Emma: Okay so like. The most fridge horror thing about the triwizard tournament is that they’re like “we added an age restriction!”
Emma: Not “we raised it!” Just “we added one!”
Emma: Which implies that previously, 11 YEAR OLDS COULD ENTER
Emma: Like I doubt they were ever chosen bc someone whose magical repotoir consists solely of “swish and flick” is not the best candidate for their school but what the FUCK
Meghan: AU where the Tournament happens 1st year, the other Champions are the same (17) and throw the whole competition making sure Harry doesn’t fucking die. They even let him take the Cup bc he’s so tiny and adorably earnest…
Meghan: Obviously that backfires, but Cedric isn’t dead at least.
Oh, no, TINY HARRY in the Triwizard Tournament. That’s AWFUL.
I love it.
AU where the Tournament happens in 1st year? I suppose Quirrell is still the DADA prof, but you could actually have him as the Muggle Studies professor still if you wanted Fake!Moody as the DADA prof. I think Scabbers ran away before Percy could give him to Ron as a pet, if you wanted to have Peter also helping Voldemort. (Oh, man, this is a nightmare. It’s great.)
You could only make this work in fanfiction, but I would LOVE to try and combine books 1, 3, and 4. (I don’t think Lucius would have thrown the Diary into the mix of this, so we thankfully don’t have a basilisk slithering around too, and I don’t think Dumbledore would bring the Philosopher’s Stone into this. Although you could add those for the ULTIMATE nightmare scenario.)
I’m thinking like, “Harry, you’re going to wizard school! And you’ve been tossed into a death game where all your competition is 17! And since your photo was in the paper, your mass-murderer godfather escaped prison! And now the dementors have been stationed around the school to keep this Tournament from going even more horribly, horribly wrong!”
I’d love to combine this with the Veela!Viktor & Werewolf!Fleur AU (obvs if Viktor takes Hermione to the Yule Ball, it’s purely so Harry can have friends there). Throw Remus Lupin into the mix as another DADA prof? With Fake!Moody? If you wanted to pull a “give Hogwarts more staff” AU just to add to the chaos, so you can have both (evil!)Quirrell and Burbage as Muggle Studies professors.
Oh man, your readers would be screaming at you the entire time, because tiny Harry would be surrounded by so many danger elements and they would have no idea how everything combined would unfold. Cedric, Viktor, and Fleur would probably be mild audience!inserts for this fic, doing everything they can to keep the littlest Champion safe (because clearly this is a plot to kill the BWL) even though he’s insisting that he can do this himself and doesn’t need help.
“GET THE BABY BOY OUT OF THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO NOW, PLEASE,” says the audience. “Lol, no,” says the author.
Knell you have an evil, evil mind, and I’m dying. (I am laughing over the idea of Victor Krum, international Quidditch star with magical love powers, taking an eleven year old girl who doesn’t care about sports as his date to the Yule ball, as a favor to the tiny eleven year old champion who does care about quidditch. Ron called first dibs as Harry’s date and regrets it.)
Throwing in Sirius is such a terrible awful move. Everyone is talking about the mass murderer who broke out of jail and the sinister omen of death spotted during all the tasks and tongues are waggling like crazy.
Prof, that is absolutely the picture I am going for here. Viktor Krum is the ultimate gentleman to his date (a twelve-year-old girl who has no idea who he is) and is having a great time listening to her chatter about her first-year classes. Veela!Viktor and little!Hermione dancing together is melting my heart.
Can you imagine, Cedric and tiny Harry in front of the Triwizard Cup in the center of the maze, and Sirius Black shows up? (After people have been gossiping like mad, egged on by Skeeter, over the terrible death omens looming over the Boy-Who-Lived.) Let’s say that the Cup was always intended to be a Portkey back to the beginning of the maze, so Sirius overhears this piece of information and realizes that the Cup is the perfect opportunity for something to go terribly wrong. But Harry is obviously not going to listen to “Mass-Murderer Sirius Black” desperately telling him not to take the Cup.
Sirius tries to tackle Harry, but they both end up in the graveyard. (Cedric is panicking back in the maze.) Peter and Sirius recognize each other immediately. Harry has no idea what’s going on.
Then you have to choose how you want the rest of this AU to go. (Voldemort obviously gets to give the Classic HP Final Confrontation Explanation of what’s been going down behind-the-scenes all year.) Does Voldemort get resurrected in Harry’s first year? Or is Voldemort’s resurrection foiled by Harry and Sirius somehow and put off for some future plot?
