do you guys remember that one text post about pyjamas the terror being an anagram for harry james potter?
so initially I was going to draw only harry wearing a pyjamas the terror t-shirt, but then I googled online anagram generator and had so much fun with it that ended up drawing the entire gang
You know what I hate with my whole fucking soul? The Hogwarts stereotypes. You’re reckless and a douche, but still good? Gryffindor. You’re a bitch, sarcastic and evil? Slytherin. You’re smart, get good grades and are like an old wise man? Ravenclaw. You’re nothing in particular, but kind and bake cookies? Hufflepuff. Because nowhere does it say if you’re a hero you’re a Gryffindor, if you’re an edgy teen you’re an Slytherin, if you’re smart you’re an Ravenclaw or when you’re kind you’re a Hufflepuff. Give me a fucking Slytherin who is manipulated easily, who is always kind but who is very ambitious. Give me a goth Hufflepuff, with a bitchface who values hardworking. Give me a Gryffindor with social anxiety, who is super shy, who is very chivalrous and values bravery. Give me a Ravenclaw who is streetsmart instead of booksmart, who is very creative and thinks out of the box. Give me non-stereotyping Hogwarts houses.
Neville as eventual headmaster is very important to me though.
Neville, who thanks to his enduring friendship with Luna sees the vital importance of fostering interhouse relationships, downplays the rivalries between the houses without lessening the importance of intrahouse unity by pushing the Quidditch Cup and House Cup as more friendly competition than all-consuming-must-be-won-enimity and introducing other means of emphasising house pride for those students who are not athletically or academically talented to the point where they feel as though they’re making an important contribution to their house.
Neville, who has so much goodness and kindness in him, having a zero tolerance policy for bullying, by staff or students, and serious punishments set down in official school policy for anyone caught bullying or intimidating a student for any reason.
Neville, who saw first hand just how vital it is, throwing the Ministry-approved DADA curriculum out the window and working with the DADA teacher to build a useful curriculum based on his two most useful years of DADA classes, those being third, under Lupin, and fifth, under Harry.
Neville, who understands how hard it is not to be One Of Those Kids, ruthlessly digging out any elitest groups like the Slug Club and disbanding them.
Neville, who understands that sometimes the teachers don’t choose as wisely as they ought, introducing a democratic system for prefect and Head Boy/Girl selection.
Neville, who knows what it is to be the bottom of the class, making a point of introducing a voluntary tutoring system for students who are in the same position he once found himself in – and making certain that it’s well known that had such a system been in place when he was at Hogwarts, he would certainly have availed of it.
Neville, who is a hero and a marvel and wonderful, brave man, fostering that same bravery and goodness in every one of his students, fighting to help them become the absolute best people they can be regardless of academic talent or world-saving ability.
Neville, who is everything that Albus Dumbledore was not, setting to rights so much of the wrong Dumbledore allowed and sometimes encouraged in Hogwarts.
remember, everything’s tagged under the dogfather. part one is here, with links to the rest at the bottom. I’m also going to round up the story-so-far and post it to my AO3 once I get Harry past the Sorting Hat. if you’re waiting for the next installment and the anticipation’s killing you, go read a zine or a comic from my Gumroad page.
on the train, Harry is a bit relieved to have a compartment nearly to himself. he’s in with Padfoot and the youngest of that big noisy family from the platform– Ron, who also seems quite glad for a bit of quiet and space to catch his breath. two of his brothers invite them to see someone’s giant tarantula, but Ron doesn’t seem to like spiders any better than Harry does.
they subside, for a bit, into the slightly awkward silence of two strangers whose parents clearly expected them to befriend one another. Padfoot flops over onto his side, puts his head on Harry’s shoes, and goes to sleep.
Ron makes the first overture. “are you allowed dogs at Hogwarts? I thought it was only cats, rats and toads.”
“if anyone asks, I’m going to say he’s a very large cat,” Harry says.
Harry knows that Padfoot and his parents are worried, but very little of it trickles down to him. it can’t: he’s too excited.
his letter comes in the post, in July, a little after what he has started to think of as his old birthday.
(technically it is the newer of the two, but he didn’t know his original birthday until Padfoot told him, so now he has the birthday he was used to, at the beginning or July, and the one he apparently had all along but didn’t know, at the end.)
the letter is just like Padfoot said it would be: his name in bright green ink, we are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. please find enclosed–
but now he needs all sorts of things! robes, and a cauldron, and books with titles that sound a lot like some of the books he already has, except those books are just stories and these ones will be real. and, best of all: a magic wand.
so he and his mum and his dad and his Padfoot are going to Diagon Alley, in London, and they are meeting Moony in person, for real.
