Rose Leviosa

This movie got made because Robin Williams said yes to it (and it's important that Gene Hackman did as well). Williams in the 90s was a mega-star of a type that's not present in the current media environment (maybe Tom Cruise, but I personally think that's echo from his salad days). Even his flops made money on the back end in the video rental market, which also doesn't exist anymore (streaming is different). Hackman was on the other side of his A-list career but still Hollywood nobility if not full royalty.

Playing gay was considered career suicide in the 90s. There had been a number of actors who put lie to that belief stretching back decades, but this was Williams and Hackman (yes, being on screen next to a gay character was enough to get you blacklisted) saying "screw that" and doing it anyway.

Being gay and out was career suicide in the 90s.

Nathan Lane had a really nice gig going for himself. The Lion King put him into the Disney rep company with people like Williams, Bette Midler, and Whoopie Goldberg (check their IMBD list from the 90s--they were making bank at Disney).

Lane didn't come out until several years later (nice summary: https://deadline.com/2024/06/nathan-lane-robin-williams-advice-coming-out-birdcage-1235975010/).

I don't want to imply that this was a Sorkinized moment where everything changed because of one thing, but this was a very important movie that caused real movement in the needle on queer acceptance.

Hope and Lyall's muggle wedding - unfortunately I did not have the skill to pull off Hope dancing in her bare feet amidst all her drunken relatives but I can, at least, draw them staring into each other's eyes like the delighted saps they are <3

From Inevitable - 1969 Ch 16 - Tied

She'd known from very early that he was a wizard. He'd confessed it a week after they'd met. The third time they saw each other, she'd started talking in amused gratitude of his heroics and he'd gone very red and mumbled his confession.

(And then she'd gotten very annoyed that he was perhaps trying to take the piss and had gotten even more annoyed when he'd said well, I can't show you now, because they were out in public, and he'd been accosted by a vice-clench of fear that this might be the last time he spoke to her, if he carried on this way, so he'd pulled them out of the cafe and into an alley and set off a silent firework from his wand, and watched the colour and light burst in her dark eyes, and the waitress had run out after them for fear that they had been planning to leave without paying.)

Anyway, they'd had two ceremonies.

After all, there were two registries they needed to submit the union to (even though, these days, it was easy enough to get a muggle-friendly duplicate made of a wizarding wedding). He'd said that - that the Ministry had a whole department for that sort of thing. Had shown her his passport, made by the same people, even.

But then, when they'd talked though the reality of it, it became clear how logistically difficult it would be.

So, they could tell her parents, really, if they must. But then, to have anyone else attend, they'd have to tell them too. And that brought in friends, and cousins, and brothers-in-law and it all became too much (for him, really. Not for her. She would have told everyone, back then).

So they'd decided they'd have a muggle ceremony, and she'd show him off to everyone, and he'd be a liar if he said he hadn't beamed at that. That she'd wanted them all there, and that was why they were having a muggle one, as he'd explained to his parents.

It was his mam who suggested having two.

Said she'd had a wizarding ceremony, and it has been very exciting and beautiful, and made her feel like a proper witch in a way that it was sometimes difficult to, as a muggle-born who, up until that point, had had most of her existence in the muggle world, with snaps of magic here and there.

His mum had said just do both - she'll like it. And so they did.

Hope and her mother had planned the muggle one, and he and his mother had planned to magical one, and if he were honest, it had been quite fun, to plan a wedding for his wife that she had very little idea about. He'd enjoyed zipping his lips with a smug smile when she'd tried every creative method to get details out of him. Hope and his mum had gone out dress shopping for it, even though she had insisted she could just wear the same dress twice, and he'd been picked up by Hope's dad in his scuffed Bedford Envoy and taken down to the tailors for a very awkward few hours while he, Wilfred Howell, and Hope's brother-in-law, Jan, had been paraded in and out of little curtained changing rooms to have shirts and waistcoats and trousers pinned and oohed at. He'd never felt so painfully out-of-place in his body before.

Redraw of an illustration of Hope and Remus from my fic Inevitable - 1969

"Remus…" She shifted, turned on her side to face him, and he finally opened his eyes. His eyebrows were knotted together in the same way Lyall's did whenever he was trying to read the paper over the noise of the two of them talking. "I'm sorry I left, this morning."

"It's okay."

"I don't think it was. Your dad was upset. So was I, but it was… unfair to leave him- oh this isn't… you don't need to hear-" she sighed and tried to straighten her train of thought. "I wish you hadn't gotten hurt. I'm sorry we didn't keep you safe."

He blinked up at her, impassive. "I am safe."

"You got hurt."

"I always get hurt."

She knew he meant it literally. As a reminder and assurance. This happens every month, to some degree. Why are you getting upset about it now? But it felt more like a kick in the teeth.

"Yeah. And it's not fair. That grown ups can't control themselves, and you get hurt."

They stared at each other for a few moments. He was rubbing one foot absently against her prickly, two days' unshaved ankle and it made her strangely self-conscious.

"I don't know what you mean."

She kissed him on the forehead more to punctuate the end of the conversation, than anything else.

"Goodnight, Mouse."