Pennies for Potterhead Thoughts

rediscovering hp fanfiction, talk about Tom riddle to me and give me recs

[stationintern]

i love how most drarry fics don't paint ginny as, like, a jealous ex. they're just like, "oh, ginny? yeah she's over there with her girlfriend and baseball cap. yeah, she's really happy. happier than this loser." and harry is sleeping on their couch or something.

[broomsticks]

​i legitimately don’t mean to subtweet — this all is So interesting for fandom meta reasons!! why is this the case?

[lacewingballad]

“Abraxas Malfoy isn’t quite as arrogant as his grandson but Harry’s pretty sure that the Malfoy’s sustain themselves on misplaced pride rather than oxygen at this point.”

-Rewind The Tapes Press by Rose_by_another_name on ao3

[cryptotheism]

As chair of the wizard- [PARRIES A SPELL] As chair of the wizard counc- [PARRIES A DIFFERENT SPELL] As chair of the wizard council, I- [PARRIES A DIFFERENT SPELL] As chair of the wizard council I think staffs should be illegal during these meetings.

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

unexpected pregnancy fanfic but the person just gets an abortion and it ends

[bexondeck]

of all of the bizarre things I’ve seen while working in skilled nursing the one that’s going to stick with me until I die is bug god

[bexondeck]

nothing can possibly prepare you for the moment you show up to give a man his apple juice and he says “Do you think bugs come from the same god as us? They’re older than our god. They have their own.”

[blvnk-art]

After their first kiss.

“Oh, I was forgetting my book.” “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to lose books right now. With NEWTs and all.” “Exactly. There.” “Great. I hope you’re not forgetting something else.” “I think it was just the book.” “Evans. Why did you kiss me yesterday?” “I don’t know.”

[lacewingballad]

camera pans away. Reveal: figures in a circle hunched over. Scribbling madly. Not a whisper of sunlight in the room. Not a sound other than graphite scratching on paper. slowly, your eyes begin to adjust, and suddenly you realize what’s on the paper and gasp. It’s drarry fanart. All of it.

The fanartists see you and rouse in desperate chorus, pleading, “I don’t know how I got here” and “Draco’s not racist in this fic”. You stare up in horror, and see the walls of the room are entirely obscured by Pinterest boards with ‘draco malfoy suit’ references and dartboards with jkr’s face. But it’s too late. You’ve seen it and understand.

You are a drarry shipper and you can’t go back.

[lacewingballad]

Fandom tumblr, can someone explain to me why the marauders era is taking over all the Harry Potter tags?? not a complaint. But with all due respect WHAT HAPPENED HERE HOLY SHIT

[lacewingballad]

Thought I’d share the list of things that Ginny’s called Tom in my current fic:

Ginny’s snark goes unparalleled, and it’s really fun

-half-human, half bottle of hair gel

-walking pamphlet for genocide

-a nose job away from total world domination

-cryptic arsehole

-psychopath

-narcissistic sociopath

-a less appealing mate than the ghoul in her attic

-‘are you sure he was born? Because most days he looked like he was shit out of a basilisk

-wins ‘biggest prick with the smallest dick’

-probably got turned on by dark magic, and STILL would have been a better teacher than lockhart

[whatastrangewriter]

The effects that no one saw

- After second year, Ginny could no longer stand snakes. Everytime she saw them, all she could think about was how she had woken up in an unfamiliar place, knowing that she had been the one harming everyone, and discovering that the monster had been a basilisk. What if someone had been killed?

- After everything that happened with the Snatchers, Hermione never wore perfume again. She didn't understand how anyone could. They would just lead the enemy right to their own doorsteps! It took her a long time to remember that there was no enemy anymore.

- For the first time ever, Luna hated darkness. She had always loved it before, but after she was held captive in Malfoy Manor, something had changed, and her love of the darkness turned to hatred. She learned how to make glowing balls of pure energy, and in her room, thousands of them floated in the air. It helped to remind her, when she woke up from another nightmare and forgot where she was, that she wasn't in the dungeon anymore.

- In his second year, Harry found that he couldn't look into mirrors anymore. Every time he did, all he thought of was the Mirror of Erised, and whenever he looked at his reflection, he couldn't help but hope that his parents would be looking out at him again. Every time that they weren't there, his heart broke a little more.

