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saintsenara · 8 hours

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as we gear up for the next round of @ladiesofhpfest, the first week of which begins tomorrow, i'm having a self-indulgent saturday-night promote of the pieces i wrote for the 2023 edition of the fest...

you can find the ao3 collection here - featuring seventy-five amazing [and completed!] female-character-centric stories and artworks - and, if the inspiration strikes you, you can find the schedule for this year's fest here.

chewing gum

remus lupin/nymphadora tonks teen | 2.1k words an auror walks into a bar and misses a werewolf.

the velveteen rabbit

mrs cole & tom riddle general | 3.2k words a boy has scarlet fever and wants his mother. he gets mrs cole instead.

five motets for a time of mourning

minerva mcgonagall & severus snape general | 6.5k words five snapshots from hogwarts castle, in that dreadful year when snape was headmaster.

the scrunchie

minor characters general | 4.5k words nobody would have let hermione granger borrow the scrunchie. but that's fine, because this story isn't about her at all.

the shack at the end of the lane

merope gaunt & lord voldemort general | 4.2k words it was an unconventional choice, on the part of the universe, to make tom riddle's victims meet his mother the moment they arrived in the afterlife.

death (eaters) in paradise

bellatrix lestrange/lord voldemort mature | 7.3k words a spanish anti-muggle group wishes to meet with the dark lord in marbella. so, it makes perfect sense for his favourite lieutenant to go with him. after all, she could do with a holiday.

leather

nymphadora tonks/various explicit | 2.9k words war looms and tonks goes on a journey.

atramentum

bellatrix lestrange/lord voldemort teen | 1.9k words two lovers pass a halloween afternoon.

bookbinding

tom riddle/myrtle warren teen | 35.5k words which will win: sixteen years of planning for brutal world domination, or one (1) teenage girl?

everlasting ink

delphini riddle & ginny weasley teen | 6.2k words ginny weasley has always been a magnet for dark-haired orphans. what's one more?

inhuman resources

dolores umbridge teen | 4.2k words speaking from the fire in the gryffindor common room, sirius black will assure his godson that dolores umbridge is definitely not a death eater. how does he know? well, he's seen the paper trail...

catmint

minerva mcgonagall & pomona sprout teen | 1.6k words the day after the war ends, grief is green.

the pleiades

bellatrix lestrange/lord voldemort teen | 2.6k words bellatrix learns to fly.

sparkling cyanide

hokey & hepzibah smith general | 1.4k words tom riddle had nothing to do with the death of hepzibah smith. hokey had just had enough of being a slave.

bó na leath adhairce

merope gaunt teen | 6.6k words a coming of age story for an invisible girl.

ecclesiastes three

andromeda tonks & bellatrix lestrange & narcissa malfoy teen | 9.4k words to sisterhood there is a season.

#asenora fics #ladies of hp fest

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saintsenara · 9 hours

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I really want to hear your thoughts on the wizarding world. So I have a question about British wizards' language skills. Canon tells us very little about British wizards and their relationship to languages. We know that Fleur, Victor and Madame Maxime can speak more than one language. (They are not British). However, we do know that there is at least one British wizard who speaks several languages. Percy and Ludo say that Barty senior speaks over a hundred languages. So, do you think British wizarding society has a general opinion about learning languages or is it more about what class a wizard is born into or what their future career plans are? After all, Hogwarts doesn't teach languages to students. I'd also like to hear your thoughts on these characters and their language skills. Do you think they can speak more than one language? Voldemort (parseltongue doesn't count), Dumbledore, Barty jr and Bill Weasley.

thank you very much for the ask, anon! and what an interesting question!

in harry potter, language-learning is one of those things which - since it's not a key aspect of the story - ends up not having any specific worldbuilding. and so it's one of those parts of the books in which the wizarding attitude towards foreign languages just seems to be exactly the same as the real-world british one.

which is - like everything in britain - enormously rooted in social class, and in things [like race and ethnicity] which intersect with this.

you will often hear, for example, that the working-classes don't bother learning foreign languages - but what is meant by this is that working-class people don't choose in large numbers to become proficient in the specific western european languages [french, german, italian, and spanish] which signify that someone is well-educated, culturally-sophisticated, and mentally non-parochial to the british cultural and intellectual elite. working-class people may very well speak one of these four languages - especially african and caribbean dialects of french - as native or heritage language, and they may very well speak urdu, yoruba, albanian, polish, turkish, and so on for the same reasons... it's just that this isn't recognised as something impressive.

