Blog of the Perilous Raven

A HP fandom sideblog

[perilousraven]

Oh my.

One thing about not playing MA consistently through the seasons is how much quite pertinent info you end up missing via the mini side events. Which I’m finding more and more true the more videos of them I find on YT.

For example. Did you know that MA does portray Trelawney’s predictions the exact same way as in the books? Complete baloney on the surface but they come true regardless, when nobody’s paying attention. Case in point, the season 15 puzzle event Divination Intervention. Trelawney makes some thoroughly unbelievable predictions about random things. Some are made ’true’ by Hazel’s interference, but. Kid on a broomstick falling from the sky? Need I remind you what happened to Robyn at the start of the current season. A mooncalf stampede? Tell me you didn’t miss season 18. Troll in the trophy room? That was in a mini event I think.

…yeah. Methinks we should all pay careful attention to what Trelawney says.

[fremitinsilva]

Snape's physical description makes perfect sense if you look at Celtic/Irish genetics, right?

We always talk about Rowling using Snape's "black, tunnel-like eyes" as a literary device for his Occlumency, which is true. But from a purely genetic standpoint, how does a pale, white British man from the Midlands end up with hair and eyes that dark?

The answer is likely in his mother's side of the family: the Prince bloodline.

1. The "Black Irish" phenotype in Ireland and parts of the Celtic regions, there is a very famous genetic contrast.

While many associate Irish people exclusively with red hair, there is a massive sub-population known historically as the "Black Irish." These are people with extremely pale, fair skin, but coal-black hair, heavy eyebrows, and deep, dark brown eyes that look pitch black unless hit by direct sunlight.

Snape and his mother are the textbook definition of this.

2. Eileen's name is the biggest clue Rowling rarely picks names at random.

"Eileen" is the anglicized version of the pure Gaelic/Irish name Eibhlin. Given that Cokeworth is located in the Midlands (an industrial hub that historically attracted thousands of Irish migrant workers during the industrial eras), it makes perfect sense that the Prince family carried these strong Celtic roots.

3. He is a Prince through and through in the books, it's explicitly stated that Severus looks exactly like his mother-the long face, the heavy brows, the bleak demeanor. Apparently he completely wiped out his Muggle father's traits with the exception of the hooked nose and inherited the full, raw Black Irish genetics from Eileen.

So to me, Snape isn't just a gothic character design; he and his mom are ethnically Celtic/Irish, and his appearance perfectly fits the biology of that heritage.

There, I said so. 😎😋

[imustconfess]

What really gets me about Harry hate is the fact that more often than not it's full grown adults hating on him simply for acting like the kid he was/is and actually responding to the horrific things he's been through in a none quiet, respectful, compliant manner (his outbursts, his trying to get his voice heard when he keeps being silenced, his reluctance to just sit still and let others protect him while he does or knows nothing when he keeps being forcefully dragged into life threatening situations where they can't protect him and he ends up seriously hurt).

It's the same old "Harry is so arrogant." Who are you, Snape? "He's such an attention seeker." Alright, Severus, calm down. "He was rich but didn't want to give money to the Weasleys." You clearly didn't read jack shit or the whole victim blaming thing where they turn around and sympathize or empathize with those who mistreated Harry because, if they themselves had to deal with “a little shit” like Harry, they’d react like that too. The jokes are whatever, but those who are serious about it concern me because if that’s their response to a fictional character (who they literally read going through all of the things he did), simply acting their age and lashing out because of trauma, mistreatment, abuse, and incompetent adults surrounding them, then I can’t imagine how they’d react to real life victims who go through this stuff or have gone through it (and aren't lucky enough to have their stories told).

[starlightomatic]

ive always thought of movie adaptations of popular books as basically officially sanctioned fanart and so im always caught off-guard when people start discussing changes made in movies like they’re canon

[cat-alvarez]

Why isn't Harry Potter's magical prowess more talked about and also a thing in every fic? This and his unrelenting sarcasm are two of his most obvious traits, and everyone continues to write him and talk about him as an ordinary, oblivious, socially awkward dweeb, that just had Things™ happen to him and now he's famous and he hates it, I guess 🤷🏻‍♀️

[adhemara]

"Harry is a jock" "Harry is muscled" "Harry is too emotional" "Harry is a -"

Just stfup. People need to get back into reading the books and get their mind off fanfics and the movies...

[perilousraven]

I swear, if I got a penny every time some schmuck on the internet called a character ”femme coded” but when I look it up it just turns out they’re traditionally upper class masculine……

[trothplighted]

what I’m trying to do in my conceptual examinations of wizard fashion is break down the really intense Western European gender presentation that we see in the the films, in fanart, in moodboards and collages, in fanfilms, in edits using fancasts, and in fanfiction. I think that’s worth doing, because the books have a high degree of normalized androgyny and crossdressing-adjacent clothing. Blending in with Muggles is hard because it involves wearing tighter pants! This is something we see acknowledged in the text! Wearing Muggle clothes is either a political or a fashion statement! I would like to see a conception of wizard masculinity that doesn’t involve reliance on 20th century gender presentation, and of wizard femininity that’s equally different, and of wizard androgyny, too!

