I’m going to start it pretty soon. I’m for some reason locked out of my student account and email and IT was no help as usual, so what is there to do except read a parody romance novel written specifically to spite J.K. Rowling?
Chuck Tingle has more or less become a meme because of his bizarre titles and covers and because of the Hugo fiasco, but I’ve heard relatively little about what it’s like to actually read his work and I frankly have no idea what to expect or if I should go into this with expectations at all
This book is…surprisingly easy to take seriously as a book. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. But it’s like. A Book and not just an extended joke. Like on some level it’s not particularly terribly written nor does the plot like, completely exist in service to the…whatever humor is derived from the self-aware absurdity of the premise
I love that he’s not even described as a humanoid dinosaur. He’s just sexy goth tattooed Severus snape and he’s also a parasaurolophus and we are left to just figure it out
I have to talk about what is going on with the worldbuilding. Like this is a parody. Of Harry Potter. But there’s an entirely different magic system and….everything???
In summary
there doesn’t appear to be a statute of secrecy type thing magic is just fully integrated with the modern world and modern technology
Harriet is a wizard, but that means that she creates spells by typing them out in long manuscripts, which on one level is a nod to the book publishing industry but on another level is kind of interesting in of itself
there’s a??? spellcasting industry??
there are different types of magic users other than wizards, and they appear to be based on the d&d classes
or at least, bards exist and they are distinct from wizard
the dinosaur is a bard
Bigfeet exist and they are integrated with modern society
there are sentient motorcycles and no one finds this in any way unusual
As much as I love skillfully crafted satire that takes deft jabs at the flaws of the thing it’s lampooning, there’s also something charming about how every character in this book has a name blatantly and hilariously derived from a Harry Potter character regardless of how most of their roles in the story barely resemble anything like characters in Harry Potter.
…You know, I’m not even sure Chuck Tingle has read Harry Potter.
I’m so sorry to sample the sex scene but. “sexualis secondus” just killed me. I have been pronounced dead by this book. im obliterated this is indescribable
I literally have no idea how to describe what I’m experiencing right now. Like this is a somewhat poorly edited parody adult dinosaur romance novel but. It’s genuinely?? Creative?? In a lot of ways???? And there’s a lot of heart to it, a lot of genuine powerful messages about identity and about art and creativity and the fourth-wall-breaking device is…I can’t explain it because that would spoil it but it’s actually pulled off so well?????
This is not like, a humorous joke story this guy did for Being a Little Shit and Spite reasons, it’s like actually in its themes and message a genuine “fuck you” to j.k. Rowling’s transphobia even though it’s this absolutely wild janky batshit story and I have never experienced anything like this in my LIFE
I did not expect my adhd little heart to be touched by understanding of my fears about creativity and writing and its place in my life. Not like this. What the fuck. What the fuck.
#this has been sitting in my to-reblog for literal months while I struggle to figure out how to tag it #but with @drchucktingle joining Tumblr‚ now seems like a particularly fitting time to dig it out #storytime #fanfic #Harry Potter #Chuck Tingle #nsfw text #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #cissexism cw?
C. S. Lewis’ Harry Potter and the Methods of Christianity
There’s a warning line in the second Harry Potter book, ‘never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain’.
In the original canon, this seems to be a throwaway remark that the wizards don’t take seriously. Why does the diary fall foul of this rule but not the talking portraits? Where does the Sorting Hat keep its brain, for that matter? How does the Goblet of Fire make decisions, or get confunded? And the man giving this advice even kept a talking mirror in his house giving fashion advice.
But in a hypothetical HP&MoC, this line is an interesting fit between the two worlds. What particular kind of magics does the Bible frequently warn against? Divinations. What do divinations frequently involve? Asking questions of things that look like they shouldn’t be able to think for themselves, as they have no brain.
I was leafing through my old posts and came across this again. Some more points which might be tied together for such a fic:
(Note: Harry Potter is a children’s book, where Rule of Funny trumps consistency or worldbuilding, and adults are obliged to be somewhat incompetent so the children can have plot. I’m overanalysing and I know it. Take all this with a grain of salt.)
