#and the james/lily parallel begins

[seriousbrat]

this says a lot about Snape's character development for me. There are many parallels drawn throughout the series between Harry and Snape; obviously, they're very different characters but there are similarities too.

I think here Snape is talking about himself. The teenaged Snape we see in the Pensieve is very much like this- emotional, heart on his sleeve, easily provoked, a definite wallower in sad memories... weak. Adult Snape, though he retains some of these characteristics that do emerge in stressful moments (in PoA we see how angrily he reacts to Sirius's escape, for instance) on the whole is a great deal more thoughtful, reserved, calculating, measured.

I think that Snape at some point had to force himself to become this. I think he actually relates to Harry here, and is giving him advice based on personal experience. In my fic he begins to learn to control his emotions partially out of a desire to protect Lily; he's fully aware that she's his weakness (or really, his strength, viewed a different way) and that openly displaying any sort of emotion towards her at all makes her vulnerable to the likes of Avery and Mulciber, who will have the perfect weapon to get to him if they want to.

Severus doesn't have the advantages of his peers, he's not pureblood, he wasn't born into money. If he wants to join the Death Eaters and rise in their ranks, he needs to be subtle, cunning, careful. he can't afford to be careless and entitled like mulciber or bellatrix or even sirius. what he's got to offer isn't his name or his money, it's his sheer talent and cleverness. moving on:

When Voldemort decides to go after Lily this becomes even more important. Imo the reason why Voldemort believes that Snape only "desired" Lily is because that's what Snape told him. He lied to Voldemort's face and told him something probably disgusting tbh because that's the only way Voldemort would accept it and agree, if it was a selfish, callous request that Voldemort could understand. We can see evidence of this here:

Asking Voldemort to spare a mudblood because he was in love with her would likely not have gone over well- and as we know, Voldemort actually bore his request in mind, though obv didn't give enough of a fuck about Snape to follow through. Because although asking voldemort to spare her must have taken serious balls, Snape's mistake here was trusting someone inherently selfish to do something selfless for him.

Clearly he immediately realises this and goes to Dumbledore, which is when controlling his emotions becomes of paramount importance, because now he's working against perhaps the most highly accomplished legilimens of all time.

It's also interesting to me that Snape in this conversation is probably the character who is most forthright and informative with Harry in the whole of OotP until Dumbledore at the end; Harry actually learns a lot in this conversation. And Snape also kind of gives him credit which is interesting too:

like for Snape that's high praise lmao. A shame because if he wasn't so bitter (i.e. didn't wear his heart on his sleeve so much around harry) then he might have actually been pretty helpful to Harry and a decent teacher. Again, during the Occlumency lessons his unrestrained emotion brought up by memories of James is a hindrance. He defies Dumbledore's orders to teach Harry Occlumency because of his emotional response to SWM, as well as honestly doing kind of a shit job before that (by not being empathetic and teaching Harry in a way that would've been actually productive.)

At this point Dumbledore believes that Harry learning Occlumency and controlling his emotions is of vital importance; he turns out to be wrong about this. In Harry's case, it turns out to be his emotional nature that saves him- unlike Snape, who is the opposite. Snape's journey is about learning that some things are more important than his selfish need to give into his own emotions.

By DH Snape's learned this lesson fully; his old hatred for James doesn't stop him from doing what has to be done, from giving Harry the tools he needs. Even in the final moments of his life, he can look past James and see Lily in Harry- and, by giving Harry the information that leads to his self-sacrifice, he can let her go.

[whinlatter]

The Ginny and Peter parallel though?? How have I never thought about that?? It‘s so horrifying and insanely compelling to me at the same time. I would love to hear (read?) you elaborate on that.

"Sirius, Sirius, what could I have done? The Dark Lord… you have no idea… he has weapons you can't imagine…. I was scared, Sirius, I was never brave like you and Remus and James. I never meant it to happen…. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named forced me - " "Harry – oh, Harry – I tried to tell you at b-breakfast, but I c-couldn’t say it in front of Percy. It was me, Harry – but I – I s-swear I d-didn’t mean to  - R-Riddle made me, he took me over..."

thank you so much for this question anon.  i have been thinking about this for a long time - about how ginny weasley might have made a really, really good traitor - and would love to talk more about my thinking behind it. a little meta on traitor talk - who flips, and why, and why ginny weasley might be the peter pettigrew to the trio's marauders after all - can be found below the cut (with spoilers for beasts chapter 14). 

hp, as a series, puts great moral emphasis on the concept of choice. after all, it’s about a world at war, where the question of whose side you're on is often a matter of life or death. double agents, deception, treachery, people serving the interests of others (either consensually or under duress): these are recurrent tropes, on both sides of the wizarding war. the plot begins the ultimate act of betrayal - that of lily and james potter by peter pettigrew - and the series concludes with the revelation of another (snape). throughout the books, there are all sorts of characters who spy, or flip, for all sorts of reasons. you have those who knowingly pretend to be serving the interests of one side when actually serving another, for principled reasons, either ideological motivation or out of selfless loyalty to another person: snape, peter, likely rookwood, quirrell, fake moody/barty crouch jr, both sirius and regulus black, kreacher, and narcissa in the forest. and then you have the group who betray either out of fear, or who are manipulated into acts of betrayal and deceit, sometimes through possession but otherwise through blackmail and intimidation, to varying degrees: xenophilius lovegood, mundungus fletcher, pius thicknesse, marietta edgecombe, bertha jorkins, bathilda bagshot, those types. (in a sign of jkr’s consistently dicked-up biases re gender in the series, women are never allowed to be interesting enough to actively betray anyone unless they’re doing it out of maternal love eg. narcissa - they can only ever actively be led astray or hoodwinked, whereas male characters can have a vast array of complex motivations and all sorts of shades of moral grey. we'll come back to that in a minute).

in chapter 14 of my postwar fic beasts, during the course of the hogwarts inquiry, augustus rookwood takes the stand and testifies of an attempt by him and his fellow death eaters to find someone who could play double agent to pass secrets about the resistance, the order and harry to the other side during the second wizarding war. rookwood - himself a former double agent - talks about how to make a traitor. he discusses the different motivations of traitors, how to find a target and how to exploit their existing vulnerabilities and weak-points to get them to come around to your side. he also reveals that, during the death eater seizure of the ministry and hogwarts school, he and his peers identified a would-be target in ginny weasley. in the fic, i have him describe the process of traitor-identification as ‘the pettigrew playbook’: finding someone who is connected, who knows the order’s secrets, who has the information you want, and who will flip less out of an ardent ideological commitment, but more because they are weak and scared but also disrespected and resentful and more inclined to save their own neck than act out of loyalty

i’ve always been very struck by peter pettigrew’s attempts to justify his betrayal of lily and james in PoA (see above). peter pettigrew is always a slippery and elusive character, rendered mostly through other people’s memories or descriptions of him. this is one of the very few times he explains something of his own worldview - though, as we know he is a liar, and in this instance errrr trying to save his own life as sirius threatens to kill him (slay), we have to take even these lines with a pinch of salt. we know pettigrew is a character that acts, at all times, out of a desire for self-preservation, trying to secure his own survival. he was tolerated but never respected by his schoolfriends, made the potters’ secret keeper as a ‘perfect bluff’ because he was a  ‘weak, talentless thing’ voldemort would never bother going after, a trait which ultimately made him the perfect and most vulnerable target. when outed as the real spy by sirius and remus here, he acknowledges he is aware of his deficiencies and weaknesses, and talks about his fear for his own life, his sense of how he did not live up to the principled bravery of his friends, and claims  that voldemort ‘forced him’ to surrender lily and james - presumably through the threat of terrible violence, suffering and death. 

pettigrew’s remarks are particularly interesting when put alongside the justifications and excuses of another character who has betrayed harry to voldemort, albeit under very different circumstances. like peter, ginny’s confession is given through floods of tears as a desperate plea to be believed and excused. in it, ginny begs harry to understand her own lack of culpability. just as wormtail does, she insists to harry she was forced by riddle to cause harm to others and to hand information about harry over to riddle, and to play an integral role in returning lord voldemort to life.  of course, the series always frames ginny’s actions in CoS as the behaviour of an entirely innocent person. but even these lines show a streak of self-preservation and a certain amount of weakness and cowardice that runs throughout ginny’s encounter with the diary. ‘I couldn’t say it in front of Percy’, she says, suggesting she feared getting in deep trouble with no proof of riddle’s hand in her actions. in fact throughout the diary episode, ginny shows real moments of acting to save herself rather than do the right thing and come forward with the truth. she tries to dispose of the diary, but doesn’t go to a teacher about what it has been making her do. she stole the diary back not to protect harry but to protect her own secrets and prevent him from discovering her complicity (at least by TMR’s telling). she even watches hagrid get falsely accused and sent to azkaban, and stays silent in the process, a distinctly pettigrew echo if ever i heard one. 

of course, we know ginny and peter pettigrew’s relationships with voldemort are not alike in dignity. it’s clear that, in so many ways, ginny’s encounter with the diary is much more clearly an experience of victimhood than of malicious intent. we know that ginny was possessed; we know she is not a character who would commit murder without that level of involuntary mental surrender. but there are more uncomfortable echoes of pettigrew in her experiences in CoS. we see them in the decisions of a character acting of fear and a desire to save their own skin in ginny’s experience of the diary than we might like to think. ginny ofc was targeted by lucius malfoy because of who her family was, as stalwarts of the anti-voldemort pro-muggle resistance during the first wizarding war, with powerful enemies determined to discredit and undermine them at every turn. but, as TMR makes clear, what makes ginny such a good target in the end, so vulnerable and so useful, was that she was weak. she was insecure, and lonely, teased and misunderstood and feeling inadequate. in all of that, there was a very rich opening for TMR to access her innermost fears and secrets and to use them to manipulate, pressure and threaten her into compliance, in addition to the active possession of her body to conduct deliberate acts of attempted murder. it’s not a perfect pettigrew parallel by any means. but there’s more than a little bit of pettigrew in that, too. 

maybe more parallels with ginny and peter pettigrew than meets the eye - particularly in ginny’s relationship to the trio. there are a few posts that periodically do the rounds on tumblr and reddit that talk about neville’s relationship to the trio as the parallel to peter pettigrew’s with the marauders - as this post compellingly puts it, ‘all who peter could have been’. neville, these posts usually point out, was a character who was weak and much less talented than his friends, an outsider who needed the protection and patience of cooler classmates, who was always on the outside looking in on a friend group that largely excluded him. what distinguished neville from peter was his approach to his own weakness, and how that approach drove him to heroism rather than betrayal and villainy. it’s an interesting idea, and there’s something to it. but the more i thought about it, the more i thought - is neville + the trio the only parallel with peter + the marauders? what about ginny? 

it’s remarkably under-appreciated in fandom that ginny is remarkably poorly treated by the trio for much of the series. ‘go away, ginny’ - that’s how ron banishes his sister at the start of PoA, because harry mutters to his two mates that he wants to talk to them in private and to ditch ginny. neither harry nor hermione object to it - hermione, though kind to ginny when the dementors arrive, makes no defence of her right to stay. ginny duly leaves, hurt, to go sit by herself on the train back to school, returning to hogwarts for the first time after her deeply traumatic experience in the chamber, dismissed and dispatched. not meaning to drag ron here - this is, ofc, how big brothers have behaved for time immemorial, as is their wont. but it’s kind of the statement for how the trio treat ginny for much of her school career really until HBP, harry and hermione included. ofc there are many textual/plot reasons ginny needs to be held at arms length from the trio. but it is striking that the effect of this plot habit for the reader is a usually unkind and sometimes even callous exclusion of ginny by the trio throughout many of the books.

in CoS itself, ginny is never invited to join the trio or spend any time with them: when she isn’t, you know, trying her hand at possessed attempted murder, she’s doing a light bit of potter hero worship that does recall a certain lakeside snitch-catching display of yore. it’s ginny who’s left feeling left out when the trio are swapping suspicious eyes and sirius secrets in GoF, ginny who is hermione’s back-up friend when the ron and harry showdown kicks off over the triwizard tournament, ginny who shoulders the role as harry’s consolation prize friend when ron and hermione go off to the prefects on the train in ootp (and takes him to neville and luna), ginny who goes defenceless when the trio are demanding to be included in order secrets and is physically removed from the room with no protest from the others, ginny who has to fight her case to be taken seriously and included in the department of mysteries plot to rescue a man she too is friends with (‘I care about Sirius as much as you do!’), being patronised by three friends who pick her up and put her down when they feel like it (always enjoy hermione being like ‘we need three thestrals!’ and ginny being like ffs we need four why won’t you show me an ounce of respect). in fact, when ginny is revealed to be becoming popular in a different social circle throughout ootp and hbp, it is something of a shock to harry and ron, who have spent a good six years making no effort to include her and now are finding she has built a much more successful social life beyond them (you reap what you sow, lads). i don’t say this to overstate the trio’s malice nor to overstate the pettigrew comparisons (ginny is clearly both conventionally attractive and much more socially adept).. but i do think it’s striking that  if there is a character with pettigrew echoes in the trio’s surround, always orbiting the trio, trying to feel included (and hero worshipping the potter at the heart of it), it’s more often young ginny than it is neville. so many of the things that made ginny vulnerable to TMR - her loneliness, her isolation, her insecurities and sense of inadequacy - are not helped by the trio in the years afterwards, and in some cases, actively reinforced.