We know there’s a concept of crossdressing according to wizard norms (see: Mundungus) and we also know that this is distinct from Muggle crossdressing (see: the man in GoF who arrives to the campground in women’s clothing and refuses to change; he doesn’t seem to register what he’s wearing as gendered in the same way Molly registers what Mundungus is wearing as gendered.)

we’re missing out on so much by going Man Trousers Girl Skirt, people

[csenegb-deactivated20210520]

Hermione and Crookshanks

[perilousraven]

…..dammit, HM. Why did you do this.

Okay, so. We’re talking Hogwarts Mystery eighth year timeline today. Previously in ch10 Forge Ahead, the MC attended Harry’s first quidditch match with Skye. That canonically took place in early December. Which is all well and good still! It forces the first nine chapters to take place in very quick succession, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and the timing more or less perfectly matches Flitwick mentioning the school year just started in ch5 Monkeying Around.

But afterwards is when things start to go a little weird. In ch14 High Society Callum says they dig through the fiendfyre rubble for days. Said fiendfyre took place on the day of the quidditch match. Okay? But even if we presume it took ROCC several weeks to get access to the site, it’ll still be late December at most. This timing is further corroborated by a background NPC in the assignment Rath’s Autograph (unlocked in ch16) saying that the Quidditch World Cup took place last year. The World Cup is held every four years canonically, which means that ’last year’ was 1990 still. So we have to presume ch16 takes place in December too, or at most early January if the assignment happens before the main story.

I mean, the timing is starting to get a bit tight there, but okay. It just means ch10-14 or 16 or so all took place in December.

But then the story goes into that long-winded sequence about Jacob’s little tantrum. It all happens over the space of several days, a week or two at most if you really stretch it out. So we’re in early to mid January and ch16. Then Barnaby’s grandmum dies and he goes all weepy. Things continue to happen quickly. References are made to Jacob’s tantrum having just happened and the guy himself is a powder keg waiting to go off if you don’t act fast enough.

And then it is ch20. Barnaby is still weepy and grieving and dealing with the stuff his grandmum left behind. And. Then the story slaps you around the head with Harry and Draco’s detention in the Forbidden Forest.

Like.

EXCUSE ME???!!!!?? That detention happens in fucking JUNE!!!

I have no words. They just skipped over five months there. What am I meant to even do about this. There’s no way.

The only option seems to be to ignore Firenze’s talk about Harry and place that scene in like February. Even if I were to ignore that NPC that mentions the World Cup, there’s only so far you can stretch Jacob’s tantrum into covering, and Barnaby’s grief happens literally right after. The most I could possibly do is stretch the main story to March and even that is questionable. I guess I could also imagine that it took literal months for ROCC to gain access to the fiendfyre site, but then it’s the MC’s grief period that gets stretched out to unbelievable lengths.

They’ve really made a mess of it. Something has to go for the story to work at all. I just hope it doesn’t make any further references to book events, they seem to very consistently fuck those up. *remembers the Norbert’s transport TLSQ with pure revulsion*

[perilousraven]

Two days ten hours left of a season is a good time to remember that the latest story in MA sounded thoroughly uninspiring so you went on a break a few days in without ever touching it, right?

Well then. I did manage a fair bit of a grind today so as not to miss out on the most important rewards. Even got the monthly pass to lv40-something, seven more days to go on that so I think I’ll make very good progress on that too, even if it’s impossible to max it in the remaining days.

I’ll see about the story later today after I grab some sleep. Still not convinced anything Wenshi-related will lead to a compelling story, though.

[thenoodlestickingtomyceiling]

Currently thinking about how Hermione and Ron’s birthdays were never mentioned in the books or movies yet they always made sure to get Harry presents for his. Like I get that Harry was the Chosen One, but come on, give my other children some full blown birthday celebrations please.

Hermione and Ron are just as important as Harry and always will be.

[perilousraven]

That’s actually a good example of my main gripe about the books as a fan, that we get to know very little about the actual lives of wizards and witches, whether that’s at Hogwarts or elsewhere.

(specifically gripe as a fan not as a reader, I acknowledge that it would have made for unreadably long books if everything was included)

I mean, the books start with Harry’s birthday but he’s not exactly spending it with friends, and the only birthday during school term we see is Ron’s in HBP and that doesn’t exactly go the way it’s supposed to. Why don’t we ever see a single wizarding birthday celebration?

