#hcu spoiler

[savingsallow]

What's in my MC's bag? 🎒

— Let's go raid, my MC, Valentine Black's bag.

thank you @dom1re for the tag! ❤️‍🔥

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Valentine Black 🌙

School Bag: Medium-sized leather backpack with silver accents

This bag was gifted to her by her late mother for her to utilize once she studies at Hogwarts.

If one looks closely, her initials (V.E.B) are engraved on the bag alongside her middle name Esther. This is because her mother used to call her Esther instead of Val. Also, never address her by her middle name since it will make her melancholic and nostalgic as she associates that with the memory of her mother.

Before I forget, this bag has an extension charm because this kid carries a LOT of things.

What's in it?

Journal - This was a gift from her best friend from the Muggle boarding school she attended before Hogwarts. Val would write down her daily observations and reflections here. She cherishes this journal so much that sometimes she pretends it is her way of communicating with her late best friend. Additionally, she made this journal enchanted later on so that no one would read her entries. Instead, the viewer will just see Val's random doodles and the words are invisible.

Notes - This kid loves to take down notes, especially from her favorite subjects like Potions, Arithmancy, and Astronomy. Although, I wouldn't say that her notes are always organized. Most of the time, it's a pile of mess, but she somehow manages to navigate her notes easily.

Fountain Pen and Inkwells - Despite having an unholy amount of stock of these, Val usually carries a pair and calls it a day.

Leather notebooks - Val owns two of these. One for her potion ideas, and another for her astronomical observations (especially the phases of the Moon).

Perfume - She always brings her favorite floral and woody perfume with her. Val is lowkey obsessed with perfumes.

Thunderbrew Potions - She says it's better to be prepared XD There's always at least 5 of these inside her bag.

Books - Val loves to borrow books from the library. It doesn't matter if it's counted on her library card or not (hi, restricted section 😁) but if it piques her interest, you bet she will borrow it.

Letters - She won't admit it, but she writes a lot of letters, and they're mostly unsent, mind you. The unsent letters are usually love letters that she decided not to send at the last minute since her mind dismissed them as something irrational.

[Bonus: from an AU (to be released soon 👀)]

Music Box - Val carries a music box that was given to her by a childhood friend, Callan Gaunt ( @girl-named-matty ), whom she had forgotten the name and face through time. Little did she know that they'd meet again in Hogwarts.

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— thank you for reading all of this! 🫂❤️‍🔥

[menelaiad]

UMMMM so what can you tell us about the Agamemnon Goes To Ithaka timeline? (And if you want to avoid spoilers, what gave you the idea?)

uhhh if it wasn't painfully obvious already, i am obsessed with agamemnon and odysseus' dynamic and the very little we get of it in homeric works and beyond implies a ...familiarity. a friendship, i guess. but we get no 'backstory' for them. and i just wanted to explore that side of it a bit more. how would they interact and behave when meeting during ....... those very turbulent years of agamemnon's life.

also, at a base level, they operate a very similar role - princes. sons to kings. heirs to kingdoms. and odysseus' journey on that path is pretty smooth sailing. agamemnon's isn't. and i think that would effect agamemnon's behaviour and such. but he still has that loyalty to odysseus. agamemnon seems very scared and desperate to please odysseus in a lot of the hcu works. and that's so interesting to think maybe why???

also. not only do them as individuals and them as a pair fascinate me, but the relationships with their families. for two characters who operate a similiar role in the politics of their homes.... their relationships to their families (fathers especially) is so so so different. and going to ithaka to see odysseus and laertes will show agamemnon that difference. and i think his reaction to that and his feelings towards that would really interesting. they also both have mothers who are very different. they also both have siblings, whom they both love.

in the fic, menelaus is still sent to sparta. they're kinda split to get rid of that 'strength in numbers' thing. ithaka is smaller than sparta so if aga is sent there he'll be less trouble etc. etc. so - the trojan war still happens. helen and menelaus meet. and that is all the same. but. agamemnon never meets clytemnestra. there is no iphigenia. there is no affair. there is no revenge. how does that change aga? how does that change everything? because that fear of odysseus and that need to get to troy thats present in IIA will still be there. but in a different way.

plus i want them to kiss and go on ithakan adventures and to give myself, if nobody else, that stupid slowburn, forced proximity, strangers to slight enemies to friends to lovers. the bottom line is that: agaody slaps and i cant stop.