1: Most of the ‘magic’ performed in Harry Potter is extremely un-mystical, being about as mechanistic as a compass, which also draws on mysterious invisible forces but in a mostly consistent and predictable manner. The existence of an extremely “school-y” school with large classes and textbooks and a curriculum and standardized tests of a standardized progression and a deeply teachable topic further reinforces this.
2: The two major moments of mysticality that I recall are the Divination classes, which have a bad reputation as a fake topic and Trelawney isn’t in control of the few real prophecies happening, and Voldemort’s resurrection ritual, which he is in control of but which is clearly marked Dark Magic.
3: When Voldemort fights onscreen, he is strangely incompetent. His combat strategy against Dumbledore is to fire five Killing Curses in a row. These all fail to kill Dumbledore, because the Killing Curse is a highly-visible single-target projectile that’s slow enough to dodge or intercept. It is a wicked spell, and it is a weak spell. Voldemort might have gotten Dumbledore if he’d used a spell which was exploding, or homing, or high-penetration. Or a gun.
4: The Astronomy class is a bizarrely Muggle subject. It is emphatically not “astrology”: horoscopes happen over in Divination class, while Astronomy class covers mundane facts like the moons of Jupiter: Europa is icy, Io is volcanic. I do not recall it having any magical application at all. I do not recall it having any application, period. Why is it there?
5: Magical Britain as shown in the books has an odd hole where Christianity should be. At the one end, this is a society that split off from Muggle Britain in 1692 with the Statute of Secrecy. This is a society where people live longer, and change is slower. One of the four House Ghosts staying at Hogwarts is “the Fat Friar”, a monk with tonsure and all. At the other end, we see two gravestones in the seventh book. The one for Harry’s parents is inscribed with “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”, which is a Bible quote from 1 Corinthians 15:26. The one for Kendra and Ariana Dumbledore is inscribed with “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”, which is a Bible quote from Matthew 6:21.
What sort of culture would you infer to exist between these two ends? Not the one shown, IMO.
—
A possible outline of plot points for Harry Potter and the Methods of Christianity, then:
’never trust anything that can think for itself etc.’ is, or was originally, a warning against summoning spirits (particularly, demons) to possess you or your tools, or using objects that someone else has put a spirit in. If brainless objects give a superficial appearance of thinking it’s probably cold-reading. But if they give substantive information, that implies Something Else is working through them, and with how much casual blatant magic there is in the Wizarding World, a Something Else that still feels the need to hide while manipulating you should be presumed hostile. (This overlaps with Divination, see below.)
A lot of the funny talking items would have to go, or be made less obviously thinking, to make the setting consistent.
The Ring-leaders who shape Wizarding society and culture are what TvTropes calls NayTheists: they know God is real and they don’t like it, trying very hard to avoid the implications. They concede the dead to God, hence the gravestones, but the living have been working very hard to extend life and create the Philosopher’s Stone (some adjustment to the first book’s plot required here) and seeking magical immortality to avoid God’s judgment, hence the secular culture. They are trying to have it both ways as ‘materialist magicians’: supernatural power and command to reshape the world, but without supernatural entanglement to God nor the Devil, nor any other Power that may exist, such as Faerie.
Divination class is Like That because the Inner Ring gradually cleaned it of every divination by contact with a Power, and found that there was effectively no such thing as mundane divination left. Everything that remains in the class is fraudulent, but it would be embarrassing to admit, at least until there’s sufficient generational turnover and the dead can be blamed for the previous curriculum change.
Astronomy class is Like That because the Inner Ring cleaned astrology of the mystical influences of the planets back in the day when they still had worries about Jupiter possibly being a god, and once they’d swept out the Powers they were left with a real field of science that was interesting research in its own right. The Wizarding World is ahead of Muggles at Astronomy.
Voldemort is Like That because his “Dark Magic” involves pacts with the Devil for power. Both parties are naturally treacherous as Hell about this.
Voldemort thinks he can instrumentalize the Devil, take over Britain, reign as immortal wizard-god-king, pay off or wriggle out of his pacts, and never have to worry about Hell again because his full debts will never come due. Satan meanwhile is underpaying enough for Voldemort to lose and (sorta) die a few times so that Voldemort goes deeper into debt for more power and more second chances from death, to be paid off by killing more babies for Satan.
