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

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also (bangs fists on the table) jkr tell me more about newt's scary ex, because I Love Every Lestrange*

*except bellatrix's husband, who i always forget exists. so i guess actually just bellatrix and le(t/d)a lol

 

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I know nothing about scary ex but i have the feeling those two will end up my horrible unhealthy ship of choice for this specific bunch of movies

 

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@rats said she read that taking the fall for something she did was the actual reason newt got expelled, so That's Exciting

 

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I'm here for this. I am so ready for dysfunctional manipulative relationships

 

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sufficiently traumatising to create the obscurus maybe, but i dont think sufficiently traumatising that she would actively chose to suppress her powers for that long? considering they were just random nosy neighbour kids and she literally never would have seen them again after that.

 

http://thegreatratsby.tumblr.com/post/153709328817/ceruleanvulpine-thegreatratsby look at @rats' and my beautiful post

 

a summary of this movie

 

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@Sol that is true!! i have no clue haha

@emythos YES i was wiki/reddit-trawling post movie and i went to leta's page and apparently it was stated somewhere that leta and newt originally bonded because theyre both weird monster-loving outcasts, and one of leta's things got loose and almost killed someone and newt took the fall for her and that's why he was expelled
also: queenie saying that she was a taker, not a giver......i wonder how much of taking the fall was newt's idea and how much was leta's

that text is smaller than i thought it would be but OH WELL memeing is not an exact science

 

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didn't dumbledore's dad fuck those guys up and go to wizard jail? that could mess somebody up, i guess

 

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i wouldn't be surprised if it was the sorta thing where she let him think it was his idea

 

me: (sees a kind brave boy who loves animals)
me: >:]

 

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yeah p sure he did. honestly the entire dumbledore family is kind of a hot mess.

 

Spoiler: grumbling about fantastic beasts

i do feel like it kind of lost the particular, weird, extremely charming magical aesthetic that the modern-day HP universe has? maybe that's just because we're not in Britain anymore. but there were so few actual spoken spells!! it makes sense for "graves" to be good at wandless magic, but come on, JKR, you've got a cast of competent adult wizards, give me more weird incantations and shit. ALSO APPARATING MAKES A LOUD CRACKING NOISE YOU CAN'T SNEAK UP ON SOMEBODY WITH IT--

 

@blue I DIDNT EVEN NOTICE THAT WTF THATS SO TRUE

 

i did like the special effects that they did for apparating tho, it was very cool

 

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Okay, so - as best I could understand it, it looked like the obscurus spontaneously forms when specific conditions are met: 1) the kid is Traumatized As Fuck and 1a) the trauma may need to be specifically tied in with magic, and 2) cannot freely express magic. Which still leaves us wiggle-room for Ariana - because I've seen some damn good theory (by Red Hen, I think?) that suggested that Ariana wasn't able to properly express magic because of some disorder - the family Dumbledore is a hot mess and reading between the lines suggests that Mama Dumbledore, who was Muggleborn, might've had some family who would've been considered "not quite right in the head" by the standards of the time. And then she's got two sons, both of whom are a little odd - but hey, they're fine, everything's fine. And then along comes Ariana, and suddenly things aren't fine; we're told that Ariana had fits. She might've had epilepsy, which might definitely have fucked over her ability to normally express magic - maybe it came out in great bursts, when she had a seizure, and just kept building up the rest of the time. And she probably knew just enough to know that her magic wasn't like her brothers' or her parents', hers was wild and dangerous, and add in the trauma of whatever happened to the muggle kids (and we don't really know what happened, just that whatever it was, Papa Dumbledore confessed to it and went to Azkaban for life)...well, even knowing that you're different from your whole family, really different, is enough to make a kid go "I wish I were normal like them" and if you've got magic, that can be dangerous in itself. Add in muggle kids who know just enough to come snooping in to see magic going on (Red Hen speculates that this is because Aberforth's personal trick was to become invisible or at least hard to notice and he tended to wander off when Albus was supposed to be watching him and Ariana and go find somewhere more interesting to play - and he'd wander off just the same way when he got bored with the muggle kids), and Ariana having one of her "fits"?

We really don't actually know what the hell happened to those kids. We know just enough to know that the Dumbledores keep secrets, and that they were very clearly taught this at their mom's knee, and Ariana was one of the family's oldest secrets. We honestly can't trust anything Aberforth tells us about what happened - he's at best a second-hand account; more likely, he's speculating and selling part of the story that his mother taught them: the muggle kids came poking in and frightened Ariana, and her magic reacted. There was an accident, and Aberforth "expects what they saw frightened them" - which implies that he didn't see what happened, especially since this is contradictory to how they were poking at her to show off her magic just the line before - and he then goes on to sell the idea that the muggle kids, of course, must have attacked Ariana to try and make her stop doing what she was doing and it didn't work, and only made things worse.
For all we know, Ariana accidentally maimed or killed one of those kids. And Papa Dumbledore took the fall for her, because she was nowhere near old enough to even really understand what had happened (they hoped) and surely if they just kept her quiet and calm, the trouble would pass and Ariana would be a normal little girl again and everything would be fine.

