#gred

Two very cool guys from @kezokinos and @bluefbread ♥ I had so much fun drawing these, thank you for this commission ♥

(Gred, Freddikins, The Better Twin)

Basics

Full Name: Frederick Gideon Weasley

House/Alignment: Gryffindor

Year/Birthdate: April 1st, 1978 Aries

Heritage: The Weasley Clan is rather comically large and spans all across the south of Wales, the county of Cork, north through Mallow and up into Shannon. Originally they haled from the island Inishbofin, where still stands the Caislean O Laochda, long abandoned by the family itself who have not set foot on the island for five generations due to an unfortunate occurrence with an Elf called Romi and the misfortune judgment of Clodagh O’Laochda. To create distance and, hopefully, rid themselves of the stain of their unfortunate relations actions they changed their name to ‘Weasley’ and moved to Wales. Since then they have been subject to a truly unfortunate turn of luck. At every avenue, at every venture they encountered misfortune after misfortune. This bad turn didn’t truly start turning around until the fortuitous marriage of Arthur Weasley to Margaret ‘Molly’ Prewett. The Prewett’s, being longstanding Welsh Wixen were a family of old traditions, good fortune and better sense. The Unfortunate loss of Molly’s elder brothers, Fabian and Gideon, did mean that the Prewett family needed a new avenue of inheritance. Fortunately for everyone, the Weasley Twins were born. The Twins are efeilliaid hudol, or Magical Twins, and as such share the Prewett title and family seat. 

Notable Features: wild, curly brown hair, mischievous brown eyes and an overabundance of freckles. 

Reputation at Hogwarts To Gryffindors: “Oi Freddie! Got a question for ya!”

To Slytherins: “Which one is that? Absolute menaces both of them, should have been expelled ages ago.”

To Ravenclaws: “He’s not here is he! This is the library! They were banned! Hide the books!”

To Hufflepuffs: “Good for a laugh I do say, don’t want to get on their bad side to be sure.”

Strengths & Magic

Most folk don’t take into account the amount of work that goes into the Twins pranks and shenanigans. They’re quite skilled to be sure, though not at all in the same way as one another. The other thing that people tend to miss is that being twins, even Magical Twins, does not make them the same person. Fred is the more flamboyant of the two, and prefers explosions, colorful reactions and pushing the bounds of Experimental Research in the name of fun.   

Extraordinary skilled in intuitive incantation, thaumatological innovation and defensive magic. Between the two of them Fred is very much the Idea Man, always pushing for bigger, better, weirder or perhaps something with bells on it.  

Weaknesses & Troubles

Has by far the more explosive temperament of the Twins, and is far more likely to curse first, ask questions later. This does, on more than one occasion, cause problem. 

Uses aggressive forms of humor as a defense mechanism for when people can’t tell him and his brother apart, or who minimize his intelligence to ‘troublemaker’ or ‘prankster’. 

Relationships

Allies: George Weasley, Lee Jordan, Angelina Mansur, Alicia Spinnett, Katie Bell, Oliver Wood

Family Notes: He loves his family, truly he does. His brothers are his heroes and he finds his father’s eccentricities to be delightful as well as occasionally inspiring. His mother…well. He loves his mum, she’s the absolute center of the Weasley Family’s life. However…well. Her relationship with Fred and George has never been easy. They’ve always been a bit Too Much. Too Loud, too Boisterous, too Reckless. Too much like her departed brothers. Too much fool bravery and intuitive leaps for her comfort. It takes Fred until well into his adulthood to understand that his mother’s shouting, her admonishments and cosetting which had so frustrated him in adolescence and smothered his childhood, was not a lack of faith. Nor a belief that they were ‘Bad’ or ‘Stupid’, but love wrapped in fear and delivered with scolding and tea. It wasn’t until much, much later that Fred realized that of all her many sons, Molly Weasley feared for the Twins the most, for they more than any of her children, reminded her of her own brothers. Reckless and brave and gone. It wasn’t forgiveness perhaps, but it was something close to understanding. 

Enemies: Voldemort (obvious) the Slytherins (as a matter of High Amusement) Percy (mostly out of habit and because he squeaks very satisfyingly) 

Tragic Crushes: Fred treats Romance, as he treats most things in his life, as a Grand Joke and a very good time. Crushes, flirting, and casually dating is all great fun in all its forms. He never hurts anyone, and nobody ever really hurts him. He also doesn’t really stay still long enough for anything of real consequence. It’s all just fun and games until, well, until.   

