In CoS when they try to sneak into Myrtle’s bathroom to ask her about her death, McGonagall catches them and Harry makes up the excuse that they wanted to see Hermione in the hospital wing and Minnie doesn’t give them detention and then comes this and since we all know Harry’s dumbest excuse, here’s the official suggestion to rate all of Harry’s excuses on a scale from
I vividly remember the scene in like the second movie where the Weasleys were looking at their school supply list and Molly was like “I really don’t know how we’re going to afford it this year” after they had just risked life and limb to rescue Harry and Harry was sitting there eating their food like ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Harry ‘Dickhead’ Potter through a mouth full of Wizardburger Helper “idk…….that’s……wow that sucks i guess lol so i’m thinking about buying this solid gold cauldron what do yall think? a little over the top?”
“oh that’s wild lmao… hey check this out I’m gonna buy all the candy off the cart on the train”
“dude you guys haven’t been able to buy new robes in like 10 years….wow that sucks i guess kek but hey lets go get some butterbeer my treat but fuck you :)”
He was literally 12 years old at this point in time, as well as the fact that he always felt extremely bad about their situation and even tried to pay for things for Ron numerous times, however he knew that Ron was ashamed and prideful over his lack of money.
Not to mention he gave Ginny all of Lockharts Defence Against The Dark Arts books, and gave Fred and George his triwizard winnings in the fourth book.
And if you think, for even a second, that Molly or Arthur Weasley would have ever taken money from him then you don’t know that family at all.
Oh, and when he got all the candy on the train, he was extremely malnourished after being mistreated and abused from living with the dursleys, and made sure that he got enough for himself and Ron, whom he had literally only just met.
a literal child who, only hours prior, was in the process of being starved and abused by his relatives in a room with bars on the windows: *eats food*
narcissa malfoy was probably the most powerful occlumens in hogwarts history and nobody knew
she literally stood up to lord voldemort and lied that harry potter was dead and i don’t know about you but if i were an evil ruler i would probably want to triple-check that my nemesis was, you know, actually deceased
voldemort had actual doubts about snape
narcissa swans on by without a whisper, without a second glance
narcissa malfoy understood from a young age that she was meant to do only a few things: look pretty, say nothing, and marry well.
narcissa malfoy understood those rules, and she layered her mind with them.
look pretty. wear the most expensive robes. grandmother’s pearls. curl your hair every night. think only of clothes and dimples and the way your hair falls when you flutters you eyelashes at a boy.
say nothing. don’t speak when mother and father are screaming at each other. demurely look down as another boy asks you to dance. retreat into the reading room when your family friends, known death eaters and criminals, pay your parents a visit and speak in hushed voices over tea. think of pretty things.
marry well. marry into a family of your parents’ friends. bear children. wear pearls and look demure and think of nothing but pretty, pretty things, like the way your husband’s hair gleams in candlelight.
masters must learn the rules before they can break them. narcissa learned the rules so well that they wrapped around her; sank into her skin and her mind. they protect her from enemies. they conceal the quick, strategic plots ticking her brain into gear every moment of every day. they hide the calculation of each smile, each movement.
narcissa is so good, so perfect, that no one will ever know.
Not only was this one of the most badass moments of the books, but it was genuinely surprising without being some Random Shit Out Of Fucking Nowhere that some authors/scriptwriters think is all there is to being surprising/shocking.
Because it makes perfect sense. Of course Narcissa would turn on Voldemort without a second thought to protect her son. Not only because she’s his mother, but because that’s how Voldemort was defeated the first time around, and Voldemort cannot change or learn. 1980′s Voldemort was defeated because of a mother’s love, Lily’s sacrifice for Harry.
Lily was not considered important to Voldemort, only James and Harry were. Voldemort was even willing to spare her for Snape, if she didn’t put up a fight (which of course she did). To him, Lily was irrelevant, because she was a woman and Muggle-born. Voldemort underestimated her, and it cost him. So naturally he would do the same thing again in the 90′s, focusing on Harry and the prophecy, never considering the thing that defeated him before might do so again. He was wary of Lucius and Draco, but underestimated Narcissa and it lead directly to his defeat. And she KNEW he did, and used it to her advantage.
This short-sightedness is even reflected in his most ardent supporter Bellatrix, who was also killed by a furious mother protecting her child.
A mother’s love started the series, and a mother’s love ended it.
