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Reblog if you're okay with people coming into your dms or ask box with storylines and rp ideas!

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, from a letter featured in The Life & Letters of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

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What do you think about Harry and Dumbledores relationship? Do you think Dumbledore actually cared for him as he said? Do you think his ignoring Harry in OOTP was justified? Also they barely spoke in the books but seemed to care for each other?

I really love all your analysis of the books its really well thought and well written

Lot of what I think about Harry and Dumbledore's relationship is covered here in this ask which also includes links to my metas that cover more ground.

I do think Dumbledore loves Harry - and I think that attachment surprises even himself. It is visible in the Howler he sends Petunia - "remember my last Petunia" and he follows up on that anger with his coldness in the opening chapters of HBP with Dursleys. He admits as much in ending chapters of OOTP - that he cared too much, and that was his biggest blindspot. In HBP, he is moved with complex set of feelings when Harry admits that he told Scrimgeour that he was Dumbledore's man (Harry will understand the weight of these words in Deathly Hallows, but Dumbledore understands the weight of what Harry unthinkingly accepts in HBP and is moved to tears.)

I don't think they "barely" spoke to each other though. The frequency of their conversations increases as the books go on, humanising Dumbledore and breaking the God-like, all knowing image of early books.

Whether him ignoring Harry in OOTP was justified or not is not the real wound - Dumbledore is so involved with the big picture that he turns a blind eye to individual agency. The wound is that he dismissed Harry's agency and independence by doing so, and the next two books deal with that particular wound.

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nymphadora tonks... a young vibrant wild and free woman reduced to a yearning heartbroken mess by a beige prematurely aged man in his late 30s... i see you queen

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Not only do I absolutely love and agree with both these headcanons and with holding them simultaneously (the more canon-friendly and the more let-Albus-have-fun-damn-it one), I also feel as though we are all being ROBBED if I don't come up with at least 3 more headcanons for serial ghoster!Albus and the Harry who has to deal with him.

Albus gets frustrated early on in his ghosting attempt with how often the hypothetical Professor-Harry-at-Hogwarts seems to be able to find him, even with the repellant charm on. How is he to know that Harry has a map with his name and precise location at any given moment on it?

There is definitely at least one time where Albus tries to hide out at the Hog's Head ("who would look for me at my rough younger brother's weird dive bar?") and Aberforth, whose general opinion of harrydore in general is "ew", still gets in his daily "fuck you, big bro" quota by immediately informing Harry.

Fawkes, who has been extremely indifferent to the prior partners Albus has brought home, decides after one (1) interaction with Harry Potter that This Is The One, and Albus' opinion be damned. He is more than happy to enable future meetings between Harry and Albus. Is Albus teaching? Well, one of Harry's students needs to see Albus for a Transfiguration question right this instant, so surely Albus can handle impromptu phoenix travel. Oh, or perhaps Albus is giving a speech to the Wizengamot in Nice, France? Well, good thing they left a spot open on the front row—perfect for Harry to slide in and hear his beloved speak. And how many times do you think Fawkes waits, craftily, until Albus has changed and settled down for a nightcap in his lonely bed... and then pops Harry in?

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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Big fan of characters realizing they don't get to die. They have to live. And grow. And be a person. And deal with shit they thought they'd never have to. And be fucked up about it. I would like more of this. Enough dying for honor or as redemption. It ain't. You're just a corpse. There is no moral value in dirt time.

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phase two of my militant belief that regulus black is not hot and betraying voldemort did not mean he stopped being conservative in general: shipping him with another guy who isnt hot and struggles with both conservative beliefs and his relationship with his older brother [headcanon]

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Concept I don't want to forget: One of those time travel fics where Harry goes back in time to help Tom not become Voldemort. Basically: + Harry teaches DADA and Albus teaches Transfiguration. + Harry is at odds with Albus, wanting to take over 'watching over' Tom with his own methods - but Albus won't be pushed out. + Albus is obsessed with Harry, who is a suspicious enigma. It isn't the first time a younger man with a mysterious past and skills in dueling has stormed into his life... as worrying as it is captivating. + Tom gets two dads who are both very intense about him.

Dippet is like "Albus you can't be DADA teacher next year either - we need a Transfiguration teacher too badly" or whatever. Albus sad... he wants to do DADA... if only he wasn't multi-talented... :'^(

Some young adult man with messy black hair, scruffy beard, sparkling green eyes and a scar on his forehead enters the room. "We've hired Professor Harry Potter to fill the role - he has proven more than capable. I expect you to show him the ropes, Albus."

Harry has been 'traveling', apparently, between the wars... Gellert has also been traveling... not a member of the 'main' Pureblood Potter family, but Potter is a relatively common name... "Didn't go to Hogwarts, home-schooled - please show me around, Professor Dumbledore." Harry lies - but Albus notices he seems extremely comfortable trotting around the halls... Harry is extremely comfortable with high-difficulty dueling spells, even some Dark Magic - but average at everything else. A warrior...

Harry is DEDICATED to his goal: 'fix' Tom to stop him before he can do any damage. He has big sympathy for him and isn't really thinking of anything else. This leaves him being a bit cold, serious, focused, confident - lacking hesitation... dark, mysterious, handsome man.

For Harry, Albus is a means to an end. He does feel more comfortable with him than most - but this isn't HIS Albus. He will cozy up to him enough to ensure he can tag along to Tom Riddles orphanage.

Albus is a sharp man. He can tell something is off with this guy, nothing quite adds up... and he is hooked. He justifies it as being suspicious this has something to do with Grindelwald. He has a conspiracy wall - acts friendly, passive and charming and at the end of the day adds another pin to the board of "Who is Harry Potter? Where did he come from? What are his goals?"

Albus does his regular Orphanage routine - trying to calmly connect with this special boy, enamor him to the Power of magic but insist it is at the price of Responsibility - while also giving him freedom and trust to do things himself... ...but Harry came with him, agreeing to let him do most of the talking: but goes all 'Strict Parent' about it: "No, Tom - I think we should go around now and give back all these toys. Then we will take you to get your school supplies - No, Albus, we CAN'T let a young boy shop on his own." (Harry suggested the suit he wore. The one he compliments in HBP.)

Albus' 'keep an eye on someone' is incredibly hands-off. Harry knows what Tom will become and intends to step in and do differently, even if he has to drag a then-innocent boy by the ear. Honestly he is a bit too strict with it - but he is haunted by the deaths he causes in the future.

As Albus is HELLA suspicious about Professor Potter focusing on this only slightly odd boy... he inserts himself into Toms life more than he ever had before, while Harry is trying to push him out.

Basically Tom suddenly has two dads that are intense about him... but even more intense about eachother. Harry gets Albus as the friend he never quite managed to be in life. Albus is 'fixed' by a hot man who came into his life like a storm.

Something happens with the war idk haven't thought that far

Harry definitely stops Riddle from opening the Chamber alone. He was going to stop the death of Myrtle and the expulsion of Hagrid at any cost. He goes in with him and they have a bonding moment in Parseltongue they agree not to tell Albus about. When Albus finds out Harry can speak Snake and knew about the Chamber etc - ?????WHO IS THIS MAN????? is refreshed.

Harry is weird about romance because this is DUMBLEDORE... but its also NOT Dumbledore... understandably difficult to process.

Albus thinks Harry is weird about it because Homosexuality. Albus is weird about that, too - he pretends to not feel anything. Also last time Albus fell for a mysterious younger man adept at dueling who stormed into his life from a mysterious past it didn't go very well. His nose is crooked to remind himself how well it didn't go.

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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...]