- Ron had always been fine with leaving his friends alone. But he was seventeen, and whenever he tried to leave a room that his friends were in, all he felt was the overwhelming panic of them disappearing, leaving him behind even though all he wanted was to join them again.

- "Please let them be okay," Neville whispered to himself whenever he went to sleep. Because after his seventh year, he had grown so used to his friends disappearing in the night, reappearing days later with new injuries and a haunted look in their eyes. He was terrified to close his eyes, because there was always that fear that one day, one of his friends would vanish and would never come back.

- Whenever her children visited her, Molly Weasley was overjoyed. But whenever her family sat down for a meal, that joy soon turned to grief, as Molly realized that once again she had laid a place for a son that would never eat with them again.

- Andromeda Tonks lived in a house that felt far too big for just herself. She was used to laughter filling up the halls and tripping over messes left by a bubbly girl who changed her looks to suit her mood. She was not used to the empty feeling of grief that followed her everywhere she went. A few days a week, her grandson would go to her house to spend time with her, and he was just as bubbly and irrepressible as her daughter had been. She loved him for that, but sometimes, she hated him for it too.

- For five years after the war, George refused to speak, because he could not fathom how he was supposed to say anything when there was no one who would finish his sentences.

- It took years until Draco could allow people to hug him. And even then, it took everything in him not to shudder and recoil, as his mind flashed back to a pair of cold arms embracing him as he chose his family over his friends.

[lacewingballad]

*rubs hands together* oh im doing something fucking EVIL with this

[incorrect-drarry-quote]

Draco: Harry, are you okay? You seem distracted

Harry, shrugging: Just thinking.

Draco: About what?

Harry: How to politely ask you to pin me against the wall

[lacewingballad]

#survival is a talent

[marauder-queen]

Hermione: *is introduced to magic*

Hermione: *literally watched a human being turn into an animal*

Hermione: *time travels multiple times through the day*

Professor Trelawney: I can see into the future!

Hermione: NAW MANN! THAT'S BULLSHIT! THAT AIN'T POSSIBLE. FUCK YOU!

[pripecias]

i never talk about these things but i can’t remain silent.

i know tumblr doesn’t give a SHIT when things happen in countries outside the “most popular ones” (such as the usa & england). it’s true, don’t lie to me. y’all don’t give A FUCK. not every issue and problem in said countries gets the appropriate exposure but in general shit shows up on the news WORLD FREAKING  WIDE. you set up donations, you help out, your spread the word, you say “pray for x”……

southern europe is burning. 

my country is burning.

people are dying - at home, on the road, trying to run away, in their cars.

yesterday my country had 300 active fires.

people are losing EVERYTHING they own.

i have a friend that is on a train right now passing through places that have been burnt to the ground and she says the smoke is so intense it’s getting inside the train and she can barely breathe.

and yet, even though several people (myself included) have been trying to bring awareness to what has been happening in southern europe… what we get from most of you, those not part of the countries suffering, is silence. we don’t ask for money, we don’t ask for shit other than a reblog to spread awareness… something you can delete in 24/48hrs if you wish. 

i don’t know what to tell you. i’m angry. i’m frustrated. i’m disappointed. i feel like i’m screaming into the void. “a reblog does nothing” - you know that’s a damn lie, you know exposure always helps, you know people start paying attention when posts on social media become popular. my country in particular is a small one, we get ZERO exposure. y’all are only starting to figure out we even fucking exist bc of the shit we’ve been winning lately. 

but hell, if the EU doesn’t give a shit, why should some user on tumblr dot com?

again, i don’t know what to tell you so i’ll let the images speak for themselves: 

An image captured by a Nasa satellite shows a thick plume of smoke blowing southward from the Greek island of Chios over the island of Crete

Torneros de Jamuz, Spain

Duca, Croatia

A helicopter from Italy’s civil protection service drops water on a fire near the railway between Venice and Trieste

Residents take refuge on the beach as a wildfire burns on the mountain next to the village of Lithi, on the Greek island of Chios

Men gather cattle during a forest fire in Vieira de Leiria, Marinha Grande, Portugal.