In a quip: “Satan doesn’t want Voldemort to win, Satan wants Voldemort to sin.”
At no point did Satan teach Voldemort tactical competence, so Voldemort is all “Killing Curse! Killing Curse! Killing Curse! Killing Curse Harder Why Isn’t This Working!?” and keeps trying to substitute more hellpower for good planning. People with good planning ability generally don’t make pacts with the Devil in the first place.
Because the Inner Ring has been working very hard to keep wizarding culture away from God, Magical Britain talks in euphemisms like “Dark Magic” and average witch or wizard doesn’t even know what Voldemort got up to. Voldemort has the same Inner Ring impulse of not wanting to reveal his discovery to the world, either, only his inner circle of most trusted Death Eaters.
This makes it very hard for Magical Britain to understand, research, or counter what Voldemort is doing. It doesn’t follow the normal laws of mechanistic magic, which is why such an inbred imbecile can terrorize Magical Britain with some hellpower and some curses inferior to an AK-47. Then Harry Potter shows up with the Methods of Christianity, and the demon-possessed gear of the Death Eaters promptly stops working on hearing the name of Jesus.
Bonus scene idea: The magical history of Ancient Egypt is suppressed and classified, because there’s too much content there which leads into proto-necromancy and Horcrux theory and other things the Ministry of Magic doesn’t want students getting ideas about. But the Ministry’s classification order doesn’t extend to Muggle content, so the History of Magic class at one point has a teacher (maybe not Binns) reading from the Book of Exodus.
Tags:
#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #Christianity #hell cw?
HPMOR, now with a writer actually less cringy than the original harry potter!
Tags:
#Harry Potter #Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #((this amusement not to be taken as expressing an opinion regarding the statement itself)) #high context jokes #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
Not nearly enough “Sirius Black makes himself at home in Privet Drive because there’s nothing the Dursleys can do to get him to leave” fic out there, and it’s a crying shame.
Harry just rolling up like WHADDUP THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT FAMILAR HE EMOTIONALLY SUPPORTS ME BY MAULING PEOPLE WHO THREATEN ME. And Sirus dog-charades AND THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT COUCH YOU CAN SIT ON THE FLOOR FUCKERS.
You know what else is good “Dudley gets on top of how fucked up his parents are faster” fic, and i feel like “Sirius Lives at Privet Drive” dovetails nicely into this:
Dudley, age 14 and realizing his mother’s Loving-but-Ill-advised cooking is setting him up for some serious health problems, and that he’s tall enough to look his dad in the eye now, so his previous rationale of “If he’s hitting Harry he’s not Hitting Me” doesn’t hold up now, and goes full Eye of The Tiger to cope.
This means Sirus gets dragged along on a lot of Parent-avoiding “Walkies”
So many that one evening after a fight Dudley is trying to round up Harry and Sirius for a cooldown run and Sirius groans “Oh you’re big lads you can jog to the tesco on your own.” from the couch There’s a hot moment of silence.
“He’s a Magic Dog.” Says Harry.
“What do you mean your dog is a 40-year-old man?” “What do you mean your Dad’s BFF?” “What do you mean convicted criminal?” What do you mean WIZARD HITLER WANTS YOUR HIDE??” “..Shit I gotta up my workout routine.”
“You’re not gonna punch Voldermort out Dudley.”
“Not with these wimpy biceps I won’t.”
Shit’s getting increasingly tense in the house so when Ron announces they have tickets to the Quidditch World Cup Harry has to ask “Hey, can Dudley come too?”
Dudley might be short on wizarding skills but one thing he’s learned at Fancy rich boy School is the art of Schmooze. They meet Corneilus Fudge and Dudley charms the hell out of him. Fudge doesn’t even realize he’s not a Wizard. Harry tries to impress upon him the ‘VOLDERMORT’S ALIVE WITH A CULT DIPSHIT” upon him and nearly ends up in tears before Dudley takes his arm and whispers “Let me Handle This.”
Thirty minutes later Corneilus is organizing a Task Force of Aurors.