[theuniversitychallengereview]

UC 50.8 - Darwin, Cam vs St Andrews

Right, I’m going to warn you straight from the off - this one is going to be experimental. And I don’t mean experimental in the way literary types describe Will Self novels, because it is only ever used when they think the experiment in question has been a success, at least to some extent. I’m using it in the purely scientific sense, whereby a hypothesis is proposed and then proved or disproved using an agreed upon methodology. I am under no illusions that this is going to work, or that it will even achieve one tenth of what it sets out to, although of course if it does (which I very much doubt it will) pull this off even a little bit then this bit will look like nothing but bluster and I’ll come across as exactly the kind of pretentious I was going for.

Anyway, last things first, if you haven’t seen the new Christopher Nolan film Tenet then there will be... I was going to say spoilers, but that would imply that I understood the plot well enough to be able to spoil it for you. But still, the hypothesis of this post will be to review this episode of University Challenge in the style of Tenet, so if you don’t want to spot cack-handed references to various plot points then you may want to stop reading here.

Okay, here is the point where I admit that I have no idea how one would go about writing a review of a quiz show in the style of a sci-fi spy thriller, and the reason that this is being released on a Saturday is that I spent the whole week trying to come up with a sufficiently clever way of doing it. 

.net rof retrats tsrif ruoy s’ereh ;ti htiw no teg tsuj s’tel os ,won yb selur eht wonk lla ew tuB

Is it simply good enough to run some of the sentences through a backwards text generator and call it a day, or do I have to do other things as well? (oot tnorf ot kcab sa tnuoc nwod edispu seoD and could I have used the upside down Spanish question marks there¿). I guess what I should really be doing is running a temporal pincer movement, but what would that involve exactly; should I be

swerdnA tS 552 - 09 egdirbmaC ,niwraD :erocS laniF

simultaneously reviewing the beginning and end of the episode with one version of me travelling forwards and the other backwards? I’ll just carry on, shall I? 

St Andrews have made loads of appearances on the show, but haven’t made the quarter finals since 2010. They give a very strong performance against a timid Darwin side to give them a shot at breaking that duck (I only know this because I was told by the inverted version of me travelling backwards from the end of the episode. Keep up). 

They have a player who is literally called Sherlock, though it is their surname rather than their first name, which checks out given the theme of this post (unfortunately none of the contestants have palindromic names, which would have been even better), and they are the star of the show, with seven starters, including four of the first five. Sherlock has a moustache that is fit for twirling and the most remarkable pair of glasses I’ve ever seen, which could, for all I know, be from the future themselves. Hang on, I���m just going to go back for another pass through the first few questions...

Yes, I was right. You don’t notice it because you don’t think it would be possible, in the smae way taht you can siltl raed wrods if the ietanrnl ltetres are all jbemlud up, but Sherlock actually gives their answers before Paxman asks the questions. The reason Paxman looks confused by it is because, like when John David Washington’s protagonist uses an inverted bullet for the first time and is perplexed by the sensation of catching rather than shooting it, he is not asking the question, he is answering it. This explains how Sherlock was able to put on such a dominant performance, and why they have such bizarre (and excellent) spectacles. Probably something to do with their eyes not being able to process inverted light. 