but it is certainly true that language-learning for reasons other than heritage generally isn't considered to be particularly important in class-brackets below a certain threshold in the middle-middle- to upper middle-classes.

partially this is for boorish, parochial reasons which align with certain strains of political and social conservatism. uncle vernon, for example, would regard language-learning as woke nonsense and be horrified if dudley came home from school and asked to be given loads of italian novels for his birthday... he would have a similar reaction if his son announced his intention to start playing the violin, take ballet, write poetry, become interested in impressionist painting, or eat the local food while on holiday.

[the grangers, in contrast, appear to come from the europhile wing of the upper-middle-classes - and would, therefore, regard it as horribly parochial to only speak english. we know they go on holiday to france in prisoner of azkaban - and i think we can imagine that this isn't the first time they do so, and that hermione and her parents can all speak conversational french. indeed, if hermione was privately educated prior to starting hogwarts - and all signs point to yes - she would have studied french at prep school.]

but british monolingualism is also partially because the global hegemony of english means that being able to speak anything else isn't crucial for travel, employment, or - indeed - emigration, since brits who aspire to move abroad often want to go to places like australia and new zealand.

and so language-learning has become - like music - an academic subject which seems to be thought of by many brits as "not a key skill" - unlike, for example, something like maths. nice to have if you've got a grip on everything else, but not a necessity... and so, for british children who are educated in state schools [public schools in the us], foreign languages are only compulsory for three school years [years 7-9, the equivalents of years 1-3 at hogwarts]. some schools insist on a language being taken at gcse [exams taken at the end of year 11 - hogwarts year 5, what owls are a pastiche of], but this is not mandatory.

[although it was at my school. slay.]

so it makes sense within this cultural context that there are no languages on the compulsory hogwarts curriculum - the intended audience isn't expecting there to be.

[although it's worth saying that ancient runes - while i know it has a whole fanon surrounding it which makes it a sort of spellcasting system - is a pastiche of latin/classical greek as school subjects, so there is at least one elective language students can study].

of course, it makes less sense that this is the case when we remember that jkr did french at university... and it also makes less sense that this is the case because hogwarts is based on real-world institutions - britain's elite boarding schools - which do prioritise language-learning, since the students come from class-backgrounds which value multilingualism as a signal of cultural status.

[seriously - while i accept that this is anecdotal - it was so striking to me when i was at university that all but three of the thirty-or-so people i ever met doing a degree in a foreign language, whether a european language or not, was privately educated. add in classical languages and that ratio gets worse.]

but i think we can get around this by noting that hogwarts is set up in a way which presumes that its entire student body has had a wizarding primary education - and not only that, but an elite one [since hogwarts does, even if this isn't the doylist text's intention, seem to apply some sort of selection process which means that students who aren't from well-heeled backgrounds stand out enormously]. and then by presuming that the primary curriculum which someone like draco malfoy would have studied [at home, probably with a governess] would have included some sort of language tuition.

i imagine that this tuition would be in a muggle language - non-human languages [like mermish or gobbledegook] seem to be regarded as sufficiently "niche" in the eyes of the population that they wouldn't be taught as a general skill, but either learned in one's own time or as part of the training for specific careers, such as goblin liaison; the fact that barty crouch sr. speaks so many just for fun is a way canon hints at him being a bit... weird - and i imagine that this muggle language would be french.

this is not, however, because i go in for the fanon that all purebloods are of recent french heritage and retain close family connections in france [names like malfoy and lestrange are anglo-norman - which means they arrived in britain a thousand years ago with william the conqueror, and are as meaningfully english as the word "beef" or "monarchy...], but because french is generally considered the most "useful" language to learn in britain because france is literally next door.