Or stuff like how curfew or Hogsmeade permissions evolve, or school clubs other than the House quidditch teams. Surely the older students can leave the castle more? The seventh years are of age even (and sixth years age into it mostly during the school year), surely they have more permissions than third years?? Or even any detail about the average student’s school life. You can’t tell me there aren’t clubs for students who want to take care of all the various magical creatures the school must have (for classes if nothing else), quidditch and gobstones simply can’t be all there is. What about a school paper? And classes even, are we quite sure Herbology and CoMC never require them to make field trips? And even if their History prof is useless surely someone should see to it that the students get to experience at least some sites of historical and/or cultural significance?

The thing that gets me the most is that we don’t get to find out whether these things actually exist or not. Classes and regular school life basically don’t exist as far as the books are concerned, so they could be hiding anything and everything - even just looking at the evidence of what must be there according to text but is never explicitly mentioned, we find out stuff like maths in at least Astronomy class and probably Transfiguration, we find the necessity of orientation days at the start of first year from the weekdays and class frequencies mentioned (it’s all obfuscated in a couple paragraphs, when the text suddenly skips from Monday/the sorting ceremony to Friday and first Potions class when later it’s at least a couple times a week), we find afternoon activities (not just Flying) for first years that don’t start until later into fall term (early weeks have all afternoons off before dinner starts but later on certain days they don’t have free time until after dinner)…the list goes on.

And…yeah. A lot of people don’t even think these things exist in canon, they’re skipped over so effectively. Tighter writing, but duller world. I would have liked at least some ’filler episodes’, in the early books that were still short and could have accommodated them. The books even regularly skip over entire months at a time, plenty of free space there for a class trip or three.

Basically, they should’ve let regular student life take the spotlight every now and then dammit. 😭

[perilousraven]

This is probably a dumb question, but recently I've been trying to work out how Lupin was able to escape the Shrieking Shack every full moon. Because hear me out: according to the Harry Potter wiki (down in the trivia section of the Shrieking Shack page) it states that Dumbledore reinforced the structure to be abnormally durable, and placed protective enchantments on the Shack that prevented Lupin from getting out, for obvious reasons.

But then... he escapes every month to roam the grounds with James, Sirius, and Peter. And I know one of the explanations was that Peter as a rat was small enough to sneak up to the trunk of the Whomping Willow and stop it from fighting, but that still doesn't actually explain how Lupin was able to get out of the Shack itself.

And it wasn't like he wouldn't be taken to the Shack, because Dumbledore had no idea about the three Animagi or about Lupin escaping in the first place.

Is this just an oversight on my part, or a genuine PoA plothole?

Oh, thank you for the ask! 💜

The situation you asked about is actually a bit complicated, but not impossible despite not being fully detailed in the books. Most of the hints towards understanding it are there though. Whether you consider this a plot hole or not is up to personal interpretation I think.

I've discussed this same issue before with someone else. The result we came to is that there must be a magical ward that keeps werewolves from passing it at the entrace hole at the Shack end, with kind of an on/off switch that can be disabled by non-werewolf persons. After all, a simple moving tree wouldn't stop a werewolf for very long, it would just have to move fast enough to avoid the branches or be reckless enough in its bloodlust to not care and off to the school grounds it would go. As well as the fact that it would be impractical to cast the protections every month! But they still have to get Lupin into the Shack somehow, as well as out. Logic dictates that this kind of protection with a switch should exist to make the Shrieking Shack situation possible, and it's clear that humans can pass through the wards anyway. Otherwise there would have been no point to plant the Whomping Willow specifically as extra protection to stop any humans from stumbling on the tunnel and wandering into the Shrieking Shack, the wards would handle that if humans couldn't pass through it.

"This house" - Lupin looked miserably around the room, - "the tunnel that leads to it - they were built for my use. Once a month, I was smuggled out of the castle, into this place, to transform. The tree was placed at the tunnel mouth to stop anyone coming across me while I was dangerous."

(PoA, ch Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs)

Note the wording there. Not planted to keep him in, but to keep others out. Therefore, a special anti-werewolf ward must exist as well.

Furthermore, since werewolves don't attack animals (or animagi in animal form) the same way they do humans, it would have been safe for at least Sirius or Peter to go all the way to the Shack to disable the protections, let out Lupin, and then accompany him back all the way through the tunnel to the Hogwarts grounds, from where they could head out anywhere they wanted and had time for.

"They couldn’t keep me company as humans, so they kept me company as animals," said Lupin. "A werewolf is only a danger to people. They sneaked out of the castle every month under James’s Invisibility Cloak. They transformed … Peter, as the smallest, could slip beneath the Willow’s attacking branches and touch the knot that freezes it. They would then slip down the tunnel and join me." [...] Soon we were leaving the Shrieking Shack and roaming the school grounds and the village by night. Sirius and James transformed into such large animals, they were able to keep a werewolf in check.

