Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

teacupsandcyanide:

do you think after Ron and Hermione got out of the trapdoor and raised the alarm and were being patched up in the hospital wing

do you think they were given the most royal proud mama smackdown by McGonagall like “ how DARE you infiltrate a death maze you are ELEVEN and miss granger how on earth did you solve my chessboard i”

and hermione interjected like “oh professor it wasn’t me. i’m useless at chess. it was ron.”

and McGonagall turned to look at Ron Weasley in total amazement at this 11 yr old kid who had been pretty ordinary in all her classes but had apparently beaten her in death chess and he just shrugged like “rookie mistakes, professor. you made some rookie mistakes.”

(via lupinatic)

thesquirrelisonfire:

gingersnapwolves:

perfectparamour:

fastpacedfreefall:

ave-aria:

scaredpotter:

the slytherins making a drinking game where they take a shot every time draco malfoy talks about harry potter

Madam Pomfrey banning the drinking game the very next day, after 90% of Slytherin house is admitted to the hospital wing with alcohol poisoning

#She drags Albus Dumbledore down to the hospital wing to show him the damage#Slytherin classes have been cancelled for the day as nearly everyone is here#too drunk to function#most are silent#but a few will occasionally look off into the distance with a sneer#and under their breaths#in the most disdainful and haughty voice they can manage#will mutter#POTTER#causing a fit of giggles to ripple through the room#Dumbledore agrees to ban the game and makes the announcement at dinner that evening#the only Slytherin in the Great Hall at that time is#of course#Malfoy#who turns red and immediately mutters that obviously this is Potter’s fault#Snape takes a shot#Harry Potter (x)

Oh my god it got so much better.

Snape takes a shot

A bunch of drunk Slytherin kids giggling in the nursery is more than I could’ve asked for

(via clockwork-mockingbird)

jhameia:

mademoisellesansa:

rapacityinblue:

queerperegrintook:

emberkeelty:

aporeticelenchus:

heidi8:

sonneillonv:

dressthesavage:

narwhalsareunderwaterunicorns:

anglofile:

spicyshimmy:

how is it possible to love fictional characters this much and also have people always been this way?

like, did queen elizabeth lie in bed late sometimes thinking ‘VERILY I CANNOT EVEN FOR MERCUTIO HATH SLAIN ME WITH FEELS’ 

was caesar like ‘ET TU ODYSSEUS’ 

sometimes i wonder

oh my GOD

the answer is yes they did. there’s a lot of research about the highly emotional reactions to the first novels widely available in print. 

here’s a thing; the printing press was invented in 1450 and whilst it was revolutionary it wasn’t very good. but then it got better over time and by the 16th century there were publications, novels, scientific journals, folios, pamphlets and newspapers all over Europe. at first most were educational or theological, or reprints of classical works.

however, novels gained in popularity, as basically what most people wanted was to read for pleasure. they became salacious, extremely dramatic, with tragic heroines and doomed love and flawed heroes (see classical literature, only more extreme.) books in the form of letters were common. sensationalism was par the course and apparently used to teach moral lessons. there was also a lot of erotica floating around. 

but here’s the thing: due to the greater availability of literature and the rise of comfy furniture (i shit you not this is an actual historical fact, the 16th and 17th century was when beds and chairs got comfy) people started reading novels for pleasure, women especially. as these novels were highly emotional, they too became…highly emotional. there are loads of contemporary reports of young women especially fainting, having hysterics, or crying fits lasting for days due to the death of a character or their otp’s doomed love. they became insensible over books and characters, and were very vocal about it. men weren’t immune-there’s a long letter a middle-aged man wrote to the author of his favourite work basically saying that the novel is too sad, he can’t handle all his feels, if they don’t get together he won’t be able to go on, and his heart is already broken at the heroine’s tragic state (IIRC ehh). 

conservatives at the time were seriously worried about the effects of literature on people’s mental health, and thought it damaging to both morals and society. so basically yes it is exactly like what happens on tumblr when we cry over attractive British men, only my historical theory (get me) is that their emotions were even more intense, as they hadn’t had a life of sensationalist media to numb the pain for them beforehand in the same way we do, nor did they have the giant group therapy session that is tumblr. 

(don’t even get me started on the classical/early medieval dudes and their boners for the Iliad i will be here all week. suffice to say, the members of the Byzantine court used Homeric puns instead of talking normally to each other if someone who hand’t studied the classics was in the room. they had dickish fandom in-jokes. boom.) 

I needed to know this.