So, we already know the score, because what’s happened, happened, but I will say that Darwin 

)esnes sekam lla ti taht emussa ot evah tsuj ll’uoy dna )raf siht ti edam ev’uoy fi esigolopa ylno nac I .ti gnitirw emit a fo elahw etulosba na gnivah m’I ))yrros ,noitpecnI eb ot tnaem t’nsaw sihT .peed stekcarb ruof eerht m’I won dna( t’nsi ti hcihw( gnitirw fo eceip tnerehoc dna gnillepmoc a si siht ton ro rehtehw fo sseldrager tub ,daer ot emit eht ekat yllautca lliw enoyna erus ton m’I taht txet sdrawkcab fo eceip a ni elbmar-dim m’I elihw edisa elttil a( ,dnatsrednu ot gniyrt ti htrow ton sti ,teneT ekiL .tsop siht tuohguorht detartsnomed neeb ydaerla evah taht daerht lacigol siht htiw seicnetsisnocni dairym eht fo yna nialpxe ot rO .rehtruf ti nialpxe ot em ksa t’noD .trats eht ta drawrof gniog sa emas eht sti dne eht ta sdrawkcab gniog sti fi esuaceb ,detrevni eb ot sah ti ,dne eht ta er’ew esuaceb tuB .trats eht ta tup dluow I taht elttat-elttit yrotisopxe fo dnik eht si siht esuaceb si sdrawkcab ni si tib siht nosaer eht dnA .enildaeh a fo laog nepo na hcus teg uoy netfo ton stI .puhctam nosaJ sv ydderF suolevram eht ni llaH dnumdE tS dna oeL ydderF yb detaefed eb ot ylno ,wohs eht no saw eh erofeb lwobziuq ta maet drofxO na gniyortsed was I ohw ,sonifloG nosaJ citsatnaf eht fo pihsdrawets eht rednu oga sraey owt slanif-imes eht edam ohw( 

do get some questions right, quite a few actually, its just that they were unfortunate to be up against a time-travelling super-quizzer called Sherlock. And this being the fifth first round match to post a combined score of 345 or more we’ve already exceeded the equivalent total from last year, indicating either a jump in quality or a dip in difficulty, but I’ve noticed no evidence of the latter. 

So, we’re coming to the end/start of this review, and I would like to thank you if you’ve made it this far, given the batshit nonsensicality of it all (I don’t think nonsensicality is a word, but it might just be the only way of describing this drivel). You don’t need to tell me whether it all makes sense, because I already know, and you don’t need to ask me how I know, because you already know... 

ytiretsoP

[townesorsomething]

Hatchetfield Connected Universe pt. 1

So, this post (and all the posts connected to it) contains Black Friday spoilers so uhhh don’t read if you don’t wanna know anything going in.

idk how to do the “read more” thing so put up with my longass post pls.

Ok! All named characters in the Hatchetfield universe, plus a few that were unnamed but had nicknames (blue for TGWDLM, green for BF, red for both)

Children:

Tim Houston

Hannah Foster

River Monroe

Teenagers:

Lex Foster

Ethan Green

‘Hot Chocolate Boy’

‘Cinema Kid’

Alice (?)

Deb (?)

Grace Chasity [mentioned by name?]

‘Hatchetfield Bee’

‘Smoke Club Girl’

Danny (?)

Adults:

Emma Perkins

Tom Houston

Paul Matthews

Bill (?)

Ted (?)

Melissa (?)

Professor Henry Hidgens [mentioned]

Gerald Monroe

Charlotte (?)

Linda Monroe

Sherman Young

General John Macnamara

Xander Lee

(?) Davidson

Wilbur “Uncle Wiley” Cross

President Howard Goodman

Officer Sam (?)

Officer Doug (?)

Officer (?)

Becky Barnes

Gary Goldstein

Frank Pricely

‘A Man In A Hurry’

Zoey (?)

Nora (?)

Morris

Jane Houston/Perkins [deceased]

If I missed anyone, tell me pls!!

this is pt 1 of a series of spoiler posts sorry for being annoying but im trying to piece together the HCU