I want to see a fanfic where Harry hatches a basilisk.
I want to see a fanfic where he looks up “magical snakes” as soon as he gets to Hogwarts because that thing at the zoo always bugged him, and so the Trio works out that it’s a basilisk immediately after the first petrification in Second Year. But they don’t know how it’s getting around or where it is or anything, so Harry is just like WELP SET A BASILISK TO FIND A BASILISK while Hermione and Ron are like HARRY NO.
I want to see a fanfic where Harry sticks a chicken egg under a toad and makes all these plans about how he’ll talk to his huge deadly snake and get it eye-blinkers and shit so it doesn’t kill people and make sure it’s not too aggressive, and somehow it never occurs to his twelve-year old brain that the chicken egg has a total volume of about four tablespoons and he is not going to get the giant King of Serpents he is expecting.
I want to see a fanfic where it finally breaks out of the shell and Harry finds himself with a bb!basilisk too smol to even have the murder-eyes yet, who can only petrify someone for about half an hour before the effect wears off. She eats spiders and gets tired very easily and demands that he wear a hood she can curl up in and sleep.
(She is also the same vivid green as his eyes and already hideously venomous, but doesn’t like using her fangs because she says they get cold and give her brain freeze when she unsheathes them.)
I just… I really want Harry with a haughty, demanding, arrogant danger noodle who has an overinflated sense of her own importance, views Hedwig as a TERRIFYING MENACE because she isn’t big enough to eat owls yet and keeps up a steady stream of insults hissed in Harry’s ear whenever she’s near someone who has a Dark Mark (which she can sense at close range). And who is basically useless as a familiar because she refuses to slither across anything other than sun-warmed stones or Harry, hasn’t got a very powerful gaze yet and doesn’t like biting people.
(Except snake-arm-people. She finds snake-arm-people confusing and annoying, and would probably make an exception on the no-biting thing where they’re concerned.)
I mean there are obviously a lot of factors influencing snake growth rate but if we assume basilisks just get stupidhuge because they grow their whole lives and are immortal, this snake is probably going to be at least 8 feet long by Deathly Hallows, which is a significant and intimidating chunk of scaly muscle that is intelligent enough to do what it is told. Like, you know, hey, bite this necklace.
So I mean by like his fourth year it’s going to be pretty hard to hide this snake that is nearly as long as he is tall and it’s not going to do much for his reputation that the Boy Who Lived has a pet fucking basilisk but holy damn does it make book seven a whole hell of a lot shorter.
I feel like I should write this
can you just imagine him ron and hermione coming up with increasingly ridiculous excuses trying to hide their pet baby basilisk in the dorms (hagrid would be so proud). how long do you think it’d take before harry’s pet basilisk is just a really badly hidden secret between all of gryffindor? and the ensuring antics of the entire house as they try to keep mcgonagall from finding out? (she knows something is up, but even just thinking of what could be big enough the entire house is trying to keep it from her makes her want to break out the firewhiskey)
ron gets the idea to try and practices parseltongue with baby basilisk since he hears harry talking in his sleep with it all the time anyway (and ngl, baby basilisk is kind of adorable and eats all the spiders in the dorm so he doesn’t have to deal with them, he’s pretty smitten once she hatches), and as soon as hermione overhears him trying it, she’s dragging him and harry to the library because, well, parseltongue is a language, why can’t they learn it? so it’s the two of them alternating between hissing at harry and hissing at the basilisk and harry is trying so hard not to laugh because 90% of what they’re saying is utter nonsense and the basilisk doesn’t even bother, because she likes these two humans but wow are they dumb, that’s not how words work.
With literally every single individual (over the age of 11) suffering from Boarding School Syndrome, it’s no wonder that the wizarding world is such a mess. And it somehow explains the callousness and indifference that grown ups show towards the fears and pains of traumatized Hogwarts students.
Filch has a doctorate in art conservation and has definitely read Hogwarts A History
Actaully speaking of PoA, can we fuckin talk about Filch and his art credentials?
