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

I will still forever headcanon that the whole "mind-wiped my parents so they're safe and nowhere in England" story that Hermione told Ron and Harry was an utter lie that she told them because she knew Harry was still shit at keeping Voldemort out of his head, and any precautions she had taken would be useless if Moldy Pants knew how they worked. Because Riddle wouldn't question that someone would just mind-wipe people to get them out of the way; he doesn't understand people, not really. And neither Ron or Harry are going to question that Hermione could do that or that she'd go to those lengths to protect people she cares about.

Meanwhile, her parents were probably off in Canada hoping to get word from her so they'd know it was safe to come back to England.

Also, I absolutely believe that Hermione would've tried her hardest to keep up with what was going on in the muggle world so that she could still fit into her old world. And that she'd try and get things set up so that she could go to university or get a job in the muggle world if she felt like it.

 

@turtleDove interesting thought! I have various other ideas about sending Muggles into deep protection, and must mull yours over and return to it.

Unrelated: is anyone [still] playing Hogwarts Mystery, and if so, do you have any interest in posting about it? (@winterykite @Emma?) The gameplay is so terrible and yet I keep freaking going and appreciate solidarity grumbling.

 

That, and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. She didn't erase her own memory of her parents, she, presumably, still cared about them a little. Her parents didn't/wouldn't know where she was at any level. If the Death Eaters had caught her parents and tortured them or whatnot, it wouldn't be to find out where the gang was, it would be to and lure Hermoine/etc out, or just out of spite.

So how the hell does erasing her parent's memory provide any benefit, in the slightest? It doesn't negate the threat to them, it doesn't negate the threat to her, it, if anything, only increases the danger (because, in the off chance the Death Eaters do follow them to Australia, they don't know there's a threat to avoid. It also negates the possibility of (effectively) using magical defenses, i.e., Hermione could reasonable acquire a ranch house in the borders of the outback and make it Unplottable.

The only way it might make sense is if they categorically refused to leave - which, A, seems uncharacteristic, since they've let her handle her own stuff more or less since she was 11, and B, sheesh, that's about the most drastic intervention possible.

 

I assumed she erased their memories so they wouldn't be traumatised by the knowledge of the war and their daughter's front-line position in it?
*edit* I assumed Death Eaters wouldn't be able to follow them because their identities had been changed, so any attempt to track them on the basis of "where are Hermione Granger's parents" would be rather impeded...

 

Yeah, if she never planned to do that then the whole thing would've been practically like... killing them. In a way.
And now I want to either read or write a fic about the traumatic nature of that whole thing and specifically the fact that she didn't tell her best friends about it for so long. (Not sure how long it was; how long was she at the Burrow before she mentioned it? Because however long that was, it's just the minimum. We don't know when exactly she did it. I can imagine her staying at the family home for a while afterwards, though.)
I wonder if she told Ginny. Or just like, anyone. (Before Harry and Ron, I mean.)

 

there's a theory that she actually wiped them and sent them off to safety right after the events of book 4, which is horrifying but also kind of makes sense, because i think after that point she always spends holidays with the weasleys

 

That's an impossible theory thought that is very much not supported by canon, because Hermione's parents pick her up from the train at the end of book 5 and they chat with Arthur Weasley then.

 

She also goes skiing with them over Christmas in OotP; the fact that they apparently didn't mind her leaving for Christmas Day could be seen as support for them not having really been there, but would contradict them picking her up from the train. It would also have meant that she went to quite great lengths to conceal their absence from her friends by pretending to have gone on holiday, and I imagine that would have taken a much bigger mental toll on her; all in all, she would have probably shown signs of significant depression throughout the latter years if she had modified her parents' memories already and kept it secret for so long.

(Personally, I like to imagine that the reason her parents didn't mind her skipping Christmas Day was because they're Jewish. And that she and Remus quietly celebrated Hanukkah together at Grimmauld Place.)

 

oh thats extremely good......................my jewish ass always overidentified with hermione as a child (big teeth? bushy hair? insufferable? check) and i love that
thank u guys for correcting my brutal headcanon LMAO i havent read the books in ages so i had no clue how supported it was in text tbqh

 

I went through the Sorting Hat Chats again, and...I suspect I'm probably a Slytherin primary/Hufflepuff secondary, with a Hufflepuff primary model and a Ravenclaw secondary presentation? (And the ability to slide into...prrrobably Gryffindor secondary presentation, under duress, and charge at the problem until it stops existing.)
Which is surprising, because I've always identified as a Hufflepuff, but - yeah, no, Slytherin primary makes a lot more sense for how I view the world and interact with it.

 

That post about JKR having spouted off about how wizards didn't even use bathrooms until Muggleborns started expecting indoor plumbing to be a thing, and how Hogwarts doesn't have sex ed (but group masturbation sessions in the dormitories are totes common, especially in Hufflepuff) has turned up again and on the one hand, it makes me laugh because JKR, no, go home, you're drunk.

On the other hand, as someone who actually studied anthropology and history, I'm screaming because no. That's not how anything works, Rowling.