A mother’s love started the series, and a mother’s love ended it.
YES.
Blessed are the mothers, whose love is constantly underestimated.
I will never forgive them for cutting out this scene.
Tumblr app doesn’t show this gif set but I already know what it is. No need to hesitate to reblog.
And he did this just before a road trip, stuck in the car with his parents asking what he was thinking.
The look of utter defiance Dudley gives Vernon as he steps over the fence though
And how he does it really slowly as well as if to say “What you gonna do about it huh?”
The phone rings. It was an absurd wedding gift from his father in-law, and one which much to Harry’s surprise, had actually worked when he’d plugged it into the landline. Arthur had taken to phoning him on it, just for the pure novelty of the thing—though how they’d managed to get a BT engineer out to the Burrow without causing an incident, Harry doesn’t know. He’s not sure he wants to.
“Hello?”
“Uhm,, is this…is this the Potter residence?”
There’s a beat of silence as Harry adjusts the receiver against his ear, not quite sure he’s heard who he thinks he has. “…Dudley?”
“Yea…uhm, Harry?”
“Dudley.” Harry repeats numbly, turning to look at Ginny who is looking at him expectantly, eyebrows raised. “Uh…Christ, Dudley, hi how did…how did you find this number?”
There’s another beat of silence and the crackle of static that might have been a sigh or simply just the line breaking up. “Hi, sorry I know you probably…sorry this was stupid. I uh, I put your name in the computer and this was the only thing that came up.”
“Oh.” Harry breathes, still trying to recover his equilibrium. Ten minutes ago he’d been using his wand to clear away dinner, he’d been getting ready to sit down and read through some reports before putting the kids to bed, and now somehow, he’s talking to his muggle cousin who he hasn’t seen since… “How, how are you?”
“Good, yea” Dudley replies, seeming to rally, “You?”
“Yea, uh, doing well…”
The conversation lasts maybe a half hour, faltering and awkward. But they’re going for a coffee at the end of the week and Harry supposes…that’s…that’s a thing that is happening.
*
“Harry…”
Harry turns and looks up, and looks up some more at the looming figure blocking out the light.
“Dudley,” he says, standing up and hoping the pang of something awful doesn’t show on his face. For a moment he thought he’d been looking at Vernon. “It’s good to see you.”
Dudley gives him a look that says he clearly knows Harry is lying, but is thankful for being humored. “You too, you’re looking good…”
They pass the first few minutes with awkward pleasantries and even more awkward silences. But it’s…nice would be too strong a word, but it’s not bad either. He even manages to get a smile out of him when he calls him Big D, the other man shaking his head with a self depreciating eye roll.
“Dad died,” Dudley says after a while, and Harry feels an icy hot flash go down his spine, curdling in his gut.
“Oh,” he says, not quite sure how he’s supposed to feel about that, “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Dudley snorts into his coffee. “Somehow I doubt it.” and it’s not accusing, but Harry still can’t help but feel like he should defend himself. The words they locked me in a cupboard are on the cusp of his tongue but Dudley gets there before him. “There’s a lot of things…looking back…lot of things…” and it’s not an apology, not really. “Took me a long time to realize certain things weren’t right…too long.”
Harry nods at that, because yes, it had also taken him a long time too to understand the full of extent of what had gone on in 4 Privet Drive. He still doesn’t like tight spaces.
“You realize things though, when you have kids,” Dudley carries on, shaking his head, “Like they’re just kids, how can you do that to a kid? They need you for everything.”
And Harry can relate to that too. Lily is three and Ginny is pregnant again and James already has an alarming alacrity for finding trouble and with or without magic Harry doesn’t have enough hands to deal with it all. But he loves it, and he loves them, and the thought of anyone ever treating his children the way he remembers his first eleven years of life is enough to make the electric lights over their head flicker.
“You’ve got kids?”
“Two,” Harry says, “third one on the way. You?”
“Nice. Just the one, so far.” He hands over his phone, the image of a bright young girl with dark skin and tight ringlet curls staring back at him from the grasp of Dudley’s arms. “Effie.” He smiles ruefully at Harry’s obvious surprise. “Dad wasn’t too happy about that either.”
“She’s gorgeous.” Harry says, handing the phone back and pulling out his own wallet to reveal the moving pictures inside.
Dudley flinches a bit at that, but he guffaws broadly when he spies James. “Cor, he don’t half look like you. No glasses though.”