[irish is sobbing.]

when it comes to the characters you specifically asked about...

lord voldemort's pre-hogwarts education is a bit of a mystery - in that the fact that the text isn't concerned about fleshing it out means that he ends up being far better educated than would normally have been the case for a child of his background [simply by virtue of not being functionally illiterate...].

even if he went to a moderately well-resourced school by random chance, though, he's extremely unlikely to have formally learned any foreign languages. but the fact that the most common fanon locations for the orphanage are parts of east london which had historically large jewish communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries means that he'd have had a fair chance of picking up snippets of yiddish while he was wheeling and dealing around each day. east london also had a large irish community, and if the orphanage is a catholic one [which doesn't really work canonically but which is a headcanon i'm nonetheless wedded to], then he'd probably also have a bit of latin.

once he's at hogwarts, i presume he must take runes [since he's heavily implied, like all male characters the series considers to be intellectually brilliant, to have taken twelve owls]. nonetheless, while he's clearly a nerd - and while he loves a language puzzle, since he spends his teenage years coming up with an anagram of his own name [...] - he has a slightly harry-ish preference in canon for only enjoying lots of flicking-through-books research if it's for a tangible goal [i.e. opening the chamber of secrets]. i can't see him scouring textbooks in an effort to teach himself the european languages his posh friends would have learned at home unless he thought doing so would be unequivocally beneficial to him.

indeed, we canonically know that voldemort can't speak german, since when he's on his hunt for gregorovitch in deathly hallows a woman speaks to him in that language and he just defaults to the british standard of speaking louder in english... and i think we can reasonably assume on these grounds that he can't speak french either.

but he must be able to speak albanian fluently - simply out of necessity, since he spends so much time in the country.

and it's also interesting to me that during his ten years in europe after murdering hepzibah smith [so c.1955-1965], he is implied to spend a lot of time in communist europe, even if not in countries which were fully behind the iron curtain [he must, for example, meet karkaroff - and potentially dolohov - in some part of the eastern bloc, and the bulgarian delegation at the quidditch world cup know who he is]. i think it's entirely reasonable to suppose, then, that he must also be able to speak some level of russian.

dumbledore - on the other hand - can probably speak french, german, and italian, which would have been expected of the sort of late victorian young man who was preparing to embark on a grand tour, and which he undoubtedly taught himself in order to keep up his correspondence with the "most noted magical names of the day" [including grindelwald, to whom he probably spoke german].

i also quite like the idea of him as the sort of late victorian orientalist who crops up again and again in british history, who speaks a language like hindi, arabic, or ottoman turkish with a cut-glass english accent.

the various non-human language he speaks in canon - such as mermish - are presumably also self-taught, and the question which preoccupies me the most in relation to these is whether dumbledore can speak parseltongue?

after all, we know it's a language which can be learned by non-parselmouths - since ron manages to speak it in deathly hallows - and so it must have an actual structure rather than just be vibes. and if dumbledore can't understand it, then what the hell did he think was going on in the memory of the gaunts he shows harry?

barty crouch jr. was definitely forced to have endless lessons with tutors hired by his father, who wanted him to match his two hundred languages, but then forgot everything he knew about mermish the second he started school.

i am sure that - even if he doesn't seem to be able to during the canon timeline - bill weasley learns how to speak french fluently the second the war's out of the way. since this is a basic courtesy if your partner and her family is from france.

i am also sure that the three delacour-weasley children are raised to be bilingual, and that they take great pleasure in bitching about the three potter-weasley children to their faces.

the more interesting question, though, is whether bill can speak any gobbledegook.

it's implied that he might through his job - and he's asked in order of the phoenix about whether there's any pro-voldemort talk among the goblins at gringotts, which suggests that he's known to be able to understand any gobbledegook chit-chat he overhears. but it still always strikes me in deathly hallows that the imperialism really jumps out when bill's speaking to harry about griphook:

“I know goblins,” said Bill. “I’ve worked for Gringotts ever since I left Hogwarts. As far as there can be friendship between wizards and goblins, I have goblin friends - or, at least, goblins I know well, and like.”

this really doesn't sound like a man who takes the time to speak to his "friends" in their own language...

the fact that even the good guys treat non-human magical communities with - at best - paternalistic contempt is a really noticeable theme in the series [and, crucially, something which the series doesn't seem to think is a particularly bad thing]. and so i quite like the idea that someone like bill would have a lack of ability to communicate in gobbledegook, and that this would never be something he interrogated.

