#and there's also the point that when harry potter was at its peak popularity the entire world was reinforcing the fact that this is amazing
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it’s not actually that weird that people are saying “harry potter was never good, actually” after joanne went full mask off, and no it doesn’t mean that we all secretly think harry potter is amazing but don’t want to admit it. it’s pretty simple actually: most people read harry potter when they were children, when they hadn’t read a lot of other books and therefore didn’t have a lot to compare it to. then every time you reread it as an adult, you’re looking through pretty hefty nostalgia goggles. then, after you’ve realized that joanne is a violent bigot that wants you and / or people you love and care for dead, those goggles are broken and when you attempt to look at hp again you’re more likely to see it’s flaws. it’s not rocket science.
#like don't get me wrong people have pointed out stuff wrong with hp since the beginning#both the bigoted aspects of it and the simply bad writing aspects#but it was in bits and pieces and far less vocal#whereas now you see its more 'wait a minute the entire series is lowkey shit' and is a lot more people saying it#also for people like myself#you read a lot of fanfiction and saw a lot of fan discussion and so whenever you reread harry potter#that stuff was in the back of your mind whether you meant it to be or not#and it maybe caused you to think that what you were reading was a lot deeper than it actually was#because you were taking all this fan content as canon even if nothing of what you were actually read in the text suggested it#but then when everything fell apart you hadn't even thought about harry potter for a good while and that fan stuff wasn't in your head#and you could see the text for the mess it was without the bolstering and hole filling that fandom had done for it#i speak#anti jk rowling#and there's also the point that when harry potter was at its peak popularity the entire world was reinforcing the fact that this is amazing#so you're less inclined to find flaws because somethign this big cant POSSIBLY be bad
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RED RISING BOOK 1 CHARACTER TIER LIST + FULL THOUGHTS! >:D
Below is my review of book 1, I'll go into spoilers. After this, I'm either gonna move onto a different book or try to find golden son. Not sure which one will happen.
But yeah, great book, 4 stars, or 8/10! Definitely just set up for things to come in the trilogy, but also a really good setup & story.
PREFACE: This is from the perspective from somebody who DOESN'T read books for fun too often. Red Rising was the first book in a long while I chose to read for fun since Harry Potter in 1st year high school (I didn't even finish the series, I stopped at the start of Half Blood Prince). So you're dealing with one of the most casual guys who went into the series. Another thing: I came into the series thinking it would be similar to Nimona (2023) or Sylas's story from League, since I brought up these two things when I first asked for book recs, so my expectations were HORRIBLY wrong (kind of, sylas's lore is pretty similar and the only difference is that sylas gets STRAIGHT into action but also his characterization sucks). So my perspective is strange, is what I'm saying, and I am far from the most valid person to be seriously reviewing this book. I'm just sharing this for fun lmao :P
I'm just writing the first few things that come to my mind, so stick with me people! These are messy, unfiltered thoughts.
This book is rough, really whumpy at the start of the book, but it's good whump. It's just setting up and establishing what's to come and to make all the payoffs feel better by showing us the insane suffering Darrow goes through. But also? Damn. That was rough. it felt like grimdark (this is coming from the perspective of a guy who actively avoids all things grimdark - with the exception of whump fanfics on ao3).
And then we get into the institution, and I just went, "oh. This is hunger games harry potter." I was a bit disappointed to be honest, I know the book is called "red rising" and it literally means "the slow rise of a red" so he still needs to prepare himself for what's to come, but also... eh?????? Someone in Reddit called this segment "pierce brown kidnapping fans of the hunger games when it was at the peak of its popularity", which ✨️iconic behavior✨️ but I was a bit confused as we took this academy stuff seriously. But slowly, I grew into it when the characters started interacting. I liked it when Darrow was interacting with others since the first half of the book felt so isolating. I liked every single scene Sevro shows up since he brings so much chaos and fun to a story that had so much downtrodden underlying sadness. The chapter 9 reveal is still hitting me, like "damn FUCK THESE GUYS BRO, WHAT DO YOU MEAN THIS PLANET HAS ALREADY BEEN TERRAFORMED???" Also because sevro's fucking awesome, but that's besides the point. The same goes for Darrow's scenes with Virginia and pre-sword fight Cassius, but they aren't as iconic as Sevro.
Darrow is a super compelling protagonist for the story he's in. Making him this power fantasy fulfillment guy makes things feel all the more liberating when he beats the shit out of a guy, it's sort of like a shonen anime protagonist, I guess (i don't watch anime btw). Bro talks about Eo a bit too much though 💀 it got to the point where it got a bit funny, but some moments do hit... before virginia came into the picture as the better love interest since she's girlboss and eo is seraphine from league of legends.
Most of the characters are well written or awesome! The proctors are real loveably hateable pieces of shit I wanted 200 feet below the dirt, and I loved seeing them get beat up. Except you Fitchner, you are iconic, and you gave us Sevro. I love you. Antonia, Cassius & Jackal are just set up here, and it's mildly disappointing? I am super happy the finale ended up being "FUCK THE PROCTORS" but also that stole time away from finishing off the inter-student conflicts. Yeah those will 100% be explored in the rest of the books with more time to do so, but damn :/ the last time we see Antonia, I think she just stands there at a castle to remind us she exists??? Whatever, watching the proctors get shit on was exactly what I needed to want to see more out of this series.
I was a bit disappointed when Darrow ended up being the only red we explore in this book. I was kind of disappointed when Darrow just speaks with a gold accent the entire time, I hope later in the series he speaks like a red again because I have a red bias and hate fancy ass shit. From a book called "red rising", there aren't too many reds after part 2 which I found odd for a revolution story about a red taking control over the system. Titus? Ohoh! FUCK HIM! why did they write him to be this rapist guy, and he just exists to let darrow know he isn't the only fake gold at the institute. I was mildly hoping we would get to see another red-turned-gold team up with darrow as a 100% trustworthy ally since I felt like we needed it after all the loneliness Darrow goes through, but sadly no :(
OH AND THE ACTION SCENES HELL YEAH!!! Reddit wasn't kidding when they talked about how bloodydamn GOOD the fight scenes are. I got spoiled that "Clang! Clang! Clang! Confess!" means something, and I don't even know who is fighting who, but I want to read the whole series just to get to that point because it sounds badass.
But uhhh this series came to me at a rough point in my life. It was hard to read some parts of it and I took a few breaks. Yeah, I read the whole thing in 2 weeks, but also just to fill myself with some sort of closure when I felt sad. I felt good coming out of it, but during? UHHHHHH-
These disorganized thoughts are getting messy, if you have any questions about specific things, comment them for me to answer. I might. 🥰
Story: 7/10, just set up but good set up
Characters: 9/10, bloodydamn good, almost all of them. I can tell, despite my initial disappointment for some of them since I know this is a book SERIES, so we will be seeing more of them soon.
Personal Enjoyment: ????/10, felt too sad at some points, absolutely adored this book in others.
Quality: 9/10, amazing writing, I want to buy all the books JUST to support Pierce Brown, I'm not even sure if I will be reading them, I just feel like throwing money at him.
Overall Score: 8/10, scared to continue, but damn I want to continue.
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What are your thoughts on Star V.S The Forces Of Evil?
I used to follow this show back when it was airing. I had a friend who was absolutely obsessed with StarCo.
Said friend just became super depressed at the finale and stopped talking to us because of it.
Everyone knows the finale of this show is a bit of a dumpster fire. However, the most popular vloggers - such as Blue Order - say that ships like TomStar were "clearly being built up to". This is wrong. The show was clearly baiting StarCo the whole time. It would have impressed me if it actually subverted StarCo but alas we need our series-long-slow-burn-to-finale-kiss :/
i guess they didnt actually kiss in the finale they kissed before then on top of some pigs, which is... better? but
imagine an au where there were a couple for like an entire season or two and we got to see them be a pair ala finn x flame princess, which imo is still one of the best teen relationships ever portrayed on television, realistically awkward and honest and flawed.
i think it was starco which cemented my idea that series finale pairings are bland hetero bullshit. though harry potter movie 8 certainly helped.
I think the point where the fatigue REALLY hit is when they were acting like Tom and Star would get together, then there was Marco and Kelly, and suddenly Marco and Kelly brOKE UP OFFSCREEN and Kelly was written out of the show entirely during the Cleave. Stuck in her own universe. Holy shit. Tom was as well, if I recall? I can't remember where he ended up.
anyway enough about shipping, time for the actual plot.
the first season is a bit agonizing. it has its fun moments but it's mid to low tier. it's commonly agreed that the show peaks at the Toffee storyline, and I totally agree here, there's enough going on emotionally - especially with poor Moon, and when Marco punches Toffee - while still being small scale enough to feel personal. i am also SUPER crazy for the use of dark magic in these early seasons, like the Whispering Spell, or the curse that Eclipsa taught Moon. It was nice that you have these magical girls but not all their magic is light, some of it is very grim.
i found Eclipsa's storyline mostly interesting, but largely wasted potential. I didn't feel like Eclipsa becoming queen was a natural conclusion, since she doesn't WANT to be queen. She wants to run away with her monster husband! To make a comparison, in Adventure Time, an AU in the comics has Marceline become a Queen alongside Bubblegum, but the show itself heavily implies Bubblegum eventually steps down to live her best life with Marceline, and I think the latter is far more fitting. Eclipsa is even closer to Marceline in this regard! I still think Star was a more fitting Queen, even if Eclipsa was the rightful heir, and I was sure season 4 was building to her just giving the throne to Star (before it was eventually destroyed... or not? i don't know).
The whole stuff with Mina in the final season... the thing is, the story wanted us to be invested in the Monsters vs Mewmans war, but spent absolutely no time with any relatable/likable monsters. It just assumed we would automatically be invested in the Right Thing, because Star is, but Star is just an aristocratic ally. She's great and all, and I think the arc she goes through is genuinely good as a maturity storyline, but Star agonizing over all the monsters being discriminated or leaving, it was not fun. The Mewmans themselves were so annoying and agonizingly narrowminded anyway, it’s not like this was a conflict we cared about.
What I found somewhat ballsy, politically interesting even, was the episode with Moon and the Mewmans who had either been displaced after Eclipsa gave the monsters back their homes, or who left just because they felt uncomfortable with monsters being around. The episode makes it very clear that the Mewmans are largely bigoted assholes, but they're also people, and some of the reparations under Eclipsa actually hurt them. Like a family whose home they had for generations got returned. It's not the fault of the Monsters, it's the fault of Solaris and the kingdom leadership for invading the monster homes and putting Mewmans into it, rather than working on solving the problems within her own kingdom.
As a result, even though Moon has not made any political statements against Eclipsa, she finds herself surrounded by a bubble of displaced or agitated Mewmans who do not want to integrate with monsters, and as the former Queen, she feels it is her responsibility to look out for these idiots. But what makes her different from Star is that Moon herself has a hatred of monsters, especially because of what Toffee did to her family ( yet it turns out Toffee only existed BECAUSE of her family). So Moon hasn't decided what she thinks is right, and has a pseudo nation forming around her, while Star has already set her mind on doing the right thing but is losing a lot of allies over it. This episode made the world feel more alive to me!
Unfortunately the way this arc was concluded was aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Namely, whatever the fuck Moon did with bringing the Solaris soldiers to life (WHY??? WHY WOULD SHE EVER DO THAT? SHE WOULD NEVER RISK STAR GETTING KILLED), versus the whole "destruction of magic" (WHAT), and finally the Cleave????????????
Because fusing the two worlds together is clearly the best solution, anyway don't mind that we literally destroyed all magic for some reason, only the magical beings you dont care about died or got debiliated (which makes no sense but whatever).
Overall a decent show mired by romance nonsense and by a misguided attempt at politics for two groups that nobody gives a shit about.
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Allocating Your Aesthetic Budget: Sailor Moon Edition
Sailor Moon is a show that undoubtedly built a powerhouse of a visual brand. Should I even bother posting a screenshot of the sailor scouts, given that I am 100% confident anyone reading this can recall them instantly? I guess it won’t hurt:
Anime is often really good at creating iconic designs like this, through repetition of the visuals. It is awkward in live action shows if characters just wear the same outfit every scene (what, they only own one outfit? Are they homeless/work in the tech industry?), but animation gives us enough aesthetic “distance”, an awareness that this isn’t accurate to real life, that you can buy into the conceit. By wearing the same outfit every time, it just becomes the character. Not to mention a studio can really save quite a few bucks by streamlining production with neat tricks like having only one character design to animate - when you are on a shoe-string budget, like pretty much every anime in the 90’s was, every cut corner counts.
What is interesting about Sailor Moon is that most of the time it doesn’t really use this conceit at all.
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Episode 15 of Sailor Moon’s first season has, in its opening act, this shot of all of the Senshi (at the time) talking to the plot-of-the-day character, who clearly trains rock Pokemon in 16-bit caves in his off hours:
If you knew nothing about these three characters, you could probably infer about 80% of their personality just from their outfits. Usagi (the blond one in the middle, if that's necessary) is wearing:
Light pastel colours, with pink on top of that: girly, feminine, bubbly and breezy
Short-but-not-too-short of a skirt, and red heels: cares about fashion, wants to project an image of being a woman with a romantic hint to it
Long-twin tails w/ buns: Contrasting the shoes, she is still immature and childish. It also means she is the protagonist of an anime
Rei (far right) rocks a very different look:
T-shirt and jean shorts, shoes over heels: sensible, practical, a bit sporty
Very short shorts, long black hair: Confident, a bit aggressive, and suggestive of a more overt sexuality
Ami (far left) settles into a more restrained vibe with:
Full, long, but sleeveless dress, bob-cut hair: Chaste, more conservative, but not to the point of prudishness; particularly with the length (and the hand posture, shielding her body) probably a bit shy
Monochrome blue colour in outfit & hair: reserved, serene, possessing a calm demeanor
I know I have seen the show already, but really none of these details are a stretch - this is just the language of fashion. And all of these outfits are outfits that the characters have never (or rarely) worn before up until this point. The cast of Sailor Moon, far from that animation conceit of “standard outfits”, change clothes all…
the….
time.
I just randomly clicked on episodes to find these, it requires no hunting
And while it isn’t always as spot on as the top picture, they all in some way embody the language of visual design to speak to the personality of the characters. If you want to see more, check out one of the multiple tumblrs dedicated to the everyday clothing the Sailor Senshi wear, because of course those exist.
If this was a 2010’s Kyoto Animation show, pointing this out would be the end of it - every one of their shows has this level of impeccable detail. Sailor Moon is notable in that it is not at all that kind of show; the animation and designs in Sailor Moon take perpetual shortcuts to get the job done. I don’t think the transformation sequences need to be belabored - the way they permitted the team to recycle identical animation sequences, multiple times per episode, was surely a godsend to the production schedule. Yet not all of the budget limitations are so prettily masked:
I’m sure they finished the background art in the...VHS release?
The show is filled with dirty animation, unfinished backgrounds, backgrounds that are a simple color gradient for no clear reason, and so on. It is clear that the Sailor Moon team did not have the resources for every detail - which is why the decision of what details they did choose to prioritize is so interesting.
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What is the point of Sailor Moon? I do believe that shows have “points”; and by that I don’t mean a message or theme but a core appeal to an audience, something specific that they will get out of the show. Almost every show appeals along multiple axes, and Sailor Moon is no exception, but I want to focus on one: aesthetic identification.
If you learn someone is a Sailor Moon fan, there is the obvious follow-up question you have to ask, namely “which Sailor Senshi are you?” It’s the which-Harry-Potter-house-are-you question of anime, a horoscope where you can choose your sign (in this case literally). The premise of this concept is not hard for media to execute on - it is just personality traits and aesthetics grouped together under a label, a basic building block of media and clickbait internet quizzes. Harry Potter, ironically, raised up its memetic question almost by accident, as its focus is so squarely on House Gryffindor that the others are almost forgotten; it was just so mind-bogglingly popular that it didn’t matter.
Sailor Moon, however, takes this concept and allocates so much of its aesthetic budget into making it a centerpiece of the show. Sailor Moon herself is a klutzy, lazy romantic, Sailor Mercury is a shy, earnest bookworm, and so on, with none of them ever really becoming very complex characters. However, the show devotes itself to making you *feel* these archetypes as strongly and intricately as possible. All of those outfit changes are chosen because not only do real girls care about their outfits and can therefore identify more strongly with characters who do the same, but so they can constantly emulate their archetype in diverse, different ways. The show doesn't have the budget for intense action scenes, so after Sailor Moon engages in her hyper-serious transformation sequences, she proceeds to, nearly every time, bumble through the combat scenes like this:
Oh sure, the scenes are done this way because it is funny (and good comedy can be done on any budget - these shots are frequently still frames with motion lines!), but it is also done this way because Sailor Moon is a total screw-up, and if you identify with that it is validating to see someone “just like you” able to pull off wins despite it all. The transformation sequences are not only beautiful animation that showcases aspirational power, but are also crafted to highlight the personalities of the Senshi in question - unless you think aggressive, combative Rei got fire powers by coincidence. Half of the run-time of every episode is spent, not on the plot du-jour, but on light-hearted personal squabbles between the cast because those scenes are not just funny, but also allow for far more moments of character expression.
All of that work pays off in building with the audience, not a connection with a character who reflects their identity in total, but a connection that reflects one aspect of their identity in an extremely deep (dare I say multifaceted?) way. I think if you were to describe Sailor Moon as a “shallow” show, you would actually be right to say so, in a sense. These characters will never have the true depth of personality, themes and so on of a more ‘adult’ show. But those adult shows have to spend their effort somewhere - for all that the themes of say Evangelion or Paranoia Agent are pristinely detailed and impactful, you aren’t ever going to be memorizing the moves of their transformation sequences. The way Sailor Moon committed so strongly to fleshing out the archetypes the Senshi stood for is, I think, one of the keys to how this cast of five became so iconic.
Not even their school uniforms match! They had to spend time in-universe *justifying* this!
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A Final Note:
At least, everything I’ve said here applies to Sailor Moon at its peaks. The show, however, is not one without its stumbles, even in Season 1. This section doesn’t flow into the core essay too well, but I wanted to note it because if you were to watch Sailor Moon today, you might struggle to feel the dynamic outlined above. The biggest culprit here is the length - Season 1 is 46 episodes long, and sections of it most certainly drag. They also take a startlingly long time to introduce the cast - this choice builds tension around their arrival, but it also means the later Senshi get a lot less time to establish themselves. Sailor Venus in particular gets hamstrung by this - she is introduced and then immediately arc plot elements sweep the narrative, and so she is left as a hollow shell for some time. The pacing of the show is undoubtedly flawed.
I think Sailor Moon is a show that you do have to keep its time and place in mind for - namely, middle schoolers and anime nerds watching it on broadcast TV in the 90’s. As an adult you “get” the point of the show pretty quickly, and get satiated on it almost as fast. Watching it all in a few sittings only heightens this problem. For a younger audience, and one that is waiting for a week between episodes with no internet for plot reminders, all that extra time is needed to jog memories and build connections. And younger audiences just have that limitless commitment to the things they love! If you think no one could actually enjoy seeing the same transformation sequence for the 30th time, watch it with someone who would have died for this show when they were 10 and you will be disabused of that notion *very* quickly.
Still, we can’t travel back in time - Sailor Moon is a show of its era. There are “filler-reduced” guides out there, though I caution that the plot of Sailor Moon is absolutely not the point of the show in comparison to the character dynamics, and so sometimes the filler is the best part (Cat-Rhett Butler is the best character in the show YOU KNOW I’M RIGHT). Certainly, however, some method must be used to cut down on its length. If you are going to be a first time viewer in adulthood, that reality should be kept in mind, and if you do accept it for what it is you can really appreciate its core appeal - and don’t forget to finish it off with a 1990′s era internet personality quiz to really wrap it up!
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Lmaoo so there is this one tweet that actually describes what I really think the insane mauruaders stans and the tweet goes : some of yall heard one fucking word and now yall can't stop saying it (and it's like a reference to those fuckers who say gatekeep, gaslight, toxic but for everything and they act its profound or some shit). I think they um definetly saw those words and deadass went let's be eco friendly and reuse the same arguments and everyone else went yes. And when there was a genuine difference of opinion they go to their backup response : by supporting this element or seeing their pov you are ( anti Semitic /racist / homophobic) and it's just like :you are aware the same people exist in this community right???
(also I really find it funny that some of them literally don't think the mauruaders won't fucking hate crime them, no ma'am they will hate crime you and then proceed to get the slap on the wrist, they are the reasons your school has anti bullying week [also lmaoo pandering to them makes to be in the 'group' makes all of you Peter Pettigrew you know the same dude you all decided to ignore] )
And then I have to remind myself that there will be one of them who will raise kids and try to be 'jily' parents which I assume is living vicariously through your child because God you peaked in highschool and you won't shut the fuck up about it (and lack any fucking development) which is consistent with Canon so hey it does work out. Also like who's gonna pay for your child's therapy when they realize people who are dickish to you are simply just dickish and no why do you think this is an enemies to lovers trope (and also for their kids dry ass personality which they got from their parents because ik they would want them to be constantly involved but like gym teacher with a kid who's into slight sports and now the kid has to try to get in the national team lol)
Like I need them to have a snape attitude towards kids which was very much : fuck them kids ( and I honestly couldn't agree more to.)
