when she was sorted into gryffindor, she was excited and nervous, because she was a muggleborn and wasn’t quite sure what that meant. but everyone was smiling and clapping, and she grinned at the sea of smiling faces dressed in red.
she was given a place in the boys dorm, and that seemed right to her at the time. but in her fourth year, she began to wonder if the out-of-place feeling she had wasn’t just her anxiety and awkwardness, but something else. when she realised she was a girl, it felt like she had blossomed into the world, to face it as a finished person. she told people that summer – texts to her muggle friends, owls to the wizards, and everyone was happy for her. for days she couldn’t do anything without the beep of her phone, or the peck of an owl at the window.
when she came back to hogwarts, and went to her dorm, she turned the other way. towards the girls dorm, where she had a place ready for her, picked out by her friends. she felt that same tight nervousness she felt when she was sorted, the pounding in her chest, the shaky hands. but she told herself to be calm. she was going to do this.
she put her foot on the bottom step. and then the next. and then the next.
the voice inside her head that had been telling her that hogwarts wouldn’t realise who she was shut up. she whispered a thank you to the steps, a small word that only the castle heard. then she ran up the rest of the stairs, a grin emblazoned on her face, new robes swirling behind her, ready to start the next year at school.
–
he was fifteen when it happened. he had been questioning for a while, but he wasn’t sure. he didn’t want to call himself a boy, not yet. a part of him was urging himself to just go for it, because he knew who he was, if he really thought about it. but he was hesitant, and didn’t define himself.
then it happened. one night, when he was alone, he was going back upstairs, when he slipped. his hand steadied himself on the rough stone wall, and he looked down to see what had happened. one of the steps was slanted, just enough to make him trip. it wiggled a bit, then made itself into a step, as if nothing had happened. he frowned at it at the time, and went up to bed, but the memory of the incident lingered days after. and weeks.
he remembered it later, when he sat up all night thinking of how he didn’t belong here, in the girls dorms. he didn’t want to label himself, but he’d been more and more out of place, and he knew who he was, really. when he stopped telling himself that he wasn’t.
it wasn’t too long before he told everyone. he felt like shouting it from the rooftops, flying over the castle with his new name on a banner. he didn’t, though. he just settled for casual chats with the people he knew and an awkward owl to his professors.
and one night, after he’d settled in to the boys dorms, he put a foot on the bottom step of the girls staircase. instantly, the bricks flattened themselves into a slide. he grinned, and carried on up to his new room in the boys dorms.
–
they always knew they didn’t quite fit into any of the genders they knew. they weren’t quite a boy, weren’t quite a girl, but they didn’t have the words to express what they felt. it was only after a few years at hogwarts (and a lengthy google search one night at home) that they learned the word ‘nonbinary’, and realised that there was a word for it, after all.
they decided to be casual about it at school. the people that they trusted knew, and some of the teachers. but it wasn’t as though they had a separate dorm just for them, so
except…
one day, when they were heading up to sleep, they saw a door. it was on the stairs to the dorms – girls went one way, boys went the other, with a blank wall in the middle. except it wasn’t blank, not then. there was a door. they asked their friends about it, but just got strange looks in return. but every time they climbed those stairs, the third door was there.
the next year brought a new wave of first-years, and they joined a group helping the kids out with navigating hogwarts. they were showing a group the way to the dungeons when one asked them what the third door was for. you know, the one between the girls and boys dorms. they froze, and looked down at a nervous first-year who was, even then, getting odd looks from their classmates.
they opened it together, the first-year and them. turned out it was another dorm. the beds were made, light shone through the windows, and the whole room seemed to beckon, invitingly. the first-year was ecstatic, and they found themself smiling too. the pair of them moved in the next day, and began to set up their own little space.
after they moved in, everyone could see the door. and slowly, the dorm began to fill up. kids from all years claimed beds there, older kids who had been too nervous to try the door, younger kids who were thrilled that it existed. they were the first, so they were looked up to, and they were happy they had.
–
help will always be given by hogwarts, you see. even for those who don’t know they need it.
