I don’t ship Drarry but with that being said, I will accept no other Drarry prompt than them stubbornly competing to outdo the other for the sheer drama.
It starts off when they’re still enemies in the Goblet of Fire. Draco makes a taunt about who Harry’s going to ask to the Yule Ball and how they must be from the worst of the worst lot and Harry rolls his eyes and says, “Well, fitting you say that, Malfoy, because I was going to ask you.” A perfect zing, Harry. 10/10.
But now the ball’s in Draco’s court and obviously he’s not going to pass up on the chance to humiliate the scarhead so he takes the most logical route of humiliation and calls out his bluff: “Fine, Potter, I reckon we’re going.”
But do you think Harry James Potter is just going to back down? That stubborn teenager is going to stare Draco down and say, “Reckon we are.”
Ron’s confused and Hermione’s confused and literally the entire castle is confused but Harry’s satisfied because he called out a bluffer’s counterbluff with a bluff of his own. And they just keep it up.
“I suppose you don’t even know how to dance, Potter?”
The furious teenager who spent years having to watch soapbox dramas with Mrs. Figg just glares at him in his stupid dress robes. “I know some things.”
“Prove it.”
“Fine.”
It’s like that for days until Draco makes the ultimate power move by inviting Harry to the Malfoy’s Annual New Years Eve Ball, taking out a Daily Prophet ad no less, because oh, oh, he’s got Potter now. He’ll never accept and he’ll be humiliated in front of the entire wizarding world. And do you think Harry’s just going to go down without a fight? God, no, he’s going to win whatever the hell this is because he’s Harry Potter, Draco better be worried, oh boy.
They’re still going at it six months later.
“Err—Malfoy?” Crabbe says. “Potter just sent you a dozen roses?”
“That son of a bitch! Send a box of chocolates. That’ll show him.”
“Um, Draco—?”
“I WILL NOT BE OUTDONE, PARKINSON!”
i couldn’t resist 😛
Yep. This is it. This is the only Drarry headcanon I’ll accept from this point on.
like, i totally appreciate that HP fandom is still so intense and all the creativity that still gets poured into it, nearly 20 years after the first book came out, but ngl every time i see one of those edits with the original Marauders being represented by like, some impossible perfect Millenial instagram models with artfully tousled hair and pouty lips it always throws me bc those dudes were in their prime in late 1970′s england aka an era when looking like a led zeppelin reject was about the peak of popular young male hotness
like you know this is what they looked like, don’t try to fight it
Conclusion: Voldemort was the most useless, magic dependant wizard that ever existed. He could have lived till like 200 if he just ate well and exercised, but no he had to go and split up his soul and ruin perfectly good jewellery, fucking dumbass.
this sounds like it was written by hermione granger at 1 am
He tried to use an advanced death magic spell to kill a baby. He literally doesn’t know how to do anything without magic. Just drop it out a window my dude, babies are so delicate
“Slytherins didn’t participate in the battle of Hogwarts bc they’d be fighting family” Do you have ANY idea of how much I’d fucking LOVE to fight some ppl in my own goddamn fucking family forget the goddamn wand I’m gonna punch my homophobic racist uncles in the throat à la muggle
also there’s no way that each and every slytherin has a death eater family member that’s just dumb
Race 100% does matter here. Not only would a Black Hermoine give HP some desperatly needed representation, it would also change Hermoine’s story. A Hermoine who has to face racism in both worlds, who came to the wizarding world to get away from bigots only to find that she can’t, that there will always be someone somewhere who will hate her for being who she is, is different than the white Hermoine we got in the movies. Her experiences at Hogwarts would have been fundamentally different.
Would a Black Hermoine have cried when Malfoy called her a mudblood if people had been throwing the n-word at her since the day she was born?
How would a Black Hermoine, who’s seen what a mob of hooded white supremacists can do (and what they can get away with), view Voldemort and his death eaters? How safe would she feel at Hogwarts knowing that their children are sitting in the same room as her? She was almost killed her second year for not being “pure enough.” She’s heard those words before, this isn’t new to her.
Imagine what it would have meant for Victor Krum to fall for a Black girl who never seen anyone who looked like her be called beautiful? For Hermoine Granger to walk into the ball with Krum on her arm and be the darkest girl in the room. Imagine her standing out like a sore thumb in a sea of white faces and for once in her life feeling pretty.
It’s canon that the students of hogwarts make fun of Hermoine’s bushy hair. Imagine if on Hermoine’s first vacation home, she begs her mother to let her get a relaxer. She’s tired of being teased for having 4c hair. Her mother refuses and 11 year old Hermoine is sent back to school, her hair as bushy as ever. Over the course of the story, picture Hermoine learning that her hair is fine the way it is. Her fifth year, she decides to grow it bigger. When someone calls her hair bushy Hermoine thanks them. It’s a compliment to her now. By her seventh year Hermoine is rocking Bantu knots, twist outs, braids, and an afro that she wouldn’t trade for anything.
