scargo 🐌

Pippin, just being pippin: Look, MUSHROoms!!

The other three, running at full speed: MUSHROOMS!

Aragorn, who is a skilled ranger who knows every plant, tree, and flower to survive: No those are poisonous!

Frodo, who’s mouth is stuffed full: No they’re not. We eat these all the time back in the shire.

Merry, speaking with his mouth full, spitting mushroom everywhere: Yeah, they’re definitely not poisonous. Do you want one?

Aragorn, now having an existential crisis: No, n-no. I’m good.

What if that’s the reason Sam and Frodo survived in Mordor? 

What if all those references to noxious fumes and tainted water and everything were completely literal? They avoided eating anything made there, but they had to keep drinking and breathing. 

What if part of Mordor’s defenses was that it’s literally poisonous to any creature not specifically bred to live in those conditions? What if Faramir was so careful about warning them about drinking the water because he knew it was fatal? What if Sauron’s general lack of concern about shit going down inside his own borders (aside from treachery, which apparently happened a lot) was knowing that any Mortal Man or Elf or Whatever that wandered in was gonna be stone dead in a few days, and his desire to catch any infiltrators on the borders was to keep them alive long enough for questioning?

And then these two hobbits who have spent their entire lives merrily ingesting enough poisonous fungi for breakfast to give Shelob a stomach-ache trot into Mordor and drink the poisonous waters and breath the poisonous fumes and scratch themselves on the poisonous thorns and feel mildly unwell.

ー 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐲 𝐠𝐢𝐫𝐥 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐦𝐧 𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧🕯️⚰️

Paring: N.L x Reader Tags: Classmate romance // Sweet // School hood pining // Request: what if the reader and Neville are paired up together in herbology to take care of a plant like a baby project W/C: 811 A/N: a shorty! V Sweet <3 [masterlist] Much love, Saige

Neville piece wooooo!

So my headcanon is this: the Weasleys were your regular pure blood family, aristocrats essentially. Maybe not as rich as Malfoys or Potters, but still very well-to-do, and then lost it all very recently. That’s why we are presented with the world where there are supposed to be many many weasleys, but in fact there are only Arthur’s branch. His brother Billius was a raging alcoholic, too. The twins said he died from delirium from drinking basically.

So here goes: the sacred 28 form the wizard House of Lords, that’s why Arthur is able to push for some laws (and I think that given that the laws thing and the sacred 28/blood purity are explored in the same book, that’s probably what she intended), because he has the seat in the wizarding House of Lords. He and Lucius knew each other well and were friendly/grew up around each other before the Weasleys went bankrupt and Arthur chose to side with Dumbledore in the war. That’s why Lucius is going around talking to his son about Arthur, while sounding very bitter. Explains the strange money flow and all of the connections and favors, too.

What a fantastic theory. I absolutely love this. You can absolutely make the case that the Weasleys and/or Prewetts were aristocratic families who fell from grace *recently.*

Like we have:

~ Molly's squib second cousin the accountant who they "never talk about." Yeah I BET. It sounds like this cousin just left the wizard world completely. Are you even allowed to do that?

~ Uncle Bilius, Ron's namesake. The alcoholic who officially died after seeing a grim... but it's kinda vauge if grim even exist, so we're going to chalk that one up under "died under mysterious circumstances."

~ Aunt Muriel, who has money... but she's not helping out Molly and Arthur, even though she's "fond of Bill" so does she really? She's the one with the goblin-made moonstone tiara, which kinda sounds like (the last?) family heirloom.

~ Molly's brothers Fabian and Gideon who died unexpectedly young, and without heirs. Does this mean that the Prewett money went to another family/branch of the family? Was Molly out of the running because she technically wasn't a Prewett at the time, and the money follows the name? Also, she'd already had most of her large family before they died, so maybe she was counting on an income that dried up.

(do they have death duties / inheritance tax in the wizarding world? they MIGHT.)

We actually know that a person from the Black family got disowned for marrying a Weasley (Septimus Weasley, if I remember correctly). This guy is most likely Arthur's father, based on Sirius's explanation of how they're related, so we know the Weasleys were already considered blood traitors before Arthur was born (or, alternatively, Arthur's father did something that turned him into a social pariah after Arthur was born and the whole family got disowned). I imagine that they started losing their fortune, or rather stopped earning new money, when they got "cancelled" by pureblood society and therefore lost any business contacts. OTOH the Blacks who intermarried with Prewetts are still on the family tree, which makes me suspect that Molly's family is at the very least disapproving of her marriage to Arthur (which also makes sense considering how more... Normie she is compared to him). Now, the Black family tree says that Septimus Weasley had 3 children, but according to some JKR interview there was a draft where Ginny was supposed to be "the seventh child of the seventh child" and therefore super magically powerful, which makes me think that Septimus perhaps had seven children, Arthur being the youngest, and that the couple had three children *at the moment when his wife Cedrella was burned off the family tree*. Because why would the family tree continue tracking her if she's been obliterated from it? This would explain why the Weasleys are so poor: Septimus had to divide his rapidly dwindling fortune between seven children, and Arthur is the youngest. It would also explain why "Old Uncle Billius" is old - he could be one of the eldest children, and therefore almost a generation older than Arthur. And it would also place Arthur in the position of growing up raised by rich parents who are no longer rich, hence his lack of care with money (nobody taught him how to manage it) and "rich people habits". I personally like this theory because this is what happened to *my* family: my grandfather is the ninth child of a minor aristocrat who lost everything through backing the wrong side in WWII, and my grandfather (who barely remembers the time when the family had any money) inherited nothing but a tiny plot of land and a sense of entitlement. I can confirm that it does definitely lead to "rich people habits" and a complete lack of knowledge of how to manage a household on a normal budget, among other behavioural weirdness. I imagine Molly was also used to life of a... Higher tenor I guess, which has probably contributed both to the growing resentment between her and Arthur, and her overbearing insistence for her children to make something out of themselves. I imagine that she's likely from a younger branch and the Prewett money went to some older uncle/son, if she hasn't been actively disinherited as well. I don't remember if we ever hear Molly talking about any family members aside from her brothers?