(to briefly say something on gender - sometimes wonder if ginny were a male character if people would have made more of this. percy stans, for instance, go to great lengths to point out all the ways percy was bullied or teased by his family as an excuse for his errrrr war crimes. would people care more about many ginny's exclusions if she were a maligned misunderstood young man? probably? it's noticeable too that all traitors in hp are men lol, a classic example of jkr’s weird and fucked feminism striking again. women are led astray or hoodwinked - men get the complex motivations and agency arcs. but i digress).

why does any of this matter? we know ginny doesn't take the path of pettigrew, however much she might have good reason to. harry's endearingly naive line in DH ('I trust all of you, I don’t think anyone in this room would ever sell me to Voldemort’) ends up being borne out: there are no betrayals during the second wizarding war, and certainly not by ginny (though the sword heist almost ended up doing it on accident). but i found myself thinking a lot about this as i was sketching out the plotline for beasts and thinking about ginny’s war, and what is asked of ginny in it. i was particularly thinking about it relation to how the second wizarding war plays out, the unique position of danger ginny would have been in as a hogwarts student in the 1997-1998 academic year, and what a good target she would make for death eaters on the hunt for a spy within the order of the phoenix.

when i was reading DH for the first time, i remember thinking that it is absolutely bonkers that ginny weasley goes back to hogwarts in september ’97. by that summer, the weasleys are the order of the phoenix. no longer just the blood traitors’ blood traitor, they’re now the face of the wizarding resistance, both parents and (nearly) all sons in active combat, something the ministry certainly knows about even when trying to normalise death eater rule and allowing the facade of arthur et al going to go to work in the ministry/gringotts etc. ginny’s family home is order hq: she lives there all summer, and trots off to the hogwarts express straight from the kitchen table where order meetings take place. when death eaters descend on the wedding, she’s there alongside the rest of the rest of dumbledore stans. she is also famously in the DA, and fought death eaters alongside the trio in the department of mysteries, and again in the battle of the astronomy tower. and then there’s the obvious point that hinny shippers everywhere have pointed out is baffling since the dawn of time, which is that the world and his wife knows that ginny weasley is harry potter’s ex, something that might put a big fat target on her head for a death eater or two to have a pop at trying to get some secrets and intel out of her. 

of course, there’s a compelling case for why ginny has to go back. ron’s already used the splattergroit excuse, and arthur’s going to work, and so is bill, and the twins (at least for a bit), and the weasleys are going for normalisation and at least a fig leaf of compliance. so off ginny goes, into the belly of the beast, back to school, despite all the access she has to order secrets and intel, as well as information on harry and the trio. she is in a uniquely dangerous position of risk: it’s a fortress run by death eaters and her card is marked. she finds herself in an unenviable and unrivalled position as a very good person to go after if you’re a death eater fancying some intel about what the guerilla resistance - and harry potter - are up to. we know there are death eaters about who would like to claw themselves back into some level of relevance by working towards the big man and trying to curry favour (yaxley). we know there is a family intimately aware of ginny weasley's weakness and failings who are desperate to get back in voldemort's good books (the malfoys). we also know there are witnesses to ginny's exclusions both from the order and from the trio over the years - in particular, one witness that already sold secrets on the order to death eaters, namely kreacher.

the reason i came back to thinking about parallels between ginny and peter in beasts is because beasts is a story about ginny’s war, but also in part about morality in the wizarding world, about war and sides and choices. at various points in beasts, i’ve tried to play with ginny’s echoes with characters that waver morally - including regulus - or who find themselves drawn to or in some way embroiled in darkness, and who are at times governed by fear and cowardice and self-preservation in a moral universe that prizes bravery, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. so this plot came from putting all these pieces together - ginny's existing vulnerabilities and insecurities, her position of privilege and access, but also her alienation and mistreatment, and this interest in moral motivations and what experiences or traumas might lead a person, or even justify, a person's treachery, moral inaction, or active moral failing. it was even more interesting for me to play with the idea that other people might have noticed ginny weasley's weird position relative to the trio and the order too, people who want to know what she knows and who would be willing to exploit the cracks in those relationships for strategic wartime gain. and that's for chapters fifteen and sixteen!

[the-invisibility-bloke]

001 Sirius/Harry

Have a nice day😃

Oh you're gonna regret this. XD (But I hope you have a nice day too!)

When I started shipping it if I did: 2004? I think they were my first HP ship.

My thoughts: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

What makes me happy about them: THEY SAVE EACH OTHER'S LIVES ON THEIR FIRST AND LAST NIGHTS TOGETHER, RESPECTIVELY. TELL ME ANYTHING MORE ROMANTIC THAN THAT. Also, found family in a sense, but better yet, they were given to each other by James and Lily, and their chemistry from the very beginning is everything, they are so utterly devoted to each other, so thrilled to be in each other's lives, so love-starved and touch-starved, they are each other's links to their past as well as each other's hope for the future. All they want is to care for each other, it's so fucking beautiful it hurts, and the reason it's so fucking hot and just the right amount of sweetly toxic is because they have no fucking boundaries, Harry was raised in abject neglect (so was Sirius, in his own way) and Sirius spent those years in prison so they suffered on parallel timelines and now here they are, a collision of orbits, perfect complements, where Harry was forced to grow up too fast and Sirius' life stopped at 21 so the power imbalance is skewed and fucky and all the lines get blurred because they simply need so desperately, the hunger and yearning, but also the fact they just get each other. They tick each other's boxes, fill all the voids, the need to protect, to be protected, and it's no secret this man was Harry's sexual awakening, a not-father figure but the first man to step up and fill those role model shoes, with his tattoos and his recklessness and his general sexiness/coolness making him unlike any adult who's ever shown Harry affection, not to mention the yummy angst of Past Prongsfoot™, so extra guilt for Sirius there, but more significantly, he very quickly comes to see Harry as his own person. I think he's the first one to see that the similarities to James are less than the differences, and more beautiful for that, and I think it would be a bit terrifying for him to realize he's fallen for Harry as himself and not as a replacement, because now he has no excuse, he can't write it off as an inevitability of loving James. ...Anyway.

What makes me sad about them: HE FUCKING DIES.

Things done in fanfic that annoys me: I'd share in DMs, but as someone with the world's lowest self esteem, I never want to discourage anyone from writing what they love.

Things I look for in fanfic: I love canon-compliant or canon-adjacent, desperation and codependency, Harry being first ashamed and afraid of rejection, then when he knows he's got him, shameless about what he wants. I love Sirius being tortured by his own guilt until the explosive breaking point where he loses all self control. OOTP era is my favorite because they're in close physical proximity and there are Opportunities, okay, OPPORTUNITIES. Late-night fireside chats (snogs), Harry slipping into Sirius' room under pretense of nightmares, come on, it fucking writes itself. I'll read the occasional Sirius Lives (just wrote one, in fact), but part of me kinda loves that he dies, because it enables all my OTPs to exist in tandem, case in point...

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other: Sirius? No one. He's gone for that boy and he dies loving him. But 20 years later, Harry falls for Teddy and is wracked with the most delicious guilt. Is he projecting the godfather-godson dynamic he so brutally lost with Sirius? (No, but the guilt is fun!) I also like the premise of Harry and Draco falling into each other post-divorce, better late than never, but after a lifetime of competing for Teddy's attention, godfather vs cousin, turns out the boy's kind of in love with them both, so H/D/T OT3 is my jam.

My happily ever after for them: Sirius lives, obviously. But I want to write a fic where, after the war, Harry obsessively dedicates himself to working out the mysteries of the veil and getting Sirius back. He succeeds some 20 years later, right after he finally decides to leave the past behind and embrace the present, where his own lovely godson has been madly in love with him for years. So basically he gets Sirius back right after he and Teddy begin a relationship, thus it ends up Sirry+Teddy OT3, but this is where multishipping hits a brick wall because what about Draco. OT4?

who is the big spoon/little spoon: I'm dully traditional and default to whoever's bigger (Sirius), but I think they wake up fairly often with Harry clinging to his back, all nestled in like a cute little parasite.

what is their favorite non-sexual activity: Motorbike rides, pickup Quidditch, Muggle video games, and I think they like to travel. Harry never did, growing up, and after all those years in Azkaban... yeah. Gay cross-gen wizards take on the world.

[ashesandhackles]

'Be brave like my mother, Professor'

I have always loved the Harry-Slughorn scene in the books where Harry coerces pushes Slughorn into giving him the vital Horcrux memory, because of how strongly it parallels Tom Riddle. The quality of willingness to do whatever it takes for a larger goal.

The scene begins with Hagrid and Slughorn singing drunken songs, and Harry refilling the drink in the background (already paralleling Tom who got Hagrid to fess up Fluffy information in a bar). That already adds a coercive quality to the scene, given that Felix felicis also assures Harry that Slughorn won't remember handing over this memory tomorrow (which the films try to make consensual cos they can't have hero doing messed up things, but HJP is a lil messed up. That's why he is a great protagonist).

Anyway, in my recent re-read, I picked up something I hadn't realised before:

“No — well, I was only one when they died,” said Harry, his eyes on the flame of the candle flickering in Hagrid’s heavy snores. “But I’ve found out pretty much what happened since. My dad died first. Did you know that?” “I — I didn’t,” said Slughorn in a hushed voice. “Yeah . . . Voldemort murdered him and then stepped over his body toward my mum,” said Harry.

I have highlighted a line that Harry can't have known until the next book - until he actually sees his parents' murder through Voldemort's eyes. Until now, this is the information he has:

James' death:

Then came a new voice, a man’s voice, shouting, panicking — “Lily, take Harry and go, It’s him, Go! Run, I’ll hold him off~ The sounds of someone stumbling from a room — a door bursting open — a cackle of high-pitched laughter 

Lily's death:

“Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry,” “ Stand aside, you silly girl ... stand aside, now. ...” “ Stand aside, you silly girl ... stand aside, now. ...” “ Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead — ”

And of course, Voldemort's taunts in Philosopher's Stone, which he will reference. The detail about Voldemort stepping over his father's body towards his mum is constructed - something he may have imagined while replaying their last moments in his head in POA (which he is said to have done), and he particularly uses this line, of Voldemort casually degrading his father's body by stepping over it to really push Slughorn's buttons, to horrify him.

Respectability is important to Slughorn, and he will emotionally respond to callous details like this. Harry understands this, given what he observes about Slughorn over the course of this book.

And then Harry tells Slughorn what Voldemort said in Philosopher's Stone:

Slughorn gave a great shudder, but he did not seem able to tear his horrified gaze away from Harry’s face. “He told her to get out of the way,” said Harry remorselessly. “He told me she needn’t have died. He only wanted me. She could have run.” “Oh dear,” breathed Slughorn. “She could have ... she needn’t ... That’s awful. ...”

This is what Voldemort says:

but your mother needn’t have died ... she was trying to protect you. ... Now give me the Stone, unless you want her to have died in vain.”

Interesting how Harry uses a similar tactic on Slughorn later in the scene: "give me the memory or she would have died in vain".

Anyway, back to the scene. To make the scene even more horrifying for Slughorn, Harry infers Lily's motivations from what he has heard from his parents' last moments and says it to induce more horror:

“It is, isn’t it?” said Harry, in a voice barely more than a whisper. “But she didn’t move. Dad was already dead, but she didn’t want me to go too. She tried to plead with Voldemort ... but he just laughed. ...”

The idea that Harry replayed his parents' death over and over again back when he first heard their deaths, imagined their motivation, constructed a scene for himself is extremely sad. This is how he talks about it in POA:

D’you know what I see and hear every time a dementor gets too near me?” Ron and Hermione shook their heads, looking apprehensive. “I can hear my mum screaming and pleading with Voldemort. And if you’d heard your mum screaming like that, just about to be killed, you wouldn’t forget it in a hurry. And if you found out someone who was supposed to be a friend of hers betrayed her and sent Voldemort after her — ” “There’s nothing you can do!” said Hermione, looking stricken.

