What if Draco had managed to escape his Manor with Harry and everyone else when they had very barely avoided Voldemort? What if he somehow managed to convince Harry to help him?
2. The Parts That Won't Heal by whoeveristhatbadger [E, 334k]
Draco never asked to survive the war. It wasn't part of his plan to have to continue going afterwards, through the trials and the repercussions and having to go back to Hogwarts despite nobody wanting him there. What's the point of it anyway, when the wizarding world will never again respect him? Death would have been more agreeable. Then Harry shows up with a badly sewn heart. [...]
3. It's the same damn thing, that made my heart surrender by hoe637282 [E, 148k]
In which Draco’s greatest enemy is a chair, Gryffindors are confusing, Unspeakables are even more so, and Harry Potter is becoming a problem. It’s a good thing Draco is above frivolous things like love. Right?
4. The Hidden House by DrSchaf [M, 147k]
The force of forgetting made the tower disappear first.
5. Stone of Theia by @mykkitno [M, 139k]
After the war, haunted by Grimmauld and suffering from dreams and visions, Harry finds himself in an otherwise empty room, except for a rune-covered table and a crystal ball. Not understanding the significance, he grabs the ball, intending to throw it. The next thing he knows, he’s holding an amulet, there’s a ring on his finger, and he can hear Sirius pounding on the wall. Offered a chance to change things, he knows nothing will be the same again.
6. A Spell Written in Fire by @eeniiart [?, 82k]
Draco Malfoy was doomed. His life was in shambles, when an unfortunate event sends him back in time, just before fourth year. Getting a chance to change the horrible future, he decides to stop the Dark Lord from rising again. For that, he needs to figure out how to do that first - comes the brilliant idea: stop Harry Potter from participating in the Triwizard Tournament. What could possibly go wrong?
7. Accident on Valentine's Day by obscure_parakeet [T, 74k]
[...] What starts as a ruse from Harry's side: play nice with the blond git and accept the betrothal to get out of the Dursleys ends up being the best thing that has ever happened to him.
—
※ Word count: 1k ~ 15k
※ Word count: 15k ~ 40k
7 Minutes in Hell by spider_lily_57 [T, 15k]
If anyone asks, I was under Imperius by Maelduin [E, 23k]
London Skies. by @blaiddseren [E, 15k]
SILENCE/Onomatopoeia by HecateInLove [E, 21k]
Oh, Will Wonders Ever Cease? by aberthknox [M, 16k]
Weasleys’ Wizard Wetivities by Dame_RID [M, 15k]
When I Saw You There by @an-evening-botanist [E, 39k]
You don’t seem to understand by @lizardio [T, 29k] *typo
What if Draco had managed to escape his Manor with Harry and everyone else when they had very barely avoided Voldemort? What if he somehow managed to convince Harry to help him?
2. The Parts That Won't Heal by whoeveristhatbadger [E, 334k]
Draco never asked to survive the war. It wasn't part of his plan to have to continue going afterwards, through the trials and the repercussions and having to go back to Hogwarts despite nobody wanting him there. What's the point of it anyway, when the wizarding world will never again respect him? Death would have been more agreeable. Then Harry shows up with a badly sewn heart. [...]
3. It's the same damn thing, that made my heart surrender by hoe637282 [E, 148k]
In which Draco’s greatest enemy is a chair, Gryffindors are confusing, Unspeakables are even more so, and Harry Potter is becoming a problem. It’s a good thing Draco is above frivolous things like love. Right?
4. The Hidden House by DrSchaf [M, 147k]
The force of forgetting made the tower disappear first.
5. Stone of Theia by @mykkitno [M, 139k]
After the war, haunted by Grimmauld and suffering from dreams and visions, Harry finds himself in an otherwise empty room, except for a rune-covered table and a crystal ball. Not understanding the significance, he grabs the ball, intending to throw it. The next thing he knows, he’s holding an amulet, there’s a ring on his finger, and he can hear Sirius pounding on the wall. Offered a chance to change things, he knows nothing will be the same again.
