Love you, canon Sirius. Sirius, who loved his motorbike and leaned back in chairs. Sirius who suffered 12 years in Azkaban while being innocent. Sirius, who missed crossword puzzles and turned into a dog to escape. Sirius, who bonded with other animals and magical creatures. Sirius, who wanted to commit a murder in front of children. Sirius, who is tall and terrifying. A pureblood heir. The bad child. Sirius, who is top of the class. Sirius, who chose his own family. Sirius, who bullied other students for fun and told Snape about the willow because he was a noisy git. Sirius, who doesn't apologize for who he is. Sirius, who ate rats to be closer to Harry and fought Molly who tried to question his parenthood. Sirius, who is brave and energetic and didn't do well just sitting in the house when others are in danger. Sirius who didn't lose his mind in Azkaban. Sirius who was a competent wizard, loyal friend and loving godfather. Sirius who is moody and drank alcohol to cope and lost his temper. Sirius who never wanted to be apart from James. Sirius who hated the dark arts. Sirius who was mean to Kretcher. Sirius who risked his life constantly for people he loved and died protecting Harry.
Since Oppenheimer (2023) is out this is a perfect time to remind everyone that it’s war propaganda to believe the atomic bombings on non-military civilian centers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary or justified to end the war. No, it was a war crime against an enemy we had throughly defeated at that point. The bombings weren’t to “save lives” (they horrifically ended many) but to send a global message that the United States has weapons of mass destruction and was willing to use them on their enemies. It was a power play in the wake of Hitler’s defeat and the emerging transition to the Cold War, nothing else.
The first time Auror Alastor Moody accidently met James Potter and Lily Evans during a visit to Hogwarts, he wasn’t very confident about the young couple…
[instagram @potterbyblvnk]
This is perf fan fic material right there
Hi! I started reading marauders fics this year, more specifically, jily. I was wondering if there were any good ones where james and lily are opposite genders that someone could recommend? Or something similar? 😭
was arguing politics with my brother earlier and now i can’t stop thinking like, if we can’t care about other people what even is the point of all this? your ideology must be fundamentally rooted in compassion. it’s not naivety to want to help people.
[…] then came a new voice, a man’s voice, shouting, panicking – "Lily, take Harry and go! It’s him! Go! Run! I’ll hold him off –"
“I heard my dad,” Harry mumbled. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard him – he tried to take on Voldemort himself, to give my mum time to run for it….”
Harry suddenly realized that there were tears on his face mingling with the sweat. He bent his face as low as possible, wiping them off on his robes, pretending to do up his shoelace, so that Lupin wouldn’t see. (poa)
Harry began to run. He had no thought in his head except his father… If it was him… if it really was him… he had to know, had to find out….
Harry threw himself behind it, peering desperately through the leaves. On the opposite bank, the glimmers of silver were suddenly extinguished. A terrified excitement shot through him – any moment now – "Come on!“ he muttered, staring about. “Where are you? Dad, come on –” (poa)
And he came … first his head, then his body … tall and untidy-haired like Harry, the smoky, shadowy form of James Potter blossomed at the end of Voldemort’s wand, fell to the ground, and straightened like his wife.
He walked close to Harry, looking down at him, and he spoke in the same distant, echoing voice as the others, but quietly, so that Voldemort, his face now livid with fear as his victims prowled around him, could not hear…
“When the connection is broken, we will linger for only moments… but we will give you time… you must get to the Portkey, it will return you to Hogwarts… do you understand, Harry?“
"Do it now,” whispered his father’s voice, “be ready to run… do it now…” (gof)
“Dad! Help me, Dad! He’s going to kill me, Dad! Boo hoo!” “Shut up,” said Harry quietly. “Shut up, Dudley, I’m warning you!" “Come and help me, Dad! Mum, come and help me! He’s killed Cedric! Dad, help me! He’s going to – Don’t you point that thing at me!" (ootp)
"Parents,” said Harry, “shouldn’t leave their kids unless – unless they’ve got to.”