Fun Facts

Once managed to charm every suit of armor on the ground floor of Hogwarts to sing sea shanties for a full week. McGonagall nearly lost her voice trying to undo it. He’d been thirteen at the time. 

Famously wrote an entire essay for Morwenna in limerick form. Received an E for Exceptional Rhythm and creative thought. 

Maintains (loudly) that he and George swapped places for all of fourth year and ‘nobody noticed, not even Mum.” This is, in fact, true. The only one who noticed was Lee, who thought it was great fun, and decided to swap with Fred but only for Lockhart’s classes. 

Is technically banned from Zonko’s Joke Shop in Hogsmeade for ‘excessive loitering,” but Fred claims he was just doing ‘market research.’

Holds an abiding and profound love of fireworks—not the store-bought kind of course, but the sort he has invented himself, which may or may not produce creative profanity. 

Narrator Aside 

Fred is a person who has never, not even once, believed life ought to be taken seriously. This was, in fairness, a perfectly reasonable position, as life had never shown any indication it intended to take him seriously either. He laughed in the face of danger, danced in the face of doom, and set fire to the curtains in the face of common sense. If the world insisted on being tragic, Fred would insist on being comic—because someone had to. 

As you know, the question “How did it get like this?” is one I continue to wrestle with, if only to remind myself that it hasn’t always been like this, i.e. we haven’t always had to face an existential threat of such magnitude.

As for the rest of the human malaise, atrocities and inequality, that appears to have been there (practically) from the very start – and I don’t say that to in any way excuse what’s happening now or to come.

But how did it get like this?

How did we not see that that which goeth up and up would eventually bring ruination and destruction on such a scale that whatever we might believe we can do to ameliorate the consequences, the effect of big business, big pharma and big egos was simply that: too big a problem to change.

And yet, as COP28 and similar talking shops aptly demonstrate, our inability to accept that globalisation and our desire for a better life – better than what? – is simply unsustainable on a finite, animate world. 

When I think back to the late 70s and early 80s, when it’s arguable that things really got going – e.g. there is no society and greed is good and we’d never run out of oil – there were no cautionary tales to tether our hubris and self-belief that we could be anything we wanted to be, have what we wanted and enjoy the best of everything. I’m not saying everyone was so in love with materialism and be all you can be but I don’t remember any of my teachers, and certainly not my parents, telling me to aspire to be less than what I was capable of and that meant, of course, consuming and destroying as I went along.

Imagine it otherwise.

Imagine that there was at least an elder or two who could have applied a gentle brake to my putative runaway success, and asked the simple but profound question:

“. . .[B]ut at what cost?”

We know only too well, now, the cost, and the Gods have spoken but still we don’t take heed or not on a scale anywhere sufficient to give us a wee bit more time to find a way to leave this planet for Mars – or wherever the dot.com money is taking us.

As a slight segue, I remember watching one or two videos of the father (apparently) of efilism, Immendam*, who promulgated the idea that all life was inherently bad and someone should press the Red Button to end it all. Radical, nihilist and pro-mortalist for sure but at least there was someone who had a very different narrative on what it meant to be human. I’m not saying I agree with his thesis, and certainly I’m not endorsing him or his material, but I am pointing to a different version of what I’d been exposed to throughout my adult life. Not in the same bracket, but Professor David Bennatar’s book, Better Never To Have Been, was also something that made me think that if only I’d had the benefit of someone in my early days who was prepared to explain what our growing population was and would do to the earth, and that once we all succumbed to the neo-capitalist messaging and adopted mutatis mutandis the same modus vivendi (apologies for the Latin), that it was game over.

But I’m going off the point.

The question is and will remain, how did it get like this? And it’s one I feel duty bound to explore and to share my musings on, if only because I don’t want it said that I didn’t leave a few web-based breadcrumbs for the next generation who are being or have been hoodwinked to believe that this is ‘normal’ (more like insanity if you ask me).

I’m sorry if my message, at least for now, seems repetitive and a little anodyne but it’s where I’m at.

Blessings, Julian 

*Antinatalism led to efilism, a school of thought pioneered by a man known as “Inmendham” on YouTube. Efilists don’t only subscribe to antinatalism but believe all life — animals included — is inherently negative. – We need to talk about extreme antinatalism, Unheard, 5 April 20023

Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

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Azalka, Poma, Lilcia and Diva are created by @weirdimension