But the fact that he then uses something that is obviously a horrifying and personal memory against Slughorn is absolutely chilling.

Anyway, here is Harry taking the leaf out of Voldemort's book:

"But you won’t help her son,” said Harry. “She gave me her life, but you won’t give me a memory.” Harry looked steadily into Slughorn’s tear-filled eyes. The Potions master seemed unable to look away.

After which, Harry takes ownership of being the 'Chosen One' out loud to another person. That is, of course, important in context of next chapter because it also deals with statement and interrogates it.

It is only at the end of the scene that Harry offers mercy for Slughorn's guilt: "You'd cancel out anything you did by giving me that memory. It would be a very brave and noble thing to do."

[lizard-on-a-window-pane]

so, i started writing this fic, and i think i'm going to continue it, but i would love to get some reactions to the idea i had so much fun adapting a romcom to the marauders in my 10 things i hate about you fic, then i was rewatching life as we know it for the first time in years and was surprisingly still into it and thought it could be a fun one cos of some of the parallels, so here is the set up:

in an au where voldy is destroyed, sirius never sent to azkaban, and reader and sirius have to raise harry together after james and lily die even though they hate each other... initially ofc

pairing: Sirius Black x reader word count: 1.9k

You’re surprised to hear a knock at your door this late. Exhausted after another Order mission, you resent whoever is on the other side of it. When you open it, lowering your ready wand just behind the door with an exasperated sigh, the feeling heightens. 

“What the hell do you want?” you ask a smirking Sirius Black leaning on your doorframe. 

“What kind of a greeting is that, love?” he retorts seemingly unfazed.

You say nothing, glare harder. 

He rolls his eyes and begins, “Dumbledore wants you to tell me about your mission. He has something he wants me to do soon — won’t tell me what exactly yet, you know how he is — and he thinks whatever intel your mission provided will be relevant.” 

“Can’t it wait till tomorrow? I’m exhausted, Black.” 

“He told me to come tonight,” he says firmly, shrugging. “Look, I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to be here, but there are more important things right now than resting” — he gestures to you — “or keeping good company,” he finishes, gesturing at himself.

“Oh I’m bad company? Have you met yourself? And you’re one to talk about important things, Black. All you ever do is joke around. And —” you go to continue, but he cuts you off, gently pushing his way past you and into your flat.

“Choose a line of attack, L/N. You’re rambling.”

You groan but follow him into your living room. He’s making himself comfortable, putting his boots up on your coffee table to settle in. 

“Fucking hell, Black,” you whine as you kick his legs off. “I know there’s a war going on, but I’d prefer for my home not to become a pig sty, thank you.” 

“Leave it to you to worry about shit like this now,” he sighs, rolling his eyes at you for the second time in mere minutes.

His critical comments are nothing new. The two of you had gotten into it over nothing since your school days, your best friends eventually getting together doing nothing to make you hate each other less. Lily had been your best friend since first year, James his. 

With your current exhaustion, even this little comment had you practically seething. Knowing him, though, you knew anything you said back would just give him more ammunition to mock you somehow. So, you just stood and stared angrily at him. 

“Well?” he looks at you infuriatingly nonchalantly. “The faster we do this, the faster I’m out of here.” 

“Fine.” You sit next to him begrudgingly and relate the events of the last few days to him, falling into “official” mode the only thing that made dealing with Sirius Black any easier.

~

This message wasn’t right. There was no possible way it was right. It had to be wrong. A mistake. A trap. A cruel joke. Anything but the truth.

You’re standing there, staring at the spot where a fellow Order member’s Patronus has just vanished after delivering its message to you. Your jaw is slack, your eyes wide and quickly brimming with tears. Tears at the mere idea that your best friend and her husband were dead, not the reality. It couldn’t be reality. 

After what might have been several minutes, though your mind is stuck, your body moves to action and heads immediately to Order headquarters. 

When you get there, you’re surprised at how many people are here. Such gatherings are usually reserved for the most important of meetings only; it’s too dangerous to have so many members together in any one place, lest the enemy find out and root out what little resistance remains. 

Oddly enough, it’s in crowds like this that you most notice the absent. You miss them when you are alone, too, of course, but there is something about looking around and not seeing Marlene’s beautiful — even if haunted toward the end — face amongst the others. Not feeling Dorcas’s head coming to rest on your shoulder. Not hearing Alice’s sweet giggle at something Frank has just whispered to her, bringing joy even in the darkest of times. Their voices are devoid of joy now, shut away at St. Mungo’s. 

Lily can’t be gone too. Please not Lily too. 

You’re not sure how to gauge the expressions of your friends and comrades around you. There is such a strange intermingling of emotions lingering on their faces. James and Lily couldn’t be dead if there was a look of such relief on Emmeline’s face, if Elphias was busy chattering away to a few other members. 

But then you see him. You see Sirius Black, and you know.

He’s sitting in a corner. He isn’t crying. He doesn’t look sad. He looks hollow. There aren’t tears in his eyes because his eyes are dead. 

You gravitate toward him without thinking, and when you’re close, his empty eyes meet yours. Sirius stands. You look at each other for a long moment, understanding crossing between you, and without a word from either of you, you embrace.

A few long, shaky breaths later, with Sirius Black’s warm, firm arms around you, you break down. You can’t see his face from where you have yours burrowed into his chest, but his arms tighten around you as your sobs shake your whole body. He holds you through the entire episode, until your body has drained itself of all the tears it could possibly produce in this moment. Only when you’ve been still for a minute does he loosen his grip, stepping back slightly.

You already know the answer, but you ask anyway, “Both of them?” He just nods. You immediately follow with, “Where’s Harry?” Fear shoots through you at the thought, but before you lose yourself in it, Sirius grabs your shoulders and says, “Harry’s fine.” Another bout of fear oozes through your body, but this one is slower, eerier. It takes you a moment to discern its cause: it’s Sirius’s voice. It’s never sounded like this before, and you hear in its dullness a pain you’d think unimaginable if you weren’t feeling it too. 

You nod slowly and ask where your godson is. Sirius tells you he’s with Remus. 

“What’s going to happen to him?” you whisper. 

“I don’t know,” he responds. “Dumbledore said he’d talk to us once we were both here.” 

~ 

It’s much later in the night, almost morning you reckon, when you find yourself and Sirius sitting across from Dumbledore, finally alone. He’d had to handle a million and one things already, the scope of the night’s events incomprehensible to your grief-stricken mind. 

Dumbledore doesn’t wait at all before saying, “I am truly sorry for the loss you both have experienced tonight and will continue to experience for the rest of your lives. The loss of someone so close is a loss from which one never truly recovers.” 

You both nod, saying nothing, and he continues. 

“I’m certain both of your main concern at this point is Harry. Firstly, let me provide you the comfort of informing you Harry is perfectly safe. How exactly, none of us know, and perhaps will never know. But young Harry survived Voldemort’s attack tonight, and somehow destroyed him in the process. Harry is currently with Mr. Lupin, but you can sort for yourselves how you wish to go about the transition in the following days. I have not spoken to either of you about it personally, but I imagine, given the arrangement, that you will be moving into the Potter’s home in Godric’s Hollow?”

You’re sure your face betrays your utter confusion, and on instinct, you look to Sirius for some sort of clarification. The look on his face tells you he’s as lost as you are. 

“Arrangement, sir?” you finally manage after some awkward silence.

“Yes. It was Lily and James’s wish that in the event of their deaths, Harry should be raised by his godparents.” He looks between you and Sirius. “You, of course.” 

A pregnant beat. 

“I’m sorry, what? ‘You’ as in who? ‘You’ as in me? Or him? Not ‘you’ as in us?” you ramble. 

“‘You’ as in both of you, yes. You and Mr. Black.” You give a mirthless chuckle. 

“There must be some kind of misunderstanding, sir. We,” you gesture unnecessarily aggressively between you and the man sitting next to you, “are not together. We’re not a couple; we’re not even friends; how are we supposed to raise Harry together?” 

“There is no misunderstanding. And I do feel the need to add that this is in fact one consideration in bestowing — and accepting — the role of a godparent, I’m sure you know.”

You turn toward Sirius, who is just sitting there completely dumbstruck. You smack his chest and urge, “Say something, for Godric’s sake.” 

“Ummm… I… Well… I… She…She…,” he looks to you briefly, “I and… and she… I and she… she and I —” He can’t string even a phrase together, and Dumbledore gently raising a hand mercifully puts an immediate stop to his ridiculous attempt.

“It is unfortunate that your friends did not discuss this decision with you before its effect was rendered necessary. I imagine they dreaded such a conversation and suspect they never found it the ‘right’ time. However, I am certain it was what they wanted. After all, it was at my behest that they made a decision at all. Few of us ever want to think about our own deaths, but when I realized what danger the Potters were in, I knew it was a necessary consideration. I am devastated to have been proven correct.” Dumbledore was always calm and collected, but you know him well enough to know he meant those words.

“If you choose to reject this arrangement, we can see about other options. Though, as I have said, it would be going against his parents’ wishes. There is of course his aunt and uncle, the Dursleys I believe they are called. Alternatively, there are orphanages for such occasions, but they are dreadful places, and I would wish that fate upon no child, especially if he could be raised with family.” 

“The Dursleys aren’t his family,” you say immediately, a strength to your voice that had not been there in the entire conversation thus far. Dumbledore looks at you. “They’re not, sir. I’ve met them. They’re horrid people. They hate wizards and witches, were terribly cruel to Lily. I can’t imagine how they’d treat her wizard son.” You grimace at the thought. “They’re not his family… We are.” This sits heavily in the room for a moment, and it is Sirius who speaks first. 

“We’ll take care of Harry,” he whispers. His voice is quiet but certain. “We’ll figure it out.” He looks to you inquisitively, and you nod. 

“I’m gladdened to hear it,” Dumbledore says. “You don’t have to stay there long term, but I imagine it will be good for Harry to be in a familiar place as he adjusts to such change, so I will have him brought to his house in a few hours. Can you collect yourselves and meet him there?” 

You both nod; he adds a curt, “Good,” and before you know what’s even happened, you’re left sitting in a room with Sirius Black, a man you’d always hated, a man who is suddenly your co-parent to Harry. 

[florsial]

ceasar & brutus and james & peter parallels essay when

i feel so disappointed in myself that I forgot about this, it actually came up when my teacher was reviewing the end of Act 3.

Anyway, not an essay, unfortunately, just pure thoughts. I'm not that smart, sorry to disappoint.

-We aren't explicitly given a reason for Peter's betrayal but I heavily agree with the idea that PART of the reason why Peter betrayed James and Lily was so the war could end (it had been going on for YEARS even before the marauders joined). 2 deaths over god knows how many. The only thing to back me up on this was that Peter was sorted into Gryffindor despite being considered a "cowardly" man (he even outright says this himself). He was sorted into Gryffindor so he HAD to have some traits, it just didn't translate that well

-Similarly, Brutus is considered an honorable man who is loyal to Rome, but once again, didn't end all that well for Caesar. So I see it as Peter can be loyal, just more so to the entirety of Wizarding World over Lily and James, like how Brutus loves Caesar, but he loves Rome more. James is sacrificed for the Wizarding World and Caesar is sacrificed for the Romans.

-Also! Brutus dies from suicide out of guilt and in the end, he is redeemed through this act. I think it's very neat next to Peter, whose death also redeems him. It's a minor parallel, and the intricate details are a bit different (I also think it's different compared to a character like Regulus who dies off-screen, and who I see more so a tragedy than sacrifice) (we read about Harry seeing his father die and Peter dies in front of Harry)

-On the topic of death, my teacher pointed this out and it clicked in my head. Caesar dies at the feet of Pompey's statue and James dies at the feet of Voldemort when he opens the door. And it's even more interesting when you remember that Shakespeare wrote about Caesar coming back from defeating Pompey at the beginning of the play, only to die at the feet of Pompey's statue (also the fact that the conspirator gathers together at Pompey's porch), and then there is James (and Lily) who rejected/deified Voldemort 3 times and survived until their actual deaths in 1981. At the feet of Voldemort who they managed to get away, alive, from.

-James/Caesar were both well-loved and loved Peter/Brutus. This and the fact that Peter/Brutus were the ones that basically landed the final blow to this seemingly powerful man.

Anyways, sorry for this, my mind was more so just wandering than anything else!

[sisididis]

The Parallels Between JJK and Harry Potter

I am sure that a great many have already caught on the similarities between Jujutsu Kaisen and Harry Potter, but I could not pass up the opportunity to list the ones that I have spotted along the way. As you will see, there are quite a few and, as a fan of both works, I couldn’t be happier about it!

