been thinkin bout
~parchment~
and the absolutely buckwild implications of its use in the harry potter world (and probably others???) as like, notebook paper
there is a fanfiction in one of the tags i follow that is ostensibly a modern ass student/barista au but the title is like "macchiatos and parchment" and im like. macchiatos and what now
like. hp is ultimately urban fantasy, right. yes, the magical world is isolationist and traditional, but so many people that enter the wizarding world from muggle backgrounds every year, and NONE of them have said oh god why do you people still use fucking PARCHMENT
no. stop that. what the hell is wrong with you. find a way to magically mass produce paper. i will personally go out and bulk buy paper with muggle ass money every semester until you figure this out
WE CAN USE PAPER! WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY!
god, do you know what parchment is? no, better question: do you know how labor intensive that shit is to make? no, even better question: do you know what parchment is?
the thing about parchment is: it’s not paper. yes, it was used as a writing medium, like papyrus was. but it’s not papyrus either.
parchment is animal skin. untanned animal skin. the production process is arduous--the dehairing solution soak alone takes 8+ days, and up to twice as long in winter. probably magic streamlines the process, but you see the problem with using this material for 11 year olds to write their shitty homework assignments on.
and the kids don’t know this, right? there’s no way they know. if they knew, SOMEONE would have something to say about it. and you’d think that someone would be hermione!! but hermione must know about it, because she’s hermione. lavender brown had her elderly rabbit die in PoA and was pretty distraught about that! but what, everybody thinks it’s so normal and fine to write all their 11 year old ass homework on fucking animal skin in the year of our luigi 1991 that they don’t even feel the need to acknowledge it, let alone comment or have an opinion?
ofc the actual answer is either that it’s jkr’s committed vendetta against animals or that she ALSO did not know what it was or think about the implications of anything she wrote (as always) and when she found out, decided to change nothing and double down (as always). but if we dota for a second and really inhabit that watsonian perspective? the statement this makes about the hpverse is bonkers.