War, yes, War suits Gryffindor well. Fighting and dying for beliefs; fighting and dying for nothing; drafted into bloodshed and fire by bravery or chivalry or neither. Some take joy in this; some are burdened beyond repair. There was a cause, somewhere; there was good, somewhere; there was a reason for all this, somewhere. Oh, you’d have to be brave to live through this. Red and gold. Gold like armor and glory; red like blood and reality.
But Famine and Hufflepuff? No. Famine is Ravenclaw, ever-hungry for knowledge, constantly starving for more and more and more, almost feral for fulfillment. Where is the wisdom in the world? The truth? Nothing is true; nothing is enough; all there is to devour is worthless scraps. Blue and bronze. Bronze like a set of scales tipping and found wanting; blue like the infinite that never satisfies… never gives the answers.
Thus Pestilence is not Ravenclaw. Pestilence is Slytherin, sick with clever plans and cunning potential and corrupting desire. Ambition spreads like a sickness, a plague of greed and an illness to the soul. Maybe some might call it cruel, but here among friends it’s simple cunning at work. Green and silver. Silver like the sheen of glazed eyes; green like the complexion of infection.
And so Death is not Slytherin. Death is Hufflepuff. It is a hard work; it is a work that is never done. But someone must do it, and do it fairly – do it justly – do it well… perhaps even kindly. Everyone is equal here – in the end – a bunch of duffers. Said Hufflepuff, “I’ll teach the lot… And treat them just the same.” Yellow and black. Black like loss of sight as the air leaves your lungs; yellow like the flowers that’ll grow over your grave.
(hey tumblr please don’t delete the previous people’s comments like you did the last time i added someone’s tags to a post mmkay)
No but that’s actually so clever okay like the people who live in the castle would get a general idea of the patterns and how to move around efficiently but like for anyone planning on attacking it would be impossible to infiltrate like how the hell do I attack the headmaster when I can’t even find the bathroom why the fuck am I in a chemistry supply closet okay these stairs went to the main hall but now I’m on my way to the broom closets holy fucking shit fuck leonard SAID the dorm was on the left of the three headed hippogriff but I’m here and it’s just a painting of a man with a donkey face is this a fucikgin joke leonard do you think this is funny because it’snot. its not okay siri how the hell do i get to the nearest anything “here is: the nearest painting” like fuck you siri
actually considering all this, the changing floorplan probably worked exactly as designed when it came to the battle of hogwarts in the late 90′s. the invasion was towards the end of the term, so the students, especially the renegade students in hiding, had the full term to master getting around the school quickly, quietly, and efficiently. the invading deatheaters were generally their parents’s ages, and hadn’t been back to hogwarts in several decades, if they’d even attended at all. so, while the adult invaders easily outmatched the adolescent defenders in strength and skill, hogwarts was a lethal maze to the deatheaters, while it was home to the kids.
I like to think that Rita Skeeter totally lost whatever renown she had after the war and so Harry and Ginny and the others like to pick up her stories for fun without worrying about the effect it’ll have on their image? Like Harry just idly turns a page every morning and goes, “Oh, we’re getting a divorce.”
And Ginny yawns as she fetches two coffee mugs and says, “Is it because I’m snogging Neville?”
“No,” says Harry, “it’s because I’m snogging Neville.”
And Ginny slams down her mug and says, “Goddamnit, Harry, let me have my affair in peace, would you?”
They have this sort of conversation in public, sometimes. Especially in places (the Leaky Cauldron, the Three Broomsticks, etc) where they know that it’ll get back to Skeeter.
I like to imagine that the kids get in on it as well. Like Albus and Scorpius can be over heard in the Great Hall with the latest Potter Family gossip
“Did you hear that your dad is leaving your mum for my father?”
“I thought mum was leaving dad for your mum, Scorp?”
“No that was last week. Your mum is with your aunt Luna right now.”
The most hilarious thing about the fact Buckbeak had a trial and lost is that later on JKR resolves the issue by having Hagrid take him in again and renaming him Witherwings. That’s literally all it took. What if in POA, Hagrid simply said, “Sorry, Buckbeak flew away.”