Yuta Okkotsu and Severus Snape: The confidante and double agent 

Both Yuta and Severus play a dangerous game. At their mentor’s request, they walk a tightrope between maintaining their antagonistic superiors’ trust (Severus Voldemort’s and Yuta the Jujutsu High’s higher-ups’) and looking after their mentors’ protégées. In the aftermath of Lily’s death, Severus promises to look after Harry and, in the event of Gojo’s disappearance, Yuta promises to look after his students (despite him being his student, too). 

“You know how and why she died. Make sure it was not in vain. Help me protect Lily’s son.” “He does not need protection. The Dark Lord has gone—”  “The Dark Lord will return, and Harry Potter will be in terrible danger when he does.” There was a long pause, and slowly Snape regained control of himself, mastered his own breathing. At last he said, “Very well. Very well. But never — never tell, Dumbledore! This must be between us! Swear it! I cannot bear . . . especially Potter’s son . . . I want your word!” (Chapter 33, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

What's more, when Itadori asks Yuta why he's doing all this, Yuta explains that Itadori is important to people who are important to him. Isn't that the reason why Snape agreed to look after Harry, the son of his first and only love, too?

(Chapter 143, JJK)

Itadori Yuji - Sukuna and Harry - Voldemort: “Our souls are the same.”

I will preface this by saying yes, I know that the soul connection and circumstances surrouding the two pairs are different, but the similarity is still there. Hear me out. In Chapter 257, we learn that Jin Itadori, Yuji’s father, was the reincarnation of Sukuna’s would-be twin. Before his twin could be born, a starving Sukuna had eaten him in their mother’s womb. For centuries since, Sukuna’s twin’s soul has “bounced around aimlessly, until it eventually fell into Kenjaku’s hands.” When we look at Maki and Mai’s story, we learn that in the Jujutsu world twins share the same soul. This explains why Sukuna says that his and Yuji's “souls are the same.” 

(Chapter 257, JJK)

While Yuji and Sukuna’s connection is innate, Harry and Voldemort’s isn’t. We remember that Voldemort’s killing curse backfired and accidentally implanted a part of his soul in Harry. 

“Tell him that on the night Lord Voldemort tried to kill him, when Lily cast her own life between them as a shield, the Killing Curse rebounded upon Lord Voldemort, and a fragment of Voldemort’s soul was blasted apart from the whole, and latched itself onto the only living soul left in that collapsed building. Part of Lord Voldemort lives inside Harry, and it is that which gives him the power of speech with snakes, and a connection with Lord Voldemort’s mind that he has never understood.” (Chapter Chapter 33, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

Here comes the million dollar question: If Harry had to die to make Voldemort mortal again, does Yuji and the other vessel who had ingested Sukuna’s fingers (cough Megumi cough) have to die, too? If Sukuna-Megumi dies, can Sukuna bounce back into Yuji’s body? 

Harry, Gojo and Yuji: Death, limbo and rebirth

Both stories are rife with elements of death and rebirth. Harry, Gojo and Yuji come back to life to fulfil their destinies — Harry as the chosen one, Satoru as the strongest, Yuji as the humanitarian — and protect their loved ones. Selflessness pervades every aspect of their lives. 

Now, the reason why I typed this post to begin with is the airport limbo scene in Chapter 236, which instantly reminded me of both Harry’s meeting with the ghosts of James, Lily, Remus and Sirius in the Forbidden Forest and his meeting with Dumbledore in the King’s Cross limbo. Both Harry and Satoru get to see the ghosts of their loved ones before and / or after their death in places that are universally associated with transitioning from one place (or phase of existence) to another. 

(Chapter 236, JJK)

“He was not really fetching them: They were fetching him.  He closed his eyes and turned the stone over in his hand three times.  He knew it had happened, because he heard slight movements around him that suggested frail bodies shifting their footing on the earthly, twig-strewn ground that marked the outer edge of the forest. He opened his eyes and looked around.  They were neither ghost nor truly flesh, he could see that. They resembled most closely the Riddle that had escaped from the diary so long ago, and he had been memory made nearly solid. Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts, they moved toward him, and on each face, there was the same loving smile.” (Chapter 34, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

And despite Satoru’s tough front when he sees Suguru, Nanami and Haibara again, both JJK Chapter 236 and HPDH are 100% certified tear-jerkers.   

This was the similarity that caught my attention and gave birth to the rest of this post. 

[dufferpuffer]

James also acts very poorly when he was a teen, what would you say the differences and similarities are between him and Draco? (I do feel like jkr was definitely drawing parallels with him, Draco and Dudley. Especially when we see 11 yr old James on the train, the way he talks about sorting is very similar to how Draco did, just they fall on different sides, but the arrogance is still there. Also I feel Dudley’s gang in the beginning of ootp is another parallel to the marauders behavior in swm) (I also find it interesting that James bullying is more extreme/cruel/violent than Draco’s even though Draco has more of a reason to be prone to violence than James (he seems to actually be adverse to it, like in HBP)

'as a teen' - honestly I think James acts poorly as a bloody adult lol

Dudleys gang = Marauders is so big brain, you've blown my mind, that's actually awesome And pulls Harry right in to being comparable to Severus

I think the biggest difference in the upbringing of Draco and James, both raised bullying, rich, spoiled Purebloods - is James was raised with the idea that it's what you DO that gives you worth. While the Malfoys just believe they have worth, for WHAT they are.

James goes around and fights the bad guys. Sirius chooses to ditch his 'bad-guy' family. Remus chooses to 'be a good werewolf'. I don't even know what Peter did to be fair - they were just mean to him. Lily is a talented Muggleborn in a time where that's dangerous.

Severus? No matter how much they beat him down he keeps doing more bad stuff, he digs his heels in and becomes 'worse'. Which means he is choosing to knowingly be a 'bad-guy' Because James, as a kid, seems to see the world in B&W. He can say hurtful things to his friends because he proves himself as good. He can hurt Severus because Severus is bad. He has never had to understand context and differing viewpoints. Maybe that changed a little from the prank: His friend doing something quite bad to Severus, Remus and Dumbledore... but was still a good guy. Draco just... IS good. BORN good. He can sit on his high horse and sneer at people because he was born one of the 'good guys'. It's annoying to him when someone born a 'bad guy' gets so much attention... and for what? A stupid scar? (thats something he and Harry would agree with: Harry hates the attention he gets for his stupid scar, too.)

Draco doesn't need to prove anything. The idea of getting his hands dirtied is grotesque - he is too good for that! Draco can whinge and complain about a broken arm because that dangerous dirty half-giant is a menace to good society! Thats all I feel about it right now, uh... cool ask :) makes me brain brr

[saintsenara]

So I found your blog a while back and I last night I finally found the time to browse through pretty much all your HP meta and ship takes (i slept way later than I should've yesterday, thanks to you ^^) and I'm astonished at how you manage to weave in well founded analysis even into your answers to even the most deranged ship-asks

That being said, I scrolled through a lot of your blog and I couldn't find your opinion on grindeldore as a ship. Since i really like your takes on ol dumbles (even though I don't agree with all of them. For example I don't think his whimsical traits are entirely a lie. I think they are a part of him he over-exaggerates as a coping mechanism and a comfort to himself and others) I was wondering how you think this relationship-dynamic worked, how it shaped him and how large a role it played in his later life

(This is not a reaction to the ask game obviously, since the ship has no gone rather mainstream. I sometimes miss its days of obscurity before the fb movies but that's another ask)

thank you very much for the ask, anon - and especially for the very kind message at the start.

my opinion on grindeldore is coloured by the fact that i've never seen any of the fantastic beasts films - and that i've also gone out of my way to forget anything i've ever accidentally learned about any of them. i just don't find the idea of them interesting in the slightest.

but i love the little flashes of grindeldore we get in the seven-book canon - the image of the owls flying back and forth at all hours of the night because they can’t bear not to be talking to each other has a good claim to be the most romantic thing which happens in the series - and i also love the way that grindelwald becomes another example of a narrative tool the series uses to great effect with many other main characters besides dumbledore: the figure, only ever fragmentarily known [both by the reader and by the character who loved them], who causes such immense grief that it dictates the entire course of that character's life.

grindelwald plays the role in dumbledore's narrative arc that james plays in harry's - he considers grindelwald perfect, wonderful, brilliant... until he can't pretend this is the case anymore, just as harry hero-worships his father until he is confronted by the proof that he was a bully. but while harry then begins to understand james with more nuance, dumbledore retreats - hides himself from grindelwald until he's literally forced to duel him, and then hides grindelwald away and never sees him again.

grindelwald is dumbledore's lily - his grief over losing him [and, specifically, his grief over losing the imagined version of him, when who he really was could no longer be ignored - which is exactly how snape thinks of lily] drives him towards a life which encapsulates what the series understands as "love": the willingness to steadfastly endure and suffer and sacrifice in silence.

and he's also dumbledore's merope - the person who didn't even try to stay alive be better for him, who irreparably ripped his chance at a happy family apart, and who abandoned him when things got hard - and, just as voldemort's entire life becomes about creating a place for himself in the world which soothes that grief, so too does dumbledore's. his public persona becomes unwaveringly noble for exactly the same reason that voldemort's becomes unassailably villainous - so that the fragility of the grieving man beneath the mask is never known.

these parallels are why i back the concepts of snumbledore and riddledore [and the triad - snumblemort] so utterly [i am not quite brave enough for harrydore, i fear], and so they certainly mean that i should find grindeldore compelling...

but i find - i think - that i like grindelwald better as a background character whose ghost haunts dumbledore's later relationships - romantic or otherwise. his shadow looming over the two dumbledore brothers, and the way that the memory of him rears up when the eleven-year-old tom riddle calls himself "special", and the way that dumbledore still loathes himself so strongly - a century later - for being taken in by his smile that he spits "you disgust me" at snape are canon moments which always stand out for me, and i love how these can be expanded in fanfiction - what happens when voldemort and/or snape find out about grindeldore obsesses me, for example.

and i am similarly interested in how dumbledore can't be written as a fully-rounded character unless the impact of his relationship with grindelwald [and how this drives his public performance of careful eccentricity, causes his obvious ivory-tower-ishness, and informs his thinking on love and desire and so on] is taken into account.

but i just am less interested in grindeldore as the central relationship in a piece [although there are definitely exceptions to this rule] - and i think being so stubborn about fantastic beasts is probably why. grindelwald works so well in the books as a shadow that i end up finding that more compelling than seeing him as a main character [which i also feel about james - i really like the ghost of unrequited prongsfoot, which is canon, haunting sirius in his adult life, but i care about it less as the main ship of a fic], but i'm sure that i would feel otherwise if i ever bothered to get into how he's written for the films, where he serves such a different narrative purpose that he gets more substance.

and i should also say that i don't find that grindeldore interests me to write myself because i think that filling grindelwald out into a main character on the basis of book-canon detail alone would mean confronting just how explicit an analogy for hitler he is in the text [my impression is that fantastic beasts changes this a lot], which is something i don't really have the energy for.

[although - since it's always worth reiterating this - the grindeldore girlies are perfectly entitled to ship the pairing in any way they like, and to write the characters and their motivations in any way they choose, without getting any grief about it. this is fiction.]

but who knows - maybe i'll change my mind the more grindeldore crosses my path. stranger things have happened.

because there is a little idea which continues to needle at me... that dumbledore's loathing of horcruxes, even in the 1940s, is because grindelwald had made one. and that this is why, when he meets harry at king's cross, he is so determined to believe that the rumours of his repentance were true...

[waxingrunes]

Heyy i saw your tiktok video on The Prank™ and I'm dying to know what your interpretation is on how it happened and how they made up, how it impacted them, you get the gist I just can't believe I haven't thought to ask before.

My HC/take/interpretation of The Prank, isn’t anything so special but I do think if I were to ever fully expand on it I’d make sure Sirius wasn’t so dogged down as he was over it. I think The Prank, despite it being canon, is sometimes very overdone and milked for its worth just for the sake of dredging up angst over and over again.

Now, do I think it’s important if you’re creating something within that verse, yeah. I think it’s a pivotal moment that shows some serious oversight on Sirius’ part. Sirius is notoriously tactile and quick witted, but I believe in his younger years he was quick to get a tad bit overexcited or enthused when it came to revenge and this was a prime example of that. He didn’t think about the consequence of his actions and had tunnel vision with the end goal of a, ‘aha!’ moment with Snape. Pure vengeance (good little Scorpio).