“What the fuck do they teach you there?” asks Harry. “Oh, buttering egos, Trigonometry, grift, the usual.” “What’s Trigonometry?” Asks Ron, walking with them on a field trip through Muggle London for Nandos. Dudley’s Uncle “Gerald White” is supervising them it’s fine. Dudley stares for a moment. “You guys… are learning math, along with your Divination and Transmorfigication and whatsits, right?” There is an awkward silence. Even Sirius considers morphing back into a dog to avoid this conversation. “Oh for fucks sake.” Sighs Dudley, texting Hermionie to see if she brought her Muggle textbooks along.
(She Did)
IDK what happens when the school year starts but I love the idea of “Well some snitch (Snape) might notice if Sirus is hanging around, so instead he goes with Dudley to Fancy Rich Boy School. Maybe they’re short a teacher there and he can reccomend his friend Remus, currently out of work for reasons that aren’t his fault…
Yassss!
“What’s trigonometry?” some pureblood at the World Cup asks him. “It’s a variant of arithmancy,” says Harry, who’s become somewhat adept at bullshitting translations between magical and muggle things when the incentive was avoiding Aunt Marge’s wrath.
Nobody’s ever heard of trigonometry except for one elderly pureblood witch, who had heard it mentioned once back in school by a classmate who went on to become a famous name in advanced and extremely theoretical arithmancy.
Everybody loses no time in agreeing that trigonometry must be this tremendously advanced arithmancy specialization and Dudley Dursley must be an absolute arithmancy prodigy to the point where even the arithmancy buffs don’t want to risk making themselves look stupid by asking him about his research.
OBVIOUSLY Dudley goes to some extremely foreign wizarding school with an advanced research program available. There can’t be many of them with an advanced “trigonometry” program like that, so nobody asks which school it is because what if there’s only one of them and they look stupid for not knowing about it?
Besides, Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, is giving him the time of day like he’s someone really important, so, yeah.
Oh, yeah, he’s definitely the type of absent-minded brilliance that forgets his wand regularly, head in the clouds with all those theorems.
Dudley actually takes up computer programming at Smeltings. He tried it out because he likes video games, and then sort of fell in love with the process, the building something up out of lines of code, the thrill of success when it works. The awestruck reactions of wizards who see a couple of his notebooks when he sits there scribbling out code on a spiralbound notebook with a ballpoint pen is almost tangible.
The ballpoints and the notebooks take some suspicion for their muggleness until Harry points out that you don’t need to pay attention to how much ink is left and when you need to dip it, so it’s perfect for somebody who might want to scribble out whole pages of that stuff without noticing whether they’ve run out of ink, and the notebooks have pages so you could remember where something is. Pretty soon quill-tipped ballpoints are all the rage and spiralbound parchment stacks are being sold in all the stores.
Somebody asks Dudley about his family history. “Oh, they’ve all been like me,” he says, “as far back as anybody remembers” and he means not-a-wizard, but everybody thinks the opposite.
His father is blustery and yells and prone to explosive bursts of anger, he says, and his mother is obsessed with cleanliness and etiquette, and everyone is perfectly happy to never suggest they’d like to meet them.
Once Dudley figures out that everyone thinks he’s a wizard, he and Harry have a solid laugh over it and Harry teaches Dudley what he’d need to know to continue the deception. Fred and George are brought into the equation and provide him with lots of cool tricks and such so that he can appear to do some small bits of magic now and again.
He eventually marries Daphne Greengrass, who knows about his muggleness at that point and loves the idea of getting one over on her overly bloodpurist parents without them ever knowing about it. Harry and Sirius quietly gift them Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, and the assumption that Dudley has the sort of money that buys a historic Pureblood property as a starter home goes round and round.
Dudley ends up on the Board of Governors, and later Minister for Magic, and in their old age Petunia and Vernon suffer the mingled pride and fury that their son is a Government Minister and they can’t brag about it.
Two other AUs this goes well with:
“all the pureblood dipshits tithed thier land and holdings to Voldemort so when Harry kills him, all the assets go to him and now he owns half of wizarding UK.”
“early on his career as a wizard, Dudley goes to Wales to meet another Famed Arithmancer and becomes close friends with fellow videogame and rugby enthusiast Howell Jenkins.”
