#avpm umbridge

[spinachbobsquarepants]

I love how in-universe, the first person to say "totally awesome" was Umbridge. Some student had to be like "I know she tried to kill us but that's too good NOT to use" and everyone else AGREED.

[grandkhan221b]

I was cleaning up my art folder and came accros some old WIPs I'll probably never finish. Might as well dump 'em here ig

1st one is more AVPM sketches I did after my rewatch

for the 2dn one, I was going through a very brief nostalgia phase for harry potter due to rewatching AVPM, and was trying to draw my own take on wizard clothes. The nostlagia didnt last long enough for me to finish this apparently lol

3rd one is the 11th Doctor and River going on a date in matching outfits ✨(I still really like that idea I should finish it someday)

4th one is Team Dragonstone from ASOIAF 🔥❤ kinda criminal that I didn't post ANY art of Stannis when I was going though the ASOIAF brainrot considering how obsessed with this man I was lmao

[lilbeanz]

NOOOO Dolores CANT be THAT!!! you cant DO that 😨😨😨😨!!! (wild speculation) ((but i think im right))

........A sexy stud-muffin?

[hiidkwhatimdoing7525]

A Very Potter Musical Sketches

who else found AVPM and fell in love with it? especially the slytherins?

[royallygray]

characters who are so awful (as people, not as characters) that you physically cannot imagine them shipped with anyone. a straight ship? no. well then gay ship? no, they wouldn't be gay. aro/ace/aroace? yeah but see they kind of seem like they'd have attraction to someone. just. not men. or women. or non-binaries. or anyone else.

but you also can't imagine them being attracted to anyone. but they're not aspec because of Vibes and they kind of seem like they would have attraction?

this is a post. these were some words. good day.

[iwouldexistwithoutyou]

This version is so incredible, the original is still my favorite in no small part due to the death eater's dance number. This is such a well made song though, could be on the radio honestly. "You were never my- You were never my lover."

[starcanwrecked-sexyman-bracket]

[thatnerdyqueer]

You ever having a bad day and you just,,, go and rewatch malfoy's entrance in avps?

[gxlacticlove]

someone remastered avpm and avps so obviously I had to watch hd stutter and it occurred to me how impressive that Joe walker did stutter in umbridge voice with dancing. the remastered quality really shows us how much that man suffered for his craft.

[susiephone]

(and just so we're clear - fuck jk rowling, i no longer engage with the harry potter series. but you can't talk about starkid's early years without talking about the very potter trilogy. bear in mind those shows came out before rowling was a vocal terf, and unlike her, team starkid has expressed regret for some of the parts of their early work that haven't aged well and have done a lot better since. i still love a lot of the early shows, but it can be jarring if you found starkid via hatchetfield.)

[spinachbobsquarepants]

It's her, the Joe Mama

[princeisolde]

Things that had no right to be as deep as they were in AVPM/AVPS:

Snape seeing Lily in the mirror of Erised.

Draco writing to Lucius informing him he doesn’t have to hurry writing back, because he never will, but Draco still hopes.

Umbridge’s insecurity and how it made her toxic trying to fight toxic patriarchal standards.

Quirrel and Voldy that’s it for now bye add any I forgot

[mummer]

its crazy that glee is like, making fun of coach beiste is wrong!!! and then exclusively presents them (? i never got to the trans arc) in extremely humiliating storylines and directs them to act like umbridge in avpm. Stop it!!!!! Anyway what im belatedly pitching is that the show shouldve gone in for a full schue/beiste romance. money where your mouth is

[come-see-our-show]

can you explain how the sk shows are sexist? im not trying to be rude i just hadn't noticed it before

avpm/s/sy: literally zero female friendships to be found. ginny is a badass in the books but in the musical she's reduces to a one-dimensional boy-crazy fangirl who's main job is to help harry grow as a character. i know it's a comedy, but how come harry gets to grow and not ginny? also not to mention how badly umbridge has aged as a character because "haha masculine women are funny!!!"