See, we’re all just the current steps in a time-honored tradition! (And this post is good to read along with Affectingly’s post this week about old-school-fandom-and-history-and-stuff.

Ancient Iliad fandom is intense

Alexander the Great and and his boyfriend totally RPed Achilles and Patroclus. Alexander shipped that hard. (It’s possible that this story is apocryphal, but that would just mean that ancient historians were writing RPS about Alexander and Hephaestion RPing Iliad slash and honestly that’s just as good).

And then there’s this gem from Plato:

“Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus - his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far)” - Symposium

That’s right: 4th Century BCE arguments about who topped. Nihil novi sub sole my friends.

More on this glorious subject from people who know way more than I do

Man I love this post.

And to add my personal favourite story: after reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa in the 18th century, Elizabeth Echlin decided that she was NOT HAPPY with the ending and basically wrote her own fix-it fic. No-one dies and Lovelace (the villain) was totally reformed and became a super nice guy. It’s completely OOC and incredibly poorly written and it’s beautiful. 

Also, so many women fell in love with the villain, Lovelace, and wrote to Richardson about it, that he kept adding new bits with each edition to highlight what a hideous person Lovelace was. So it’s almost unsurprising that reading novels in this period was actually considered dangerous because it gave women unrealistic ideas about men and made them easier prey for rakes. 

Basically, “I want my own Christian Grey” has been a thing for hundreds of years. 

Also a thing with fix-it/everyone lives AUs: at various points in time but especially in the mid 1800s-early 1900s (aka roughly Victorian though there were periods of this earlier as well) a huge thing was to “fix” Shakespeare (as well as most theater/novels) to be in line with current morality. Good characters live, bad characters are terribly punished – but not, you know, grusomely, because what would the ladies think? So you have like, productions of King Lear where Cordelia lives and so do Regan and Goneril, but they’re VERY SORRY.

Aka all your problematic faves are redeemed and Everyone Lives! AUs for every protag.

Slightly tangential but I wanted to add my own favorite account of Chinese fandom to this~ I don’t know how many people here have heard of the Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions (红楼梦), but it is, arguably, the most famous Chinese novel ever written (There are four Chinese novel classics and A Dream of Red Mansions is considered the top of that list). It was written during the Qing dynasty by 曹雪芹, but became a banned book due to its critique of societal institutions and pro-democracy themes. As a result, the original ending of the book was lost and only the first 80 chapters remained. There are quite a few versions of how the current ending of the book came to be, but one of them is basically about how He Shen, one of Emperor Qian Long’s most powerful advisers, was such a super-fan of the book, he hired two writers to archive and reform the novel from the few remaining manuscripts there were. In order to convince the Emperor to remove the ban on the book, he had the writers essentially write a fanfiction ending to the book that would mitigate the anti-establishment themes. However, He Shen thought that the first version of the ending was too tragic (even though the whole book is basically a tragedy) so he had the writers go back and write a happier ending for him (the current final 40 chapters). He then presented the book to the Emperor and successfully convinced him to remove the ban on the book.

According to incomplete estimates, A Dream of Red Mansions spawned over 20 spin offs, retellings, and alternate versions (in the form of operas, plays, etc.) during the Qing Dynasty alone. 

In 1979, fans (albeit academic ones) started publishing a bi-monthly journal dedicated to analysis (read: meta) on A Dream of Red Mansions. In fact, the novel’s fandom is so vast and qualified and rooted in academics of Chinese literature that there is an entire field of study (beginning in the Qing dynasty) of just this one novel, called 红学. Think of it as Shakespearean studies, but only on one play. This field of study has schools of thought and specific specializations (as in: Psych analyses, Economics analyses, Historical analyses, etc.) that span pretty much every academic field anyone can think of. 

(That being said, I’ve read A Dream of Red Mansions and can honestly say that I’ve never read its peer in either English or Chinese. If for nothing else, read it because you would never otherwise believe that a man from the Qing dynasty could write such a heart-breakingly feminist novel with such a diverse cast of female characters given all the bitching and moaning we hear from male content-creators nowadays)

the beauty of archival research *sigh*

(via lupinatic)

spookypunktink:

I feel like if the harry potter theme parks sold jumpers that looked like weasley jumpers but they had every single letter in the alphabet they’d make a lot of money 

(Source: dramaqueenfromtatooine, via gryffindorconsultingtimelord)

lupinatic:

danceacrossmymemory:

marauders4evr:

killingkari:

killingkari:

marauders4evr:

killingkari:

So how stupid do you think the Hogwarts teachers felt back in Harrys first year when their traps and riddles designed to keep out Lord fucking Voldemort were beaten by three 11 year olds

killingkari:

So how stupid do you think the Hogwarts teachers felt back in Harrys first year when their traps and riddles designed to keep out Lord fucking Voldemort were beaten by three 11 year olds

I had a theory about this actually!