Hey so if you're a fan of the m*rauders and this appears in the general tag, im sorry, i tagged the post correctly but sometimes the tagging system doesnt filter content correctly, but just so yall know, below the read more will be content that is very m*rauder critical which yall may not like or may be upset by. this is a fair warning
It's genuinely frustrating how often they repeat the same arguments as if we care. like we know snape isnt a kind person and we know he doesnt make the best or morally correct decisions, but they never hold other characters to a remotely similar standard that they hold snape to
they like characters due to popularity and how much they can add in headcanons, we know almost nothing about the marauders era, so they can make their own universe independent of the harry potter plot line, but they dont actually give a shit about the canon characterizations we already have
the m*rauders are not canonically progressive, their bullying of snape isn't coming from a progressive stance. they literally only bully him because they think hes weird. there isnt any canon evidence that they went after students who were actively causing harm to others, such as avery and mulciber (two boys who actively were attacking muggleborn students), they never went after regulus despite the fact that je was outspokenly supportive of voldemort to the point where regulus basically had a fucking shrine dedicated to him, there isnt any canon evidence that they went after any other junior death eater. there is canon evidence that they attacked random kids simply for annoying them. there is canon evidence that they used illegal hexes on students that had the risk of causing permanent bodily damage. and i think the real nail on the coffin for the idea that the m*rauders only went after snape due to him being a wannabe death eater is something sirius literally says
this means that even during the war, the m*rauders didnt suspect snape of being a death eater, let ALONE when they were at school
they also just think all snape fans are white straight cis women who obsess over the "always 🥺" line. like they dont take into account POC fans, lgbtq+ fans, nonbinary or trans fans, jewish fans, poor fans, disabled fans, neurodivergent fans. they paint us all with the "you never read the books you just want to fuck alan rickman" brush and call it a day so they dont actually have to engage with us despite constantly coming into our spaces
also it BOTHERS me how they'll call snape a n@zi and then turn around and say "awe james was just a bit of a jerk !! 🥺🥺" bestie he was an actual genuine sadist who got off on bullying and sexually assaulting kids he deemed weird. like sorry to the alt m*rauder kinnies, but if you're punk, emo, goth whatever james potter would've bullied the absolute hell out of you. canonically. sirius literally defends his bullying of snape by calling him an oddball, yall dont think you would've been on the other end of their bullying?
#anti marauders#anti james potter#anti sirius black#pro severus snape#severus snape#this got kind of rambly#also if this does find its way into the m*rauder tag id recomment filtering the anti general tags so that this type of content doesnt appea#in the search engines in the future
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all the odd ones for the fic questions pls and thank you pepster
all the odd ones, meaning 1, 3 etc right? oh BOY are we gonna be here for a while (and i love it 🥰)
it’s morning right now so let’s see how long throughout the day this is gonna take me sdfghjk let’s do it!!
1) what was the first fandom you got involved in?
hmmmm. i wanna say harry potter, more than a decade ago? specifically dramione and scorose
3) what is the best fandom you’ve been involved in?
for all that it has given me i have to say bechloe
5) which fandoms have you written fanfiction for?
so far just for bechloe
7) list your NoTPs from each fandom you’ve been in
i’m only gonna list pairs i have strong feelings against and from only the fandoms i’ve been most involved in
harry potter: snape and hermione
frozen: elsa and hans (no but for real. why)
pitch perfect: beca and jessie, chloe and chicago
marvel: hm hm surprisingly nothing comes to mind
the haunting of bly manor: same as for marvel
9) what are the best things about your current fandom?
having a space where i can fully be myself, expressing myself freely through my writing, meeting so many wonderful people, having a previously unexplored side of myself revealed to me, finding and delving into characters that make me feel less alone, and so much more. it’s been a real blessing, having this fandom in my life
11) who is your current OTP?
bechloe
(this was the point where tumblr lost me ALL MY ANSWERS FROM QUESTIONS 13 TO 33 so let’s do this again SHALL WE??? i’ll be saving each answer as we go dear god)
13) any NoTPs?
already answered!
15) is there an obscure ship which you love?
hmm i don’t think so? none that comes to mind at least
17) who was your first OTP and are they still your favorite?
my first OTP, before i even knew what an OTP was, was scorpius and rose from harry potter. it’s not still on top of my OTP list, but always has a special place in my heart
19) is there a ship which you wished you could get behind, but you just don’t feel them?
not really? i mean, there are popular ships that i don’t support, like hermione with bellatrix or natasha with wanda for example. i can see their appeal and i get why people like them. they’re just not for me and i’m okay with that
21) what was the first fanfic you ever wrote?
ah my accidental multi chap baby sdfghjkdfg
All is Fair in Love and War was posted as an one shot, and that was all it was supposed to be. it was my first finished written piece. and then a couple of people in the comments were really nice abt sharing thoughts of where the story could go next and what they’d like to see happen, and they were very enthusiastic abt wanting to see more of that story. so the second chapter was born
sooo one thing led to the other and before i knew it that fic had become an 8 chapter, over 60k words story sdfghjkdf i’m amused and grateful to this day
23) name a fic you’ve written that you’re especially fond of and explain why you like it
how can you ask a mother to pick her favorite of her kids HUH
no but for real, i love all of my stories equally. i’m a perfectionist, so nothing gets posted before it’s perfect in my eyes. plus, all my stories are my babies. each has its flaws and imperfections, each in their own ways. but they’re all beautiful and meaningful to me
what i will say is, i have a particular soft spot for (wondering if you knew) i was enchanted to meet you. i truly think my writing peaked in that story, in all the parallels and tiny but very important things that are in there
25) what’s your most popular fanfic?
based on views and kudos, it’s All is fair in Love and War
ofc that’s a multi chap, so maybe the numbers aren’t exactly equivalent to popularity
my most popular one shot, by a very large margin at that, is (i’ll let you in) and baby, that’s when
27) what do you hate more: coming up with titles or writing summaries?
i honestly love coming up with titles
writing summaries, on the other hand, is the bane of my existence
29) do you have a beta reader? why/why not?
i don’t, and it’s bc i’m literally incapable of taking any kind of critique over anything unfinished. once it’s posted and out in the world it’s fair game; but until then? that’s a big no for me
31) what’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said about your writing?
i honestly can’t answer this question bc every comment is so so special and important to me. i often go back and read them all. even right now while writing this there are so many different comments swirling around in my head. i appreciate and am grateful for all the kind words always 💜
33) do you write one shots, multi chapters, or huge epics?
sdfghjkk definitely not huge epics
i’ve written both of the other two. in the beginning i preferred and wanted to write multi chapters. however nowadays and for the past year or so, i lean more heavily towards one shots
35) do you write drabbles? if so, what do you normally write them about?
i am physically and mentally incapable of writing short things sdfghjkd so no, i don’t write drabbles
37) first person or third person? what do you write in and why?
always third person. idk the idea of first person narration always seemed weird to me. plus, i see my stories as me retelling the events the characters have confided in me. so third person makes sense and it’s also why i use past tense in my stories
39) what is your greatest strength as a writer?
describing and narrating emotions and using metaphors
41) list and link to five fanfics you’re currently reading
my reader’s block has been going strong, so i’m not reading anything currently unfortunately
43) is there anyone in your fandom who really inspires you?
my squirrels 💜
45) what is your all time favorite fanfic?
i have to say Experimentation i just have to
i also love Perdition, what an incredible piece of writing
47) ao3, ff.net or tumblr - where do you prefer to post and why?
definitely ao3, i just love its interface i guess?
49) do you care if people comment on/ reblog your writing? why/why not?
okay so here’s the deal. ofc i care. every artist who shares their work, every creator, cares; at least to a degree. it’s why we share. we want people to see and love and appreciate our work, we want it recognised and celebrated even. we want people to engage with it, show it to their friends, talk abt it, have thoughts abt it. it’s only natural and ofc i’m absolutely no exception
with that said. i’ve always tried to remind myself that kudos/likes are also engagement. that even just reading is engagement. that everyone’s limit or ability for engagement isn’t the same, and that ultimately it’s their choice how or if they’ll engage with my writing. i try to, and i do, value everyone who even just reads my stories. i share something with the world for free and it’s my choice to do and continue to do so. what happens after that isn’t up to me
so yes i do care a lot abt reblogs and comments. they make me very happy, they validate and encourage me. but people have no obligation, in my eyes at least, to engage with my works a specific way. just like i have no specific obligation to provide a certain type of content on set periods of time or with a set limit of words or to continue to provide stories; or literally any other obligation. no one can police my actions and choices up until i’ve posted a story and i can’t police anyone’s actions or choices after i’ve posted it. and that’s the beauty of fandom for me - we’re all here bc we want to and bc it makes us happy, with no expectations or obligations
ending this with an essay seems only suitable sdfghjkd thank you my egg for giving me the opportunity to talk abt myself in such length 😌💜
#ask#snowonebutyou#ask game#i don’t even know if i did this right sdfghj#but i loved it#btw it’s 6:30pm right now lmao
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Quest RPG Adventure: Gossip Goblin
Premise/Setting
This adventure takes place in a magical university at which Player Characters attend. The magical university (we’ll call it Mosshollow, for the sake of this adventure module) is an endless network of classrooms, laboratories, lecture halls, and who knows what else.
The adventure begins in the midst of drama. Somewhere in the university is a person who writes down everyone’s secrets in a magical tome. The entries in this tome magically replicate in every journal in the university, for everyone to read. Every entry is always signed with the name Gossip Goblin. Think about this adventure as a D&D meets Gossip Girl cross over.
Before you start the session hand a small note to each of your players. One of them is going to play the author of Gossip Goblin. The other notes can be specifics about the bonds they hold with one another. One note should read “You’re greatest ambition is to discover who Gossip Goblin truly is. This character is the on tasked with convincing the others that an investigation is warranted. Each note is private and shouldn’t be shared.
Note: this adventure has explicitly sexual undertones. It can, of course, be adjusted for player safety.
Beginning The Adventure
The adventure begins on the first day of the new term. One of the PCs is missing from the opening scene, but shows up directly after Gossip Goblin’s message drops. Students (and Questers) are just back from summer vacation. If any Questers have a journal they can read the “welcome back” entry from Gossip Goblin, but if none of them do, they may just hear about it through word of mouth. Either read the below entry to your players or give it to one of them and let that player read it to the rest.
Welcome back to Mosshollow Uni, students—I’m sure you’ve had the best summer ever, but all that fun is coming to an end. Word is there’s a new Necromancy professor, will she be a withered crone or a necromantic temptress? Remember, what goes by day, comes by night. Thirsty? Try not to let your tongue hang too low, it’s liable to be pulled out… XOXO Gossip Goblin.
Just then the missing Quester is introduced to the scene and catches up with their friends. The missing Quester is the one who has been given the Gossip Goblin note.
While the new necromancy professor may be the bait, the real adventure of Gossip Goblin is figuring out who has the magical book.
Professor Santis Oan’Daru
Santis is the new professor of necromancy at Mosshollow University. She takes two forms. By night she is dark-skinned, with golden eyes, short natural hair, and long lashes and nails, slim and tempting to all in her presence. She is prone to wear the bones of animals and has a skeletal cat that goes with her everywhere. During the day, however, Santis becomes a wizened and old woman who relies heavily on a crocked staff. She has long natural hair that curls large, and drooping eyes, a shuffling gait.
Since Gossip Goblin already knows about the necromancy teacher, the most logical course of action for Questers is to go meet her. There can be a fair bit of roleplay here, seeing as students might have to go to classes. While there aren’t any specific classes that must be attended, Guides can make some up. Harry Potter is obviously an easy source to draw on, but think you could also think of other classes such as Elementalism, Chronomancy, etc. If Questers decide to go to class they may meet some of the major players of this adventure before they are named by Santis as someone she met before Gossip Goblin introduced her.
Major Players
Zigafur Crawly:
Zig is a Gnome from. . . somewhere. He’s a bit of a loose cannon. He’s known for his talent with magical enchantings. He’s tiny but carries tones of imbued gadgets on his person. His quills are imbued with everlasting ink, he’s got a mechanical spider that hangs out on his arm, and he keeps the tethered soul of his grandmother in a jar at his hip. She can’t say anything, but the jar swirls with green mist that sometimes coalesces into a humanoid form. Zig has a low voice and isn’t much of a talker. He met Santis the morning of the first term while at breakfast. Once Questers realize Santis is both a krone and a seductress, they should be able to deduce that Zig couldn’t have been the one to write about her in Gossip Goblin since he would not have met her during the night and seen her during the day.
Armatia Finch:
Armatia is a popular-girl half-elf who enjoys wowing people with shows of sorcery. She constantly talks about how she gets the both of best worlds being half-elven, extended life, but none of the empathy that comes with immortality. Unlike her immortal kin, she has ambitions. She’s going to be the greatest Sorceryilst the world has ever seen. She makes visual art by using magic, mainly three-dimensional surrealist landscapes and city sprawls. She has a thing for putting melting clocks everywhere in her Sorcerylist work. She’s convinced of her own brilliance. She wears short skirts and knee-high boots. She has pointed ears and high cheekbones that accentuate her pale complexion. She’s got long everything and keeps boys’ heads turning everywhere she goes. Her father is an old colleague of Santis, but Armatia hasn’t ever met her until the night before term when Santis asked to have to with Armatia. Like Zig, Armatia can’t be Gossip Goblin, as she has only seen Santis at night and only thinks of her has a beautiful temptress.
Supda Gragovich:
Supda is the person you go to for all your magical mind-alterings. Their known around the campus as a party animal. Always throwing ragers. Supda is a huge half-troll. They barely fit through the doorframes of the university, and they specialize in magical herbs and concoctions. They’re like the person who would find the mushroom Alice uses to change sizes, and distill it into its essence, then replicate it by magical means, and make it one-hundred times more potent. That’s Supda. Supda has both ears pierced. They have some other piercings underneath the clothes they wear, but those don’t get seen by the general public. Despite being a rager, Supda is also a gym rat. They are constantly working out and trying to be fit at the 24/7 physio gym the university maintains. Supda met Santis in the middle of the night while at the gym. They were pleased to have company and Santis and Supda might have gotten in some extra working out. Wink
Harkel O’Possum:
Harkel is a quiet and nervous little boy who is nonetheless one of the most brilliant students at Mosshollow Uni. He’s only 7 years old, but it is said he’s the reincarnation of Omaglious Hatpost, the previous headmaster of Mosshollow Uni. Harkel wears glasses and has a bowl cut his mom gave him. He is always writing in his journal and wears sweatpants and baggy shirts. He raises his hand to answer every question in class and never gets anything wrong. It’s like he was once the headmaster here. He met Santis during the interviewing process when the university was searching for a necromancy professor. He was brought in to help decide and interview candidates. This was during the day, so Harkel thinks Santis is just a nice old lady.
Carl:
Carl is just a normal run-of-the-mill undergraduate student. Nobody knows his last name, and only a couple people know his first name. He tries really hard, but doesn’t really get good grades and doesn’t really belong to any group. He’s got a perpetually surprised look on his face. He’s a bit of an insomniac. He always wears the same thing, a red t-shirt with a breast pocket and blue jeans. Nobody knows if he wears the same pair each day, or if he just has a dresser full of blue jeans and red t-shirts with breast pockets. Nobody’s ever asked and nobody wants to. The night before term started Carl was passing the gym on one of his long insomniatic walks when he overheard, then saw Supda and Santis “working out” together. He didn’t interrupt them, but they clearly saw him and he smiled and waved as though what they were doing was a totally normal thing to do in a public place. Santis waved back at him. In Carl’s mind, it was normal. He’ll say he’s seen Santis around and that she seems nice, but he won’t specify what time he saw her or what she was doing unless asked specifically. He only knows Santis as a nice person who would return a wave. That’s more attention than he usually gets from people at the university.
The PC Who Met Santis:
The PC who received the note with the nugget of information that they are Gossip Goblin met Santis the night before and witnessed her turning from a young woman into a wizened sage. While Gossip Goblin isn’t initially in the first scene, they arrive moments after the message drops. Why they were out and about is up to the Player, but it is presumed between the Play and Guide, that Gossip Goblin just wrote the post while out and away.
Gossip Goblin didn’t meet Santis, but did see her when the sun was rising. As the sun peaked over the horizon, was up doing something (dictated by the player) and saw Santis walking across the court yard to her bedroom. As Gossip Goblin watched, they saw Santis shrivel into a old woman. What Gossip Goblin doesn’t know is that Santis was aware of being watched.
Meeting Santis Oan’Daru
When Quester go to meet Santis it is either the old woman or the young one who answers at her room within the university. Santis will name the five NPCs above, as people she has met. She won’t let on too much about how she met them or where, but she will give their names. She’ll also tell the Gossip Goblin in the party that it’s nice to see them again. If asked what she means, Santis will say they ran into each other on their way to an early breakfast.
Going Forward
Who is Gossip Goblin. It must have been one of the few people Santis Oan’Daru met the day/night before. While most PCs will be doing everything they can to discover the identity of Gossip Goblin, the Quester who is the Gossip Goblin can try to throw them off, cast blame onto NPCs, and more.
In my experience, it’s best not to have too clear an idea of what might happen, as the skills Questers may use, and the decisions they may make might lead the session completely away from Gossip Goblin--though if that happens, I’d suggest separating Gossip Goblin from the rest of the party and giving them an opportunity to write their own message to the school. You could do this by taking each Player into a separate room and giving them a piece of information that only they know. Basically--the whole session turns into an extreme version of the game Clue. . . maybe. But there’s a lot of fun and deep Roleplaying that could come into play and who knows where your players might take this premise!
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Tell me what is love (ch-8)
Chapter 8
Taeyeon was at her friend’s party when a call from baekhyun surprised her. He never calls unless in emergencies, and mostly they were about Sarang. Excusing herself she made he way out of the crowd before answering him.
“Where’s Sarang?”
“Wow, no hello, no where are you? Sarang is with Heechul Oppa.”
“That’s very responsible of you Tae. Heechul Hyung of all people?
Taeyeon hung up without responding. Baekhyun was being so difficult these days that she was losing her mind. She picked up a drink from the bar and drank it furiously before someone sat beside her.
“Trouble?”, smirked Changmin.
Changmin had always had a soft spot for Taeyeon. When she had just joined the company, he had spotted her as someone with a lot of passion and watching her grow both as an artist and as a person had been a delight for him. When she was dating Baekhyun, he was a little disappointed. He had expected her to focus on her career when she had just begun climbing fame. With the news of her dating and later marriage and children, her popularity had suffered and she had to begin from zero.
“Ah. Oppa. Nothing just, married couple issues, I guess.”, she smiled, taking another sip from her glass.
“Honestly, Tae, don't get me wrong. Why did you rush into this?”
“I told you, I was pregnant.”
“Do you realize how huge of a problem this is? How could you be so careless? You were just at the peak of success.”
“I was scared, Oppa. I was scared and Baekhyun proposed.”
“Did he?”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn't propose to you. Nor did you actually accept.”
“What is the use of thinking about these things? We’re a couple now.”, she sighed. “ Moreover, we have a child now. You know how these things will be twisted now if we decide to separate.”
“I didn't even say that you should. But if that’s what you're even thinking about. Well, there’s a problem, love.”
“But…”
“Look, ill just say this. Before the two of you, no one would have dreamed of marrying and having a baby at this age. Two members of popular idol groups and from the same company. How scandalous is that? But few fans have supported and have stayed loyal. Maybe after divorce, it’ll be another thunderstorm, but if you only you can bear through it. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll be how it was. At least, on the bright side, you won't be as miserable.”
Baekhyun called up Heechul to make sure Sarang was still with him. On confirming, he quickly drove over and brought his daughter home and bathed her.
“What would my princess like for dinner today?”
“Cake!”, Sarang chimed.
“Ey, a cake isn't a meal. What about jjajangmyeon?”
“Yes yes yes”, the little one danced. Baekhyun laughed and quickly began boiling the noodles.
“Sarang do you remember Aunt Hye hee?”
The little girl shook her head silently, while busily trying to climb a chair so that she could see what her father was cooking.
“Well, I met her today and I feel really happy. Kind of how you make me feel, get it? All fuzzy and rainbows.”
“Daddy, I want an elephant.”, Sarang cried.
“What! Of all the things in the world? How about I get you a plushie?”
“Elephant!!”
“Elephant plushie allowed only.”
Baekhyun was always too busy to spend time with his daughter, but when he could he loved playing with her. The last time he was home, Sarang made him playhouse and him to come into her play den for tea and chips. He was tired but playing Sarang was the best thing on the planet for him. Today he was Sarang’s patient as Dr.Sarang checked his temperature.
Taeyeon came home then and Sarang ran over to her mother.
“Hey, you're home.”, baekhyun mumbled, tidying up after Sarang.
“Yeah. did she eat?”
“Yeah. made her some jjajangmyeon. Did you have dinner or should I make you something?”
“I did. Are you free tomorrow?”
“ Yeah. Why?”
“I have a schedule at 4 am tomorrow. Will be back by 3 pm. If you're home, then I don't need to drop her at my mother’s.”
“Cool. no issues.”
That’s it. Silence. This was how the couple spoke to each other. Mostly about Sarang.
The couple went to bed at the same time after months and it was always awkward.
“How’s work?”, asked Taeyeon
“Good.”, he sighed, “the agency wants us to begin individual projects now. So, I’m thinking about finally trying to get that solo, you know.”
“Baekhyun do you think we are okay?”, she blurted.
Baekhyun looked at her blankly, knowing very well what this was about.
“I really think we should talk about this. Not just for us, but for Sarang. We can't let our issues get to her.”, she continued when baekhyun didn't answer.
“Hmmm.”
“Hmmm? C,mon baekhyun!” she exclaimed, agitated
“I don't know what to say.”
“Do you still love me?”, she asked, turning towards him.
Her blunt question startled him and he was caught off guard.
