something unbroken, something defiantly whole

More vampires who are like, “I don’t know, man, I spent most of that decade in an opium den.”

More vampires who weren’t paying attention because they didn’t think it would be important.

More vampires who don’t know because there was lot of conflicting gossip and they don’t want to point any fingers.

More vampires who are just bad at dates. “Back in 1620, or was it 1645, wait, what year is it now?”

“Oh yeah, the only thing I remember about the American Revolution was this nice candlemaker I met sometime, and she was wearing this really cute red shawl…”

it’s pretty important to find your drift partner, don’t get me wrong. but it’s also really really important to find your control room team— y’know, that group of people that you love and trust and despite (or because of) not being able to actually read your mind, still watch your back all the time and aren’t afraid to override the controls and manually shut your shit down to save your fucking lives.

the story of how anakin skywalker fell to the dark side when there was so much good in him could’ve been amazing, and the changes needed to make it so aren’t even that big. give me an anakin that’s actually damaged from being a slave his whole life; an anakin that latches onto padme not because she is “beautiful” but because of her compassion, strengths and beliefs; give me obi wan meeting anakin w/ his master and actually bonding with him, agreeing about his potential even if he doesn’t quite believe an old prophecy; give me padme’s simmering fury and protectiveness over a child who fell into slavery which she thinks is disgusting but she can’t concentrate on that right now because her whole planet comes first. give me an anakin that gets to react to the jedi’s fears of him; give me the child that goes from being a slave to being sworn to an order that’s strict and tells him no; don’t fear, don’t form bonds, be better. give me anakin and obi wan bonding scenes. give me palpatine actually being subtle in his manipulations. have padme and anakin keep interacting through the years and anakin falls into slow love with her without realizing, because she is justice and compassion and strength.

 you can keep so many scenes if you just tweak them. so many plot points still work with some background added to it. give me anakin asking if he could see (/free) his mother and beind denied by the council because jedis can’t have connections, anakin, you can’t be attached. have obi wan reluctantly agree that they can’t do it. have him still have the dreams and still protect padme, but when she catches him dreaming and he tells her the truth (that he dreams of his mother in trouble and he’s not supposed to see her but he can’t stop thinking of her, how he abandoned her to that life–) and she’s the one who says they should go to her. because padme never believed in slavery and never wanted to leave her behind in the first place but she had bigger problems then, and maybe she feels guilty about that. have anakin realize he loves her then. and she’s watched him grow and watched him toy the line but she’s not there yet, and he goes to his mother and fails, that’s fine, that’s fine, but he doesn’t kill the entire camp. he’s not there yet. he does it by the code, but then he comes back to padme and he tells her the truth; he wanted them dead. he wanted them all dead. he wanted to kill them with his own hands. she tells him the same thing– that anger is human, that it’s normal to feel– and he says he is a jedi. he must be better. and then he admits; he still wants them dead. he is unsatisfied with the justice he got. he’s scared of how much he wants them dead. isn’t he a jedi? isn’t he good? and padme tells him he is so good. he is allowed to have feelings, she tells him. anger and fear don’t lead to bad things by themselves, letting them control you does. he tells her he loves her and she sees the man he could be and says they can’t. but she wants to, too. 

give me a padme that is just as annoyed at the jedi way as she is any other injustice in the world.give me an anakin that struggles with his feelings and not being allowed to feel them. give me an obi wan that doesn’t understand that struggle and those feelings because he’s never hated, not that much, but anakin has hated his whole life. he has been angry and afraid. give me a palpatine that says things just like padme does; that validates anakin when he has feelings he doesn’t want to confess to obi wan because he is just that much on the side of the jedi order that tells him to just not. give me a obi wan that has failed a friend; a brother, for real, not by convenience of absence but by failing to question his teachings. give me an audience who can sympathize with anakin and can almost fall for palpatine too because he isn’t so obvious the jedis should’ve seen him coming ages ago.

give me an obi wan that listens to count dooku’s warnings and feels torn, not because he doubts the ways of the jedi, but because he’s seen what those ways can do. give me padme and anakin in a slow burn love, with no wedding but with careful stolen moments through time where they let themselves feel, where they both love each other’s passion. where they are both a bit afraid of what it could all mean. give me a yoda that feels actual fucking shame when he realizes his speeches about fear and attachments and feelings is what drove anakin right to palpatine’s waiting treacherous words. give me a yoda with a reason to exile himself and to not want to tell luke the truth; not because the truth is hard for luke or might tempt him, but because the truth is hard for YODA to admit to.

