pangaeaseas

[pangaeaseas]

Imagine if the basilisk didn’t die and just kept following Ginny around forever because it wanted friends once Tim Riddle no longer controlled it

[pangaeaseas]

I love the hc that Sirius Black didn't date during Hogwarts. I love the hc that Sirius Black didn't have sex during Hogwarts. I love the hc that Sirius Black was wanted by everyone and their mother but he was too wrapped up in James Potter to notice literally anything else.

[pangaeaseas]

Do you think Sirius would have taken part in extra curricular clubs at school, like duelling club etc? Or would he have been too cool for that?

100% yes he went to clubs or did his own extra curriculars.

I think his 'acted out' at school because he was probs understimulated by the curriculum (he doesn't need to read the school book because 'he knows it all already").

As for being 'cool,' I don't think he would ever care about how he was seen by the majority of people. Canonically, we have lots of evidence of his 'extracurriculars', like the map, becoming an animagus, etc.

So I think he defo world have joined clubs just to challenge himself. I can imagine transfiguration club while he and James are working on the animagus thing, dueling for sure, and I always imagine him as a chess player (or if there's a crossword club....).

[pangaeaseas]

If I were dictator of the internet, I would take ban the term 'gallows humour' because..

nobody uses it correctly. Making memes and posts about other people's tragedies or making thinly veiled racist comments when a plane crashes is not 'gallows humour because you are not on that gallows.

Examples of gallows humour from real life include Anne Boleyn joking that she already had such a little neck on the day of her execution. OR in fiction, Sirius saying he is a wanted mass murderer so he can't be seen giving out leaflets about the Order. In both these examples, the people joking are the ones on the gallows, not some dickhead using the term incorrectly when they are called out for callousness towards a situation not happening to them.

[pangaeaseas]

What do you think of the double standard between How Regulus is treated vs Draco?

I saw a few who believe that it’s hypocritical and strange Rowling treated Regulus as redeemed even though he was technically worse than Draco.

Regulus Actually made a shrine to Voldemort while he was active, and neither of his parents were death eaters. Regulus seemed to actively seek him out and only defected because Voldemort was mean to Kreacher or he thought a Horcrux was too far.

While Draco only enjoyed the stories his parents told him while Voldemort was gone, his parents actually were death eaters and Voldemort was the one who went to him and ordered/threatened him into working for him. He defected because he actually felt bad about the evil actions that he didn’t know much about when he was younger.

Truly, the biggest sin Draco commits is surviving the book.

JKR has sort of a thing about death (and/or willingness to die) being inherently redemptive and noble. There is a reason the climax of Book 7 revolves around Harry "Master of Death" Potter martyring himself. Then the epilogue revolves around Harry's sons... named for a string of men who did some pretty not-great things... but y'know, they all had noble sacrificial deaths, so they're cool. According to JKR, Voldemort's main problem is that he doesn't want to die. In the Harry Potter books, death - and especially the right kind of death - purifies you.

So Regulus dies stealing a horcrux and protecting a house elf. And Draco... doesn't.

I've thought quite a bit about the scene in Malfoy Manor, because to be perfectly honest, the framing is so all over the place that I'm not sure how I'm supposed to read it. Because I would have said that Draco buying Harry time with "I can’t — I can’t be sure,” is an effective and brave example of passive resistance. You'd think it would represent some sort of turning point... except no, Draco spends the rest of the book with no agency, needing to be saved multiple times by Harry. He ends the book unimportant, and mildly pathetic (with his receding hairline.)

I think the intention was to have the Malfoy Manor scene read as a sort of symbolic castration. Draco loses his wand, just like his father - (and oh boy is Lucius' loss of a wand treated as a castration.) We learn later that Draco lost not only his wand, but the Elder wand as well, and then to top things off... Dobby shows up to free the prisoners for him, and Dobby's the one with the noble, heroic death.

It might even be a deliberate flip of what happened with Regulus. Regulus dies destroying horcruxes and sacrificing himself for a house elf. Draco survives preventing horcruxes from being destroyed (at least, he's letting the sword that destroys horcruxes be taken away from Harry.) And then he lets a house-elf die doing the job that (narratively) he was supposed to so. Freeing Harry & Friends, dying in the process.

When it comes to Regulus himself... @saintsenara has written this fantastic analysis, and specifically about how he functions as both a Draco parallel and a Snape parallel at different times, and I absolutely could not say it better.

[pangaeaseas]

Ambitious, cunning, ended up as a politician, and seemed to be comfortable with killing almost casually as a means to an end. Could Kingsley Shacklebolt have been in Slytherin?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

i definitely like seeing kingsley as someone who wasn't in gryffindor - because god knows, some of the series' heroes have to be - but i've always preferred to picture him having been a ravenclaw, largely because i think there's some really interesting ambiguity in how the house is written.

while we have several examples of ravenclaws in the text who are fairly indistinguishable characterisation-wise from gryffindors - cho [fiercely, stubbornly loyal, even when maybe she shouldn't be]; luna [ditto]; flitwick [based] - their collective presentation is actually slightly less positive.