Harry has been trying to act a little more grown up, now that he’s a wizard and nearly eleven, but it’s proving extremely difficult when he is this excited.
Reblog for the morning crowd. soon: the train to Hogwarts.
This may be my favorite AU ever.
Imagine Sirius, well-groomed and sane, not trapped in his fucked-up childhood home.
Would Harry’s adoptive parents move in there when things became dangerous? Would Sirius make an aborted move to cover the screaming painting of his mother before watching numbly as Harry’s mother stepped forward and gave her a piece of her mind? They waited so long for children. So long, and to see parents who treat their children so abominably, well. Maybe they can’t help with the actual fight, but would they become caretakers/healers of Grimmauld place? Would it shine under their care, warm candlelight and laughter and the plushest of tea towels for Kreacher since they can’t technically buy him clothes?
Would Sirius insist on using cleaning charms because he can’t bear to see Harry’s mother (and possibly his own surrogate mother figure) exhaust herself trying to clean the place up? Maybe Kreacher would explain about Regulus when he was treated kindly. Maybe Sirius would take back the years stolen from him.
Harry’s loved and treasured and Draco is a screwed-up trust fund baby raised by an angry, thwarted Nazi who wouldn’t remind him of Dudley or Vernon at all because there’s no trauma to be re-triggered.
Just, dude, why are you so hostile and strange, and then he hears about Lucius Malfoy from Sirius and Harry’s parents reprimand Sirius for saying such terrible things about Draco because he’s a child, honestly, and look what Sirius grew up with.
This is such a lovely, hopeful AU and I adore it. I adore everything about it. Thank you for this this morning!!
reblogging for this lovely, lovely commentary. oh man. btw, I am officially in love with the idea of Tim and Caro tackling Grimmauld Place with the same DIY verve and spirit as they did their own house.
::flailing Kermit arms of joy::
I can’t stop thinking about an AU like this. What would Harry see in the Mirror of Erised, since he hasn’t been starving his whole life for loving parents?What happens when Tim and Caro meet Moony as a wolf the first time?
Since Harry hasn’t been isolated and abused, would Dumbledore have less of a hold on him?
Would Snape bother him as much? Would he have some hilariously well-adjusted response to Snape’s resentment while Sirius slinks in the shadows to avoid being recognized and make various plans to bite him?
“No, Padfoot, it’s not worth it. Mum says anyone who’s that angry is really sad deep down.” —Harry
“Sirius, you’re just going to get a mouthful of grease and regret.” —Remus
Is it weird to wanna write fan fiction of a not!fic?? 😂😂😂
“Mr. Black, I know exactly what you’re doing in my hallway and I do not approve in the slightest. That said, I expect I shall be quite engrossed in these papers for the next hour. Kindly keep the noise down.” —McGonagall
you should definitely write as much of this as you can manage.
(for the record: I think Harry still does see Lily and James in the Mirror. he doesn’t have a lot of extended family– Tim and Caro are both only children from small families– and he’s spent a lot of the last few years hearing stories about Lily and James. he *would* like to know them better, and once he knows the Weasleys he really loves the idea of a big, noisy, messy extended family.
so he sees Lily and James in the Mirror, and lots of his Potter relatives, as in canon. but also Petunia and Vernon– a version of them very unlike the real ones, not that he’d know– and various Evanses as well. And all the MacIntyre relatives he never got to meet, on top of that.
Harry knows that Padfoot and his parents are worried, but very little of it trickles down to him. it can’t: he’s too excited.
his letter comes in the post, in July, a little after what he has started to think of as his old birthday.
(technically it is the newer of the two, but he didn’t know his original birthday until Padfoot told him, so now he has the birthday he was used to, at the beginning or July, and the one he apparently had all along but didn’t know, at the end.)
the letter is just like Padfoot said it would be: his name in bright green ink, we are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. please find enclosed–
but now he needs all sorts of things! robes, and a cauldron, and books with titles that sound a lot like some of the books he already has, except those books are just stories and these ones will be real. and, best of all: a magic wand.
so he and his mum and his dad and his Padfoot are going to Diagon Alley, in London, and they are meeting Moony in person, for real.