#asks answered #asenora meta #hard-launching my beef with william “elgin” weasley

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saintsenara · 10 hours

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I love your Riddle/Gaunt post, its brilliant, just one tiny issue. The closest city to them would be York, they all live in Yorkshire. Liverpool was more a recent party weekend destination, in the 1900s it was the beach resort, but still a travel. York on the otherhand has been around since Roman times and likely before and its on their doorstep. If any gossip were likely to reach a city, it would definitely be York.

thank you for the comment, anon. i am - however - going to reserve the right to disagree with the idea that there is any issue here...

little hangleton is not proven to be in yorkshire - the only detail that we get about it in canon is that it is 200 miles north of little whinging. this may be 200 miles in a straight line, or it may be 200 miles in a looser sense [in the same way that i could describe my hometown as 200 miles north of dublin, when it's actually around 175 miles northwest, and not be understood as spatially illiterate in context]. the outskirts of liverpool are around 220 miles northwest of guildford, in surrey - and a scouser who was driving to visit the dursleys saying they were driving "200 miles south" would be understood as correct in informal conversation. locating little hangleton near to it is entirely justifiable on the scant information we receive in canon.

i also like this as a location for the village because "gaunt" is a name historically associated with lancashire, the county which borders the city of liverpool.

this doesn't mean that other people can't prefer to locate little hangleton in yorkshire [and to have gossip about the riddles' doings hit york] - but just that it isn't an unreasonable misinterpretation of canon to shift it across the country. england is pretty narrow, after all...

but while this aspect of the question is entirely open for personal interpretation, there is a part of what you've said which is completely factually wrong.

in 1900, liverpool - owing to its position as a port city on the atlantic - was one of the most important cities not only in the united kingdom but in the british empire - in the nineteenth century 40% of the entire world's trade passed through liverpool. it was a major industrial centre, was enormously diverse in terms of population [it has the oldest chinatown in europe], and was - prior to the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 - pretty much as rich as london.

you have confused it - i suspect - with blackpool, a seaside resort slightly further up the lancashire coast.

york, in contrast, was in 1900 [and remains] an average-to-large provincial city - populous and economically active in comparison to many places, but dwarfed by a city like liverpool. and its long history is irrelevant to this late victorian context - lots of places in england have been around since [pre-]roman times, and while some [chester, york] have evolved into cities, others [cirencester, dorchester] are small towns.

i hope this helps.

#asks answered

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saintsenara · 11 hours

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Voldemort/Wormtail

thank you very for the ask, anon!

and... flopping, i fear. since it's always really striking in canon that voldemort fucking hates wormtail.

obviously he thinks wormtail's stupid, lazy, and interpersonally annoying - but the thing which always stands out to me is that voldemort specifically hates him because he completely agrees with sirius' assessment that wormtail only wanted to ride the coattails of the biggest bully in the playground. he constantly berates wormtail for being insubstantial in his loyalty - with the fascinating implication that he judges him for wavering in his loyalty to the potters just as much as he judges him for wavering in his loyalty towards him. even though wormtail's betrayal of james and lily was exactly what he wanted to happen.

[after all, i know the doylist reason voldemort calls him "wormtail" is because it helps the reader keep track of who he is... but the watsonian explanation is that voldemort likes taunting him for his cowardice by using the nickname he was given by the school friends he betrayed...]

and we all know - by which i mean, i am committed to believing - that this is because voldemort cannot believe that wormtail would dare to turn against the true messy-haired hottie he simps for: james potter.

but don’t worry. wormtail is getting some god-tier hate sex out of snape.

#asks answered #asenora's opinions on ships #unhinged and deranged ships #petermort #peter pettigrew #tom riddle #lord voldemort

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saintsenara · 13 hours

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okay, I'm super curious about your thoughts on when and how snape becomes a potions master. some people say he was still working on his mastery when he became a professor but i like to think he got it in early 1980 and he apprenticed with a potions master he was recommended to through his ~connections~ (cough malfoy cough).

although the idea of him teaching and grieving and also attempting to not fail at the one thing he knows he's good at does have its own angsty appeal

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

although i regret to say that i'm going to start the answer to it by being very pedantic...

the idea that masteries are something which exist in the wizarding world is complete fanon.

they have emerged as a trope due to a reading of the phrase "potions master" which does make perfect sense outside of the cultural context in which the books were written - by which i mean that it makes readers unfamiliar with the culturally-specific meaning of this bit of language think of masters degrees or other high-level qualifications - but which is nonetheless incorrect within context.