“Look, we… I don't know…”, her voice trailed as she tried to find words.
“Do you think we should separate?”, he asked softly, still unable to meet her eyes.
“I mean if that would make us less miserable, yes.”
“It’ll get very complicated.”
“It will. But I think we can support each other on this one thing, don't you think? We got married against everyone’s wishes too. It was difficult but we overcame it all.”
“The company, our members, the team..?”
“Seriously, baekhyun? Will this matter when its too late? We’re miserable right now. Coming home shouldn’t have to be this stressful.”, Taeyeon stated.
“Do you currently like someone else?”
“What?”, Taeyeon turned to him furious. “Is that why you think I’m asking for a divorce? Wow, I can't believe I got married to you. No wonder Hye hee left you so easily. You're still a child, baekhyun.”, she spewed, hurt. Picking up her coat and purse, she rushed out of the bedroom without glancing back.
Baekhyun quietly peeped into his daughter’s room finding her peacefully asleep. He sat by her bed once again, resting his head beside hers.
“Sarang. My little princess. I wanted to be everything I couldn't for you. But look here, what do we have? A loser. I've done everything for this life I have and have lost everything in return. Now, possibly, your parents will gamble a happy normal family for you. Are we too selfish? I can say I’ve pushed it this far. I’m at fault. She’s right, I’ve dealt with this almost childishly. But was it all my mistake? Or was it fate? I’ve lost everything. Everything.” baekhyun sobbed uncontrollably.
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“Hey good morning, hye hee”, Jaebeom welcomed her with a smile when she visited them the next morning.
Hye hee felt extremely apologetic towards him for Baekhyun’s behavior yesterday, but Jaebeom had been more than okay.
“It’s fine! He might have been surprised to see me. Also, celebs are afraid to be seen right. Green smoothie?”
“What with leaves?”
“Where else will it get its pretty green hue from? Hahaha. Don't worry, it won't taste bad, I’ll add berries in it. Jaein is still in bed, by the way, she made me watch reruns of harry potter last night with her. We watched the first three, after which I had to force her to go to bed. Can you imagine? A patient!”
The kitchen seemed different with Jaebeom moving around. Hye hee had been so used to just jane in this house, and the world knew she never cooks. She set the bunch of tulips she got for jane in a glass. Tulips were jane’s absolute favorite. She never had a specific color preference, so hye hee got her a mix and match of the colors at the florist.
“They certainly do brighten up the space.”,Jaebeom’s voice startled her.
“Oh sorry. Here’s your smoothie.”
“Wow, really vibrant.”, hye hee chuckled.
They sat at the dinner table while sipping on the smoothies. He was right, it didn't have that bad healthy taste that green smoothies usually did.
“So, you're also a journalist?”, asked Jaebeom.
“Yes, journalist aspiring to be a writer someday.”
“Oh, that’s cool. I’m a video producer.”
“Wow, anything I could have seen that you produced?”
Turns out, Jaebeom had worked with many filmmakers and also assisted music video producers.
“No, I’ve never worked with the artists directly. You see my work is mainly behind the scenes. Once my team receives the tape, we edit and add effects. It takes months at times, depending on the company’s reference.”
“That’s super cool. I've always wanted to learn how to edit.”
“Maybe I could teach you sometime. Of course, the professional level will take longer.”
“Oh, no. the basics are just fine for me.”
“What about you? Where are you working right now?”
“I got sacked out of my old one. The company went bankrupt. I’m trying to find another one right now, but no luck so far.”
“Would you consider working for scriptwriters by any chance?”
“Yes! Anything at this point.”
“Alright, I’ll get back to you after I speak to them. Last I heard they were looking for an assistant scriptwriter. You have a good typing speed too. A bonus.”
He hadn't mentioned anything about yesterday’s occurrences and it made her fidgety.
“Are we going to ignore what happened?”
“Hmm?”, he innocently asked, genuinely surprised.
“About baekhyun?”
“Oh! Look, I need to admit, I didn't fully trust you when you said you were friends with an EXO member, but seeing Baekhhyun did startle me. I did a google search about him after coming home. He has a daughter, eh? He’s quite young for being a dad.”
“Yeah. they had her immediately after marriage.”
“Yeah… you don't quite see that in the entertainment business. You were friends, right?”
“Best friends since middle school.” she stated.
“Whoa, now that’s something.” he smirked.
“What?”
“I’m sorry if I seem intrusive, but did you guys date?”, he asked, a smile on his lips.
Hye hee was taken aback by his question. How did he know?
“Okay, I’ll take that as a yes. Yeah, it did seem as such.”
“He was just worried about me, with the things happening”
“Probably.” Jaebeom softly said, the smile still playing on his lips.
She loaded her guns to shoot back answers when Jane entered the room. She looked very weak, now that could be because of the medicines or that she didn't sleep enough last night.
“Hello, my dear muggles.”, she croaked as she took a seat beside hye hee hugging her.
“I heard about your Hogwarts adventures.”, hye hee chuckled.
“Good. now that you're here, you’ll stay the night and watch the rest with me. You like the 4th movie anyway.”
“Yeah, that's great, another night with no sleep.”,Jaebeom cheekily added.
Baekhyun hadn't called her all day and it bothered hye hee a little. Suho might have said something to him about it. Had he known that baekhyun spent the night at hye hee’s? Though she wasn't home, a spectator would add things differently.
Jaebeom stepped out to get some groceries when she decided to spill everything to her best friend.
“So, you suspect this could be a fan’s doing?”, jane guessed.
“Why else would people patrol outside my house? They are not even sure how I look seeing they attacked you.”
“This is dangerous. You should talk to baekhyun about this. I’m shocked that he didn't see this coming. But, hey, on the bright side, he still has fans.”, she joked.
“What should I do?”
“Nothing. As Suho said, try to keep a bit of a distance. You are too caught up in your head with him. Live your life a little, please? Baekhyun isn't everything. He has his life spread out before him and it looks glorious. What about you? You’re still focused on him.”
When hye hee didn't answer, Jane continued, “I’m sorry if I was too blunt, but this is the truth and you have to face it sometime.”, she clarified, softly caressing her arm.
“I know, you mean well. I guess you’re right.” hye hee exhaled.
“Not taking the SM job then?”
“Actually your brother said he’d try to talk me up with his scriptwriters. Maybe it’ll work, fingers crossed.”
“Jaebeom? My brother? Actually, that reminds me, it’s kind of odd to see my brother so friendly with you. He’s usually very quiet, a stark opposite of me.”
“He’s been very kind, even though he half wanted to kill me after he found that you were in the hospital because of me.”, hye hee giggled.
“Now that sounds more like him.”, jane laughed.
Hye hee decided to spend the day at Jane’s after having lunch that Jaebeom bought for them. Jane was happy to have people in the house after so long that her brother decided to stay as well. It was quite a fulfilling day. The siblings shared each other’s embarrassing stories, Jaebeom played his guitar, turns out he has a very attractive voice as well.
After dinner, they all curled up to watch the rest of the harry potter movies. Halfway through the fifth part, Jaebeom realized jane was asleep with her head on hye hee’s lap. He carried her to her room and joined hye hee to finish the rest of the movie.
“Whoa. that is intense every time I watch it.”, sighed hye hee.
“Another Potterhead?”
“I cried when I didn't get my Hogwarts acceptance letter.”
After a while, the two of them decided to get some hot chocolate before bed.
“You're lucky! I bought marshmallows today.”,Jaebeom chirped looking through the grocery bag. Meanwhile hye hee made the hot comforting drink, taking it out to the balcony, where they sipped the hot drink with the gentle cool breeze touching their skin.
“So, do you have a boyfriend?”, Jaebeom asked, still looking ahead.
“No. not right now.”
“What a pity. Any man would be lucky to have you. I’m sure you've been asked out.”, he met her eyes. Hye hee was mesmerized and something about him seemed to draw her out of her shell.
“I wasn't ready.”, she simply put.
“Ah. no one quite reached your heart, then.”, he said letting out a throaty chuckle. “I get that, it’s quite the same for me. I see no point in dating for the sake of it. Unless its someone that stirs up your heart in ways unknown to yourself.” he glanced at her again, with the sweetest smile ever.
“Alright. I’m off to sleep. If you need anything, I’m here in the living room.”, he wearily said.
She watched him grab his bedding and spread it on the floor, as the couch was too small for him. Something about Jaebeom was very enticing to her, almost addictive. Shaking away her bothersome thoughts, she decided to call it a night. Maybe tomorrow would be a good day for everyone.
#baekhyun#byun baekhyun#baekhyun exo#exo#EXO baekhyun#baekhyun scenario#baekhyun angst#baekhyun fanfic#baekhyun fanfiction#baekhyun story#kpop fluff#baekhyun fluff#baekhyun x oc#exo fanfiction#exo fanfic#exo angst#exo fluff#exo story#exo x oc#got7 jb#got7 scenarios#got7 jaebeom#got7 imagines#got7 fanf
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Well, I read the ‘sneak peak’. God I hope they cut a lot out because there were places where the pacing felt like they cut something out.
The was... a general level of ‘I think I’d have more fun beating my head against the wall’, but there were a few places where I had some things that needed to be said.
Under the cut because I’ve included the full available text in addition to my b*tchy little notes.
So I’ve just realised the whole thing +sneak peak is 14,232 words, that’s a bit excessive for a single post.
I might leave just the snark here (I chucked the +sneak peak chapters up on AO3, it’s just for more contexts.)
Prologue
Under her list of ideas, she’d written the results of her experiments.
July 6th—candles—no burns.
July 8th—camping stove—no burns.
July 10th—blowtorch—no burns.
Experimenting on herself had been scary, but not as scary as the memory of her home burning.
You set shit on fire and your only experiments thus far are: “does this burn me? How about this?”
CHILD! Start with a candle, a lighter and a f*cking FIRE EXTINGUISHER and practice putting out a single flame!!!!
Then: light a single candle!
Stop putting your hand in fire if it scares you! “I am this many kinds of fire proof” does not equal “control of fire so I don't hurt anyone else”!!!!
Also, the wall behind the woman had opened into a shimmering portal of light. Just another clue that something unusual was going on.
Bloom waved this off. “Is this the part where you tell me I’m magic now?”
“You always were, Bloom,” said Headmistress Dowling. “You just didn’t know it yet.”
That was enough. She might have mysterious powers that were out of control, the world might be going mad, but her parents hadn’t raised her to listen to strange adults who approached in the dead of night with what sounded like a cult recruitment speech. Bloom snorted, abandoned her sleeping bag, and made for the door.
The woman’s voice stopped her at the mouth of the warehouse.
“I know about the fire, Bloom.”
Bloom trembled like a candle flame in a gust of wind. Slowly, she turned around. The woman was watching her with a steady gaze, keen but not unkind.
“Where are you going? You can’t go home. You’re too afraid you’ll hurt your parents again.”
Headmistress Dowling was right.
Kay, so obvious magic goes unremarked upon, not even a “nice trick with the lights, is that suppose to convince me”.
Also, either someone's been stalking Bloom, or Dowling is some kind of Mind Fairy.
FIRE
Once upon a time, it was my favorite possession, the fanciest book I owned, with golden swirls on the cover. But I’d grown up and packed the book into my old toy chest along with my teddy bears. I’d thought I was long past fairy tales.
That was before I used magic to burn down my house. My toy chest and my fairy-tale book had burned, too.
Creators kick my nostalgia for the lulz: 01
My book of fairy tales hadn’t included a swarm of kids around my age. One long-legged, capable-looking African American chick strode by, wearing a denim jacket and carrying a bag full of athletic gear. Wait, she wasn’t African American. Fairies didn’t have Africa or America. I didn’t know the name of the fairy realm I was currently in. Also, I hadn’t pictured fairies being into extreme sports.
Another girl, pale with a cloud of brown hair, was clutching several plants to her bosom as she hurried across the courtyard. A third sauntered by, vaguely punk rock and olive-skinned and wearing enormous headphones that buzzed faintly on her ears. I hadn’t pictured fairies rocking out, either.
Oh look, this Bloom also subscribes to the: “it's not whitewashing if they're aliens” theory
There was a rangy guy with skinny jeans, overly sardonic eyebrows, and a knife-bridge nose. California had plenty of white boy edgelords, but this edgelord had an actual knife. Oh no, actual knife! I wasn’t interested in getting to know Knife Boy better.
Called out Riven.
A stunning blonde girl with porcelain skin was taking a selfie with a group of overawed younger students. A luminous wisp floated in the air, making her glossy hair shine. Talk about a beauty angle. Seemingly, fairies could create their own beauty lighting.
Bloom is gay for Stella count: 01
I sneaked a look at him and grinned. His hair had coiffed peaks like a gold helmet and his shirt was pink, which I liked because gender stereotypes were for the weak. He even had a summer tan that fishbelly-pale redheaded me could only dream of. But no matter how cute he was, I wasn’t going to encourage him.
“I guess that means we have to do this forever. There are worse things, but—”
I stopped and turned to him. “I don’t need help, but thanks.”
Now I was looking at him properly, Some Guy was very cute, with a hero jawline and a confident air. Some Guy might be cute, but I was the independent type.
By the way, it's very important you all know that Bloom is a strong independent woman™ who scoff at gender roles, because she's hip and edgy, but she's like, totes not an edgelord(!) She's cool(!) Even if she hates her super pale skin.
Some of the chandeliers in this place were so dainty and delicate, they looked like stars suspended on gilt ribbons. The rooms were large and bright, with sunbeams dyed by stained-glass windows that were as intricate as the embroidery on a princess’s hem. Much of the stained glass was different shades of green, subtly coloring the air around us as though we were in a world made of jade and emerald.
Welcome to the Emerald City of Oz?
She continued talking, full of ennui about the fairy-tale castle, while I sneaked another look at her ring. “If you ever want to go back,” Stella said as she deliberately flashed it at me. She was making some kind of power play, and I didn’t know why.
Stella might be a bitch now, but I'm pretty sure It's only because Stella is also Diaspro in this reality?
FIRE
There was a realm called Eraklyon, which sounded like a dragon clearing its throat.
I mean... that's one way to pronounce it? I guess?
FIRE
I’d do anything for my parents, including lie to them about my new boarding school in Definitely Switzerland.
Your parents didn't ask about any paper work? They just accepted that you were moving overseas without warning? Who's paying for this alleged boarding school? Actually how are you paying for school?
We’d get dressed up and she’d play me cheerleader-type music. I remembered one chant that went Close your eyes and open your heart! The cheesy brainwashing hadn’t worked. I never much cared about frilly princess gowns, but I liked the idea of being at home in my princess castle.
Creators kick my nostalgia for the lulz: 02
In what beautiful blonde Stella had called the Winx suite—a bright series of rooms with tall windows and a view I couldn’t allow my parents to see—only one person got a room of their own. To my total lack of surprise, that person was Stella.
Bloom is gay for Stella count: 02
Creators kick my nostalgia for the lulz: 03
Really? That's how you're chosing to shoe-horn the Winx brand in? It just happens to be the name of their dorm. Sorry, their 'suite'.
When Mom, always waiting for my transformation into Ms. Popular, asked about the other girls, I shrugged. “Honestly, it’s five girls in an enclosed space, so … it’s only a matter of time before we descend into a Lord of the Flies situation and kill one another.”
So... no. Lord of the Flies is an extension of a study in relation to a very specific mono-ethnic (white), male and privileged group. It is literally young rich white boys, and the break down in community and sense of ethics that results in their single bias attitudes in the face of adversity.
The Winx are firstly female, multi-ethnic (not as much as they should be) and from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. If it devolves into murder, it will be vicious but it will not be “Lord of the Flies.” Find a better reference.
I busied myself with unpacking to hide my discomfort. “Ms. Dowling said there’s a fairy somewhere in my family tree? A long-dormant magical bloodline?” I sighed. “One day I will get used to how ridiculous all this sounds.”
Aisha’s surprise became wry amusement. “Oh my God. Have I just met the one person in the universe who’s never read Harry Potter?”
… why is that your conclusion? Long lost princess/prince/hero/magical heir swept up for adventure is a common trope. It doesn't make it feel any less ridiculous.
I wondered if any of my new suitemates ever felt that way. Happy bustling Terra, cool girl Musa, glamorous Stella, and Aisha who seemed so grounded.
It is so amazing how the girls that Bloom just happened to notice outside, you know, the only girls Bloom noticed outside, are all her roommates.
MIND
Terra’s super sweet voice revved into overdrive, picking up speed and frantic pleasantness on the way. “She’s just having fun. And I know it’s a lot. Shocker, Earth Fairy named Terra likes plants. It’s a family thing. I’ve got a cousin named Flora. My mom’s name is Rose, and my dad works in the greenhouse here. That’s why I know a lot of the second years. I grew up around Alfea, and—”
ohp, there it is
Creators kick my nostalgia for the lulz:04
“Stella’s a second year? Why is she in a suite full of first years?”
“Oh yeah. Actually … I don’t know. Some administrative thing last year? I mean, I think …”
I think you’re lying, thought Musa. She turned her back and dipped her power toward Terra, getting a faint sense that …
Somehow I doubt it was blowing up a potions lab in pursuit of a new shade of pink.
SPECIALIST
Less cool was Sky, Riven’s super annoying best friend in the whole world, who was rattling on about the ginger girl from the human world he’d met yesterday. Riven was sure she was crazy. He knew this because crazy was what Sky looked for in a woman.
So Riven is Riven and Brandon, okay.
I hate these assholes.
Riven bared his teeth. “Correction: I got high this summer.”
… : /
There was no real point trying to beat Sky. He was the best. Anyone in Alfea could tell you that … right after they told you Riven was the worst.
There was no real point, but Riven kept trying to beat Sky, anyway. Hey, nobody ever said Riven was smart.
… >:(
Sky’s dad was Andreas of Eraklyon, the dead legendary hero, slayer of the Burned Ones. Sky’s dad-substitute was Specialist Headmaster Silva, their fearless leader with the cold blue eyes and passion for early morning runs.
So many dead parents suddenly
He passed the blue, shimmering Barrier and went into the deep, dark woods. He could almost hear Silva’s voice now, telling the first years that the Barrier was their magical shield against the Burned Ones. Beware those merciless monsters with their inhuman strength and speed, never mind that nobody’s seen one in sixteen years, woo woo, so scary.
And Bloom is how old? Also: guess who’s about to start showing up suddenly! Trick question, it’s the Burned Ones, the ones we’ve already been told are the new series’ enemy.
EARTH
Their suite was called the Winx suite, which was such a cool name. Maybe they could call themselves the Winx Club?
Yep, they're going with that, okay.
You couldn’t even name the suit Wings in the kind of obnoxious cursive that makes it look like Winx and have Bloom misread it and become a running joke amongst the girls?!?!?!
Terra nervously eyed the food laid out on the tables before them. Sometimes she felt as if food might bite her before she bit into it. She couldn’t take cookies. All the other girls in the Winx suite were so skinny and pretty. If Terra ate a bunch of cookies, people would say, “No wonder she looks like that.” But if Terra got a plate full of carrots, people would say, “Who does she think she’s kidding, when she looks like that?” It was hard to know what to do.
Wow, just, wow. Terra honey, they do you so dirty. Fat girls don't have to hate themselves, just a note for the creators. And Terra, baby, if people gonna talk shit either way, you eat whatever the f*ck you want.
(If this is not the set up for a personal growth arc in which Terra learns to not-hate-her-body and that she is worth loving regardless, and the creators really think plus sized folks just hate themselves as a constant state of being, I'mma be so unbelievably pissed off.)
She wasn’t going to hunt for her annoying brother.
Hold up, Terra has a brother?
FIRE
I still needed a breather. “Where can I go that’s the opposite of this? What’s outside?”
Cute Guy looked alarmed. “Past the Barrier? Depending on the rumors, bears or wolves or something much scarier.”
Did you not hear about the dead body? The very mutilated dead body? Sky, buddy? You're not going to bring up the very murdered and mutilated dead body in order to prevent the new girl from a foreign world (that you want to bang) from going into actual and legitimate danger?
No?
I thought about Stella saying once she knew me, she’d find something to love about me.
It made me smile.
Bloom is gay for Stella count: 03
As if I’d conjured her by thinking about her, Stella’s voice rang out. “Hey, Sky. Can we talk?”
Stella was wearing her flawless new outfit and holding two drinks. Every twinkly light in the courtyard caught gold in her hair. She was looking right at Cute Guy, whose name was apparently Sky. From Sky’s expression, he knew Stella pretty well.
Yeah, Stella is Diaspro now
EARTH
Oh, for the love of … Riven was menace-flirting at some poor Specialist boy. This was Riven’s typical behavior when he felt off balance. Terra had once witnessed Riven looming at a fern in a way that suggested he either wanted to prune viciously or make out.
I... what???
“Really? Bullying the new kid? Be more obvious.”
Riven smirked, because of course he did. “Can’t bully the willing. Right?”
There was something loaded about Riven’s tone.
“I don’t know what that means!” the new boy said sharply.
The new boy was clearly feeling uncomfortable. Terra sympathized. The poor thing mustn’t take Riven’s terrible personality personally.
Well, someone belongs on a sex offenders registry. What the f*ck Terra, don't excuse this shit, it's not okay.
“But sometimes we’ve had a bad day, and a scrawny little twerp says the wrong thing at the wrong time,” Terra purred. “And all of a sudden, we’re not happy you’re talking to us. And we’re not nice. And most of all, we’re not harmless.”
“purred”, really? You gonna make it sound sensual? Let the girl Snarl! Damnit!
The vines were suffocating him so he couldn’t even talk. It was so nice and peaceful.