6. A Spell Written in Fire by @eeniiart [?, 82k]
Draco Malfoy was doomed. His life was in shambles, when an unfortunate event sends him back in time, just before fourth year. Getting a chance to change the horrible future, he decides to stop the Dark Lord from rising again. For that, he needs to figure out how to do that first - comes the brilliant idea: stop Harry Potter from participating in the Triwizard Tournament. What could possibly go wrong?
7. Accident on Valentine's Day by obscure_parakeet [T, 74k]
[...] What starts as a ruse from Harry's side: play nice with the blond git and accept the betrothal to get out of the Dursleys ends up being the best thing that has ever happened to him.
—
※ Word count: 1k ~ 15k
※ Word count: 15k ~ 40k
7 Minutes in Hell by spider_lily_57 [T, 15k]
If anyone asks, I was under Imperius by Maelduin [E, 23k]
London Skies. by @blaiddseren [E, 15k]
SILENCE/Onomatopoeia by HecateInLove [E, 21k]
Oh, Will Wonders Ever Cease? by aberthknox [M, 16k]
Weasleys’ Wizard Wetivities by Dame_RID [M, 15k]
When I Saw You There by @an-evening-botanist [E, 39k]
You don’t seem to understand by @lizardio [T, 29k] *typo
The fashion house that designed the dress is founded by two people who established their brand as a direct reaction to the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in which 1,134 garment workers in international fast fashion (mainly low paid women) were killed when an 8 story building collapsed because of heavy machinery negligently placed within a structurally unsound edifice. "By adopting a highly shocking, ironic, and non-glamorous name {Fecal Matter}, they sought to force consumers to buy their clothes for quality and originality rather than just a prestigious brand name. Their work often uses unsettling aesthetics to critique fashion elitism and corporate greed."
Hiii, I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but, can you please please please rec me some drarry kids time travelling to meet their parents. I'm mostly on the time travel tag looking for these and I rarely see them, maybe I'm not looking hard enough to see them or it just get piled on by all those other time travel fics. Can you please help, thank youu❤️. Sorry if my english is awkward its not my first language.
Hello nonnie~ I have no fics in mind to rec for you. My advice is: keep digging deeper through the #time travel tag!
And for some shameless self-PR: I have this Thematic Rec Masterlist with the SETTINGS section that has:
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
"Why do you keep wasting your time arguing with people who are commenting on this article without having read or comprehended it?"
The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
Because it fucking matters that y'all are being confidently and persistently wrong. Because this attitude of "my uninformed opinion matters just as much as the facts" is going to screw us all.
If you can't be bothered to read the thing you're commenting on, never mind the other comments on it, before blurting out the first thought that pops into your head, you are at best wasting your time and everyone else's. You are not contributing meaningfully to the conversation. Just because you have the opportunity to say something doesn't mean you should, and if you don't know what you're talking about because you haven't been paying attention, you shouldn't.
And when you say things that are blatantly wrong, or misrepresent what other people said, you are actively sabotaging the conversation being had. You are misinforming other people. You are undermining their trust in the discussion.
It never ceases to astound me how many people profess to give a shit about the state of the world, about political corruption and propaganda and fascism, and yet also apparently think it's beneath them to spend the time to read something for comprehension and get their facts straight before they start making declarative statements about it to others. If that's the way you feel, you need to know that you are actively working against your own purported causes. You are making shit worse by being lazy and addicted to saying words for internet points.
This take is definitely too hot for a lot of fans but I’m gonna say it anyway: Sherlock Holmes is a canonically queer character. What type of queer he is is up to interpretation, but he is canonically, explicitly Not Straight, and people who write him as an allosexual hetero man are the ones who are actually projecting their own headcanon onto him.
I’m 100% serious. Here are the canonical facts we have about his feelings on sex/romance:
- He says multiple times that he is not interested in women. When Watson comments on the attractiveness of a woman, Holmes responds that he “didn’t notice”.
