I think the reason Theo wasn’t top in History of Magic is that she had an unorthodox streak that Binns never appreciated.

Headcanon...

…because I was talking to @shabbyrobes about accents and stuff last night.

Theo is Welsh, and she sounds it. Her ancestors left Scandinavia and came to North Wales around 870 AD, and her home is located on the same piece of land on which they settled. There have been Notts living in Wales for over a millennium. There have been Notts living in Wales since before Hogwarts was founded. She sees no reason to try to disguise where she’s from.

Mental health in the Wizarding world

Part of the reason I gave Theo major depression was to explore mental health in the context of the Wizarding world. Based on what we see in the books, the Wizarding world is centuries behind the Muggle world when it comes to psychiatry and psychology. Harry's PTSD goes entirely unacknowledged, which is tragic. I think there's a decent case for Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Severus Snape all also having PTSD, which again goes unacknowledged. St. Mungo's apparently uses electroshock therapy to treat delusions, which is horrifying.

So I decided to give Theo a mental illness -- not one that would be immediately noticeable, but one that would certainly carry stigma if it was known about. That, in addition to my own personal experiences with mental illness, was why I chose depression. I also chose to make it run in the Nott family. Studies estimate that developing depression is about 50% based on genetic factors and heritability, so this is realistic, and it also gives Theo 1) a family secret, and 2) her father as a resource to draw upon so that she's not left completely on her own. (I love her too much to do that to her.)

Her father gives her a name for her illness and shows her how to self-medicate with St. John's wort, which is a fairly effective treatment for mild to moderate depression, though it doesn't work for the kind of severe depression Theo experiences in her sixth year at school. But he also warns her not to tell anyone about her illness, because he knows that she will be judged and ostracized if it becomes common knowledge. Even in our real world in the year 2024, mental illness is stigmatized. I cannot tell you the number of teachers, professors, and even significant others I've had who have tried to tell me that depression isn't real, that I'm "pathetic" or "weak" or "just need to suck it up". My own brother has tried to tell me that my mental illness will be cured by doing yoga. Our current world is still pretty bad for the mentally ill, and I think the Wizarding world must be a hundred times worse.

So Theo keeps her depression a secret. Even following her suicide attempt at age 17, she doesn't mention to anyone that this is not the first time she's felt this way. The only people she's opened up to about it as an adult are @mayhemxmugglesxmagic's Draco and Pansy. In her professor verse, she tries to watch for the signs in her students and intervene as best she can without revealing her own illness, but she doesn't feel comfortable advocating for better treatment for people like her. She's already seen as a maverick for her magiarchaeology work, and she doesn't want the world to write her off as a full madwoman. When it comes to her depression, she's isolated and frightened, which I think must be the case for most of the Wizarding world's mentally ill members.

When Theodora's employer had sent her on this errand to the Ministry, to liaise with the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office, she had expected that she would be dealing with Arthur Weasley, who by all accounts had been running the department since before Theo's own birth. Being greeted by Sirius Black of all people came as something of a shock; she hadn't even known he was working for the Ministry, let alone in such a small, overlooked subdivision. After all, he was one of the heroes of the Second Wizarding War. Perhaps not on par with Potter and Granger and Ronald Weasley, but he was at least on the level of Kingsley Shacklebolt and Minerva McGonagall. Add to that his twelve years' false imprisonment, and she would have thought the new Ministry would be falling all over themselves to offer him some sort of restitution.

Surely this couldn't be the best they had been able to come up with? From the way Black was talking, it sounded as though the department was just as poorly funded and scorned as it had always been.

"I work for Garius Tomkink," Theo said, opting to ignore Black's unprofessional air in favor of getting straight to the point. "The Ministry asked him to consult on several cursed artifacts that were seized from Muggle museums recently, but he" -- doesn't feel that this matter merits his personal attention -- "had some pressing prior commitments, so he sent me in his stead."

Some people might have found being sent on such an errand by an employer to be flattering, a show of confidence in their skills, but Theo knew better. Garius Tomkink was less interested in her own work with Common Brythonic and her ideas regarding the material culture of the ancient Wizarding world than he was in her ability to answer the door and to sort and file his papers. Mr. Tomkink had only sent her because he didn't want to deal with the matter himself.

