violent shades of violet

[main; ao3]

[grindylowtank]

intro post

30s, she/her. anti-jk, anti-terf, will block. i don't engage financially with hp. not interested in the show, audiobooks, game etc. please don't encourage financial engagement on my posts.

here to talk to other people who also aren't over it. i love book-based discussion and theorising and not taking anything too seriously; i have more of a "what if it's this?" mentality over one fixed interpretation. i don't do ship drama (you can sell me on anything), mwpp vs snape drama (they all suck and i like it that way), etc etc. this is a sideblog, i follow from @likealittledeath. ao3 is here (ongoing remadora fixation).

[grindylowtank]

ooh sick tag game - 📂📂

thanks! augh you know most of my headcanon already so i'm gonna try to go outside the box here

ok i know you're fond of hooch/rosmerta so here's a really silly hooch one i came up with ages ago - she and ludo bagman hate each other. they have unresolved beef over a particularly contentious quidditch match they both played in, some 15 years prior to goblet of fire. he broke her nose with a bludger that she is totally convinced would've been a foul had he not been mates with the referee (i have not decided if she is actually correct about this - the important part is she fervently believes that she is lol). if they're ever in the same room for too long, it devolves into shouting, petty personal insults and bad vibes. (...am now tempted to have rosmerta pre-emptively bar him from the three broomsticks in a show of support if i ever pick that gof fic up again)

mad-eye's one friend outside of the aurors and the order is his ex-wife. they've been divorced for 30 years and get on much better as mates, their marriage was a short-lived disaster. her name is mairead and she was a curse-breaker for gringotts before she retired. tonks only discovers this scrap of personal information about her mentor when she visits him in st mungo's after the bcj debacle and mairead is there. tonks is thrown by it because she feels like he knows everything about her and she didn't even know he'd ever been married or had any kind of life outside of his work (also she's already feeling guilty she didn't keep in touch with him during that year because she thinks she'd have been able to tell it wasn't really him). but like of course he'd never mentioned it, mad-eye would consider telling people how he takes his tea to be extraneous personal information that could somehow be used against him.

[grindylowtank]

📁

tonks was fuming she didn't get prefect. she canonically is able to explain why sprout didn't give it to her - i have to conclude she stewed on it until she couldn't help demanding to know why. little miss future wizard cop wanted that shiny badge, i'm convinced.

delusional of her though; she asks sprout why while literally in detention. she earned it for impersonating snape and convincing the slytherin quidditch team their match against hufflepuff was cancelled, causing them to no-show. she did this because the hufflepuff chasers were all very hungover from the firewhisky she herself brought to the pre-match party the night before (purchased in hogsmeade while impersonating snape again - her snape impression is particularly convincing, by fifth year she's taught herself how to do the voice and everything - rosmerta thinks he has a drinking problem until she's later clued in).

[grindylowtank]

📁

i've said it before and i'll say it again, andromeda is president of the hating remus lupin club. you won't convince me otherwise, there's no universe where you're tonks's mum and don't loathe that guy (i believe him when he says tonks's family are disgusted he's a werewolf - i just don't think it's the only reason they'd hate him). she'd just started to soften to him slightly after teddy's born, but after the battle it's easier to blame it all on remus than to admit she's angry with her dead child, so that's what she does.

dean thomas goes and visits andromeda a couple of months after the battle of hogwarts. he tells her as much as he can about ted's months on the run with him. he makes it sound a lot more pleasant than it really was - she can tell, but it's comforting anyway to hear that it wasn't all misery. unfortunately dean was also #1 professor lupin fanboy and makes the mistake of saying so... which goes down like a lead balloon.

years later when she's racking her brain trying to come up with non-negative things to say about remus to teddy that aren't "well he had surprisingly good table manners", she remembers how effusive dean was about him and is at least able to say his students loved him. this isn't especially useful to teddy as he's heard this anyway from harry etc, but she does try!