Imagine Black Hermoine sending her eleven year old Black daughter off to school, knowing that the system is rigged against her in both worlds and still having every confidence in her daughter succeeding. Imagine Ron worrying about things he’s never had to worry about before. Does he panic when the muggle police stop his daughter on her way home? Does he notice that his eleven year old daughter gets followed around in stores when he doesn’t?
Black Hermoine is still a genius and brave. She’s the same person but her experiences are different and that would affect her behavior. Implying that she’s identical to White Hermoine except for her skin color implies that white experiences are universal (they absolutely are not). What all of you “All Hermoine’s are equal and good so who cares of she’s Black or White??? 🙂 🙂 :)” stans are saying is that White Hermoine™ + Black Skin = Black Hermoine which is OFFENSIVE and UNTRUE. Cut that shit out.
all right. so. this is a Harry Potter AU, in rambly and abbreviated form.
this is a version of events where, on the morning of November 1st, 1981, the police are called to a house in Surrey.
when they arrive, a large man with a red face and a moustache is waiting for them, brandishing a baby.
to be more accurate: he is brandishing a basket. the basket contains a baby.
he tells the police that his wife found the basket on their doorstep that morning. “Gave her the shock of her life,” he says, with a chuckle that does not seem the least bit sincere.
the police officers have a lot of questions about this, but the man does not have any useful answers. his wife, he tells them, is not in any shape to be interviewed. “she’s been poorly,” he says, “and we’ve got a baby of our own to worry about, keeping us up at all hours.”
the baby in the basket seems to be about a year old. he is cheerful, seems healthy aside from a cut on his forehead, with a crooked sticking plaster on it. he has startlingly green eyes.
there is no identifying information in the basket, except for a torn scrap of paper with ‘his name is Harry’ on it in a delicate hand.
there is nothing else to be done, it seems. the officers take baby Harry, and leave.
one of them comes back a few days later for a follow-up interview with the woman who found the baby. she seems a little fragile, and her own baby, in the next room, keeps up a constant shrieking tantrum the whole time the officer is there. “I’m sorry,” the woman says, with a brittle smile. “this has all been a bit much. I recently lost my sister, you see.”
i’m literally going to write out of spite a fantasy series focused on the relationship between two gay wizards in the 1920s who are driven apart due to one’s lust for power, ultimately leading to a final confrontation between the two to determine the fate of the world. and you know what??? jk can’t even sue me for it since she never actually incorporated it into her works, so boom i win.
harmony vs romione vs dramione – it was getting UGLY out there (hell, it’s STILL ugly out there)
constant idealization of draco and constant demonization of ron – which led to the creation of the “draco in leather pants” and “ron the death eater” tropes. (you still see this, of course, but i think we’re getting better)
my immortal dramatic readings EVERYWHERE
my immortal still being on fanfiction.net
actual fanart of my immortal
soooo many youtube music videos for the creator’s otp
“harry potter chatroom” videos on youtube where the premise was that each character had a laptop and was in an online chatroom for some reason. usually each character got their own music that played in the background while they “typed,” and they all looked like this:
i wish i was kidding
i may have been obsessed with these when i was nine
so many fanvids of draco with “untitled” by simple plan (aka “how could this happen to meeeeeeeeeeeee i made my mistaaaaaaaakes”)
fanfics where voldemort had a daughter (and it was ALWAYS a daughter. pre-cursed child, mind you.)
people actually liking snape
pretty blatantly ignoring the fact that electricity doesn’t work at hogwarts in fanfictions
THE RISE OF DRARRY
drapple (draco + green apples. not joking.)
