When I was in elementary school, there was a wordplay prank kids pulled on each other by asking "What are you eating under there?" When their target, confused, responded with "Under where?" they'd laugh and shout "You're eating underwear!"
No one was actually eating underwear; no matter how upsetting the mocking was, it did not change the truth. Similarly, responding "What?" to someone quickly whispering "Idiotsayswhat" does not make you an idiot, or any of the other wordplay pranks.
J.K. Rowling can say "Engaging at all with Harry Potter fandom means you support my political ideology!" all she wants, but that does not make it true. Especially when you consider how many people blissfully go through their lives ignorant of social media. The Drarry shippers and 8th Year gen ficcers and the grandmother in your knitting group making a Hufflepuff scarf are not inherently supporting Rowling's crap just by doing those things.
Directly giving her money potentially allows her to donate more to her favored political causes, sure. That's also true of any other author, editor, artist, actor getting residuals, movie producer, musician...Hell, it's true of tipping your barista and buying carrots at the farmers market.
I'm not going to give Rowling any more money. I'm also not going to terrify myself by assuming the fellow shopper at the grocery store tossing the HP Keebler cookies in their cart wants me dead, or feed my scrupulosity by looking up the authors of every single book I check out from the library.
you have to understand. i have spent the past season of high potential howling on my priv twitter about how bad i need morgan to sleep with nick wagner. it is so conceptually messy. it is a bad idea for both of them and for everyone around them. it throws a wrench into the gillodec dynamic. all of these are positives btw. the way they understood each other before they liked each other. the way neither of them can be sure if it’s safe. the way it is absolutely not okay to have a situationship with your subordinate. i have seen the vision and i’ve been seeing it since last october. it has been 5.5 months. and admittedly while i really wanted a stupid messy hookup i am OVER THE MOON over them having A WEIRD AND EMOTIONALLY COMPLICATED FIRST KISS AT WORK
Do they believe some individuals are inherently more important than others? (Cassidy)
Which do they fear more, the deep ocean or the reaches of space? (Brandon)
How would they react if they learned that some of their memories were not as they remembered them? (Jeffery)
When do they consider someone no longer a person? If someone remembers nothing, are they still themselves? (Edith)
Feel free to do however many of these seem interesting to answer! I love learning more about your little guys!
Hello, HP! Thank you for these questions! I'm so happy you're interested in my OCs :] I hope you're doing well!
Identity is a fascinating concept. I love my time and memory losers. Get existential crises, idiots (/affectionate).
A read more was put at the end of Cassidy's section to prevent this from getting too long.
Questions from the Cosmic Horror Ask Meme.
Cassidy: Do they believe some individuals are inherently more important than others?
Oh, definitely. Cassidy is the golden girl of the school. She's the cheer captain, the to-be prom queen, the sought after tutor, and widely considered one of the nicest students around. Her long-standing relationship with Benny (the so-called King of Prebrook Falls) gives her a reputation as one half of a perfect pair. Although she tries to do right by most people, she absolutely has a hidden superiority complex.
Her father runs the tin can factory on the outskirts of town. He gets a lot of money for it. She lives in a big house on a tidy street with her parents. Her neighbours all present as well-to-do, all American people. Of course, everyone in town has their struggles, but the outward appearance is picturesque.
She's very ignorant to class struggles. She knows that some of her classmates can't afford the school lunches or don't have enough food to bring their own. She knows some of her classmates wear the same few outfits because they don't have any other clothes. She knows it all in a factual sense. She doesn't think people from lower classes are dirty, disgusting vermin. It's just that none of it sinks in for her.
Cassidy's idea of inherent worth is very tied to social classes. At the core of it, she ties worth to how much someone can influence the world at large. Money, assets, and especially relations all contribute to higher social power. When you're stuck at the bottom of the class ladder, it's harder to have this power on a large scale as an individual.
I could keep rambling about her, but I think it would be better to make a separate post for the rest.
TL;DR: she attributes worth to social power. She is absolutely a nepo baby who is not ill-intentioned but extremely ignorant to the obstacles blocking lower classes from gaining this power. This has given her a superiority complex.
Brandon: Do they fear the deep ocean or deep space more?
Brandon will tell anyone he's not afraid of either. The answer is the ocean terrifies him.
Any time someone expresses fear regarding deep space, he'll go on a spiel about how that's a stupid fear to have. He'll list all the facts he knows about deep space. He'll put heavy emphasis on the fact that so much is unknown but that doesn't matter because it barely affects humans. He thinks fearing something so vast and constant is irrational and weird.