Still, Theo was relatively certain she could manage this assignment on her own. She'd been attending classes in archaeology at the University of Cardiff in her free time for almost a year now -- not that she'd told Mr. Tomkink, of course -- and she'd always been a dab hand at curses, both casting them and breaking them, thanks in no small part to her Death Eater father, who was now rotting in Azkaban, and serve him right.

She had also read up on some of the older enchanted artifact cases Mr. Tomkink had dealt with in the past, back before he'd decided that his time was simply too valuable to spend on this sort of thing. One incident in particular had stuck in her mind: Muggle archaeologists who had found what they thought was a cannonball from the 14th Century. It had in fact been an early example of a bludger, and had proceeded to rocket around their dig site, terrorizing them all and necessitating the deployment of several trained Obliviators. Once it had been captured and disenchanted, it had been given to the Museum of Quidditch in London.

Trust wizards not to care about historical artifacts outside of the Wizarding world's favorite sport. For Theo, a history lover to her bones who also held Quidditch in great disdain, this was an intolerable state of affairs.

@tnott said “So the expert on all of this is… you?” (for Sirius from Theo)

"Yep." Sirius spread his arms out in mock celebration. "Welcome to the Headquarters of Magical Objects, and the answers to all the burning questions of your heart's content, granted that it's stored in that filing cabinet there, and relates to something no one in all the ministry actually gives a damn about." He gestured to a nearby cabinet so dusty, it was clear no one had cared to open it in years.

Two decades ago, Sirius would have considered himself the goddamn expert of the whole fucking universe. Yes, he'd been a cocky prick, but he'd had good reason for it--he'd been good, damn good. He and James hadn't just been popular in the social scene alone; they'd been top of their class. Sirius had gotten top grades in all of his OWLs and NEWTS without trying, and he'd managed to become an animagus when he was only fifteen years old, when many grown wizards couldn't pull it off. So yes, once upon a time, Sirius Orion Black had been full of promise, a rising star in the wizarding world.

And then came the war. And prison. And another god damned war. He was twenty-two when he was locked up, thirty-four before he'd managed to escape, and thirty-eight by the time the war was over and his name cleared. By that age, most people had at least some idea what they'd been put on this earth to do, but Sirius had spent the last year or so shuffling around from one job to the next in the Ministry. They had all been easy enough to get; the Ministry owed him a debt, after all. Twelve years of false imprisonment, it turned out, was worth a job or two, so Sirius tried them all, quitting after only a few short weeks.

And that was how he'd come to work in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Department. It had been a good enough excuse to get paid for taking apart the things he already cared about: like his motorcycle, or Arthur's car. He'd long been interested in muggle technology--in muggle anything, really, that might have pissed off his parents. Now, however, they had him digging up old muggle artifacts that had been cursed and placed in museums across the country: old devices from the Roman era and Medieval Europe. Some of it had been cursed long ago with anti-theft charms and the like, but some had some pretty nasty curses, the sort of thing his parents might have concocted, and the sort of thing he'd unearthed in his family home, Number 12 Grimmauld Place, a hundred times over.

So maybe, in a manner of speaking, he was an expert. He slumped back into his office chair--he was still surprised he had an office in the first place--and threw his boots up onto the desk, crossing his arms behind his head. "What can I do you for?"

Christina Marie Brown, Ghost I

Lessons of history

This is something that Theo has felt strongly about ever since she was a child -- that understanding history is vital to understanding the present and guiding the future. She first formed this idea while reading about the Goblin Rebellions and the history of Wizard-Goblin relations. She saw how this often bloody history was still affecting that relationship to this day. But in a lot of ways it was an academic belief, not something that had much to do with her everyday life.

The Second Wizarding War changed that. The war destroyed her family -- though she blames her father and the Dark Lord for that just as much as she blames Cornelius Fudge and the Ministry. After the First Wizarding War, after Voldemort's first defeat, British Wizarding society and especially the British Wizarding government tried to forget. They tried to move on by pretending that the war had never happened. People who should have been sentenced to Azkaban, like Lucius Malfoy and Lenotius Nott, were allowed to go free and resume their old positions of power, thus giving them free reign to use their influence to keep the old order of society intact.