And after that, Ariana was kept under very, very close supervision by her mother. The Dumbledores moved to a different village, one where no one knew that Ariana existed, and she didn't leave the house again until after she was dead. Given that the other kid we know of - the Sudanese girl Newt mentions - was also kept locked up...well, it looks to me like we've got the conditions for a wizarding-born kid becoming an obscurial right there.

I don't think that the MoM Trace prevents an obscurus from forming or even informs the Ministry about an obscurus existing; it's pretty explicitly just to keep an eye on whether Muggleborn kids are using magic outside of school, since we never hear about the Weasleys getting letters about underaged magic use (and you know Molly would harp on about it if they were). And the Trace doesn't seem to activate until the kid's old enough that they should be in school at least some of the year, which means that most obscurials would fall under the radar anyways, since Credence being...however old he was (12? 15? I read him as Barely Teens, but I'm not good with ages) was clearly unusual af - most obscurials burn themselves out by ten at the oldest, according to the movie.

Newt refers to it as a parasite, so my theory is that it's basically the kid's own magic turned in on itself - given enough self-loathing and enough deep longing to not be magical, for their magic to just go away, and I bet their magic will wrap around itself and start walking off on its own. But it still needs its host. But the kid can't sustain it any more, at that point - not usually; once it's got enough power to start fucking off and attacking anything that's causing the kid misery, the kid doesn't have enough power to keep it from draining them dry. Admittedly, I'm basing this off of Newt's wild speculation that the reason why Credence hadn't imploded was because he had so very much power.

I think Newt's got it in a sort of stasis bubble - it can't affect anything (unless you stick your hand in there, I guess - he's really insistent that Joseph not touch it) and it also can't turn into dusty ash. Or whatever the frig the Credence-obscurial turned into. And I think he nabbed it in an attempt to try and cure the little girl - it'd make sense for how he thinks, after all: get the parasite out, get the kid away from the people being awful to her, and things will sort themselves out, right? Except that it went bad, and she died - possibly she was right on the verge of burning out and this was just one thing too many for her system.
He's probably studying it to try and come up with a cure, but I don't think he's had any luck - although, to be fair, he did say he'd only had it for about three months. I suspect, however, the only actual means of dealing with an obscurial is preventing magical kids from ending up in situations where they feel like the only safe thing to do is to suppress their magic and keep it from doing anything.

In regards to why neither Harry or Tom Riddle turned into obscurials...well, they got punished for weird stuff happening around them, sure - or at least Tom was punished when the matron could be sure that it was his fault somehow, even if she wasn't sure how; Tom mostly got left the hell alone, after a certain point, in the hopes that it'd make him stop terrorizing the other kids. (It didn't work, but she had reason to want him gone any way she could get it.) Neither of them knew that the 'weird stuff' that happened around them was magic, though - Tom had no one to clue him in, until Dumbledore said so (although he may have started piecing it together on his own), and Harry was explicitly discouraged from thinking magic was real. And Tom wasn't really being traumatized so much as causing trauma to everyone else around him. So neither Harry or Tom were actually prevented from freely expressing magic - or rather, Tom wasn't, and Harry wasn't sure what the hell he was expected to do about the weird stuff that kept happening around him (which works out to about the same effect). And whether or not Harry was abused / has trauma seems to depend on how JKR feels that day, so let's just go with "he was abused, there should be trauma, but his brain never linked 'this is why the bad things happen' with his expression of magic and we can all be very thankful for it".

I'm pretty sure that Grindlewald can't "smell" a squib, he's just assuming since Credence is too old to plausibly be an obscurial (as far as he knows) and doesn't see the point in continuing to be nice now that he's got what he wants.

Also, can I just - shriek in frustration about Graves turning out to have been Grindlewald hiding in a high-level position in MACUSA, for a bit? Because, just. What the hell? Like, sure, have Graves turn out to be one of Grindlewald's men! That makes sense! (If you assume no one's getting screened for that sort of shit, considering there's a war on, but then again, screening of that sort would imply some sort of actual competence from wizarding governments. Which is obviously just not going to happen if JKR's writing. Carrying onwards.) But having Graves be Grindlewald himself, and be someone who's in a position of authority? One that's putting him right next to the president of Magical America, at that? Just. What. How did he even have fucking time for that? Did he just run around and set up fake identities all over the place for himself, just in case he ever needed them? Did he have a follower set it up and work the position till he needed to go on the run? What the hell's going on there.

