do you ever think about how the series of events that lead to Dumbledore’s death in HBP was literally set into motion by Oliver Wood’s passion for Quidditch
okay but literally I can’t stop thinking about this –
it is of course possible that Draco would have gotten the Death Eaters into the school some other way if the Vanishing Cabinet hadn’t created the perfect opportunity, but it wasn’t looking likely.
so like, it’s reasonable enough to assume that Dumbledore’s death (at the hands of Snape specifically, obviously I know he was going to die soon enough from the curse, but the timing does make a difference so I’m still focused on this) occurred because of the Death Eaters getting into the school. the reason the Death Eaters were able to get into the school was because of the Vanishing Cabinet in the Room of Requirement, which Draco repaired.
the Vanishing Cabinet ended up in the Room of Requirement over the summer of 1996, presumably (reasoning for this is in the next paragraph), and Draco discovered it there sometime in his 6th year. but the only reason he had even known what it was, and what it could do, was because he had spoken with….
Graham Montague, a Slytherin who was in 7th year in 1995-1996 (when Harry & co were in 5th year). Montague was shoved into the Vanishing Cabinet in that year by Fred and George Weasley, because he was a part of the Inquisitorial Squad and was presumably about to take points from the Weasley twins for doing something disruptive. and we know that Montague got stuck in a limbo between the two connected cabinets, due to one of them being broken – he could hear things being discussed in Borgin & Burkes, which is how he was able to let Malfoy know that the other “end of the tunnel”, or basically the other cabinet, was in Borgin & Burkes (which, Draco would already have seen as a 12-year-old, in the summer before his 2nd year, when he visited the shop with his father – fun fact, Harry hid in that exact cabinet while Lucius Malfoy was transacting with Borgin).
Montague would never have had this experience at all if the cabinet hadn’t been broken in the first place. but in fact, we know exactly how, when, why, and by whom the cabinet was broken.
it was in the fall of 1992, when Nearly Headless Nick observed that Harry had gotten in trouble with Filch, and prompted Peeves to drop that very same cabinet from a large height in order to cause a distraction for Filch, allowing Harry to get out of trouble.
why was Harry in trouble in the first place? because he was “tracking mud” in the corridors.
why was he tracking mud in the corridors? because Oliver Wood had had him out on the Quidditch pitch all day even though it had been literally storming outside. so Harry came into the castle drenched and splattered with mud.
Dumbledore literally died because of how obsessed Oliver Wood was with winning the Quidditch Cup.
sorry, one more thing – people keep reblogging this with tags that imply they think that this is like a “headcanon” or just “plausible” and while I get why you would think that, I need you to really understand how canonical this is because it’s Very canonical which is Ridiculous
to clarify:
the bits about the Vanishing Cabinet being the only real way he had to get the Death Eaters in, having heard about it from Montague and how that made him realize he could use them as a passage, etc – that was all clearly laid out in HBP, chapter 27 (The Lightning-Struck Tower).
Montague being shoved into the cabinet takes place in OOTP, chapter 28 (Snape’s Worst Memory).
Draco seeing the cabinet and Harry being in the cabinet is all in CoS, chapter 4 (At Flourish and Blotts).
and the entire situation with the Quidditch practice and the mud and Harry getting in trouble and Nick getting Peeves to drop the cabinet is in CoS, chapter 8 (The Deathday Party).
it’s the lined-up-dominoes meme, and it’s ridiculous. and it’s all on the page.
Technically, Draco lead to Dumbledores death twice. Both by getting the death eaters into the castle but also because if it weren’t for him stealing Neville’s rememberall, Harry wouldnt have ended up on the team at all, and consequentially, getting mud through the corridors
Me “I can raise the temperature of a space by 5 degrees (Fahrenheit) per success” DM “Okay.” Me “And that’s 6 successes, so 30 degrees…” DM “Okay…” Me “And ‘inside the human body’ is a space, right?” DM “…I don’t like where this is going.” Me “So I’m going to raise the temperature inside his body 30 degrees.” DM “Yeah, so he’s dead now. He was fine, and then went through all the stages of heat stroke in half a second before his body went ‘No thank you’ and just shut off to stop it from being so hot. Good job.”
