Starting to dislike/realize the flaws in Harry Potter feels like waking up from the trance of a fairy king.
The smile slowly fades from your face as you step out of the circle of mushrooms, asking yourself “Did Joanne really win awards for this level of writing?” The glassy look begins to vanish from your eyes as you think, “Why did Cho Chang get constantly berated by the narration for grieving her graphically murdered dead boyfriend?” You remove your flower crown and hold it in shaking hands as you ask yourself “Were we all just fine and dandy when Jay Kay Ar decided that one of the four houses at her wizarding school was founded by a faux white supremacist and was also FULL of eleven-year-olds who were forcibly designated as white supremacists?” The sky grows darker. You remember the Tolkien plagiarism. You remember the house elves. You remember the banker goblins. You begin to run—
This show is getting out of control with its meta. Basically Midge here comes to visit Barbie from her “hometown”, and is a vintage style doll like the original Barbies and is all old fashioned, black and white, and even comes with a 50s/60s sitcom style laugh track. She can’t even bend like current Barbie does!
I looked it up on the wiki, and in real life, Midge was introduced in 1963 as Barbie’s “original” best friend, and for the first two years, she did not have bendable legs. Also, the doll went out of production for 20 years and didn’t come back until 1988 as California Dream Midge, so her appearing at Barbie’s house suddenly after being separated from her for a long time, getting a makeover and immediately grabbing a surfboard is all a SUPER NERDY reference to that. I love that aficionados are Barbie history and its ever changing canon are being catered to here, what a niche.
Also vintage Midge got married and had three kids in a “happy family” doll line and there was a pregnant Midge doll that caused controversy because parents thought she was too young to have children (though I don’t see any reference to her being a specific age?)
So I choose to believe in the canon of this show, Midge faked her death and abandoned her family back in Barbie’s hometown to start a new life in California. This dark twist adds drama.
I’m sorry but what the FUCK is going on in the Barbie Netflix show
Headcanon that an outraged 6-year-old Charlie Weasley writes to an elderly Newt Scamander wanting to know why Gringotts keeps a dragon locked up underground and begging him to fix it. Newt writes back saying that sadly he’s been fighting that fight for years and no one ever wants to listen to him because the powerful families whose money is being kept safe by the dragon always shut him down, and that Charlie is the first person he’s heard of who’s as angry as he is about it. Charlie decides that day to dedicate his life to finding out everything he can about dragons so that one day he can free the poor Gringotts dragon. After the war, when they hear that Harry, Ron and Hermione freed the dragon, they celebrate and immediately begin petitioning to have it made illegal to imprison dragons so that nothing like that ever happens again. It’s only when Hermione becomes Minister that it’s finally signed into law.
This is the best Harry Potter headcanon I’ve ever seen
Just imagine how that conversation would go though, like Charlie’s been learning about dragons his whole life, studying them, learning about the laws surrounding them, practising the jailbreak of dragons by smuggling one out of Hogwarts, preparing for the moment when, one day, he can free the Ukrainian Ironbelly from Gringotts.
And Ron’s like “Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it—we broke into Gringotts and used him as our get-away vehicle. He’s just chilling in the wilds somewhere now so, yeah. Job done.”
I want an AU where Ron, completely convinced that he’s overshadowed by all his brothers and will never be as remarkable or as well-recognised as any of them, just accidentally achieves all of their major life goals without noticing. They’re all super jealous and think of him as The Golden Brother and he’s completely clueless.
I’m not sure this is an AU to be honest. I mean:
Bill Weasley: Curse-breaker, works for Gringotts breaking into cursed tombs and distributing valuables to heirs. Ron Weasley both broke into Gringotts itself and destroyed the ultimate cursed object, a Horcrux. Check.
Charlie Weasley: Aforementioned dragon stuff. Check.
Percy Weasley: Social climber, status seeker, desperate for attention and approval from his superiors. Ron: Literally married to the actual Minister of Magic. Check.
Someone else add on to this with Weasley-twin eclipsing stunts and hijinks, I’m sure there are some but my brain isn’t thinking of them right now.
Charlie:
The twins had it worse than anyone.
They wanted to be the worst troublemakers Hogwarts has ever seen?
Ron stole a flying car, flew it from London to Scotland (breaking the international statute of secrecy so many times in the process), and then crashed it into the Whomping Willow. In his second year.
They wanted to use the Marauders Map to learn all the secrets of Hogwarts castle?
Ron helped discover the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, managed to sneak into the Slytherin common room and had weekly meetings in the Room of Requirement. Oh, and he also managed to top it all of by discovering the secret of the Marauders Map itself.
They wanted to at least make sure that they ended their last year at Hogwarts as the main talking point in the school— y'know, since they put so much effort into all those cool pranks and things?
Ron only goes and takes part in a battle at the Ministry of Magic, during which actual Lord fucking Voldemort shows up and posesses his best friend, safely ensuring that nobody’s going to be talking about that cool swamp the Weasley twins made anymore.
One of the main reasons they started Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes was that they knew that Ron wasn’t interested in starting a business and so was unlikely to one-up them in that regard (and then he ended up becoming a partner in the business…)
For years, whenever Ginny confided in her older brothers about her crush on Harry, it was a running joke with all of them except Ron (who never knew about it) to tell her that she’d better get a move on, whatever happened, lest Ron steal her dream too and propose to Harry.
I lost the prompt for this one somewhere in my askbox, but one of you asked for What If none of the Weasley kids got Sorted Gryffindor?