that fanfic that was a lemon of the giant squid and the hogwarts castle… i can’t be the only one that read it out of sheer morbid curiosity
jily fanfics that gave lily two OC friends that would be paired off with sirius and remus
no muggleborn slytherins, ever
fanmade potter puppet pal videos – some of them were quite good, but most weren’t
bashing viktor krum, cho chang, lavender brown, fleur delacour, and the entire weasley family for no reason
fics where people “switched houses”
people actually shipping snily
you could always tell the author’s opinion of draco malfoy based on whether they called him “malfoy” or “draco” in their narration
fanvids of “you belong with me” for every ship imaginable
the trio ALWAYS being white in fanart
fics where hermione randomly got hot over the summer
sorting yourself into slytherin to be “edgy”
or because you had a crush on tom felton
or both
pairing hermione with literally every male character. ron, harry, draco, cedric, fred and george (sometimes both at once), lucius, snape, voldemort, neville, dean, seamus… if they interacted in canon (or even if they didn’t), they were shipped
“transfer student” OCs to explain why they haven’t been there for the past five years
not many same-gender pairings apart from wolfstar and drarry
harmony fanfics making ginny an “evil bitchy slut” and ron a drunken rapist so harry and hermione can find comfort in each other’s arms
people placing literal bets with actual money on who would die in the last book
which led to a bit of an issue for people who had bet on harry, as no one was sure whether or not it actually counted since he didn’t stay dead
my immortal predicting that harry would turn out to be a horcrux
people flipping the fuck out when their otps got sunk in the epilogue and swearing off the series forever
everyone having a crush on oliver wood (to be fair this one is completely understandable)
school play fanfics, usually with the purpose of getting their otp to kiss on stage (i am 1000% convinced jk rowling had “tales of beedle the bard” mention that theatrical productions are banned at hogwarts specifically to get people to knock it off)
“american exchange student” OCs
a girl ends up in harry’s (or draco’s) dorm for some reason – either bc she’s pulling a mulan or because of a mistake no one bothered to fix
lots of fanfics of the otp banging bc “i don’t want to die a virgin”
“101 ways to annoy lord voldemort” lists
calling voldemort “moldyshorts”
fanfics of the characters somehow reading the harry potter books and reacting to them (these were all taken down bc of copyright)
leaving peter out of marauders fanart and fanfic (i understand the urge but come on he was a marauder it’s what made his betrayal so tragic)
fred/george fanfic (my eyes, they bleed)
fred and george (but mostly fred) being the school heartthrobs
think of any two characters. any two. there is a fanfiction somewhere that ships them. (this is still true, of course – in a fandom this massive, it’s inevitable)
if you spoiled THAT DEATH from the sixth book, and someone murdered you for it, it was your fault
same with THAT DEATH from the fifth book. and a certain few THOSE DEATHS from the seventh.
cedric dying was old news within like a month though.
the divide between people who had gotten into the series late (or, sometimes, because of the movies) and people who had been there since (almost) the beginning
people refusing to go online until they’d finished reading the seventh book for fear of spoilers (i am SO glad i didn’t have tumblr back then)
people actually saying they wanted to join the death eaters
every character was either good or evil. no in between as far as the fandom was concerned.
everyone’s icon looking like this for some reason
dramione fanfics where he calls her mudblood AFTER THEY START DATING??? AND SHE PUTS UP WITH IT????
dramione fics where hermione heals him with her love
making ginny out to be the school bicycle and basically burning her at the stake for going on dates
fics where the head boy and girl get their own separate room??? for some reason???
VAMPIRE AUS (usually harry and/or draco)
dumbledore either being 100% heroic or satan
hermione’s parents always being named “dan and emma”
fics where hermione turns out to be adopted and a pureblood all along!
harry switching to the dark side for some reason??
basically
the harry potter fandom has ALWAYS been wild
it’s the same shit as always, the details are just different
tbh people mock harry for going back to rescue fleurs sister in the second triwizard task but harry knows dumbledore better than anyone else. he probably looked at the situation and thought “would dumbledore let an eight year old drown just because fleur couldnt do this bit? yes. yes he would.”
it’s also possible he was acting off of the lessons he learned in the abusive dursley household. that’s why he does a lot of his so-called “hero complex” shit. he takes a lot of personal responsibility for other people bc he learned growing up that “no one’s here for you, no one will help you, you will not catch any breaks”. he helps bc if he didn’t, who would? certainly not the dursleys, and that’s what he grew up with.
he does things by himself and the two people he actually trusts, bc he’s learned that authority figures are no help and will only make things worse. he takes situations at face value bc he’s never seen other options in his life, he’s never HAD other options in his life. speaking very personally, that was a serious marker of abuse that i saw in myself – i never thought abt escape, or what i could do to improve my situation, bc i didn’t even see that as an option. the options were survive or don’t, deal w it or don’t, acclimate or implode.
maybe he wasn’t thinking abt what DUMBLEDORE would do, what anyone at hogwarts would do. maybe he was acting off what he knew the dursleys (his main authority figures) would do. the dursleys would let the girl drown. and harry was there, and harry could do something, and so harry did. he took personal responsibility for fleur’s sister’s safety bc all his life he’s learned that authority figures cannot be trusted to do so.
people characterize these aspects of harry as a “hero complex” or a “stupid nobility” or a “lack of common sense”, but i don’t agree with that. i can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. it’s not completely unhealthy; it’s even very useful and responsible on occasion.
it’s called “complex ptsd” and if you get out of the abusive situation before you’re old enough to understand how fucked up it was, like Harry did, you don’t end up with the classic flashbacks so much, just atypical behavior patterns and a high risk of other shit. That’s why Harry is so fucked up by everything that Umbridge does, it’s because he’s being retraumatized in his safe space.