Tags:
#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #abuse cw? #embarrassment squick? #oh look an update
As someone who has spent time with professional ornithologists and has seen people make 500-mile trips to see a Single Species Of Hummingbird i can say without a single doubt that wizards being discovered cus they keep bringing their nonnative birds places is a completely realistic scenario
i’m imagining a bunch of very confused ornithologists trying to research the appearance of non-native owls in scotland, but they keep getting turned around by hogwarts’ anti-muggle defenses and it’s this endless cycle of
“well, we know that within this few mile radius of undisturbed highlands, there are massive concentrations of owls that Should Not Be Here. we know the owls are here, we know where they hunt and approximately where they return to roost but we just. we jsut. can’t find a SINGLE fucking nest??? anywhere?????? every owl we tag has their tracker malfunction RIGHT HERE but whenever i investigate i somehow end up back home in my slippers with a cup of tea.”
Not nearly enough “Sirius Black makes himself at home in Privet Drive because there’s nothing the Dursleys can do to get him to leave” fic out there, and it’s a crying shame.
Harry just rolling up like WHADDUP THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT FAMILAR HE EMOTIONALLY SUPPORTS ME BY MAULING PEOPLE WHO THREATEN ME. And Sirus dog-charades AND THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT COUCH YOU CAN SIT ON THE FLOOR FUCKERS.
You know what else is good “Dudley gets on top of how fucked up his parents are faster” fic, and i feel like “Sirius Lives at Privet Drive” dovetails nicely into this:
Dudley, age 14 and realizing his mother’s Loving-but-Ill-advised cooking is setting him up for some serious health problems, and that he’s tall enough to look his dad in the eye now, so his previous rationale of “If he’s hitting Harry he’s not Hitting Me” doesn’t hold up now, and goes full Eye of The Tiger to cope.
This means Sirus gets dragged along on a lot of Parent-avoiding “Walkies”
So many that one evening after a fight Dudley is trying to round up Harry and Sirius for a cooldown run and Sirius groans “Oh you’re big lads you can jog to the tesco on your own.” from the couch There’s a hot moment of silence.
“He’s a Magic Dog.” Says Harry.
“What do you mean your dog is a 40-year-old man?” “What do you mean your Dad’s BFF?” “What do you mean convicted criminal?” What do you mean WIZARD HITLER WANTS YOUR HIDE??” “..Shit I gotta up my workout routine.”
“You’re not gonna punch Voldermort out Dudley.”
“Not with these wimpy biceps I won’t.”
Shit’s getting increasingly tense in the house so when Ron announces they have tickets to the Quidditch World Cup Harry has to ask “Hey, can Dudley come too?”
Dudley might be short on wizarding skills but one thing he’s learned at Fancy rich boy School is the art of Schmooze. They meet Corneilus Fudge and Dudley charms the hell out of him. Fudge doesn’t even realize he’s not a Wizard. Harry tries to impress upon him the ‘VOLDERMORT’S ALIVE WITH A CULT DIPSHIT” upon him and nearly ends up in tears before Dudley takes his arm and whispers “Let me Handle This.”
Thirty minutes later Corneilus is organizing a Task Force of Aurors.
“What the fuck do they teach you there?” asks Harry. “Oh, buttering egos, Trigonometry, grift, the usual.” “What’s Trigonometry?” Asks Ron, walking with them on a field trip through Muggle London for Nandos. Dudley’s Uncle “Gerald White” is supervising them it’s fine. Dudley stares for a moment. “You guys… are learning math, along with your Divination and Transmorfigication and whatsits, right?” There is an awkward silence. Even Sirius considers morphing back into a dog to avoid this conversation. “Oh for fucks sake.” Sighs Dudley, texting Hermionie to see if she brought her Muggle textbooks along.
(She Did)
IDK what happens when the school year starts but I love the idea of “Well some snitch (Snape) might notice if Sirus is hanging around, so instead he goes with Dudley to Fancy Rich Boy School. Maybe they’re short a teacher there and he can reccomend his friend Remus, currently out of work for reasons that aren’t his fault…
Hello, yes, I love this. I love the idea of Dudley and Hermione tutoring Harry on Muggle science and whatnot, and Ron is sitting there confused and just going ???? Also, you just know that Hermione is going to read ahead extremely quickly and she’ll be Dudley’s best study partner.