This meant that when Voldemort returned, he didn't need to start rebuilding his army from scratch. Instead, he immediately had a core group of influential followers that he could call upon. And because the people in power in the Ministry -- Cornelius Fudge chief among them -- had been trying for fourteen years to forget what had happened, the people who should have been paying attention and noticing the signs of Voldemort's return instead chose to turn a blind eye. If the Ministry had acted quickly and decisively, Theo thinks, then the Second Wizarding War might have been prevented entirely.

She's aware that that might have involved her father going to Azkaban and her family still being damaged, but thousands of other people would have been spared suffering and death. It took Theo several years to come to grips with the fact that, by keeping her father's secrets, she was complicit in that suffering. It's her greatest regret in life. But it reinforced her belief in the importance of paying heed to the lessons of history, and more than that, it made it personal rather than academic. She feels that the adults in power in the inter-war period failed society in general and her generation in particular enormously.

As an adult, that belief in the importance of history burns in her, and she's dedicated her entire career into trying to educate Wizarding society about the past in the hopes that that knowledge can help make the future a better place.

source

Model Iron Age Hill Fort, Biggar Museum and Gallery, Lanarkshire, 22.10.19.

"But I don't want to go," Theo said, with great emphasis. "Why should I give up my study time to watch a bunch of idiots on broomsticks throw a ball around? We have our OWLs this year! I need to spend my time preparing and revising. I'm not going to let that stuck up bint Granger be the only one to get top scores. Besides, who cares about Quidditch? It's not like the Quidditch Cup actually matters. We all know that that old fool Dumbledore will hand Gryffindor the House Cup as always, no matter who wins the Quidditch Cup."

“ If there’s an award for the biggest tattletale, I am certain Malfoy will be victorious. ” A playful little smirk as she glances at the other table before returning to look at Theo. “ Of course he’d make a big deal out of that. For some reason, the boys at this school find quidditch to be the end-all, be-all for everything. "

"If you’d like we can go together, I will sacrifice my afternoon and watch one of their painfully boring games. You should be understanding, mentally, that none of them are fully capable of a more complex line of thought than something you could prescribe to an infant. ”

"He will, won't he. So predictable." Theo couldn't help sounding a little superior as she added, "I know I've never gone crying to my father the way Draco does."

She glanced around to double check that no one was within earshot, leaned forward, and, voice lowered conspiratorially, said, "All right. Since it's you. Andrew's cross with me. He wants me to watch his Quidditch matches, and I said no."

“ Don’t let him hear you, Theo, he’s going to start whining about telling his father. ” She smirks looking across the room where Draco and Blaise were sitting. “ You know what I meant…don’t take it so literally. I was just curious, I need to know all the details, you know me?”

IT’S ST DAVID’S DAY

which means it’s time to eat welshcakes, sing songs about saucepans, stand in a circle and slap your knees, pin leeks to your clothes, try desperately to remember the parts of your heritage that weren’t erased by centuries of anglocentric history, and watch someone be crowned the poet king on a wooden chair while a druid does sick sword tricks over their head

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus, pawb!!!!!

"Dramatics? How can you call me dramatic when Draco is within a ten meter radius of us? If anyone in our House is dramatic, it's him, not me."

“ Oh stop with the dramatics Theo, as if I’ve shared any secret of yours…is that what you think of me? Just tell me, you know you’re going to eventually. ”

"It wasn't an accusation, Pansy. I was simply conveying my expectations of secrecy. I would think that you of all people would understand that."

“ You’d never truly believe that I’d betray you, would you? I mean I never have, and I don’t appreciate the accusation, Nott. ”

@tnott liked for a short starter.

"She had a meeting with McGonagall," Theo said. "Something about wanting to do an extra credit project, I think."

For her part, Theo wasn't pursuing any extra credit this year. She knew she would pass all of her classes with flying colors even without seeking extra points, and it was her NEWT scores that would really matter in her post-Hogwarts life. Better to focus on studying for those all-important exams than to spend her limited time trying to get her day-to-day marks even higher than they already were.