My worst horror house experience was when I couldn’t find the (rather obvious) exit and the guy chasing me with a chainsaw stopped, sighed and pointed me to the exit, saying “please scream as loud as you can when you run out there” and just left. I disappointed the horror house chainsaw dude and I will never get over that
Guy: They are all my friends.. (motioning to hanging corpses; then grabs a noose) Will you be my friend? Me: Sure totally, you made me a friendship necklace? Oh my god your so sweet? Guy: … Yes.. Please, let me.. I cant I cant just go (laughing).
– Got to walk a second time through–
Same guy: My friends -wailing- Me: I came back I just really wanted to be friends so bad Guy: (laughing more) Please, Im not allowed to laugh.
I went to a Haunted House and literally befriended every actor there.
Specifically, I remember;
There were zombies walking around in the waiting room. I said “Hi!” and he gave me a high five. Every time he passed from then on, I got a high five.
Near the end, there were these twin little girls. “Come play with us.” They said. “Okay!” I said. “Forever.” They said. “Oh, sorry, can’t do that. I’m busy.”
The Real Horror Is The People We Dissapointed Along The Way
Tags:
#embarrassment squick #death tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Halloween
Look. Meetings of the Sharing apparently involve a lot of volleyball, as we know from mentions in #1, #10, Visser, and #31.
Volleyball is a dangerous sport. Volleyball injuries happen. Volleyball accidents frequently result in severed limbs. We know this from the dozens — no, hundreds — of recorded cases of this exact phenomenon occurring, almost all of them in one town in Southern California. Statisticians have hypothesized that this may have to do with the extent to which one particular local organization uses regional variations on the standard rules of volleyball, but all attempts at participant observation have resulted in the social scientists who joined the Sharing abruptly dropping the project and going in new directions with their lives.
Currently, warning labels on volleyball equipment indicate that its use has a 15% chance of resulting in serious injury and/or death. Factoid is actually a statistical error. The Sharing’s inter-chapter volleyball league, which loses an average of 41.7% of its members per month to volleyball-related amputations and murders, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
That sounds like an excellent way to live in a constant state of terror and fascination; being a human social scientist who is infested and watching the mess that is the Visserarchy from terrifyingly close, and thinking that that either you’ll either never be able to share your findings (if you die or the Yeerks win), or be at the edge of any entirely new edge of social science.
Imagine being a yeerk inside a newly captured social scientist watching them passively eviscerate every aspect of your primitive 30-year-old military culture down to its component parts, every conclusion basically being “these guys suck at everything they’re doing and are struggling desperately to make sure their underlings don’t realise that”
<Stop it! Stop thinking! Stop trying to shake my loyalty!>
<I can’t! This is what I was trained to do! You don’t like it, stop reading my mind!>
<I CAN’T!>
*Visser Three starts speaking*
<And this one’s intimidation tactics have gone far, far beyond useful and are greatly crippling his own forces; not sure yet whether it’s pure unchecked sadism or insecurity and distraction as a result of – >
post war someone is going to have an amazing dissertation “Perverse incentives in authoritarian systems, a first(ish) person case study”
Tags:
#Animorphs #fanfic #violence cw #death tw #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the newly captured social scientist) #my past self has good taste
It’s a story about a clown who is wrongfully blamed for the murder of a child and is killed by vigilante townsfolk who don’t accept his innocent verdict. Years later, after bouncing from one foster home to the next, his daughter returns to Maine as an adult and decides to avenge her father… by murdering Stephen King, who she blames for inciting the anti-clown mass hysteria that killed her father.
I just got my Alcor membership finalized! I have the amulet and everything!
\o/
—
Oddly enough, I was just researching cryonics myself these past two days.