Charred trees are seen on the hills above the Cloister of Thivaidas on Mount Athos, a World Heritage Site in Greece

Portugal

[tinacroat-deactivated20180821]

This is fucking important. I am glad someone fucking spoke about this and said what they had to say. The damage is terrible, and all the evergreen, stone, even the ground is black. I was fucking terrified when Croatia was burning. The fire was near a village where I like and I thought it will burn down. I thought the church will burn down. I thought the cemetery where my grandpa is buried will burn. I still remember the smell of smoke, and when I went to check how bad is fire, my clothes and hair and skin all stunk of smoke. It didn’t go away for weeks.

This is NASA’s picture of Croatia and Montenegro burning. My fucking country was burning. Fucking reblog this. I don’t care that it isn’t UK or US, or that it doesn’t go with your blog, fucking. Reblog. It.

[arafagzhzjxxkd]

Not my blog type, I dont care.

[letitbefiction]

Reblog for awareness. Do it.

[deadpoetsmuses]

@mullthingsoverinthehotwater @willowestelle @ughgclden @galaxyrhytm @spacexcowgirl @lumos-barnes @kirawriting @towriteabetterlife @yourpal @nananostalgic @neilsemeraldsweater @wonderfilworld @ge0rgeweasley

[lacewingballad]

“Slytherin are loyal, Ginny knows. It’s just that the lines they draw, the units of insiders they create are not defined by common boundaries, by anyone else’s rules. They do not pledge loyalty based on notions of people they should care about. It is far more complicated and infinitely more nuanced than that. It can’t be understood with just a glance.”

-The Changeling by Annerb on Ao3

I swear to the gods, read the Changeling. Ginny gets sorted into slytherin, and it follows her growth and sharpening into a weapon of war. It not only expands on Ginny but on the entirety of what it means to be a Sytherin living with a title that means you’re instantly feared and pushed away, even, in Ginny’s case, by your own family. The writing is gorgeous, just *chefs kiss*, visceral; reading like a journal written by someone in disassociated fury. It’s like, these characters are statues that have been carved and beaten until they form something beautiful. That’s hella flowery but. Agh. This fic reminds you what the core of the Hogwarts community is meant to be. That and, well, The Changeling has the honorable title of Nearly Made Me Cry, which has happened rarely enough that I can count it on one hand.

[ginnyxluna]

harry potter, age 11: oh boy! i hope i have fun adventures in the magic world!

harry potter, age 15: time to bring down the fucking government i guess

[lacewingballad]

hey, look, mood

[is-that-you-satan]

OK

SO i was texting a friend @lacewingballad that absolute fiend and we were talking about this fanfic we’ve been reading that’s amazing (highly recommend, read Survival is a Talent from ShanaStoryteller) but we got to talking about characterizations of Ginny (she’s amazing in siat, all the characters have depth and personality even if they’re side characters and you root for all of them and it’s so well done and the worldbuilding and everything) and ended up brainstorming a concept we REALLY want someone to write. if not we at least want to share it.

ok concept:

after the end of the whole chamber of secrets debacle in ginny’s first year the horcrux is gone, but because tom riddle was possessing her for so long she ends up with like a ghost/remnant of him constantly following her around and linked to her. he can’t actually touch things and she’s the only one that can see or hear him, and both of them hate it. 

and like, okay, it sucks for pretty much all of ginny’s second year. the dementors just make things worse and she’s obviously traumatized by what happened but he just is constantly sarcastic and insulting in a vaguely endearing way and doesn’t give a shit about ginny near the beginning and has just decided that since he’s stuck like this he’s NOT going to mute himself and this thoughts. and ginny hates it for a long time but then starts to get used to it and realizes that yeah he possessed her but he’s harmless right now and kind of just wants attention instead of to be ignored even if he’s SO annoying in class

“really, he’s teaching it like THAT? there’s more to learn on a chocolate forg card. i can do it in half the time.”

“ginny ignore severus he’s being a twat. add some occamy eyes to your potion instead.”

“minerva FUCKING mcgonagall that bitch, you know she ruined my perfect record at hogwarts??? i would have been top of the class in everything every year but that scottish pile of basilisk dung always beat me in transfiguration.”

Ginny: just SHUT UP! *everyone turns to stare at ginny* Tom: oooooo Ginny’s in trroublllee

like, her 2nd year and a lot of her third are hard but she slowly gets better and more used to it, and he’s actually very helpful with the dementors and during the quidditch up attack. he’s all—”you’re my only link to the world without you I’ll disappear so you’re not allowed to die, even if you are incompetent. don’t be so selfish” and she slowly realizes that yeah he’s being a dick but he is scared of disappearing and he’s slowly growing on her like a parasitic mold.