Seriously, the Dursleys would have not only let her drown, they would have let her drown so they could blame Harry for it afterwards. (Although the loudest “Potter, too busy winning to care about anyone else” voice in his head would probably be Snape’s.)
Incidentally this is even more clear in the first and second books, to me. Because Harry DID go to adults and say someone’s trying to steal the stone, and what did the adults do? Did they say, yes, we know, we’re taking precautions, real, good protective measures? Noooo. Did they say, thank you, we’ll look into it, even? Noooo. They said, don’t be silly, it’s not your concern, nothing to see here, little boy, run along and do your schoolwork.
And they said this to a boy whose entire life experience has never involved an adult that can be depended on. And they lied, lied about their own knowledge, said “that’s silly” when they know “that’s true.” And they were too convincing: since he as well knew the truth, what they ended up convincing him was that they didn’t know. And it fit right in with his expectations. Adults, whether actively malicious (the Dursleys, Snape) or well-meaning but oblivious (Mrs. Figg, Harry’s primary-school teachers, the other Hogwarts teachers), can’t be depended on. If anything’s got to be done, Harry and his friends have got to do it himself.
Second book, same thing—they’re headed for the teacher’s lounge to tell the teachers it’s a basilisk, and overhear the teachers saying that Ginny Weasley’s been taken by the monster, and they need to close Hogwarts, and their only plan to rescue Ginny is to send Gilderoy Lockhart—knowing full well he’s a fraud, a coward, and no match for a Cornish pixie, let alone a basilisk. Once again, the adults are flat-out useless and if anyone is going to save Ginny, it’s gotta be Harry and Ron.
Notably, this is after another ball-drop on the part of the adults: when Harry’s been framed for underage magic and locked up in his room and starved by people who have every intention of keeping him out of Hogwarts forever, it’s other kids, Ron, Fred, and George, who go rescue him, and when the adults find out, one of them punishes and scolds and the other is only interested in how his car worked.
In book three, we meet a couple of adults that are competent, helpful, and willing to listen—Sirius and Remus—and the other adults come in and the end result is, one’s fired and the other has to go on the run lest he have his soul sucked out by dementors. Dumbledore does listen and give them the necessary hints, but it’s Harry, and Hermione this time, who have to do the work.
And then in Order of the Phoenix, in comes the smothering bullshit about how he’s too young to be in the Order and needs to leave everything to the grownups, after the grownups have dropped the ball four years running and are batting zero on the trust-and-listening factor—no wonder he threw a tantrum, I would’ve thrown a tantrum, he was fucking entitled to one.
“Well, that was a bit stupid of you,” said Ginny angrily, “seeing as you don’t know anyone but me who’s been possessed by You-Know-Who, and I can tell you how it feels.” Harry remained quite still as the impact of these words hit him. Then he turned on the spot to face her. “I forgot,” he said.
– OotP
“he does things by himself and the two people he actually trusts… it’s not completely unhealthy; it’s even very useful and responsible on occasion.” – @gaelissfelin
…this. Harry sees people as: a. him and people he trusts, b. people to be evaded, and c. people in need of help. When he gets backed into a corner (Voldemort inside his head, heading down the trapdoor alone, off to the DoM alone, into the Forest alone), the circle of people he trusts shrinks down from the DA/OotP, to the Trio, to just himself. Harry never wants to be a hero or gets off on it, he’s just a person who’s suffered from the bystander effect and doesn’t want to be a bystander himself.
…that’s what it is, why it’s useful, I think. It’s not a hero complex, it’s an anti-bystander complex. Sometimes it only takes one person standing up.
When I was younger I never understood why people thought Harry wasn’t thinking things through. But now that I am older and have my diagnosis of PTSD I realize that I was just one abused child identifying with another. It was logical to me that Harry not trust the adults in his life because I couldn’t trust any in mine. No one ever believed me when I told them I was being bullied, my parents were too wrapped up in screaming at each other to give a fuck about me. You go that long feeling like a shadow without a voice and you just start doing things on your own because who the fuck cares about you. You wind up with a protective streak a mile wide because in the back of your mind you know that things can’t change for you but maybe you can change them for someone else even if it means taking their pain as your own. No wonder Harry winds up an Auror, he’s been saving people and getting himself hurt since birth, he needs a psychiatrist to help him but he doesn’t trust anyone so he just throws himself into the only thing he knows how to do rather than healing. It’s by sheer force of will that he’s not catatonic or having PTSD flashbacks every time he goes to work.
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