[it's always very striking to me, for example, that only a few of them stay behind to fight for the order in the battle of hogwarts...]

the reason that hermione isn't in ravenclaw is - as i bang on about ad nauseam - because she's not a creative thinker. she places a huge amount of trust in disciplinary authority, she believes in academic rules and norms, and she values being a member of an academic community in an institutional sense, with all the conventions and boundaries this implies.

or, she's interested in sharing and participating and respecting the work of those who have gone before. she's not interested in using her brains purely for her own gain. and she's especially not interested in smashing up the rules and overturning the disciplinary canon and disregarding the findings of those who are more senior...

ravenclaws - the series suggests - are much more inclined towards this slightly self-serving, "i can do what i like", "i don't care if a century of research says this is the rule, rules are made to be broken" approach, much like slytherins such as snape and voldemort.

[although slytherins in general seem not to have this boundary-pushing tendency. they like order and structure and hierarchy, as long as they're the people who benefit from it; their self-serving natures are focused on forcing other people to live by their standards, whereas ravenclaws are focused on doing what they want without the restriction of convention.]

gryffindor and ravenclaw loyalty should be understood as following these principles. ravenclaws are clearly capable of enormous loyalty, but their loyalty is much more interwoven with their own self-interest - that is, it conforms much less to the way loyalty is presented within the conventions of chivalric literature - than is the case for gryffindors.

[i.e. everything xenophilius lovegood does in deathly hallows...]

and i really like this vibe for kingsley.

he has the convention-defying ravenclaw aspect - the way harry talks about his earring definitely suggests that it's an unexpected look for an adult wizard, but kingsley knows he looks incredible and dgaf.

but he also - more importantly - has this ravenclaw approach to loyalty. he's often found in canon working alone - he runs the hunt for sirius by himself; he's the only magical liaison in the prime minister's office; he fights off the snatchers and goes on the run alone when he break the taboo - and he's often absent from things the rest of the order is present for - he isn't there for molly's boggart; he doesn't participate in the cleaning campaign in grimmauld place; he doesn't escort harry to king's cross at the start of term; he doesn't visit arthur in hospital with the others. this makes an interesting contrast with tonks, who's introduced to the series at the same time, whose relationship with the mission is much more communal.

he's also - and i always think this is very interesting - the only order member we see explicitly state their disagreement with dumbledore in order of the phoenix - when he says that he disagrees with the decision not to make harry a prefect. the rest either take the lupin view - that dumbledore's decisions are above reproach - or only criticise him implicitly - as is the case with sirius.

and something i really, really enjoy in post-war fics is when this aspect of kingsley's characterisation is expanded upon, in a way which makes clear that he's not a good minister for magic because he's filled with inherent gryffindor righteousness... but because he's prepared to get a wee bit morally flexible when the situation calls for it...

this - in my view - is a way of dealing with the series' famously milquetoast politics - where everything is fine once voldemort is dead, and the wizarding world goes back to its status quo, barring a couple of minor adjustments which eradicate blood-supremacy - which is actually compelling.

kingsley as the architect of "all was well" - doing as much boundary-pushing stuff as he can, before finding that he doesn't have the political capital to undo centuries of legislation suppressing the rights of goblins and centaurs or remove pro-pureblood members of the wizengamot or arrest anyone who collaborated with voldemort's regime [because that would wipe out the entire civil service...] or sanction the wealthy pureblood families who funded the death eaters; deciding that he can live with that, even though it's unjust; and being directly responsible for the creation and maintenance of the idea that there is nothing to worry about with the dark lord dead - always pops for me.

[i also like kingsley as a ravenclaw because then, at the end of deathly hallows, when voldemort's duelling him, slughorn, and mcgonagall all at once, he's got three of the four houses represented. let's imagine that sprout was on her way to smack the dark lord round the head with a frying pan when harry pulled focus and ruined her moment.]

[pangaeaseas]

the thing about HP that makes it so endlessly compelling and the heart of such a big immense fandom is that there's things in it that are good and there's things that are good without the author realizing it and there's her horrible views in it too and there's things that could be good but aren't actually done and there's things that are just bad but the skin is compelling is has the proverbial good bones--and that leads to the impulse to fix it by actually exploring what jkr doesn't. like out of all the fandoms ive been in hp is probably the most striking where its fic is truly amazing and incredibly creative and yet the series itself is like fine. it is a great spur of ideas, not so much great in itself....it contains multitudes in its fic because it has enough jumping off points where you can go anywhere in fic, but the series is pretty standard hero's journey with a basic urban fantasy backdrop that isn't heavy on the 'real world' part at all but fic writers occasionally go in the real world direction really well and more often go into the fantasy part in a more worked out way than JKR, which can often work very well.

[pangaeaseas]

What do you think about the series treatment towards Muggles?

Most of the muggkes we hear of, are nasty towards wizards who did nothing to them.

Most of the wizards, even the ones who are supposed to be accepting, Seem to treat them as foolish at best or animals at worst.

