harry potter series + writing
harry potter
Remus Lupin: Sirius you did what.
Inspired by this post and others by lotstradamus
#i want the 50k story of facepalming remus and panicked sirius with kidnapped baby harry on the run from dumbledore (via meh-guh)
Ok but hasn’t it been shown that a single stupefy wouldn’t be enough to have an effect on hagrid due to his giant blood?
clearly this means that hagrid pretended that the stupefy knocked him out, gently laid down on the ground so the baby wasn’t jostled, and pretended to snore while sirius ran the fuck away
possibly interrupting himself mid-snore to offer advice
*Hagrid sits up*
“SUPPORT ‘IS LI’IL HEAD, YE GREAT IDIOT!”
*lies down*
*Sirius climbs on motorbike*
*Hagrid sits up again*
“DON’ FERGET TO BURP ‘IM AFTER A FEEDIN!”
*Motorbike zooms off*
*Hagrid sits up, cups hands and yells*
“AN’ MAKE SURE ‘E SLEEPS ON ‘IS BACK!”
*lies down again for another five minutes for good measure*
I have this theory that Neville is supposed to represent everything that Peter could have been. You know, both of them were the weak link in the friend group, the guy easily influenced. But instead, Rowling made Neville weak to prove the two paths an individual could take. How each of our weaknesses manifest in different ways. Peter’s weakness made him a villain, ultimately worse than Voldemort because he betrayed his friends, while Neville’s weakness made him work harder and in the end made him Harry’s strongest ally.
Harry = James, Ron = Sirius, Hermione = Remus, Neville = Peter, Ginny = Lily, Luna = Snape.
You will notice that none of the six from the old generation survived. The kids each have traits from the old generation but they’re here to fix the past, and thus must survive the series to metaphorically right the past. Some may raise their eyebrows at Luna as Snape, but just as Harry represents James (the popular kid who was good at quidditch, but didn’t become arrogant like his father) or like Peter and Neville (two people who could have been cowards, but Neville rises to life’s challenges) Luna mirrors Snape in being mocked, a pariah, Looney Lovegood and Snivellus. Instead of being resentful, she rose above it, and loved herself regardless.
If you went with Harry to the Ministry of Magic in book 5, you mattered beyond just backing him up against Voldemort. This core six represented the loss and failure of the Marauders generation, and the hopes of a post-Voldemort future.
Holy shit
No one can tell me that Harry and Neville didn’t clean out Grimmauld Place and make it into a home for kids who had no place to stay over the holiday or had abusive households they needed to escape (and the whole thing was named after Sirius AND Regulus). And Mrs Weasley would make sweaters for everyone and eventually it also became a place for squibs who had been kicked out of home and they came here and got the best possible magical education from a retired McGonagall…
.
#never understood krum hate #he’s like what everyone wanted draco to be #surrounded by dark magic and bad influences #treated like royalty #even without his famed seeker status he was pureblood elite #and yet he never treated anyone as lesser #he liked muggle born hermione for her mind AND physical beauty #thought harry was a great quidditch player #and never once compared harry to his own skills because he’s humble #was genuinely flattered that ron wanted his autograph #liked cedric and made a poin to tell harry so #also told harry he would be an ally in the fight against voldemort #the only time he did dark magic was under the imperius curse #to which he can’t be held responsible #three years later he talked to an in-disguise harry at bill and fleur’s wedding #just a regular person he didn’t know was harry #and investe himself in that conversation #he made such an effort to interact at hogwarts and i feel like most the fandom dislikes him for no reason #because he was the type of character who wanted to rise above the expectations others held of him #he knew durmstrang’s bad rep and actively wished to do better #i don’t know y’all i just think we should all appreciate viktor krum more
(kneelb4todd)^this
what i really want is new-gen hogwarts students
what i really want is angry SJ punks who make ‘recreational potions’ and print zines about non-human rights and wear patches that say “voldemort was a symptom of an uncured disease” and bring tazers to wandfights
#hp #this is everything i have ever wanted #public disobediance and flagrant mixing of muggle and wizarding technology #angry slogans and screaming demonstrations and reclaiming slurs #’my brother did not die for your comfort!’ screams dennis creevey#activists giving wands to willing house elves #petitioning for first muggleborn then nonhuman representation in government #in education #in the economy #marches for squib rights #demands that the system be torn down because it’s broken beyond repair #letters and yelling and detention and arrest and riots and unforgivables #and a little muggleborn girl who gets turned into a posterchild after her family is killed in a hate crime #and a centaur who breaks with centuries of tradition to demand his place in government #the centaur office gets a use once more #goblins who speak out about the racist history and their cultural erasure #dolores umbridge’s face on posters with the words ‘never forget’ and ‘this is what the establishment looks like’ in bold letters #i just want the revolution to happen #and it will be messy and ugly and terrible and beautiful and overdue and too soon and terrifying and necessary
#they would pull so much from muggle history, #because muggle history is history of revolutions, #especially in the last few hundred years, #i’m seeing cockades with all the house colors, #i’m seeing occupyhogwarts hashtags, #la marsellaise rewritten to suit them, #civil disobedience and rioting and an outright refusal to obey, #this is a broken world, #and they will claim it for their own so they can burn it down and build a new one, #harry potter, #i have feelings, #if i knew more about how the wizarding world operates i’d write the shit out of this,
how can rowling tweet these two things one after the other with complete seriousness and no self awareness lmfao
Because she’s reiterated over and over again in interviews that Snape is no hero, no role model and his only redeeming quality is his bravery, whilst Draco still generally gets a free pass from fandom despite being an odious racist?
