Do I really need a name.

My first fanfic, look !!!

I did just have to bite the bullet, accept that it’s terrible, stop editing, and publish anyway.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/72887301/chapters/205557026

This ended up being great timing.

Earlier today I read a story about a Ukrainian soldier and POW who was held in Russian captivity for over 1000 days. While there, stories starting getting to his wife from fellow prisoners, how he had been keeping up everyone's hope... by reciting Harry Potter.

ALL of Harry Potter. He had basically memorized all seven books, and through the long days he would whisper the story, almost word-for-word, careful to leave them on cliffhangers. When he finished... they asked him to start again.

And I was thinking about this man, this prisoner whispering to his cellmates between bouts of torture, this story of hope, of light overcoming darkness, of a world to escape to and characters to care about. It's about friendship, love, family, and it's about war, and grief, and death.

His name is Oleksandr Ivanov, and he's back home with his family, after being captured in 2022.

step 1

step 2

step 3

I will give credit where it’s due: Snape doesn’t mock Harry about any of the traumatic memories he sees. He even almost compliments Harry a few times. He seems to be occasionally trying. Even when he isn’t being the most sadistic version of himself which he is 99% of the time, he clearly just has no clue how to teach (although, after 15 years of having children in his care - certainly including children whose families were victimized and killed by Death Eaters and Snape himself - the least he could do is suck it up and learn how to teach). Faced with proof that Harry isn’t a pampered prince like James, Snape is clearly very reluctantly seeing himself (and seeing Lily) in Harry.

Unfortunately, all of that is made null and void with Snape’s reaction to Harry viewing SWM and all his abusive behavior in the future.

I can’t believe it’s still debated whether Snape’s reaction to Harry viewing SWM is about the Marauders or about Lily. It’s not his worst memory because of James, it’s his worst memory because of Lily. If Snape didn’t react like that to Harry seeing memories of his abusive father, then his reaction here isn’t due to a memory of being bullied.

And Snape like, very very openly says things like “Sirius tried to MURDER me!” in front of Harry, he was never even pretending that he was anything but a victim of the Marauders, he claims that status readily! He seems like he’s blatantly implying it in a lot of the things he says about James, he also shows Harry detention slips of the Marauders’ attacking others (idk if they included any slips of them attacking him but he’s still obliquely alluding to their “bullying” and therefore the Pensieve memory), and willingly brings it up in HBP during his duel with Harry after Dumbledore’s death.

People say SNAPE had his privacy invaded? Snape only had one singular memory revealed, to one singular child (okay, two, counting the one with his dad). This book consists of Sirius’s childhood trauma being put on display for the whole Order, including Snape, to see for a year - which Snape constantly mocks him for, despite his conveying the prophecy being what led to Sirius’s best friends being killed and his imprisonment and torture in Azkaban, which Sirius is still paying the consequences for and is the whole reason he’s stuck in that house as a fugitive. And still, Sirius endures it, because having Grimmauld Place as a safe house helps the Order. Snape has seen months and months worth of Harry’s worst memories, memories far worse than SWM. Snape also had no issue reading aloud to a whole classroom an article that violently invaded Hermione’s privacy about her romantic life - an article that called her a slut and that the whole damn wizarding world could read - to humiliate her.

And you know what - Snape lost the right to any privacy about Lily when he called her a slur and humiliated her publicly in the front of the whole school, and certainly when he got her killed.

Harry has every fucking right to his mother’s story. He has every right to know about the man who is responsible for his mother’s death and how that man treated her and victimized her.

Lily isn’t there to tell Harry her story because of Snape. She isn’t there to tell him about the heartbreak and despair she felt when she was betrayed by her best friend. Lily and her memory is erased from history because of Snape. Snape fucking owes Harry that memory.

Snape’s response to being faced with his OWN biggest mistake, his OWN horrific fascist violence against his muggleborn best friend, is not to take responsibility for it, but to get physically violent with her son and stop doing his fucking job for the Order in teaching Harry a life saving skill that is absolutely crucial for their mission, which eventually leads to Harry being lured to the DoM and Sirius’s death. Snape can’t make this one sacrifice (which can hardly even be called a sacrifice). He does the same thing in HBP when Harry uses Sectumsempra - he’s faced with a Dark curse he invented and certainly used in combat to torture/kill victims as a DE, and used enough at Hogwarts that it became known as his specialty, and responds by deflecting blame onto the Marauders by showing Harry detention slips of their petty crimes and psychologically torturing Harry over his grief over Sirius. He also only doesn’t sell out Harry over the Prince’s book because he’s hiding the Dark magic in it from Dumbledore, again being unwilling to acknowledge his Death Eater violence.