Harry looked down at his feet, thinking of his father. Would James have backed Harry in what he had said to Lupin, or would he have been angry at how his son had treated his old friend? (dh)
They had not drawn the curtains; he saw them quite clearly in their little sitting room, the tall black-haired man in his glasses, making puffs of colored smoke erupt from his wand for the amusement of the small black-haired boy in his blue pajamas. The child was laughing and trying to catch the smoke, to grab it in his small fist…
And tears came before he could stop them, boiling hot then instantly freezing on his face, and what was the point in wiping them off or pretending? He let them fall, his lips pressed hard together, looking down at the thick snow hiding from his eyes the place where the last of Lily and James lay, bones now, surely, or dust, not knowing or caring that their living son stood so near, his heart still beating, alive because of their sacrifice and close to wishing, at this moment, that he was sleeping under the snow with them.
“You are nearly there,” said James. “Very close. We are… so proud of you."
"Until the very end,” said James. (dh)
“What Harry craves is a father” - JKR
“So you did see your father last night, Harry… you found him inside yourself.” (poa)
One of the things I love about Rowaelin and their dynamic (aside from really relating to her as a woman who unapologetically loves herself and is good at most things) is that he’s not like, possessive? A lot of male fantasy romance heros are possessive and growling and snarling at others, but like the only time in the book he gets vaguely possessive is right after they bone the very first time, and it’s like a “hmm, weird feeling, gotta be careful with that” and isn’t mentioned again. Fenrys shows up and to Aelin he’s like “have fun flirting with our boyfriend babe”. Like even with Arobyn he just puts on the almond skin oil (it’s the grooming and psychosis that bothers him, not the possessive element of it). Like he’s so confident in himself and his relationship with Aelin that he doesn’t feel the need to do that, which is incredibly sexy, and much more reflective of the dynamic that I want in real life.
An interesting thing to explore when analysing Sirius’s rage towards Peter, is his personal sense of hurt at the betrayal (outside of James and Lily’s murders). The tragedy of the situation is that he considered Peter a friend. Although Sirius never once mentions the harm Peter has done to him ( the little thing of wrongful imprisonment) and throughout the scene frames his anger as wanting justice for Jily and mainly to protect Harry (which is certainly his prime motivation).
There is just something about the way he rips into Peter, “cringing piece of filth”, “Stinking skin,” and my personal fave “there’s enough filth on my robes without you touching them,” that has so many layers.
It also reminds me of “shame of my flesh,” and is potentially another similarity with Walburga. Wherein they both resort to awful insults to mask how much someone has wounded them.
I just read something about some fanfic readers on TikTok, mostly younger ones, are against AO3 because it doesn't recommend fic to them. As in, it doesn't track them and auto-feed them content using an algorithm.
I am sure it's not every younger fanfiction-reading nerd. But....
The generational divide between old internet and new internet users is so stark sometimes. Like. That younger people don't remember the individual fanfiction websites days... okay. I get that. Some of them weren't even born and time is time and it moves on. It's fine.
But to grow up with an internet where you do not get a choice, or not much of a choice, except to be fed content? Oh wow that's a yikes I've never thought about before.
Yeah, there's some filter capabilities but companies override that all the time with subtle little changes. Youtube recommends stuff constantly (often conservative videos even to me who has no history of watching or liking that shit). Twitter and Facebook got rid of chronological posts and even when you try to get rid of suggested posts, they come back. Instagram is basically all ads now. And then TikTok literally doesn't even ask you to search (and as I recall, their search function sucks), and you can like videos to change what you see *a little* but ultimately the algorithm will lead you wherever it wants.
That's so sad to grow up with that. Choice and searching and relying on your judgment and the recommendations of people you like... those are good things.
I am not like "oh those youths!" here. I am "fuck these corporations!" here. Look at this shit. It's not a rec list from someone you like and trust--it's what corporate has decided you should like. And a lot of these kids have not known anything else. That's scary and infuriating.
So much of what is “cringe” is just… earnest.
what if you made an honest expression of genuine human emotion and someone saw it!