Omg, Dudley and Hermione joining forces to bring the wizarding world into the modern age
Adding: Dudley stays relatively fat, but now he can bench-press Buckbeak.
Tags:
#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #abuse cw? #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the Gerald White reference)
Harry Potter AU in which Fred and George are in different houses and they steal and wear each others ties whilst doing stupid things in hope of the others house losing points
AU where Fred and George are in different houses and they get their hands on house ties from the other two houses as well. By the end of their first year nobody knows which house either of them is in and just take points off a random house whenever they see a redhead getting up to something.
The confusion runs so deep by the time Ron starts that Snape once takes points off Slytherin for Ron fighting with Malfoy.
There’s a few months in Fred and George’s second year when they successfully convince most of the school that they’re actually quadruplets, one in each house.
After this confusing quadruple mess, a conspiracy theory emerges that Fred and George are actually just one person, and there were never any Weasley Twins. To add fuel to this theory, Fred and George make a point to never be seen together (publicly).
When asked about this theory, Fred/George subtly insinuates that he used Polyjuice Potion so that there could be multiple versions of himself at once. This goes around the Hogwarts Rumor Mill like fire. The Weasley family says nothing to dispute it, not even Percy.
Percy makes polyjuice successfully for the first time in his fifth year, when he finally has sufficient motivation. Fred, George, Edward and Hubert walk into the great hall one morning, identical but for their school ties, and the chaos is so great that nobody realizes Percy and Ron are missing.
Tags:
#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #fun with shapeshifting
I want to see a fanfic where Harry hatches a basilisk.
I want to see a fanfic where he looks up “magical snakes” as soon as he gets to Hogwarts because that thing at the zoo always bugged him, and so the Trio works out that it’s a basilisk immediately after the first petrification in Second Year. But they don’t know how it’s getting around or where it is or anything, so Harry is just like WELP SET A BASILISK TO FIND A BASILISK while Hermione and Ron are like HARRY NO.
I want to see a fanfic where Harry sticks a chicken egg under a toad and makes all these plans about how he’ll talk to his huge deadly snake and get it eye-blinkers and shit so it doesn’t kill people and make sure it’s not too aggressive, and somehow it never occurs to his twelve-year old brain that the chicken egg has a total volume of about four tablespoons and he is not going to get the giant King of Serpents he is expecting.
I want to see a fanfic where it finally breaks out of the shell and Harry finds himself with a bb!basilisk too smol to even have the murder-eyes yet, who can only petrify someone for about half an hour before the effect wears off. She eats spiders and gets tired very easily and demands that he wear a hood she can curl up in and sleep.
(She is also the same vivid green as his eyes and already hideously venomous, but doesn’t like using her fangs because she says they get cold and give her brain freeze when she unsheathes them.)
I just… I really want Harry with a haughty, demanding, arrogant danger noodle who has an overinflated sense of her own importance, views Hedwig as a TERRIFYING MENACE because she isn’t big enough to eat owls yet and keeps up a steady stream of insults hissed in Harry’s ear whenever she’s near someone who has a Dark Mark (which she can sense at close range). And who is basically useless as a familiar because she refuses to slither across anything other than sun-warmed stones or Harry, hasn’t got a very powerful gaze yet and doesn’t like biting people.
(Except snake-arm-people. She finds snake-arm-people confusing and annoying, and would probably make an exception on the no-biting thing where they’re concerned.)
I mean there are obviously a lot of factors influencing snake growth rate but if we assume basilisks just get stupidhuge because they grow their whole lives and are immortal, this snake is probably going to be at least 8 feet long by Deathly Hallows, which is a significant and intimidating chunk of scaly muscle that is intelligent enough to do what it is told. Like, you know, hey, bite this necklace.