Either way, I think it’s highly necessary that Sirius punches someone in the face. If Voldemort is resurrected, then it’s definitely Voldemort. If Voldemort isn’t resurrected, then it’s probably Peter. These fists were made for punching and that’s just what they’ll do. “STAY AWAY FROM MY GODSON.” *CRACK*
If Voldemort is resurrected, then Sirius probably gets to witness Harry’s Priori Incantatum with Voldemort! (Would a Priori Incantatum work with Peter if Harry doesn’t get to duel Voldemort? Since Peter used Voldemort’s wand to kill Cedric?) OH MAN, THE DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS PAIN OF SIRIUS BLACK GETTING TO SEE A REMNANT OF JAMES AND LILY POTTER. I WOULD DIE. I would be FACE-DOWN on the FLOOR. People would be poking me like, “LK, are you okay?” And I’d be like, “Absolutely not.”
In either scenario, I think everyone escapes. Peter and Voldemort escape. Sirius picks up Harry and just books it. (Maybe Sirius has Harry’s Firebolt for some reason? Would Sirius still send Harry the Firebolt? I know the Firebolt didn’t come out until 1994, but the idea of an 11-year-old getting a Firebolt is so funny. Hermione has no idea why everyone at the Yule Ball is freaking out over Harry’s new broomstick; it can’t be that good, surely.)
Harry ends up stranded out in the countryside with the godfather who never actually betrayed his parents, getting to know Sirius, and is probably actually really relieved to have an adult handling the situation (Sirius is… not the best adult, but Harry is eleven here) and to get some family. Voldemort might be back and that’s awful, but Harry’s actually kind of having an alright time? He’s away from all the stress of Hogwarts and the Tournament for once.
Meanwhile, Cedric Diggory has alerted everyone back at Hogwarts that Sirius Black has kidnapped Harry Potter and they are LOSING THEIR MINDS.
I love this concept, and I wonder what an equally speedrunny sequel would look like. Books 2 and 5 seem like they’d mash up pretty well?
Harry comes back in September, and no one believes his story about what happened at the end of the last task, because it’s frankly pretty unbelievable. Also he’s apparently a serial killer apologist now? Dumbledore’s backing his story, yeah, but the Prophet’s been saying for months that Dumbledore’s a liar.
And that’s before the petrifications start to happen and it comes out that Harry’s a parselmouth.
The kids close to Harry’s age mostly shun him as evil, but also concerned older Hufflepuffs start to approach him, saying that they don’t know exactly what happened over the summer but Sirius Black is not a person to look up to, and they know Harry’s just a kid but petrifying people to impress your serial killer idol is not okay actually.
On top of all that, Umbridge is the DADA teacher, and she’s a lot more intimidating to a twelve-year-old.
(something DA-like could still happen. Being twelve, Harry’s too young to be teaching it himself, even if people were willing to be taught by the probable Heir of Slytherin. But he talks about Umbridge to Sirius and Sirius talks to Lupin and Lupin knows the castle, he can sneak in if he needs to help these kids that he got attached to last year. And yes, sneaking is required, because Umbridge does not want filthy halfbreeds in her castle.)
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #fanfic #Harry Potter #long post #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
apparently my boss who is a professor at my school doesn’t have a cell phone and his coworkers were upset by this so they bought him a childs toy phone and labeled it “David’s jitterbug” (for those of you that don’t know jitterbugs are phones made for old people that have like massive buttons and shit) so the other day I walked into his office to ask him a question and he pressed a button on it which made it start loudly playing the ABCs and he said “excuse me I have to take this” and then started singing along to the ABCs while shooing me out of his office
this is the phone. he apparently was in the middle of a meeting with the department the other day and got annoyed so he pressed a button, said “I have to take this” and left
David’s co-workers probably: “This is a valid tactic to embarrass him into buying a mobile phone, right?”
David: “Bold of you to assume that I get embarrassed.”
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(”and then started singing along to the ABCs”) #storytime
Ooh, hm. If you liked Worm, you’d probably also like @walterlw‘s The Fifth Defiance, which is in the same vein of realistic and/or clever superhero worldbuilding and has some great characters. Uh, what else, though, going off knowing you liked Worm, and also I know you were into Homestuck back in the day… hm.
nostalgebraist’s The Northern Caves is a fun sort of psychological horror-y thing told through mocked-up message board posts, plus his other stuff (Almost Nowhere, freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit, and Floornight, his previous freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit) is great.
Do you like Danganronpa? KinuNishimura has a really good fanganronpa called Operation V.K. that goes in its own direction and does some cool shit with robots.
I was about to recommend Floating Point by Stefan Gagne, which is this thing about like, the internet as a self-contained world inhabited by digital people who have no idea a real world ever existed, but for some reason his site is impossible to find- I don’t know if he took it down to sell the physical books directly or what.
I wrote some stuff, but you’ve been following me for a while so I figure you probably already know about Cordyceps and my Overwatch fic.
The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer is pretty cool- really elaborate sci-fi worldbuilding for a future Earth where high-speed transportation has rendered geographical nations obsolete, which really gets into the wild political ramifications of everything.