Idk I’m in a weird headspace today but I can’t stop thinking about the vet tech who did the intake on my cat when we arrived at the ER, who was so kind and gentle and fearless when sticking her bare hand in a carrier with my very unhappy cat who, let’s face it, was never known for being nice to strangers even when she didn’t feel like shit — this vet tech who knelt down on the floor to talk to me as I hunched in a plastic chair, trying not to sob, who played her role, got through the scene, then laid her hand gently on my knee and said, “you’re doing great.” Stood up to walk away, hesitated. “I hope that wasn’t weird,” she said. “No,” I said. “No, I really needed that.” I keep replaying it over and over again. I hope that wasn’t weird. And I can’t help but think that the weird thing is how we’ve come to expect that showing our love to strangers, the gentle touch, the compassionate word, will be perceived as something foreign, something strange, a threatening hand thrust in a cage, when really it’s lifesaving, like the woman who once bought me a cookie in a coffee shop that one time when I’d been poorly hiding the fact that I was crying, pink cheeks and salt streaks on my glasses, “I hope this isn’t weird,” she’d said, “but it looks like you’re having a bad day.” And in that moment I was so embarrassed, so ashamed at having been caught out, at being seen, but I accepted the cookie and she left and I ate it, and I let my walls down just a little bit, just enough, like the crumble of brick, like the dust of cookie bits, and I think of her still, nearly ten years later — I hope this isn’t weird I hope this isn’t weird I hope this isn’t weird — why is it weird to love one another?
i love characters with an innate ability to just fucking survive
bestie you should be dead but you arent fucking how
[ID: a screenshot of a tweet by user ForrestValkai that reads: "It's crazy how people get justifiably angry when scalpers buy a bunch of tickets to sell them at unreasonable prices, but when landlords do the exact same thing with houses we all just act like that's normal and smart business and homeless people should just work harder." End ID]
I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.
-Sylvia Plath
As someone who is fascinated by the Black family (particularly Sirius and Regulus). I find the debate about Sirius’s feelings towards Regulus really interesting. Here is my interpretation of what we see in cannon:
1. When talking to Harry he calls him ‘soft enough to believe them.’ And a ‘stupid idiot.’ Sirius does not mince words when he hates someone, for example he calls Walburga a ‘horrible old hag,’ who ‘kept herself alive out of pure spite.’
He gets snappy with Harry when talking about the other family death eater (Bellatrix) and it’s one of only a few times he’s snappy or short with Harry. Sirius ends his diatribe about Bellatrix with declaring that, ‘she’s certainly not my family.’ So his description and tone when talking about Regulus is mild in comparison and he later uses the term ‘idiot,’ to describe himself and James.
2. Sirius can be callous when he doesn’t care about someone (his ignoring of Kretcher for example). Yet he bothered to find out about Regulus’s death.
‘ From what I found out after he died’ - the use of the pronoun ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ indicates that Sirius did this alone and it wasn’t Order intelligence gathering.
He also indicates that he has dedicated time to theorising about how Regulus must have tried to hand in his resignation, once he got cold feet.
This idea also indicates that Sirius doesn’t think Regulus is capable of the type of evil carried out by the more high ranking death eaters. His comment that Regulus wasn’t important enough to be killed by Voldemort himself, is slightly disparaging ( there’s some sibling rivalry still present as the ‘much better son’ comment indicates), but shows the idea that he doesn’t think Regulus is evil.
3. Sirius throws out precious family heirlooms during the cleaning, including pictures and his father’s ring. He also turns his mother’s old room into a Hippogriff stable. Yet in DH, Harry finds Regulus’s room untouched and still locked.
In my opinion , even if he’s not overt about it, Sirius loved Regulus ( although he might not have liked him). Thoughts on this?
Hard agree, I think that Sirius had a soft spot for his little brother, despite their enormous ideological differences. His comments about Regulus do very much deflect and almost excuse the atrocity of Regulus joining the Death Eaters. His parents are assholes, but Regulus is just soft and stupid. Regulus' flaw is ignorance and lack of fortitude, not ill intent. Sirius blames their parents for the way that Regulus turned out twice--Regulus was "soft enough to believe them" and Sirius assumes his parents "thought Regulus was a right little hero for joining up in the first place". For someone like Sirius, who does have a tendency to default into black and white thinking when judging people he dislikes (because as much as he distances himself from his family, he is still a product of his upbringing), having such a charitable, nuanced view of his brother is notable.
Especially because I think, in this case, he's maybe a little wrong. A little too generous. Yes, obviously, their parents played a large part in the ideology that Regulus embraced and the path that he ended up taking. That said, I don't think Regulus was stupid--the teenager who figured out Voldemort had a Horcrux and then drowned in a lake of corpses to get it was neither soft nor stupid. I think he knew what he was doing and was very intentional about his choice. And then changed his mind. And I'm sure Sirius knows that Regulus is not an idiot. But by minimizing Regulus' agency and competence, he can make Regulus' choices more palatable.
