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

may trigger: discussion of consent & how love potions violate it


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I'm glad to know that JKR publicly acknowledged the consent-violating nature of love potions. It's pretty skeevy that they're considered a joke shop item.

My headcanon for that is that the kind of love potions Fred and George sold are very much focused on infatuation. The way this would work is like, think of Ron's experience of being spiked by Romilda Vane: if Romilda had actually tried to hook up with him during that time, then he would have been far too twitterpated to actually let anything happen. For example, she wouldn't be able to make out with him, because he would just want to sit next to her and stare at her adoringly, maybe holding hands. He would ramble on about how much he adores her, and make sickeningly sweet puppy eyes at her, and just generally do nauseating Puddifoot type stuff so much that he'd completely ignore any advances she made.

And I don't remember exactly how long Gred and Forge said the potions lasted (apart from that the duration depended on the weight of the recipient and the attractiveness of the user), but I would hope that they would overall be much too short-lived - and have effects far too ridiculous - for anyone to try to do anything truly awful.

I hope, anyway.

Given the generally disgusting nature of the wizarding government, I imagine that a good number of truly dangerous love potions would be fully within the law (despite their capacity to act as an aid in sexual assault), but some of the ones that more intensely mimic real love or lust would be illegal - including the one Merope used.

I hope.

 

Soooooooooo.

How about that question of "what does evil look like, themed to each of the houses? Since Slytherin = evil is absurd and needs correcting."

 

@cryptoThelematrix I'm really interested in your meta about how each house can go bad, if you're ok with posting it.

(That being said, I'm not even that into Harry Potter, oops)

 

There was more to it than that, but sure. Fair warning.

I used to be known as ataniell93 on LJ and I got trolled all to fuck and back because my HP meta made people really angry.

 

Okay, for those who don't read the enormous Complaints thread, we tangented onto a conversation of Harry Potter, and were asked to move it here. The context:

Spoiler: So many quotes

Re: your last question, Umbridge had some background stuff revealed through Pottermore, including sorting. The worldbuild stuff in that is all canon per JKR, to the best of my knowledge.

 

http://tiferet.livejournal.com/370427.html

Turns out that Hufflepuff evil isn't in there :( but my POV on Hufflepuff evil is that it takes two forms mainly:

1) Being a loyal True Believer/Follower of someone else (probably not a Hufflepuff) who is evil

2) Slavish devotion to the rules and to the notion that everyone is equal to the point of refusing to acknowledge situations where people due to their different circumstances, histories and abilities are unable to make exactly the same contributions and do exactly the same things and participate in things to the same degree. The sort of person who makes you jump through a lot of hoops to prove you're "really" disabled or "really" trying to get a job. The inability to understand that different types of people need different kinds of help.

 

Thanks for the repost @swirlingflight ! I can't believe I am actually voluntarily in an HP thread again lol.

 

Umbridge is SO NOT really a true Slytherin, sigh. So many of the things she did had no potential benefit either to herself or her support system or her "tribe".

 

I definitely agree with Umbridge being a Hufflepuff. I take umbrage at her not being in Hufflepuff. Because she's definitely NOT a Slytherin, and putting her there is ignoring her qualities and slapping her in Slytherin because "lol she's evil"

 

http://tiferet.livejournal.com/370664.html

Here is another one I just unlocked, it had been locked for several years due to trolling.

 

Yeah! She was all about hierarchy and place, especially being at the top of the hierarchy and putting others in the place she thought they deserved. Forcefully. I guess that's technically a kind of ambition.

 

I guess it is a kind of ambition, yet at the same time she wasn't overly concerned with being absolute top dog; she was perfectly content to do the work that her superiors charged her with. I don't think she really coveted the position of Minister of Magic, she was just happy with being somewhere in the upper ranks.

 

Backreading:

I would imagine that if you have an actual illness requiring actual medication (and I could not survive without Concerta, jesus fuck, I am so hyper) they have another way of dealing with it, maybe a potion or spell. They don't really respect muggle medicine (remember when Mr Weasley got hurt, the things they said?) so they probably don't call up the local apothecary. Likely they have spells for focusing when it's an occasional problem and a potion for people like us that is probably nasty af. :)

 

I guess I do see her as Slytherin, because while we see her nasty behaviour and petty ways of putting people in the place they belonged to, we don't see her backstory until later, which I think says a lot... because there we see how her ambition really drives her forward with her bitter views on places, since she wasn't a pureblood at all. Putting the Umbridge write up under a spoiler so everyone can judge it by themselves and also because it is long.

Spoiler: Pottermore Umbridge

Dolores Jane Umbridge was the eldest child and only daughter of Orford Umbridge, a wizard, and Ellen Cracknell, a Muggle, who also had a Squib son. Dolores’s parents were unhappily married, and Dolores secretly despised both of them: Orford for his lack of ambition (he had never been promoted, and worked in the Department of Magical Maintenance at the Ministry of Magic), and her mother, Ellen, for her flightiness, untidiness, and Muggle lineage. Both Orford and his daughter blamed Ellen for Dolores's brother's lack of magical ability, with the result that when Dolores was fifteen, the family split down the middle, Orford and Dolores remaining together, and Ellen vanishing back into the Muggle world with her son. Dolores never saw her mother or brother again, never spoke of either of them, and henceforth pretended to all she met that she was a pure-blood.