How I like to see it, is Remus, James and Pete were all shocked by this obviously but they didn’t spend weeks on weeks treating him like a piece of shit for it. I think the bounce back rate was quick, but the thick of the aftermath was hard. So Remus got angry fast but it was resolved quicker than most of the times I’ve seen it dragged out for. James wouldn’t ignore Sirius, it would just be strained for a few days while they worked through their own tension over Sirius’ blatant stupidity and selfish motives. Pete much the same, though I suspect he would be armed with a few nasty quips here and there which James would chastise him for, even if he was slightly agreeable to them. Pete would try to keep away from Sirius and encourage Remus to do the same so they could both “cool off”, whereas James is a man of action and want things resolving instantly. Though he wouldn’t lack the sensitivity of being naive enough to know the mending wouldn’t happen like that, it wouldn’t be overnight, he’s emotionally intelligent and a people person and would know when the line is about to be crossed.

Remus, I believe would be in disbelief for the first few minutes of hearing it, type of white noise blocking out everything that isn’t the information he’s trying to compute. I think he would turn physical quick, or at least want to, but not towards Sirius. His violent streak is often downplayed, something that is canon (though I have no interest in keeping things parallel to that or drawing similarities, but this one is important for the topic) and bred through Remus feeling somewhat constantly restrained and bottled up. He has a lot to say, but sometimes doesn’t feel he’s in the right space to say it, a confidence which he found in the comfort of his friendships with the Marauders and Lily. Despite his presence being a quiet, calm and reserved (albeit sarcastic) one, post Prank Remus was a ticking time bomb. Cutting corners, Sirius was fast becoming his world and the betrayal was like a jab to his gut, throat and balls all at once so that pressure valve was ready to burst.

The fallout would’ve lasted in total, a couple of weeks, three at the absolute most. Remus would begin in denial and then lash out physically, the product of which wouldn’t have bothered him due to his existing scars. The headcanon behind Sirius sleeping in Remus’ shirt is something I imagine as a segue in their relationship, the link between Moony = safe, Moony’s smell = safe, Moony’s clothes = smell, safe, secure. Home. Team that with Sirius’ family issues, it ties in well that whilst they were still denying their feelings for each other outwardly, the ball was rolling in the symbolic trade of Sirius wanting to be dowsed in Remus’ scent, only really ever feeling truly safe when he felt encompassed by him. So, cut to Sirius pulling the Prank and unwittingly simultaneously putting Remus’ life in potential danger and landing him in Azkaban for murder, it was Remus who didn’t feel safe anymore. And Remus, when feeling unsafe, will lash out and retreat. He was so angry that he wanted to level out the playing field and strip Sirius of the safety he found in that shirt, something that was an unspoken token between the two of them and therefore, even more sacred. It wasn’t just a fickle give me my shirt back, it was acute enough that Sirius would feel it and understand the icy intention crystal clear.

That night Sirius walked down into the common room wearing it for the first time (the next day) after the Prank, it would be the first time any of them had heard Remus’ full baritone yell. Soon as that man clocked Sirius, it was like pedal to the ground rage, instinct, you don’t belong in that anymore.

[ice-and-starlight]

I’m jumping you back into the hp fandom. I need to know your in depth opinions on jily!

Are you sure? I mean, are you sure?

...Alright, then.

WARNINGS: This is going to be so very extremely anti. Anti-Lily, Anti-James, Anti-Jily, Anti-JKR. Just... so much negativity. Seriously, please don't read this if you like even a part of any of these.

Are we clear?

Okay.

So, to begin with, James and Lily are held up as paragons of virtue for a lot of the first half of the series, and I'm honestly convinced that's what JKR intended them to be. Even when she tries to make them more like characters than ideals, it's fairly half-hearted from an author who has brought us such great examples of depth and complexity as Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore.

There is so much room for extrapolation and fan interpretations, not least of all because both of them exhibit some deeply disturbing behaviour that mostly gets glossed over by the narrative. And my interpretations aren't going to be kind. Mostly, I'm sad to say, as a reaction to 1) fans of Jily trying to shove it down my throat when I was a teenager and 2) JKR's anti-trans warmongering making me highly critical of a lot of her attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and relationships.

So, first, I'm going to try and detail what we actually know about them from canon. Then, I'm going to talk a bit about how knowledge of JKR's prejudices and biases have affected my interpretation. Then... I'm going to drag Jily through the mud.

So, James and Lily met on the train to boarding school at eleven. James picked on her friend based on a social prejudice that's new to her, and she removed them from the situation. Over the following years, James picks on her friend frequently, which she doesn't ever seem indignant about, culminating in the event where James, who's had a crush on her for a while and obviously enough that Severus noticed it, tries to threaten her into dating hi., Lily puts him down harshly, and then leaves her newly ex-friend to his mercies after he insulted her. At some point about a year to a year and a half later, they start dating after 'James deflated his head a little'. They marry straight out of school, and join a vigilante group to fight terrorists together. Also, James goes into training to become an Auror. There is no mention, afaik, as to what else Lily is doing in that time, besides that we know that she and James 'thrice defied' Voldemort, presumably in person, given that I'm sure a lot more couples 'thrice defied' him in some way during the course of those three years. They have a child two years into joining this war, and go into hiding to protect him. They know there's a spy in the Order, and this fractures their friendships (well, James's we're never told who Lily's friends are besides Severus except that she has them), while James chafes at the restrictions of being in hiding. Eventually, Voldemort finds them, and James tries to hold him off without a wand while Lily runs upstairs to get Harry, then stands over his crib begging Voldemort to spare her baby.

That's... pretty much all we know of them from canon.

Metatextually, we know that Lily is meant to represent the unconditional love of the mother, the selfless sacrifice, and James is meant to represent the ideal that Harry's striving to become. (Ask me some time about how disturbing I find the parallels between Jily and Hinny.) And that together, they are meant to be the shining example of love and happiness and bravery and justice. (Also ask me some time about how there isn't a single adult in Harry's life who looks at him and cares (or doesn't care) about him for him, instead of because of who his parents are.)

And given what I now know about JKR's ideas about gender, gender roles, and therefore the standard hetrosexual relationships of our society... The disturbing inconsistencies between what we're told about Jily and what we actually see of their relationship begin to make a lot more sense.

So on the one hand, I fully believe that Lily and James belong together and deserve each other. On the other, I don't really mean that as a good thing.

James's feelings towards Lily are not selfless and they're not kind. He bullies her friend and tries to use that as leverage to get her to date him, and literally only stops where she can see him after that. Lily... finds that good enough. Frankly, given some of the details and turns of phrase in the the Prince's Tale, I would go so far as to say she passively encouraged him even before that. Look at the way she talks to Severus about the bullying. She condemns James's behaviour once, in passing, to stop Severus from bringing him up so that she can continue to scold him. (I'm not passing judgement on whether that scolding was justified or not, that is a whole different meta.)

We don't know what they looked like while they were dating, but we do know they probably weren't even dating for a full year before they got married. Understandable given the state of war their world was in, but... not something I'd hold up as a sign of good decision making on either of their parts. James 'got the girl' (I don't think I need to elaborate on why I find that whole dynamic skeevy) and Lily... I get some serious 'I can fix him' vibes from her decision to date him, and that never ends well. After that, we're told that James and Sirius are trying/want to become Aurors. (I think. I can't actually remember where... Please correct me if I'm wrong and that's only fanon.) With no mention of what Lily's doing afaik.

We know she fights for the order, but... I expect, if you asked JKR what Lily's career was, the answer would be 'housewife'. Within a year or so, she's pregnant, a year later, she's in hiding, a year later, she's dead.

Now, I do understand that part of the justification for all of this will be 'it was war, they were young and in love', but it seems like a really stupid thing, to me, when they've been personally and repeatedly targeted by Voldemort himself, to have a baby. They're really young, James can't possibly be out of training yet, there is a mass-murdering dark wizard gunning for them, Lily is part of his preferred demographic to torture and kill, and their reaction is 'you know what would make this situation better? A baby!'?!

Now, why would Lily, who from what we've seen was a passionate, (self-)righteous person, be willing to take time off from fighting a war that's both extremely personal to her and also escalating fairly quickly, to dedicate herself to raising a baby? Because motherhood is the epitome of womanhood. How could she not?

Hello, JKR, I can see you there behind the curtain again.

As for James in all of this... Well, I've written a draft ranting about James Potter that I didn't post because I try not to spew negativity all over the internet anymore (I tried that once, it wasn't fun for anybody). But I will say that I think there are some deeply sinister interpretations of a rich spoiled bully immediately going into law enforcement after school while his 'headstrong' wife ends up staying home to watch the baby.

TL;DR: Lily and James are that perfect married couple who on the surface appear to be every romantic dream made real, but when you scratch the surface, a lot of ugliness oozes out. At best they were young and stupid and made some significant mistakes that they never got the chance to learn from and reflect on because they died so young. At worst they were a toxic, abusive mess vying for power over each other and we only never got to see them fall apart because they died so young.

(Of course, they never would have, because we know that this is JKR's idea of an ideal relationship. Yikes.)

They are so severely fucked up, and if they'd actually been presented that way, I might have actually found them engaging and interesting, as individuals and as a couple. But I took a hard right into 'I'm fucking done' because so many people bought into the stereotypical heteronormative love story of a couple who can do no wrong.

[whinlatter]

sirius and ginny: a meta (part 1)

“Excuse me, but I care what happens to Sirius as much as you do!” said Ginny, her jaw set so that her resemblance to Fred and George was suddenly striking.’

are you a very brave, very reckless, very hot self-destructive rebel with a treacherous sibling and a flair for christmas decoration, harbouring complex feelings about your mother, close ties to crookshanks the cat and spend your days plagued by the memory of your worst mistakes and dark past? do you find yourself constantly being begged to stay in a state of protective confinement to save your life by a young man with a lightning scar, bad hair and crippling abandonment issues? if so, congratulations! you might be one of harry potter's chosen family members, sirius black and ginevra molly weasley! 

basically - i want to talk about sirius and ginny. these are two characters who don’t share a lot of scenes in canon but who, i think, have some clear (if overlooked) parallels: stubborn, fiercely protective of harry, self-sacrificing, admired, principled, haunted (in different ways) by traumatic pasts and betrayals, with complicated relationships with their families and entirely uncomplicated devoted relationships with someone else’s cat. their narrative arcs are successive, with ginny ascending in significance in the series during sirius’ period of decline and ultimate death. and ultimately, they’re also the two people who become, over the course of the canon series, family to a protagonist desperately seeking to build one. sirius and ginny are the two people harry in canon most worries about, wants to protect, and thinks of as someone who embodies the promise of family and home.

sirius and ginny aren’t mirror images of each other. ofc, ginny also has parallels with the only other family members harry claims in the series, lily and james (i mean, especially james - she’s literally a cocky funny flirtatious chaser with a years-long debilitating mega crush who can also catch a snitch like a champ. come on now). it’s also clear in canon that sirius means more to ginny as a hero/role model/ally against her mother than ginny ever means to sirius. nevertheless, the text puts in work to let the reader know we should think about these characters together as somehow aligned. from the beginning of ootp, there are clues and signals in the text that foreshadow ginny’s emergence as someone important to harry, and that subtly let the reader know that the baton of being harry’s ‘person’ is about to be passed from sirius to ginny, two kindred spirits, after sirius’ death. so that's what this meta is about! (consider this my 700th attempt to show that, as the popular fandom complaint/all of reddit still insist, ginny as a character, and especially the harry/ginny romance, did not ‘come out of nowhere’.)

the following meta is part one of two (and yet it's still too long! sorry about it). o in this part, i look at the period from the end of goblet of fire thru the start of half blood prince, exploring how the text sets up the sirius and ginny parallels as a way of foreshadowing ginny’s emergence as harry’s main love interest and place as a family substitute. the second part (tbc) will be what the memory of sirius does for harry’s view of his relationship with ginny, and the kind of positive - and negative - ways this shapes harry’s ideas about love and what family do for each other. i wrote this meta as a way of thinking through some characterisation choices for my current WIP, beasts. if you're following along with that fic, this meta can be seen as a companion piece especially to my thinking behind chapters ten and eleven, so hope proves helpful for some of my thinking behind the sirius and ginny friendship that appears in that project. it's also dedicated to @ashesandhackles, queen of metas, who has reminded me to post this meta precisely 9 million times because she is a long-suffering saint.

ok - sirius and ginny. let’s goooooo!

sirius and ginny before ootp

before OotP, ginny is absent from any plot connected to sirius. ginny doesn’t know the truth about sirius’ innocence, nor does she know that harry, her brother and her friend are in regular contact with sirius and that harry now as a surrogate father/big brother figure to confide in and seek comfort in.  in fact, in one of ginny’s few appearances in GoF, the narration is unusually insistent that the reader knows how little ginny knows about sirius:

