#and like sure he was lying through his fucking teeth until he realized Credence *was* an untrained wizard and Obscurial but STILL
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about Obscurials and pre-Hogwarts Harry
this is your daily reminder that Harry could never have been an Obscurial, not because That Woman hadn’t created/retconned in the idea yet, but because of the actual definition, which is “a child who knows about their magic and tries to suppress it”.
Ariana Dumbledore knew she was a witch from the time she was able to know things. She was actively and knowingly doing magic when she was attacked, and afterward she refused to use her gift and it turned inward.
Harry Potter knew that strange things happened around him, but he did not know that it was magic, because he didn’t think magic was even real. One of the first things he says to Hagrid after The Reveal is something along the lines of “this has to be a mistake, I can’t be a wizard”. He also wasn’t trying to “suppress” any of the things happening to him, because he didn’t know he was the one causing them to happen.
so yeah, there’s no viable “Dumbledore knew Harry could have become an Obscurial when he left him with the Dursleys and still left him there” argument, because Dumbledore didn’t know the Dursleys weren’t going to tell Harry about his magic or even treat him like a member of the family (see: my 12-hour long post about this shit last month, along with The Books).
yet another big argument Dumbledore-bashers have that falls apart when you actually adhere to the story lol
#I am once again begging y'all to reread the books#Harry Potter#Ariana Dumbledore#Obscurials#when I watched the first FB movie I was like ''huh interesting'' and then people tried to make Credence/Harry parallels#EXCEPT CREDENCE ALSO KNEW HE HAD MAGIC????#Grindelwald was literally telling him all sorts of shit about the magical world and implying he could ''give'' him magic or unlock his magic#and like sure he was lying through his fucking teeth until he realized Credence *was* an untrained wizard and Obscurial but STILL#JKR is not great at storytelling but this actually holds up in-universe!#if you know magic is real and you might have it and you suppress it: Obscurial#if you don't think magic is real and you don't think you have it: you're just Harry lol#can't believe a stupid ass Quora poster made me think about FANTASTIC BEASTS today#JKR likes to retcon herself too though so I wouldn't be surprised if there's some dumbass line about this in the latest movie#meta#what's interesting is that Hermione never comes up in these bashers' conversations#she is another person who would have had a stake in ''wishing her problems away'' if she had any magical outbursts#yet no one ever says ''Hermione could have been an Obscurial!'' you know why?? because the theory DOESN'T MAKE SENSE for anyone but Ariana!#and Ariana is like Hermione in that she had two loving parents! so clearly Obscurials don't need to have an abusive caregiver to be birthed!#Credence is more of a parallel to Tom Riddle tormenting kids in the orphanage than he is to Harry; just more sympathetic#sigh#'bout to circle back to twitter for a while bc I'm so annoyed about this
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Playing Dead
Kelly
It was that job that you always see all over the Internet that always seems fake but 18 days in with my first healthy paycheck sitting in my checking account, I had become a true believer.
“Make money while you sit at home in your pajamas.”
You see the advertising everywhere. Too good to be true, right?
Well, apparently not.
This was my fourth-straight day of sitting at home and periodically posting things to Facebook that my supervisor sent me while passively watching things on my DVR and brushing my teeth more than I needed to. My supervisor, Phil Joseph, had been incredibly thrilled with all of my work promoting a facial cream that I had not even tried myself and the exposure it was getting amongst my 238 Facebook friends whom he said were the target audience of GreenTree Marketing.
Had the professional windfall not taken place in the middle of the most unnerving experience of my life, I would have called it a godsend.
It started pretty slowly. Every few nights I would wake up in the middle of the night to the sounds of what sounded like someone tip toeing through another part of my house or the sound of someone closing a cabinet in the kitchen or running the water in a bathroom. I would get up out of bed, examine every inch of my house stark naked in the cold of the night with a baseball bat in my tired hand and find nothing. I would then lie in the my bed, blanketed, with the safety of the noise and glow of my TV while convincing myself that the sounds were just a possum or squirrel on the roof or something until the salvation of the morning sun crept through my window blinds.