The portrait of the fat lady gets slashed and Dumbledore hands her off to Filch to get restored?
AND FILCH DOES IT, AND DOES IT WELL?
The next time we see her there is NO mention of anything like, oh she’s back but you can kinda see where she was cut… NO. She comes back in PEAK CONDITION.
Restored by Filch, who *has no magic.*
He restored this however many hundreds of year old painting *by hand.*
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH SKILL MUST HAVE BEEN INVOLVED HERE?
This 100% changes the character of Filch. Like I’ve only ever seen him portrayed as this kind of head janitor kind of character, movies style, but like. Why? Why would Hogwarts need that if it’s full of house elves? According to Harry Oblivious Potter, probably cause Dumbledore felt bad and gave him a shitty job but one he could at least do and still be in the wizarding world.
WRONG. It’s cause that’s not his actual job.
Listen.
Dung bomb goes off in a classroom? Long night for the house elves.
Dung bomb goes off in a 300 year old suit of armor? Long six to eight weeks for Argus Filch.
Fanged frisbee tears up an irreplaceable tapestry?
Filch.
Peeves draws dicks on a portrait of the founders?
Filch.
All these damn kids in and out of here every day acting like dumbasses and blowing stuff up when it’s already bad enough they keep tracking dirt and *breathing* all over everything?
Filch.
Now how about, how does Filch know all the secret passages? A combination of things. Probably paintings told him about some. You spend weeks restoring a portrait of someone who helped build the place which lives and moves and speaks in their voice and you’re bound to at least talk a bit, if not learn a few things. But many he probably found on his own, either by wit or by study- he’s gotta be entrenched in tr history of this place. If Binns hadn’t come back as a ghost Filch could probably teach history of magic in his place.
He keeps the place in order such that generations next will still have it, and said generations next show him no god damn respect for that. He’s bitter for a lot of excellent reasons.
I’m trying to think of a different name for a “squib” from Harry Potter. Something that isn’t an insult, to go along with the world-view that squibs can be a part of the magical community, they can teach or have a number of various jobs that don’t require magic and shouldn’t have to either choose janitorial labour or going into the muggle world in order to have a career.
…thinking about it, I think that squibs as a recognized class in magical society is probably an artefact of magical seclusion? Prior to the 17th century, the muggle children of magical parents were probably just apprenticed to muggle professions in the community and remained in contact with their families. Maybe a bit of an embarrassment for some prominent wizarding families, but not really notable in the broader scale. It’d explain why so much of wizarding culture and tech seems to have stalled out – they’ve lost contact with what used to be a reliable source of input from skilled adult muggles.
“A clever plan..because if Harry here and his friend Ron hadn’t discovered this book, why–Ginny Weasley might have taken all the blame. No one would ever have been able to prove she hadn’t acted of her own free will…and imagine…what might have happened then…The Weasleys are one of our most prominent pure-blood families. Imagine the effect on Arthur Weasley and his Muggle Protection Act, if his own daughter was discovered attacking and killing Muggle-borns…”
It brings me SO MUCH joy that the plot of Chamber of Secrets basically happens because Lucius is terrified out of his mind of Arthur and Molly Weasley and their SEVeN kids who were all raised to hold the line in case anyone tried to start a genocidal regime again. They are so powerful and so dangerous to any attempted rise to power from the Death Eaters, and Lucius feels the need to try and marginalize and demonize them in order to decrease the threat they pose.
And boy was he right to be concerned, they are…unstoppable. Each and every one of them. You thought it was impressive that it took five Death Eaters to kill their uncles? Try having a couple Weasleys illegally on the airwaves, one destroying Voldemort’s Horcruxes, one protesting at Hogwarts, one running loose in the government, one housing escaped prisoners, and one getting foreign support!! More children than they can afford? Try more children than you can effectively stop!!