mamd: the idea that sexually active women are worn out and broken, and the only way they can be fixed is by finding monogamy

tgwdlm: this one is complicated for me. all of the female characters are great, but they either hate each other or are neutral to one another. also for some reason emma feels like the type of girl who would say “i prefer hanging out with guys because girls cause too much drama.”

black friday: this is the same problem as tgwdlm. here we are again, with plenty of interesting women, none of whom get to form bonds with one another (except for lex and hannah). lex, emma, becky, and linda are all great characters, but having all of the women being pitted against each other when the men are NOT is a glaring issue. maybe this is more a fandom issue than the writing itself but idk.

JUST TO CLARIFY: i still love all of these musicals. that doesn't mean i can't criticize them though.

[sexygaywizard]

What if we slander JK Rowling but praise Starkid's AVPM

I mean AVPM has a lot of that style of bigotry everyone thought was really funny back in the 2010s, the second one's big running joke is that Umbridge is a transphobic caricature which, when my main criticism of Harry Potter is the author's transphobia, doesn't really make it a winning alternative. It's been years since I watched any of that obviously but you can't really enjoy a lot of stuff from that time period without being critical of it. The only tangentially HP related content I endorse is My Immortal

[man-down-in-hatchet-town]

If We Can't Move Forward...

"You're so focused on your past that you can't appreciate your present. That's no way to live. How can you possibly move forward if you're always looking back."

I've been thinking about this quote, which Harry says to Umbridge towards the end of AVPS. In a lot of ways, I think it's the thesis statement of the whole musical (I mean, it's a damn time travel show), especially when it comes to the villains and their actions/motivations. Umbridge has a three-ton chip on her shoulder and hyper-focuses on the trauma of her youth. Snape is caught up in his childhood feud with the Marauders and is initially persuaded to help Lucius and Umbridge after being shown his own memories in a Pensieve. And Lucius and his Death Eaters literally time-travel almost two years into the past because they cannot let Voldemort go.

"If we can't move forward, why shouldn't we move back?" Lucius says in the opening, in a direct contrast to Harry's statement at the end.

And then we have Harry himself...

Harry, who has just as dark and upsetting of a past as any of his villains, yet doesn't seem particularly caught up in it. He uncovers the true story of his parents' death, sings one terrific song about finally finding a home, and then takes to his new life like a fish to water. Maybe I'm wrong (after all, he does still see his parents in the mirror), and it's all up to interpretation but Harry, our show's protagonist, doesn't really fit the overarching theme of being stuck in the past the way his biggest enemies do.

You could argument that, yeah, that's the point. Harry ultimately wins because he believes in moving forward and lacks the hang-ups that hold his opponents back. And there is truth to that. But the flaw is that Harry not really contending with his own past separates him from the emotional core of the story. If the villains wanted to bring him down to their level and stick him back in his own past, and he had to overcome that particular obstacle, that would be one thing. But they are too busy looking back at their own histories to care about forcing him back into his. Even when Harry time travels, of his own, willing accord, it's all plot, not thematic character work.

And so the antagonists once again take on the emotional center of the show, just like Voldemort and Quirrell in AVPM, only this time it's not quite as effective. Maybe it's because we are given no reason to root for or care for Umbridge or Lucius, whereas Voldemort had his accidentally genuine relationship with Quirrell. Or maybe it's because they never deliver that moment of emotional catharsis Voldemort does at the end of the first show (Snape gets this moment, but ultimately his entire character arc happens over the course of less than 25% of the show's runtime so it doesn't carry as much weight).

Or maybe it's just because I love Joe Walker's Voldemort so much that I'm biased against every other Very Potter villain.

I dunno. Maybe I'll come back to this post in a few months and be shocked by just how wrong I am. But at this moment I think that AVPS touched on some really interesting ideas of dwelling in the past, and the show would have been more effective if it had pulled its protagonist deeper into the theme being explored through so many of the side characters. After all, Starkid ironically does so quite brilliantly in A Very Potter Senior Year...