Ginny keeps hexing walls because she tries to throw curses at him and they go right through and he gets so fed up he’s like, “NO, you’re stance is wrong. let me fix it.” and accidentally ends up teaching her a bunch of stuff.

and he also has opinions about people. like the amount of blackmail and judgement he has is astounding and he’s not afraid to call people about because this is sixth year tom, not yet voldemort, just a very salty teenage boy.

Tom, grudgingly impressed: “the goyle line is still going? do they look like the hapsburgs yet?

“it’s leviosA, not leviOsa. honestly ginny your classmates are idiots. has the collective intelligence of the wizarding world gone down since i was alive?

“aaaah, i remember crabbe and goyle. i think they were still following around malfoys in my day; i kind of wis hi had just poisoned them instead of cultivating them as minions. look at them. a mountain troll has more intelligence. i’d rather people marry mudbloods than those two, sweet merlin.”

around the middle of her third year she has to prepare for the yule ball but has no idea how to dance and he spends like three days insulting her, “what sort of pureblood witch doesn’t know how to dance? were you raised in a sty? were you too busy balancing out the idiocy in your entire household brought upon by all that red hair to learn basic manners?” until she finally challenges him to do better. he’s like FINE and just grabs her and spins her around and empty room and they’re spitting insults the whole time and purposely stepping on each other’s feet.

“what if someone sees?” “you dancing by yourself? eh, so maybe you’ve had a drink” “merlin to do this, i’ll need more than one.” “madam rosmerta is very easily bribed if you want firewhisky”

and they finish dancing up and realize that they don’t hate each other so much anymore and don’t acknowledge it, it’s just awkward and quiet and they don’t talk about it but ginny’s a great dancer by the yule ball even if tom spends half of it running around the room collecting gossip and blackmail like a magpie and the other half insulting neville but being begrudgingly impressed by neville’s dancing skills. ginny originally spent all of second year learning occlumency on her own so that she could tune out and get rid of tom when necessary because she’s incredibly determined and scared after being possessed by the diary, but as time goes on she realizes that she doesn’t need to use occlumency against tom and stops, lets him teach her legilimency so that she can defend her mind as much as possible.

and ginny originally hates all the slurs but by her fifth year has just given up and has fully brought up the fact that her blood is purer than his. when he gets particularly annoying she starts pointing out all the people he hates who have purer blood than him and he can’t even run away because they’re linked. at this point even she has grown on tom, his insults have continued but gotten less pointed and he spends more time snarking at others and teaching her revenge spells “to corrupt her” even though they both know she’s not going to get very corrupted.

by her sixth year his retribution to her annoyances is to start pointing out classmates and asking to play fuck marry kill. he’s even done it with professors and on one memorable occasion when he was particularly salty, dumbledore. and while this is happening there is a war going, for the record. like, he’s showed her dark magic spells for reversing cruciatus exposure and acts as lookout for ginny and the DA during her sixth year and has such scathing insults for the Carrows ginny has burst into laughter in public. and tom helps her out as much as he can even when she yells at him that he’s stifling her and that she can take care of herself.

“but you’re so pathetic! and helpless! like a baby niffler!” and she scoffs and hexes the first bully she comes across with a vicious bat bogey hex and is like “helpless? me? bitch you’re a ghost.”

and even while the war is going on tom’s officially realized that he doesn’t want voldemort to win because then he’ll disappear and it sucks but he’s kind of invested in ginny now, she’s been there and she’s kind of what he wished a friend would have been when he was younger because everyone in slytherin either looked down on him for being a mudblood, was jealous of him for being smarter than all of them, or was scared of him. ginny has experienced the darkest parts of him and still refuses to be scared and flinch away, matches him word for word and snark for snark and he can appreciate it okay. so he starts feeding information about voldemort to ginny so she can share it with harry, who doesn’t really question where it comes from because ginny asks him to trust her and just says that she remembers some stuff from being possessed from tom as a first year. and it’s weird stuff too, like how tom lost his virginity, or tom helping to make lesson plans for the DA around grey borderline dark magic spells that can be used for healing and stuff. 