And then when they ALL show up to fight in the Battle of Hogwarts? What a trip for Lucius Malfoy! Hey bigots! Would you like to pick an opponent based on which Quidditch position they excel at, or do you wanna roll the dice and go with one of the brothers who got 12 OWLs? Those are your only two options because Weasleys are EVERYWHERE and the weak link is NO ONE. The fear that must have been in his heart when one or two of them was around every corner of the school taking down his DE pals…is so amazing to think about. Glorious. Iconic. Every Weasley has red hair, freckles, and a drive to destroy the concept of blood purity at all cost!!
The Weasleys are not always nice or right, but they are GOOD and they believe in standing up for what is good, and when evil is around they SHOW UP to fight it. No questions asked. And evil is so scared of them, so worried about what they can do, that it resorts to desperately weaponizing a little girl to try and stop them.
there is absolutely no reason hogwarts couldn’t’ve been founded as a monastic school for the education of the clergy, with two houses for women and two for men, except that the hp fandom is full of bitter atheists and people who don’t know shit about paganism & religious history
@ofloveandmedea said: please talk about this headcanon it sounds Fascinating and you always have such good sources
here’s two things that i don’t think fanfic writers understand about pre-enlightenment europe:
first, there is zero evidence that paganism continued to exist as a practiced faith in western europe after about 900 CE. there is more evidence for demons. (reading on this, among other things) if you want to make the case that with the statute of secrecy, wizards erased all evidence of their existence as your justification for pagan wizards, that’s fine, but you’re then left with the question of where the stories about witches came from.
second, there was no way for a non-christian organization to function. period. it didn’t happen. jewish groups, especially pre-1492, were very small and very quiet; islamic groups kept out of christian europe; there were no other options. if you were a guild, if you were a school, if you were a group of any form, if you were a government–you were christian. it was explicit. there wasn’t even a conception of how to organize without invoking christianity.
so when, in or about 950, hogwarts was founded, it had to be founded in a christian framework. there’s a big, huge, gigantic problem though: in 950, education happened one-on-one, through tutors or apprenticeships. the only, only institution educating in a group format was the church.
why? because clergy came from all classes, because clergy were required to be (at least partially) literate, and because the majority of the population (in some places and eras, from any demographic) was not literate. religious institutions were the only places collecting significant numbers of children and giving them an education.
there were two forms of this: cathedral schools, which produced priests, and monastic schools, which produced monks and nuns. (some reading)
couple of reasons why hogwarts would be monastic and not a cathedral:
the boring, the reasonable, hogwarts isn’t anywhere near anything that would be a cathedral, but monasteries were all over the place and the more remote, the better
priests were all male, which makes two of the founders difficult to explain
scotland was more connected to the irish monastic form of christianity than the mainland european bishop focused christianity
so. if you’re going to create a school in 950 in scotland that accepts students from all backgrounds with the goal of educating them, the most reasonable framework for this is the monastic school.
(monastic schools were also notoriously apolitical, which would go a long way to explaining some things in the books…)
but wait! you say. what about christianity and magic?
i’m so glad you asked. medieval catholicism didn’t actually have a problem with harry potter magic, as long as it was dressed up in the appropriate forms.
quote from holy feast and holy fast by caroline walker bynum:
By 1500, indeed, the model of the female saint, expressed both in popular veneration and in official canonizations, was in many ways the mirror image of society’s notion of the witch. Each was thought to be possessed, whether by God or by Satan; each seemed able to read the minds and hearts of others with uncanny shrewdness; each was suspected of flying through the air, whether in saintly levitation or biolocation, or in a witches’ Sabbath.
in other words, it’s not the things that people do that make them witches: it’s their relationship (or not) to God and the Church. things that we today would call magic–healing people by touching them, or saying incantations; turning one bread into many; transporting from place to place–all of these turn up in hagiographies of saints as miracles that they performed.