Spoiler: spoips for dove yelling about how Rowling is Wrong

Sure, she probably just wanted a funny "aren't wizards Weird and Sometimes Gross, haha" tweet and didn't spend more than five seconds thinking about it. But seriously: no, magic-users in general - and Hogwarts specifically - would have had bathrooms. Even before indoor plumbing became common in the Muggle world, bathrooms existed! It was not socially acceptable for anyone old enough to be out of diapers to be just crapping all over the place, whether or not they could magically vanish the evidence!

(This is leaving aside the whole bit where Hogwarts having bathrooms was a plot point for one of the books, because honestly, I've stopped expecting her to remember anything about the books. That'd require going back and re-reading them and she doesn't do that.)

No animals crap where they eat or sleep. This is a thing! It's a known thing! An animal that defecates where it sleeps or spends most of its time is not well, and this is a sign of it not being well. And humans, as a species, have made a point of separating where we crap from where we spend our time since before we were out of the hunter-gatherer days; you don't find evidence of defecating or urinating near the sleeping areas or cooking areas, and while this was well before anyone would have been able to connect "well, you crapped next to the meat we were cooking" with "and then everyone who ate that meat got sick", we're biologically programmed to find poop and urine gross because it encourages us to avoid being near them - which makes it less likely for us to get sick as a result.
So to say that wizards - who would have at least had chamberpots and outhouses, if not actual indoor plumbing prior to separating from the Muggle world - would have just been walking all over the place and letting it go whenever they felt the urge? Yeah, no. They would have used bathrooms and chamberpots like everyone else in the era. The only difference would have been that those used by wizarding folk would have been cleaner and smelled nicer, since it would have been much easier for them to clean it thoroughly with magic.

And even if Hogwarts doesn't have sex ed, group masturbation sessions in the dormitories are. Um. I'm not going to say "would never happen", since sure, it's possible. But that's not the primary way kids would be finding out about how their bodies work or how to stay safe when they have sex. They'd be passing information on to each other, some of them from older siblings (god help Ron, hopefully he got the talk from Percy, Charlie or Bill, or at least knew enough to double-check anything the twins had told him before trying it out), some from parents or other relatives, and some from books that had been buried in the library. There'd be charms to keep you from getting pregnant, or from catching anything from a partner. There'd be potions to help end a pregnancy or to make getting pregnant easier.
Even if it isn't taught as part of the curriculum, students would figure it out. There'd be at least one kid in every year, once puberty hits, who manages to reinvent the charm that keeps you from getting STDs if it isn't taught to them; there'd be Potions nerds figuring out how to avoid pregnancy, there'd be Ravenclaws trying to work out how to build a wearable anti-pregnancy charm. People would be passing notes on how to do the spell that lets you tell if you're pregnant.

Controlling fertility, and ensuring babies don't happen when you don't want babies, has been one of the things humans have been trying to do since we figured out how babies happen. It's been something we've been doing since we were making cave-art!

 

I am relieved to tell you that tweet was fake.

 

The masturbation tweet is fake, but the bathroom thing is, unfortunately, a real thing on Pottermore.

It did cause some really, really funny conversations on FFA a while back, though. :::PPP

(ETA link)

 

Aaand now I had to go and dig it up again to provide highlights from the FFA Wizard Poopscourse:

Spoiler: Gross

From subthreads here and here:

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I'm still disappointed that nobody pointed out that Vanishing Charms are advanced 5th-year magic that Hermione was having trouble with. With all the amazing new vistas of horror and hilarity this opens up.

 

It reads like a misunderstanding of those small chamberpots that could be shoved under dresses in real history.

 

Auuugh

 

So, it sure is a goshdarn shame that there's no sequel to Fantastic Beasts. It'd be cool to see what Newt was up to, but I guess we'll just have to wait for Rowling to be willing to let someone write a screenplay for her.

 

so i've been dabbling with hp fanfic over the past few days (because even if jkr is a disconnected walnut at best and a transphobe at worst, i still want to play around in her world, dammit), and i realized how little we know about any of the classes that hermione takes, especially after 5th year. that's a hell of a juicy chunk of canon to tear off and chew on.

does anyone have any head canons about what an arithmancy class looks like, for example? what exactly is Wizard Calculus?

 

Given the name and arithmancy as an actual word that exists I'd presume it's a form of divination based around numbers and the significance of them in some fashion. Apparently number of letters in a word or just assigning numerical values to words in general factors into at least some forms of it? I'd assume a lot of studying the significance of particular numbers and sequences of numbers or some shit. Like how 4 isn't always a Bad Spooky Number in Japanese number symbolism shit though it often is, so like you need to learn contexts and such. Lots of studying stuff on your own and then trying to interpret the results. Like how modern bird augury practices are done. While there are (rather old) sources on like the exact positions of crows on your home and the exact noises they are making and when the results don't always have like...applicable cognates for now. So for that I'd suggest you sit and watch and listen to the crows yourself, jotting down notes of where the crow is and what kind of noise it is making. What sorts of feels you get about this. What things happen. Then add that to your data set that you eventually go over and see like...what if anything can be made of this. Are there patterns that are meaningful and so on.

NOW DO THIS. with numbers in words or some shit instead of birds.