lannamichaels:

eldabe:

I want a fic about the founders where they purposely design Hogwarts as some sort of rejection of normative Muggle architecture. “This will be a purely magical space” they declare as they make a room that only appears when people want it hard enough, a room that purposely looks like it has no ceiling, staircases that will do everything to prevent you from getting from point A to point B in a timely fashion, and a freaking dormitory (with windows!) under a lake before Muggles even have the technology to make that possible.

Crossposted to DW

Muggles: you can’t do that.

Hogwarts founders: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

kyraneko:

animateglee:

ohboywonder:

is that no teacher ever called him James by accident, or that Ron never was called “Bill-, eh Charl-, no Per-, argh!”

As a younger sister who knows this struggle all too well: THIS IS REAL. Pretty sure 70% of my past teachers still think I’m called what my sister is called in fact.

Imagine Fred being called Percy by McGonagall accidentally and then he gets so offended that he refers to her by “Professor [insert any other name but McGonagall” for the rest of the year, costing Gryffindor a considerable amount of points one at a time.

From then on, she vows to just call them all Mr Weasley.

Until Ginny comes along and she calls her Mr Weasley by accident and Ginny “accidentally’ calls her Sir and it starts again.

It’s lightly off-topic but also slightly relevant but I have long cherished this mental image of Professor Snape saying something snappish to Harry in just the wrong tone of voice and Harry absentmindedly, wearily, and completely accidentally responding with, “Yes, Aunt Petunia.”

chordatesrock:

Wait. Wait. The entire fandom has been arguing for years over whether to take the 40 students in Harry’s year and multiply by seven to get Hogwarts’ total student population (280) or trust Rowling’s estimate of the total (1000) and assume there are more students than 40 in Harry’s year, even though we have the list of all of them.

But. You guys. Harry was born during a war against Voldemort, who had no qualms killing infants, and who certainly had no problem killing the young people Harry’s parents’ age.

Harry’s year is unusually small, and maybe Ginny’s is, too. Things picked up again after the war, when there wasn’t that threat of death hanging over everyone’s heads and taking young soldiers away from their spouses or significant others. And it really didn’t start until the Marauders were adults or almost adults, so… it shouldn’t have been an issue shortly beforehand, either.

Harry’s year is 40 students, instead of the expected hundred-odd, because of Voldemort. “The” girls’ dorm, and “the” boys’ dorm, are the only two dorms used by students in Harry’s year, but of course there are closed-off rooms, maybe ones that have disappeared because they don’t exist unless they’re needed. You know those empty, unused classrooms that I seem to recall hearing mention of once or twice? They’re for splitting classes that would be too big. But that’s not needed for Harry’s year. (It might be needed for the year below Ginny’s, though.)

Imagine being a teacher, or one of the older students. You’ve seen sortings before— ones with a hundred kids, or two hundred, and that’s what you’re used to.

Then you sit down, and watch the children file in for a Sorting. And there are forty of them. And you count back in your head and realize— these are the children conceived during the war. And this year is small. And so is the next. And the next.

But then the post-war baby boom starts using all the closed-up dorms and classrooms, and Hogwarts is back to normal.

ron-is-awesome-sauce:

andfrecklesandyoursmile:

One thing about Percy that I’d forgotten about until my reread is that he too is nuts for Quidditch just like the rest of the fam

I feel like in most fanfics I’ve read Percy doesn’t care for quidditch and sits out all the games between his siblings and never even like, watches them??? And so in my mind Percy doesn’t only not play but is like, completely anti-sports???

But I’m reading PoA and here he is making bets on the games with Penelope and telling Harry he has to win and “jumping up and down like a maniac, all dignity forgotten” when Gryffindor wins the cup I love him

I knoww right. I hate the fact that just because Percy is so academically inclined people think he hates quidditch. He loves it just as much as everyone else in his family. I mean, remember who his roommate was for 7 years people. He would not have survived living with Oliver Wood if he did not love Quidditch.

lesbianhulk:

So this morning (at 1am) I learned that JK Rowling has confirmed the oft touted fan theory that lycanthropy in Harry Potter is explicitly intended to be an HIV metaphor. This gave me a number of feelings which I will attempt to elaborate on below. (God I wish I still had a real blog. Tumblr is rubbish for this!)