Terra smiled sweetly. “What’s that, Riv? I’m sure it’s clever. I just can’t hear you.”
His face turned red. He was about to pass out, Terra noted, still with that feeling of cheery distance. She shouldn’t actually let him faint. Riven would hate that.
Uhhh, so Terra might have psychopathic tendencies and maybe a dissociative disorder.
She shouldn’t actually let him faint. Riven would hate that.
Yeah, and his victim would have hated being assaulted, choke this douche.
Gods above I cannot stress how much I hate this Riven in comparison to OG Riven, and I was not OG Riven's biggest fan.
FIRE
THESE ARE THE SCENES FROM THE TRAILER!!!!!
Bloom continues to be a dumbass.
WATER
Aisha wasn’t used to Alfea, but she was used to being part of a team.
Well someone hasn't watched the show.
How her mother and Bloom had been fighting about her social life, and how Bloom would rather fix old lamps than cheerlead.
Who is this woman, where is Vanessa? And Bloom's art thing? The lamps sounds interesting, but I've never seen sign of it yet, was it cut for time?
“It was almost like the fire had a life of its own,” Bloom went on. “I don’t remember how long I let it burn. I just remember their screams.”
When Bloom finished the story, she was clearly fighting back tears. A subtle, weary tremor went through her frame, like a runner past her endurance. It seemed like Bloom had been fighting for a long time.
“My mom was covered in third-degree burns,” Bloom said. “Because of me. And if I hadn’t gone in there to stop it? To stop what I started?” She looked completely burned out.
“Every night after that, I sneaked out. I was so scared I’d hurt them again that I slept in this creepy-ass warehouse near home. Until Ms. Dowling found me and …”
Given the Tragic Backstory™ , I'm actually a little surprised Bloom didn't straight up run away from home completely, the fact that she went back at all...
“I’ve heard the story of my birth a million times.” Bloom’s tone brooked no argument. “Miracle baby. There was a problem with my heart in the womb, but the day after I was born, it was gone.”
Aisha went cold. “Oh God,” she breathed. “You’re a changeling.”
Because Bloom needs to be even more Special™, this is doing nothing to ruin my theory Bloom is a Burned One, by the way. (Actually starting to think Burned Ones are Fire Fairies whose powers pretty much consumed them or cursed that way or something along those lines.)
So where's the “real” Bloom Peters? Was the fetus even real, or just a simulacrum to have something to switch MC Bloom with?
MIND
Stella’s tone gave Musa pause. Plus, Musa could tell Aisha was really upset. Deliberately, she let her powers turn on, and faced Stella with her eyes glowing.
I'm sorry, I thought Musa couldn't control her powers and that’s why she “has to wear her headphones at all times to block out the noise of other peoples emotions”, now she can 'deliberately turn them on'? When did this happen? Did I miss some Implications?
“You’re a Mind Fairy,” Aisha observed, but there was no other judgment.
Aisha turned to Stella just as Terra came out of her and Musa’s room.
“A Mind Fairy?” Terra repeated sharply. “What’s your connection? Memories, thoughts—”
Okay, so now we learn there are different types of mind fairies. Explain to me why Musa is an Empath with Synthetic input? ('hearing' feelings, or experiencing them in a way that registers as audio.) Is this a “Song of their Hearts” reference, because I don't feel like that was done on purpose if it is.
Only Terra was moving toward Stella, and the way she moved wasn’t Terra’s usual going-nowhere happy bustle. The way Terra moved was that of a woman on the warpath.
Musa was almost impressed.
“She was talking to Sky, wasn’t she?” Terra demanded.
“And?” Stella demanded haughtily in return.
Terra pursued: “And I know what happened to the last person who talked to Sky. I was here last year, remember?”
A crack appeared in Stella’s veneer as she shot back, “You don’t know the full story!”
Didn’t seem like Terra cared. “Ricki was your best friend, then she talked to Sky. Now she’s not here anymore. Why is that again?”
Yeah, definitely getting the feeling DiaStella isn't being held back for a Pursuit of Pink Potions accident.
FIRE
There was even more rustling than usual in the detritus piled in the warehouse corners, but I didn’t care.
Why teleport there? Is there a Rule about where Portals can go? Or is is just Because Bloom felt this was the best place to pop in?
“You don’t have to be okay,” Mom assured me. “You’re only sixteen. Being that far away is a huge deal.”
Dad said gently, “I couldn’t have done it when I was your age. Be thankful you got your mom’s bravery.”
But now I knew that wasn’t true. I didn’t get anything from my mom. No wonder I was always such a disappointment to her.
Osmosis [noun] Def. 2. the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc..
You have some damn decent parents by the sounds of this scene, even if your mother is sure you're a likeable human being who will have friends one day, why are you this way?! For the Angst points?!
Only I could see Mom through the kitchen window. She didn’t seem disappointed. She looked so happy just to be talking to me. How could I ever tell her what I did to her? How could I ever tell her what I was?
Okay, so this line is bringing back the “they deserve to know what I am” line from the trailer, and now I'm torn between “The Winx deserve to know Bloom is a Burned One” and “my parents deserve to know I'm a Magical Fire Fairy (who burned down our house) and maybe a Changeling and thus not their biological daughter technically, maybe.”
My parents told me they loved me. I knew I loved them. And I knew I didn’t belong here. Maybe I never had.
May I advise you: remove your angst blanket, turn on a light and clean the room to remove the Dark and Gritty filters of your life.
I heard faint whispers. Sibilant. Strange.
Sibilant means hissing by the way. In case anyone was wondering.
The monster was on the grate above me.
I crawled as fast as I could. The ring was on the other side of the mesh, but there was a hole just big enough for my hand to get through. I reached for the ring, almost had it.
But in the crawl space in front of me, past the barrier, the shadow of the creature passed on top of the grate. The monster bashed frantically at the grate. Once. Twice. Until with a ringing metallic crash, the monster fell into the claustrophobic space with me.
I made one last grab for the ring, but the monster slammed its hand down on it.
Oh man, if only telekinesis was one of the most basic of Fairy abilities Bloom might have been able to do something, but no, it's basic bitch elements or nothing.
SPECIALIST
I really freaking hate this version of Sky, just, so much.
Terra has her suspicions about the Stella-Sky dynamic and she just, 'oh they's in love at first sigh nothing could possibly go wrong here' hand the number over? Really?
Diaspro!Stella confirmed?
#fate the winx saga#fate saga#winx#winx club#it's bitch o'clock#fate the winx saga book sneak peak reaction
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Avatar Comics Good Reads Ratings - Troubling Trends
Good Reads is a website where members can rate and review books such as Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and even the Avatar comics by Dark Horse. Good Reads says they have about 90 million registered members.
I was curious about what the results would show for the Avatar comics by Dark Horse, so I took the quantity of ratings for each installment and converted them into graphs. The quantity of ratings denotes how popular a work is on Good Reads, not necessarily its quality.
For example, Harry Potter #1 has over 6.5 million Ratings whereas The Martian ‘only’ has 750,000. That doesn’t tell you how ‘good’ either book is, just that one is more ‘popular’ than the other. Both are very different stories.
Here are the Good Reads ratings for all the Dark Horse Avatar comics (excluding Imbalance):
Assuming this data represents the fandom’s popular reception to these works (i.e. how many liked them enough to spend money), here are some interesting takeaways:
Most follow-on works don’t do as well as the first installment but The Search had more ratings for its Part 1 than The Promise’s Part 1. However, The Search also saw a much, much steeper drop in ratings than The Promise. The Promise actually held its readers pretty well until Part 3.
Half as many fans returned for The Rift than The Search but The Rift also saw a precipitous collapse in readers similar to The Search. The Rift maintaining half of The Promise’s initial readers is actually over-performing, as you will see.
Usually, you expect a ‘sequel’ to receive 2/5th as many readers as the first installment’s peak. This can be illustrated by taking Harry Potters and The Hunger Games’ Goods Reads ratings and comparing their first installment numbers to the follow-on works.
You can see how, for even cultural phenomena, the sequels never do as well as the first. This isn’t always the case but it’s a near universal trend.
Another trend is also visible: a popular work holding its readers after the first installment.
This is illustrated by a similar bar graph for Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. It held its readers well over its run until eventually running out of steam like all series do. I’m using Mistborn as an example because it doesn’t have the ‘cultural baggage’ of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games that could potentially throw things off for those titans of contemporary literature.
You can see Mistborn held fans very well after the first installment, much better than even Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, with the 2nd and 3rd installments maintaining their popularity almost exactly. It wasn’t until Mistborn #4 that there was another drop, but even then the readers who remained mostly stayed for #5 and #6.
What do the The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and Mistborn have in common? They held their readers.
This can be further illustrated if you graph the Good Reads ratings as percentages relative to the first installments. In other words, if the first installment’s peak represents 100% of the popularity, then the next installment is 75% and the next is 50% and so on.
You can see the 2/5th drop I mentioned earlier. While Harry Potter and The Hunger Games saw big drops compared to their first installments, Mistborn didn’t reach the 2/5th drop until Book #4 and only saw a steady decline over the lifetime of the series. However, both The Hunger Games and Harry Potter maintained their followings more consistently after the first book’s drop while Mistborn held its Book #1 readers much better overall.
Converting these bar graphs to lines, you get the following ‘slopes’:
As you can see, rapid drops for The Hunger Games and Harry Potter followed by steady-state readership, while a steady decline for Mistborn with periods of steady-state readership for Books #2 and #3, and Books #5 and #6.
So what does this say about the Avatar comics? Taking the total ratings for each Avatar installment, averaging them, and adding them to the above graph, you see that the Avatar comics never held its readers until the very end, but by that point, the total readership was a mere fraction of the The Promise/Search high.
This graph is actually misleading for the Avatar comics.
Since each installment was broken up into three separate volumes, and published at different times, readers were able to ‘opt out’ of an installment if they wanted. This means turning each installment into an ‘average’ artificially props-up them up since the first parts of The Search and The Rift over-preformed compared to their second and third parts.
It’s really the first bar graph at the beginning of this article that tells the story.
I’ve added the 2/5th line to the first graph as shown below:
From this graph, with the 2/5th line added, you can see the vast under-performance of the second and third volumes of the The Search onward.
Why did this happen?
Why did the Avatar comics, when Avatar had a massive built-in fan base, never hold its readers until the end? Why did it only get in the range of 22,000 ratings for a peak when Mistborn #1 has over 360,000? Remember that the Avatar finale received over a 5.5 million viewers. Mistborn doesn’t even have a television show!
Here’s why I think this happened:
First, Avatar is supposed to be animated and epic. When fans learned that the Gaang+Zuko & Azula were continuing in mere ‘graphic novels’, especially ones that looked ‘kiddie’ in nature, they probably thought, “Really? That’s lame!” and were disappointed. No matter how well-written or mature these graphic novels were, they’d never have the same exposure as the animated spectacle; 73 pages per book for an 8-11 year old audience is simply not enough.
Secondly, the premises of both The Promise and The Search appealed to the general fan base. That’s why the ratings for both Parts 1’s are basically the same. The premise of The Promise is that it is the next story of Team Avatar. Of course that’s going to draw fans!
The premise of The Search, on the other hand, gets into the loose-threads of the franchise, namely the Zuko-Azula-Ursa family drama triangle. Both of these premises are rather distinct from one another and, technically, could have been completely separate story lines (the Gaang gets a dedicated plot line, the Fire Nation royal family gets another). This is why both had near the same amount of readers for both Part 1′s: they were addressing topics the general fan base already wanted.
However, once readers ‘got inside’ these books, in particular The Search and The Rift, they opted out and became apathetic. This apathy is why Smoke and Shadow and North and South tanked... Hard.
Even though Smoke and Shadow was supposed to continue the Fire Nation royal family triangle, Smoke and Shadow’s Part 1 rating is only 11% of The Search’s Part 1.
Yikes!
Even Mistborn #6′s ratings was 20% that of Mistborn #1, and Azula and Ursa’s relationship hadn’t even been resolved!
The specific reasons for why the comics hemorrhaged readers is anybody’s mystery. Certainly plenty has been written about it. Much can be said about the poor writing, half-baked plots, bad characterization, childish tone, etc.
What I hope these graphs give you is an idea of the ‘numbers’ behind fiction, and in particular, Avatar’s current Post-Finale comics. We don’t know what the true purpose of the comics was (Make money? Keep the fandom alive? Keep the copyright relevant? Drive away its teenage/young adult fan base?), but it’s clear they didn’t appeal to Avatar’s fan base as they should have.
Whether you like the comics or hate them, one thing is clear: they should have been a lot better.
As an aside, take a look at Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese Good Reads ratings compared to the performance of the Avatar comics. American Born Chinese is what allowed Gene Yang to be taken seriously for the Avatar comics. Also keep in mind that Avatar had a built-in fan base.
And if you compare American Born Chinese’s Google Trends results to Avatar: The Last Airbender’s, you get the following graph:
In the words of Charlie Brown: good grief.
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If someone were to tell you that major and influential business sectors like the fossil fuel and health insurance industries simply don’t exist, or imply that major corporations like ExxonMobil and Cigna don’t try to manipulate public opinion and advance a political agenda in order to protect and maximize their profits, you might find it hard to contain your laughter.
But looking at corporate media’s coverage of corporate media, one gets the sense that anyone who dares to suggest that media corporations like Comcast-owned MSNBC, AT&T-owned CNN or News Corp–owned Fox News have their own commercial interests—which incentivize them to push pro-corporate politics—are kooky “conspiracy theorists.”
That’s really strange. After all, there are plenty of reports from corporate media discussing how major oil and health insurance companies spend fortunes to propagandize Americans into believing that a single-payer healthcare system would be disastrous, or that the climate crisis really isn’t that serious, despite all evidence to the contrary (FAIR.org, 1/24/20, 1/31/20). There are whistleblowers like former Cigna PR executive Wendell Potter who revealed how he, along with other paid corporate propagandists, cultivated “contacts and relationships among journalists and other media gatekeepers,” and learned from the tobacco industry’s “groundbreaking work in stealth PR” in order to develop talking points and advance a political agenda to protect industry profits.
So why exactly should we trust for-profit media outlets to be impartial and have their news coverage untainted by their own business interests?
Throughout the 2020 election cycle, FAIR (7/17/19, 8/21/19, 1/30/20, 4/7/20) has documented how corporate media have been trying to play kingmaker by aggressively pushing centrist and right-wing Democratic presidential candidates like Joe Biden onto the electorate, while assailing progressives like Bernie Sanders as “unelectable.” Now that Sanders has dropped out of the race, it’s worth examining the role propagandistic and hostile media coverage played throughout the primary in determining the outcome.
Analyzing the paradoxical phenomenon of the sizable “Socialists for Biden” voting bloc, FAIR’s founder Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 3/16/20) noted that although continuous exit polls confirm that most voters agree with Sanders ideologically, many nevertheless voted for Biden, because they perceived him to be a more “electable” candidate against Donald Trump.
Although several people have debunked the myth of “low” youth voter turnout in this election cycle (FAIR.org, 2/26/20; Films for Action, 3/5/20; Atlantic, 3/17/20), it’s true that older voters turned out in massive numbers to support Biden. On Twitter (3/14/20), journalist Malaika Jabali attributed the “generational divide” in voting behavior to an “information divide,” and argued that many older voters don’t suffer from a lack of information, so much as too much information from different sources compared to younger voters.
That influential media outlets like CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the New York Times and Washington Post continue to exercise a formidable class-control function on behalf of their owners and advertisers seems to be borne out by data confirming Jabali’s analysis.
Pew Research (12/10/18) found that although social media has become a more popular source for news, television still retains supremacy, with 49% of US adults receiving news most often from TV. Whereas young adults aged 18 to 29 receive 36% of their news from social media and 16% from TV, older voters aged 50–64 receive 65% of their news from TV and only 14% from social media, and voters older than 65 receive a whopping 81% of their news from TV and a mere 8% from social media.
Pew (9/26/19) also documented a striking partisan divide on Americans’ trust in the media, with 69% of Democrats having a “great” or “fair” amount of trust in the media, compared to only 15% of Republicans.
Other media studies of cable news like CNN and MSNBC confirmed their pivotal role as an anti-Sanders attack machine (FAIR.org, 1/30/20). According to the Norman Lear Center (5/19), self-identified liberals watch MSNBC at three times the rate of moderates and ten times the rate of conservative viewers. Branko Marcetic (In These Times, 11/13/19) documented that MSNBC’s August–September 2019 coverage of the Democratic primary not only emphasized electability over policy issues, but also talked about Biden three times as often as Sanders, who had fewer negative mentions (11%) compared to Sanders (21%). Another survey by In These Times (3/9/20) of CNN’s coverage of the 24 hours after Sanders and Biden’s massive wins in Nevada and South Carolina found that Sanders received three times more negative coverage than Biden, despite winning by similar margins.
Given Sanders’ massive advantages over Biden when it came to campaign staff and volunteers, organizational and online presence, ad buys as well as money in Super Tuesday states, it’s clear that the media blitz following Biden’s South Carolina win played a decisive role in propelling him to victory in states he didn’t even campaign in (New York Times, 2/26/20).
Yet, in what is truly a collective galaxy-brain level take, corporate media appeared to deny their own existence and how the profit motive compromised their coverage throughout the primary.
Whenever corporate media discuss themselves, they frequently use scare quotes around the term “corporate media” (e.g., Washington Post, 10/24/19; Politico, 8/13/19), as if the term is referring to a nonexistent entity or a figment of their audience’s imagination. This is in stark contrast to their alarmist attitude towards foreign state media outlets like RT and Xinhua, which are frequently referred to as “propaganda” and “state media”—no quotation marks required (New York Times, 3/8/17, 2/18/20).
Yet when they weren’t suggesting they were imaginary, corporate media were also fully capable on occasion of discussing their enormous impact on the race. Vanity Fair’s “Joe Biden, Revenant, Was an Irresistible Media Story—and It Helped Win Him Super Tuesday” (3/5/20) described how Biden campaign aides were gloating to CNN about riding their “earned-media tsunami” to victory in Super Tuesday—referring to coverage that wasn’t paid for following Biden’s South Carolina win—and estimated to be worth at least $72 million during those crucial days.
Despite noting that Sanders actually had more free coverage ($156 million) during this time period from the same “‘corporate media’” which had “written him off” earlier, Vanity Fair argued that media narratives trump any other factor (including money), with Sanders’ narrative being largely negative in contrast to Biden’s:
In recent days Biden has basked in mostly positive coverage, with TV pundits citing his South Carolina victory in arriving at a consensus narrative: Biden, despite poor showings in all of the early-primary states, is the comeback candidate peaking at the perfect moment…. Following Biden’s Saturday blowout, the media narrative shifted from Sanders being the momentum candidate to questions about whether his campaign was constrained by a ceiling due to his poor South Carolina performance, particularly with black voters, the most consistent Democratic voting bloc.
Corporate media frequently noted how Sanders has been their most frequent critic when he was on the campaign trail, and even when they grudgingly admitted its validity at times, they treated Sanders’ media criticism as an ideological perspective on the media, rather an uncontroversial description. Politico (8/13/19) wrote that “Sanders has long accused the ‘corporate media’ of putting the interests of the elite above those of the majority of Americans.” Vanity Fair (2/18/20) wrote: “Sanders has long contended that the agenda of ‘corporate media’ doesn’t necessarily reflect the people’s needs, and his 2020 campaign has doubled as a rolling media criticism shop.” The New York Times (3/5/20) also gaslit readers by attributing critique of the “‘corporate media,’” and MSNBC’s hosts for pushing an “‘establishment’” perspective, merely to Sanders and the “activist left,” as if their critique were only a sectarian complaint.
The Washington Post’s media critic Erik Wemple (10/24/19) mocked Sanders’ critique of the “‘corporate media,’” implying that Sanders hasn’t “done enough research” to “tease out tendencies,” despite writing that “attacking the ‘corporate media’ is good politics for Sanders, and his critiques sometimes land with heft and reason.” Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (2/12/20) glancingly acknowledged media hostility towards Sanders when she observed that Sanders kept dissing “what he calls the corporate media,” and that his “ardent followers bond with him and with one another by despising the mainstream media, often enough with good reason”—yet she failed to explain this hostility in structural terms regarding media ownership and commercial interests. In the Post’s “Bernie Sanders’s Bogus Media Beef,” Aaron Blake (8/14/19) cited executive editor Marty Baron dismissing Sanders’ claims as a “conspiracy theory,” while the Post’s Paul Waldman (8/14/19) dismissed Sanders’ media criticism as “something in common with pretty much every candidate,” and breathtakingly asserted that “ideological bias is usually the least important.”
Waldman’s assessment isn’t shared by FAIR (Extra!, 10/89), or by Politico’s founding editor John Harris (11/7/19), who admitted that “the pervasive force shaping coverage of Washington and elections is what might be thought of as centrist bias, flowing from reporters and sources alike.”
Another approach to dismissing structural media criticism has been to portray Sanders and Trump’s media criticisms as equally wacky conspiracy theories (FAIR.org, 1/24/20). CNN’s Chris Cillizza (8/13/19) asserted that Sanders’ critique of the Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post’s coverage is “absolutely no different than what Trump does.” Politico’s John Harris (2/13/20) bemoaned the “dilution of mainstream media’s institutional power” and pined for the days where editors at “major news institutions possessed enormous power” to “summon sustained national attention on subjects they deemed important” with their story selection and framing, while denouncing Sanders for following the “Trump precedent” in “taking flight from public accountability.”