“And have you heard from — ?” Ron began, but at a look from Hermione he fell silent. Harry knew Ron had been about to ask about Sirius. Ron and Hermione had been so deeply involved in helping Sirius escape from the Ministry of Magic that they were almost as concerned about Harry’s godfather as he was. However, discussing him in front of Ginny was a bad idea. Nobody but themselves and Professor Dumbledore knew about how Sirius had escaped, or believed in his innocence. “I think they’ve stopped arguing,” said Hermione, to cover the awkward moment, because Ginny was looking curiously from Ron to Harry. “Shall we go down and help your mum with dinner?” 

the only other tiny crumb of sirius and ginny we get is the news that the owl sirius bought in PoA and gifted to ron as a replacement pet for scabbers has been embraced and named by ginny. sirius gifting a tiny little spitfire of an owl that annoys ron? it's giving foreshadowing, your honour.

the reader, though, knows who sirius is to harry by GoF. throughout this book, for the first time in the series, harry has a person he can claim as something like a family: someone to worry about, someone who cares about him,who can advise, guide and mentor him, as well as offer him support and consolation in difficult times (‘someone like a parent…’) although sirius has not been able to offer harry a stable alternative home to the dursleys due to his status as a wanted man, he’s still filling a role that previously had been vacant in the series: he’s harry’s person, the surrogate parent chosen for him by james and lily. he’s close by, either by the floo or eventually living (at great personal cost) as padfoot in hogsmeade, and he’s present emotionally for harry in ways that prove incredibly meaningful to his young godson. in times of great of distress, sirius is there for harry to meet emotional needs that ron and hermione (understandably, no shade to them) can’t always meet. the floo scene early on in GoF, during harry’s row with ron, is a particularly good example of this:

“Never mind me, how are you?” said Sirius seriously. “I’m —”  For a second, Harry tried to say “fine” — but he couldn’t do it. …Before he could stop himself, he was talking more than he’d talked in days — about how no one believed he hadn’t entered the tournament of his own free will, how Rita Skeeter had lied about him in the Daily Prophet, how he couldn’t walk down a corridor without being sneered at — and about Ron, Ron not believing him, Ron’s jealousy . . . Sirius looked at him, eyes full of concern… He had let Harry talk himself into silence without interruption’.

harry derives enormous comfort from sirius’ presence in his life during GoF. he writes to sirius, he repeatedly turns to him for advice, he worries for him more than he does any other person. sirius fulfils harry’s desire to be kept abreast of important information about voldemort and death eaters, doesn’t sugarcoat news for harry, and makes him feel important, cared for and understood. (harry even shows off to sirius telling him about how much of a slay the first task was. ugh). by the time of the third task, sirius is sending harry daily owls, a constant flow of reassurance and concern (‘He reminded Harry in every letter that whatever might be going on outside the walls of Hogwarts was not Harry’s responsibility, nor was it within his power to influence it. If Voldemort is really getting stronger again, he wrote, my priority is to ensure your safety.’) when harry returns from the graveyard at the novel’s end, it’s sirius who races to his side to advocate for him and offer him both words of comfort and physical affection as he processes the traumatic series of events that constitute the climax of the book’s plot. (my personal favourite part is where harry says ‘wormtail cut me with a knife’ and the text says sirius made a ‘vehement exclamation’, which i can only assume is children’s book speak for ‘fucking hell’.) harry goes to bed: sirius stays with him, a literal guard dog as he recuperates. after the most traumatic events of the series to date, the reader is at least consoled that harry potter has a person now, someone he loves for him to worry about and to worry for him, who catches him on the other side of traumatic events and makes them that bit much more bearable.

sirius and ginny during ootp

with sirius' role in harry's life established in GoF, OotP begins with harry, cooped up and restless at privet drive, angry with ron, hermione, sirius, and dumbledore for abandoning him at privet drive and keeping him in the dark. harry arrives at grimmauld place to find an anxious ron and hermione, with whom harry is angry and frustrated for having left him out of their summer hangs and having neglected him, by his assessment, in surrey. it’s the most conflict we’ve seen in the trio in terms of harry vs ron and hermione, and sets up one of the important themes of the book, which is harry no longer being solely emotionally fulfilled by the people he is closest to, including his two surrogate parents best mates but also his godfather. when he encounters sirius for the first time after the order meeting, he finds him surly, bitter, and depressed, furious that he is confined to his childhood home, and (understandably) much less able or willing to offer harry much in the way of comfort, apology or cheering words (‘Harry, who had expected a better welcome, noted how hard and bitter Sirius’s voice sounded.’) in this sense, the book opens with harry disappointed and/or more distant from all the people on whom he most depends and is usually closest to, and that there therefore is already an absence of a certain kind of emotional support in harry’s life that the plot demands be filled.

fresh off the back of harry’s row with ron and hermione is ginny’s reintroduction to the reader. after years of being so shy in harry’s presence she was often nearly mute, the reader finds that ginny is not only now speaking, but that her presence turns out to be remarkably refreshing. from her opening scene where ginny enters harry’s bedroom at grimmauld place, the reader discovers the new ginny is confident, up to no good, in cahoots with her most troublemaking brothers trying to intercept the order meeting, enterprising in her mischief (and very happy to lie to her mother’s face about it). she’s thoroughly unfazed by harry’s great display of rage that has just startled and upset ron and hermione. (side note: in both ootp and hbp, ginny’s opening scene is her entering harry’s bedroom, which is the kind of foreshadowing i personally find delicious). everyone else is behaving pretty much as they have been up to this point, but it’s ginny who is showcasing behaviours new to the reader, a signal that she might be about to play a different role in the series than she has done up to this point.

cut to the dinner scene. sirius and ginny are in the room together for the first time. sirius is moody: though he’s still able to laugh, enjoying displays of mischief and humour (the twins and the knife), he’s more bitter than harry and the reader have seen him since PoA. it’s an important scene for lots of reasons (not least the sirius v molly beef), but it’s also one where sirius and ginny are repeatedly drawn into mental association in the reader’s mind. it’s also a great scene because the behaviour of crookshanks the cat literally serves to foreshadow the behaviour of harry james potter in ways that are frankly extremely fun.

so! the sirius and ginny hints start small. from the start of the scene, ginny is amused by mundungus the crook (a man, we will learn, so disdained by her mother):

“Some’n say m’ name?” Mundungus mumbled sleepily. “I ’gree with Sirius. . . .” He raised a very grubby hand in the air as though voting, his droopy, bloodshot eyes unfocused. Ginny giggled. “The meeting’s over, Dung,” said Sirius, as they all sat down around him at the table. “Harry’s arrived.” 

sirius and harry, sat at the end of the table, are both greeted by crookshanks, sirius’ old accomplice from PoA:

'​​Harry felt something brush against his knees and started, but it was only Crookshanks, Hermione’s bandy-legged ginger cat, who wound himself once around Harry’s legs, purring, then jumped onto Sirius’s lap and curled up. Sirius scratched him absentmindedly behind the ears as he turned, still grim-faced, to Harry…

when fred and george’s levitation goes awry, flinging a knife at sirius (now that’s how you foreshadow a death), crookshanks bolts: 

‘Harry and Sirius were both laughing… Crookshanks had given an angry hiss and shot off under the dresser, from whence his large yellow eyes glowed in the darkness…’

during the meal, ginny’s with hermione, having a laugh with tonks, a character harry has just met but whom he has already decided to both admire and like. after the meal, when harry’s cheered up a bit and had his crumble (the man loves dessert), crookshanks finally emerges from his hiding place, having been coaxed out from his sulk by - you guessed it - one g. m. weasley:

‘…Ginny, who had lured Crookshanks out from under the dresser, was sitting cross-legged on the floor, rolling butterbeer corks for him to chase.’

a grouchy character, initially drawn to sirius, but prone to lashing out and locking himself away, only to be lured back out into comfort and safety by ginny weasley? wow………. radical

after dinner, the argument between sirius and molly kicks off. sirius is arguing hard for harry’s right to know, though he makes no attempt to advocate for any of the other weasleys or for hermione. ginny’s noticeably singled out in her reaction to this scene, the text highlighting that she is particularly struck by this conflict as if it is of particular personal resonance, including someone standing up to her famously overprotective mother for once:

‘Ron, Hermione, Fred, and George’s heads turned from Sirius to Mrs. Weasley as though following a tennis rally. Ginny was kneeling amid a pile of abandoned butterbeer corks, watching the conversation with her mouth slightly open. Lupin’s eyes were fixed on Sirius.’

of course, molly loses the argument: harry gets to stay for juicy order deets (‘Sirius was right, he was not a child.’) after the row, ginny is the only person forbidden from hearing information about the order’s activities. suddenly, the roles are switched: it’s ginny who’s now furious and bitter to be kept out of the action:

‘“Fine!” shouted Mrs. Weasley. “Fine! Ginny — BED!”  Ginny did not go quietly. They could hear her raging and storming at her mother all the way up the stairs, and when she reached the hall Mrs. Black’s earsplitting shrieks were added to the din. Lupin hurried off to the portrait to restore calm. It was only after he had returned, closing the kitchen door behind him and taking his seat at the table again, that Sirius spoke. “Okay, Harry . . . what do you want to know?”’ 

it’s not just the parallels of confinement between harry, sirius and ginny that are so revealing, it’s also the dual maternal conflicts. ginny loud raging at her own mother sets off the howling relic of sirius’, serving to underline two characters who continue to grapple with maternal relationships that are complex and full of conflict, though by no means solely negative (sirius i see you sleeping in your mother’s bedroom babe. don’t think i think your relationship with walburga is just one of straight hate ok). when ginny later gets knocked down the stairs by fred and george, there’s more direct mrs weasley/walburga parallels, with the two of them literally shouting over each other during the ordeal lol. as such, the readers see that the conflicts being set up for sirius’ character in this book - frustration at confinement, conflict with a mother figure, drawn to more reckless and arguably irresponsible characters (mundungus, the twins) and courses of action - are also conflicts subtly playing out with the new ginny we’re meeting, too.

as the rest of the summer at grimmauld wears on, there are more examples of sirius and ginny foreshadowing. the scenes where the two characters interact serve to place ginny and sirius firmly in the same camp of people harry admires and has fun with, the troublemakers and the rebels. over the prefects issue, ginny not only is sat chatting with the troublemaking adults harry likes most, but actively draws sirius into conversation on the issue, likely knowing the answer will comfort harry, but also showing a curiosity and interest in sirius that suggests she admires him:

“I was never a prefect myself,” said Tonks brightly from behind Harry as everybody moved toward the table to help themselves to food. Her hair was tomato-red and waist length today; she looked like Ginny’s older sister. “My Head of House said I lacked certain necessary qualities.”  “Like what?” said Ginny, who was choosing a baked potato. “Like the ability to behave myself,” said Tonks. Ginny laughed; Hermione looked as though she did not know whether to smile or not and compromised by taking an extra large gulp of butterbeer and choking on it.  “What about you, Sirius?” Ginny asked, thumping Hermione on the back. Sirius, who was right beside Harry, let out his usual barklike laugh…’

ginny’s choice to try and draw sirius into the conversation bears fruit: sirius confirms james was never a prefect, and harry’s sour mood is suddenly lifted. (‘All at once the party seemed much more enjoyable; he loaded up his plate, feeling unusually fond of everyone in the room.’) ginny is thus beginning to provide harry with subtle comfort and reassurance, especially as sirius, struggling with his own confinement,  is taking a less active role in trying to cheer harry up. what i also like is that we have evidence of how ginny views sirius - she’s curious about him and his past, she clearly thinks he and the other new rebellious adults are cool as shit, and she’s drawn increasingly away from her mother’s cautious overprotective approach towards these resistance fighters who prioritise the fight over safety. (it is noticeable to me that ginny does not become a prefect in HBP, suggesting sirius' example proved instructive).

we see more small parallels between sirius and ginny during the cleaning scenes. the battle against grimmauld place is an important symbol of one of the important themes of OotP as a book: a battle over past traumas and their persistent and unwieldy symptoms that are seemingly never-ending. while it’s harry’s experiences that, of course, take centre stage, sirius’, too, loom omnipresent throughout the text. it’s significant, then, that ginny’s own past gets brought up for the first time in three books here, albeit briefly: 