Harry has been trying to act a little more grown up, now that he’s a wizard and nearly eleven, but it’s proving extremely difficult when he is this excited.
all right. so. this is a Harry Potter AU, in rambly and abbreviated form.
this is a version of events where, on the morning of November 1st, 1981, the police are called to a house in Surrey.
when they arrive, a large man with a red face and a moustache is waiting for them, brandishing a baby.
to be more accurate: he is brandishing a basket. the basket contains a baby.
he tells the police that his wife found the basket on their doorstep that morning. “Gave her the shock of her life,” he says, with a chuckle that does not seem the least bit sincere.
the police officers have a lot of questions about this, but the man does not have any useful answers. his wife, he tells them, is not in any shape to be interviewed. “she’s been poorly,” he says, “and we’ve got a baby of our own to worry about, keeping us up at all hours.”
the baby in the basket seems to be about a year old. he is cheerful, seems healthy aside from a cut on his forehead, with a crooked sticking plaster on it. he has startlingly green eyes.
there is no identifying information in the basket, except for a torn scrap of paper with ‘his name is Harry’ on it in a delicate hand.
there is nothing else to be done, it seems. the officers take baby Harry, and leave.
one of them comes back a few days later for a follow-up interview with the woman who found the baby. she seems a little fragile, and her own baby, in the next room, keeps up a constant shrieking tantrum the whole time the officer is there. “I’m sorry,” the woman says, with a brittle smile. “this has all been a bit much. I recently lost my sister, you see.”
so: that’s all for the Dursleys.
baby Harry, on the bright side, is a sweet-tempered infant in good health, with no knows legal claimants to custody.
he is adopted very quickly, by a family who has had a nursery standing empty for some time, and for whom he is the fulfillment of a long-awaited dream.
so, rather than a cupboard under the stairs, Harry has a cozy bedroom with a window seat, a heap of stuffed animals, a rocking chair where his mother sings him lullabies that are really her favorite poems set to made-up tunes.
he has a father who already owned a whole shelf of cookbooks the day they brought him home, and promptly starts filling a second shelf with South Asian cookbooks because he has read that children of color adopted by white parents should be able to maintain links to their culture of origin.
he is not, from this point, Harry Potter. He is Harry Jones or McIntyre or Lee; more importantly, he is happy and loved.
when Harry is two or three, something terrible happens that he knows nothing about. it does not make the Muggle papers, but it does, to Dumbledore’s dismay, make the Daily Prophet.
there is a great deal of upset, and a number of people want to know why no one noticed, before now, that the Boy Who Lived has gone missing.
the question of why no one noticed the murder of his aunt and uncle is quite secondary.
Dumbledore has no good answers, and no luck at all in finding any.
the problem of public attention, at least, solves itself when Sirius Black escapes from Azkaban, and captures the Daily Prophet’s front page for a good long while.
it would be nice to think that whichever Death Eater tracked down and murdered Vernon and Petunia did not bother to murder Dudley.
i am not sure I can offer you that comfort, sadly.
they left without what they came for, at least: even if they had been able to find the police officers (they weren’t, as Vernon had long since forgotten their names), or the social worker who handled Harry’s case (who had changed jobs six months ago), they would never have been able to navigate Muggle bureaucracy well enough to find Harry himself.
some people are more determined, though, and have better motivations.
when Harry is six, a dog follows him home from school.
in fact, the dog had also followed him to school that morning, waited patiently by the gate to the playground until recess, allowed innumerable children to pet him and tug his ears, and consented to play fetch only when it was Harry throwing the ball.
his parents are surprised but not dismayed when their son comes home with an extremely large and exceptionally well-behaved black dog, and begs to keep him.
“he looks just like that stuffed toy you loved when you were a baby,” his mother says. “remember?”
the dog is christened Padfoot, after the toy, which name had been his parent’s best guess at what baby Harry had been calling it.
luckily, they were good guessers.
Padfoot is a very good dog. he does not chew things that ought not be chewed, he is wonderfully protective of Harry, he sheds much less than you would expect.
he does, however, have a strange knack for removing every dog collar Harry’s parents buy for him within twenty-four hours.
eventually, Harry goes out to the shed, locates a length of curb chain as thick as his thumb and a small carabiner, and attaches Padfoot’s tags and license to it.
It ought to slip off right away, as it is far too loose to be called a collar, but to everyone but Harry’s surprise Padfoot tolerates it with perfect equanimity.
it’s not like he ever actually needs a leash, anyway: it was already clear that taking Padfoot for a walk meant that both parties agreed to the polite fiction that the leash meant anything at all.
he is an extremely smart dog. it’s a little uncanny.