"master" [and the feminine equivalent, "mistress"] is just an alternative term in british english for "teacher". it doesn't imply anything about a level of qualification. "potions master" and "potions teacher" are synonyms.

the term is archaic - british people nowadays would exclusively say "teacher" - and it's very class-specific, in that it would have particularly been used to describe teachers in elite schools, whether fee-paying private schools or grammar schools [state schools which are academically selective].

as a result, it turns up in lots of the children's literature written before c.1980 - especially in boarding-school stories like malory towers and the worst witch which are explicit influences on the harry potter series. it's used in the text - especially in the earlier books - as part of worldbuilding which generally seeks to make the wizarding world feel whimsical by virtue of being very old-fashioned, which things like the fact that the most advanced technology wizards use is the radio and the steam train also hammer home.

that snape is the only teacher referred to as a master is connected to these genre conventions. because snape is so important to the full arc of the story, he's the teacher we spend the most time in the classroom with throughout the six books in which harry's at school. and he's therefore the teacher who - in the first few books - best fits a children's literature archetype which we would expect to find in any twentieth-century school story [with a magical setting or not] - the hated schoolmaster who is horrible to the child-protagonist and who every child reading can't wait to see get their comeuppance.

so snape is a potions master because he teaches potions. nothing more than that.

but that doesn't mean that it's not worth thinking about his training...

clearly, higher education of the type most of us are familiar with doesn't exist in wizarding britain - nor, i suspect, in wizarding europe more broadly.

and this makes perfect sense - not only because the magical population is so small but because the divergence of the magical and muggle worlds in 1689 takes place well before universities and university-level education look like anything a modern student might recognise. a seventeenth-century university education was still broadly generalist and aimed at trainee clergy, and careers which we would nowadays expect to require a degree - such as law, finance, medicine, science, and engineering - were generally taught by apprenticeship.

this is clearly how things continue to function in the wizarding world of the 1990s, since we know from order of the phoenix that healers are taught by apprenticeship [and, indeed, that hogwarts graduates all go straight into the workforce after they leave school].

potions - since it's analogous to chemistry - is nonetheless understood in-world as an academic discipline. but this doesn't mean - within the post-school educational structures we can suppose the wizarding world has - that it's a discipline in which one needs specific formal training in order to acquire a right to teach or publish about it.

the seventeenth century was a period - especially in britain - marked by a great expansion of scientific enquiry. this was - by our contemporary understanding of academic science - amateur. scientists wouldn't have been expected to have doctorates, to work at universities, or even to have attended them, and their experiments were often self-funded by personal wealth or dependent on a patron. the circles [often international] in which they debated, demonstrated, and reviewed theories and inventions were social ones - the gatekeeping line was class [with the level of education - and, primarily, of literacy - that this implied], rather than level of education itself.

these social circles often had a certain level of official standing - by which i mean they became, during the period, the learned societies, the most famous of which is probably the royal society. membership [or fellowship] of the learned societies requires a demonstration of some sort of contribution to the discipline they relate to - which means that the vast majority of contemporary fellows of such societies are university-based academics. but this wouldn't have been the case in 1689.

and we know that the wizarding world has its own equivalent of learned societies, because slughorn mentions one in half-blood prince - the most extraordinary society of potioneers.

which is to say, snape is probably a member of this society. he may very well publish papers in academic journals connected to the subject [as dumbledore does in transfiguration today], and he undoubtedly has a reputation among the wizarding world's men- and women-of-letters. but he doesn't need to have any formal post-hogwarts qualification in order for him to have acquired this reputation.

so what do i think he's doing between 1978 and 1981?

well... he's a death eater.

my theory has always been that snape comes to voldemort's attention - via lucius malfoy - because of his potions skills. the dark lord's operation would have needed potions - poisons to bump off enemies, healing potions because wanted criminals can't just turn up at st mungo's, potions to trade on the black market [as aberforth dumbledore tells us the death eaters do during deathly hallows], and so on - and voldemort would want to keep the production of these potions in-house, rather than risk hiring a private brewer [even a shady one] who might change their mind and go to the aurors.

