#cancel dumbledore

[maraudersoncrack1981]

I can just imagine lily leading an army of everyone who died because of Dumbledores stupidity just to beat the sh!t out of him when he died and the moment Dumbledore is begging for forgiveness Regulus just walks up and says womp womp

[maraudersoncrack1981]

SOBBING??? HELLO??? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS???

"HE WAS A CHILD. HE WAS ONLY 17. YOU COULD HAVE SAVED HIM." in the afterlife, sirius black screamed at dumbledore, 1998, after harry sacrificed himself

"HE WAS A CHILD. HE WAS ONLY 17. YOU COULD HAVE SAVED HIM." sirius black, age 19, screamed at dumbledore, 1979, after learning of his brother's death

[lovebeatriceplz]

Severus Snape >> The Marauders. FIGHT ME

[apicelladonna]

"I wasn't 'trauma dumping' I was just telling you my lore."

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore subtext exhibit 7

exhibit 1 | exhibit 2 | exhibit 3 | exhibit 4 | exhibit 5 | exhibit 6

[nerd-elf]

I need my favorite crew back

[padfootswhiskers]

philosopher's stone is charming and all but genuinely why would dumbledore send hagrid to rescue baby harry potter from the last known place voldemort himself is known to have been? and why does no one have a reaction to the sirius namedrop? did jkr decide on the whole secret keeper plot line later or...? because canonically dumbledore, at least, must've realised that this meant someone sold james and lily out, right? and yet he says nothing when hagrid tells him he borrowed a bike off of sirius. how do you guys make sense of this

[solarisburns]

Summer camp councilor (part 3 the terrible three/assorted others)

Regulus: he splits his time between the magical lessons and the office, he does not want to be there (sirius was only aloud to go if reg went, sirius begged), kids adore him because he so obviously doesn't want to be there, a surprisingly good teacher

Barty: he terrorizes the children, it's funny, he helps run campfires and drama, hes not aloud around pointy things, attracts all the delinquents

Evan: kinda just around? Hes the ultimate floater and seems to have a six sense for when people need an extra set of hands, as he doesn't work with a specific group you can just hear excited cheers around camp whenever he just randomly shows up

Dumbledore: his name is on the building, he shows up once maybe twice the entire summer

Other Hogwarts teachers: they show up one a week to teach a mini lesson about their subject, bot many of them know what to do with kids that young, the first week is interesting...

Camp lasts pretty much all summer with a new batch of campers every week or so. All various friend groups go in hating each other but come out bonded by the horrors of small children. Sirius and Regulus help a pair of brothers fox their relationship and heal a bit through them

[rewritingcanon]

headcanon that Albus is big into tradition and stuff

hmm i’ve actually never thought about this before. i feel like (with my characterisation of him, at least) he sort of sways with it. like he’s flexible for the most part but there are some things he considers sacred that he legitimately can’t break, like cooking for his dad and mum on fridays or going out to trivia with rose every fortnight or something like that.

[wisteria-lodge]

Gender and Harry Potter is such a hydra that just keeps revealing more heads the more you try and chop through it. Case in point: Today I just realized Harry Potter might've been originally intended as a book for boys, which if it was *wow*, way to miss the mark Joanne. Do you think it was actually intended for a male audience? To me it kinda makes sense if it was because of the way most women and girls are portrayed in it.

Bloomsbury Publishing definitely requested that JK Rowling publish with her (gender neutral) initials instead of 'Joanne Rowling' because they were concerned boys would not buy a book with a woman's name on the cover.

My guess is that her British publishers slotted it more firmly under 'boy' than her American publishers did. Harry Potter is 100% a school story, a super established British children's book genre. Historically, there are boy school stories (set in all-male posh public schools) and girl school stories (set in all-female posh public schools.) Hogwarts is of course co-ed, but that fact that it comes out of a literary tradition in which all the characters are the same gender... might help explain why in-universe gender politics seem remarkably absent from the wizarding world.

It actually kind of bugs me, when a canon-compliant fic makes a big deal about male-only inheritance or something, because that's just not something we see. There's one line about "Black family tradition" saying that the house goes to the next oldest guy, but since Dumbledore is worried that *Bellatrix* is about to inherit, it clearly isn't that important.