The problem with the ocean is that it does affect humans. Water makes up 71% of Earth's surface. It's inescapable. The fact that scientists don't even know all of what's at the bottom is eerie. He can study space like it's an endless playground of wonder. Sure, humans' knowledge of it only goes so far, but that makes sense for something practically infinite!
Meanwhile, the ocean is finite. There is a bottom and there's a top. It's contained. Even so, there are so many things that lurk in the depths. The idea of aliens scares him, but he's a sceptic. It's unfortunate that the creatures of the deep trenches act and look a whole lot like the extraterrestrials he fears.
So, yeah, he's totally not afraid of either, and you'd be stupid to assume he is.
Jeffrey: How would they react if they learned that some of their memories were not as they remembered them?
>:]
Memories warp with time. I read once that the human brain never remembers something exactly as it happened because the paths taken to form a memory versus to recall a memory are different. I don't know the accuracy of this, but it was in a science book, so I'll trust it enough.
Jeffrey wouldn't believe this. He loves to force ignorance onto scientific facts. He loves to force ignorance onto everything. A more cartoon version of him would cover his ears, close his eyes, and say it doesn't exist if he can't see it.
Ironically, he'd argue that the tree still fell in the forest even if nobody bore witness to it.
Anyway, he'd be deeply disturbed if it could be proven to him that he remembered things wrong. Little things, sure, he could handle better, but big events would be deeply troubling to him.
For example, if he were to misremember and entire birthday of his from years before, he'd be thoroughly distressed. He'd start questioning his other memories. Is anything he knew real? Can he trust other people's memories? He doesn't have to face up to that fact he ignored. I mean, it's not even real! Right?
Edith: When do they consider someone no longer a person? If someone remembers nothing, are they still themselves?
EXCELLENT question, HP! :D
Throughout The Butterfly Effect, Edith is tormented by her sense of self. She's forced to face a future version of herself she has not experienced and now never will. Did she experience these things? It was her who wrote it down, who went to that place, who said that thing, but was it her?
The Butterfly Effect focuses heavily on memories. When Edith finds the copy of her journal from her future, she is immediately thrown off course. The simple act of finding the journal will irreversibly prevent her from ever experiencing that future exactly as it happened. You could say it's similar to the different paths taken when forming a memory versus recalling a memory.
As for before the time journal (as I call it) is found, she would say it's a grey area. Nobody remembers being born when they're an adult, but they were still that baby once. Key words being 'were' and 'once'. She wouldn't consider herself the newborn she once was. That was a state of her that only exists in the past.
She thinks identity is transient through time. She can't comprehend a single, identifiable state of being thanks to the infinite scale of time. If she was this person at this exact second, what about all the microseconds within it? It freaks her out when she thinks about it too much.
If faced with a hypothetical person who truly remembers nothing and cannot form memories, she's actually consider that the most constant state of self someone can have. To have no memories is to be a blank slate. A blank canvas is always a blank canvas. When you paint on it, you're changing it. Even if you finish the painting, it will flake and fall apart with time too.
Despite this, she would be the most terrified if she were to have all her memories wiped. Well, she'd be terrified beforehand. Being a husk might be the (for lack of a better word) purest state of self, but it's one that cannot experience life unless you remove the purity from it.
The Mystery of the Pears (89958 words), Regulus Black/James Potter
Chapters: 3/3
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Series: fruitbowls
A friend and I are trying to disassemble the Harry Potter story for spare parts and see what happens if we rebuild it with more of the JKR stench shaken out, and to our own preferences and sensibilities.
Like okay first. She wants to replace the Dursleys with a nicer family who just put not-Harry under the stairs because they literally don't have the room for him. But he's no locked in, he gets as nice a bed as they can put under there, and he's encouraged to decorate the space and make it his.
Friend points out that we need at least one trans character and floats the trans-Ron idea she'd discussed a while back. I add "not-Harry can be agender, with 'fuck it, whatever' pronouns". The sort of character I call "cis by default". As in, they'd just go through life thinking they're cis and this is just what being a man/woman is, until something makes them question themselves.
We get into the details of werewolves for a while, and I mention I want to keep the house elves but like. Nix the entire "slaves who enjoy being slaves" thing.
Go back to actual fae creatures from myths.
They're house brownies.
People are fucking terrified of them.
A strange magical creature shows up in your house one day and starts doing the chores and you just have to live with it.
"Hey uh. Thanks for washing the kitchen. Do you want anything as repaymen- OH GOD IT'S HISSING AT ME!"
Give them milk and bread, or wine, and try not to get in their way and hope you don't piss them off.