Then it became more frequent, and much, much closer. It turned into scratching on my bedroom window. It turned into the shuffling of socked feet outside of my bedroom door. It turned into waking up to a tickling feeling upon my nose. It turned into me getting up to investigate to find nothing, but then hearing something again the second I laid back in my bed. I eventually just stopped getting up. And that’s when it got worse.
Things started disappearing from house, personal and embarrassing things. My deodorant, dirty underwear, a letter from an old boyfriend that I had been hanging onto since I was 21 that was folded up and tucked into a drawer in my nightstand, even a vibrator, all gone. I tried to write it off as me simply misplacing them, but the final straw broke when one night I heard the dryer running and I rushed down to my basement to find each of the missing items tumbling hot and melted in my dryer. I panicked, ran outside into the night without even throwing clothes on, jumped in my car and drove into town and just parked within earshot of human life so I could feel safe.
It was at this point that I reached out to a “spirit medium,” which was much easier to find in Southwest Louisiana than I imagine it may have been able to find in somewhere like Omaha or Cleveland. I chose one out of around 15 that I found advertising on Craigslist and went with the one that seemed to be the least crazy based on how he appeared on his website. He was little to no help. All he really did was add fuel to the fire that the disturbances in my house were the ghosts of my parents trying to roust me out of my sedentary lifestyle because I was disgracing the 3,500 square foot home they had left me when they died. However, I didn’t put too much credence into that because he only started heading in that direction after I mentioned their passing and my inheritance of the house. The fact that he mentioned that he could take a debit or credit card on his new iPhone four times during our meeting didn’t help either.
I was on my own with the mysterious disturbances in my house. The teasing of suicide would even occasionally dance around my head, but this surreal job opportunity appeared just as those black spider webs had started to spool into my brain. My first steady employment, and a quite enjoyable employment, in nearly a decade had done wonders with soothing me against the nightly disturbances that were becoming living nightmares.
However, no amount of easy money would be able to soothe my soul enough to deal with the terror that would soon come.
Maria
Like 100 percent of good Americans, I hated my boss and thought that he had no fucking clue what he was doing.
My boss’ latest harebrained scheme was that a string of disappearances that had recently taken place across the Southern U.S. were being carried out by a serial killer who posed as a ghost. He had a lot of halfcocked explanations for why he thought this. His hammering point was that a few of the women had reached out to spiritual mediums shortly before disappearing. He used this theory to somehow convinced his higher-ups in the FBI to conduct a sketchy sting-like operation where we monitored women who fit the profile (25-35 years of age, unemployed, or at best lightly-employed, fair looking, but plain, lived alone in a house, not an apartment) of the eight victims who lived in the general vicinity of where the murders had taken place.
The sting thing was fairly simple, we offered the girls who fit the profile an online job opportunity that was too good to turn down so we could Trojan horse monitoring bugs onto their computers to keep an eye on them and their houses and to keep them home. My boss clung to the thought that there was something to the fact that all of the victims were unemployed or lightly-employed women who were home all of the time. He wanted to make sure that they had a job that kept them at home. The job he cooked up had the women posting things on Facebook every few hours, so they could never go too far and so they could regularly have their computers on so we could monitor them with the webcam.
My job the past month or so had consisted of monitoring the computer’s of these women to see how they, and their surroundings, looked whenever they were on their computers. Had I not been a 32-year-old, straight woman myself, it may have been a pretty cool job as these decent-looking women were regularly on their computers in various states of undress, but it did pretty much nothing for me except provide me with a regular pay check for the first time in a while. As the assistant to a private investigator in rural Louisiana, underemployment was something that I was very familiar with myself.
Not a single thing of true interest or suspicion had happened during my weeks of monitoring. One time, the girl who actually lived just a few towns over from me in Louisiana, I think her name was Kelly, got edgy when it sounded like there was crying coming from another room in her house, but it turned out to just be her cat. Actually, that cat, an orange tabby named Steve, would end up becoming the only thing that I enjoyed seeing during my time working. I especially enjoyed when the chunky feline would park himself on her keyboard when she was trying to do something.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I did have one of those awful “maybe my boss has been right all along” moments a couple of weeks ago when I watched Kelly call up a spiritual medium. Since then, I had actually been paying closer attention to her, though I had noticed nothing really else unique or unusual about her behavior.