When corporate media didn’t dismiss their bias against him, they sunnily described how Sanders didn’t seem to need fairer coverage from corporate media—and cable news in particular—because nonprofit media outlets, with considerably less resources and reach, are increasingly picking up the slack. Citing the “formidable” influence of “alternative media,” the Los Angeles Times (12/12/19) argued that “coverage in what Sanders likes to disparage as the ‘corporate media’ may matter less to him than to any of his rivals because of the benefit he derives from a surging alternative media ecosystem.” The New Republic (2/12/20, 2/28/20) acknowledged MSNBC’s hostile posture towards Sanders, yet also failed to explain that bias in terms of corporate interests, while arguing that Sanders’ campaign strategy of relying on an alternative media infrastructure to run “against the ‘corporate media’” and “withstand attacks from mainstream networks” has “worked wonders.”
Strikingly, in all these reports, corporate media either misrepresented Sanders’ proposed solutions to corporate media bias or omitted them altogether. Vermont journalist Paul Heintz (Washington Post, 2/26/19), for example, chided Sanders for not understanding what a “free press” does, and claimed that Sanders’ remedy for corporate media is merely “uncritical, stenographic coverage of his agenda.”
In fact, Sanders’ op-ed in the Columbia Journalism Review (8/26/19) echoed many of FAIR’s criticisms of corporate media and proposed solutions:
Today, after decades of consolidation and deregulation, just a small handful of companies control almost everything you watch, read and download. Given that reality, we should not want even more of the free press to be put under the control of a handful of corporations and “benevolent” billionaires who can use their media empires to punish their critics and shield themselves from scrutiny….
In my administration, we are going to institute an immediate moratorium on approving mergers of major media corporations until we can better understand the true effect these transactions have on our democracy…. We must also explore new ways to empower media organizations to collectively bargain with these tech monopolies, and we should consider taxing targeted ads and using the revenue to fund nonprofit civic-minded media.
Setting aside the interlocking commercial interests mass media corporations share with other industries and advertisers funding their coverage (FAIR.org, 8/1/17), just as one can expect the healthcare and fossil fuel industries to launch propaganda campaigns to protect their profits (Intercept, 11/20/18; Guardian, 10/23/19), one can reliably predict these same media corporations to oppose any political agenda that harms their own profitability. Given Sanders’ opposition to future mergers and corporate consolidation of mass media giants, proposals to wield antitrust legislation against Google and Facebook, and levying new taxes to fund nonprofit media outlets, is it any surprise that for-profit news sources opposed his candidacy (Politico, 8/28/19)?
Perhaps future media criticism might sound less “conspiratorial” if we simply referred to outlets like MSNBC as “Comcast,” CNN as “AT&T” and the Washington Post as “Jeff Bezos” instead. When one understands corporate media as an industry in themselves, decisions to have a centrist bias to maximize profits by appealing to liberals and conservatives alike, or creating “information silos” to sell the news as a commodity to target demographics, make a lot more sense. And when we understand the news industry as a top-down institution, beholden to stockholders like all other corporations, we can stop blaming journalists for bad coverage, and start blaming executives like Les Moonves and Tony Maddox for doing things like gifting billions of dollars in free coverage for Trump (FAIR.org, 3/31/20, 4/13/20).
Then maybe claiming that corporate media outlets like MSNBC and CNN are hostile to left-wing political agendas will be considered just as obvious as saying that ExxonMobil and Cigna are opposed to climate action and universal healthcare.
#joe biden#bernie sanders#whistleblower#propaganda#fake news#media criticism#capitalism#late stage capitalism#conspiracy theory#conspiracy#teorias da conspiração#mass media#presidential primary#democratic debate#democrats#democratic candidates#democratic establishment#democratic politics#2020 presidential race#2020 election#jeff bezos#trump#les moonves#tony maddox#universal healthcare#medicare for all
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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Everyone Lives AU
Table of Contents
beta’s by @ageofzero, @magic713m, @ccboomer, @somebodyswatson and Aubs
Chapter Fourteen
Felix Felicis
Herbology was an excellent class to talk in, given the noisy nature of practical work. On their long walk down to the greenhouse Tuesday morning, Harry told Ron, Neville, and Hermione what he’d learned from Dumbledore in his lesson the previous evening.
Neville shivered in the cold morning mist. “I’m glad he didn’t go to school with us. He sounds awful.”
“Yeah, it’s a scary thought,” Ron said, and pushed the door open for everyone. “The Boy You-Know-Who.” He shook his head and accepted the set of protective gloves from Hermione. “But I still don’t get why Dumbledore’s showing you all this. I mean, it’s really interesting and everything, but what’s the point?”
Hermione pulled her thick hair back from her face. “I think it’s fascinating,” she said. “It makes absolute sense to know as much about Voldemort as possible. How else will you find out his weaknesses?”
Neville pulled a pair of protective goggles on and headed straight for one of the Snargaluff stumps. Harry watched as what had looked to be a half-rotted stump sprang to life. Thick, thorny vines erupted from its center, doing their best to beat Neville back and prevent him from retrieving the pods buried beneath the roots.
Harry took some time adjusting his goggles. “How was Slughorn’s party?” he asked.
“Oh, it was quite fun, really,” she said, with a tone that surprised Harry. He’d spent so long mocking the suppers with Ron and Ginny during his conveniently scheduled Quidditch practices, that he had assumed Hermione had been miserable at them, but he supposed he and Ron had just pretended that she hated the dinners for so long, they’d believed it must be true.
“I mean, he drones on about famous ex-pupils a bit,” she added, “and he absolutely fawns on McLaggen because he’s so well-connected, but he gave us some really nice food, and he introduced us to Gwenog Jones.”
“Gwenog Jones?” Ron spluttered. “The Gwenog Jones? Captain of the Holyhead Harpies?”
“She’s Ginny’s favorite,” Harry said, surprised both by Hermione meeting such a popular Quidditch star and by this strange fact that had leapt unbidden to his tongue.
“Yes, that Gwenog Jones,” Hermione said, and gave Harry a curious look. “Ginny was quite shocked to meet her. Though McLaggen did put a damper on her enthusiasm. Personally, I thought she was a bit full of herself — Jones, I mean, not Ginny —”
Before Harry could ask what McLaggen did this time, other than be himself, Professor Sprout came by their table and urged them to get started. Neville had already retrieved a pod all on his own. It was impossible to discuss who someone’s favorite Quidditch player was and why that information was pertinent when a Snargaluff stump was busy protecting its pods with thick whips and constricting roots.
Hermione was the one who reached her hand into the center of the stump while Ron and Harry held back the vines. She triumphantly emerged with a glowing, pulsating pod about as big as a fist. Once she’d pulled the pod free, the vines retreated into the stump and it once again appeared to be an innocent piece of dying tree.
“Don’t be squeamish!” Professor Sprout said. “Squeeze it out; they’re best when they’re fresh.”
Hermione, with a look of disgust, dropped the pod into the bowl Harry passed her. She did not look like she had any interest in squeezing pus from the pod, protective gloves or not. She passed the bowl to Ron and said, “Anyway, Slughorn’s going to have a Christmas party, Harry, and there’s no way you’ll be able to wriggle out of this one because he actually asked me to check your free evenings so he could be sure to have it on a night you can come.”
Harry groaned, and Ron, who had been attempting to squeeze the tube’s juices out by pressing down on it, stood and used his entire weight to push on the pod in the bowl.
“And this is another party just for Slughorn’s favorites, is it?” he said, though he was looking down at the pod when he did, and it was possible the frustration on his face was at the pod’s resistance to being squeezed. Possible, but not probable.
“Just for the Slug Club, yes,” said Hermione.
The pod slipped out from Ron’s hands after a particularly violent push. It flew across the green house, smacking into the glass ceiling with an unattractive squelch and plopping down onto Professor Sprout’s hat. Harry hurried to retrieve it.
When he returned, Hermione was saying, “Look, I didn’t make up the name ‘Slug Club’ —”
“Slug Club — It’s pathetic!” Ron’s disgusted face could no longer be blamed on the pod, because Harry was now the one holding it. Ron’s hands were tightened into fists on the table and his face was slowly turning red. “Well, I hope you enjoy your party. Why don’t you try hooking up with McLaggen, then Slughorn can make you King and Queen Slug —”
“We’re allowed to bring guests,” Hermione snapped, “and I was going to ask you to come, but if you think it’s that stupid then I won’t bother!”
Harry knew Hermione well enough to know from the rough edge in her voice that if he looked up, he would see tears in the corner of her eyes. As it was, he had absolutely no desire to look up, and instead looked back over his shoulder to see if Neville could provide him with an escape from this, but Neville was showing Professor Sprout the jar full of pus he had already collected.
So instead, Harry banged the pod against the bowl as loudly as he could manage, but it was not loud enough to drown out Ron and Hermione’s conversation.
“You were going to ask me?” Ron said, and he no longer sounded like he found Snargaluff pods and the Slug Club equally disgusting. It was a surprisingly soft voice for Ronald Weasley.
Hermione, though, was still furious. “Yes. But obviously if you’d rather I hooked up with McLaggen —”
Harry grabbed a trowel and beat the pod with the flat side of it. The slaps and squelches did not cover Ron’s very soft, very gentle answer.
“No, I wouldn’t.”
Harry missed the pod and the bowl shattered beneath the trowel with a loud crash. He repaired it quickly, but the crash had reminded Ron and Hermione where they were and who they were with. Hermione hastily dug through her bag for her textbook, intent on hiding her face from everyone for a moment. Ron gave Harry a slightly apologetic smile, but he seemed pleased with himself. Harry didn’t blame him. He wondered if this was finally going to be the end of Ron and Hermione’s bickering and he could finally have some peace.
“Hand that trowel over, Harry,” Hermione said as she ran her finger over a page of Flesh-Eating Trees of the World. “It says we’re supposed to puncture them with something sharp.”
Harry handed over the trowel and pod and eagerly dove back into the stump for another pod.
He thought perhaps this might be the beginning of a new chapter for Ron and Hermione, but he observed no identifiable changes between them over the next few days. They were more polite to each other, at the least. But there were no whispered conversations, nor solitary walks like Harry might’ve expected from his friends, like Harry remembered from his brief relationship with Cho Chang. But perhaps it was better as it was, considering the way he and Cho had gone. Perhaps Ron and Hermione simply being friendly again was what they needed. Hadn’t he learned from watching his parents that friends made the best partners? But he’d also learned the opposite watching Remus and Sirius.
Only time would tell. Harry didn’t care to play matchmaker between his friends; instead he had a Quidditch team to sort out.
As Halloween passed, and the Slytherin game came ever closer, Harry reluctantly admitted he would need to replace Katie Bell. She was still being treated at St. Mungo’s, and there was little chance she would be recovered in time for the match. Even if she was, she hadn’t been training with the team, and he needed time to make sure his Chasers flew well together. And as Harry had no interest in wasting another Saturday with the circus of tryouts, he knew he would have to ask someone to fill in as Katie’s alternate.
The next best flyer from tryouts had been Dean Thomas, a choice that Harry made reluctantly for several reasons. Least of which, Dean and Seamus were both good friends, and choosing one over the other would upset Seamus. But Harry swallowed down this fear, cornered Dean after Transfiguration class, and offered him the position.
Another reason Harry had wished for a choice other than Dean was the way other Gryffindors whispered about his choices. Granted, Harry had a good deal of experience with Hogwarts spreading rumors about him and whispering behind his back. As irritating as it was to have his housemates annoyed that he had chosen some of his closest friends for the Quidditch team, it was nothing compared to people thinking he was the heir of Slytherin, or that he was half-mad and cared about nothing but his own fame.
There were other reasons Harry disliked having to choose Dean Thomas, but he didn’t dwell on those. Instead, he comforted himself with how well they flew at their first practice together. Dean, Ginny, and Demelza were as synchronized as Katie, Angelina, and Alicia had been. They passed the Quaffle with practiced ease, like they had been doing it for years. Harry knew that his Chasers had what it took to crush Slytherin. His Beaters, too, were getting better with each practice. Jimmy Peakes and Ritchie Coote were not natural flyers, not the way Fred and George had been, but they had enthusiasm and took correction well.
It was Ron who was proving troublesome. His confidence was flagging, and it seemed to get worse daily.
Harry knew if he did not win this match against Slytherin, he would go down as one of Gryffindor’s worst captains who had ruined the team’s winning streak by choosing only his friends for the team. The trouble was, he did not know how to boost Ron’s confidence. Harry had not witnessed the game in which, by some miracle, Ron had saved every goal and Ginny had snatched the Snitch from under Cho Chang’s nose. He did not know what Ron needed to calm his nerves before their match against Slytherin in just two weeks.
After a particularly awful play, in which Ron punched Demelza Robbins in the face and broke her nose, and Ginny hit Ron with the Quaffle as often as she scored — Harry was certain that it was intentional, but he had no way to prove it — and Peakes caught Harry with a nasty Bludger to the shoulder, Harry called an end to practice an hour early.
Ginny stormed off to change without a word to even Dean, which Harry found both pleasing and unsettling. He wanted to run after to check on her, but Dean was already on it. Harry decided as Captain, he ought to focus on Demelza and Ron.
Fixing Demelza’s broken nose was easy enough with all the practice Harry had received over the summer; Ron’s ego was an entirely different matter.
“I played like a sack of dragon dung,” Ron said as he touched down. And while it was true, Harry refused to admit it.
“No — not at all.” Thankfully, no one was left on the pitch to refute Harry. “You’re the best Keeper I tried out, Ron. Your only problem is nerves.”
Ron still looked pale as they headed to the changing rooms, so Harry kept the encouragement up as best he could. He reminded Ron of his better saves, of his championship game against Ravenclaw last year, of his perfect tryout score. It helped — at least, Harry thought Ron looked marginally cheered by the time they reached the castle.
They took their usual shortcut up to Gryffindor tower. Harry pulled back the tapestry that hid a staircase and was greeted with a vision that would haunt him for months to come.
Ginny Weasley and Dean Thomas had apparently moved on from whatever sour mood Ginny had been in, because Ginny’s hands were twisted tightly into Dean’s t-shirt, pulling him closer, and his hands were on her hips — no, lower — pulling her against him. Their lips were pressed together just as tightly, parting only for a moment, long enough for Harry to hear a sound from Ginny that burned all other thought from his mind.
“Oi!” Ron shouted.
Harry had hardly heard him, but as Dean and Ginny parted, the hot white anger dampened slightly, just enough for him to process the conversation around him.
“What?” Ginny snapped, though she did not let go of Dean’s t-shirt as she turned to look at Ron.
“I don’t want to find my own sister snogging people in public!”
“This was a deserted corridor till you came butting in!”
Harry considered letting the corridor return to being deserted and doing his best to pretend what he had just witnessed was a nightmare. He also considered doing something outrageous and drastic, like punching Dean Thomas.
Dean, for his part, had let go of Ginny, and seemed to be looking to Harry for sympathy. He even smiled with a little embarrassment but not proper shame on his face. Harry found himself unable to do anything more than stare back, and hope the anger that burned in his stomach was not visible on his face.
“Er… c’mon, Ginny,” Dean said. “Let’s go back to the common room.”
“You go!” Ginny finally let go of Dean only to fold her arms over her chest. “I want a word with my dear brother!”
Dean did not look too upset at being sent away. He was surely familiar enough with Ginny’s temper. Harry was, too, but he had a feeling that if he followed Dean he would do something he would later regret.
“Right.” Ginny tossed her hair over her shoulder with a haughty glare. “Let’s get this straight once and for all, Ronald. It is none of your business who I go out with or what I do with them.”
Ron’s face was as red as Ginny’s. “Yeah, it is! D’you think I want people saying my sister’s a —”
“A what?” Ginny shrieked with a sort of anger Harry had never truly seen on her. She even pulled her wand from her pocket. “A what, exactly? I s’pose you and McLaggan —”
Harry got between Ron and Ginny, though it seemed a dangerous place to be. “You know Ron’s never spoken two words to McLaggan. He doesn’t mean it.”
“Yes — he does!” Her anger did not wane at all with Harry between them; it seemed to increase. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve all said about me. I don’t care.” The heat on her face and the tears that slipped down her cheeks belied her apathy. “Ron’s just jealous that he’s never snogged anyone in his life — just because the best kiss he’s ever had is Auntie Muriel —”
Harry could hear Ron fumbling for his wand and a small, distant part of Harry thought Ron should be better prepared in case of a duel.
“Shut your mouth!” Ron said.
“No, I will not!” Ginny no longer seemed to care that Harry was between them. She grabbed his shoulder and tried to shove him aside.
Harry thought himself particularly stalwart to hold himself there, to not make an attempt to grab her hand, though his stomach twisted with an unbidden electricity.
“I’ve seen you with Phlegm,” Ginny shouted over Harry, unable to get around him, “hoping she’ll kiss you on the cheek every time you see her. It’s pathetic! If you went out and got a bit of snogging done yourself, you wouldn’t mind so much that everyone else does it!”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Ron, now, tried to move around Harry to get to Ginny. Harry put his hand on Ron’s shoulder to hold him back in a way he dared not do with Ginny in this moment.
“Just because I don’t do it in public —” Ron said, but he was cut off by Ginny’s laughter.
“Been kissing Pigwidgeon, have you? Or have you got a picture of Auntie Muriel stashed under your pillow?”
An orange streak flew past Harry and missed Ginny by inches. Harry shoved Ron back into the wall, instinctively, unsure which of them he was trying to protect.
“Harry’s snogged Cho Chang!”
Though he had his back to her, Harry could hear the tears in Ginny’s voice.
“And Hermione’s snogged Viktor Krum!”
Harry wanted so desperately to turn around and say something comforting.
“It’s only you who acts like it’s something disgusting, Ron!”
Harry wondered if he held her, would Ginny feel better? If he let her cry into his arms —
“And that’s because you’ve got about as much experience as a twelve-year-old!”
Ginny stormed down the corridor, towards the common room, and Harry maintained his hold on Ron not just to keep Ron there, but to keep himself from chasing Ginny as well. She would go back and cry on Dean’s shoulder, and there was nothing Harry could do about that.
When Harry was certain neither he nor Ron were going to start a duel the moment they walked into the common room, he let go. They did not move, each absorbed in their own all-consuming anger and frustration. It was not until Mrs. Norris rounded the corner that they felt compelled to hurry up to bed.
They made it up seven flights and passed the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. “Out of the way!” Ron snarled at a small girl, who was clearly out after her years’ curfew. She jumped in fright and dropped a bottle of toadspawn.
Harry vaguely registered the crash of glass on the stone floor, and thought Ron, as a prefect, ought to tell her to get back to the common room, but all thought seemed distant. His mind was elsewhere, wandering hidden corridors with Ginny.
“D’you think Hermione did snog Krum?” Ron asked suddenly.
Harry was stunned by the question, and had to drag his thoughts away from the corridor and back to the present.
“Oh — er…” Though he did not dare give it, Harry knew the answer to Ron’s question. He didn’t think Ron would like the answer anymore than he would like to walk in on Harry snogging Ginny.
Ron, it seemed, interpreted Harry’s nonanswer just fine. “Dilligrout,” he grunted at the portrait of the Fat Lady, who swung open without comment.
They headed straight for bed without a word. As Harry undressed and set the two-way mirror on his bedside table, he considered calling his parents. He had checked in with them after the full moon, and was glad they were alright. Though his father’s pallor had been worrisome, they had both assured him that everything was fine. They’d also promised to be at Harry’s Quidditch match.
Harry didn’t know what he would say to them if he did check in tonight. There was nothing on his mind except Ginny Weasley in the corridor. That was not something he wanted to discuss with his parents. Maybe with Sirius.
The clearest non-Ginny related thought Harry had as he dressed for bed occurred briefly and sharply. He wondered, just for a moment, if what he’d felt when he’d seen Ginny and Dean in that corridor was anything like what Sirius felt about Tonks and Remus. Was that why Sirius had taken a mission so far away for so long?
Harry buried his face into his pillow and hoped that Sirius would come to his Quidditch match. He did not know who else he could talk to, who else would understand. He wondered if he would be able to focus much at Quidditch with his head muddled like this. Though they were nothing like the nightmares he’d had last year, Harry’s dreams were unpleasant and full of furious Rons and Ginny Weasleys, showering him and each other in curses.
Harry found that he preferred dreams of Cho Chang being upset about chocolate frog cards. He spent much of his morning lying in bed, wondering why the fury he felt towards Dean was so much stronger than the frustration he’d felt with Cedric back then.
Harry did not find his answers as the days went on, and Ron’s mood did not improve. Instead, it grew worse, and so did his Quidditch playing.
Off the Quidditch pitch, Ron was predictably rude to Dean, was not speaking with Ginny, and was unusually snide with Hermione. Hermione was bewildered by this treatment, and no amount of peace-keeping on Harry’s part seemed able to resolve the situation. When Hermione warned him against dropping his knarl quills into his potion before stirring, Ron snapped that he knew perfectly well what he was doing, and why didn’t she pay attention to her own potion. Harry, whose book told him that it was better to add the quills while stirring, did not know how to help them.
On the Quidditch pitch, Ron was both unusually aggressive and a terrible Keeper. He and Ginny sniped at each other, and he managed to criticize each player on the team, despite how terribly he himself was playing — or perhaps because of how terribly he was playing. At their last practice before their opening game of the season, Ron went several steps too far, and made Demelza Robbins cry.
“Enough!” Harry finally shouted. The fury in Ginny’s eyes was likely to turn into a Bat-Bogey Hex at any moment, and Jimmy Peakes looked ready to launch the next Bludger into Ron’s face.