Even Hermione, began drifting further away from her parents as time passes.

Honestly, I think it's a structural problem that one of the villain's main talking points is that muggles are stupid, lesser, and kind of suck... and then all the muggles we meet are stupid, lesser, and kinda suck.

Like the Dursleys suck. Dudley's friends suck. Tobias Snape is abusive. Mrs. Cole is an alcoholic. The Muggle Prime Minister is a foolish, comic character. (So are Mr. and Mrs. Mason, in like, the one scene they appear.) Tom Riddle Senior is apparently a snooty airhead. The citizens of Little Hangleton are both stupid and mean... probably the most sympathetic muggle character in the whole series is Frank Bryce - who is also crotchety, bad tempered, and (to he honest)... boring.

Once we hit the Fantastic Beast films, we get abusive villain Mary Lou Barebone, some ineffective senators... and Jacob Kowalski. The only muggle character treated unambiguously positively. And I'm not sure I can even give JKR 100% of the credit for him, since I think it's pretty likely he's a recycled Dr. Who companion... and he also gets a wand in the third movie. I would bet money that if the series had continued, he would have been revealed to be some kind of magical something.

What's crazy to me is this is a very fixable problem. Just give Hermione's parents first names and slightly more time on the page. Even just giving them a little more of a moment back in Book 2 would have made a difference. Or (this is my favorite) - make Ted Tonks a muggle, not muggle-born. It changes nothing, and boom. Now at least we have A positive muggle character going into Book 7.

You are completely correct that even the pro-wizard Muggles like Mr. Weasley have a condescending, paternalistic view of muggles, and Hermione's decision to commit 100% to wizarding world culture is treated as a complete non-issue, a foregone conclusion. And the books... are apparently fine with all this.

[pangaeaseas]

There's no question: gender affirming care saves lives.

If you wouldn't accept a trans or queer child, you shouldn't be a parent.

[pangaeaseas]

I love how curse breaking is seen as a highly desirable and respectable job in wizarding world Britain when it’s just stealing artifacts and treasure from other countries and cultures, yeah you would see it like that huh lol

[pangaeaseas]

It's literally 2025, can we pls start giving lily evans flaws beyond "she's too nice and trusting" or "she just sees the good in everyone" or some shit lyk that. NGL it's just cowardly if ur fav male characters are becoming fascists and attempting to kill each other while u give ur female favs flaws that make her look even more sympathetic and good. Lyk for fucks sake, god forbid a teenage girl isn't the most morally correct and appropriatly loving person on the planet smh

[pangaeaseas]

Thank you for Tom Riddle as a cinema attendee, I am now justified in imagining him taking a break from working at B&B to see Black Narcissus and having a lightbulb moment...

correct, although black narcissus is much, much too high-brow to really vibe with my headcanon that voldemort loves incongruously upbeat, frothy nonsense.

something i'm really into is the fact that so much of the pop culture of voldemort's youth - by which i mean the period 1926-1956, from when he's born until when he disappears after killing hepzibah smith - is just so un-voldemort-ish that it's funny to imagine that he's [however reluctantly] into it.

i prefer to think that he's trotting off to the pictures to catch a screwball comedy.

[somebody write the tomarry i was a male war bride au, i beg.]

apart from when he's seated for a musical, that is.

[somebody either write the guys and dolls au, in which tom's post-school decline in health is caused - much like miss adelaide's - by abraxas malfoy stringing him along for a decade without making an honest man of him...]

[... or write the "the death eaters attempt to make money with a tasteless war-themed musical, after voldemort sees the producers" au. i need to hear "springtime for grindelwald" desperately, please, i'm on my knees.]

[from left to right: lord voldemort, yaxley, rookwood]

and i always - in everything i've ever written - make him an enormous fred and ginge fan. largely because all gay teenage boys are assigned a female celebrity they have to stan with the force of a thousand suns, and wee tom was too much of an edgelord to go the mainstream route and pick judy garland...

[tomarry the gay divorcee au incoming, i fear...]

[pangaeaseas]

Companion poll:

[pangaeaseas]

Death Eaters

But it's Voldemort and his three weed smoking girlfriends

This came to me in a dream~

Do whatever you want with this image, i feel just drawing it, put a curse on my bloodline.

[pangaeaseas]

Don’t think I’ll ever be over the extreme selflessness it must have taken for Travis to let go of Javi’s body and walk away.

[pangaeaseas]

Shout out to Tonks who was proven not to be the absolute best at something one (1) time and is still so hung up on it over a year later that it’s one of the first things she brings up after a near death experience

Truly never related to something more

[pangaeaseas]

joining tumblr for the first time now is like in movies when the city kid goes to the small small small town and someone there is like “we ain’t got nona that weefee or whatever but we’s got Jimbo who yells the news and that’s good enough” and points to Jimbo who is currently asleep on his rocker

Except for us it’s like “we ain’t got no al-go-rithm but we do have haiku-bot and that one destiel screengrab that tells us the news and that’s good enough”