[this is also presumably what voldemort - undoubtedly at snape's request - tries to recruit lily to do.]

i have never believed that snape was taken on as a death eater in the expectation that he'd perform a combat role - there is a clear implication throughout the series that the only person he ever directly kills is dumbledore, and that he gets along badly with death eaters [such as bellatrix] who did take more violent roles in voldemort's terrorism.

so i presume that, when he leaves school, he ends up working as a personal brewer for voldemort - on a stipend presumably paid, at the dark lord's request, by either lucius or abraxas malfoy. i also presume that, outside of work voldemort specifically requests, he's given free reign to brew for other clients, study, experiment, and publish as he wishes.

and i further presume that if he trains with anyone, then that person is voldemort himself.

voldemort claims, in goblet of fire, to be interested in experimenting with potions. he appears to invent the potion made from nagini's venom which sustains his half-body prior to his resurrection - and i think the implication of the text is that he also invents the potion guarding the locket-horcrux. voldemort also evidently encourages snape's interest in the dark arts, and he also appears to have some influence over snape's comportment - the teen snape we see in order of the phoenix is extremely rough around the edges, in a way the adult snape, who both speaks and moves in canon very similarly to the adult voldemort, isn't.

voldemort taking such an interest in snape would - obviously - largely be a grooming tactic. snape clearly becomes a death eater because the organisation offers him a chance to belong and succeed which his class-background would ordinarily make impossible for him within wizarding society, and voldemort must therefore massively indulge his belief that he's never given the respect he deserves for his intellect. voldemort's obvious contempt for slughorn - who matters so little to him that he doesn't even bother to kill him - would, i imagine, also win snape round.

and by training snape in an academic rather than a combat sense, voldemort gains a valuable tool - someone he can place at hogwarts as a teacher to spy on dumbledore.

we can assume that voldemort was having dumbledore tailed throughout the first war - and, indeed, that this is what snape is doing when he overhears the prophecy - but that he couldn't watch him at all times because he didn't have a spy among the hogwarts faculty.

it is clearly voldemort who tells snape to apply for a teaching job in early 1980. he must also tell him to apply for the defence against the dark arts post [which we know snape canonically applied for first] - which means he must expect to be imminently victorious in the first war, since snape would only be able to stay in the position for a year...

the prophecy, which snape hears c. january 1980, obviously derails this belief slightly... and snape famously does not get the defence against the dark arts job for the 1980-1981 academic year.

how do we know this? because he tells us in order of the phoenix that he's been teaching at hogwarts for fourteen years. he says this right at the beginning of the autumn term in 1995 - so he clearly means that he's been teaching for fourteen previous academic years and the 1995-1996 year is his fifteenth. so... he started teaching at hogwarts in the 1981-1982 academic year.

voldemort settles on harry as the child the prophecy refers to after harry is born [so, after 31st july 1980]. we don't know how quickly he does this and we don't know exactly when snape defects to the order.

but, clearly, at some point during the 1980-1981 academic year, dumbledore hires snape to begin teaching from september 1981 onwards. he presumably tells snape to tell voldemort that his change of heart was because he didn't think snape was qualified to teach defence against the dark arts but that he does think he's qualified to teach potions [pointing, perhaps, to publications snape got out under voldemort's tutelage], and that slughorn's announcement that he intends to retire means that there's a position available. he then undoubtedly also tells snape to convince voldemort of the same pretence they'll use throughout the second war - that he's a loyal death eater passing information on dumbledore's movements to his master.

which is to say... when lily dies, snape has been in his job for at most nine weeks.

just imagine how miserable that must have been!

#asks answered #asenora meta #severus snape

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saintsenara · 15 hours

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not a completely unhinged ship, but thoughts on madam hooch/madam rosmerta?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

and i have to say... it's a hot ship! we love to see a classic high-octane butch-femme pairing - hooch is strutting around town in her immaculate tailoring buying her woman those glittery turquoise heels, rosemerta has a thing for leather quidditch gloves and how good hooch is at diy. and we also know that rosmerta has a canonically excellent rack - and, since hooch knows a nice set of bludgers when she sees one, you know she's going to appreciate it properly.

but the main reason why we have to back this pairing? it's staring us in the face in the canon text!