So I mean by like his fourth year it’s going to be pretty hard to hide this snake that is nearly as long as he is tall and it’s not going to do much for his reputation that the Boy Who Lived has a pet fucking basilisk but holy damn does it make book seven a whole hell of a lot shorter.
can you just imagine him ron and hermione coming up with increasingly ridiculous excuses trying to hide their pet baby basilisk in the dorms (hagrid would be so proud). how long do you think it’d take before harry’s pet basilisk is just a really badly hidden secret between all of gryffindor? and the ensuring antics of the entire house as they try to keep mcgonagall from finding out? (she knows something is up, but even just thinking of what could be big enough the entire house is trying to keep it from her makes her want to break out the firewhiskey)
ron gets the idea to try and practices parseltongue with baby basilisk since he hears harry talking in his sleep with it all the time anyway (and ngl, baby basilisk is kind of adorable and eats all the spiders in the dorm so he doesn’t have to deal with them, he’s pretty smitten once she hatches), and as soon as hermione overhears him trying it, she’s dragging him and harry to the library because, well, parseltongue is a language, why can’t they learn it? so it’s the two of them alternating between hissing at harry and hissing at the basilisk and harry is trying so hard not to laugh because 90% of what they’re saying is utter nonsense and the basilisk doesn’t even bother, because she likes these two humans but wow are they dumb, that’s not how words work.
I love parseltongue and Hermione like welp it’s a language and then most everyone in their year ends up learning it even the other houses just like the horrible scary snake language ends up being the secret language between the kids so they can gossip and the teachers are like what. Also Hagrid would love the baby basilisk.
You know most would just pick up a few curse words and insults.
what is everyone else is thinking when the Gryffindors start hissing under their breath? Their table sounds like a snake pit and it’s eerie af. The Slytherins are pissed cause surely this is a joke at their expense. And obviously everyone turns to Harry because he’s the ONLY ONE who could have stared this.
And can you imagine someone flubbing a scentence and activating a parseltounge feature of the castle? A small group of Gryffindors are complaining about astronomy and suddenly the stairs turn into a super slide. Discovering Salazar’s secret liquor cubbord. Secret passage ways being stumbled into left right and center because no one can pronounce ‘greasy git’ in parseltoung(besides Harry) but they’re sure as hell gonna try
You know that thing where really big dogs listen to really little dogs because they’re like someone that confident obviously knows what they’re doing?
Well, here we have Hermione treating this baby basilisk like a person because Harry keeps having actual conversations with it, so obviously it’s got a personality and capable of thought and such, and she doesn’t want to set a precedent of treating it like a lesser creature or especially not like a servant the way the big basilisk has been treated. Everyone follows her lead, because Hermione probably knows what she’s doing, she’s read books.
Now this other basilisk has been following commands only, some of them very old and some of them from the more recent master (the diary), having been carefully trained to Just Do What I Say from a young age. It’s not really making its own decisions, but trying to do its best the way it was trained.
But Harry’s bb basilisk has other ideas, and who is it really going to trust, some creepy smelling wizard, or another basilisk, which it probably never even met before, but instinctually recognizes as Like Me. Especially since that baby (”excuse me but what do you think you’re doing!! how dare you scare my friends!!”) is alternating between threats (the big basilisk has never met another basilisk and doesn’t know they’re not credible) and telling all about walkies and the nice warm rocks they could go lie on if it would just stop fighting.
Hermione, once she learns parseltongue, starts teaching the large basilisk all about morality and how to make its own decisions.
Tags:
#Harry Potter #story ideas I will never write #fanfic #snake #my past self has good taste #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
Someone (probably Hermione) takes Luna to a muggle museum of natural history, in a last ditch effort to convince her that dinosaurs really did exist. They go through all of it: full and partial skeletons on display, fossil imprints of skin textures, a little video about carbon dating, exhibits on the evolution of all life from tiny one-celled sea creatures, bird-hipped vs. lizard-hipped, living giant isopods and coelacanths, the whole spiel about how the dinosaurs aren’t actually completely gone, since some, like the anchiornis and archaeopteryx, were the predecessors from which today’s birds – including every owl in the Wizarding World – evolved.
Luna takes all this in with her usual calm demeanor until the very end, when her eyes seem to grow even more enormous in her face, but doesn’t say anything. After a full minute of Luna’s silent astonishment, her companion prods her for a response. “Of course!” Luna exclaims, “no wonder I’ve never found them. I’ve been going about things the wrong way!” She launches into a lengthy explanation that the records that she and her father have been using for references were copies of copies of copies of absolutely ancient scripts, so in order to find the creatures as described in them, she needed to be looking for fossils.