She would get top scores on her NEWTs. She was determined to do so. She was going to give the world no academic reason to shut any doors in her face. And if someone shut those doors in her face anyway, she'd kick them down. She was a Slytherin. She had plans, and ambitions, and the right skills to get where she wanted to go. She wasn't going to let her father's crimes drag her down.

Turning to the next page of her book, she said to Draco, "The library isn't as peaceful a place as it used to be, as I'm sure you know. Some people carry grudges, and they don't know when to leave well enough alone. At least here in the common room I know no one will try to hex me while I study."

There was a silver lining, a small miracle in the final year at school. When no one wants to be seen with you, no one also talks to you. And he had spent the past few months happily staying cooped up in his room or the common room, only leaving when he needed to attend class. It would have been nice if he could fly when he had free time, but he avoided being noticed, and Draco learned that he did not mind being ignored. Not that everyone ignored him, other students would whisper and glare, try to hex him, that much he was accustomed to already.

But at least there were the few friends he still somehow managed to have. “ Nott, I’d assumed you’d be in the library somewhere. Probably being the most prepared students to take their NEWTs in Hogwarts history. ” There was no bite to his joke, it was just that, a joke. And even though the war and his family’s position in it, had made him a social piranha.

Now that Voldemort was not looming over every waking moment of his life, his parents were not going to be murdered, and when he would go back to the manner after school was over, there would be no groups of death eaters taking advantage of Malfoy forced hospitality. “ Where’s Pansy? Haven’t seen her today at all? ”

neither “that’s not canon” nor “fuck canon we made this all up” but a secret third thing (canon shouldn’t be taken as gospel but is useful as a reference point for building upon and recontextualizing characters and details. if you worship the source material as unchangeable then fandom in general probably isn’t for you. if you have complete disdain for the source material you would probably enjoy yourself more in a different fandom)

Rosina Emmet Sherwood

Mental health in the Wizarding world

Part of the reason I gave Theo major depression was to explore mental health in the context of the Wizarding world. Based on what we see in the books, the Wizarding world is centuries behind the Muggle world when it comes to psychiatry and psychology. Harry's PTSD goes entirely unacknowledged, which is tragic. I think there's a decent case for Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Severus Snape all also having PTSD, which again goes unacknowledged. St. Mungo's apparently uses electroshock therapy to treat delusions, which is horrifying.

So I decided to give Theo a mental illness -- not one that would be immediately noticeable, but one that would certainly carry stigma if it was known about. That, in addition to my own personal experiences with mental illness, was why I chose depression. I also chose to make it run in the Nott family. Studies estimate that developing depression is about 50% based on genetic factors and heritability, so this is realistic, and it also gives Theo 1) a family secret, and 2) her father as a resource to draw upon so that she's not left completely on her own. (I love her too much to do that to her.)

Her father gives her a name for her illness and shows her how to self-medicate with St. John's wort, which is a fairly effective treatment for mild to moderate depression, though it doesn't work for the kind of severe depression Theo experiences in her sixth year at school. But he also warns her not to tell anyone about her illness, because he knows that she will be judged and ostracized if it becomes common knowledge. Even in our real world in the year 2024, mental illness is stigmatized. I cannot tell you the number of teachers, professors, and even significant others I've had who have tried to tell me that depression isn't real, that I'm "pathetic" or "weak" or "just need to suck it up". My own brother has tried to tell me that my mental illness will be cured by doing yoga. Our current world is still pretty bad for the mentally ill, and I think the Wizarding world must be a hundred times worse.

So Theo keeps her depression a secret. Even following her suicide attempt at age 17, she doesn't mention to anyone that this is not the first time she's felt this way. The only people she's opened up to about it as an adult are @mayhemxmugglesxmagic's Draco and Pansy. In her professor verse, she tries to watch for the signs in her students and intervene as best she can without revealing her own illness, but she doesn't feel comfortable advocating for better treatment for people like her. She's already seen as a maverick for her magiarchaeology work, and she doesn't want the world to write her off as a full madwoman. When it comes to her depression, she's isolated and frightened, which I think must be the case for most of the Wizarding world's mentally ill members.