“We need to return to the castle at once,” said Dumbledore. “Rosmerta” - and though he staggered a little, he seemed wholly in command of the situation - “we need transport - brooms - ” “I’ve got a couple behind the bar,” she said, looking very frightened. “Shall I run and fetch - ?”

rosmerta seems to live alone and to be the only person who works at the three broomsticks. why does she have brooms plural behind the bar? it's obvious - they keep being left there by the hogwarts flying teacher when she turns up for late-night shenanigans.

#asks answered #asenora's opinions on ships #unhinged and deranged ships

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saintsenara · 17 hours

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Wait, Snape/Luna?? I feel like this could be top tier?!

thank you very much for the ask, anon - i love the enthusiasm for snuna.

it's not a ship i back - as i've gone into more detail about here - but i'd be delighted to be convinced otherwise.

#asks answered #asenora's opinions on ships

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saintsenara · 1 day

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How have I never drawn Kingsley??? (And I’m sorry I keep giving beards to people who probably don’t have them lol)

#hp art #kingsley shacklebolt #.... would

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saintsenara · 1 day

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Very important question: Based on his canonical age and class background, is Tom Riddle Sr. a Drones Club member?

My unhinged ship: Since Luna is extremely Madeline Basset-coded, and best shipped with older men, Luna/Grindlewald (the best analog I could think of for Roderick Spode, whom she marries in the TV adaptation).

(Whereas Neville is definitely Gussie Fink-Nottle-coded).

i cackled.

yes. tom sr. is one hundo a drones club member. the assembled members call him "croaker" - after the avian specimen in that famous riddle, "why is a raven like a writing desk?"

he and bertie wooster were clearly at eton together and had a minor rivalry which continued at oxford when tom [oriel] beat bertie [magdalen] to the lowest pass-mark in the year. bertie regards tom as a bit weak in the top storey, and is very much of the opinion that if he had a jeeves of his own he'd never have got into all that gaunt mess. he is correct in this assessment.

and i am unavoidably compelled to back the idea of gellert grindelwald/luna lovegood - and, all the more importantly, to back the idea of grindelwald as a secret entrepreneur in the realm of ladies' undergarments. the entire plot of the code of the woosters - with, i think, ron in the bertie "suspected of stealing a cow-creamer" wooster role and neville, as you say, in the gussie "my word, have you seen grindelwald eating asparagus?" fink-nottle role - would slap when transported to the harry potter universe.

i beg someone to write it.

#asks answered #asenora's opinions on ships #unhinged and deranged ships #crossover edition!

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saintsenara · 1 day

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What do you think about Bellatrix/Lupin?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

and... flopping, i fear.

lupin's canonical vibe is really giving "massive self-loathing in the streets, humiliation kink in the sheets". this is unfortunate for bella, because while she's got a thing for men who are killing machines - and she thought lupin would be a suitable prospect on the grounds that he turns into a rampaging wolf once a month [ok, and? so do i, he's not special!] - she has no interest in brandishing the whip and telling remus he's a monster who should never be allowed to live in normal society and who should be paraded around on a lead in public so everyone knows what a mess he is. she's the one who wants to be on her knees with her hands tied behind her back getting a thorough telling-off for being foolish enough to get sent to azkaban - but remus can't quite project the authority she's looking for in a dom.

and he refuses to put in the red contacts.

#asks answered #asenora's opinions on ships #unhinged and deranged ships

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saintsenara · 1 day

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So I found your blog a while back and I last night I finally found the time to browse through pretty much all your HP meta and ship takes (i slept way later than I should've yesterday, thanks to you ^^) and I'm astonished at how you manage to weave in well founded analysis even into your answers to even the most deranged ship-asks

That being said, I scrolled through a lot of your blog and I couldn't find your opinion on grindeldore as a ship. Since i really like your takes on ol dumbles (even though I don't agree with all of them. For example I don't think his whimsical traits are entirely a lie. I think they are a part of him he over-exaggerates as a coping mechanism and a comfort to himself and others) I was wondering how you think this relationship-dynamic worked, how it shaped him and how large a role it played in his later life

(This is not a reaction to the ask game obviously, since the ship has no gone rather mainstream. I sometimes miss its days of obscurity before the fb movies but that's another ask)

thank you very much for the ask, anon - and especially for the very kind message at the start.