(complicating matters is that they did have a conception between good and bad witches, it’s just that all were damned. so you have good witches, who are doing good things, and bad witches, who are doing bad things, and saints, who are doing good things, and the quality of the thing…well it does matter, but it matters less than the position of the person doing it)
additionally, throughout the middle ages, you see records of people definitely doing magic which is contemporaneously acknowledged as magic who are…not getting burned as witches. the big easy example here is court alchemists & astrologers, who were all over the place telling the future and/or making things blow up and only really getting into trouble when their patrons did. (some reading)
there were also tumblr’s favorite women, the herbalist or local midwife (or, equally common, the wealthy widow). the line between “medicine” and “magic” was not all that well formed: if you knew that certain herbs with certain prayers would keep someone alive, who was to say that it was the herbs vs the prayers that did the heavy lifting? later there was a clear(er) distinction, but even then, the association of midwifery with witchcraft is not new and it is not unfounded. (more reading)
so there’s a deep, deep split here. because on the one hand, yes, people were (irregularly, but routinely) tortured and (less commonly) executed for witchcraft (under a variety of names). but on the other hand, people were socially rewarded for practicing magic within accepted forms, and while sometimes this was because the source of the magic was seen as different, sometimes it was not.
in this context, then, in this understanding that some people could (and did) work magic without being evil, in this society where education was the province of a very, very select group of people who were also (what a coincidence!) more likely to be workers of magic, in this situation that j.k. rowling seems to have absolutely no idea of–
hogwarts was a monastic school to produce good catholic magical monks and nuns.
(some more readings i didn’t have an excuse to share earlier: link (on merlin), link (on anglo-saxons), link (on things witches did), link (on what the witch hunters thought they were hunting and why)
This is plausible and overlaps interestingly with my rant about how considering Hogwarts was founded that far north in ~the tenth century by persons with mostly Saxon names,
the admissions-policy dispute Salazar is most likely to have flounced over not only is unlikely to have been about ‘muggleborns’ in the modern sense (since the secrecy policy didn’t exist so it would have been a mere status issue at that point)
but is quite likely to actually have been over the political/military question of admitting Danes. (Potentially also Scots.)
Scotland, shockingly enough, was not ruled by the English in the 10th century. With enough assumptions about dates and locations we can get Hogwarts having been founded in the kingdom of Northumbria, which was English but also fell not that long after the earliest plausible date for the founding of Hogwarts to invading Danish forces, which settled in and colonized the place.
(Because they did not entirely overwhelm and drive out the previous wave the Vikings are surprisingly often left out of the list of ‘people that took over England’ but they really shouldn’t be.)
So. Salazar Slytherin: probably patriotically opposed to educating young aspiring magicians whose family loyalties lay with the Great Pirate Army.
A tangent, but I think a compatible one to the Monastic Hogwarts theory: I think it’s reasonable to assume that at various points in history the castle housed more than just the school.
Some of the magical sites in London doubtlessly date to antiquity – the Veil chamber seems ancient enough that I suspect the rest of the Ministry complex was built on that site specifically to contain and protect the Department of Mysteries, and while it’s hard to say without a geographical location, it’s possible that the Diagon/Knockturn/Gringotts area represents an older wizarding settlement that was engulfed by the primarily muggle city. But Saint Mungo’s? The facade is decades old at most, and based on the dates on the famous wizards card of its founder, the hospital itself was probably founded only very shortly before the statute of secrecy went into effect.
And Mungo is a Scottish saint.
For a significant portion of British Wizarding history, Hogwarts was probably not only the main educational institution for children, it was probably the major academic and medical center for witches and wizards of all ages. The castle certainly seems to be larger than is necessary for the ambiguously several hundred children who currently make up the student body, and presumably when the muggle population of the British Isles was much lower, the magical population was smaller as well. Which implies that at some point at or after Hogwarts’ founding, someone had a use for all that space other than the education of wizarding children. This could have included one or more monastic orders, possibly carrying out missions or vocations later absorbed by the secular wizarding government.
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