anakin falling to the dark side out of fear of being powerless to save padme– to save his family– just like he failed to save his mother works, tbh. but  give me a padme who doesn’t die in childbirth because she “couldn’t go on”, like she didn’t have two kids, like she wouldn’t have fought tooth and nail to bring back democracy and been the first to lead the rebellion? give me a padme that doesn’t die in childbirth and raises leia for a few years so her fucking comments about her mom makes sense. give me bonding scenes between anakin and people, and superimpose that with the jedis telling him no. you can’t. 

have your audience start to agree with the dark side too, and then when they’re starting to think darth vader was fully justified pull the rug out from under them. have him go too far. it doesn’t have to be child murder, because that’s easy. that’s cheap. but have him be the direct cause of the jedi falling so easily; betraying them from afar because he knew all these people and their weaknesses and he is giving them away for one person. have obi wan and him fight with legitimate feelings; “what you’re doing is wrong” and darth vader asks why? when he has control. it’ll be better. he’ll fix it. and obi wan realizes he failed him because anakin still deals in absolutes, still deals in how slavery hit him; the people who can do anything are the ones with power. the ones who own things. is it greed? it is fear and anger and hate, and that turns to greed, sometimes. sure. 

give me a vader who drives away padme but searches for her because he wants her and his child; doesn’t she understand? she doesn’t, she can’t, she has never wanted one person to rule all. give me a padme who, like luke, still believes in anakin skywalker but who never gets the chance to say it because the rebellion is snuffed out. give me a padme who fakes losing her child so that anakin doesn’t know he has two because she can’t while he is vader. while he is under palpatine. give me a padme who dies fighting, tired and sad but still ultimately hoping for anakin to come back. to be good.

give me an anakin who thinks he’s lost everything and who hates the emperor for it but who’s given up; who lets himself be everyone’s fucking darth lapdog because what is the point? until he realizes luke is alive and then, then he thinks, he has something again. something worth fighting for. 

give me a story where i understand and nearly sympathize with anakin skywalker, where i feel for obi wan’s loss of his pupil, where i see the good luke saw in his dad from the get go but also what caused him to be so twisted. give me the start of the empire as slow and methodical, dark and the result of both sides of the force pushing and pulling instead of weird political moves that makes no sense. where i understand why padme fell in love with him and believed in him. where the jedi order meant well but was so obviously fucked up they were doomed from the start. 

I’m increasingly of the opinion that all the events in the Harry Potter books that had their root in someone who went to Hogwarts were in some way orchestrated by the Sorting Hat.

The Sorting Hat had access to the minds and potential of every single Hogwarts student ever. In fact it directed their potential, due to the segregated nature of the Hogwarts House system. Everyone just TRUSTED it to make the right decision. I mean, yeah, new students would sit there arguing with it, but once it has made a decision that’s it. I’ve not yet come across any JKR tidbit citing that there has ever been anyone who switched from one house to another. And all of those students, ALL the students, had their future at Hogwarts heavily influenced by the declaration of that one enchanted object.

Which is basically an AI computer, but in magical terms.

And I’ve seen discussions online that get closer and closer to “the house divides are extremely nebulous and unfair and sketchy” (and some that go straight to “the house divides are wrong and evil”), but many seem to tend towards trying to “fix” book-canon, to take what was in the books and expand upon the very limiting parameters to make it seem like the system ISN’T wrong and broken.

Especially when it comes to Slytherin, and to do with making Slytherin house not “the evil one” of the four.

But you know, it’s a fact in the books that most of the Death Eaters and other really bad wizards (not all, but many) that went to Hogwarts went through Slytherin in the books. And nominally, people get put in Slytherin because they are cunning and ambitious. But the way in which this is determined is not simply “this hat is charmed to measure your cunning and ambition levels” or whatever.

That hat’s alive, pretty much. Its consciousness is modelled after the fashion of humans, only it has been in the castle almost since the castle was there and has seen the passing through of countless witches and wizards. It has the absolute trust of everyone in the castle, and there’s nothing to suggest in the books that there was anyone else in charge of it.

Who’s to say it isn’t just putting people in whatever house it damn well chooses? Who’s to say it didn’t just decide one year that it was bored and started carefully plotting how best to place people to cause maximum havoc in the wizarding world?