“There’s a hippogriff right there, Hagrid.”
“A different hipprogriff.”
“I’m… pretty sure that’s the same hipprogriff.”
“Prove it.”
no dna tests we die like scientifically underdeveloped societies
Prisoner of Azkaban continues to be the most frustrating book
Someone should have just adopted Sirius and started calling him Gerald.
Remus: Erm… this is our new order member, my… cousin Gerald. Gerald White.
“Mr. Lupin that is Sirius Black with glasses!” “Oh come now Minister, Sirius Black doesn’t wear glasses. That wouldn’t make sense.” “Well have Mr. White take off his glasses then!” “He can’t he needs them to see.”
it got better
It’s honestly a miracle to me that wizarding society doesn’t collapse every other week because like
You’ve got this world full of people who can destroy whole buildings or turn people into beetles or make vehicles fly just by waving a stick at them
And there is literally no common sense
Anywhere to be found
Voldemort would never have had anyone find out he was back if he just went around calling himself Steve
Okay, see, I thought I saved this post to comment on it but I’d like to bring up
The Minister would NEVER EVER disbelieve in Gerald White. He’d buy it hook line and sinker. The wizarding world would buy it hook line and sinker. The GOBLINS wouldn’t but wizards have been shown to be pretty blindingly clueless. Still, Gringotts would grudgingly give Sirius access to the Black fortune.
But, but, but, you know the one person
the one person
who Gerald White would drive AB-SO-LUTELY FUCKING BATSHIT?
Severus Snape.
Snape would do everything, EVERYTHING, to get people to believe that it’s Sirius. But the Order would ignore it (they accepted Sirius as Sirius before anyway) and Remus would just be so… so affronted.
‘Severus, he is my cousin.’
And Sirius would love it. He’d love the fact that Snape just hated it. He’d be the BEST DAMN GERALD WHITE EVER b/c Snape is doing everything from dropping veritaserum into his firewhisky to capturing a dementor in a box and releasing it on Sirius when he least expects it
That one causes problems for a bare minute because SHIT A DEMENTOR ATTEMPTED TO GIVE GERALD THE KISS MAYBE SNAPE IS RIGHT except Harry comes forward and is like ‘excuse me, I’ve never committed a crime and dementors are ALWAYS attacking me, I think they’re attracted to glasses’
and the magical community is like ‘shit, yeah, you’re right’
and just
Spare. Snape goes spare.
Picturing Snape as Mr. Crocker from the Fairly Oddparents now.
Gerald White eventually becomes a fully registered animagus. When he turns into his animagus form right in front of Snape, Snape’s bursting at the seams, just pointing at him and spluttering:
‘HE’S A BIG BLACK DOG! A DOG – THAT IS BLACK. SIRIUS BLACK. BLACK DOG DOG BLACK.’
And Remus calmly says: “That’s absurd, Severus. Sirius Black was never an animagus and besides which, people’s names don’t have any influence over their animagus forms or anything like that. That’s ridiculous.”
And Snape yells: “Shut it WEREWOLF MCWEREWOLF!”
Everyone looks at Remus, who blinks and sighs as Gerald White turns back into his human form.
“Pure coincidence,” Gerald says. “My aunt was into Roman mythology. Has to happen sometimes.” Then he pauses to give Snape an overly concerned look. “Are you alright, Severus? You’re looking a little red.”
when i heard there’s only one wizarding school in america, i laughed incredulously, and i know i’m not the only one. one school for the whole huge country? obviously brits don’t have any idea how big america is! cue derisive anecdotes about visitors who thought they could visit hollywood as a day trip from new york.
but recently something’s occurred to me: what if ilvermorny IS the only ‘wizarding school’ in america, with ‘wizarding school’ being defined as a wizard-only establishment where they teach nothing but magic?