Luna (with Rolf as her assistant) begins searching through areas of Wizarding Britain, using magical equivalents of the muggle tools she read about at the museum (a variation on Tempus to determine the age of a magical item or creature, Cryptozoam Revelio as a substitute for ground-penetrating radar). She finds the remains of a number of magical creatures from various ages, as well as accidentally uncovering a nest of Knuckers, a relative of the dragon previously thought to be extinct. After this discovery, she and Rolf are given a bit more credence than before, and they gain the support among creature-handlers, especially dragonologists. Because of this, they get access to more regions of the world, and their team grows. Eventually Luna ends up founding the Wizarding Archaeological Society, the first institution to combine both muggle and wizard research methods at a single institution.
On the 50th anniversary of the Society’s founding, they open a museum of their own (”Everything that was, at the WAS!”), to display the various fossils of magical creatures that they’ve managed to locate over the years. Unveiled at the opening ceremonies was what would become the pride of their collection, a diorama of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in every stage of development, along with details about their habits, average lifespan, and a map of the full range of their habitat at their peak population in the mid-17th century. Their extinction at during the 20th century was attributed to rising global temperatures, as their most flourishing period coincided with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age, and no specimens from any later than the 1976 Heat Wave had thus far been recovered. The disappearance of the Snorkacks, it was said, had been an early warning sign of the global climate change which had troubled the entire world, wizarding and muggle, for the better part of the last half-century. A cooperative partnership had been reached between the WAS and the Royal Society a scant decade after the WAS’s founding , allowing research witches and wizards to pool their resources with muggle scientists, in time to prevent a catastrophe that the wizarding world would otherwise have been unlikely to survive.
In her speech at that evening’s gala, Luna told the story of how it all happened, to reveal the person who had singlehandledly started this series of events, which resulted in not only a golden age of discovery in the field of cryptozoology, but also an era of peace and cooperation between both worlds, allowing restrictions imposed by the Statute of Secrecy to be loosened for the first time in nearly five hundred years, all in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Hermione Granger, who had been grumbling in her chair the entire time, rose when acknowledged. Luna Lovegood beamed at her aging friend, the witch who had gone from being her most skeptical critic to her most dedicated – and most challenging – supporter in a mere half-century.
When Harry becomes the DADA professor, kids constantly ask him for an autograph, but he refuses, saying the only thing he’ll autograph is a detention slip. Eventually, though, he starts carrying around a stack of autographed pictures of Ginny, which he gives out when people ask for an autograph. It gets really popular, so he starts mixing it up with autographs from other people, mostly Ron and Hermione. But the students love it, so he adds more. Soon he’s giving out autographs from like fifty different people, including all the teachers at Hogwarts, and a bunch of other random people like Luna, Lee Jordan, Oliver Wood, etc. He even has some fairly rare ones from Krum and Fleur. It becomes a game in Hogwarts to collect all the autographs, like chocolate frog cards. Some of them are more limited edition than others, like signatures from all the ghosts (though Harry won’t reveal how he managed to get those). George starts to offer a discount at Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes (and a prize autograph from Peeves, who will only sign Bertie Bott’s scratch-and-sniff cards) to anyone who can prove they’ve collected the whole set. Harry provides him with up-to-date lists of autographs to check against. Every Hogsmeade weekend there’s a line of Hogwarts students in WWW’s Hogsmeade branch trying to get the discount.
At some point a seventh year comes up to Harry and asks for his autograph, but not as the Savior of the Wizarding World, but because they now have the autograph of every other Hogwarts teacher and want Professor Potter’s to go with them. Harry–trying not to tear up–agrees, but only in exchange for the student’s signature. He begins offering this deal to all departing seventh years, his autograph in exchange for theirs. He tells them it’s in case they ever get famous, so he can add it as a limited edition autograph, but really he keeps them all in a big binder just for himself, to remember all his students. (A couple times, though, when a students does become famous, he will contact them and ask if they’d like to be added to the game. So far no one has said no.)
When Teddy starts at Hogwarts he begins a black market autograph trade because he has access to a lot of the people Harry gets autographs from. Harry’s other three children proudly continue the trade when they get to Hogwarts. They’re all secretly aided by Ginny.
Brinens and Things 