“Peakes, pack up the Bludgers. Robbins — pull yourself together. You played really well today. And Ron —” Harry dropped his broom down beside Ron while the others left the pitch. “Listen, Ron — you’re my best mate, but carry on treating the rest of them like this and I’m going to kick you off the team.”
Harry was braced for Ron to hit him, to react out of the anger that had been boiling over all week, but to his surprise, Ron dropped down a few feet, as if it was his anger that was keeping him afloat.
“I resign,” he said. “I’m pathetic.”
This was not the response Harry had hoped for. True, Ron had failed to save a single one of Ginny’s goals, but Harry knew how great a player Ron could be when his heart was in it. Since encouragement hadn’t been working, Harry tried a different tactic.
He grabbed the front of Ron’s robes and pulled him closer. “You can save anything when you’re on form. It’s a mental problem you’ve got!”
“You calling me mental?”
“Yeah, maybe I am!”
For a moment, Harry thought the fight had returned to Ron, but it left just as quickly as it had appeared, and Ron shook his head. “I know you haven’t got any time to find another Keeper, so I’ll play tomorrow, but if we lose, and we will, I’m taking myself off the team.”
Harry tried to imagine the team without Ron. He would have to replace him with Cormac McLaggen. Just the thought of it made Harry’s stomach turn.
But no amount of cajoling or criticizing or cheering would lift Ron’s spirits. Even when they went to dinner, Ron seemed more interested in snapping at Hermione than in any conversation Harry tried to have about Quidditch. Even when Hermione went up to bed early, tired of Ron’s attitude, Ron did not care to hear Harry’s insistence that the team would be devastated if Ron quit. Harry’s words were undercut by the Quidditch team, huddled together and throwing Ron nasty looks. Nothing Harry did worked.
That night, Hary put together a plan. He would not lose tomorrow’s match — he couldn’t. It was his first match back since Umbridge’s ban and his first match as Captain. He could not let down his team nor his house. Also, he was determined to crush Draco Malfoy. He just needed to guarantee that Ron would have a really good day….
The weather that Saturday was perfect for a game. The excitement in the Great Hall was overwhelming. Slytherins booed as the Gryffindor Quidditch players entered the hall for breakfast, and Gryffindor returned the favor. Even Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws were decked out in reds and greens to support their friends in this intensive rivalry game. The entire Gryffindor table and half of the Hufflepuff table cheered as Ron and Harry entered. Harry grinned, used to this treatment, and Ron did his best to smile back, but he looked as pale as he had before his very first match.
“Cheer up, Ron!” Lavender said, passing by the two of them unusually closely. “I know you’ll be brilliant!”
Ron didn’t seem to notice her.
“Tea?” Harry offered as they took a seat. “Coffee? Pumpkin juice?”
“Anything,” Ron said, and took a bite of toast.
Harry waited until Hermione had come downstairs. She’d taken to waiting to join them for meals, and Harry didn’t blame her, given Ron’s attitude. Today, when she approached she gave Ron a wary glance.
“How are you both feeling?” she asked.
“Fine,” Harry said, as cheerily as he could manage. He handed Ron a full glass of pumpkin juice. “There you go, Ron. Drink up.”
Hermione stared as Ron lifted the glass. As he put it to his lips she snapped suddenly, “Don’t drink that, Ron!”
Ron hesitated. “Why not?”
Harry looked up at Hermione with a raised eyebrow. “Yeah, Hermione, why not?”
Hermione stared at Harry in utter disbelief. “You just put something in that drink.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I saw you. You just tipped something into Ron’s drink. You’ve got the bottle in your hand right now!”
Harry tucked the small golden vial into his pocket. “Don’t know what you mean.”
“Ron, I warn you — don’t drink it!”
“Stop bossing me around, Hermione,” Ron grunted, then downed the glass in one big gulp.
Hermione leaned close to Harry and hissed, “You should be expelled for that! I’d never have believed it of you, Harry!”
“Hark who’s talking,” he hissed back. “Confunded anyone lately?”
Hermione frowned. She apparently did not have it in her to take attitude from both Ron and Harry today, but Harry didn’t mind that she stormed off. He only prayed that she would wait until the end of the game to tell a teacher.
As they headed up to the pitch, Ron still looked a little green.
“Lucky the weather’s so good,” Harry offered. There was still a chill in the air, but to have such a clear sky on a Quidditch game day was lucky indeed.
When they got to the changing room, the girls were already in their Quidditch robes. Ginny, as had become her habit, ignored Ron and turned to Harry.
“Conditions look ideal,” she said.
Harry nodded. His tongue had taken to turning into lead when Ginny was around. He found that was probably safer than saying something he might regret.
“And guess what? That Slytherin Chaser Vaisey — he took a bludger to the head yesterday during their practice, and he’s too sore to play! And even better than that — Malfoy’s gone off sick too.”
Harry, midway through pulling his robes over his head, turned to face Ginny. “What? He’s ill? What’s wrong with him?”
“No idea,” she grinned, “but it’s great for us. They’re playing Harper instead; he’s in my year and he’s an idiot.”
Harry finally got the robes over his head and tied off the golden laces. He wondered why Malfoy wasn’t playing. It seemed strange that Malfoy would willingly back out of a Quidditch match against Harry, after so many years of vicious competition. The score between them currently sat at two wins for Harry and one win for Malfoy, though Harry’s second win had been dampened by Umbridge’s declaration that Harry was banned from Quidditch for life. Harry had been certain Malfoy would be looking to settle a score.
“Fishy, isn’t it?” Harry whispered to Ron. “Malfoy not playing?”
“Lucky, I call it,” Ron said. He pulled his gloves on. “And Vaisey off too — he’s their best goal scorer. I didn’t fancy — hey!” Ron froze, helmet half on, and stared at Harry.
“What?”
“I… you… my drink —” Ron dropped his voice and leaned closer to Harry. “My pumpkin juice — you didn’t…?”
Harry, who knew how illegal fixing a Quidditch match with potions could be, said nothing. “We’ll be starting in about five minutes. You’d better get your boots on.”
When they walked out onto the pitch, the crowd shouted an equal measure of cheers and jeers, depending on which half of the stadium they were seated on. Harry waved to the Gryffindor half of the stands and turned to the teacher’s box. He shielded his eyes against the sun and caught sight of his parents, seated near Professor McGonagall, waving at him. He did not see Remus nor Sirius. He was, though, glad his parents weren’t sitting with Hermione. He didn’t want her to say anything that might force him to forfeit the match.
“Captains, shake hands,” Madam Hooch said, pulling Harry out of his worry. He turned to face the Slytherin Captain, Urquhart. They shared a crushing handshake.
“Mount your brooms,” Hooch said. “On the whistle… three… two… one…!”
The frosted grass snapped beneath Harry’s boots as he kicked up and into the air. The Quaffle went upwards, too, and within seconds it was in Urquhart’s hands. Harry, for his part, soared towards the edge of the pitch, where he could keep an eye out for the Snitch, away from the chaos of the match. It also was helpful as Captain to get an eye of his team. His Chasers were right on Urquhart’s tail, flying in perfect sync. It was hard to pull himself away from watching them to keep an eye out for the Snitch, but he forced himself to.
The replacement Slytherin Seeker, Harper, was low to the ground, zipping across the pitch. Harry pulled himself higher, hoping that in the bright, clear day he would see the sunlight reflecting off the tiny Snitch.
“Well, there they go,” the announcer’s voice filled the stadium, “and I think we’re all surprised to see the team that Potter’s put together this year. Many thought, given Ronald Weasley’s patchy performance as Keeper last year, that he might be off the team, but of course, a close personal friendship with the captain does help.”
As the Slytherin side of the stadium reacted to this inciting statement, Harry looked for the commentator’s box. Lee Jordan, who had held the position for Harry’s previous five years on the Quidditch team had finished at Hogwarts last year. Instead, Harry saw an unfortunately familiar, skinny, obnoxious Hufflepuff in the commentator’s box. Zacharias Smith, who had been a member of the D.A., was providing the play-by-play of the match. His criticism of Harry’s leadership abilities, it seemed, extended not just to illegal Defense lessons, but to Quidditch as well.
“Oh, and here comes Slytherin’s first attempt at goal,” Smith said, as Urquhart drew close with the Quaffle. “It’s Urquhart streaking down the pitch and —”
Harry couldn’t watch.
“— Weasley saves it! Well, he’s bound to get lucky sometimes, I suppose.”
Harry grinned, glad to hear Smith playing right into his plan. This game was going to go well. He could feel it.
And it did. As surely as if Ron had taken Felix Felicis, he saved every goal. Gryffindor had not shut Slytherin out in years, but they did it in this game. Ron did it.
And the Chasers played flawlessly. They passed the Quaffle with ease, and the few Bludgers that did get through Coote and Peakes, they took in stride, and did not break formation. Harry had to begrudgingly admit that Dean and Ginny made a good team. Even Zacharias Smith, who could no longer pick on Ron, and could not move onto Ginny, who not only had an excellent Bat-Bogey Hex she was not afraid to use on him, but had scored four of Gryffindor’s six goals, had to admit Harry’s team was doing well.
“Of course, Coote isn’t really built for a Beater,” Zacharias Smith said, deciding that if he couldn’t criticize the Keeper or the Chasers, he may as well start in on the Beaters. “They’ve generally got a bit more muscle.”
Harry zipped past Coote and said, “Hit a Bludger at him!” but Coote just grinned and sent his Bludger sailing at Urquhart, who took the hit soundly, and fumbled the Quaffle. Ginny was there to scoop it up and score as surely as if Urquhart had announced he was passing it to her.
As Ron made another save with just the tips of his fingers, the Gryffindor side of the stadium roared with approval and began a chorus of “Weasley Is Our King.” Ron threw the Quaffle to Demelza Robbins and waved gratefully to the crowd.
“Thinks he’s something special today, does he?” Harper sneered, and rammed against Harry, then darted towards the other side of the pitch.
While Seeker-smashing was not legal, Hooch’s back was turned, so Harry thought he’d take the opportunity to return the favor. He rubbed his shoulder and shot after Harper.
“And I think Harper’s seen the Snitch!” Smith announced. “Yes, he’s certainly seen something Potter hasn’t!”
Harry grunted, unable to comprehend Smith’s stupidity. Had he, too, missed the crash-and-dash, like Hooch? But he saw the glitter of gold ahead and his stomach sank. No, Harry had been too busy watching the game to remember to keep an eye out for the Snitch. Gryffindor was only up a hundred points. If Smith got the Snitch now, the hard work of Harry and his team was all for naught.
Harry accelerated, but he knew he could not catch up with Harper. Harper had too much of a head start. His hit had been intentional, knowing that he couldn’t outdo the Firebolt and Harry’s flying unless Harry got off to a slow start. But Harry was not about to let this be the end — not after Ron had played so well, not after Harry had even let go of his jealousy to let Dean Thomas on the team.
“Oi! Harper!” Harry shouted over the wind. “How much did Malfoy pay you to come on instead of him?”
It was a desperate attempt, a shot in the dark, but it worked with incredible success. As Harper glanced back in shock, the Snitch slid through his fingers. He was unable to bank and turn back around by the time Harry had reached the Snitch. He clutched his gloved hand around it and the whistle that marked the end of the game sounded throughout the stadium.
Two hundred and fifty to zero. It was Gryffindor’s best game since Harry had joined the team. He held the Snitch high above his head as he sank to the ground, cheers abounding from the Gryffindor side of the stadium. Harry grinned up at his parents, who were the loudest cheerers in the professor’s box, right beside the commentator’s box. A streak of red flew past them and into the commentator’s box.
“Miss Weasley!” Professor McGonagall’s voice carried across the pitch.
“Sorry, Professor!” Ginny shouted over her shoulder. She was already heading back down to the pitch, not nearly as bruised as Zacharias Smith had to be. “I forgot to brake!” And then she was landing on the pitch and pulled Harry into a hug. It was a brief victory hug, and she quickly moved on to give Dean a longer hug, but Harry stored the memory of the moment somewhere in the darkest corners of his mind to ruminate on later. Now was not the time. Now was a time for celebration.
He clapped Ron on the shoulder and then the pitch was full of a mob of Gryffindors, all cheering for their team.
“Celebration in the common room!” Seamus shouted at Harry, any bitterness between them long forgotten. Harry grinned and waved in acknowledgement. Several more Gryffindor students, and notably Luna Lovegood with her roaring lion’s hat, shook Ron’s hand and clapped Harry on the shoulder. Finally, Harry and Ron managed to extricate themselves and get to the changing room.
Ginny, Dean, Demelza, Jimmy, and Ritchie had already hurried to change and get to the party, it seemed, so Harry and Ron were alone.
It was just as well, because Hermione forced her way in. Fortunately, Harry and Ron had already pulled on their trousers.
Ron still had his shirt in his hands though, and he hastily pulled it over his head.
“I want a word with you, Harry,” Hermione said, twisting her scarf in her hands. “You shouldn’t have done it. You heard what Slughorn said. It’s illegal.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Ron. “Turn us in?”
“I’ll tell your parents, Harry! You know I will!”
Harry turned around to hang his robes and to hide his smile. “What are you two talking about?”
“You know perfectly well what we’re talking about! You spiked Ron’s pumpkin juice at breakfast! With Felix Felicis!”
Harry pulled on his jacket and turned to face her with a raised eyebrow and a thinly concealed grin. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes you did, Harry! That’s why everything went right. There were Slytherin players missing and Ron saved everything!”
Harry slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out the small, glittering gold vial, wax seal still intact. “I didn’t put it in.” He turned to Ron. “I wanted you to think I’d done it, so I waited until Hermione was looking to fake it. You saved everything because you felt lucky. You did it all yourself.”
Ron blinked as Harry returned the potion to his pocket.
“There really wasn’t anything in my pumpkin juice? But — the weather’s good. And Vaisey couldn’t play. I honestly haven’t been given a lucky potion?”
Harry shook his head. Ron had always been a good player; he had just needed a confidence boost. Harry was glad he had been able to give it to him.
Then Ron rounded on Hermione and Harry felt all his hard work crumble beneath the three of them.
“You added Felix Felicis to Ron’s juice this morning! That’s why he saved everything!” Ron mimicked in a cruelly shrill voice. “See,” he said, “I can save goals without help, Hermione!”
Hermione blinked back tears. “I never said you couldn’t, Ron — You thought you’d been given it, too!”
But Ron was already walking past her, uninterested in her defense. The door to the changing room slammed shut behind him.
Harry searched for words of comfort, unsure why everything had gone so wrong. He’d expected Ron’s success to improve Ron and Hermione’s relationship. He’d thought if Ron got his confidence back, he could go back to the brief politeness that Ron and Hermione had shared.
“Er…” He struggled for something reasonable and came up empty. “Shall we go up to the party, then?”
“Oh, you go!” Hermione wiped a tear from the corner of her eye that threatened to spill out. “I’m sick of Ron at the moment, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done!”
She stormed out after Ron. Harry wished he had words of comfort for her, but he was not sure how to tell her that what she had done was kiss Viktor Krum. It sounded unreasonable, even to him, who had been there to see Ron’s temper.
Harry headed out of the changing room, head down, lost in thought and walked right past his parents.
“Hey — Snitch!”
He looked back to see that his parents had been waiting for him along the path back to the castle. In the wake of everything with Ron, Hermione, and Ginny, he had forgotten how excited he was to see them. That excitement boiled up into a laugh despite his troubles, and he doubled back down the path to hug them both.
“Great game,” James said.
“Better than any your father played,” Lily said, and kissed his forehead.
“That’s unfair; I wasn’t a Seeker! It’s not comparable.” But James was laughing as he protested Lily’s jab.
Harry took a moment to take in his father’s smile. It seemed that there had been so few of them this summer. It was nice to have this moment, to have joy in something simple.
“I missed you at breakfast,” Harry said.
“We tried to get here earlier,” Lily said, “but we were helping Frank and Alice — will you tell Neville they said hello?”
“Sure. Everything alright?”
“It is now,” James said. “We had a run-in with Bellatrix Lestrange and Travers late last night —”
“Early this morning,” Lily corrected.
“Right. Everyone’s fine now, though. Worked out okay. Lestrange got away, but we got Travers. I expect you’ll see it in the papers, and I expect we won’t be mentioned.”
Harry looked his parents over and did not see any additional scars or new wounds. They looked as they always did; they looked even better than they had during the summer holidays.
“Er — no Remus and Sirius?” Harry asked.
“Sirius is still north, I’m afraid,” said Lily. She took Harry’s hand and James’s hand and started up the path. “We haven’t heard from him for a few weeks…”
“But there’s good news,” James said hurriedly. “Remus has agreed to come home and take his potion and he’s got his wand with him, so he can Apparate safely when he needs to. He’ll be home on Monday for his first dose.”
“That is good news,” Harry said, though it did not erase his fears about Sirius.
“Is everything alright with Hermione?” Lily asked. “She looked terribly upset when she passed by.”
Harry told them about Ron’s fight with Ginny. He left out his own jealousy, still afraid to put words to it. He was not yet ready to admit to his parents he liked Ron’s sister, a girl he’d grown up knowing, a girl his parents knew fairly well. He wondered if they knew anyway.
“Ron will grow up,” James said confidently. “And Hermione’ll learn to be more honest with her feelings.”
“How do you know?” Harry asked.
“Because we had to learn that,” Lily said.
“But why do I have to suffer in the middle of it?” Harry grumbled.
James laughed. “Remus, I believe, was stuck between Lily and I. Maybe you can talk to him tomorrow night, if he stays long enough. Somehow, Sirius always seemed to prefer it when we fought.”
“Sirius was just used to us fighting. He understood us better when we were angry with each other than when we got along,” Lily corrected. She squeezed Harry’s hand. “We heard about Katie Bell. Are you doing alright?”
“Me? I’m not the one in St. Mungo’s.”
“Your mum and I read Tonks’ Auror report,” said James. “We know you were there.”
“I’m alright. It was… scary. But I’m fine. You don’t need to worry.”
“And how are lessons?” Lily asked.
“Fine,” Harry said readily, eager for a change in subject. He considered telling them about Dumbledore’s lessons, but decided that there wasn’t time for that conversation. “Snape’s terrible, as usual. It might be the first year I fail Defense.”
“Impossible,” James said. “It’s your best subject. You came along excellently as a duelist this summer.”
“You didn’t teach me nonverbal spells!”
James frowned. “Nonverbals already?”
“I started nonverbals with my fifth years,” Lily said as they reached the castle. “I didn’t expect them to master it, but most professors expect it by sixth year. You’ll get the hang of it, Harry. It’s just focus and practice. I’d say let’s have a practice duel now, but you’ve got a party to attend.”
Harry wondered if the atmosphere of a party would encourage Ron and Hermione to make up. He thought it unlikely.
“What if I didn’t go?”
“You’re the captain!” James protested. “You have to be there.”
Reluctantly, Harry hugged his parents goodbye and trudged upstairs to the Gryffindor common room. He took the long way there, rather than the usual shortcut. It gave him time to sort through his worries about Sirius and the few secrets he had chosen to keep from his parents. It was hypocritical of him, wasn’t it, after so many years of begging them to be honest? They’d shared the truth of why they were late so easily. They’d been honest about where Sirius was, about what was going on with Remus. Surely Harry owed them honesty in return.
There was just a month left until Christmas, Harry told himself as he gave the Fat Lady the password, and he would tell them everything then, when there was time to discuss it all. When there was time to be worried.
A resounding cheer filled the common room as Harry entered. Several people asked him where he’d been and he smiled and gave them non-answers. He didn’t see Hermione anywhere, but it was hard to make out anyone past the Creevey brothers, Colin and Dennis, who demanded a blow-by-blow account of the match. He’d only just managed to get away when a group of fourth-year girls got between him and the drinks table. He remembered Romilda Vane from the train ride, and she was heavily hinting that she wanted to attend Slughorn’s Christmas party with him. He wondered how she’d even heard about it.
He managed to slip away from her and right into Ginny. She sloshed the two drinks in her hands all down the front of hers and Harry’s clothes.
“Sorry —”
“S’alright,” Harry said, and avoided looking at her as he used his wand to Vanish the spill and clean up their clothes. Her cat, Puck, was slipping between her ankles and clawing at her leggings, trying to get at the Pygmy Puff on her shoulder.
“Were you looking for Ron?” she asked, and he finally looked up at her.
“What?”
“He’s over there,” she grinned and pointed, “the filthy hypocrite.”
He followed her finger to a corner of the common room where Ron and Lavender were entangled in each other, snogging at least as passionately as Dean and Ginny had been, but in sight of everyone in the common room, rather than a hidden corridor.
“It looks like he’s eating her face, doesn’t it?” Ginny said casually as she refilled her two drinks. “But I suppose he’s got to refine his technique somehow. Good game, Harry.” She knocked her elbow against his side in congratulations, and even just that small gesture sent Harry’s stomach plummeting.
He looked away as she returned to Dean with their drinks, but knew he could find no solace in Ron, who it seemed would not likely be leaving Lavender soon. He was just about to look for Hermione when he thought he caught her leaving the common room. His stomach sunk again, with a much less pleasant sensation.
Harry barely managed to evade Romilda Vane and the Creevey brothers a second time and hurried into the corridor.
“Hermione?” he called, but the corridor was empty. He tried the nearest unused classroom and found her sitting alone on one of the desks. She had her wand out, and a flurry of yellow canaries circling her head. They’d only just learned the charm in Transfiguration that week, and Harry was impressed she was able to conjure it now, as distraught as she looked.
“Oh — hello, Harry,” she said, and though she smiled at him, her voice cracked. “I was just practicing.”
