Good Vibes

Severitus crossover with Arcane because I love being in pain by my own hands... (starts sobbing in the corner)

(No text version under the cut)

I had to save this and the other one for when I had time to sit and write it out lol

5. Umbridge Hear me out. I don't like her as a person but I like her character due to the importance she plays in the storyline. She was a necessary evil to kickstart Neville's growth, to kickstart the resistance at Hogwarts. We needed her.

4. McGonagall She's very motherly, despite not having kids of her own. She is very protective of her students, she turns into a cat, she is a brilliant witch. I also love her backstory and how lost love didn't turn her into a bitter woman. She's just a wonderful character!

3. Andromeda Andromeda's entire story is tragic. She leaves her family for love, knowing she'll be disowned. She loses everyone at the end of the war- everyone except her newborn grandson- and no one ever talks about it enough.

2. Fleur I love Fleur. I hate how she was made to sound like such a snob in HBP, and the way the others treated her was disgusting. She's brilliant, she's brave, she's strong minded... she's a very good character, if you ignore the blatant misogynistic treatment she gets. The old "mother in law hates son's fiancée" but is so gross. Fleur deserved better. 1. Tonks This should surprise no one. I love Tonks because she's strong, smart, people just like her(aside from Bellatrix) and she had so much potential. Imagine if she had decided to become a Death Eater! She'd be unstoppable!

Why does this one feel so much harder lol

5. Buckbeak I just love him. I love his attitude. I love how he just gives no shits. He needs to be in more fanfics.

4. Kingsley I just really like him. He's a voice of reason in a world of chaos. I don't know he's always so calm every time we see him, but good for him.

3. Sirius As much as he's an asshole, as much as he's immature, he is also an important character in the narrative. He definitely needs to mature, he's definitely not as different from his family as he may pretend(I mean... he picks on the poor kid and beats his elf...) but his presence is still very important.

2. Remus As much as I have lately been looking at Remus' actions with criticism and disdain, he is still a good character. He's severely flawed, severely impulsive, I don't think the man knows how to think ahead about anything aside from being a werewolf... in fact, I don't know that he knows how to think about anything aside from his condition tbh lol But he's a good man beneath it all, despite also having a bit of immaturity. (okay, a lot with some situations). 1. Moody I know, not Remus? Okay but listen. Moody is like that crazy old man who posts on the local Facebook groups about teens wearing hoodies and walking after dark. He's paranoid, he's a hero, he's a little crazy. I love him. I love that he dragged himself through a battle to try to revive Tonks when she fell in battle. For a man who is very much "always be ready to fight!", he ignores the fight in order to get to his fellow soldier.

He loves being able to throw himself into fights - all starting with the thrill of pulling pranks at school and just getting bolder and bolder with it. It could’ve been because it was attention seeking, it could’ve been any number of reasons that I could easily tie to his childhood if it wasn’t one in the morning and I hadn’t spent the last five hours trying to write an essay

It gets worse during the war. Now he has purpose, something meaningful to actually fight for. And when he gets the information that James and Lily have been murdered by Volde-tort that shit skyrockets - he chases after Peter, cackling when Peter gets away with it somehow….

And then he’s in Azkaban. And then there’s nothing for him to do for years and years - the real, human guards barely show their faces, and dementors do not understand spoken language - or humanoid language at all. There’s nothing.

And then he escapes, and that thrill he gets of not being caught is back tenfold. And the cycle repeats. Not getting caught. Being stuck in his childhood home. Calling Harry and almost getting caught. Being stuck. Breaking out to help Harry

But James loved Lily.

And Remus also loved James.

James was his greatest friend he ever had, because Remus needed him most. James who never recoiled from the wolfish parts of him. James who charged into danger with stupid Gryffindor bravery and made Remus feel, for fleeting moments, normal. Safe. Wanted.

But where Remus quietly built James into the center of his world, James had already done that with Sirius years before.

Sirius was the person James sought first in every room. The one glance across a classroom to share a joke with. The one he trusted instinctively, blindly, absolutely. They moved through life like two halves of the same reckless thought.

Remus knew this because James forgave Sirius things he would never forgive anyone else for.

But it was safer for him to love someone who belonged to someone else.

And then there was Peter.

Always there.

Sitting at the foot of their beds while Sirius and James talked late into the night. Laughing a bit too hard at their jokes.

Peter followed them through corridors, through detentions, through war, through transformations under the moon, and somehow still remained peripheral.

The process starts now in my new chapter. (Coming soon)

“What sort of animal would you like to be?” he went on.

“No idea. Something powerful. A lion, maybe,” James’s voice came out of the darkness.

“A lion would definitely suit you,” Peter replied eagerly.

“I don’t mind,” Sirius answered the friends question now. “As long as it’s not something boring like a rabbit or a bird orwhatever.”

James and Peter nodded silently.

“I don’t mind either,” Peter said, answering his own question. “Just not a water creature.”

But first, I need to talk about a book called "Mastiff."

"Mastiff" is the third book in the Provost's Dog trilogy by Tamora Pierce, that follows a young cop called Beka Cooper. You don't need to know much about it to understand why I'm talking about this. What you need to know is that in book 3, Beka receives iron-clad information that one of three people very close to her (mentor, friend, romantic partner) is a traitor working against her.

this could be a great plot device. but something weird happened to me when I read it, and I've talked to other people who have had the same experience, which is that once I knew it HAD to be one of those three....mentally, emotionally, I turned on all of them. I stopped liking all of them the same way. I felt like i had to harden my heart to all three of them. When the traitor was eventually revealed, I almost didn't care. I wasn't even glad for the other two, and i STILL liked them less than I had before I had to come to terms with the fact that they might be a traitor.

