The Wizarding World of Harry Potter (a thread for Potterheads)

Yeeeah, that's... basically the situation that was the case in a lot of feudal aristocratic families, historically. "Don't care about your sexuality" is not the right way to phrase it and implies entirely-too-nice things about it- it's "you must produce an heir, and we don't care who you fool around with after that." Which means they absolutely care about your sexuality, and if you're gay or asexual you better suck it up and marry somebody you're not attracted to and make babies with them via turkey-baster or something and if you want a fulfilling relationship, that's what extramarital affairs are for. Have fun being glued to a spouse you're not interested in for the rest of your life and having to give them more legitimacy than the people you actually love, because these kind of people are not likely to be big on divorce, either.

 

....this is my new favorite way of writing this
please link to fic

 

link now in post but here it is again
they meet on kik when a dick pic gets sent to the wrong person by mistake it's hilarious

 

@Elph link.

EDIT: FUCK I WAS ALREADY READING THIS.

 

which is just such a depressing future...
now I want to make an HP OC who's a pureblood and her character arc is basically her learning to rebel against this idea.

 

Ohh my god I love that fic, it's one of my faves. They're all so well written through the texts (and Peter is included as a decent character! It frustrates me to no end when he gets excluded because of what he becomes, like, no that's dumb they wouldn't have trusted him if he was so pathetic/barely even there/whatever!)

 

I think part of the reason people do that is because JKR basically did that in canon. :::|||

 

One of my brother's favourite historical anecdotes is about a guy whose family's competitors wanted out of the picture, because if he produced any heirs they'd be out of the running for some important somethingorother. But they were responsible for raising him for some reason, so they tried to raise him to be gay by surrounding him with gay people and socialising him into queerness.
When he got older, he got back at them by marrying a notorious lesbian who agreed to help him have as many children as possible. IIRC they had a long and happy companionable marriage.
(Sadly, I do not remember any of the context to this story.)

@Sol link is now in the post! Also in my reply to chaoticArbiter :)

 

lol this thread is moving so fast :P (edit: I was not expecting to actually be able to double post!)

She totally did - the thing that bugs me the most is not portraying him as the odd one out in the Marauders (because that would be a very plausible contributing factor to his eventual betrayal; Shoebox Project's last chapter does this very well), but portraying him as the stupid talentless one. I get him being awkward and maybe not very high-achieving in school, but he helped make the Map too, and he became an Animagus in his teens as well, and neither of those things were remotely easy. He had to be pretty powerful in his own right to achieve that.

I am hoping, however, that A:TB Peter stays nice. And since the authors have said it is ultimately a fluff piece, I imagine that'll happen. I dunno, maybe he'll fall out with them at some point, but at the very least I think they'd make peace at the end.
(I really just love ATB Peter. Primary school teacher Peter who makes an educational corner for a house party so people can go make communist-themed art. Excitable Peter who's really disappointed that they can't make a last-minute pole for people to dance on using his arts and crafts materials. ATB Peter.)

 

I imagine we're just supposed to assume that Peter achieved these things by way of his friends, and that they included him and helped him along because they didn't want to leave him out, but like...? he's gotta have some redeemable quality, some smarts, some power, something that they saw in him that made them want to include him in the first place.

 

SBP does peter so well with the betrayal thing, i'm sad it never got finished further than it did because i bet it would have been fucking heartbreaking

 

Spoiler: Related to sexuality thing tiny-fandom pet peeve

This is also reminding me of how. There's this one character in RH who a lot of people headcanon as aro ace, and she's a princess of a kingdom whose royal family has magic powers necessary to keep the world from ending, and whose royal family is almost extinct. And I keep seeing people going "I headcanon her as aro ace, and that she never marries despite social pressure because she sticks up for herself!" And I'm just over here like "Guys. No. I am literally the first person to propose this headcanon in the fandom, and I am telling you that no. There would be a turkey-baster arranged marriage to some dude, because she's got an entire continent's welfare riding on her having kids, and she'd put that over her own lack of interest." 888|||

Re: Peter: something that really bugs me is that the author's obviously letting her own feelings about betrayal color everything about him as a character. Like, how much more compelling would everything about him have been if she'd given him some admirable and sympathetic traits in canon? Or even a reason to feel sorry for him instead of look down on him- like instead of "he blabs everything to the Death Eaters," it's that they tortured him for the information, and he's now so terrified of them because of that that he thinks the only safe place to be is on the same side.

 

I mean, she does that a lot, just look at how the Slytherins are the always evil house.

 

Exactly. It's a really common flaw throughout HP. "I don't like [whatever], therefore even if I say it's not all evil it'll be evil like 99% of the time and exceptions will be framed as a No True Scotsman."

 

Also, Snape.

 

A world of possibility and cool ideas, toned down in the actual execution to bring them back to 2.5 kids white picket fence British norms. Which works, in a way, because then part of the story arc is "people are just people, no matter the neat and strange things they can do, and the mundane cruelties we visit on each other can be found among any people." But god fucking damn, is it a disappointment in a lot of ways. Partly because of representation failures, partly because of the abrupt changes to characterization in order to fit the later parts of the story, and the awful overlooked things (like the humanity of the 'bad guys')

 

"Maybe we sort too early" = No True Scotsman-ing him because of features that the author finds admirable.

 

I mostly find it telling that in the Happy Heterosexual Future, the only people who don't survive with their white picket fence and 2.5 kids are Remus and Tonks. Everyone else killed on screen was single, I'm pretty sure.

 

the happy het future is so unreal to me like what the fuck? was jk writing the same books i was reading? harry "twenty years of trauma!" potter goes on to marry his best friends sister and live happily ever after with 2.5 kids and i'm just supposed to accept that? ginny weasley, resident badass who doesn't need your help, gives up her career to have kids and be a happy little housewife at what, 30 tops? why the fuck.

 

Not to mention Harry actually becomes an Auror, a career option he just kinda said once because it was the only thing that came to mind, despite the fact that he's now the Official Bearer of the Elder Wand and if anyone ever so much as disarms him after this ownership will transfer and it will keep being a Problem.

I'm trying to decide which character's hallucination I can say that epilogue is. Maybe Dumbledore's?