[grindylowtank]

vauxhallroadnewsagent here to reciprocate your generous 📂! Give me as many as you like

thank you! dangerous proposition, i'll limit myself to four like you did. prewetts, evanses and potters:

the prewetts' vaults are depleted by poor investment choices by the time molly, gideon and fabian are born (in that order - molly's 5 when gideon's born, fabian's the year after). in the not-too-distant past they were one of the more prominent families in wizarding britain, hence their inclusion in the sacred 28. the prewetts put a high value on traditional wizarding culture and as a rule, they don't involve themselves in conflict - it's a big fucking deal that fabian and gideon join the order. it causes a lot of tension between them and their father (their mother died when molly was still in her teens). molly takes it upon herself to be the bridge between them all but it doesn't work; when gideon and fabian are killed, it devastates their dad and he's never the same after, only surviving his sons by a couple of years.

when the second order is formed, it's molly who first insists they get involved - arthur's on board immediately. they'd agreed to prioritise their young family last time but each had privately felt guilty about doing so. molly's motivated by the memory of her brave little brothers and grief for the lives they should've had, but that's complicated when her older sons insist they're joining too. bill's around fabian's age when he died. her guilt's even worse when they move their younger kids into grimmauld; she feels she's dragging them into it. she's not very honest with herself about it, but her conflict with sirius has more to do with that than it does harry's welfare - the more harry is involved, the more ron and ginny will be.

i'll reluctantly accept euphemia and fleamont dying of dragon pox - but if so, mr and mrs evans were 100% murdered by death eaters as retribution because they couldn't get to lily and james. this happens not long after harry is born, and the 'official' line in the muggle world is that they were poisoned by a gas leak in their terrace. there's a parliamentary enquiry about neglectful council infrastructure, which comes to nothing other than adding more fuel to the fire for supporters of the thatcher government's recently launched 'right to buy' scheme. petunia in her heart of hearts suspects the truth, but is so appalled by it that she never voices that aloud to anyone as long as she lives. lily (correctly) assumes telling petunia what really happened would only strain their practically nonexistent relationship even further, so never confirms it to her.

witches can choose to delay and/or reverse menopause through magical means. it's rare for anyone to want to, but it's not unheard of for witches to give birth as late as their seventies. this is what euphemia did - she and fleamont met on an all-wizarding cruise down the river nile in their late forties. neither had been married before or had ever particularly fancied it, but they ended up having such a good time together that being married to each other seems like it could be a lark, so that's what they do. they spend two decades travelling the world and having a brilliant time being a glamorous, childless older couple with all that sleekeazy money, and then one day they look at each other and are like "right we've seen everything now, shall we take a crack at the heir business?". james grows up hearing about their travels and plans to do an old-fashioned grand tour upon graduating hogwarts - he sells the idea to his friends pretty easily when they're young - but by the time they get there, it seems more important that they immediately join the order instead.

[grindylowtank]

📁📁

okay we're doing a hagrid double feature here (except i'm me and my more 'useless' headcanon runs a bit myopic, so there's a hagrid-and-lupin theme)

by the time the marauders hit seventh year, hagrid's spotted evidence of their full moon exploits in the forest one too many times not to figure it out. he chooses to keep that shit to himself rather than doing the sensible thing and telling dumbledore. he does not know that james, sirius and peter are animagi - he's assuming they're out gallivanting with wolf!remus as humans - but his thought process is something along the lines of "ah well they're clever boys, if they were going to get themselves bit it'd have ruddy well happened by now" and leaves them to it.

later, remus is the only hogwarts staff member who can match hagrid's freak on creature-related enthusiasm. their areas of interest differ - remus can get quite animated about the classification discrepancy between "dark" creatures and the more general category of magical creatures when someone gets him going; hagrid mostly wants someone to reminisce about cuddling norbert to and who'll listen non-judgmentally when he opines about the nuances of acromantula-led weaning practices - but when the two of them are on a roll they'd bore anyone listening in to tears in that staff room.

[grindylowtank]

📁

andromeda buys tonks an owl before she starts hogwarts. it's a peace offering - tonks wants to take the family cat and has a big strop about being told no. andromeda has a "helpful" list of name suggestions at the ready - blodeuwedd, athena, nyctimene, lakshmi, lilith (she goes on ad nauseum here). tonks insists no, it's my owl actually mum and she's called dave. andromeda hates this but ted thinks it's funny, so she's outvoted and has to deal. she will however only refer to the owl as david.

[rp-meme-glaceon]

Send “📂“ for a random yet completely useless headcanon I have

[vauxhallroadnewsagents]

Don’t know if you’re still doing this but if you are:

📁📁📁

Hi Nonny! definitely ongoing :)

1—Harry replaces Ron’s wand in CoS.