aside from how unprepared that leaves kids for the rest of life, there just isn’t the population density to support wizard-exclusive pocket-universe enclaves anywhere but the east coast and possibly los angeles. even chicago is more spread out than that, and when it comes to mid-size cities like minneapolis and st. louis, forgeddaboudit. not even wizards would choose to live crammed cheek by jowl on quaintly crooked pedestrian-only streets when they could have a three-bedroom prairie-style on a wooded half-acre in edina.
so i’m thinking, yeah, ok, most american magicals don’t send their kids to wizard school. kids go to regular school and have wizarding clubs and retreats and summer camps instead. gives new meaning to “one time at band camp.”
the pureblood prejudice never developed in america? well, of course not, no one but the hamptons set goes even a single day without interacting with muggles. most of your friends are going to be muggles. there aren’t enough magical jobs for everyone, so most people’s coworkers will be muggles. except we wouldn’t call them muggles, of course, and certainly not ‘no-maj’ – that sounds like something that was said for a while by one particular new york jet set clique in the 1920′s and got written down in an english etiquette book as ‘what americans say’. we’d probably call them ‘mundanes’ or ‘normals’ if we called them anything at all.
the stuff about wand permits and other odd regulations makes sense for a small bureaucracy that doesn’t really understand why it can’t control things the way european magical governments do. it’s kind of a cargo cult legislation. probably most americans don’t even use a wand most of the time. european wand-focused magic might be the Done Thing among the WASP contingent, but everyone else undoubtedly knows at least something about navajo healing ritual, haitian voodoo, lakota dance magic, chinese feng-shui warding techniques, etcetera. taking away a person’s wand doesn’t take away their magic. you can’t say ‘corn pollen permit’ with a straight face and they sell chalk at the corner store.
i expect american wizards look at the hogwarts set as kind of a weird sect with weird restrictions and weird costumes. like the amish, but instead of furniture and quilts, they export clueless young men.
if I lick your brain will I gain your creativity?
i don’t know but it’s worth a try
also no one else will be able to eat it because it’s got your germs on it, which will be handy if zombies
this has always pretty much been my whole exact understanding of the hp universe
i also figured a lot of american magic is in english instead of the pseudo greek/latin British spells since, unlike British schools, most Americans never study those, so our spells are like ‘Fire’, ‘Unlock", “Magic Missile’
also american wands have gun grips or are baseball bats
when i was a kid i made a wand out of a piece of copper pipe with brass end caps, and carried it around with me for most of a year; i know a lot of kids who had walking sticks from summer camp or hiking, and pretended they were magic. hell, i bet a lot of wizard kids learn to cast with a #2 pencil, just from idly messing around.
also, spells based on superhero powers: definitely a thing.
imagine some baddie trying to AK someone and getting hit by SHAZAM in return.
american wizards learn how to do spider-man webbing out of wands the way kids learn to do that one S symbol
source: remember those dumb/racist comics ron had in his room? that’s all they got. britwizards don’t know a single spider-man
spells based on d&d too, i bet. and not nearly as much distinction between ‘dark arts’ and the rest, largely because a lot of the nonwhite arts got classified as Ebil Scary Bad by anglos, and the rest of america wasn’t having it. in louisiana, knowing the voodoo lady can raise the dead just speaks to the high quality of her marching powder.
florida wizards can use pool noodles as wands
not a single british wizard has ever returned from florida
dude florida is just one big messy cryptid zone, the ‘florida man’ phenomenon is real and ‘hold my beer’ is a very powerful spell
edit: ok, wizarding america IS silly, just not the way rowling thought
I bet for the professors teaching Ravenclaws is like herding cats away from empty boxes.
Older Ravenclaws have finely honed the art of asking just the right argumentative questions to direct their teacher onto an entire-class-session-long tangent about something entirely irrelevant to the course material.
Can you imagine Ravenclaws trying to overhaul the entire school system with Muggle ideas. Trying to figure out how to best teach people, more concerned with how people learn than what they’re learning.
“Why do we force people to learn things they aren’t interested in, we should create our own curriculum.”
“We should figure out everyone’s learning styles.”
“We need smaller class sizes.”
“No, no, wait, guys, what if we eliminated grades entirely.”