my opinion on grindeldore is coloured by the fact that i've never seen any of the fantastic beasts films - and that i've also gone out of my way to forget anything i've ever accidentally learned about any of them. i just don't find the idea of them interesting in the slightest.

but i love the little flashes of grindeldore we get in the seven-book canon - the image of the owls flying back and forth at all hours of the night because they can’t bear not to be talking to each other has a good claim to be the most romantic thing which happens in the series - and i also love the way that grindelwald becomes another example of a narrative tool the series uses to great effect with many other main characters besides dumbledore: the figure, only ever fragmentarily known [both by the reader and by the character who loved them], who causes such immense grief that it dictates the entire course of that character's life.

grindelwald plays the role in dumbledore's narrative arc that james plays in harry's - he considers grindelwald perfect, wonderful, brilliant... until he can't pretend this is the case anymore, just as harry hero-worships his father until he is confronted by the proof that he was a bully. but while harry then begins to understand james with more nuance, dumbledore retreats - hides himself from grindelwald until he's literally forced to duel him, and then hides grindelwald away and never sees him again.

grindelwald is dumbledore's lily - his grief over losing him [and, specifically, his grief over losing the imagined version of him, when who he really was could no longer be ignored - which is exactly how snape thinks of lily] drives him towards a life which encapsulates what the series understands as "love": the willingness to steadfastly endure and suffer and sacrifice in silence.

and he's also dumbledore's merope - the person who didn't even try to stay alive be better for him, who irreparably ripped his chance at a happy family apart, and who abandoned him when things got hard - and, just as voldemort's entire life becomes about creating a place for himself in the world which soothes that grief, so too does dumbledore's. his public persona becomes unwaveringly noble for exactly the same reason that voldemort's becomes unassailably villainous - so that the fragility of the grieving man beneath the mask is never known.

these parallels are why i back the concepts of snumbledore and riddledore [and the triad - snumblemort] so utterly [i am not quite brave enough for harrydore, i fear], and so they certainly mean that i should find grindeldore compelling...

but i find - i think - that i like grindelwald better as a background character whose ghost haunts dumbledore's later relationships - romantic or otherwise. his shadow looming over the two dumbledore brothers, and the way that the memory of him rears up when the eleven-year-old tom riddle calls himself "special", and the way that dumbledore still loathes himself so strongly - a century later - for being taken in by his smile that he spits "you disgust me" at snape are canon moments which always stand out for me, and i love how these can be expanded in fanfiction - what happens when voldemort and/or snape find out about grindeldore obsesses me, for example.

and i am similarly interested in how dumbledore can't be written as a fully-rounded character unless the impact of his relationship with grindelwald [and how this drives his public performance of careful eccentricity, causes his obvious ivory-tower-ishness, and informs his thinking on love and desire and so on] is taken into account.

but i just am less interested in grindeldore as the central relationship in a piece [although there are definitely exceptions to this rule] - and i think being so stubborn about fantastic beasts is probably why. grindelwald works so well in the books as a shadow that i end up finding that more compelling than seeing him as a main character [which i also feel about james - i really like the ghost of unrequited prongfoot, which is canon, haunting sirius in his adult life, but i care about it less as the main ship of a fic], but i'm sure that i would feel otherwise if i ever bothered to get into how he's written for the films, where he serves such a different narrative purpose that he gets more substance.

and i should also say that i don't find that grindeldore interests me to write myself because i think that filling grindelwald out into a main character on the basis of book-canon detail alone would mean confronting just how explicit an analogy for hitler he is in the text [my impression is that fantastic beasts changes this a lot], which is something i don't really have the energy for.

[although - since it's always worth reiterating this - the grindeldore girlies are perfectly entitled to ship the pairing in any way they like, and to write the characters and their motivations in any way they choose, without getting any grief about it. this is fiction.]

but who knows - maybe i'll change my mind the more grindeldore crosses my path. stranger things have happened.

because there is a little idea which continues to needle at me... that dumbledore's loathing of horcruxes, even in the 1940s, is because grindelwald had made one. and that this is why, when he meets harry at king's cross, he is so determined to believe that the rumours of his repentance were true...

#asks answered #asenora's opinions on ships #grindeldore #albus dumbledore #gellert grindelwald

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