#because she's flat. she's Pretty Quidditch Girl who cries a lot and then betrays them i want more i want FOOD

[greenerteacups]

miss ma’am gtc!!! may we pick your brain about:

- your five favorite harry potter characters

- your five least favorite harry potter characters

- five scenes from the harry potter books that altered your brain chemistry

- five scenes from the harry potter movies that altered your brain chemistry

thank you, i love u so much!!!

oh SO fun thank you for the question!!

(1) top five blorbos (in no particular order): 1. Hermione Granger (I lied about the order. She's first). She's SO. She exists at the perfect spot on the smart/stupid friendly/mean optimistic/pessimistic continuum, she's so rich. She changed me as a person when i was 11 years old and I would not be here without her, probably. The others, actually in no particular order, are: Draco Malfoy (sad little rich boy doomed by narrative but also the Narrative is social conditioning and he had free will the whole time, fucking gut-punch, mwah, the best of both kinds of tragedy) and Sirius Black (tasty, complex, brilliant rendering of a grown-up antihero who worked through his problems but still has Issues, arguably JKR's best character work in any book comes in Sirius in OOTP where he keeps comparing Harry to James, it's fucking heartbreaking). Also Remus and Ginny. (What if you forced yourself to get over your celebrity crush despite him Living With You basically 24/7 and then you became a popular confident athlete loved by all for being ferocious in defense of the vulnerable, then your celebrity crush fell head over heels for you anyway. what then?)

(2) least favorite blorbos. I think about these in the "opposite of love is indifference" type of way, because I love a character that I can hate. Like, Umbridge is awful, but I could, in theory, explain any given action that she takes by referencing her motivations and context. But I struggle with characters I don't understand, or worse, that I don't believe. Namely, Peter Pettigrew, whose betrayal kicks off the whole story to happen and is never explained. So you get all these Marauders fics where this cool, era-defining foursome is actually just The Marauder Trio Plus This Guy I Guess, but his betrayal would not have hurt these people like it did if he wasn't a dearly beloved friend. I don't like Peter because I don't believe in him, as a character. His past and his present don't match.

Same for Bellatrix, unfortunately, because although she's a cool concept, I have no idea what's under the hood in her cranium. How did the same family produce her and Andromeda? Who knows. Really sucks because she's the kind of girl who would my favorite in a different kind of story — love an evil bitch, my God — but she doesn't have the texture to get me there. Also, hot take, but Molly kind of bugs me: starting with Book 5, she gets pretty hard on Sirius (fairly! she is a parent trying to watch out for Harry, and Sirius is very much not!) but she's super unkind about it, and doesn't really try to sympathize with him at all. Plus she nags Remus about getting with Tonks, which I think is kind of out of bounds and also unrealistic for a woman who is the mother of a person Tonks's age to want, so it's just like, JKR wanted a Moral Authority to tell Remus to fuck a twenty-three year old, cool, sorry Molly, sucks that it had to be you.

Dumbledore frustrates me for similar reasons, there's just not enough flavor; the Grindelwald thing from the movies would have been great if it were handled better and also officially written into canon, because it turns Dumbledore's life into a magnificently cool You Must Become Evil To Defeat It arc. how wild would that be? Dumbledore steps out of public life in the 30's to deny himself the temptations of power but the War forces his hand, three times, first with Grindelwald and then twice with Voldemort and so — gradually, gradually, but surely — Dumbledore is made to take the power he so feared, made to accept honors and give advice to Ministers and eventually he's grooming children as soldiers and thinking this is fine, I can handle this, and then he's keeping secrets from his closest lieutenants and lying to the Ministry about his plans and he's still thinking I'm the only one who can handle this, and then by the time he realizes Harry has to die, maybe he doesn't hesitate. And maybe he's still technically morally in the right, and it's necessary, but — hey, anyone think about what Dumbledore was planning to do if Harry hadn't volunteered to die? But listen: it's for the greater good.

Because maybe he never really stopped thinking that way. Maybe you need a Greater Good Guy on your team, if you're not gonna get your ass beat, but that doesn't mean you should necessarily crown him. And maybe you're not the hero the wizarding world deserves, but you're the one it needs right now, and all his life Albus Dumbledore desperately wanted to be the hero but destiny made him the anti-villain. Anyway that was some cool fanfiction I just wrote. In the books he's an old dude who's never wrong and he likes socks.