks Voldemort wears, the distance he deliberately crafts between himself and his followers and his foes so people will revere and fear him, Dumbledore is able to see right through him and not fear him at all. And by walking Harry through Voldemort's early history in HBP, Dumbledore gives him the tools to be just as fearless and superior to Voldemort in DH.

This is critical because the Harry of years 4 and 5 is terrified of Voldemort. He freezes up when Voldemort's nearby, he's debilitated frequently by the pain in his scar, he despairs of being able to get away from him... even when he decides to go to his death "straight-backed and proud" like his father in the graveyard, it is still a decision borne of terror.

Someone who is scared of Voldemort cannot defeat him, no matter what a prophecy says.

Although it's definitely more dull from the reader's perspective than spell training or mock duels, Dumbledore's demystification of Tom Riddle is one of the many ways in which he saves Harry's life.

I don't understand why Dumbledore wanted Harry to know Tom Riddle's whole life story and Harry even questions why Dumbledore is showing all of these memories to him too. Dumbledore also makes Harry feel terrible with his passive aggressive remark "are you feeling sorry for Tom Harry"? God damn Albus....yes, Tom Riddle became a evil man but his life was fuckin sad. All what Dumbledore sees in that child was the spawn of satan, he has zero sympathy for a child! Albus despised Tom Riddle since the womb, I don't understand this intense hatred/obsession Dumbledore had for Tom. don't think Dumbledore is as great of a man as he thinks he is. I can understand why Voldemort/Tom Riddle feared him, if a guy like Voldemort is scared of you then you must be some piece of work. I just get a odd feeling about Dumbledore in this book.

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Slughorn X Augusta Longbottom post War?

extraordinary. immaculate. transcendent.

look. we all know that slughorn was clearly into augusta, because why else would he invite neville to the slug club lunch on the train than because he was after getting her number?

[probably because of her extraordinarily cunty aesthetic. that hat's a serve and anyone who claims otherwise is lying.]

while harry describes neville's interactions with slughorn as "a very uncomfortable ten minutes" - and while he tries to claim this is because slughorn was asking lots of deeply unacceptable questions about neville's parents' health - those of us who understand how to read properly know that harry was spiralling because slughorn was actually asking neville what sort of flowers to send to get his granny in the mood for romance.

[i can't judge. i'd be exactly the same...]

but surely it flops, right? neville isn't invited back to the slug club after that first meeting, so augusta must have turned slughorn down?

not so. this is a woman who loves to boss people around and hit them with her handbag, and slughorn is a crawling sycophant. she told him that his parties were mid and neither she nor neville would be seen dead at one.

and he loved it.

and so - post-war - she's going to be dining out forever on the fact that neville ran a counterterrorism organisation and destroyed nagini, she ruined dawlish's life... and slughorn just about managed to offer up a bit of resistance at the last minute and then ran around in those pyjamas she hates.

i think the two of them are very happy.

[and i think neville's getting really good at meditation, spending a lot of time away from home, and knocking on any door he encounters just in case horror lurks behind it.]