Because McGonagall is not a dangerously negligent teacher, she noticed that Ron’s wand was dangerously faulty, and arranged for an appointment with Ollivander at the school (standard procedure after dire wand-eviscerating accidents), and sent a letter home informing Mr and Mrs Weasley of the necessity. Of course Ron’s parents come to the school, and of course Harry’s there in the common room when Ron is about to get dragged off to see Ollivander after classes are over, and of course he overhears a bit of the conversation outside the portrait hole about the expense of wands/money worries. And Harry, who is shown to have enough emotional intelligence to navigate situations like this all the way back on the train journey to Hogwarts in first year and I will die on this hill, and who spends so much time in the second book noticing Ron’s broken wand and feeling guilty about the car and the howler and the MoM fine and the trouble to Mr Weasley in a way that would very much appear to be leading somewhere, pulls a wait here a second! while he sprints upstairs to grab seven galleons to shove at Ron and not take no for an answer. Tell your mum and dad we both came up with it, Harry tells him firmly. Tell them we’re sorry about the car, and this is the best we can do to make up for it.

(In the inevitable kerfuffle Molly then causes around Ron mumbling his way through an explanation of why exactly his parents don’t need to arrange a debt with Mr Ollivander, the old wand is not suitably disposed of. Ron just... shrugs and takes it with him along with his nice new wand because what else do you do with it. And when Lockhart tackles Ron outside the Chamber, Ron, who is supposed to be a quick strategic thinker already capable of outplaying McGonagall in a chess match at eleven and I will die on this fucking hill, is fucking clever enough to switch the old wand from his pocket during their scuffle. Meaning Lockhart comes away with the backfiring wand, which Ron let him grab on purpose, because c’mon guys, Ron really deserves to contribute to the ending of that book in a more meaningful way. Let my boy be capable again.)

2—“And while Harry was sure he had never heard the name T.M. Riddle before, it still seemed to mean something to him, almost as though Riddle was a friend he’d had when he was very small, and half-forgotten.”

If you think I am capable of letting this line pass unremarked, you are wrong. Little Harry locked inside his cupboard talking to and playing with his imaginary friend Tom Riddle. Little Harry who by some miracle managed to not develop severe attachment issues or socially inhibiting maladaptive behaviour patterns or the developmental delays typical of such a harrowing extent of neglect, and is in fact startlingly normal after all that early childhood isolation, do not make me show you the Spitz/Wolf grief film of what happens to babies who lose their parents abruptly and do not experience adequate care replacement, because it turns out he was not actually alone for any of that time and the only thing he couldn't get from his companion was the physical stimulus he needed for his growth indicators to turn out normal. Pseudo-horcrux forced age-regression childhood do-over, I said what I said, and if I can ever get past my own feelings on the matter being so strong they make me weepy just typing it out, I will have one hell of a cathartic time exploring this idea to its deserved extent.

3—Finally, an actually “useless” headcanon (since that is technically the name of the game, so I’d better put at least one on your very generous ask of three): the Potter’s cat was named Marzipan. Marzi, for short. He was Lily’s seventeeth birthday present from her mum and dad. They didn't quite know about the standard coming of age gifts (like certain wonderful metas about women traditionally receiving a locket), but they did know Lily had been begging for a cat ever since her Hogwarts letter told her she could have one. I’m not crying you’re crying

[morphmaker]

Sirius’s cave in Goblet of Fire

[neverenoughmarauders]

Why have I never thought of the fact that he eats Peters

[keepmycandleburning]

Oh, Beautiful

Lavender/Parvati, 2.6k

Lavender believed in soulmates, in other halves, crushes, star-crossed lovers, twin flames.

Sometimes I pretend mine was her.

[grindylowtank]

sick to the back teeth of height discourse. every character is exactly 3.5ft tall. they just announced it.

[grindylowtank]

“Yes — yes — a boy,” said Lupin again, who seemed dazed by his own happiness. He strode around the table and hugged Harry; the scene in the basement of Grimmauld Place might never have happened. “You’ll be godfather?” he said as he released Harry. “M-me?” stammered Harry. “You, yes, of course — Dora quite agrees, no one better —”

putting my exasperation about the baby-makes-everything-better narrative aside for a sec, i can't lie, he's so cute at shell cottage

...but oh my fucking god, i'd kill to see andromeda's reaction when those clowns earnestly explain to her that they're asking a seventeen-year-old fugitive to be her grandson's godfather

(can't imagine the reasoning behind it endears her any towards her son-in-law 💀)

andromeda babe nobody suffers to the degree you suffer. i hope you went off your nut.