When I was a student nurse back in Adelaide in 2006 I worked on a Palliative Care Ward. Most of my patients had cancer but I cared for a couple of people with AIDS. Some of them were angry drug addicts, some of them were sad, silent & completely alone, some of them had friends & family & partners who visited every day. I was never told how they contracted the virus that was killing them – HIV is so much more insidious than a ravening beast stalking the countryside – but I did know that none of them deserved it and that NOT ONE OF THEM WAS A MONSTER.

I had one particular patient who was in some ways reminiscent of Remus Lupin – he had family & friends who loved him, he was quiet but cheerful & polite in the face of adversity and he was one of a very small number of people to notice a young person falling apart & desperately in need of help. He tried to help me, in what little ways he could from his hospital bed. He saw that I was deeply depressed & found ways to make me laugh every time I did his obs or changed a dressing, he recognised my desire to learn & taught me things well in advance of my studies (long term patients always know more medicine than all but the most senior of medical staff), he recognised that I was struggling with being gay & showed me that it was possible to be different & still be loved. His impact on my life might not have been as profound as Lupin’s on Harry’s but he was important to me at that time & in some ways he saved me even though I couldn’t save him.

But Lupin is only one of two named werewolves in the Harry Potter canon. The other, Fenrir Greyback, is described as “the most savage werewolf alive today. He regards it as his mission in life to bite and to conta­minate as many people as possible; he wants to create enough were­wolves to overcome the wizards. Voldemort has promised him prey in return for his services. Greyback specialises in children… Bite them young, he says, and raise them away from their parents, raise them to hate normal wizards.” I’m not going to go looking for specific anti-gay propaganda to quote here but I’ve seen a lot of it that reads exactly like this. The gays are after your children. They’re going to deliberately infect them with HIV. They’re monsters. And this is where your “lycanthropy is a metaphor for stigma against HIV” falls apart. Firstly, the VERY FIRST THING they teach you when you work with people with heavily stigmatised illnesses is not to fall in to the traps of making moral judgements about your patients or creating a good patient/bad patient dichotomy. Which is…actually what you’ve done here. Secondly, Greyback’s actions ARE the stigma against people with HIV (and with STIs, and with Hepatitis, and with Schizophrenia etc etc etc). In creating the narrative of Lupin as the “good patient” and Greyback as the “bad patient” you have made Lupin seem like he is something extraordinary – the One Good Werewolf (especially since the few other werewolves we hear of in the series seem more inclined toward’s Greyback’s behaviour than Lupin’s). Exceptionalism does not fight stigma.

Now obviously & slightly hypocritically, my patient above is my Exceptional Patient and obviously in fiction you can’t flesh out every side character but I feel like as an author you have a responsibility to really THINK about what you’re saying when you say “[fantasy situation] is a metaphor for [delicate real life situation]”. Because I met a lot of patients with stigmatised conditions (hell, I AM a patient with a stigmatised condition) and some of them were lovely & some of them were mean & some of them were quiet & some of them were scary but none of them were MONSTERS & I’m pretty sure none of them harboured a desire to make other people suffer like they were. I love Remus Lupin. He’s one of my top 5 Harry Potter characters. But if you want to talk about anti-Werewolf stigma like its in any way like anti-HIV stigma I hope like hell this new werewolf story is about Mrs & Mrs Batra-Nagy, their three children, & their jobs as a school teacher & a social worker specialising in werewolf peer support & community engagement. Or maybe about Sam Moyles who got bitten during the Battle of Hogwarts & just really wants to live a normal life but is really bad at remembering when the next full moon is. But I digress.

Remus Lupin is an incredible, wonderful person regardless of his “condition” & his only fleshed out counterpart is so evil as to make Lupin look like a saint in comparison. Of COURSE the reader will see Lupin as worthy of good things & as undeserving of stigma. Likewise, a paramedic contracts HIV on the job is seen as less deserving of stigma (and more deserving of treatment and survival) than a hard-partying gay IV drug user who can’t remember which city they were in when they might have come in to contact with the virus. But there are no good patients & bad patients, there are just people & in creating the Lupin vs Greyback narrative you’ve obliterated everything that stands at the heart of anti-stigma dialogue.