“Yeah — er — they’re really good.” He wasn’t sure what to say, exactly, but he knew he would rather be here than in the common room at the moment, so he sat on the desk next to her and watched the yellow birds flitting over their heads.
She was quiet for a long moment, so long Harry wondered if perhaps she had not seen Ron and Lavender after all. But then she said, “Ron seems to be enjoying the celebrations,” and a sniff at the end of her statement told Harry all he needed to know without seeing the tears on her cheeks.
“Er… does he?”
“Don’t pretend you didn’t see him. He wasn’t exactly hiding it was he?”
Harry struggled to find an answer, and was saved by perhaps the most unfortunate event. He thought Voldemort intruding on his and Hermione’s private conversation would have been better than Ron throwing open the door and dragging Lavender in by the hand.
“Oh,” he said, which Harry thought particularly ineloquent of him, not that Ron was the most eloquent of his friends.
“Oops.” Lavender giggled, and tried to tug Ron out of the room. It seemed she had nothing more eloquent to say herself, and slipped out of the room. “Come on, Ron,” she called, but Ron seemed rooted in the doorway.
“Hi, Harry,” Ron said, with an uncomfortable and overly friendly smile. “I wondered where you’d got to.”
Harry found himself at as much a loss for words as he had been for Hermione.
Hermione, however, was never at a loss for words. “You shouldn’t keep Lavender waiting outside,” she said, in the same brittle tone she’d greeted Harry with. “She’ll wonder where you’ve gone.”
“Er — Right.” This did not seem to be the response Ron had been prepared for, and he looked relieved that it was nothing worse.
Harry wished it had been something worse. Harry wished Hermione had gotten angry with Ron, then maybe Ron would give up whatever this was with Lavender and things could iron themselves out.
But Ron did not move, and it seemed that Hermione’s temper was only thinly restrained. “Oppugno!” she said, and the flock of yellow canaries that had been circling the room dive-bombed Ron, pecking and scratching, until Ron finally left the room, and they scratched at the door until they disappeared in a puff of yellow feathers.
Hermione choked on a sob. Harry decided words were useless anyway, and wrapped his arm around her.
“I’m sorry, Harry.” She sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “I’m ruining your party.”
“I didn’t want to go anyway,” he admitted.
“Because of Ginny?” She pulled herself out of his arms and he let her pull herself together. He knew Hermione well enough to know that as much as he was trying to comfort her, he was probably embarrassing her more than anything else. She didn’t show her vulnerable feelings to many people.
“And other things,” Harry said.
Something tapped at the glass window panes, and for a moment, Harry thought Hermione had managed to create the canaries again. But when he looked, he saw Hedwig trying to get in.
Harry hurried to let his owl into the classroom. She dropped a scroll into his hand and hooted at him. Harry fished in his pocket for a treat, but came up empty.
“I’ll get you something back in the dormitory.” He rubbed her cheek with his finger, and she bit him irritably, but she didn’t fly off.
“What is it?” Hermione asked, still drying her cheeks with the sleeve of her jumper, and Harry thought she was eager for a distraction.
“It’s a letter,” he said.
“Don’t be stupid.”
Harry broke the seal and unrolled the rather lengthy piece of parchment.
“It’s from Cedric.”
“You’re writing to Cedric Diggory?”
“I told him about my lessons with Dumbledore.”
“Does he know about the prophecy, too?”
“Yeah — it felt right to tell him. He was there for all of it, all the duels with Voldemort, I mean.”
Hermione held her hand out for the letter and Harry, with a mischievous smile, handed her the blank parchment.
She looked at the front and the back and frowned. She dropped it on the table and said, “Specialis Revelio,” but the paper refused to give up its secrets. She frowned, and Harry thought a puzzle was the best distraction he could have offered Hermione. She pointed her wand at the desk and a blue flame ignited on the corner of it.
“Whoa — Hermione —” Harry snatched the letter back from her.
“I wasn’t going to burn it! I thought that heat might reveal the letters!”
“What? Heat?”
“It’s a Muggle trick!”
“Muggles have invisible ink?”
“Yes, they do. I thought you liked James Bond films?”
Harry could not recall invisible ink being used in any of the Bond films Sirius had taken him to see. “Well it’s not Muggle ink. Fred and George had it made for us.”
“Let’s see it then.”
Harry suddenly felt very uncomfortable sharing this secret between him and Cedric, this secret he had not shared with anyone else. But he did not see how he could reasonably tell Hermione that he didn’t want to tell her. So he said the revealing half of the incantation.
“With the Snitch up ahead and the wind in my hair.”
The ink curled out from the center of each word, slowly filling both sides of the parchment with Cedric’s words.
“Oh!” Hermione said. “That’s a helpful charm. Did you and Cedric choose the incantation?”
“Yeah — something we’d both remember.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“Well, I don’t know Hermione, I haven’t read it yet.”
Harry —
I’m sorry I wasn’t able to write sooner. Things haven’t been well at the Ministry. I don’t know exactly what they’re reporting in the Prophet, but if it’s half as bad as things are, it’s a wonder the entire Wizarding World isn’t in a panic. I know they reported on Stan Shunpike’s arrest, whatever good that’s doing. Probably because we’ve let so many others slip through our fingers. I haven’t managed to be involved in much of the action, but I heard Proudfoot and Savage — Aurors — got into a duel with a pair of Death Eaters in Knockturn Alley. They survived, but the Death Eaters got away. A couple of shops in Knockturn Alley decided to close their doors because of it. Williamson and I have been tasked with making sure the people who leave their shops aren’t doing it because they’re being threatened, or worse, they’re missing. And just last night, the Longbottoms got into it with Bellatrix Lestrange and Travers. I heard your parents were there, too. I can tell you some of the Ministry was not happy to hear that, but they got Travers out of it, so they couldn’t really complain.
I heard from Tonks about what happened at Hogwarts. I’m glad you’re alright. It sounds like the Healers are optimistic about Katie, too. I didn’t know her too well at Hogwarts, but I remember she was an excellent Chaser, and a really good duelist. She and Alicia did not have the patience for Umbridge. Their snide remarks were encouraging.
From what Tonks said, it sounded like you were part of the reason Katie was able to get help so quickly, and it may have saved her life. I know what you mean about feeling helpless, but I hope you know you weren’t. You took action quickly, and you helped in a way that got Katie in the hands of people who could counter the curse, and that’s not something everyone knows how to do.
If you were hoping for more answers about who cursed Katie, I’m afraid we don’t know any more than Dumbledore. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you, but I thought it worth letting you know. It’s interesting that you think Draco Malfoy is the one who cursed Katie. I can’t believe that a student would be able to pull off something like that without Dumbledore knowing about it. I know Malfoy Manor’s had its fair share of raids, too. With Lucius Malfoy’s arrest, they’ve had a lot of Aurors go through their house, looking for dark artefacts. It’s hard for me to believe that they’ve managed to keep anything hidden, but maybe they did. Maybe Mad-Eye should go through their house with that magical eye of his.
Katie’s curse aside, Draco Malfoy having the Dark Mark is a serious accusation. From what the Ministry has come to understand, it’s a mark reserved only for those most intimate in Voldemort’s organization. Certain Death Eaters have had it, but there are plenty of Dark Wizards who follow him who aren’t marked. For Voldemort to choose Draco Malfoy to be in his intimate circle seems like a stretch. I’ll keep it in mind, though I don’t know what good I’ll do with the knowledge. You’re the one who’s closest to Draco Malfoy right now.
As for your lesson with Dumbledore, you’re right, there isn’t much I can learn about Tom Riddle’s history just knowing he was born at some orphanage in London. It must have been unnerving to see Voldemort as a child, though. I can’t imagine what it must be like for people like McGonagall and Dumbledore, who got to see him grow up.
A lot of the things you pointed out about Voldemort — his secrecy and isolation — make sense. They’re definitely things that help us understand him better, and with any luck will help us catch him faster. I can’t help you with the collected items. I have no idea why Dumbledore would think that was important. Was he using them for a spell? I know he was just a child, but you did mention he had a strong grasp on magic, even before attending Hogwarts.
I couldn’t find much on Tom Riddle himself. It seems he was awarded for special services to Hogwarts at some point during his time there, but that was stripped recently, and I couldn’t find any further information on it. I’m sorry I’m not much help this time, Harry.
I’m writing this at Grimmauld Place, which seems to have become the only place in my life with any peace and quiet, and Sirius and Emmeline Vance just walked in. They’re fine, and I expect they’ll have a proper report ready for the Order shortly, otherwise I’d tell you everything now. He says to tell you hello, and that he’s sorry he missed your Quidditch game. I hope it went well. It’s your first game as Captain isn’t it? Captain is stressful. I don’t miss it, though I do miss playing. I hope you had fun, whether you win or lost, though I guess against Slytherin there’s only one option, isn’t there?
Stay alert, Harry. And stay safe.
— Cedric
When Harry had finished reading, he handed it to Hermione. He was glad to know that Sirius was back from whatever his mission had been, and he hoped that Sirius would stick around until Christmas. The full moon fell on Christmas Eve this year, and it would be nice to have everyone home for the holiday. Harry hadn’t had a proper Christmas at home for a few years. He hoped this one worked out.
While he wished Cedric had been able to tell him more about Malfoy and Riddle, he hadn’t expected much. He hoped that he would have another lesson with Dumbledore soon, but it seemed unlikely it would happen before the holidays.
“What did Cedric tell you in his last letter?” Hermione asked.
Harry had forgotten how quickly she could read. He took the letter back and hid the ink again. While he folded the parchment up and put it in his pocket, he told her what Cedric had told him about the Gaunt family, how Marvolo Gaunt and Morfin Gaunt had been arrested, and Morfin had eventually been arrested for murdering the Riddle family.
“Why didn’t you tell us any of this?”
Harry shrugged. “It was interesting, but it didn’t tell me anything about Voldemort, really.” He’d also felt like his letters to Cedric were something to be kept secret. He hadn’t wanted to share them with anyone. The only reason Hermione knew about them now was because she’d been upset when Hedwig arrived. At least it had cheered her up. And at least Ron didn’t know. Harry had a feeling that Ron might rib him for having secret letters with Cedric that were sealed with a couplet.
“It’s odd, though, isn’t it? That Morfin Gaunt murdered them all those years later. And why wouldn’t Dumbledore tell you about that? Voldemort’s father being murdered by his uncle seems like an important detail.”
“Why’d he tell me all about Tom Riddle collecting things as a kid? What Dumbledore thinks is important isn’t what we think is important. I guess when we’re a hundred-and-eighty-five, we’ll understand it, too.”
This made Hermione laugh, and Harry thought that even though the party itself had been terrible, and his plan to get Ron back in a good mood had backfired, he could at least count this part of his day as a win.
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The Deepening Sea
There seems to be a disconnect between authors and readers right now. Many publishers are having a hard time finding the readers. In fact, a recent article from the Author’s Guild stated that “The Authors Guild’s 2018 Author Income Survey, the largest survey of writing-related earnings by American authors ever conducted, finds incomes falling to historic lows to a median of $6,080 in 2017, down 42 percent from 2009.”
I’d have to write many pages to explain why so many authors are having a hard time, but in the final analysis I’d have to also point out that self-published authors are doing pretty darned well. Even as novel advances in the traditional publishing world are drying up.
Let me see if I can explain rather simply what is happening.
First, let me ask a question: How many readers are there in your genre? Do you know?
Years ago when I started writing science fiction, there was a saying in the industry: “There are ten thousand people who will buy anything.” In other words, if a publisher put out a science fiction book in paperback by an unknown author, the publisher could expect to sell about 10,000 copies, even if there was no advertising and no word of mouth.
Those readers were the frontline of fandom, the people who read voraciously and who, when they found a good book, would go out and tell their friends.
Beyond that frontline were hordes of other readers. No one knew how many. I heard one publisher suggest that he thought that there were three million people in the US who regularly read science fiction or fantasy. The made up our “avid” fans. But once again, it was hard to gauge how many there really were. I always suspected that there were more.
You see, I’ve had a couple of books that have sold a million copies in the US, yet I don’t believe that one in three science fiction fans has ever heard my name.
No one knows how many readers there are in any given genre. You see, people very often become readers for a time and then fall away in their practice. A hugely popular book comes out, and suddenly millions of people buy it, and the entire genre swells. When Scholastic decided to push Harry Potter, there had never been a middle-grade novel that was a #1 bestseller. But Harry Potter got a huge push from its publisher, sold some 40 million copies in the US, and suddenly created a “halo effect,” so that other middle grade novels were being read too. Thus one of my students, Brandon Mull, soon followed and hit as a #1 New York Times bestseller with his Fablehaven series, while many other authors were doing the same.
I recall hearing a publisher in the 1990s estimate that there were only two million active readers in middle grade—and this was at a time when R. L. Stine’s books were selling like mad. When Harry Potter came out, it sold far more than its two million copies in the United States. It sold tens of millions in short order. People who weren’t middle grade readers began buying it. People who’d never read a fiction book in their lives began buying it.
A couple of years later, Twilight did the same. The book became so popular that even nonreaders began to read it just so that they would be able to learn what everyone else was talking about. These books are what I call “superbooks.”
The number of potential fans for a genre is far bigger than the number of readers. There may be three or four million people who regularly buy fantasy novels for example, but when “Game of Thrones” debuted on television, it was estimated from polls that some 42 million people tuned in on the opening weekend. For the season 8 premiere, 17 million people watched the series on HBO, but it is estimated that another 51 million watched pirated versions around the world.
And these fair-weather fans can be fickle. They’ll watch a hit movie to be in the know, then never go back. Or maybe they have an effect on a genre for a couple of years. The huge sales in middle grade that we saw with Harry Potter have faded. The young adult boom that was brought with Twilight has gone bust. When 50 Shades came out, there was a 300-percent boom in women’s porn, and now that is gone.
So it’s hard to know just how big our audiences are, but here is something that I do know: the number of books that are getting published each year is booming. Over a million books were self-published in America last year. In July of 2018, I had one Facebook friend who noted that a cookbook he was searching for online was ranked at 7.5 million in Amazon’s search engine. In other words, there were that many books for sale online.
I want you to think of it this way. Imagine that the publishing world is a pond, and all of the authors are hungry fish hoping that someone will drop some food into the pond. Now imagine that you’re in this pond and somebody dumps 8 million more fish into your pond.
Would the competition for food become a bit more fierce?
That’s what is happening in the publishing world.
I recall a saying from one book promoter. He used to say, “A bookstore is the worst place in the world to do a book signing. Why? Because there are 50,000 competing books in that bookstore, vying for the customer’s investment.” He was kind of right.
Now you’ve got nine million competitors online, and each year there are a million new books going up.
How are you going to compete with them? How will you get the attention of buyers? That’s the question.
Right now, a lot of self-published authors are figuring out the answer to that question. Our tactics will change. Fortunes will be made and lost. In other words, it is all business as usual.
***
Fyrecon
I will be teaching a master class writing workshop at Fyrecon this June in Layton, Utah. You can learn more about it here.
SpikeCon
I will also be teaching at SpikeCon in July, also in Layton, Utah. Learn more here.
Also check out the deal on the Serpent Catch series on Amazon! All 4 books for $9.99. You can get them here.
Keep an eye out for two upcoming writing workshops. Writer's Peak July 19-20 and The Plot Thickens Master Class September 18-21. More information on these will be posted soon.
I have a short story set in the Runelords universe that is up for 2.99 today. Get it here.
Coming soon is a fun, new anthology called "Grifty Shades of Fey" that I will be featured in. Find out more information here.
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Everything of note that I have to say about Wakfu season 3:
I get that it’s old news at this point, but I finally got around to watching the new season of Wakfu & I really do have a ton to say about it... in list form!
1. It’s very good.
2. SPOILERS... duh...
3. I think I should’ve watched The Search For The Six Eliatrope Dofus first. I think the characters reference what happens in that a few times & whenever they did, I was like “what the fuck are they talking about?”
4. I don’t know why they changed the English voice cast, but it wasn’t a very good idea. It took me a few episodes to get used to them, & though I did get used to it & they did a fine enough job. Just not as good as the original cast.
5. I think this is why half of the words change pronunciation. Iop & Ruel are pronounced like how they’re spelled, which sounds like a good thing, but I always felt like pronouncing them like “Yop” & “Ruul” sounded more realistic. Adding that extra syllable is creating more work for whoever’s saying it & I think in a world that’s supposed to seem like it’s existed for millenniums, those kinds of words would’ve been shortened down to 1 syllable. I wouldn’t be complaining if that’s not how they were pronounced in the first 2 seasons.
6. Adamai is a surprisingly good villain. Of course, I think he’s much better as a protagonist, but as the antagonist; he’s a menacing figure that every member of the Brotherhood Of The Tofu have a history with, & the animation does a great job at showing the struggles he has when fighting them & vice versa.
7. I fucking hate the Dragon Ball Z-esc design for Adamai! It could just be my general disliking of DBZ, but that design really doesn’t do anything for me.
8. I think they made Adamai a bad guy because Oropo isn’t a very interesting main antagonist. Granted, it’s not like this show is known for its great villains (in fact, Oropo is by far my favorite of the them so far), but he ends up being pretty disappointing. Particularly because the framework is there for a great villain: a connection to the heroes, a memorable plot, a great motivation... it just never comes together for a very interesting villain.
9. I think it’s because most of that stuff isn’t really focused on until the last couple of episodes, making him uninteresting for most of the season & when it’s finally focused on, it’s too little too late.
10. Evangelyne & Percedal are great parents! This really is the natural continuation of their relationship after they had their “happily ever after” at the end of season 2. And whenever they’re on screen together, they have so much romantic chemistry it literally kills me.
11. I fucking love they’re kids too! It’d be so easy to make them one-dimensional slabs to motivate Percedal, but they have just as great & interesting personalities as any other member of the Brotherhood. Of course, I prefer Elely mostly because we spend more time with her, but I also just prefer her character type.
12. I don’t like that they have Eva, probably the most badass protagonist, as the “damsel in distress”. I get that they don’t want a pregnant character out in the front lines of battle, but still.
13. Every season has a fake-out death: S1 had Percedal & that lasted for a few episodes into the next season, S2 had a scene & a half of Ruel faking a heart attack, & S3 had Evangelyne almost die. It was kinda ingenious: for a minute, it genuinely had me worried, wondering if they had the balls to kill off a pregnant main character. Good thing they didn’t, probably for the best.
14. Holy shit, they actually had the balls to show a baby’s birth! I’d imagine they’d have an easier time getting that death past Netflix!
15. I haven’t looked up what the consensus is on this, but I’m willing to bet I have a controversial opinion on this: I actually really like the romance between Amalia & Yugo. It feels very genuine & natural; they have a ton of chemistry between them. Unlike with most romances, where it’s pretty obvious they’ll end up together by the end, I honestly didn’t know if that was the route they were going to take because Yugo still looks 10!
16. Keeping Yugo looking 10 was a great way to add more tension & drama to the already dramatic & tension-filled story.
17. Past seasons have had a good mixture of dramatic & comedic elements, but this season pumped up the drama & backed off of the comedy. I guess this is expected since this is the first season made by Netflix & their shows have been significantly more dramatic than most cable TV animated shows, largely because they’re meant to be binge-watched instead of once a week.
18. Netflix also tends to strip down its shows to the bare minimum for the story it’s telling. This is normally a good thing, but I think Wakfu was one of those shows that utilized filler episodes really well to show more of a connection & backstory of the characters. Basically, I wanted more filler episodes.
19. I don’t know why Ruel was in this. I get that he’s one of the main characters & they try to have him seem like he has a point by throwing in his wife for no real reason. He’s getting too old to fight & he doesn’t throughout most of the season. I’d bet he’d end up staying behind to babysit Eva & Dali’s new baby next season (if there is one).
20. Each of the demigods the Brotherhood fight are interesting & unique in their own right, they all feel like they’ve always existed & were merely waiting to be introduced in the show rather than feel like they were invented in a day for their exact episode.
21. The show in the past has always felt like it was aiming for a pretty young audience (like “Baby’s First Engaging World”), but between the focus on more dramatic elements, all of the couples getting together, & Adamai’s new design; I think the new target audience is closer to older children/young teenagers. Those just old enough to be nostalgic over anime like Dragon Ball Z & Naruto but just young enough to embrace the more childish nature moments of past seasons. A natural evolution of this long-running franchise.
22. The world & universe this show has spent the better part of 2 seasons to build is built up even more throughout the entirety of season 3. It really feels livable, like you could just walk right into your TV & right in this world! This is an element that’s really hard to nail (only done well in the most prestigious of franchises with huge fanbases like Star Wars & Harry Potter... & My Little Pony) & it does so perfectly!
23. This is easily my favorite season of the show so far, building upon the incredible blocks already created by the first 2 seasons.
24. I really hope there’s a 4th season! There’s been word from random websites & blogs by so-called writers saying there will be one either 2019 or 2020. I do think it’s inevitable considering the show is at peak popularity & critical praise & this season ended on a cliffhanger. I just want it before I die of old age!
25. I think Wakfu, though more popular than ever before, is still nowhere near as popular as it deserves to be. I always called it, “that show all your animator friends really like,” & that still rings true. If you have any doubts about whether or not to watch it, just do it! It’s a great show that deserves all the praise it’s gotten from fans & critics (& that’s a lot of praise!).
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A Look Back on the Twilight Saga
I have never felt older than I have this year, in which the film adaptation of the first book in the Twilight Saga turns ten. Ten years ago, that movie came out, three years after the book. And what a book and movie they were! They inspired so much rabid devotion and equally rabid pushback, with people gushing over the beautiful romance in equal amounts as people saying how the books were offensively awful and filled with misogyny and romanticization of abusive relationships. Golly, I sure am glad discussion of fiction has improved since then and we don’t have dumb arguments like that anymore!