I mean, on the one hand, you could argue that they were exceptionally brilliant for their ages (which they were) but even then Voldemort was also brilliant so the professors should have really made the traps harder right?

Well, what if they did?

What if the traps that the Golden Trio faced were like 1/10th of the traps and were 1/50th of the difficulty?

What if the school itself knew that they needed to get to Quirrell?

And so the school itself changed up everything just for them?

And so help was given at Hogwarts to those who asked for it?

So how stupid do you think the Hogwarts teachers felt back in Harrys first year when their traps and riddles designed to keep out Lord fucking Voldemort were beaten by three 11 year olds

So how stupid do you think the Hogwarts teachers felt back in Harrys first year when their traps and riddles designed to keep out Lord fucking Voldemort were beaten by three 11 year olds

killingkari:

So how stupid do you think the Hogwarts teachers felt back in Harrys first year when their traps and riddles designed to keep out Lord fucking Voldemort were beaten by three 11 year olds

I had a theory about this actually!

I mean, on the one hand, you could argue that they were exceptionally brilliant for their ages (which they were) but even then Voldemort was also brilliant so the professors should have really made the traps harder right?

Well, what if they did?

What if the traps that the Golden Trio faced were like 1/10th of the traps and were 1/50th of the difficulty?

What if the school itself knew that they needed to get to Quirrell?

And so the school itself changed up everything just for them?

And so help was given at Hogwarts to those who asked for it?

marauders4evr:

killingkari:

So how stupid do you think the Hogwarts teachers felt back in Harrys first year when their traps and riddles designed to keep out Lord fucking Voldemort were beaten by three 11 year olds

I had a theory about this actually!

I mean, on the one hand, you could argue that they were exceptionally brilliant for their ages (which they were) but even then Voldemort was also brilliant so the professors should have really made the traps harder right?

Well, what if they did?

What if the traps that the Golden Trio faced were like 1/10th of the traps and were 1/50th of the difficulty?

What if the school itself knew that they needed to get to Quirrell?

And so the school itself changed up everything just for them?

And so help was given at Hogwarts to those who asked for it?

Also, like, I always felt like those traps and riddles weren’t really meant to keep Lord Voldemort out–more to be an annoyance and an inconvenience. Because the fact is, the mirror alone unguarded in a room would have been enough.

No one who wanted the stone for themselves or for their own gain could get to it. Voldemort certainly couldn’t get to it, nor could anyone who might work for him, whether through fear or actual loyalty, because they would be trying to get it for their own gain (that is, the favor of Lord Voldemort). The only way to get that stone out of the mirror would be someone with completely selfless intent–like Harry, who’s only motive was to get the stone to keep it safe and out of Voldemort’s hands.

If the Mirror of Erised had stayed alone and unguarded in the room where Harry first found it, Voldemort still couldn’t have gotten the stone. So I feel like the riddles and traps were meant to be annoying and time consuming (and even painful, in the case of the winged keys and the game of chess) and potentially deadly (if he had solved Snape’s riddle incorrectly), while the Mirror of Erised was the only true defense. And it worked perfectly.

Yup - they were meant as a distraction, to make whoever was trying to get the Stone think they were very clever and beating Dumbledore’s and the staff’s best efforts. But it’s just a time waster, something to trick the person into thinking there’s some way to solve the puzzle of how to get the Stone from the mirror, when they can’t unless they have completely selfless and pure motives for doing so. That, I think, is why Dumbledore placed Snape’s logic puzzle last - so that the mirror, with its backward writing, looked like another one, something that could be overcome with the right answer, rather than the right mindset and attitude. Quirrell could have stood in front of the mirror until he starved to death and never gotten his hands on the Stone.

i-am-made-of-stardust-love:

animateglee:

I’d bet five galleons that George Weasley asked McGonagall out to the Yule Ball on a dare.

I bet that Fred popped up before she could reply and acted betrayed (“YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL, HOW COULD YOU?) and they proceed to have a fake fight over who gets to take her to the ball. Meanwhile McGonagall is trying to be stern and not laugh because it reminds of when Sirius tried to ask Dumbledore out and had almost the exact same fight with James

(via clockwork-mockingbird)