(PoA, ch Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs)

The way it's phrased the part where they all go to the Shack was back when they were only accompanying him in the Shack, and when they started roaming everywhere they presumably used the plan I sketched above - Lupin didn't say that they all came to the Shack every time after they started roaming, his words explicitly reference the time before they started doing it. Note that James Potter himself couldn't have walked the tunnel in his animagus form since he's a stag, which means he couldn't have participated in the release plan. The tunnel is cramped with a very low ceiling even for teenagers, he wouldn't have made it through it in animal form unlike all the others. He would have had to transform inside the Shack itself (with Sirius keeping Lupin at bay) whenever he went there.

[Harry and Hermione] moved as fast as they could, bent almost double; ahead of them, Crookshanks’s tail bobbed in and out of view.

(PoA, ch Cat, Rat, and Dog)

So there you have it! The answer is that they used the tunnel entrance to get out, which seems to only be protected with anti-werewolf enchantments that have a disabling switch that the others could operate since they're not werewolves.

(as for how Lupin could get inside the Shack as an adult..well, possibly they left the switch in an off position whenever he wasn't caged in there for full moon, or they were disabled after his graduation, or even that those specific protections are a kind that would wear off with enough time having passed. The complete non-reference to anti-werewolf wards is how this could qualify as an actual plot hole. But then again, the story isn't about the Marauders, it's about Harry Potter who has no need to know about the specific details of how they got Lupin out of the Shack twenty years ago, that info means nothing to him so it wouldn't make sense for them to explain it in detail. Which is how this can also be not a plot hole, just something completely irrelevant to the story in PoA!)

[perilousraven]

Styling wizard day one outfit from one of my friendies. I really liked this one, especially after I combined it with this background. All kinds of mysterious snake enchantress in an abandoned mansion vibes!

[ace-aussie-asshole]

I think people forget that in the wizarding world, certain unnatural muggle hair colours are natural to wizards. Like, canonically, having silver hair as a kid isn’t weird in the wizarding world, it’s just a natural hair colour for some people. So I’d like to submit some “natural” hair colours. Ruby red, rose gold and that one shade of dark purple hair dye companies love to put with the natural colours for some reason.

[perilousraven]

I could see it! Magic already does weird things and it’s perfectly possible for a metamorphmagus like Tonks to get pink or purple or tomato red with her ability, or for Teddy to get turquoise. So why not have a regular witch or wizard’s magic affect them enough to get hair colors that muggles don’t get? Even if they don’t have the ability to change it later.

It’d probably have to be a bit rare, and most likely one of those strong appearance traits that run in the wizarding families, but it’s definitely believable and would fit in fairly well with the nebulous hints of how magical quality inheritance works in the series.

[arwyen-nyx]

[olderthannetfic]

It's been very interesting to see proshippers going from "you can enjoy anything fictional for any reason and you'll never have to justify yourself" to "if you even so much as THINK about HP, you have basically done worse than stabbing a trans baby in the penis you BIGOTED SCUM" and not be aware of how much of an anti mentality this anti-HP fandom stuff is. Believe me, the antis think they're just as right as you think you are. They just tell people to kill themselves over different fictional things than you do, but you're both still very much making an argument that having thoughts about fictional media and publishing these thoughts as fanfiction are immoral.

Freedom of fiction, unless… a bad person gets an ego boost over others' enjoyment of it? Then this fiction needs to be censored and people harassed for the fiction they create? Are you sure y'all are proshippers?

--

[insertcpnhere]

*googling*

"How far can Harry see without glasses on?"

"Could Harry see right in front of his face without glasses on?"

"What can Harry see without his glasses on?"

for no particular reason 👀🫶

[perilousraven]

Oh, cheers for interesting topic! It’s actually a bit weird for most people to discover this, but Harry is not nearsighted. As in, he doesn’t have bad eyesight the way most people understand it. The proof? It’s in PoA somewhere - forgive, I’m away from my resources right now, but it’s a part where Harry wakes up during the night or something, he gets up from his bed, and he….sees Crookshanks all the way down and across the lawn on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. From the top of the Gryffindor Tower. During the night in just moonlight. Without his glasses, which he grabs next to doublecheck if he really saw Sirius (or rather his animagus form) with Crookshanks, but they leave before he can grab them.

So yes, going by the books Harry is farsighted. He can see things far away just as well as anyone (afaik? Not on expert on that, but any medical sources I’ve checked say that farsighted people can see things further away), but he can’t see things up close, they’ll go fuzzy.

As for how close things can be before Harry needs his glasses to see it with any clarity. Well, afaik there’s no description of him without his glasses that would give more pointers than that one scene, so it’s up to personal interpretation!