Also-also, nifflers are fucking adorable, and! The beast ban doesn't make sense, cos like - what the hell does MACUSA have against puffskeins? What do they have against - whatever the "looks almost like a cat and can crossbreed with them" critters are, that Crookshanks was suspected to be an outcross of, and that Mrs Figg had loads of? I mean, I can see the argument for "nothing flashy, nothing that's going to be hard to keep hidden" - but something that looks like a cat, or a small fluffy ball, or can be passed off as a type of exotic bird, and which isn't any more dangerous than a non-magical animal...it's a stupid law.
(Also, quietly disappointed that Newt didn't get redirected to have his luggage examined by an auror. I mean, they're worried about magical critters being imported and exported, right? You'd expect they'd be quietly redirecting wizarding passengers so that they can get properly, safely inspected without risking secrecy. I mean, you could've had Newt going "oh, yes, I've got some magical animals, I'm actually here to return one to its natural territory in Arizona, here are my security measures, I am not planning on selling anything or allowing anything out of my case except this one creature which, again, is only getting released once we reach Arizona" and then he's let go with a warning of 'okay, but keep a close eye on them, we'll be watching you, please make sure you get your wand permit before doing any magic', and then you've still got plenty of reason for him to just be wandering around New York because it's probably a day or two before he can start heading for Arizona and why not see the sights while he's here, and that still gives you the scene where his case gets switched with Joseph's, without needing to go "ha ha, muggles amirite?" right before that.)

I am really, quietly happy that Joseph was Jewish, though. (It's a subtle thing - they don't say anything about it, but: his shop is shown to be in the Jewish section of the city, and now that I'm actually thinking about it? His last name is Krezlowski, which is...it sounds Polish, to me? Or from that region, anyways. And it'd make sense if his family had immigrated. But he's pretty clearly made challah bread into some of those edible sculptures he's done, and challah's a traditional Jewish bread. It wouldn't even be known - not well, anyways - outside of the Jewish areas and it definitely wouldn't be something known enough that he could just start freehanding it into sculpture.)

 

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@turtleDove iirc dursley-era Harry occasionally was unhappy with the "weird coincidences" and inexplicable things that happen around him, because he gets in trouble for them, but you're right, i don't know if he ever made the connection from the weird occurrences to himself to.. certainly not magic, since he doesn't know it exists.

tom riddle, meanwhile, didn't have a great childhood but i think he HAD realized that he was causing stuff to happen, even if he didn't call it magic, and TREASURED that ability - it made him special, after all! and able to scare the other kids! (i really do love that scene where dumbledore shows up at the orphanage and has a battle of wills with a clearly terrifying eleven year old.)

 

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@blue yeah, Tom Riddle had very clearly figured out that he was causing stuff to happen. He didn't, I think, call it magic, but he knew that it was him who was the motive force behind it. And yeah, he delighted in it. (I think I liked the scene at the time. In hindsight, I'm just...very excalibur-face about it, since Dumbledore not going "okay, hey, maybe I should tell someone that the incoming Muggleborn managed to come up with a homebrewed version of imperius and crucio, and that the kid's a thief and clearly takes delight in tormenting anyone he thinks has less power than he does" - it's Dumbledore all over, absolutely, but it's him fucking up in being a responsible authority figure once again, honestly.

A responsible teacher would've turned over the notes on that interview to the Headmaster, and made sure that the Auror chief got a copy of them too. And then let things go from there. Tom Riddle should never have gotten within spitting distance of Hogwarts. (I mean, yeah, if he hadn't've, we wouldn't have the whole plot, but....mrrh. I got Very Tired of Dumbledore about the point where I realized that he went "I can't be trusted with power" and then went and clung like mad to a position where he's in charge of what happens to children and how they get educated. Like - no wonder the Ministry's a mess, when you think about it, Dumbledore made sure that if there was anyone competent to staff it, it'd be by sheer dumb luck and tenacity on the part of the employee! (Hi, Percy!)

 

I feel that at this point we have moved out of spoilers-for-new-stuff territory, so: yeah. like,

Dumbledore: it's ok, he can come to the school without further supervision
Dumbledore: i'll keep an eye on him
Dumbledore: i made him hate me and be terrified of me. that's the best way to ensure children don't hide things from you
Tom Riddle: (unleashes ancient snake)
Tom Riddle: (kills a student)
Tom Riddle: (frames another student for her death)
Tom Riddle: (gathers a gang of Wizard Nazi followers)
Tom Riddle: (learns how he could make himself immortal through judiciously applied murder)
Dumbledore:
Dumbledore: well, i did my best

 

I adore fic where Dumbledore didn't take out his own shadow projection on young Tom, didn't go directly to "making him fear me and my power will totally convince him to stay in the straight and narrow, and could never reaffirm his ideas that getting power over others is freedom," but instead...

Took on the responsibility of being a mentor. Teaching him in a coherent way.