harry, in the middle of the battle of the department of mysteries: “you’re scared tom. scared of what i can do to you. just like you were scared when lisa cromwell rejected your ask to the yule ball.” *everyone else is confused* voldemort, spitting and hissing. “whAAAtttt?? hOOOw??? tell me POTTER?? WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT NAME??????” tom, sitting on the side with ginny. “it was very traumatizing for us. we learned to dance for her and i’m still bitter about it.”

and HERE’S THE THING. around her fourth year ginny found a book in the room of requirement that taught her how to get rid of his ghost. but. she doesn’t. and since she can’t keep secrets from him for long, she writes herself a note, hides the book, and obliviates the knowledge from her own mind. she doesn’t want to find out or think about why she has found the book again and obliviated herself again, another two times.

the war ends and tom is still there, even though all the horcruxes are gone. and ginny does end up with harry at the end (we debated luna for a while but decided on harry as the ultimate endgame) and it’s weird because they like each other, but they can also both acknowledge that tom is part of what links them. he understands what it is like to be possessed by tom, to be seduced by his whispers and how charismatic he could be. sometimes at night he whispers that he misses the horcrux because he’ll close his eyes and feel alone but he was never alone as a kid, he always had tom, even if he didn’t know it, in the back of his mind, no matter how dark the cupboard under the stairs got. they bond over it a lot. 

one day, a few years after the end of the war, after both of them have graduated, ginny sits down and explains the whole tom remnant to him, about how he is there and following her around, and how she thinks that she can modify a spell meant to send him away to make him visible to the both of them, if he wants, instead of just her. and she explains what happened after the chamber and how he’s always been there and how tom is curious to actually be able to talk to his horcrux, someone like him but not really. and harry says yes and soon tom ends up as the third weird brother in the household, not in love with either of them, just an annoying houseguest that ginny and harry both begrudgingly enjoy snarking with. just a ghost. 

and the thing is that harry gets tom. because harry understands how tom became a megalomaniacal dark lord because harry was also neglected and ignored and scared. the only difference is that he had ron and hermione to teach him how to love, and value friendship, and be a normal human, and tom had no one to teach him. hogwarts was his home, but emotionally, it wasn’t any better than the orphanage.

OK WOW. that was long. we were texting for like more than an hour mind you. but now we have this idea and neither of us have the time to write it but i’m nevertheless putting it out there in case anyone wants to expand upon it or just add to it, i’d love to hear people’s thoughts about this AU, little scenes and funny tidbits.

[lacewingballad]

So I love the idea of second-year ginny having to grapple with whether she’s going insane, it would have to be some kind of Stockholm-syndrome, way of coping almost with Tom since she did feel alone in first year and would be ostracized in second. Obviously she felt like she could talk to Tom somehow, he was her friend, when no one else would be. Branded Heir-of-Slytherin Ginny doesn’t get much support from Harry either in book 3, and she’d have her share of snide comments and terrified glances to deal with. So having Tom again, even a nicer, slightly different Tom, even if he has no memory of what he did, would feel….nice! Ah, lovely how characters work sometimes.

@is-that-you-satan is an absolute fucking beast to brainstorm fanfics with, lmao this was born from the idea of Tom Riddle being a Bitchy Ghost Heather Chandler to Ginny’s accidental-murder-Veronica Sawyer.

I’m not gonna pretend to have any clout on this site but someone’s reading this now and I want your thoughts

[greekdaydreamer]

These are the most wholesome Tomarry moments ever in fics, aka Tom teaching Harry self worth lessons ) :

Tom: "Alright, repeat after me now: "I..."

Harry: "I..."

Tom: "...will not go out of my way to recklessly save any stranger today-"

Harry: "will not go out of my way to recklessly save any stranger today-"

Tom: "because I value my mental health more and I understand that putting my needs first is way more important than pleasing others."

Harry's brain malfunctions & he panics: "I..."

Tom, arching his brows: "Well, go on."

Harry: "I will help whoever needs me because I don't know what my role is outside of being a Savior and I feel like shit if I am of no use to those around me, so I'm in constant search for dangerous, possibly suicidal situations that might take me out of my misery."

Tom, staring at him, then sighing: "Ugh. And I thought we were heading somewhere... I swear, one of these days, I will slaughter your aunt and uncle. Dumbledore will be next. As a treat."