- He is uninterested in marriage and remains a bachelor his entire life, and never expresses any regret or sadness over this.
- He states that he has “never loved” (in this context it is implied that he is specifically talking about romantic love.) He repeatedly expresses disdain for romance in general.
That’s IT. That is ALL the canonical information we have about his sexuality. We know that he is capable of love in some sense, and Watson even explicitly says that Holmes loves him. But we never see any evidence that he has romantic feelings for women.
Any interpretation of Holmes as a heterosexual man directly contradicts all of the evidence we have about his sexuality. It assumes that everything he or Watson have ever said about his feelings on romance is a lie. The only interpretations of him that actually fit with all the facts are if he’s aroace, gay, or some combination thereof.
Anyway I’m going to start referring to straight interpretations of Holmes as “straight headcanons” now. Holmes is canonically queer.
Conan Doyle says he's aro, and aro people are queer.
Personally, I interpret him as homoromantic asexual, but the fact that the best love interest people have found for him is Irene Norton, who is in love with one (1) guy, who the keen-eyed reader of the story will note is not Sherlock Holmes--and the fact that his keeping a photograph of her as a memento of him losing is very similar to what he does in the Norbury case, and as far as I know no one in the history of ever has shipped Sherlock Holmes and Grant Munro.
No, really, I poked around on AO3 and could find no one shipping them. (Yes, I know AO3 isn't a perfect reflection, but still.)
anyway I looked through the canon for all uses of the word queer and. uh.
young stamford also says he's queer
a constant companion...a little queer in his ideas...anyway, I headcanon that Stamford was Holmes' ex but still wishes him well and so sets him up with Watson.
Holmes is a bit of a voyeur:
Be gay (or aro or ace or something) do crime (that has to be breaking a law):
HMMM:
Lestrade talking:
I'm just picturing Holmes' facial expression at Watson's he looked at us in a queer way:
LESTRADE DO YOU THINK THESE PEOPLE MIGHT BE GAY, Holmes yells:
(at the time that was written I think the meaning of queer was fairly well established fwiw)
do you ever find something that is so funny and you want to share it with everyone but it also requires 18 layers of context spanning things like. 90s anime. aviation history. europop. canada. in order to even remotely understand why it is so funny
in the late 90s there was an anime called initial d which was all about street racing and drifting. naturally every single drift was played for great drama and excitement.
in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.
in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."
what is a side-slip, you ask?
it's drifting.
the guy goddamn drifted his 767.
in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.
and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:
Me; a Canadian, 90's kid, former teen weeb, former watcher of the Canadian program "Mayday" every weekend in college, who's discord oomfies will still start a rousing rendition of Deja Vu at the drop of a hat:
It's me: context georg.
so I name dropped mayday before I finished reading all the way through and now I'm even more delighted by this post. didn't know that was possible.
Hello!! I've been a long time follower and it's so amazing to go back to this blog after a long time.
I just recently got back to the fandom and I really hope you can help me find this fic that I forgot the name of. I really loved that fic but it was unfinished so I just forgot about it until it just hit me out of nowhere.
It was basically I think omegaverse (?) with age gap (Harry is older) and Harry was a widow but he loved Ginny a lot and then they have 2 kids, James and Albus I think. And what I remember the most was Draco redecorated the house and was basically annoyed that a picture of Ginny is in the house so he hid it. And then Harry came back and he was furious.
I also remember I think it was Albus(?) went missing and turns out he fell on a cliff or something and Draco was going crazy looking for him and Astoria was there and then Draco had to go down the cliff to get him and then Harry went home (from like a mission or something) and got mad at Draco again and said a lot of hurtful things to Draco and Dravo decided to leave.
I hope you help me because I cant find it and it's making me go insane 😭
Thank you so much!!
Age gap + omegaverse!? Ooooh I'm so excited to hear of this fic!
But I'm afraid I can't be much of help. Please re-send your fic search to @lostdrarryfics. I hope it would be found soon \^o^/