'They found an unpleasant-looking silver instrument, something like a many-legged pair of tweezers, which scuttled up Harry’s arm like a spider when he picked it up, and attempted to puncture his skin; Sirius seized it and smashed it with a heavy book entitled Nature’s Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy. There was a musical box that emitted a faintly sinister, tinkling tune when wound, and they all found themselves becoming curiously weak and sleepy until Ginny had the sense to slam the lid shut…'

in this moment, we see sirius and ginny singled in the larger group as quick-thinking, shrewd characters, with a good instincts and common sense (if a bit of a tendency to get scrappy). their respective dark pasts are subtly alluded to. sirius whacks a spider trying to attack harry with a book that might as well be entitled my big book of family trauma. ginny, meanwhile, steps in when everybody present starts to be enchanted by a mysterious object luring them into danger by whacking it shut (gee i wonder why!) given this is the book that will see ginny mention the events of CoS for the first time in errrrr three years, it’s significant that the text is careful to draw ginny into this broader theme that unites sirius and harry, the constant reminders of traumatic pasts at every turn. we also see here the revelation that regulus black was a death eater. coming after news of percy weasley’s betrayal, sirius’ bitter dismissal of his younger brother deliberately mirrors ginny and the other weasleys’ attitude towards percy, this sense of pureblood families split over wizarding politics, often fatally. 

while harry fears his expulsion from hogwarts prior his hearing, he continues to fantasise about coming to live with sirius at grimmauld, and about being with a family member and finding an alternative home to hogwarts. sirius, as hermione astutely observes, tries to manage harry’s expectations and not to get his own hopes up: still, when harry is exonerated, sirius is visibly depressed, showing the beginnings of an emotional dependency on harry that harry feels great guilt over.when leaving grimmauld for the start of the school year, sirius, as padfoot, accompanies harry to king’s cross: unlike in GoF, though, he is spotted, and harry begins to worry much more actively about sirius’ vulnerability to capture, about his recklessness and about his judgement. concerned for sirius, and absent ron and hermione, who are in the prefects carriage, the person who stays with harry and offers him company is ginny. she sacrifices her own train journey (presumably with her own boyfriend) to find a carriage with harry and make sure he’s not lonely, bringing him to neville and luna and sorting him out after his embarassing cho run-in. it’s not a coincidence that once again we see ginny here taking care of harry crookshanks:

'“Where’s Crookshanks?” “Ginny’s got him,” said Harry. “There she is. . . .”  Ginny had just emerged from the crowd, clutching a squirming Crookshanks. “Thanks,” said Hermione, relieving Ginny of the cat. “Come on, let’s get a carriage together before they all fill up. . . '

once harry’s back at school, having left sirius behind to languish miserably in london, we see he's more isolated and alone than ever. he’s tormented by umbridge, endlessly (though often unfairly) frustrated with ron and hermione, ghosted by dumbledore, yet absent the more stable, reassuring sirius he came to know in GoF, unable to write candidly to him and faced with a much less well sirius in the opportunities they do have to speak face-to-face. as sirius’ mental health declines as he is shut up at grimmauld, his ability to support harry and comfort him starts to falter, and he becomes a much more uneven source of advice and support, particularly during his car crash floo appearance, where he’s much ruder than he has previously been (cutting off, ignoring their pleas for him to be more cautious, the infamous ‘the risk would have made it fun for james’ moment). this new sirius, clearly struggling, is much more happy to do up guilt trip to his godson than we have seen him to up this point (‘I’ll write to tell you a time I can make it back into the fire, then, shall I? If you can stand to risk it?’ - you petty little shit, padfoot). all of this serves to increase harry’s anxiety about sirius’ wellbeing and reinforce harry’s sense of emotional isolation. even sirius’ encouragement on the DA is, as hermione points out, partly bound up in more selfish motivations (‘I think he’s really frustrated at how little he can do where he is… so I think he’s keen to kind of… egg us on.’)

ginny’s largely absent in this section of the novel. in the brief moments she does appear, it’s to inject humour (eg. her impressions at the DA meeting) and in little reminders that she now has a boyfriend, no longer harbours romantic feelings for harry, making sure the reader continues to hold her mentally apart from harry. harry, meanwhile, misguidedly tries to seek out a relationship with cho chang, who is showing clear signs of her own emotional distress and inability to meet harry’s emotional needs given her own grief. still, among this, there’s still room for some small subtle sirius/ginny parallels. once the DA plot picks up, we have another little sign that ginny weasley and sirius black think somewhat alike:

“Yeah, the D.A.’s good,” said Ginny. “Only let’s make it stand for Dumbledore’s Army because that’s the Ministry’s worst fear, isn’t it?” 

“Trained in combat?” repeated Harry incredulously. “What does he think we’re doing here, forming some sort of wizard army? “That’s exactly what he thinks you’re doing,” said Sirius, “or rather, that’s exactly what he’s afraid Dumbledore’s doing — forming his own private army, with which he will be able to take on the Ministry of Magic.” 

with harry's isolation and need for more emotional support established in this first term, christmas at grimmauld offers more opportunity to subtly develop the sirius and ginny parallels, as well as to highlight ginny’s ability to fill the gaps left by sirius’ decline. after the attack on arthur weasley, the group arrive back at grimmauld:

‘Sirius was hurrying toward them all, looking anxious. He was unshaven and still in his day clothes; there was also a slightly Mundungus-like whiff of stale drink about him. “What’s going on?” he said, stretching out a hand to help Ginny up. “Phineas Nigellus said Arthur’s been badly injured —” 

could this be sirius literally lifting ginny up into plot significance? why yes it could

ofc the weasleys then argue with sirius about their right to go see their father. despite his own frustrations at being trapped at grimmauld, sirius proves the voice of reason and rational decision making against both ginny and the twins’ hotheadedness (ginny asks to borrow cloaks to go to the hospital: sirius: ‘Hang on, you can’t go tearing off to St. Mungo’s!’) crucially, though, when sirius points out that there are bigger things at stake - the work of the order and the resistance movement - it’s ginny who listens:

“Your father knew what he was getting into, and he won’t thank you for messing things up for the Order!” said Sirius angrily in his turn. “This is how it is — this is why you’re not in the Order — you don’t understand — there are things worth dying for!”  “Easy for you to say, stuck here!” bellowed Fred. “I don’t see you risking your neck!”  The little colour remaining in Sirius’s face drained from it. He looked for a moment as though he would quite like to hit Fred, but when he spoke, it was in a voice of determined calm. “I know it’s hard, but we’ve all got to act as though we don’t know anything yet. We’ve got to stay put, at least until we hear from your mother, all right?”  Fred and George still looked mutinous. Ginny, however, took a few steps over to the nearest chair and sank into it. Harry looked at Ron, who made a funny movement somewhere between a nod and shrug, and they sat down too. The twins glared at Sirius for another minute, then took seats on either side of Ginny.  “That’s right,” said Sirius encouragingly, “come on, let’s all . . . let’s all have a drink while we’re waiting…’

there’s a lot going on here: ginny’s willingness to follow sirius’ orders, but also her willingness to accept an argument based on some idea of the greater good before any of her brothers. she and sirius are aligned here, and it’s her decision to accept sirius’ reasoning that proves the catalyst for her brothers to follow. we see here how ginny has come to see sirius: someone she looks up to and admires, an adult whose judgement she trusts and whose worldview she subscribes to. (as a character prone to hero worship - see her view of her big brother bill - i think this is noteworthy, and is behind a lot of my characterisation choices for ginny towards sirius in beasts). but we also see that ginny agrees with sirius' worldview. there are some things worth dying for, and self-sacrifice is part of that.

when harry goes to sirius for reassurance about witnessing arthur’s attack, he finds sirius unable to properly console him and convince him that he was not to blame for arthur’s attack. the reader gets the impression of sirius withholding information from harry (‘He could only see a sliver of Sirius’s face; the rest was in darkness’), and the scene ends with sirius clapping harry on the shoulder and leaving him ‘standing alone in the dark’. while sirius throws himself into christmas preparations, obviously delighted to have company, harry shrinks from the cheer and isolates himself. in the end, ofc, the only person that manages to pull harry out of his dark, brooding thoughts is ginny. the text is careful to note she’s sitting beside him on the tube back from st mungo’s, when he looks very unwell. then, in the ‘lucky you’ scene, she showcases some of the same skills harry first came to appreciate in sirius in GoF. she tells it to him straight: she’s sympathetic, but not overly gushing, and she reminds him of her own intensely frightening experience which she endured alone, something harry can relate to, even if the experience of possession is not.  it’s an important scene for lots of reasons, but it’s also, crucially, the intervention that causes harry’s mood to lift, and he gets to enjoy a christmas with his godfather, the thing he had most wanted in the run-up to christmas, and which becomes the only holiday period harry and sirius ever spend together: 

‘I’m not the weapon after all, thought Harry. His heart swelled with happiness and relief, and he felt like joining in as they heard Sirius tramping past their door toward Buckbeak’s room, singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Hippogriffs” at the top of his voice.’

of course, once christmas is over, sirius slips back into a depressed, gloomy state. harry wants a better goodbye than he gives him, merely giving him a quick one armed hug (there’s a real theme throughout harry and sirius’ relationship of very sparing physical contact on sirius’ part, which is obviously a hole in harry's life ginny will fill in - er - a big way). back at school, harry returns to umbridge’s increasingly draconian rule, maks a disastrous attempt at forging a relationship with cho, and continues to feel lonely, paranoid, and angry. unable to speak to sirius properly via letter or floo - and unwilling to open the present sirius has given him to communicate directly with him, the two-way mirror - harry is increasingly sullen, a mood that only worsens after seeing snape's worst memory.

the easter egg scene is obviously important for hinny for lots of different reasons. but here i just want to highlight how the scene serves to show ginny as both the conduit to sirius for harry, and someone whose behaviour echoes that of sirius in GoF when harry first began to open up to and seek comfort in him. harry is distressed by his now complicated feelings both towards the father he previously revered and towards sirius, who seemed to encourage james’ bullying behaviour. ginny hands harry a chocolate easter egg covered in snitches: chocolate, a canonical source of comfort against dark thoughts, and an egg that reminds him of the love of parent. the act makes him suddenly emotional, though he at first denies he’s upset. ginny presses carefully and sensitively, asking the right questions to get him to confess the source of his worry, waiting for harry to take his time to speak - all behaviours that echo sirius’ own effective listening techniques. ginny’s acquaintance with sirius, and knowledge of how significant he is to harry, is important here, too, and a subtle sign to the reader that he trusts ginny with knowledge about sirius after a long time of having her in the dark about his godfather.  the reader leaves the scene having seen ginny breakthrough to harry emotionally in a way for the second time in the novel, in a way no other character has done (‘he felt a bit more hopeful…’) 

of course, the course of action ginny has set in motion is itself risky and reckless (‘anything is possible if you’ve got enough nerve’ is very marauders as a philosophy). the decision to go ahead with the plan the twins come up with is one harry sees as a decision on whether to be more like james and sirius - a risk taker - or to abandon the hero worship for the marauders he has lived with for so long. in the end, of course, it’s a win for the reckless troublemakers: he chooses to go ahead with the plan the twins have crafted and that ginny has set in motion, and to speak to sirius.

and yet. sirius is still alive - there is not need for ginny yet. for the remainder of the book, ginny has to beg to be included in the trio's plans and to be allowed to be a part of the plot to rescue sirius. she’s is often in conflict with harry, showing a lot of sirius’ bitterness at attempts at containment and to keep her out of the fighting. she grates against harry’s insistence that she is too young and inexperienced, and having to remind the trio that she, too, has come to care about sirius and wants to see him safe: 

“I’ve got a broom!” said Ginny.  “Yeah, but you’re not coming,” said Ron angrily.  “Excuse me, but I care what happens to Sirius as much as you do!” said Ginny, her jaw set so that her resemblance to Fred and George was suddenly striking. 

of course, it all ends in tragedy: sirius, desperate to go to harry’s aid and absolutely gunning for a fight after months of confinement, is killed, leaving harry alone. there a subtle clues that something has shifted in ginny’s relationship to harry and the trio in the scenes after sirius’ death, including ginny positioned as the mirror image to harry in the hospital: 

‘Harry was sitting on the end of Ron’s bed and they were both listening to Hermione read the front page of the Sunday Prophet. Ginny, whose ankle had     been mended in a trice by Madam Pomfrey, was curled up at the foot of Hermione’s bed…’

despite this, in the immediate aftermath of sirius’ death, harry is extremely alone. he is unable to work out what he needs (‘Whenever he was in company he wanted to get away, and whenever he was alone he wanted company.’) he tries to go to hagrid’s, but regrets it (‘He was starting to wish he was alone again’), leaving after hagrid reminds him of sirius’ core traits, an inability to stay out of the fight when he believes in the cause:

“But still, Harry . . . he was never one ter sit around at home an’ let other people do the fightin’. He couldn’ have lived with himself if he hadn’ gone ter help —” 

unlike at the end of GoF, harry is isolated by his grief and the revelation of the prophecy's contents by the end of this book. he goes alone to a secluded corner of the lakeshore, ‘sheltered from the gaze of passersby behind a tangle of shrubs’, and ‘[stares] out over the gleaming water’, and cries alone. there is no sirius or other person to catch him and console him in his grief. his person has died, and there’s a gap in his life again, just waiting to be filled: 

