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

I'm now imagining a Dumbledore version of "Mace Windu unfucks the timeline."

 

What about instead of that, McGonagall Unfucks The Timeline

 

Isn't she around Voldie's age?

...She could transmute wizards into slightly less unmitigated assholes with her diligent practice and mastery of theory.

But who else is old enough to have been a teacher back then, Flitwick and Slughorn?

 

It's McGonagall I'm sure she could manage. I mean I'm pretty sure there's an Ahsoka Unfucks the Timeline out there.

 

sinistra maybe

we know basically nothing about her but that also means she can be old

 

We know she is GOFFIC. :::PPP

 

Spoiler

i was under the impression that percival graves wasn't a fake identity tho? like, percival graves was a Real Dude who Did Things and then grindelwald pulled a barty crouch jr. and has him in a jar somewhere and is cutting off his hair for polyjuice

 

oooh also

Spoiler

fuckin tina esther goldstein tho
tina and queenie are 10000% totally jewish and it makes me real happy :D

 

Spoiler

Ooh, okay, that would actually explain it. I do wish there'd been some hint, though, because without the suggestion of "Grindlewald used polyjuice", it's frustratingly confusing (for me at least) and reads as "and we're shoving Grindlewald in because namedropping" to me. (Honestly, it still reads a bit like that to me, but it'd be slightly more sensible with polyjuice.)

Delighted gasp! I missed that. Probably because 'Goldstein' reads as a perfectly normal name to me. Which says something of its own, I guess.

 

like. its so BIZARRE for me to see a name in pop culture that is unambiguously jewish and i love it

(altho the wiki says that they "might" be jewish like O. K. please show me a nonjew with a name like that thanks)

 

Yyyyyep. Like - sure, I can see someone maybe having a name like that and not being (or identifying) as jewish in the modern day. When you're in that period between WWI and WWII? In the mid-1920s? Nuh-uh. Anyone with a name like that is jewish, in that era; if they're not identifying as jewish, then they're also stripping out any markers that are going to tip someone off that they are / used to be - which means changing their last name to something more passing. (This is how my family's name went from 'Silverstein' to 'Silver', actually - not that anyone stopped identifying that way, but that my great-grandparents changed their names to blend a bit better when they immigrated.)

 

it's such a shame that remus lupin never felt comfortable enough to come out to JKR.... such a shame.....

 

aaaaaahhhhh my girlfriend and i have had such intense conversations about queer Remus (and then fun speculative conversations about Jewish Remus and Hermione celebrating Hanukkah together at Grimmauld Place)

 

This is the most succinct and accurate summary of the issue that I have ever seen.

Poor Remus.

if I had a kid I would probably try to work "Remus" into its name somehow

 

I understand why so many people think Remus is actually queer, but for me he has never been.

For me was always someone who felt that he was broken (because he was a werewolf) and that was why he was not deserving of a relationship, and I think he closed himself off to those things long ago. And so when Tonks begins to show interest in him, he can't possibly believe it's true. Plus, there's something wrong with him, right? So he's not a good thing for her. I can totally buy into this narrative that JKR has created.

Mainly because this has been my life so far, except without someone showing interest in me at the end of it.

 

I really really love my interpretation of queer remus, but at this point I think it's more about the sheer amount of "ok so remus and sirius get a house and no one goes to jail or dies" fanfiction

but I support your interpretation as well!

the important thing here is that remus is Excellent, must be protected, and deserved so much more, and I feel that we agree on that

 

Team I Just Wanted Remus Lupin To Be Happy D: high fives all round.

 

I didn't want to derail the ship gripe thread, but please consider this a +1 to going into your thoughts about the mirror. I'd love to hear them!

 

+ 1, i'd also like to hear them!

 

Okay, so! We know that the Mirror shows the deepest desires of whoever's looking at it, and that one of the warnings Dumbledore gave against continuing to look at it was "I've seen men waste their lives, looking at it, rather than seeking out what they saw" and that he immediately followed this up with "don't try to look for it any more, I'm moving it somewhere more hidden". (Granted, this is paraphrase based on what I remember, and I don't have a copy of Philosopher's Stone to check.)

