#// thank u tessa for always giving me an excuse to just talk about my beloveds

[swanqiu]

"umbridge was threatening her mother! it’s a lot more complicated than marietta just snitching on them unprompted!! i will vent about this another time!!!" please, by all means, rant about marietta! ;D

referencing something i said in this post from forever ago—

so yeah, basically, we get that marietta is one of harry + the DA’s most outspoken critics, and a large part of that (according to cho) is because marietta’s worried about her mum’s position at the ministry since umbridge still has those ties. those influences. marietta also doesn’t really know harry or hermione or ron, other than the fact that everything that’s sent the school year into red alert mode over the last five years have, in some way, involved the trio. of course she’s somewhat wary, maybe even somewhat doubtful that being involved with the DA will be a helpful thing! 

like... good for the other students in hufflepuff and gryffindor (and even some of her housemates) for being more trusting or whatever than she is— reckless might be a word she’d prefer to use, if she has anything to say about it— but that’s not her. she’s not game to just give her trust to whomever, especially if they have a track record of causing trouble. the trio have been able to get away with a lot of it because dumbledore and the rest of the staff clearly favor harry, but who’s to say anyone else who gets involved with the DA will get that same free pass luxury? so yeah. sorry if she’s not as gung ho about this secret club as everyone else is. 

anyway, i headcanon marietta as coming from a single-parent home. her dad’s not in the picture anymore, and it’s just her and her mum, and they’re very close. they’re all the other have at this point, back home. she knows how hard her mum works to provide for her and to send her to school with nice robes and the standard equipment she’ll need for classes, and she knows how screwed they are if her mum loses that ministry job. single parents— women, especially!!!— absolutely still have a stigma attached to them, esp if we’re talking late ‘90s, so she has a lot more to risk by joining the DA than some of the other students might! she attends the initial interest meeting to support cho (because if cho wants to do something she seems passionate about and it’s something that’ll take her mind off of her de*d boyfriend, for sure marietta’s there for her)! she continues to attend the meetings to be a good friend to cho! she signs that contract because okay, at the start of the DA meetings, it seems easy enough not to snitch! there’s not much of a reason to, even if she is cautious about it all!

but then her mum starts receiving the fake-sweet, thinly veiled threats from anonymous— umbridge— sources that clue her in that her daughter might be involved with a secret rogue club at school, and marietta catches wind of these warnings, and ofc she suddenly starts feeling guilty. starts panicking and realizing that her mum’s gonna lose her job and it’s because of her. 

basically, what i’m getting at here is this: if i were marietta and i had to choose between my mom, who’s the only one i have at home and has spent her whole life raising me, and a group of students who haven’t really made an effort to befriend or get to know me but are asking that i choose loyalty to them over my mom— yeah, i can understand why marietta goes and does what she does.

and all of this isn’t even including the very heavy implication that umbridge used veritaserum on marietta!! (edited to bold and italicize this because i feel like it’s SUCH a big factor, if not the main factor, behind marietta being the ‘sneak’; it gets overlooked so much!!)

edit 2: okay i am wrong, i went back and read the quote and no, umbridge didn’t use veritaserum on marietta since she’d apparently already used up snape’s last bottle on harry, but i absolutely would not be surprised if umbridge had tried other tactics or spells, even, to get marietta to say something. not budging on this.