JKR has made a fantasy society where gender doesn't really matter - Augusta Longbottom and Walburga Black are clearly the powerful matriarchs of their respective families, Maxime and McGonagall are headmistresses, no problem. There isn't the boys quidditch team vs girl's quidditch team, the locker rooms and the prefects bathroom seem to be co-ed, "robes" are gender neutral, there isn't a sense that a specific discipline or type of magic is gendered (we see both male and female Transfiguration, Care of Magical creatures, and Defense Against the Dark arts professors...) There is kind of a sense that the boys are supposed to ask the girls to the yule ball... but multiple girls still ask out Harry. Gender comes up a lot in these books yes, but not so much in the actual worldbuilding. We have gendered bathrooms and dorms, and the rule that the girls can go into the boy's dormitory, but not vice-versa. Ron considers lace a girly fabric. Of the top of my head, that's all of the "gendered" rules I can think of.

But, since the main character is a boy, it makes sense that her British publishers would slot it more into the category of "school story (boy)" and market accordingly. I think it's extremely likely that she was asked to lean more heavily into quidditch, an aspect of the world building that JKR is clearly not interested in. She's said multiple times that she dislikes writing quidditch games - which is why she throws in comedy with the commentary, or makes some magical thing go down, or finds ways to cancel quidditch entirely. The mechanics and tension of the game *itself* are not interesting to her. I think it's also possible this is a reason for Hermione's relatively late intro into the friend group during Book 1? Harry can be friends with a girl, but first we need to establish that Ron is his *best* friend.

But then the books hit America, and the whole "school story" thing didn't read as "boy" as much as it just read "British." There was a sense in American advertising, especially in the 90s, that girl's products were for girls, but boy's products were for everyone. Scholastic Publishing seemed less interested in gendering the book, and more interested in making sure it didn't come off as too high-brow to American children - so we get the name change from "Philosopher's Stone" to "Sorcerer's Stone," things like that.

But then right before the publication of Book 4 the series exploded, and JKR could have just self-published the thing if her publishers didn't behave. So I think that you can see the fingerprints of that marketing push on Book 1, which grandfathered in a number of worldbuilding choices that JKR maybe wouldn't have made later. But pretty quickly it just became JKR doing her thing.

[maraudersoncrack1981]

Okay so I posted about me killing ai Dumbledore a while ago but they've added ai voice to it so now killing ai Dumbledore has never been more fun and I feel powerful.

[poitionsprince]

See, Severus had his trial as a Death Eater.

And I'm pretty sure Dumbledore would've been the one to tell Severus to turn himself in.

But thinking of the Ministry finding out about Sev and just barging into Hogwarts to catch him middle of thr night is such a hilarious scenario to imagine, especially if Severus is not where he's supposed to be.

So you just see a bunch of Aurors playing fkn hide and seek with a dungeon bat in a castle in the middle of the night.

And even going on the side of him turning himself in - he's still got a trial.

Which would probably get on the news in one way or the other.

You just have the students waking up to canceled potions lessons and the face of their potions professor plastered on the Daily Prophet 😭

[lilithofpenandbook]

Imagine the reason Severus Snape agreed to join the Death Eaters wasn't any of the reasons everyone else had of hating muggleborns and muggles and agreeing with Voldemort's ideaology

And it wasn't because he wanted to lash out and hurt people because he was hurting like the other bitter kids

And it wasn't because he was forced into it like other weaker kids

Imagine it wasn't for any of those reasons.

Instead, it was for knowledge.

Severus Snape, the boy who invented curses, hexes, and spells. Severus Snape, who knew more of those in his first year than any of the seventh years. Severus Snape, who rewrote text books.

He joined the Death Eaters because he was tempted by knowledge. Knowledge of dark, forbidden magic. Knowledge of terrible, frightening power. Knowledge of things he had never had the chance to learn.

Imagine it was Lucius who approached him, knowing that Severus was a genius who wasn't satisfied with what Hogwarts taught and wanted more, wanted the freedom to explore and learn and experiment in ways that shocked people. Or perhaps it was his housemates, who decided that, poor he may be and impure his blood is, Severus was a formidable weapon to whichever side he ended up on, and they decided to convince him to join them before Dumbledore asked Severus to join him. And they promised Severus he would be free to experiment and learn as he pleased without the limits Hogwarts had enforced.