oh ok right, no hero and no role model mmmmmh. ok ok kinda weird then how she had harry name his god damn son after some asshole then if thats what she really thought. and she wrote draco towards the end as if he was becoming a better person, he didnt rat out harry when asked by death eaters who were obviously a threat to his life, he didn’t raise his children with the same terrible beliefs as his parents.
why are we supposed to acknowledge snapes redemption arc, a grown ass man who joined a terrorist organization of his own free will and abused children AFTER he “”turned good”“ and not acknowledge dracos, a freaking CHILD who grew up in a terrible environment but obviously realized how terrible it was towards the end. dracos not a good person and im not excusing anything he did but people relating to someone who grew up in an abusive brainwashing environment and learned to grow out of it being demonized and then at the same time constantly praising an abuser for being ~brave~ doesnt make any god damn sense to me
I don’t want to defend either Snape or Draco – I hate both – but I do want to defend JKR, who’s still on record as saying “I don’t
really see him as a hero. He’s spiteful, he’s a bully, all these things
are still true of Snape at the end of this book’ and “he’s a deeply horrible person” and “You shouldn’t think [Snape is] too nice.” Plus from an slightly older interview, a similar line to the Draco tweet: “I hesitate to say that I love him. [Audience member: I do]. You do? This is a very worrying thing.”Her valuing ‘bravery’ above apparently all else weirds me out, as does the Albus Severus thing*, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as clear-cut as (the paraphrased fandom view) ‘she hates Draco but romanticises Snape (and by default his abusive behaviour)’. She is an abuse survivor herself, after all.
*I like to think it’s JKR’s (rather too late) attempt to ‘redeem’ Slytherin house in the text, but I don’t know.
*Albus Severus
I think it’s important for a reader to able to differentiate between Harry as a character and JKR? Harry is an abuse survivor who tends to love and forgive generously, when he does, and for Harry it makes absolute sense to have done this as Snape and Dumbledore were two people he actually struggled massively to forgive and ultimately could because of love and empathy. At the end of the day, they were the people he learned not to be black/white about, and in valuing that lesson he did go kind of classic Harry Potter b/w overboard in burdening his poor don with that ridiculous mouthful of a name.
Bravery for JKR and for Harry is also deeply tied to and inseparable from love. The bravery prized in Harry Potter is always varied. You have Harry performing amazing feats of bravery against Voldemort, but also being brave enough to have empathy for and forgive people who have wronged him, Neville’s often unsuccessful and clumsy bravery (no less valuable and no less valued by JKR and the narrative), parental love leading to acts of bravery, social bravery, emotional bravery etc. I think for JKR writing the books when she did, bravery was absolutely something she wanted to stress the importance of – the importance of being brave enough to love and to forgive and to make mistakes and be critical and to try and be a good person in an increasingly dark world.
That’s at least my interpretation.
Yeah, I like that.
Forgiveness isn’t for everyone, but it clearly was for Harry.
Sometimes I think that maybe Harry naming his children after two of the most flawed and morally dubious characters in the whole series was meant as an indicator of Harry’s own flaws — outrageous loyalty and black and white morality.