Something was different today though when Kelly logged in around eight in the morning. She looked like a wreck the second the computer illuminated her, her living room was dark and hazy despite it being a bright and sunshiny day and her cat was nowhere to be seen. She seemed to stare at her screen with defeated eyes that occasionally gave spasms while she stared blankly into its digital glow.
After a few moments of observing her skittish browsing, my eyes began to linger off of her face and out towards her cavernous surroundings. It was in this background that I would see the source of her beleaguered madness. Hiding in the shadows of the hallway that was just to the right of her was a shadowy figure that appeared to be crouched, arms outstretched in a defensive pose, and ready to strike.
Kelly
The attacked came when I least expected it. In the broad daylight of the morning.
I had just emerged from my bedroom after retreating back there to change after executing my 8 a.m. Facebook post when I was engulfed by a figure that came in on me so swiftly that I didn’t even get a look at it. The thing was just a dark blur in the dusty light of the morning. Then just as quickly as it had tackled me into the wall of my hallway, it was gone again.
I crumbled down to the hardwood floor in a heap, quickly sobbing and waiting for the figure to come right back and do it again. I was too tired, too hopeless to fight back, my will had long ago been broken. I just sat there like a hurt child on the playground waiting for the nurse to come, bawling my eyes out.
I waited minutes, but it never came. It didn’t come for so long that I was able to regain my composure, wipe my eyes and realize that I should make a run for my car, get in the thing and never come back.
I made my move in one swift motion – rising to my feet and galloping down the hallway in the direction of my front door, but didn’t make it very far. Within seconds, I was pulled back down to my feet and found myself lying on my stomach on the hard hallway floor. I threw my face back to see what had happened, wondering if I had just tripped on the bottom of my bath robe, but that was not the case. I had been pulled down by a crusted and bleeding hand that still lingered by my bare feet.
I let out a grotesque scream that I didn’t know I was capable of producing and tried to scramble to my feet, but quickly felt that hand clamp back down upon my ankle like the jaws of an alligator. I turned my head back again and nearly vomited when I saw the face of what was trying to pull me back towards it.
The thing looked human, probably male, but hideously deformed. His head was far bigger on top that the bottom, two lopsided knots jutting out like softballs from the two sides of the front of his forehead. His nose was non-existent, just two little swollen slats of black that flared in and out with every breath and bright red mouth, open with heavy exertion, revealing what looked to be sharp baby teeth, far too small for that of what appeared to be a grown man.
I’m not sure if the thing released me or if the hideous sight of it inspired my body to rip away from it, but I was suddenly free and stumbling through the hallway, hoping to get to safety, but it wasn’t going to happen. I realized that this thing was playing with me the way my cat would a mouse and I was quickly growing lethargic. It wouldn’t be long before I ran out of energy, the thing at my heels grew bored.
Maria
There is rarely traffic in rural Louisiana, but I had somehow managed to find it on this Tuesday morning as I raced to Lake Charles to try and save the woman whom I had spent the past few weeks monitoring through the glass of a computer screen. What should have been a 25-minute drive had turned into a 50-minute one and I had to resist the urge to call the Lake Charles cops about five times during that interval. My boss had told me that there was no way that we could leak any information about what we were doing to anyone outside of the operation and he didn’t even approve of me trying to go down there and intercept the thing. He warned that any kind of compromise in the operation could result in serious jail time for anyone involved. Wonderfully, he had never told me this in the early stages of the thing when I signed on. I didn’t give a shit if I had to rot in a cell for a while if it meant I had a chance to save someone else. This was a tragic moment of life when you realize that even if your boss does have the right idea, they won’t have the guts of wherewithal to actually execute on it when they get the chance.
As soon as I had the figure standing in the shadows of her hallway I looked up her address and phone number in my boss’ paperwork, punched the location into Google Maps and hit the road as fast as I could in my old Civic. I tried calling her number about 50 times on the road, but had never once gotten an answer. Not a good sign, but maybe, like me, she simply stopped answering calls from numbers that she did not recognize. Maybe I had just been seeing an old mannequin, or a bizarre boyfriend in that hallway, all was fine and I was about to show up like some frizzy-haired lunatic on this woman’s porch screaming about how she needed help. But maybe not.
