It just occurred to me, as I’m going through the Harry Potter books again, that whenever Harry has visions through Voldemorts eyes that he always, every single time, distinguishes between himself and Voldemort with the mention of “a white hand held a wand which was not his own”, or something to the effect of describing Voldemorts whiteness. While I’ve always taken this as a comment on how Voldemort is inhumanly, disgustingly pale, It occurred to me that a dark-skinned Harry Potter WOULD notice the stark, shocking difference in hands every single time without fail.
a muggleborn student coming to hogwarts with a thermos flask and filling it with tea in the morning so it stays hot all day and their pureblood friends are like “whoa what spell did you use for that” and they’re like “?????? it’s just a thermos???” and all the pureblood students start pointing their wands at cups and saying “THERMOS”
THERMOS
plot twist: it works, mugs suddenly start keeping tea at the perfect temperature for the caster all day. students in muggle studies start experimenting with other muggle jargon and a new generation of magic spells are born, propelling the stagnated wizard community into the technological age
He-Man: I do not know, but I’m sure JKR does, and it’s possibly racist.
I reckon Dementors are what people become after a few centuriesnof immortality having drank Unicorn blood. I imagine it was all the rage when people first realised it made you immortal (hence unicorns being so rare to this day), but after a while the curse caught up with them. The light bled out of their lives, all the magic they attempted went wrong, caused damage that ultimately had them driven from their homes and lives, and they were miserable. Constantly.
The phenomenon was tested, and eventually it was discovered that the ingestion of even the smallest amount of unicorn blood caused the soul itself to erode. That was the curse, the half life. You lived forever, but you didn’t get to keep your soul.
The longer these people lived, the more twisted and less human they became. Soon the world wasn’t only colourless, but completely invisible. They’d gone blind, as well as deaf, but their lost senses were made up for in other ways. They could feel the emotions of people—real people, not what they’d become. Vicariously, they were begining to feel human emotions for the first time in hundreds of years. And they were hungry for it. In droves, these bare shells of humans would descend on towns and villages only to stand around people’s homes, black robes hanging over their impossibly skeletal frames, moaning and wailing, guttural perversions of voices that often drove the victims of their presence to madness.
Hence the name Dementors.
It was then that the first of them recalled how they’d come to be this way—the power of the consumption of blood. How pure and invincible that first gulp of unicorn blood had been. Of course, it had turned out to be a terrible, terrible idea, but but then they’d lost all sense of morality, of right and wrong. All they cared about was the possibility, the slimmest chance that they might get even the smallest taste of that again.
It was then that the first Dementor followed a young man on his way home into the darkest stretch of road and sank his teeth into his throat, drank his blood until the body was drained dry of it.
And it worked, in a way. Consuming the life-force of a human being was powerful, certainly, but emotions didn’t run in blood. It wasn’t where the feeling hid.
None the less, killings became more and more common after that, the new knowledge communicated without sight or sound between them. But they wondered how they could get a more powerful high still, and thoughts returned to the essence of their condition—the essence of themselves.
Their souls were rotten. Perhaps… perhaps if they could take the souls of the living…
So they sought means to do so. It was terrifyingly easy for them, to do something so terrible, warped as their magic was. And the more souls they consumed, the faster and faster their last vestiges of their humanity left them.
So many centuries after their fatal (or rather the opposite of fatal) errors, the Dementors were no longer recognisable as having ever been human at all. They no longer walked along the ground but drifted through the air, ominous like shadows caught in the wind. And souls became all that they fed on—particularly the happy memories that lay there. Because though they could no longer remember that they had once been people, that all they’d wanted was for light and colour and joy to return to their lives, some intrinsic part of them followed the instinct all the same—sought happiness even if only stolen, because they were no longer capable of feeling it themselves.
And that kids is why we do not drink the blood of unicorns.
So I watched Half Blood Prince this evening, and I think it’s time to talk about Draco and the Vanishing Cabinet.
I mean, I’m always ready to talk about Draco and the Vanishing Cabinet, because the scenes concerning it are some of the most beautiful and sad in the movies, in my humble opinion.
But more specifically, I’ve been thinking about the objects that Draco vanishes: the apple, and the white bird.
See, these two things are things that, while watching, without even thinking much, seem - right.
Even just subconsciously, the imagery used here to me just fits, in a way that is not always easy to explain.
So I decided to actually think about it for a moment, and I realised just how significant these two objects are for Draco.
I mean, for starters, they’ve both appeared before, in Prisoner of Azkaban, arguably the HP film that puts most effort into fancy cinematography, imagery and symbolism.
First we have Draco’s message to Harry, which is strangely familiar:
And - well, we all know about Draco and his apple.
So even on a basic level, there’s an association here.
But just think of colour for a moment. The objects that Draco vanishes are crisp green and white.
You mean like…the distinctive green of Slytherin, or the Malfoys’ familiar pale colouring?