My conclusion was “given my current financial situation, increasing my expenses by ~USD$1k/year is probably more likely to get me killed than not immediately signing up for vitrification is”. (yes I saw the Cryonics Institute, but frankly I would not trust any sort of long-term facility in *Detroit* further than I could throw it) Alcor membership is now #6 on my list of Things to Save Up For Once My Finances Permit Saving Up That Much, below the non-shitty car but above the fire-escape ladder.
—
(I get the impression that the demographics are pretty different, but cryonics nevertheless parses to me as a Neat Prepper Thing. I have a soft spot for things that one will likely never find useful but will be *extremely glad for* if one does.)
Tags:
#not a day goes by that I don’t add at least a few strands to one safety net or another #cryonics #death tw #transhumanism #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
I have a hot take but y’all aren’t ready for it. This is a real headscratcher of an idea and I would absolutely lose followers if I said it. If I told ANYONE this controversial opinion, my friends would abandon me and then start a gofundme to demolish my home. If anybody even SUSPECTED i had this belief, being me would be declared a misdemeanor. If this take got out, the only olympic event would be killing me, and then everyone on Earth would get the gold and the olympics would be cancelled. If this got out, the governor of Maine would tell me that I had been declared the state bird, and I’d be happy at first, and then they’d tell me that the state bird had been declared legally dead. If I said what was on my mind, I would be put third on the list of people that the Pope isn’t allowed to know about.
Tags:
#death tw #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #the humour of my people #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
proposal: unaging humans that don’t have an ongoing population crisis – instead, norms approach “spend at least 50 years learning who you are and getting settled” and “a child really needs several parents who all have stable relationships with each other, at least two of whom are willing to do full-time parenting, at least in the early years”, and nobody who would have had children because “well, if I don’t have them now I can’t have them later” or an interest in perpetuating the bloodline or an interest in support in old age has kids
additionally, the lower rate of childbirth fails to prevent children from socializing, because of denser housing and better transit, so even if everyone in the city only has a thousand kids they can all meet up, or people temporarily moving to raise kids, or whatever
“but this would make boring science fiction” just have the kid-friendly cities be oversurveilled suburbia that children are weirded out by and teenagers hate. or, like, some kind of extended metaphor where a “working parent and nonworking parent” household has as much trouble raising kids as a single-working-parent household does today, or something.
anyway, since everyone uses science fiction as an oracle now apparently, we should be a tiny bit concerned about the total unavailability of a concept in sci-fi.
Or, the central conflict actually has nothing to do with the kids and how they’re being raised; rather, the kids’ situation in the world is a background to the existing story.
When I was in eighth grade, I wrote a story that took place in a dystopia where they had rejiggered human sleep/wake cycles to give everyone more waking time, and then forced children to spend half that time in school and half that time working for a war effort, which was kind of a “we have always been at war with Oceania” kind of war effort. Except that wasn’t what the story was about. The story was about three kids who find a treehouse that contains gateways to other dimensions, where they go to escape their miserable lives in the dystopia.
You could have a story about a future where humans have incredibly lengthened lifespans and there aren’t many kids and the kids that there are tend to live in specific kid-friendly places so the story is about a kid whose parents take them traveling a lot so they’re used to being in places for adults and then they move in with a more stable unit because they think the kid needs stability and the kid is bored shitless by other kids and “kid friendly” stuff. Or the kid is neurodivergent in a world that’s a lot more accepting of adult neurodivergence than child neurodivergence because kids are so much rarer than before. Or the family dynamics when your older brother is 40 and you’re 10. Or something totally unrelated, like the kid’s emotional reactions to one of the parents having a dangerous job. The conflict doesn’t have to be about the existence of the longer lifespans and the relative rarity of children but they are raised in places where children are denser than in other areas; you can follow through extrapolations of that to think, what kind of challenges would they have? Or come up with something barely related. Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom” gives us a post-humanist world where people back themselves up and death isn’t permanent and currency is popularity and reputation, and then writes a murder mystery set in that world where the main character is trying to solve his own murder after being restored from backup. The conflict isn’t about being in a post-humanist society where death is a minor inconvenience, but the story couldn’t exist without that background.
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #death tw #there is probably some other warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
Brinens and Things 