[thatsbelievable]

[iamnmbr3]

No but like. Where did Harry's scar come from? Because it didn't come from the Killing Curse. 1) The Avada Kedavra curse doesn't leave a mark and 2) Harry wasn't ever struck by the Avada Kedavra curse in Godric's Hollow; Voldemort was. Whatever Lily did that night caused the spell to rebound and kill Voldemort (though not permanently bc of the Horcruxes) instead of Harry.

So where did the scar come from? One option is that it is the mark left by the shattered bit of Voldemort's soul entering Harry's body. But like, why in that spot particularly? Another option is that it's connected to whatever powerful protection magic Lily invoked to save Harry. I personally subscribe to the theory that whatever she did involved some pretty scary and powerful dark blood magic, with herself - and possibly James and Voldemort as well - as blood sacrifices.

We know in the Harry Potter universe that runes are associated with ancient and powerful magic. For example the Pensieve has runes carved around the base. In book 5 a particular rune - Eihwaz - gets mentioned and Hermione says it means "defense." Now Eihwaz is a real rune in the Futhark alphabet and guess what it looks like:

...Yeah.

I think Lily was willing to go beyond the normal bounds of magic in terms of what she was willing to sacrifice. I think she cast a spell and I think her death sealed it and then Voldemort's killing curse activated it - a spell of protection so deadly and powerful that it deflected a killing curse, ripped Voldemort apart on a metaphysical level to the point his very soul shattered, and carved an indelible and visible mark of protection in Harry's skin where the killing curse should have struck him.

It's also notable that Tom Riddle resurrected himself with 3 blood sacrifices, so I kind of like the parallel of Harry also having 3 sacrifices (not just of blood but of life) protecting him - his father, his mother, and his enemy.

[iamnmbr3]

Also. In addition to the fact that canonically in the HP universe it is specifically mentioned that Eihwaz means "defense" it can also IRL be associated in some traditions with meanings having to do with protection as well as the barrier between life and death (and with yew trees).

AND it's literally a lightning bolt. Here's another image of it below. It's literally his scar. LOOK AT IT:

And we KNOW that runes have power in the HP universe. Sorry but whatever JKR says Lily Evans absolutely got one of the highest scores ever on her Ancient Runes NEWT and if Harry had ever taken the class Professor Babbling would've lost it.

Also, let's take a moment to think about the similarities between the sacrifices at Voldemort's resurrection ritual and the deaths at Godric's Hollow. In both cases the sacrifices probably fed powerful blood magic enchantments and in both cases there are three offerings made. One unknowing sacrifice (Tom Riddle Senior's bones & Jame's life), one unwilling sacrifice (blood of the enemy from Harry & and life of the enemy from Voldemort, and one willing sacrifice (flesh of the servant from Peter and life of the mother from Lily). The similarities are really quite striking.

We know that powerful dark magic seems to look a lot more like traditional medieval conceptions of witchcraft (involving sacrifices or killing of some sort). And it stands to reason that very powerful spells can't just be used all the time and that it's more than skill and power that are gating factors (although that is required too). I also think the particular emotional state plays a role - so Lily's feelings when sacrificing herself impacted things as well; this isn't just a recipe that can be replicated in a lab.

Tom knows a lot about blood magic and seems to have figured out what Lily did, at least to some extent, because he comes up with a partial solution that involves a blood magic ritual. He obviously believes in the power of what she did because he goes to significant lengths to mitigate its effects, but still says he has seen no evidence of the power of love. This could be because as a blood magic practitioner and expert he recognizes blood magic when he sees it. (Of course, Lily going to such lengths and giving her life for Harry is still very much an act of love, just in a more roundabout way.)

[theoldeststoryteller]

so Dumbledore’s phoenix is named after a violent revolutionary, which could mean nothing.

[rocket-sith]

Reblog if you write fic and people can inbox you random-ass questions about your stories, itemized number lists be damned.