Like Snape or Umbridge, Draco is one of the characters in HP with incredibly distinctive use of colour throughout the books and movies. Picture Draco Malfoy for a moment. Has he ever worn anything that isn’t black, white or green? It's so easy to associate the colours of the apple and bird Draco vanishes to him himself.
And then consider the word purity.
Draco is a lot to do with purity.
First of all, of course, we have the whole “pure-blood” idea. But we also have the whole ego of Draco, his appearance, the way he holds himself. I again ask you to picture Draco Malfoy. How does he appear? Is it neat, clean, crisp? Is it in the manner of someone who carries himself highly, with confidence in his status, his class, his role, his purity?
And then consider an apple, uneaten, uniform, green. Consider a bird, a pure, white, perfect, beautiful bird.
These two objects aren’t just random things that happen to be there.
They are Draco.
And the reason I’m bringing this up is because this association makes what happens next to these objects so much more striking, and so much more painful, even before you really realise the link is there.
Because these two objects, these pure, perfect objects, are turned so that they are not perfect anymore.
These two objects are eaten into, mutilated, killed, destroyed.
And for Draco, much the same can be said.
And then you see those things restored after it through Harry’s character which could probably means redemption for Draco since he did help:
Headcanon that McGonagall is offended on a personal level that Umbridge loves cats.
This literally got 600 more notes just while I was at dinner what the fuck
How has nobody thought about this before tbh
Ok but imagine McGonagall in cat form prowling around the castle, in strategically chosen places so that Umbridge will come across her.
Umbridge takes the cat back to her office and feeds it a little saucer of milk. The cat starts coming back to Umbridge’s office around the same time every night, until eventually Umbridge gets into a little routine of setting out a saucer of milk for the cat before bed.
McGonagall now has all the best secrets on Umbridge, all of the results of the evaluations, and most importantly, is in a perfect position to spy on the ministry for the Order of the Phoenix.
All because Umbridge is obsessed with cats.
The mental image McGonagall lapping up that milk while full of burning hatred for Umbridge amuses me in ways I can hardly describe.
Harry Potter wakes up in hospital.
“Welcome back. You’ve been in a coma for 8 years” says the doctor. “You ran face first into a wall lmao”
NO
Plot Twist:
Mrs Weasley makes all her kids volunteer at the hospital, and she encourages ron to go talk to the coma patient who’s his age that no one ever visits
hermione is a smart girl who volunteers to read to coma patients in the hospitals
at first ron is like “back the fuck off, this is my gig” cause he’s 11 and he doesn’t like girls yet, but soon the two of them start to get along, and they talk to each other and pretend to include comatose harry in the conversation.
and ginny, who is still totally a badass, but also a hopeless romantic, kisses him like he’s sleeping beauty and might wake up
they both get weirdly protective of the boy the same age as them, who’s been in a coma for so long, and get really mad when the Dursleys decide to pull the plug
(petunia actually feels bad about it, because she did love her sister and harry is all there is left of her)
so ron and hermione hatch this elaborate scheme to keep harry alive by moving him around the hospital, so the doctors can’t ever find him
they get caught, and harry gets taken off life support and monitor gives out one long beep, and he’s dead
and then suddenly his heart starts beating again, and he blinks is eyes and sits up and goes “Ron? Hermione? …you don’t look how i pictured…”
and it turns out that harry really did have a lot of money left to him by his parents, and if he’d died the dursleys would have gotten all of it (vernon’s evil plot, prolly), but it’s 8 years later and he’s legal and gets all of it
but Mrs. Weasley totally takes him in because all of the weasley have grown fond of him over the years, despite never really getting to know him.
PS: hagrid was the janitor that talked to harry during the night shift
PPS: snape was the orderly who was always a little too rough with harry when cleaning him up or changing his sheets, because he didn’t give a fuck the kids in a coma, but then was surprisingly helpful to ron and hermione when they were trying to keep harry alive
malfoy:
you know that thing where you think about how much you hate someone and you get a boner? crabbe:
what the fuck goyle:
yeah, no one does that malfoy:
haha yeah i was totally just kidding malfoy internally:
fuck
I met a really clever reader the other day, and this is what’s wonderful about books; she said to me, I really know what Neville looks like.’ And I said ‘Describe Neville for me.’ And she said, `Well, he’s short and he’s black, and he’s got dreadlocks.’ Now, to me, Neville’s short and plump and blond, but that’s what’s great about books. You know, she’s just seeing something different. People bring their own imagination to it. They have to collaborate with the author on creating the world. —
Ok so first of all that drawing of Neville and Trevor is completely freaking adorable, but that quote of JK’s is super handy to have too. Next time someone freaks out about black Hermione or desi Harry or any of the other amazing POC character canons out there, you can just be like “well JK is down with it so wtf is your problem oh wait I know what it is”