Which, okay - so hypothetically, he maybe didn't have anywhere else to put it, but he also didn't actually put anything on it that kept Harry from finding it. In fact, Harry seemed frigging drawn to it - he beelined for it once he got the cloak. And then Harry got to spend several nights sitting in front of it, looking at a conjured image of his parents - managed to drag Ron there, even! It was either really badly or really weirdly secured, and Dumbledore obviously knew that Harry was going in there. Which means that we need to ask what Dumbledore gained from giving Harry access to that thing, and that draws us over to: Dumbledore really wanted to make sure that Harry followed his script and grew up to be the perfect sacrificial lamb. And obviously, it's easier to make sure that someone self-sacrifices if they don't have any serious attachments to anyone who's still alive.

So how do you make sure that Harry doesn't, say, start regarding the Weasleys as a perfectly-acceptable foster family and start petitioning to stay with them? (Which the Dursleys would've been perfectly happy with, and which the Ministry of Magic probably would've been quite pleased about too.)

You make sure that Harry can't consider anyone else besides James and Lily his 'real' family.

See, I suspect that the Mirror is cursed. And that its curse is: anyone who looks into it sees their heart's desire, yeah - and then loses all ability to go seek it out and make it a reality. It's easy enough to figure out why Harry has no significant attachments to the Dursleys - they've made a point of being unpleasant to him, after all, he wants shot of them as quickly as possible. But there's Molly Weasley, ready and able - jumping at the gun, even! - to step in as surrogate mother...and Harry just sort of. never picks up the connection there.
Same as how Ron sees himself surrounded by accolades and all the things his brothers got, and being praised and loved on...and then, despite being fully capable of doing the work to get those things, and fully aware of what it takes to get those things, he...never actually goes for them. Despite coming from a family where ambition is encouraged and, indeed, practically a vital asset to getting out of the hole that the Weasley family is in (everything any of the kids still in school gets is second-hand, especially anything that's expensive or will need regular replacement, like clothes, and textbooks, and wands, and this doesn't seem to be a new situation for them), Ron doesn't actually show any of the drive that every single one of his siblings has: Bill and Charlie got jobs in fields they love, ones that presumably pay quite well and which get them well away from their mother; Percy gets the best marks he possibly can and lands a job in the Ministry (and does well enough at it that he doesn't get sacked for what happens with Crouch - he kept that department running on his own); Fred and George get a business up and running; Ginny aims for Quidditch and is a frankly terrifying duelist.
Ron complains about doing homework, puts in as little effort as he thinks he can get away with, and doesn't actually pick up any courses that look like they'd take effort or which aren't to placate a friend. He doesn't express any serious ambitions that I recall, after Harry drags him in front of the Mirror - in fact, I'm not sure if he even tried to get his name into the Goblet, when it got trotted out.

For all that Ron wants acknowledgement and to be praised for having accomplished things, he sure seems to have a serious lack of ambition and interest in actually going and doing things worthy of praise, doesn't he?

I doubt that Dumbledore really intended for Harry to bring any friends in to look at the Mirror - but he definitely didn't try to prevent it, either, and I suspect he'd see it as an unfortunate consequence of his plan. But I'm pretty damn sure he did mean for Harry to look at it, and to look at it for sufficiently long and often that he could be sure the curse had taken a good solid grip on Harry.
Because for as much as the Weasleys - Molly especially - try to make it clear that they'd love for him to consider them his family, Harry remains fixated on the spectres of Lily and James; those are his real parents, he wants to know all about them (except he seems to only ever ask about James, doesn't he? Despite it being Lily, if I remember right, that he looked at longest - how curious) but he doesn't really make all that much effort to really find anything out. He never asks anyone, not really - they push information on him, or drop enough hints that whatever curiosity about the topic that's managed to survive gets piqued, and then he soaks it up like a sponge, but he never goes and asks McGonnagal about his parents (either of them) or anyone who'd be sure to give him loads of information and to be relatively truthful about it. Instead he asks the people who're going to give him the least amount of information, and who're most likely to leaven it to make his dad look good.

I don't actually have anything solid enough to consider canon, to go on here. Just behaviour and the fact that Dumbledore was manipulating Harry to try and make sure he got a sacrificial lamb who'd cheerfully go to the slaughter when the time come. But it feels like a solid theory to me? idk, what do the rest of you think about it?