All joking aside, it is pretty interesting to look back on the series. With the passage of time, and the release of so much young adult fiction in cinemas between then and now, I have to say that looking back… Twilight is a pretty good film and, for the most part, a pretty good series.
Now, such a bold statement could never have been made in that period during the heyday of the series, where the popularity of the series was slowly souring and people began openly rejecting the series as trash. But I feel that rejection was just part of an obnoxious cycle I’ve seen a lot in recent years, where anything remotely popular with audiences (such as Frozen) becomes hated at the peak of its popularity, seemingly because of the sole fact that it is popular and not really due to anything having to do with the actual overall quality.
See, here’s the thing: despite the series having a reputation for being poorly written tripe, it really is a lot better than anyone gives it credit for. Now, I’m not going to say the writing is on par with other young adult fantasy series of the time, like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson, because that is just patently untrue. What the Twilight Saga was, and what it always seemed to aim for, was the level of quality of a tacky airport romance novel you pick up while waiting for your flight to kill time. It’s nothing but wish-fulfillment fantasy in which an unhappy young woman becomes the reason for living for several unfathomably hot supernatural men, a sentiment that quite frankly resonates with the modern atmosphere towards supernatural romance and the prominence of self-proclaimed “Monsterfuckers.” Bella’s situation is pretty much a dream come true, is it not? Among tacky supernatural romance novels, Twilight and its sequels are easily the queens of the genre.
Here’s the thing that really sets the Twilight Saga apart, though: there is actually a serious amount of thought and care put into nearly all aspects of the romance’s universe save for the actual romance. Every single member of the Cullen family has a fascinating backstory: Carlisle was a vampire hunter turned vampire who proceeded to venture across the world in the ensuing hundreds of years building up a family and practicing a different way of living; Alice was committed to an asylum and has a past shrouded in mystery; Jasper was a soldier in the Confederate army who was turned into a vampire and tasked with raising a vampire army; Rosalie’s backstory is Kill Bill, BUT WITH VAMPIRES!; and Emmet, while easily the least impressive of them all, still died apparently fighting a bear, and considering how he is one can only imagine what on earth he was doing. Esme is the only Cullen without a deeply fascinating backstory, but even what little we do get is a bit tragic: she lost her child and so committed suicide, or attempted it anyway. There’s absolutely no need for all of these rich, complex backstories for characters in a throwaway romance novel, and yet here they are. And that’s not all.
The rest of the world and overall vampire society is presented in a very interesting way. The Volturi in particular are a fascinating idea, a secret cabal of vampires who rule over all other vampires with an iron fist, but one that is, while a bit tyrannical and unforgiving, seemingly necessary to preserve the existence of vampire society. Hell, their rules don’t really seem TOO harsh, and they only really spring to action when there are vampires fragrantly and blatantly exposing themselves to human society. They wish to keep the vampire world hidden in the shadows, where they can feed in peace away from prying eyes. Their position is understandable in a lot of ways. They also have a very interesting history to them, having apparently wrestled power over vampirekind away from a sect of Romanian vampires. Now, I did say they are a fascinating IDEA; in execution, they always tended to be a bit… useless. Their appearances in New Moon and Breaking Dawn are ultimately wastes of time, as they are never really opposed in any sort of meaningful way and get away in the end with the status quo wholly unchanged. No impact is ever made on vampirekind when they’re involved, which almost makes me wish that they were kept in the shadows and used far more sparingly. Their influence over events in Eclipse, where they only send out their powerful agents, showcases that Stephanie Meyers could use them very effectively when she wanted to.
The werewolves are a bit less effective. While they do have an intriguing backstory, there is something a bit… problematic about shoehorning a bunch of fictional elements onto the real Quileute tribe. On the other hand though, a positive and heroic portrayal of Native Americans in fiction is never a bad thing, and Jacob Black is easily one of the more sympathetic characters until halfway through Breaking Dawn. It’s a very tricky, mixed bag. I kind of wish that the issue with the handling of Native American folklore was the biggest controversy with the series, but there’s actually one far worse and even stupider.
The Twilight Saga has come under fire for being a negative influence on young women, for romanticizing abusive relationships and stalking, and for being some sort of massive insult to feminism. Now, these arguments aren’t wholly without merit, but the issue is that they are being filtered through human understanding and imposed on fictional creatures in a fictional universe. If a real-life human acted as clingy, impulsive, over-protective, and obsessed as Edward is towards Bella, yes, it would be absolutely terrifying. Here’s where I let you in on a little secret, though: Edward Cullen is, in fact, not a human. He is part of a race of ageless semi-undead beings who live off of blood and glitter in the sunlight. He immediately sees his soulmate in Bella and goes out of his way to ensure they end up together, acting on the instincts granted to members of his kind. Trying to fit all of his actions into a human narrative is as fruitless as if an ant tried to explain humanity to his colleagues filtered through his ant experiences. The fact is, Edward operates on a far different moral code than humans. This is not uncommon for vampires in any fiction; Marceline of Adventure Time fame is a vampire who is certainly not above doing some rather sketchy stuff, for example. While Edward’s actions can come off as bizarre and creepy to humans, for a vampire, Edward is actually downright romantic and even benevolent. One also needs to take into account that Edward is a kissless virgin who has spent a hundred years doing nothing but reading romance novels and listening to classical music, which would go a long way to explain his awkward and sometimes offputting ways of trying to replicate human courtship rituals with Bella.
The criticisms leveled at Bella are rather unfair as well; while she often finds herself a damsel in distress, it rarely is something she doesn’t want. When Bella is in danger, it’s because she wanted to be there and put herself there. Yes, she does get into trouble, but that’s mostly due to her being a stupid horny teenage girl with zero impulse control. Recall New Moon, where she constantly did dangerous stunts so she could have hallucinations of Edward chastise her. Bella is, quite frankly, an adrenaline junkie, and I feel she’d rather resent being called a damsel. Even the times when she is in danger, it is no real fault of her own, but rather the fact she is a normal human out of her depth in a supernatural world. Bella is not Blade, she is not Van Helsing, she is not Alucard; she is Bella Swan, normal teenage girl, and she tends to be as effective as your average teenage girl in situations where superpowered monsters are hunting her. Imagine if we applied these sorts of criticisms to other characters in fiction… “John Conner in Terminator 2 is such a worthless damsel in distress character, why does he not just fight off the T-1000?” or how about “Why do the kids in The Goonies not take the Fratellis head-on? Why do they constantly flee from them when they cross paths? And Chunk, getting captured by them, what a pathetic damsel moment.” People not being successful in areas where they are out of their element is not some horribly evil thing. I also resent the idea the series is some horrible, anti-feminist work, particularly because the entire series revolves around Bella’s choice, and when she is not given agency she goes out of her way to take that agency. For all the flaws of Breaking Dawn, and there are many, I will give it this: presenting Bella as being in the right for wanting her choices respected is a good thing. With that in mind, I think the entire series is a lot more feminist than many are willing to admit.
And look, I’m not saying this book is a flawless masterpiece or anything like that. I have mentioned this is definitely a book more impressive for the world it creates than for the actual romance it centers around. But I do feel that, generally speaking, the books never descended to the point many who criticized the books say they did. I say “for the most part” because I cannot even muster up enough good will to say a single good thing about Breaking Dawn. But generally, the writing quality is decent. Even some of the twists on vampire lore are interesting and refreshing.
For instance… the sparkling. This is one of the most infamous additions to the lore of vampires in Meyers stories. When in the sunlight, rather than bursting into flames as vampires tend to do in fiction, their skin sparkles and glitters as if it was encrusted with diamonds. It does sound silly, and it really is, especially when they show it off in the movies… and yet, it is actually far more accurate than just about every depiction of vampires in nearly 100 years. You see, the idea vampires are killed by sunlight is actually a relatively new addition to vampire lore, being created for the famous silent masterpiece Nosferatu because they couldn’t come up with any other way to kill the vampire. In the original novel of Dracula, for instance, the titular count strut about during the day with no ill effect. So, by accident or perhaps by some better understanding of the creatures than most writers, Meyers was more accurate than nearly all contemporary portrayals of the characters. Also interesting – but not nearly so to the point I feel the need to dedicate a whole new paragraph to it – the idea of vampires having a sort of “love at first sight” thing that allows them to discern their soulmate was copied by Hotel Transylvania, so I feel like that addition to vampire lore has its merit as well.
The film adaptations tend to not truly fix the flaws with the storytelling, but instead to paint over them with some truly inspired silliness. The utter apathy Robert Pattinson exudes for his role as Edward Cullen is palpable in how he acts, and it tends to make Edward’s creepier actions actually less threatening than the were in the books – and I’d argue there he wasn’t particularly threathening, despite his angsting. Taylor Lautner’s oft-shirtless portrayal of Jacob Black seems a lot more genuinely, but equally cheesy; his and Pattinson’s onscreen chemistry really gives them the feel of two romantic rivals, which makes it easy to see exactly why there was such a devoted following rooting for one or the other back in the day. Then we get to Bella.
As usual, Bella is a horribly misunderstood character here. It’s easy to blame the books for how one-note Bella appears in the movies – as a romance protagonist, Bella has enough personality for you to care while still being enough of a blank slate that you can put yourself in her position so that you can fantasize about the outcomes – but I almost feel like her portrayal was a deliberate choice. Kristen Stewart is actually a very good actor when in the right role, and I feel like even in the past I’ve been too hard on her portrayal of Bella. I think I might go so far as to say her version of Bella is better than the book, because Stewart actually does inject some vapid, awkward teenage girlishness to the role. That’s something wonderful, especially about the films – the teenagers, more than a lot of other series, tend to feel like real people. They say the dumbest stuff imaginable, but really, is that not what being a teenager is? Everyone was a stupid, vapid idiot as a teenager, it’s just how teens are. So all t hat combined with everything else that has been said, does any part of Bella’s characterization truly feel THAT abnormal for an otherwise normal, brooding teen thrust headfirst into the world of the supernatural? I personally don’t think so; Bella is actually one of the most real characters of the series, an anchor to humanity in a sea of supernatural strangeness, a character that is absolutely perfect in her dull, flawed, overly-romantic personality. She may not be the strongest, or most interesting, or even the most pleasant character in all of fiction… but she has an air of realness to her few other characters can hope to achieve. Perhaps this is why a lot of people rejected and mocked her; it’s so much easier to dismiss and belittle something than accept that it is something real, warts and all. No one wanted to accept the less pleasant parts of Bella, and so she was rejected by all except the fans of the book; meanwhile, seemingly disinterested goth girls would be fought over by two equally strange men for her affection, all while she talks in a sort of half-awake near-monotone.
I was in that situation myself. It’s all real teenage bullshit.
I feel like this more than anything explains why the Twilight Saga ended up being violently rejected by so many people: too many people saw through the supernatural elements and into the real life teenage angst and did not like what they saw, as it reflected their own experiences. It’s so bizarre to say, but Stephanie Meyers may have been too real for her own good, and her portrayal of angst-ridden teen love triangles may have been just too close to home for a lot of people. I’m sure a lot of older people had negative experiences in high school as I did, so anything that reminds them of those stupid, painful years is not going to seem pleasant. With other stories that feature realistic elements with supernatural settings, such as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and so on, they never really faced this kind of scrutiny and rejection as while they also are grounded with realistic portrayals of their teenagers, they also take place in overtly supernatural settings; there is no place where an experience could be like that of Hogwarts or Camp Half-Blood. But there’s probably of plenty of places like the dismal, dreary town of Forks, Washington, a perpetually cloudy town out in the sticks where nothing ever seems to happen. Reading about teen angst in such an agonizingly depressing setting will not go over well with anyone who has had negative experiences in regards to the elements portrayed, supernatural dressing or no.
Looking back at the Twilight Saga, after years of imitators of varying quality and numerous attempts by mediocre young adult franchises to capture this saga’s lightning in a bottle, the stories sans Breaking Dawn seem to have aged quite well, and hold up a lot better. Removed from the rabid fandom, overwhelming hype, ad constant mockery, the series stands as a solid and kind of cheesy young adult romance series, one with superb worldbuilding that I have yet to see any young adult series after it match and an absolutely fantastic ensemble cast that is just rife with fanfiction potential. I find that even the lead trio, be it in the films and in the movie, have a lot more layer and depth to them than initially thought, with Bella in particular a character I feel deserves some serious reevaluation. And while I’d never call the series a masterpiece to rival Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, or Lord of the Rings, I do think that the series is good enough to unironically be enjoyed. While there is of course plenty to snark at here – it’s a story featuring a rather honest depiction of teenagers, after all, and teenagers are idiots – I think there is a lot more to like than the insane hatedom of the book ever gave it credit for.
And even if you can’t bring yourself to admit the series is genuinely good (albeit cheesy), there’s no denying that it had a pretty good impact on popular culture. Aside from being the basis for Vampire Sucks, which has the honor of being the only genuinely good Seltzer and Friedberg film, it put supernatural romance stories back into the mainstream again. The biggest example of a supernatural romance film that I can see got a lot of mainstream recognition was 1990’s Ghost, which is held up as a romantic classic; while there were plenty of supernatural romance films between then and Twilight, none of them seem to be recalled fondly or even at all, and none of them can even come close to saying they had the sort of cultural impact Ghost did. Twilight, though… it had a huge impact. Without Twilight, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Warm Bodies, we probably wouldn’t have gotten Horns, and honestly? We probably wouldn’t have gotten The Shape of Water, or more realistically, the movie would not nearly be as accepted. Twilight for better or worse conditioned us to see the humanity in supernatural entities and find attraction in them (not exactly a new idea as far as vampires go, I know, but it definitely put it in the minds of young adults). I can easily see the genesis of the modern crowd of people lusting after the Asset, Pennywise, Godzilla, and Venom being the Twilight Saga; it was a gateway drug that put in the minds of youths “Hey, monsters can be really sexy. Like, REALLY sexy.”
The Twilight Saga is truly a fascinating work, for better and for worse. There is a lot in it that I really admire, and there’s plenty in it that I resent, but even at its worst I can never say that the series was boring. For all the flack I give Breaking Dawn, it is still far more readable than any of the garbage Cormac McCarthy has ever shat out, and nothing in the series was as overtly misogynistic as some of the dialogue in Ready Player One. As cheesy as the film series got, the first was a surprisingly effective indie supernatural romance and the third was a gloriously Gothic cheesy delight, with the second being the awkward but still enjoyable middle film and Breaking Dawn: Part 1 being the only genuinely awful film in the series; nothing positive could be said for the slew of imitators that crawled in this film’s wake, such as Beastly, Red Riding Hood, and even some of the would-be successors to this franchise such as the cinematic adaptations of Percy Jackson, Divergent, and The Hunger Games among others, which despite them being based off of books of far greater critical acclaim had absolutely no respect for their source material the way the Twilight Saga films did. As silly as some of the acting in the movies was – and it got very silly, considering the lead three all seemed to actively despise their roles – none of their acting was as painfully bad to sit through as Jennifer Lawrence’s attempts at acting in the first Hunger Games film, or the entire cast of the Percy Jackson movies. I would never say that Twilight is the absolute pinnacle of young adult literature, but I think a lot of us had our judgment clouded back in the day, and with the benefit of hindsight I think it’s safe to say the franchise was a lot of fun; I’d even go as far to say that it is an underrated work of genius in many aspects.
Removed from the climate that created it and put into a world it helped shape, I think the tale of Bella Swan and her romance of the angsty immortal Edward Cullen resonates quite a bit better. So thank you to Stephanie Meyers and everyone involved with the film series, because without your work, the world we live in would probably be a much less interesting place, with far fewer people horny for monsters. I really don’t think I would want to live in that world.
#CineMike#essay#my writing#Twilight#The Twilight Saga#Eclipse#New Moon#Breaking Dawn#Edward Cullen#Bella Swan#Jacob Black#Robert Pattinson#Kristen Stewart#Taylor Lautner
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The White Progressivism of the Harry Potter Franchises
Hi, my name is Porshèa Patterson and I have a confession: I’m a Black woman who hasn’t read books with characters’ racial/ethnic, gender, or ability identity in mind.
Growing up, I was a voracious reader consuming any fictional stories that contained magic, strong female characters, intrigue or mystery, history, or all of the above. Often these stories were about white characters who either appeared as such on book covers or were described with attributes of white people — blonde flowing hair or alabaster skin — which, to be quite honest, were not always clearly white to me. People of color can also have blonde flowing hair, blue, green, gray, or hazel eyes, and alabaster can be stark white or gradients of brown.
In fact, it was not until I attended Lincoln University, a historically Black university, as an undergraduate student that I began to question how these identities shaped my consumption of media. Upon reflection, I realized that when I read books and watched movies or TV shows, I didn't seek to identify with characters because of their racial or ethnic backgrounds, though I often bypassed extremely white shows like Friends and chose to watch shows with female leads most. The highest priority for my entertainment choices was that I was introduced to vibrant worlds and cultures where I could see fairness and accountability in play. Coming from a smallish town in Middle Tennessee, my idea of fairness was very much shaped by my white peers and teachers, whom I engaged with most during classes and social events. To them, fairness meant seeing things from ‘both sides’ and compromising on a concept that didn’t concede the point in question with ‘either side.’ These were all perspectives I had to unlearn by questioning why I was comforted by certain media over others. It just so happens that one of the book series that resonated with me most is also one of the most popular franchises of all time, Harry Potter.
Being a longtime fan of the series and a recent addition to Harry Potter fandom communities means that any news about future stories or character backgrounds was met with happiness and anticipation. Was. Yet, since the release of Magic in North America on the Pottermore website, I’ve met all news coming from official content production sources with dread and preemptive disappointment. After seeing Native American Harry Potter fans, namely Dr. Adrienne Keene and Johnnie Jae, address the issues in J.K. Rowling having a white, Scottish character create the first and only accredited Wizarding school in North America, where she moved with the same sense of ownership over the land as other colonizers, my guard went up. Following Rowling’s dismissive response once confronted, I knew that I could never read her work without also understanding that she does not care at all about how the representation, or lack thereof, of characters and communities she does not belong to reinforce ignorance, racism, sexism, classism, latent homophobia, transphobia, or ableist thinking.
I’ve been lucky enough to engage with fandom communities through Black Girls Create and The Harry Potter Alliance which have helped me to deal with and gain clarity on the ways in which the Harry Potter series lives on through activism and critical discourse. Belonging to these fan networks means engaging in fan theory, fan-created projects, and fan fiction. However, Warner Brothers limits and even impedes fan-made products and Rowling complies by trying to be our sole official Wizarding World supplier. We can see her frustration with the fandom becoming something she cannot control or intuitively understand its needs. Instead of embracing the people who have issues and are vocal about wanting to help make things better, she ignores them in favor of ‘yes’ fans, who have the same limited understanding of marginalization as she does. The promotion of the latest Fantastic Beasts movie has exacerbated all of these issues, especially after the surprise unveiling of the only Asian woman character in a speaking role in the Fantastic Beasts series with more than two lines — we hope — presumably becoming the tool of white supremacy/blood purity later in the franchise. I made my earlier confession to make it clear that because I understand my own blind spots and limitations, I am also empathetic to these issues of within us all.
I have admired the strength, creative vision, and social mores that Rowling has embodied as an author, particularly when the fandom was at its nadir. Unlike other popular authors who have similar world-building talents, Rowling never announced deadlines that she couldn't meet and remained true to her characters’ traits, instead of integrating fanfiction that made no sense into canon. That is, until recently. Rowling's prolific writing prowess aside, the feature of the Harry Potter series that resonates most with the fans I engage with are the social mores of acceptance, standing against tyranny, questioning the status quo, and doing the right thing.
By building the Harry Potter series as an allegory of these principles, Rowling has established that these values are important to her and supports these ideals in some of her interviews and tweets. Simultaneously, her remarks in the same spaces also indicate her socio-political shortcomings. While many Potterheads of Color had no choice but to grow up with a hyper-awareness of the myriad of ways in which their identities are scrutinized and discriminated against in the world, Rowling has not had this experience. Race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, ability and disability each directly impact the ways in which peers, supervisors, content creators, and service providers decide how they treat us in formal and informal environments. Yet, in the Harry Potter series, there is little representation of characters who identify as any of the above and the ire they must face as someone who belongs to any of these communities. The main discriminatory thread that Rowling presents throughout the series is the concept of blood purity and the use of a slur for those regarded as impure blood being used by members of Wizarding society who are considered backward thinking by the general populace.
In many ways, the Harry Potter franchise and greater fandom are very reflective of white progressivism. Its steps and missteps look like the same conversations we have in political spaces. Directly impacted communities ask for inclusivity and the powers that be give us performative inclusivity. We voice opposition to the ways in which our lives have been presented and consumed by white people, then are told that we want too much or our opinions are invalid. In fact, one of the most egregious ways in which white liberals, including Rowling and her Harry Potter network, respond to the concerns raised by directly impacted communities is by ignoring our observations in service to their own sense of comfort. This obstinance leads Rowling to make oblivious statements like the Fantastic Beasts franchise was created in service to fans. Ironically, this statement will haunt the author, as even some of her most forgiving fans are taken aback by the latest installment of the series as evidenced by its numerous, poor reviews.
We are living in the time of peak social engagement, wherein societal blind spots are being brought to light. I urge us all to engage with those who openly share experiences that we do not have so that our shared values are as enlightened and inclusive as they are full of love.
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