One thing I relate to very much like I relate to Homestuck- in that it was super formative for me and remains really funny and compelling and I continue to recommend it, despite a lackluster ending, being kind of off-putting and hard to get into at the beginning, and most people who were really into it back in the day claiming to have outgrown it- is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Say what you will about it being didactic or unrealistic or condescending or whatever, but that shit is still fun.
I’m partway through Floating Point and the website still seems to be working fine for me [link].
(I was worried for a moment there when you said that, but then I remembered I kept local copies of those pages, so even if it *had* gone down I could make do)
Oh, thanks! It was down when I went to check, and even now it seems like the CSS isn’t loading right, but I guess that was just some temporary hosting issue. Whew!
Oh thank goodness, I haven’t read floating point in ages but was briefly worried that I may have missed my chance
Tags:
#conversational aglets #recs #Floating Point #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
We’re doing Postmodernism is Sociology, and the teacher was talking about ‘language games’— language that is so specialised that unless you’re part of a specific group it’s totally incomprehensible.
And, as an example, he gave us this monstrosity:
And, what’s even worse— I fucking UNDERSTOOD IT. I had to EXPLAIN this to my fucking sociology class.
This is why we should never have let the millenials become teachers.
Tags:
#oh my god #language #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #I cannot believe I actually understand this
When you follow aesthetic/fandom blogs but also social issue blogs
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #the humour of my people #in which Brin learns to speak Pokemon #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #drugs mention #juxtaposition
all i am saying is that he would ostensibly be the easiest one to take on in a fight given that he’s like three feet tall and has led a life of (physical) leisure compared to all of the others due to his standing as a gentlehobbit
legolas, aragorn, and gimli are all used to combat, sam works as a gardener, merry and pippin often gallivant off and get into mischief so they have the advantage of experience in whatever it is they’ve gotten up to/would possibly fight dirty, gandalf is gandalf so while weapons are out of the question i suppose that depends on if magic is involved. i don’t think i could take him without magic even if he IS old because he’s a very large guy, but maybe
it would be my knuckles against Frodo’s baby soft poet hands, plus i’ve got the additional height and fighting experience. i just think that he would be the easiest to win against in hand-to-hand combat out of the rest of them. also he isn’t real so he can’t offer a rebuttal to my claim
this has nothing to do with WANTING to fight Frodo, i just think he would be easiest for me to beat in a fight with no weapons. unless he utilized his very large feet, but i think he’s too polite to do that because it’s a fist fight and that would be considered playing dirty
First off, Pippin has it coming, so you won’t be fighting your conscience at the same time.
Secondly, Pippin is a spoiled rich kid. He’s no less gentry than Frodo is, but Frodo works out and is shown to have better stamina, at least at the outset. Pippin is also both the stupidest and the slowest of the hobbits. They both nearly beat one (1) troll, so that’s comparable, but Pippin appears not to have got a single hit in against the orcs that captured them while Merry was cutting off hands like a boss. Pippin also straight-up tell Bergil that he’s not a fighter.
Also there’s a nonzero chance that Frodo will just straight up curse you (if the guilt of fighting Frodo isn’t enough if a curse by itself).
And, of course, if you try to fight Frodo, you will 100% end up fighting Sam, and he will wreck you (and you’ll deserve it, you monster)
Also: if you fight Frodo you’ll have a very angry Sam & possibly also the entire Fellowship to deal with BUT if you fight Pippin they will probably cheer you on.
So here’s the thing – you absolutely DO NOT want to try and fight Frodo or Pippin because they are going to be protected by the rest of the Fellowship, which basically exists to stop asshole Big People from picking on the hobbits. Folk might talk a big game but when the chips are down, you are not going to lay a single hand on any of the hobbits. Either you’ll find yourself immediately fighting all four of them or else you’ll move to land your first hit and suddenly Aragorn will side-tackle you into the trees. And he probably hits like a freight train tbh.
So here’s what you do:
You fight Legolas.
The thing about fist-fighting Legolas of course is that you will lose. This is not a fight you’re gonna win no matter what. But Legolas has his standing competition with Gimli, so once the challenge is issued, he’s not gonna let anyone else step in and fight you either. No one is liable to volunteer on his behalf, either, so you will only end up fighting the one member of the fellowship. If you are lucky he might also take his shirt off. Bonus!
Anyway.
Legolas will mop the floor with you, but he’s also already convinced you’re weaker than him anyway because you’re not an elf, so he’s gonna go kind of easy on you. And when you lose he will be all snide and superior about it, which means everyone in the fellowship is gonna sympathize with you, and Gimli will probably challenge him on your behalf afterwards, but here’s the key thing:
You will have lost a fist-fight to an immortal warrior prince.
That’s a way better loss to cop to than that time you tried to fistfight a pudgy gentlehobbit and got beaten to the point of unconsciousness by his gardener, yeah?
#relatable #(though fortunately less relatable than it used to be) #Assassin’s Creed #(I was already vaguely aware of the quote this is riffing on) #(but only just now looked up where exactly it was from)