‘Wanting to impress Cho seemed to belong to a past that was no longer quite connected with him. So much of what he had wanted before Sirius’s death felt that way these days. . . . The week that had elapsed since he had last seen Sirius seemed to have lasted much, much longer: It stretched across two universes, the one with Sirius in it, and the one without.’

ginny and sirius parallels in HBP and DH

after sirius’ death, the parallels between sirius and ginny become more important as ginny moves into the centre frame as a character. at the start of HBP, harry arrives at the burrow and discusses his grief over sirius’ death with dumbledore in the burrow broom shed, acknowledging how profoundly the loss of a family member who cares singularly about him is affecting him. ('He felt stupid for admitting it, but the fact that he had had someone outside Hogwarts who cared what happened to him, almost like a parent, had been one of the best things about discovering his godfather . . . and now the post owls would never bring him that comfort again. . . .' beasts readers: there's a reason harry clings to letters!) of course, having reminded the reader of the gap in harry’s life that now needs to be filled, harry goes to sleep, the active reflection on his grief for sirius put to one side so the novel's plot can get underway. he'll go to bed mourning sirius and wake up in a sunlit bedroom. of course, ginny will walk into this bedroom too, only now things will be different: harry potter is back to the search for a loved one, for a family, and he's about to realise ginny is the one he wants to fill it. thus the start of the plot of ginny stepping into the role vacated by sirius beginneth.

so much of who ginny is in HBP is reminiscent of sirius. she frequently leaps into battle as harry’s protector (‘You’re taking orders from something someone wrote in a book?’, ‘Give it a rest, Hermione’), she’s scrappy (RIP zacharias smith), she’s funny and laughs easily in a way that less recalls sirius in the time harry knew him than sirius as harry sees him as a young man, in photographs or memories. she's the one who commits to the insane christmas decorations, determined to cheer everyone up over the festive period as sirius did the year before. she even enjoys the widespread admiration and lust of her peers, a trait that directly recalls sirius being eyed up by his peers in snape's memory. by the novel’s end, after dumbledore’s death, it will be ginny who goes to harry’s side after the climax of the plot and catch him in his grief just as sirius did in GoF, this time over dumbledore’s death: 

‘He did not want to leave Dumbledore’s side, he did not want to move anywhere. Hagrid’s hand on his shoulder was trembling. Then another voice said, “Harry, come on.’ A much smaller and warmer hand had enclosed his and was pulling him upward. He obeyed its pressure without really thinking about it.’

their breakup has sirius all over it. taking place at the lakeshore, the place where harry wept alone over sirius a year prior, harry draws on the circumstances of sirius’ demise as a reason he must break up with ginny (‘Voldemort uses people his enemies are close to.’) the breakup does little to shift what ginny has become in harry’s mind, though, and he spends all of DH thinking of her as he once thought of sirius: the person whose safety he most craves, the person he misses, someone he claims as his, and whom he associates with (now banished) hopes of a home and a family:

“It’s not a problem,” said Harry, sickened by the pain in his head. “It’s your family, ’course you’re worried. I’d feel the same way.” He thought of Ginny. “I do feel the same way.”

of course, echoes of sirius will also come into play during open war. it’s now ginny, not sirius, who is the one left behind for her own protection: in the run-up to the battle, harry finds himself once again faced with the prospect of confining his loved one for their safety, despite their desperation to fight and do the right thing. but these are thoughts for part 2…….

[kseniya-fyrfyr]

Do you wake up periodically in the middle of the night and think:

hmm, I wonder how discouraged Severus Snape would be if he somehow found out that he has a huge fan base in a parallel world? That there are a lot of people who are ready to strangle James Potter with their bare hands for what he did? That there are also a huge number of people who, although they respect Severus' feelings, still consider Lily not a very good person? That he is loved by many? What would he say? What would he have said at the age of 15? And what would he have said at the beginning of the first book? And the last one?

Do you know what I think? He probably wouldn't have believed it. He would never have believed it. And he wouldn't care.

What did I want to say with this post? Go and watch "Vincent and the Doctor" (episode 10, season 5). This is an episode of the Doctor Who. It’s not necessary to know and understand the rest of the show. And just imagine Severus in that very scene for a second.

Yes, that was my dream. For some reason, I comforted Severus Snape. And yes, it's not the first time I've had this dream. And I'm not even a fan.…

w h y

[kay-elle-cee]

Hey,

So, I’m listening to your IBFIBG playlist (while reading the fic of course ❤️) and suddenly the song: Kick, by Greta Stanley begins to play and it made me wonder if you got the title for this fic from the lyrics?

This is the first time I listened to this song and I really like it, it brings a deeper feeling when I’m reading the way you write Slytherin Lily, and it’s like this song is a bridge that connects the emotions that Lily feels throughout her time at Hogwarts with the happiness that she will get at the end ( yes… that means I trust you even if you have no remorse with hurting Lily 🥹🥺🥹 ).

Also, the song: Something I Said, by The Sonder Bombs, blended well with chapter 4 (a few more chapters left until I finish reading it 😔 💔😒 ❤️‍🩹😭) for me it does a great job with emphasizing the impact of Lily and James’ estrangement during their time at school. James wondering where everything went wrong between them and not knowing if she’ll speak to him again 🥺.

The manner in which you bring so much emotion into this story is my absolute favorite part. I’m always on the edge of my seat, whenever I click “Next Chapter”. Basically what I want and need you to know is that your writing is a gift and that I appreciate all the effort that you’ve made into writing this fic (along with your others, especially the micros!)

I hope your having a great day/evening (also I hope you were safe while the hail was coming down in your city )

As always thank you for sharing your writing!

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Nena! 💕 You are the first person to come to me with the connection between the playlist and the title, and you are absolutely correct!

When I was trying to figure out a title for this fic (it existed in my drafts as "Twinkle Lights" forever—the song that inspired a lot of events in the fic) I definitely dove into the lyrics of the songs from the playlist since I felt that they matched the tone of the story so well. I agonized over it and actually made banners with a few other options before deciding on i'll be fine, i'll be good. I'm glad that the sliver of hope shines through even in the earlier years (and thank you for having faith that the ending won't be all doom and gloom!😉)

I love your take on Something I Said from James' POV! When building the playlist, I was very much doing it from Lily's mindset (and for this song in particular lining up with the end of 7th year and that kind of repetitive spiral of "I'll fuck up again") but it works so well for James because of all the reasons you've pointed out! And I love that it's an example of both of them kind of feeling that sense of worry and hopelessness in parallel with each other 🥲

Thank you so so so much for all your kind words, on here AND on ao3! I hope you know how much I appreciate YOU 💕. As for my night...hoping to bang out another jilytober prompt (🤞🏼...if I can stop outlining this regency fic). We were luckily spared any damage in the hailstorm, thank you!

[lostforgottenspaces]

Welcome!

Hi! I'm Leo and I recently started posting my writing so I figured I should probably make an info post. This will have a bit about me as well as a bit about the current fic I am writing.

(Plus some other fic ideas I have)

Note that all my writing is currently marauders content. If you are interested in something else feel free to send an ask! I am a part of many fandoms and am always open to new ideas!

Also if you would like to alpha/beta read for one of my fics send me a dm :)

My Info

I go by Lost or Leo (whichever you prefer) and I use all pronouns, but mostly they/them.

My ao3 account is queer70s and I will be posting any fics over there

I love the marauders, six of crows, the folk of the air, and many, many book series. TV shows I'm currently watching are Lucifer, The Blacklist, Titans and Criminal Minds.

If you want to chat feel free to dm me! I'm always interested in talking to new people!

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Pink Folders - WiP

Pink Folders is a dorlene/marylily fic and at this stage will be mostly Marlene's POV. The first chapter is posted! At this stage, I am not what my posting schedule will be like. I do have studying and other commitments so updates may take some time but once I figure out a schedule I will try my best to stick to it!

(This info will be updated as necessary)

Summary:

Marlene is frustrated. Her best friend's boyfriend is a manipulative, lying, piece of shit, and yet her best friend doesn’t seem to realise just how terrible he is. She needs proof. Proof that Snape is cruel, a liar, and a cheater. Fortunately, Alice knows someone who might be able to help.

Chapter 1. - tumblr

Pink Folders - ao3

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Other Fic Ideas

If any of these are something you would really like to read let me know! It's not guaranteed I will post them but if I finish Pink Folders I will likely start one of these.

Hotel California:

There’s a spot on a highway between Kansas and Missouri where reality is loose. If you pass through a specific section of road at the exact wrong speed you’ll find yourself in a parallel universe. They call it, Hotel California.

[a marauders au based on parts of the song Hotel California]

James needed some time.

After his, surprisingly okay, breakup with Lily, he decided to take a trip. It’s going to be great, he’ll be able to relax, meet new people, and get ridiculously drunk every night. He’ll spend all day asleep in some hotel bed and all night at whatever bar is closest.

The Hotel California was not his original plan of accommodation.

Jegulus/Wolfstar, currently James' POV

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Unnamed Fic:

This is a jegulus/wolfstar/rosekiller hogwarts fic. I actually have bits of this written but not a title or summary. Essentially Regulus comes back to school injured at the beginning of the marauders' 6th year and Sirius freaks out about how he could've lost his brother and starts trying to spend more time with him.

This fic has (actual) fake dating and plenty of black brothers arguing and maybe bonding.

Disclaimer!!!: This description may change a lot as I work out the plot and ideas I have for it! The fake dating bit in particular is being worked through and it may become actual dating but not an endgame ship. I can confirm though that jegulus/wolfstar/rosekiller are the intended endgame ships, so if any of them date other people it will be temporary.

[antigonewinchester]

12x08 Season 12 is really trying to play to the contemporary political climate at the time, huh. A Christian President agrees to be possessed by the Devil to bring America to a better place, the month after Trump got elected through the strong support of Evangelical Christians. Not subtle.

This ep also continues the bad British Men of Letters vs. good American Men of Letters plot, especially in how much Ketch is a sinister flamboyant James Bond parody. He’s fun in a… queer-coded evil bisexual Disney villain sort of way. Kind of surprised to see this character type in 2016, but I suppose it hasn’t gone away, just become less common. It actually feels indicative of what seems to be going on in the writing of the later seasons, which has (sometimes) less explicit homophobic, sexist, racist plots but all of these ideas still shows up in subtler forms.

12x09 I’d seen how Ketch was positioned as a foil for Dean this season, but I hadn’t realized the show does the same with Mick and Sam.

Also had heard about Dean’s line about imprisonment vs Hell (“MARY: Why would you-- / DEAN: We were already dead. Being locked in that cell with nothing... I've been to Hell. This was worse. / SAM: At least this way, one of us gets to keep fighting.”) and I know I’m biased, but the writers continually downplaying Dean’s time in Hell is... Particularly because I do think Dabb intended this ep to echo back to Dean’s Hell experience—Dean being the one to “break” first (not Sam) to make the deal w/ Billie, Cas saving Mary but also Dean and Sam by killing Billie > paralleling Dean being in Hell, his breaking, and Cas then rescuing him after. And then in contrast to Sam holding out under torture at the beginning of the season w/ Toni. Leaves a weird & cynical taste in my mouth, I’ll just say that. (Although I will add the fandom takes this thread and runs w/ it to make it about 100x worse than it is in the show.)

12x10 The show has done a lot of “how does one reckon w/ the things one has done in the past and how one has changed” and not always succeeded at it, but this ep and Cas reckoning w/ his past mistakes actually worked for me. Somewhat. The writing is still doing the “I had good intentions so don’t be mad at me!!” pattern, which I will have more thoughts on later. What didn’t work for me, and what I think consistently prevents the show’s writing from being more nuanced around this theme, is how it presents a duality between revenge & resentment vs. forgiveness & letting go. Take Cas’s last line about how if Lily Sunder couldn’t forgive him, she could come find him (implied that she could kill him). It sets up only two choices: hurt people out of resentment or forgive them to let go of that resentment. But that’s a false binary; one doesn’t have to forgive someone to not try to get revenge. While chasing after revenge because of one’s resentment isn’t a good thing, resentment on its own isn’t necessarily bad; it’s just a feeling.

I’m also curious when the writers started intentionally writing Cas as in love with Dean, given 15x18. Some of the framing in the episode (angels falling in love w/ humans, certain shots of Cas’s reactions, Dean as Cas’s “heart”) could be read as subtext about Cas’s romantic feelings for Dean. It’s one of the first times when I’ve thought, huh, ok yeah, I could see an interpretation where the writers were putting the romantic angle in deliberately. Definitely only on Cas’s side, though.