I feel like that experience gives me the exact perspective of what Albus is going through at the end of the First War. He knows, according to McGonagall in PoA, that someone "close to the Potters" (I interpret this to mean Remus, Peter, and Sirius) is passing information to Voldemort, and has been for quite a while. He offers to be their Secret-Keeper himself, because the only person he can 100% count on not to be a traitor, controlled, deluded, or misguided by Voldemort is himself. He's already mentally accepted (has had to!) that one of them is a traitor. He did not believe any of them were, but if ONE has to be, then they all CAN be. He has to accept that it is possible each of them COULD be betraying James and Lily. Emotionally, he's hardened himself to it.

It also reminds me of the King's Dilemma in the Stormlight Archives. If you know 3 shepherds in your town have murdered an innocent man, and there are 4 shepherds in your town, and you have no way to know which one is innocent, can the Just King afford to let any of them go free? Can the Just King afford to hang any of them? What if there were 5 shepherds in the town? What if there were 1,000? One king says even if there were 1,000, they must all hang. The other says even if 999 were murderers, he could not hang any of them, because any one might be the innocent one.

If the responsibility of protecting people from traitors is your job, how many can you afford to let go free?

I wanted to talk about the shift in Harry's internal voice from Order of Phoenix to Half Blood Prince, and how his grief, guilt and immense self-loathing for his part in events around Sirius' death informs it. At the end of Order of Phoenix, Harry is a mess - of incoherent, unfocused grief, where he wishes he never wished more that he was anybody else:

“Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human — ”

"I DON'T WANT TO BE HUMAN!” Harry roared, and he seized one of the delicate silver instruments from the spindle-legged table beside him and flung it across the room.

The scene at Dumbledore's office is rife with how much he blames himself for his godfather's death. After one cathartic scene at the office, Harry spends the next year avoiding any and all mention of Sirius (he wolfs down his breakfast when Ron and Hermione bring him up) and suppresses his grief and rage surrounding the events of OOTP- unless he is sure that the person he is speaking to understands the weight of Sirius' loss: he hopes Remus would write to him, he mentions Sirius voluntarily to Tonks (under the impression that she is grieving him), and talks about him to Buckbeak ("Missing him? But you're okay with Hagrid, aren't you?"). His grief and rage manifests in precise, focused rage in this chilling Harry scenes:

Thank you!” said Mundungus, snatching the goblet out of Ron’s hand and stuffing it back into the case. “Well, I’ll see you all — OUCH!”

Harry had pinned Mundungus against the wall of the pub by the throat. Holding him fast with one hand, he pulled out his wand.

“Harry!” squealed Hermione.

Why do I call it a focused, precise rage? Mostly, because unlike the other times Harry is provoked with perceived disrespect to a dead parent, Harry has not forgotten his wand. (Cue the scene in OOTP that he is so angry he just beats up Malfoy with his fists). What Harry has done is not just grab him by the throat, he makes sure Mundungus (who is shorter than him) is nose to nose with him and then threatens him with a wand. (btw, a note from my reread: younger Harry attacks people bigger than him by grabbing their throats too - Vernon to get his letter, the troll etc etc. It seems to be something he had picked up from Vernon. We see Vernon grabbing him by throat in opening chapters of OOTP)

“You took that from Sirius’s house,” said Harry, who was almost nose to nose with Mundungus and was breathing in an unpleasant smell of old tobacco and spirits. “That had the Black family crest on it.”

“I — no — what — ?” spluttered Mundungus, who was slowly turning purple.

“Give it to me!”

“Harry, you mustn’t!” shrieked Hermione, as Mundungus started to turn blue.

There was a bang, and Harry felt his hands fly off Mundungus’s throat. Gasping and spluttering, Mundungus seized his fallen case, then — CRACK — he Disapparated.

And Tonks has to throw Harry magically off Mundungus.

Harry swore at the top of his voice, spinning on the spot to see where Mundungus had gone.

And he doesn't stop until Tonks magically throws him off Mundungus. It is not a coincidence that we see Harry's darker and more chilling traits in a book where he is heavily paralleled with Tom Riddle. The parallel is explicit in the scene where he uses his mother's death to guilt Slughorn into giving him the memory. But here is a tiny mention of how Tom Riddle reacts to perceived disrespect to an heirloom from his parent:

“That’s right!” said Hepzibah, delighted, apparently, at the sight of Voldemort gazing at her locket, transfixed. “I had to pay an arm and a leg for it, but I couldn’t let it pass, not a real treasure like that, had to have it for my collection. Burke bought it, apparently, from a ragged-looking woman who seemed to have stolen it, but had no idea of its true value — ”

There was no mistaking it this time: Voldemort’s eyes flashed scarlet at the words, and Harry saw his knuckles whiten on the locket’s chain.

Quite telling to me that Harry specifically notices how Voldemort's knuckles whiten around the locket, after Hepzibah pretty much talks about how Merope was essentially robbed. Harry understands.

When Harry had finished speaking, Ron shook his head.

“You really understand him.”