Harry has the most fucked up childhood yo. And due to that childhood, the expectations placed upon him by pretty much everyone, and Dumbledore’s interference, Harry develops his “hero complex.” Harry learns to identify morality in terms of heroics — a true Gryffindor indeed. Harry wants so much to believe that what he did was right, that the sacrifices others made for him were valid, that he cocoons himself in a fantasy world where the smallest of good deeds can redeem you.
Maybe JK Rowling didn’t fuck up as bad as we like to think.
Maybe Harry naming his kid after two corrupted puppet masters was absolutely and utterly in character.
Maybe Harry is so desperate to not hate himself for anything less than true-red-and-gold brave he ever did that he’s convinced himself heroism is the ultimate good. And by extension he is the ultimate good. And Dumbledore and Snape were the ultimate good. Because the died in grand flourishes and left behind mysteries. Just like his parents did.
Harry isn’t ungrateful to Hagrid or Remus or Tonks or Molly or Arthur or Fred. They simply don’t fit the showy model Harry was conditioned to accept in terms of greatness.
Because there is a little truth to Harry’s insolence. To his belief that he is an exception to the rule. And it’s not his fault. It never was. He was groomed and led down a path of exceptionalism. So he rewards the exceptional. the exceptions. Snape. And Dumbledore. And James. And Lily. And Luna. And Sirius. The outlandish and the bold and sentimentally heroic.
What Harry forgets is that the ordinary can be just as exceptional. Just as heroic. Just as good.
yes! we always thought this too. the name jokes are funny and all, but it made total sense in context of Harry’s character to us.
I agree with this. (And I’d even add that, with Snape especially, he is blinded by his love for his parents that anyone connected to Lily is immediately in his good books.) But I ALSO think that Albus Severus (obligatory lol) is the name that matters so much because it represents the end of Harry’s story.
Harry is the victim of a lot of mistreatment and hatred from the very first chapter to the end, and even at Hogwarts, the hero-worshipping comes at a price. His foils–Voldemort and Snape–spend their time at Hogwarts loved by all or hated by all, while Harry gets both the love and the hate. Voldemort manipulates, he’s selfish. Snape bullies, he’s spiteful. Harry is defined by how much he diverges from these two paths, though he could easily have become either of his enemies. Unlike Voldemort, he’s selfless, and unlike Snape, he forgives.
Athough he and Harry have very little in common, Dumbledore is another foil. They are both the Heroes. But Dumbledore’s heroism is cold and calculating, he sacrifices others–even in death, he sacrifices Snape’s “soul.” If Dumbledore is “God” then Harry is the martyr.
What does this mean for Harry’s character development, though? DH is punctuated with turning points, moments of forgiveness. PS/SS begins with Harry being abused by the Dursleys, and DH begins with Harry forgiving Dudley. He says goodbye to his cupboard, he’s not angry when he gets the Dursleys to safety, he doesn’t look back. He lets go. This is how Harry moves on.
Harry obsesses over Dumbledore’s dirty secrets in DH, but in choosing to go after the Horcruxes instead of the Hallows, he moves past his feelings of betrayal.
Before Voldemort’s death, he sees him for what he is and doesn’t feel hatred, but pity. He shows him compassion.
I think that, while there is definitely some hero-worshiping happening, Harry does realize that Snape and Dumbledore were wrong. But he’s spent so much of his youth angry and mistrustful. Honoring these two, his bully and his puppeteer, represents not only Harry’s forgiveness, but that he’s made peace with his suffering. He’s made peace with his doubts about his father and Sirius being bullies, too. (Lily Luna is different–while James Sirius is named after Harry’s father figures, and Albus Severus after his heroes, Lily is named after the two characters in the books who represent Harry’s ideal of selfless love.)
Thematically, naming his son after these two characters who were so stuck living in the past, implies a future where Harry’s learned from their mistakes. Unlike Dumbledore or Snape, Harry really lives.
But at the same time, you don’t see Ron or Hermione worshiping Snape or Dumbledore’s –this is all Harry, and this is how he’s always been. He doesn’t HAVE to forgive or admire them–but of course he does because he’s Harry. The names are SO not saying “THESE are the most important characters to Harry Potter and also the best people in the book fuck you Remus.” The names reveal all those things OP said about Harry’s flawed views of heroism, and more they represent a scar that’s fading, the resolution to a life of pain for the hero whose only superpower was living and forgiving.