I also want to comment a little here on the "much better son" issue because I think that's so damn tragic. Ugh. As someone who got the "be more like your sister" bs growing up, I have a lot of feelings about parents playing children against each other like that. But. I think it's also notable that this still bothers Sirius. Despite his vehement insistence that he wholly rejected his family and doesn't care about their stupid, hateful opinions, it still stings that his parents (from his perspective at least) favored Regulus. You would think being a worse son by his parents' standards would be a point of pride for Sirius, but it's not. He's bitter about it, it still hurts. And I think that sentiment underlies his comment about his mother not having a heart as well. He is still angry and hurt that they did not approve of him and express love for him. Being rejected by your parents, no matter how objectively awful your parents may be, sucks. Forever.
One more side note about that: the "much better son" comment comes right after he tells Harry that Regulus is younger than him. I think that's significant and it's funny to me, as a second born child, how it seems to add insult to injury when your younger sibling out does you in some way. Like older siblings, ime, tend to have this entitlement to being the first and the best and all that jazz and when they're not it grates. And I'm sure that was amplified in the Black family, with their focus on heirs and lineage and all the implications of being a first born son. Which again, Sirius still cares about to some degree.
Have I rambled on enough? I could write whole essays on this subject (and I have!) but yes. Sirius cares about Regulus. And it's no wonder that he struggles to explicitly express that because he was never taught how to express love and affection for family in a healthy way. "I hate you all" is like...the Black family love language lol.
This is so interesting and well put. From the way Sirius spoke about Regulus I've always thought he felt responsible for being unable to save him, as if it was his job, as the older brother, and he failed, just as he failed to protect James and then, until the day he died, he tried to protect Harry, to get it right for once.
Love this post! I think Sirius thought Reg believed his parents too readily - was too innocent/gullible/naïve to figure out their explanations about why they were better than muggles and maybe why muggles were a threat to wix etc were In fact lies?
There’s something a bit unusual about a kid sticking up info about Voldemort on his wall at home in his room as Reg did when he was in school - ok you could say it’s creepy but I think it’s essentially unusual - not info about the latest Quidditch star players/ biggest magical band etc, but some ‘politician’ - like a teen from a right wing family in the US having info about Trump all over his wall… I mean,even if parents were supporters, it would still be considered a bit out of the ordinary? And I just find that fascinating and has coloured my headcanon of Regulus a lot (as has his formal fuck off letter to Voldy)
Sparking Chemistry Between Characters
Subtle Gazes and lingering touches:
The eyes are the windows to the soul, and they can convey volumes of unspoken emotions. Describe those stolen glances, the lingering eye contact, and the way their gazes seem to connect on a deeper level. In addition, small touches like a brush of hands or an accidental bump can create electric moments that hint at an underlying romantic attraction. For example:
"Her heart fluttered as she caught him stealing glances, his eyes softly tracing the curves of her smile. With every accidental touch, their hands lingered, sending a current of warmth through their veins."
/////////
Meaningful Conversations and Shared Secrets:
Deep conversations and intimate confessions can be powerful tools for hinting at romantic feelings. When characters open up to one another, revealing their vulnerabilities and dreams, a bond begins to form. These moments create a sense of emotional intimacy that can lay the groundwork for a blossoming romance. Consider this example:
"Underneath the twinkling stars, they shared secrets that they had never uttered to anyone else. As he listened to her dreams, he realized that he wanted to be a part of them, and a warm smile played on his lips."
/////////
Playful Teasing and Banter:
Ah, the age-old art of witty banter! This lighthearted exchange of playful jabs and teasing remarks can build tension and create a magnetic pull between characters. It allows them to establish a unique connection filled with laughter and friendly competition. Here's an example:
"Their banter was a delightful dance of sharp wit and quick comebacks. Every retort was like a playful spark that kept the fire between them burning bright, a dance they couldn't resist joining every chance they got."
/////////
Unspoken Jealousy and Protective Gestures:
Jealousy can be a potent emotion to hint at unexpressed romantic feelings. When one character starts to feel protective or slightly possessive, it suggests a deeper connection brewing beneath the surface. Show how they react to potential rivals or display signs of concern for each other's well-being. Check out this snippet:
"Her heart skipped a beat as she noticed the subtle tightening of his jawline when he saw her laughing with someone else. His fingers tapped nervously, silently craving her attention, and he couldn't help but step closer, ready to ward off any potential threats."