I’ve got to wonder, though, how much of the school supply list at Hogwarts is based on aesthetic and how much is based on what the Muggle world was like when wizards retreated into secrecy. Like, how many wizards who haven’t taken Muggle Studies are aware that nobody uses inkwells and quill pens anymore? And I bet the Muggle parents over the years have always just assumed “well there must be some reason for all this, it must work better with these supplies, there must be something inherently magical in parchment” and just went with it.
Give me the story of the Muggle-born witch whose parents can’t afford all the fancy school supplies, who literally cringe when they’re told about the fund for “underprivileged students” because they’re not POOR but they’ve got four other children and two of them need special care, who scrimp and save and scrape together until they can afford the school supply list even if most of it’s secondhand, but they start at the top of the list with the things that HAVE to be bought in Diagon Alley and go from there, and when they get towards the end of the list they start making do.
On September 1, in this big crowd of ickle firsties, there’s one who stands out because her robes don’t look quite right but no one can quite pinpoint why, until an older student asks her the next day and she shyly admits that her mother made them for her out of some fabric she’s had lying around for a while. She gets to her first class and sits in the back because she’s a little embarrassed and pulls out the battered secondhand textbook and her wand and everything else she needs, prepared to take notes, and everything’s going along just fine until Professor Flitwick suddenly stops in the middle of his lecture and asks what she’s doing, and she just freezes but manages to stammer out that she’s just taking notes, Professor.
Flitwick is suddenly at her side, how did he get there so quickly, and examining her cheap retractable pen and the packet of looseleaf paper in a flimsy three-ring binder where the center ring is already out of alignment, and the other Muggle-borns and half-bloods in the class are snickering because look at this loser who didn’t know you need parchment and quills for this, who ever heard of doing magic with a biro, but Flitwick is fascinated and asks if he can try one, and maybe she tells him to keep that one because she has more (even though she only has a couple more, but she can make do with pencils, and surely somebody around here will loan her a little bit of ink to refill one of her pens if she needs to, I mean, it can’t be that hard to fill up the little ink sticks inside of them, can it?) and he beams at her like she’s just given him the House Cup and goes back to teaching like nothing has happened.
And then all of her teachers are asking her about these things, and maybe a few of the other Muggle-born students tentatively help her answer them, and when McGonagall presses her she admits that her parents couldn’t afford to get her everything she needed and it was a lot cheaper to go to the shop on the corner and pick up a half-dozen packs of looseleaf and a packet of pens than it was to buy the quill and parchment and honestly, Professor, I didn’t think it would matter, and McGonagall smiles because she remembers her own father and says it doesn’t.
The next year the school supply list says only ink-based writing utensils and parchment or lined paper and a few of the more traditionalist pureblood families insist on only sending their children with quills and inkwells, but there are other students–a lot of other students–with retractables and stick pens and a couple of the older Muggle-born students come in with really nice quality fountain pens and there’s a whole black market (or at least grey market) going on with regards to the buying and selling and trading of glitter gel pens and a lot of debates over whether fine-tipped pens or the broader ones are better and there’s at least one kid who’s got one of those gigantic foot-long novelty click pens because what, you said it had to be ink-based, so what if it’s an inch thick and hot pink with Disney princesses all over it, it’s still a pen, and within a few years nobody can remember why there was such an issue with them in the first place.
Nobody has the slightest idea what to do the first time a student shows up with his grandfather’s typewriter, though.
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