#obscurials

“Well,” said Harry, his eyes already half-lidded and body growing limp. “See you on the other side.”

It seems time has just run out. Voldemort finally got his way and killed Albus Dumbledore, the last thing standing in his path.

T.M. Riddle and the new Headmistress, Minerva McGonagall, try to shore up Hogwarts' defences, in a last-ditch attempt to stave off the darkness. But with a scattered Order and the Ministry cracking down on dissent, that's a tall order.

Harry Potter's not confident he'll make it to eighteen. For now, he'll try to lie low, piece together the information he's been left about the remaining Horcruxes, and fight back any way he can. Dumbledore's Army is rising.

The future speaks to Ruby Potter, and voices from beyond the Veil have joined in. If she can figure out how the hand needs to be played, she just might find the move that wins the game.

Death, as always, will take his inexorable course. Remember to live, because you have to die.

oh honey. Oh honey. I- I need you to know you came to either the BEST or the WORST person for this; obscurials are my favorite bit of Harry Potter Worldbuilding.

I've seen... the first two FBAWTFT movies, read the actual textbook, and have had so many headcanons. All of this in addition to reading the main seven, watching all eight of the original movies, and reading cursed child. I haven't done anything with the video games, but I also don't think the video games have done anything with Obscurials so who cares.

Alright, let's go. I adore the concept of Obscurials.

You may have noticed their appearances in Not Every Open Wound, Potshot, Not (Our Parents') Children, I feel like I've been on this earth many times before, and Hyacinth, that's because I adore them. Would become their patron saint.

Now, you have to give me a little bit of slack, because I did watch the movies with Credence (I watched them for Credence, let's be honest) and I immediately went 'hmm I liked it better my way'. So.

Obscurials.

An Obscurial is a person who hosts a creature known as an Obscurus. When they appear in fic, and honestly when they appear in canon, there's not a lot of explanation or expansion on what the creature is like. We just see that Newt Scamander pulled one out a girl once and she died about it. Which I think was explained by him doing it after she'd been an obscurial for too long, but I like the idea of it just being permanent. You can't un-obscurialize.

Now, how does someone become an obscurial? By hating their magic. The Woman We All Hate said in an interview once that the only reason Harry did not form/attract an Obscurus is that he didn't know he had magic to hate/blame for his treatment. It's a form of self hatred where they try to rip out an integral part of themselves and in response it turns on them and kills them from the inside out.

It's chronic. It's terminal. Obscurials don't live long. Credence, at 20, was the oldest known obscurial. Longest to survive after forming one.

Most obscurials don't know how to control it! Their magic is broken and they're too scared of themselves, hate it too much, to learn to work with it! It's such an interesting concept! And you can pry magical chronic/terminal illnesses from my cold dead hands. Did you know it's a chronic illness if it's expected to last your whole life and a terminal illness if it's expected to kill you within 2 years?

Honestly you can pry fictional illnesses from my cold dead hands. It's the chronic illness in me. I wanna see rep. I wanna see people being permanently injured and having to learn to live with it and survive even though they'll never be what they were.

Back to obscurials. Another headcanon I have for them is that they were part of why the muggleborn discrimination got so bad - yeah, we'll say the witch hunts were a large part of it, but think about it. Wixen are being hunted. They go into hiding. For reasons unknown, sometimes muggleborns and muggle-raised wixen (ones raised in areas so dangerous that they tried to reject their magic to survive) explode and kill a bunch of people. And no one even knows what an obscurial is, let alone what causes them or how to temper them.

Idk if you've read NEOW yet but the premise of that fic is that Death Eaters purposefully manipulated muggleborns into turning Obscuri to kill muggles en masse, and then Voldemort was defeated, but the obscurials were still around, abandoned by the magical world as a whole.

I just. I get so feral about Obscurials. They don't go to hogwarts. They don't get medical care from St. Mungos. They're barely talked about, they're definitely not given therapy, the wizarding world doesn't even HAVE therapists. They're children who were hurt so viciously that it's physically killing them and no one cares. No one is around to help. They're locked up in basements and hidden away in shame and they're just hurt kids who lash out because they can't help it. Magic is intent and they hate themselves so much that it turned on them and they can't undo that.

It's the best bit of worldbuilding we were ever given, imo, and it's dreadfully underused and was so clearly an aside when it was written.

DPxHP: Obscurials are a kind of Halfa.

The "lore" behind this is basically that a halfa is any ghost killed by ectoplasm (rather than something caused by portals). For Danny, that was electrified ectoplasm; for obscurials, magic is a stand-in for ectoplasm (or a form of it). They're a naturally unstable kind of ghost because their magic never stops killing them - like if a ghost was allergic to ectoplasm. You can't be allergic to yourself.

The story would have a "pay it forward" theme; newly-turned halfa Danny is helped by an obscurial, which introduces him to others who don't fit the dead/alive binary. This can pan out to him having a better idea of helping Dani (due to prior knowledge of destabilization in ghosts) and then Dani meeting obscurials in her travels and doing what she can to help them.

Consider, though, that he is well-known, and people have heard of him.

Only they’ve only heard the name of Credence Barebone, and nobody’s heard of Aurelius Dumbledore.

Or vice versa - people have heard of Aurelius Dumbledore; his identity as Credence Barebone is unknown.