None of this is Harry’s fault. It’s Snape’s for being an awful abusive teacher. Even when Snape’s behavior is at its tamest, he does still repeatedly insult Harry, and these lessons start with Snape yet again insulting Harry and Harry’s dead father in Grimmauld Place. Yes Harry doesn’t practice, but if it hadn’t been someone who abused him for five years teaching him, he would’ve been far more inclined to practice. Likewise, Harry not believing that Snape heeded his “he’s got Padfoot in the place where it’s hidden” warning and therefore tearing off to the DoM was in part due to Snape’s abusive behavior - why would Harry believe Snape had anything but the worst intentions after how he’s treated both him and Sirius? Harry also doesn’t anticipate viewing a personal memory of Snape’s when he enters the Pensieve, he thinks it’s stuff Snape is hiding about the Order. Harry respects Snape’s privacy and doesn’t tell Ron and Hermione about the memory (he also respects Neville’s re: his parents).

Harry, if that happened:

He was headmaster while Dumbledore was a student and he would’ve known about his father being arrested. Dumbledore was Head Boy and Phineas chose him for that role. Furthermore, he was headmaster until 1925 so he was the one who hired Dumbledore to teach. (I know he dumped most of his work onto his deputy, but I think that choosing the Head Boy and Girl and hiring staff are things he’d do himself, or, at least, would require his direct approval.)

This is a watsonian analysis vs doylist analysis issue.

I 100% do think that JKR went out of her way to really, really downplay the importance of gender in her worldbuilding - and this contributes a lot to the specific feel of the world. You could genderflip, idk. Neville. Snape. Draco. Hermione. McGonagall. and almost no plot elements or character dynamics would change. (Maybe James would bully Severus slightly differently? Idk. He honestly might not.)

Compare HP to something like His Dark Materials, another British fantasy series released at the same time, marketed to the same demographic... in which gender politics are REALLY important. Lyra conforming or not conforming to specific gender norms hugely impacts the way a lot of other characters treat her. So much of Mrs. Coulter's character has to do with how she's navigated the back ways and side avenues into power, because the patriarchy that runs *that* world is extremely explicit and plot relevant, and there's a lot she just can't do.

Now is JKR *good* at writing a gender-blind world? Not really no. So she's stripped out the importance of gender in a fairly surface way, while leaving evidence of the foundations intact. Everyone's a het couple, women take the husband's last name, Molly and Petunia are at home while their husbands work and there's no inverse of that situation, Fleur's father walks her down the aisle at her wedding, it's important that Hermione be able to tame her hair when she wants to, but for Harry it doesn't matter...

There is ALSO the narrative voice poking through and putting its own spin on everything. This is where we start getting judgment (for example) directed both at girls who are too feminine, and at girls who aren't feminine enough. Or sexual assault not really "sticking" if it's directed at boys. We don't have a character talking, in-universe, about how it's wrong for a woman not to want children. We just have a book where the only women who don't have kids (or take care of kids) are villains. Same thing with masculinity = strength = no crying. That's something the narrative framing / bias of the author brings to the table, but it's kept out of the mechanics of the magical world. I guess you could say Harry and Draco equate crying/fainting with weakness (but not explicitly anti-masculinity)... but then Lupin goes out of his way to separate 'fainting' from 'weakness' anyway.

Interestingly, gender is much more baked into the muggle worldbuilding. (Part of why I think leaving that aspect out of the wizarding world was a deliberate choice.) Smeltings is an all-boys school, so is St Brutus.' Dudley teases Harry about his "boyfriend" Cedric, Vernon sizes up Arthur and Mad-Eye by how masculine they are. At the beginning of Book 4, Dudley's diet is this very gendered conflict between Vernon and Petunia, where Vernon doesn't want a "little nancy boy for a son" - and that is one of the only truly gendered insults in the whole series. "Crybaby" almost counts... but the Slytherins tease Hermione for crying too, so idk. They tend to go for pretty gender-neutral insults, like "poor" "unimportant parents" "looks like a chipmunk" ... etc.

And people like "wtf why" looking out their hotel room window and there's this. This dragon just curled up in the pool chilling, literally, cooling itself down