And he agreed, and became Voldemort's most precious student. He was but a boy, the youngest of the Death Eaters, yet his talent was equal to Bellatrix Lestrange herself. The two were of the most talented that Voldemort taught and he couldn't help but notice the small boy who was equal to an adult, who could grow to become the most powerful wizard to ever live. Unfortunately for him, the boy's heart was too gentle, too tender to be put on the field just yet, and his tongue was too smooth and his mind too sharp for he easily slipped away in times of action. He was a scholar, a poet, an artist. Not a soldier.

No matter. Voldemort could wait. Eventually the boy would become a man, a man with a brilliant mind but no heart, if he was encouraged to seek knowledge even at the expense of others. It was Voldemort's own fault to assume a great mind would cancel a great heart.

And so Severus Snape sold his freedom, his goodness, for the pursuit of knowledge.

Only to sacrifice it all when the knowledge he shared was the thing that put the one he loved in danger.

[apicelladonna]

Post!duel 1899 Godric's Hollow: Gellert, packing a bag: Bathilda: Bathilda: What happened? Gellert: Nobody died. Bathilda, ??? : WHAT KIND OF ANSWER IS THAT???

[medievalpeasant]

yk i do think it's ironic that all that discourse was stirred up over misfits and magic being a harry potter season, because if we're being real so was fantasy high.

like arthur aguefort is one hundred percent a send up of dumbledore, down to the phoenix. i mean, what did you think the chronomancy joke was referencing? harry and his mommy. duh. they go to magic school, and the faculty are untrustworthy, and the guy who's an asshole (the snape) plot twist actually IS evil hahah, etc etc. they just smashed american cultural reference points into the hp setting (kind of like m&m..?)

and this is not some satirical endeavor by brennan, watch early interviews: he's an hp fan. i'm not saying this to cancel him, i like fh, but i like m&m too. the reason people freaked out was not entirely because of hp controversy, it was also significantly because aabria iyengar is a black woman. let's be real, okay?

[fugamalefica]

Barty Crouch Jr. had constant access to Harry at Hogwarts. He could have transported Harry to Voldemort at any time. Instead, Voldemort specifically orchestrated an elaborate plan centered around the Triwizard Tournament because if Harry died or disappeared during a notoriously dangerous magical tournament, it wouldn't raise immediate suspicion of foul play. The tournament was known for fatalities as Bagman mentions. The death toll got so high they had to cancel it. Harry's death could have been written off as a tragic tournament accident.

It's clear that Voldemort didn't want the Ministry or wider wizarding world to know he was back until he had rebuilt his power base. A mysterious disappearance or death during a dangerous tournament would be far less suspicious than Harry vanishing from the Hogwarts corridors.

We see this approach continue in OotP. He operates entirely in secret, letting the Ministry discredit themselves by denying his return, and Bellatrix also mentions this during the Department of Mysteries battle:

“Get it himself?” shrieked Bellatrix on a cackle of mad laughter.“The Dark Lord, walk into the Ministry of Magic, when they are so sweetly ignoring his return? The Dark Lord, reveal himself to the Aurors, when at the moment they are wasting their time on my dear cousin?

This raises the question of why Voldemort, who had maintained his secrecy for a year, came to the Ministry at all. More than that, why not leave after he'd duelled Dumbledore? He had already lost the prophecy and the opportunity to kill Harry, so why stay to rescue Bellatrix? Instead, he took the time to break the statue pinning her down and grabbed her before disapparating, knowing Ministry officials were moments away from arriving.

He was seen rescuing her.

He could easily have freed her with the rest of his followers especially since the Dementors were under his control then. He didn't even assign her anything before rescuing the rest of the Death Eaters in DH, and he waited a year to rescue even them despite controlling the Dementors, so clearly he didn't need them during HBP. Among them were Rodolphus, Rabastan, and Antonin Dolohov, who were also known for their loyalty and were very powerful.

For a man who had orchestrated an entire year-long tournament scheme just to keep his return hidden, who had repeatedly emphasised the importance of secrecy to his followers, who had carefully operated in shadows to rebuild his power base...he threw it all away in an instant to save one follower from temporary imprisonment.

Could it be because she was more than just a follower?