Yeah, Ravenclaws would drive Hermione up the wall.
“Fire the whole staff and start over.”
“Present more opportunities for seventh-year independent research!”
“Why hasn’t anyone made magically modified calculators yet?”
“Why are we still using quills and parchment when pencils exist? Please explain.”
“I don’t want to enter the work force directly after school, what are my options for higher education? Is there magical university?”
“I don’t feel confident in my professor’s qualifications because she’s teaching me astrology but doesn’t know any facts about space beyond about the year 1764.”
Muggleborn Ravenclaws forming rogue study groups to teach other students chemistry and algebra and English literature, just imagine.
“They call this the astronomy tower but we’re learning about the effects of Venus when it’s in the fourth house and the professor doesn’t believe Neptune is a planet I am really concerned.”
“Okay but what’s the oxidation state of Mandrake root in pepperup potion?”
“But can you apply differential calculus to arithmancy or not?“
“The portrayal of the witches in Macbeth has some pretty troubling implications, also, I don’t think their potion would have actually done anything.”
The SMH team have a Harry Potter party and everyone has to go as a character, no excuses.
Jack is forced to be Harry, even though he’s way too tall, but everyone wanted to see him in glasses and to loudly proclaim he looks just like his father, but has his mother’s eyes. Holster and Ransom wanted to find him a real owl but Bitty said no.
Ransom goes as Lee Jordan and spends the entire night commentating on the events of the party at great volume.
Dex is a Weasley. Which Weasley, you ask. All of them. (no, he was not given a choice).
Bitty was given suggestions such as Professor Flitwick and Professor Umbridge because of his height. He ignores both and goes as Dobby instead. People throw clothes at him all night.
Shitty goes as Dumbledore and spends half the evening dispensing Sherbet Lemons and wise advice. The other half is taken up by muttering cryptic warnings to Jack, who doesn’t understand most of them.
Holster agonises for eight days over his decision, before finally choosing Professor McGonagall, who is in his top 5 favourite characters of all time. He spends most of the evening chasing after Ransom, telling him to watch what he’s saying in a high-pitched voice and a passable Scottish accent.
Lardo goes as Sirius Black, and is undoubtedly the coolest person in the room. She shows up on a motorcycle. No one knew she could even drive one. Her moustache and flow rival Shitty’s.
Chowder goes as Hagrid, who was always one of his favourite characters. His costume is so good that it takes the team half the night to realise exactly who it is, and that’s only because he brings out his largest stuffed toy shark as a “pet”.
Nursey goes as Gilderoy Lockheart because they’re both extremely good-looking and has everyone around him laughing all night at his perfect blend of self-absorption and complete incompetence. He composes poems about himself on the spot.
Parson crashes the party halfway through the night, loudly announcing his displeasure at not being invited, and that “My father will hear about this”.
In the 2014 additions to the UK Potter books, Rowling says part of the process to become an Animagus is to hold the leaf of a Mandrake in your mouth for a whole month.
Can you imagine. These boys in Minerva McGonagall’s classes for that month, hoping she doesn’t notice.
now that you pointed that out i’m 100% sure minerva knew about that
ok imagine all the marauders pretending to take a vow of silence for a month to keep that up. Like wearing chalkboards around their necks and writing out anything they have to say around teachers and coming up with another ridiculous reason every time someone asks why they’re taking a vow of silence like. We’re protesting the traditional student/teacher constructs and the unreasonable verbal requirements of school. We’re raising awareness of how funny we are and how much your lives are worse without our beautiful voices telling jokes. We’re in a very intense round of the Silent Game and we’re all here to WIN.
“So Remus, why aren’t you doing it?” (gives very fond look to the boys) “I’m not a moron.” “(deathglares)”
Okay but
What about when McGonagall did it.
YES CAN WE ALSO TALK ABOUT THAT
Other student: Minnie, why aren’t you talking? McGonagall: *scribbles on a piece of parchment* “someone bet me I couldn’t and mama ain’t raise no bitch”
andtheytoldustotellyouhello 