Harry’s parents never know that their dog’s original plan had been to kidnap their son, but that he had changed his mind after seeing their cheerful, bright house, the shelves of cookbooks and the wall of strangely frozen family photos, the rocking chair where Harry’s mother sings ‘come away, o human child’ to him at bedtime.
Padfoot has lived with much worse. for Harry’s sake, he would again, but he’s glad he doesn’t have to.
when Harry is eight, a number of extraordinary things happen:
first of all, Harry and his dad decide to repaint Harry’s room.
(this is not one of the extraordinary things.)
that night, Harry sleeps on the downstairs sofa, as his room still smells of wet paint a bit too much.
(neither is this.)
he has a harder time falling asleep than usual: the sofa is a little too soft, and he is used to Padfoot sleeping on top of his feet, but there isn’t enough room so Padfoot is sleeping on the floor beside him instead.
this is why Harry is still just barely awake when the extraordinary thing happens.
(here it is:)
Harry hears a strange sound, a sort of fluttering, scratching noise, and cracks open one eye. the living room is not quite dark, so he sees Padfoot get up and go silently over to the window.
Padfoot noses the curtain aside.
there is an owl outside the window, hooting urgently.
Harry is now wide awake, but keeping perfectly still in case this turns out to be a dream after all. he doesn’t want to wake up in the middle of whatever this is.
he watches as his dog opens the window.
he wonders how he manages it with paws.
the owl flies inside, swooping over the sofa towards the kitchen. Padfoot follows it.
very carefully, as quietly as he can, Harry levers himself up enough to peer over the back of the sofa. he can see into the kitchen, where the owl has just landed on the table.
Padfoot and the owl regard each other silently for a moment. then Padfoot lets out a doggy huff– a sort of ‘well, all right’ sound– and turns into a human being.
this is too astonishing for Harry to even gasp at.
the owl hoots softly at Padfoot, who is now a human person. “all right, all right,” grumbles Padfoot, formerly Harry’s dog, now a man with tangled black hair and ragged clothes. the man, who was until very recently a dog, takes a folded piece of paper from the owl. the owl hoots again, impatiently.
“give me a moment, all right?” says the man who is also Harry’s dog, Padfoot. he opens the fridge and takes out the other half of the sandwich Harry’s dad had for lunch. he taps it with a wooden stick and quite suddenly there are two identical sandwiches, one of which the man-who-is-Padfoot puts back.
the second one he eats. just sits down at Harry’s kitchen table like he wasn’t a dog a minute ago, pulls up a chair, and eats the sandwich, while unfolding and reading the piece of paper that the owl gave him.
he gives some bits of sandwich to the owl, too.
after he’s eaten, he takes a biro out of the jam jar in the middle of the table and writes something on the back of the paper, folds it back up, and gives it to the owl.
the owl takes the paper in its talons, and swoops back out of the kitchen, over the sofa, and through the window.
Harry watches it go, still astonished.
then he turns back to the kitchen, where Padfoot, who is still a human and not at all a dog, is staring at him. Harry stares back.
“damn,” says the man. “I suppose you have some questions.”
“are you magic?” asks Harry.
“yes,” says the man. he is wearing Padfoot’s tags and license on a necklace.
“are you a werewolf?” asks Harry.
“what? no,” says the man. “why would I– that’s not how werewolves work.”
“well, no,” says Harry, who has now had a second to think about it and feels a little foolish. “I suppose you’d have to be, like, a reverse werewolf, right? because you’re a dog all month and now you’re a man.”
“I’m not a reverse werewolf either,” says the man. “I’m your godfather.”
“My fairy godfather?” Harry asks, because his mother read him a lot of Brothers Grimm.
“not– in that sense, no,” says the man. “Just your regular godfather.”
“my regular godfather, who is magic,” says Harry.
“yes,” says Padfoot, who has lived in Harry’s house for two years now, and read most of the books on its shelves in the middle of the night, including the ones with titles like The Adoptive Parent’s Toolkit and My Family, My Journey.
he says, “your birth dad was my best friend.”
“was he magic too?” asks Harry.
“yes,” says Padfoot. “and so was your mum. and so are you.”
“what?” says Harry, who had not been expecting this turn of events in the least.
“you’re a wizard, Harry,” says Padfoot. “and so am I.”
edited to add: links to part two and part three. more as they get written!
Question of Smoke 