“No,” Harry says, pushing his own glasses back up his nose. “He’s got his mother’s eyes, thankfully.”
“Actually, Harry, there was something I was hoping we could…talk about.”
And ah, there it is. “What about?”
“It’s…it’s about Effie…”
And when he’s done talking Harry just wants to lean back and laugh and laugh and laugh, because of course Vernon Dudley’s granddaughter is a witch, of course she is. But he doesn’t, because Dudley is doing the one thing he can think of to try and help his child, and Harry can’t fault him for that.
*
They keep in touch after that. Christmas cards, postcards—gifts for the kids on birthdays. The year Effie turns eleven—the same as James—Harry drops a casually long thought out text into the familial void.
“Diagon A this weekend, if you’re up for it?”
The text comes back quickly, a little too quickly for the way Dudders pecks at his phone whenever Harry has seen him typing. “Snds gd, 1st pint on u 😉 – Big D 🍺🍺🍺👌👍”
It’ll be painfully awkward, it always is. But it’s something.
fred and george weasley on the top floor in hogwarts trying to get slinkies all the way down by predicting the pattern the stairs are gonna shift in
they actually figure it out, they calculate the exact pattern, and start distributing it
suddenly, students are barely ever late to classes any more and there are significantly fewer incidents of getting lost around the castle
everything goes wonderfully for a week, all the professors are baffled but pleased
until the end of the week when the true purpose for the pattern’s distribution becomes clear. schoolwide slinky race. a thousand conjured slinkies all let loose at the same time. the rustling of the swarm of springs echoes through the halls of hogwarts. the house elves refer to the dreaded Slinky Sunday for centuries
I want to see a world that’s… well, let’s start like Harry Potter, with the secret magical and separate muggle worlds, with muggleborns and halfbloods and purebloods, and kids who make a surprise discovery one day. Only, I want to see a world where the most powerful magic users, consistently, are the muggleborns.
It’s not a guarantee, it’s not like every muggleborn is stronger than every pureblood, but there’s a definite pattern, and everyone knows it. Because magic is power, but it’s also wonder; magic is the impossible made real and the awesome spread of all that could be. And there is no moment in any life more magical than the moment a muggleborn child discovers magic is real. They will go through their lives forever in the echo of that moment, that knowledge that magic can do absolutely anything and they can do magic.
The purebloods keep up, because they have milennia of history and tradition behind their spells and rituals, and belief is a kind of magic too. Their magic is dependable, reliable, easy to predict, and that’s useful.
But the big magic, the magic that rips the world apart and puts it back together, the magic that warps time and makes legends, that is the realm of the muggleborns.
Because purebloods view magic like clouds; sometimes they’re pretty, sometimes they’re powerful, sometimes they’re just “ugh I hope it doesn’t rain today, I planned a picnic.”
Muggleborns look at magic and they see wonder, potential, power; they see magic.
There is no more powerful believer than a convert.
…So apparently I needed way fewer words than I used, but yes, that exactly.
one of the most important things to me about harry potter is its portrayal of happiness. in the harry potter world, happiness isn’t just a feeling—it’s a weapon. look at how harry and his friends fight: with riddikulus, laughter stymies a creature made of fear; with expecto patronum, the very memory of happiness beats back the grim forces of depression.
the weaponization of positivity stretches beyond that. fred and george weasley’s inventions, meant for laughter, turn into arms against umbridge’s regime. and after their departure from hogwarts, their joke shop becomes not only the single bright spot in diagon alley (literally & figuratively) but a hub of defensive magic. the whole weasleys’ wizard wheezes narrative serves as maybe the clearest example in the series that happiness can act as both shield and sword.
there is something deeply empowering in a depiction of happiness as something so tangible and usable. as a profoundly depressed person, i often feel myself scrounging for happy memories and clutching them close; i find myself grasping for laughter in the dark. the physicalization of expecto patronum is not a quantum leap from reality. the boggart’s laughter as combat fuel, the weasleys’ levity as not just a choice but a difficult and defiant one—it’s all familiar.
the series has its share of darkness, but it revels most in the light. it lets us believe that the act of joy is not small, trivial, or inconsequential. happiness is something not just to be lived—it is to be wielded, on your own behalf and the behalves of the people around you, to battle against the world’s heavier elements. harry potter teaches us this.
just moving along like everyone else 