An accomplished witch, Dolores joined the Ministry of Magic directly after she left Hogwarts, taking a job as a lowly intern in the Improper Use of Magic Office. Even at seventeen, Dolores was judgemental, prejudiced and sadistic, although her conscientious attitude, her saccharine manner towards her superiors, and the ruthlessness and stealth with which she took credit for other people's work soon gained her advancement. Before she was thirty, Dolores had been promoted to Head of the office, and it was but a short step from there to ever more senior positions in the management of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. By this time, she had persuaded her father to take early retirement, and by making him a small financial allowance, she ensured that he dropped quietly out of sight. Whenever she was asked (usually by workmates who did not like her) 'are you related to that Umbridge who used to mop the floors here?' she would smile her sweetest, laugh, and deny any connection whatsoever, claiming that her deceased father had been a distinguished member of the Wizengamot. Nasty things tended to happen to people who asked about Orford, or anything that Dolores did not like talking about, and people who wanted to remain on her good side pretended to believe her version of her ancestry.

In spite of her best efforts to secure the affections of one of her superiors (she never cared particularly which of them it was, but knew that her own status and security would be advanced with a powerful husband), Dolores never succeeded in marrying. While they valued her hard work and ambition, those who got to know her best found it difficult to like her very much. After a glass of sweet sherry, Dolores was always prone to spout very uncharitable views, and even those who were anti-Muggle found themselves shocked by some of Dolores's suggestions, behind closed doors, of the treatment that the non-magical community deserved.

As she grew older and harder, and rose higher within the Ministry, Dolores's taste in little girlish accessories grew more and more pronounced; her office became a place of frills and furbelows, and she liked anything decorated with kittens (though found the real thing inconveniently messy). As the Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge became increasingly anxious and paranoid that Albus Dumbledore had ambitions to supersede him, Dolores managed to claw her way to the very heart of power, by stoking both Fudge's vanity and his fears, and presenting herself as one of the few he could trust.

Dolores's appointment as Inquisitor at Hogwarts gave full scope, for the first time in her life, for her prejudices and her cruelty. She had not enjoyed her time at school, where she had been overlooked for all positions of responsibility, and she relished the chance to return and wield power over those who had not (as she saw it) given her her due.

Dolores has what amounts to a phobia of beings that are not quite, or wholly, human. Her distaste for the half-giant Hagrid, and her terror of centaurs, reveal a terror of the unknown and the wild. She is an immensely controlling person, and all who challenge her authority and world-view must, in her opinion, be punished. She actively enjoys subjugating and humiliating others, and except in their declared allegiances, there is little to choose between her and Bellatrix Lestrange.

Dolores's time at Hogwarts ended disastrously, because she overreached the remit Fudge had given her, stepping outside the bounds of her own authority, carried away with a fanatical sense of self-purpose. Shaken but unrepentant after a catastrophic end to her Hogwarts career, she returned to a Ministry which had been plunged into turmoil due to the return of Lord Voldemort.

In the change of regimes that followed Fudge's forced resignation, Dolores was able to slip back into her former position at the Ministry. The new Minister, Rufus Scrimgeour, had more immediate problems pressing in on him than Dolores Umbridge. Scrimgeour was later punished for this oversight, because the fact that the Ministry had never punished Dolores for her many abuses of power seemed to Harry Potter to reveal both its complacency and its carelessness. Harry considered Dolores's continuing employment, and the lack of any repercussions for her behaviour at Hogwarts, a sign of the Ministry's essential corruption, and refused to cooperate with the new Minister because of it (Dolores is the only person, other than Lord Voldemort, to leave a permanent physical scar on Harry, having forced him to cut the words 'I must not tell lies' on the back of his own hand during detention).

Dolores was soon enjoying life at the Ministry more than ever. When the Ministry was taken over by the puppet Minister Pius Thicknesse, and infiltrated by the Dark Lord's followers, Dolores was in her true element at last. Correctly judged, by senior Death Eaters, to have much more in common with them than she ever had with Albus Dumbledore, she not only retained her post but was given extra authority, becoming Head of the Muggle-born Registration Commission, which was in effect a kangaroo court that imprisoned all Muggle-borns on the basis that they had ‘stolen’ their wands and their magic.

It was as she sat in judgement of another innocent woman that Harry Potter finally attacked Dolores in the very heart of the Ministry, and stole from her the Horcrux she had unwittingly been wearing.

With the fall of Lord Voldemort, Dolores Umbridge was put on trial for her enthusiastic co-operation with his regime, and convicted of the torture, imprisonment and deaths of several people (some of the innocent Muggle-borns she sentenced to Azkaban did not survive their ordeal).

 

Backreading:

Hello soulmate. I am so Slytherin I probably speak Parseltongue in my sleep.

(OK I actually kind of liked Book 5 but I hate Book 6 and 7 like burning and don't even still have them. Book 6 is the worst in my opinion because Book 7 while bad did have the entertaining bits where we learned that asshole Dumbledore was once in love with Wizard Hitler.)

 

I understand where you are coming from based on this post--but I wrote my meta in 2005 (before I had a nasty breakup with the fandom that made FW on numerous occasions) and I've got a Pottermore account but I think I signed in exactly once and don't even remember the password. So I had access to exactly none of this information when I played her as a Hufflepuff prefect from Hell and by the time I was really active with the character I wouldn't have cared about being jossed.

I loathe Umbridge as a person but she's fun to play and I made liberal use of sappy cat .gifs and glitter text which was also fun.

 

Man, frankly, I am totally in the Umbridge as an evil Hufflepuff boat too, but I do see her as Slytherin too. I guess I just think both make a lot of sense nd have their own different great takes on it. It's a gift that keeps on giving that way.

 

Also I should go work not read about HP and have feels

 

Yo what up where my hufflepals at???

 

Hufflepal high five! *raises hands*