Or maybe people have heard of Aurelius Dumbledore (an illegitimate son of Aberforth Dumbledore who died young. Aberforth doesn’t like to talk about him. Aberforth doesn’t like to talk about most things, really.) and also Credence Barebone (the American Obscurial who joined Grindelwald but defected) but they haven’t connected the two. They don’t know that they’re one and the same.

Chapters: 4/? Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Justin Finch-Fletchley & Harry Potter Characters: Harry Potter, Justin Finch-Fletchley, Justin Finch-Fletchley's Mother, Justin Finch-Fletchley's Father, Piers Polkiss, Minerva McGonagall Additional Tags: Harry Potter is Bad at Feelings, Obscurial Harry Potter, Blood and Violence, Obscurus (Harry Potter), Obscurials (Harry Potter), Abusive Dursley Family (Harry Potter), Justin is just a child he doesn't know how to deal with this, POV Harry Potter, POV Justin Finch-Fletchley, Not Canon Compliant, Angst, Fluff and Angst Summary:

After all the abuse Harry suffers at the Dursleys he ends up as an obscural. He gets found by another boy who has powers like him.

I think they were the first major sign that JKR was slipping into hilarious retcon in her Fantastic Beasts series. Only, back then, no one wanted to admit it.

First, like a lot of things in Harry Potter, this thing we’ve never heard of becomes a plot device. Which, alright, interesting, except this one... I’m not really sure what the point is.

We’re assured obscurials are hugely powerful beings of destruction but... They can’t really be controlled. Oh sure, we see Grindelwald thinking he can, but everything we see from them they just wipe out neighborhoods in a fit of rage. Seems like a very odd weapon to fixate on. An obscurial is the sort of thing that might very well destroy your own forces just as much as it would your enemies.

More, should obscurials exist, the Harry Potter world would look very different.

First, the statute of secrecy could not survive the existence of obscurials. Already, wizards are hilariously terrible at keeping their own secret. But, if children who suppress their magic are ticking time bombs...

Now, there are very very very few muggleborns, so that helps. However, the likelihood of those muggleborns, even in good non-abusive households, trying to suppress their magic is very high. A normal family would have no idea what to do with their telekinetic child. It’s like trying to raise Jean Gray, who with a single thought accidentally turns your house into a puddle, that’s terrifying. I imagine even loving parents would try to get their children to control it, which, of course, could easily slip into the suppression needed to create an obscurial.

You’d have dozens of incidents of Carrie White at the prom. Entire towns might be destroyed thanks to an obscurial. And while it’s just like the Wizarding World to go “Hey, another gas leak!” I think they’d admit that this is a very large and very dangerous problem.

One that, at least per the original Harry Potter series, they don’t seem to care about in the slightest.

Tom Riddle’s in a muggle orphanage where they hint they’ve tried to exorcise him: he is a demon child and should rot! Harry Potter’s in an abusive household where they actively try to suppress his magic: it’s good for him!

I think, in the world where obscurials exist, likely muggleborn children would be made wards of the state at the first sign of accidental magic. Rather than risk an obscurial, they’d simply abduct them and place them with well to do and respected wizarding families. You’d have Hermione growing up a ward of the Malfoy family. Because you can have the statute of secrecy or obscurials, you cannot have both.

And then there’s Harry.

Harry grows up in a family that actively punishes him for performing magic. He grows up believing he is a freak of nature and tries not to use accidental magic. If anyone is an obscurial candidate, it’s Harry Potter, and yet there’s no hint that he’ll ever become one or this was ever a risk. 

I once accidentally got in a fight with some friends (who adore Harry Potter) over this and they tried to convince me obscurials weren’t retcon because Harry was never trying to suppress his magic. He just... lived with the Dursleys... who punished him for using magic... and he thought he was a freak... JKR IS A GODDESS! (Naturally, this was a few years ago before popular opinion of JKR took a nose dive and long before the hilariously terrible Crimes of Grindelwald came out). 

Which Dumbledore's Secrets Will Feature in "Fantastic Beasts" 3?

But anyway Sanders Sides + Obscurials from Harry Potter. An obscurial forms when a witch or wizard suppresses their magic. The magic turns on the person, slowly destroying them, and causing Much Havoc around them in times of high emotion.

So uhhhh Remus + obscurial??

Kid!Remus sees that everyone thinks he’s bad, and he’s scaring his brother and decides he Doesn’t Want That, so stops talking about the sort of creativity he enjoys, and tries to be more like Roman. It doesn’t work too well, and he gets sent to the Dark Sides, and there he keeps trying to be like Roman and the more intrusive thoughts he gets, the more upset and angry with himself he becomes, until he forces it all so far down that he snaps and turns into a Ball Of Chaos.

Obvs when he’s done being a Ball Of Chaos he’s p mortified with himself, and so he runs away into the Imagination to hide from the other Sides. Roman can sense that something is v wrong with Remus and wrangles the other Sodes into helping him find him but uh oh Remus is destroying himself trying to be good, and the others have to convince him that he’s fine as he is and doesn’t need to change.

A Harry Potter Obscurial can’t be saved as far as I’m aware, but this ain’t totally that and I like happy endings so, the other Sides learn to accept Remus, and even tho he still becomes a Ball Of Chaos now and then, it happens with decreasing regularity as he learns that he doesn’t have to stifle who he is.