…
The first letter was from Percy, who had ended up firmly on the opposite end of the Hufflepuff spectrum from Charlie (the spectrum went from “stuffy rule-follower” to “grows stuff behind the greenhouses,” though in Charlie’s case the stuff was dragons).
Dear Mum and Dad, Percy wrote. I wrote as soon as they let us out of the Great Hall. I’m afraid I must inform you…
But soon it was a flood of owls, tawny and snowy and speckled, large and small and all of them shedding feathers all over Molly’s kitchen table. She summoned all the occupied mousetraps in the house so the birds could at least do something useful, rather than just bring repeats of the news they’d been fearing all morning.
“At least they’re in the same House,” Arthur said, kneading at his growing headache as he leaned over his cheese sandwich. “I’d have hated to see them separated.”
“Maybe if the twins got a little time away from each other’s influences, they’d…” Molly shook the latest letter– Minerva McGonagall’s terse, stern script spelling it all out once again. The greasy, congratulatory note from Snape already had turned to ash without either of them reaching for their wands. “Slytherin. What did we do wrong, Arthur?”
Bang. The walls shook as Errol collided with the closed kitchen window with a squawk and a crescendo of feathers. The window above the sink had been open. The gathered owls all turned their heads in that same slow gliding movement.
“And that will be Bill’s,” Molly said, shoving herself up from the table. “That’s enough, I’m going to go weed the garden. If Lucius Malfoy himself shows up to welcome us into the fold, tell him I’m indisposed!”
The kitchen door banged shut behind her. Arthur sighed and reached for his sandwich.
–
When news had come home that Bill had gotten Ravenclaw, Arthur and Molly had shared a look but sent Bill a congratulatory letter and some newly knitted blue mittens. “He was always too smart for me,” Arthur had said, and Molly had hummed.
“Hufflepuff, it’s a… nice… House,” Molly had said the next year, searching in her knitting basket for a shade of yellow she didn’t dislike too badly while Arthur looked over the friendly little missive from Pomona Sprout. How had she ended up with so many ugly threads? They must have been gifts; she wouldn’t have bought this pastel mustard skein, even at a 90% discount.
“You know,” said Arthur, later, as they watched the Express carry Percy away to his first year at Hogwarts. “I don’t think Perce is gonna be the one to break the streak.”
“So it’s a streak, is it?” Molly said, keeping an eye on the twins, who were chasing pigeons she was hoping they wouldn’t manage to catch. It was making Ginny’s day, though, the little girl covering her laughter with her fists, so she wasn’t stopping them yet.
“I think it is now,” he said.
Molly sent the twins newly knitted mittens too, one pair dull silver and one pair a sedate greenish grey, with the knowledge that they’d probably swap one mitten each and wear them mismatched. The letter told them to behave, which, to be quite fair, was very close to what it would have said in a world where they were sorted Gryffindor.
–
Three months into Fred and George’s first year at Hogwarts, another owl swooped into their open kitchen window, this time carrying official school stationary.
“Oh dear,” said Arthur and went to wash the grease off his hands, leaving his Muggle typer-whatsit with its guts spilled on the table.
“Maybe Bill got an award,” said Molly, hopeful. She pushed her reading glasses back up her nose and put her budgeting paperwork aside. “Or maybe Charlie just set all of the Care of Magical Creatures specimens free again.”
“Maybe Percy punched someone for ending a sentence on a preposition,” Arthur said, tearing open the letter. “It’s from Minerva,” he said, unfolding it.
“Ms. Deputy Headmistress,” Molly sniffed.
Arthur’s face went grim, continuing to read. “The twins got detention for a month for cursing another student.”
Molly caught her breath in her icy chest. She dropped her head into her hands. “For– Arthur, what did we do wrong?”
There was a loud smack, as Errol hit the window. “That’s probably Percy’s follow up,” Arthur said, going over to help the bird in through the second, open window.
“Our little tattletale,” Molly said, mostly fond, but she hadn’t lifted her head from her hands. Paper ripped as Arthur tore the new letter open. “Arthur, I don’t understand how it could come to this. Our boys, in Slytherin? Cursing other students?”
“Molly, wait,” Arthur said, sitting heavily in the chair beside her. “It’s from Charlie.”
Molly lifted her head. “He never writes,” she said.
“He says the twins found one of their classmates throwing stones at the owls in the Owlery,“ Arthur said, squinting at the letter. “So Fred cursed him, so that everything he threw would come back and smack him in his own face. But the kid was a Chaser so there was a hullabaloo about it.”
Molly shoved her reading glasses up her nose again and reached for it. “Let me see that.” She dragged her gaze down over Charlie’s rounded, cheerful lettering. “He says they framed Warrington– you remember, the one who used to flush Percy’s head in the toilet– they got him suspended for some prank he couldn’t have done, but Charlie swears he doesn’t know how they pulled it off, either. He says they tricked Snape into eating some sort of creation of theirs to make him talk high-pitched for a week and to smell like burnt toast.” Molly sniffed. “Burnt toast would be an improvement.”
“Huh,” said Arthur.
“He says they heard someone call some Muggleborn kid– call her you know what– and Fred punched him in the jaw and George enchanted the staircases to strand him on the way to all his classes.”
They sat for a moment, staring at the letters. Errol sipped water from a cracked saucer and Molly reached out to steady him when he almost tipped over mid-gulp.
“You know,” said Arthur. “I don’t think the Hat was wrong.”
“No,” Molly agreed, setting Errol back on his feet and thinking about what shades of green yarn she might have that she didn’t hate. Something bright. Something bold. “But I think they’re gonna be alright.”