Take the brothers Sirius and Regulus, for example. Both, at the end of the day, turned out to be honourable and principled individuals who made bad choices and were punished for those choices. However, since one was put in Slytherin and the other in Gryffindor, one ended up a Death Eater and the other removed himself from a toxic family environment and surrounded himself with caring loving people. This says nothing about either brother in terms of how “good” or “bad” they are, because both ultimately put a lot of work in to defeat Voldemort. What it does indicate, however, is how the environment in which they were placed in their formative years affected the vector their life took them on.

The Sorting Hat, in other words, took pity on Sirius in a way that it didn’t with Regulus. But both suffered. Sirius got to go on to be part of a loving family of friends and make an innocent mistake that brought about the first death of Voldemort, where Regulus worked behind Voldemort’s back to try to eliminate a horcrux.

The Sorting Hat also equipped Harry Potter with the friends he needed to become the hero of the story. Harry Potter was seemingly given a choice between Slytherin and Gryffindor, and maybe the Sorting Hat relented, or maybe it never had any intention of placing him in Slytherin in the first place. All the pieces fell into place though. Harry and Ron and Hermione could have ended up in three separate houses, Neville might never even have been featured in the story if he’d been put into Hufflepuff (arguably the least well-represented of the four houses).

But it shoved Sirius and James and Lupin and Peter together. Even though Peter Pettigrew turned out to be cowardly and completely UN-Gryffindor-like, and Sirius came from one of the worst of the pure-blood families. And it shoved Harry’s friends together. It pitted Draco and Harry on opposite sides of an imaginary line. It consigned Regulus Black to an abusive environment and an unsung death.

The Sorting defines people. It determines entire lives.

The rise of Voldemort only happened because the system was already broken and all the wrong people were placed (by the Sorting Hat) into Slytherin along with Tom Riddle, which fed into his already-troubled personality. He was placed in an environment where the upper-class pure-blood prejudices of the wizarding world were at their worst and his penchant for cruelty and an indifference towards those deemed lesser were allowed to flourish.

Also an atmosphere that encourages cunning and ambition and loyalty. NOT because people in Slytherin are inherently cunning, or ambitious, or loyal, but because Slytherin House is KNOWN for those traits and thus it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. But that’s also the best environment for starting some sort of pureblood power-cult. At least half the students there are already steeped in pureblood propaganda ANYWAY so all it took was someone to exploit that a bit further. (Also, since it seems that many marriages in the wizarding world up to Potter’s era fall within house divides, those students are steeped in pureblood pride because their parents were put in the same house. By the Sorting Hat.)

The Sorting Hat had to know this. It’s taken a look inside all the heads of the students, it lives (as of Potter’s era) in the headmaster’s office, it has access to everthing anyone says there. It knew what it was doing and it could have put Tom in any other house without it being questioned. It wasn’t like his parentage was common knowledge, which would be used as a judgment by other people as to whether he was put in the “right” house or not, so no suspicions would have been raised.

Putting Tom in another house could have made all the difference, some other house that hadn’t become a festering pool of prejudice and bigotry already. He might still have ended up as a thoroughly bad person, but without the cult of dark magic to back him up.

The Sorting Hat CREATED Lord Voldemort, and it ultimately brought about and ended the darkest hour of Hogwarts history, destroying much of the castle in the process and killing hundreds.

And for what? The greater good? Did it want to end the segregation of pupils based on arbitrary and malleable character traits? Did it just want to watch the world burn?

Hardison has of course made sure they all had a crash course/refresher on the movies, but he’s still prompting Eliot on the comms when Eliot has to prove his nerd cred to the Big Bad, but then the Big Bad asks something Hardison doesn’t know, and while he’s like “hold on just stall until I can look up the answer,” Eliot pulls the “excuse me but your question shows that you’re the one that doesn’t know what he’s talking about” because Eliot is secretly a huge nerd.

and of course their props are actually disguised hacking/thieving equipment, and Hardison has a model BB8 that he programs to follow Eliot around, and when Eliot is finally like “ok so what’s the robot for?” Hardison’s like “lol I didn’t put anything in the robot, it’s just there because it’s cool.” “Dammit, Hardison!”

also they get periodically mobbed by fangirl shippers who keep requesting photos of the trio in various combinations and with varying levels of shippiness. Eliot doesn’t catch on until one snaps a photo of Hardison smooching his cheek (”Dammit, Hardison!” They know he’s only pretending to be annoyed though.)

a smol child dressed as Poe Dameron is too shy to ask Eliot for a picture, so Eliot asks him for one, and when some older kids try harassing the little one about his obviously low-budget homemade cosplay, Eliot shuts them down.