I pulled off the highway and within just a few minutes, was parked right next to the rickety wooden steps of a lakeside Victorian behemoth of a house that looked like it could collapse within itself at any moment. Was this really where this normal-looking young woman lived? The thing looked like it was out of an old Cajun fairy tale or something - its pastel green paint splintered and faded, surrounded by a prayer circle of baldcypress trees covered in Spanish moss.
From the outside, there appeared to be no signs of life and my car was the only vehicle parked in the muddy little circle that served as the parking lot of the home. I wasn’t sure whether this calm was a good or a bad thing when I stepped out into the cold wind of the early-Spring morning and dashed up the soggy wooden stairs to the front door.
Three knocks upon the hollow wood of the front door had produced nothing. I stepped in through the unlocked entrance with an announcement.
“Hello, Kelly?” My voice echoed throughout the cavernous domicile that looked like a Vincent Price wet dream scattered with cobwebs and dated artwork that smelled like an attic.
I shuffled around the foyer for a moment, grabbing peaks at the various connected rooms, but didn’t see the living room that I had seen from Kelly’s hacked webcam anywhere. I quickly began to wonder if this was even the right house. The living room in the webcam had looked modern, but plain, as if it had been built in the 70s, but everywhere I had seen in this place looked like it was designed when slavery was still legal.
“Kelly?” Another call into the shadowy catacombs of the place produced nothing, not even a creak from the old musty place.
I began to start combing through the rooms and quickly noticed that some parts of the house were remodeled in the bland look of Kelly’s living room, while others were left in their haunting dress of yesteryear. It took me a few minutes, but I did eventually find that dreary living room, complete with the laptop propped up on the coffee table in front of a big forest green couch, but that was it. No signs of life, just props sitting silently on the set of life.
A search of the rest of the house also proved fruitless and there weren’t even recent signs of life – a half-eaten apple, the smell of a recent shower in the bathroom, half-empty glass of water on the nightstand – something like that. Maybe she had really just left to go to the store or something.
This thought left me feeling horribly creepy myself. Here I stood in a complete stranger’s bedroom, calling out her name and looking insane. This was probably all just a misunderstanding. Remember, this whole suspicion was cooked up by a fat, balding, middle-aged guy who I knew spent most of his working hours perusing the Facebook profiles of ladies that he went to high school with. Like always, he was probably fucking dead wrong.
I was shocked at just how quickly after one of the most-harrowing sequences of my life that things had returned to completely normal. I was now back home in my house eating potato chips and mindlessly browsing near strangers’ profiles on Facebook with reality TV on in the background. The only thing that suddenly seemed out of the ordinary was my cell phone vibrating with a call and the fact that I had just noticed that my NightGuard was missing from my night stand.
I usually would have ignored the ringing call, knowing that the only people who ever really called me anymore were the occasional telemarketer, but I check the screen and noticed a 615 area code.
“Hello,” I begrudgingly answered the call.
A frantic female voice appeared on the other end of the call, out of breath and flustered, she sounded a lot like me when she started in.
“You gotta get out of there,” the woman’s voice screamed at me.
“What?” I fired back.
“He’s there. He’s there. He’s there. I’ve been watching you when you are on your computer,” the voice screamed on, but I was suddenly distracted by a sound that was coming from just outside my open bedroom door.
The noises seemed like a light crying from the hallway, but they were so faint they could have just been the air conditioning or something.
“What do you mean?” I asked, now up and tip toeing to the doorway with the phone still pressed against my ears.
I pushed the door open to reveal the source of the noises - a familiar-looking orange tabby cat, one that I had previously only seen on a computer screen.
The feline looked up at me and meowed again.
My heart fully stopped, I started paying attention to a different sound, the sound of the woman screaming in my ear.
“I can see him. He is in your closet.”
The woman’s wailings were interrupted by the feeling of something rough and icy cold upon the back of my neck. Her pleadings and my phone fell to the ground as I was lifted up off of my feet. In my last waking moment, in the reflection of the black screen of my phone that was lying face up on the floor, I saw the image of a dark, shadowy figure standing right behind me.
Originally published by Thought Catalog on www.ThoughtCatalog.com
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