The Image Of Ariana Accusing Albus Of Dragging Another Child To Martyrdom Is Delightfully Haunting. The

I've always liked the idea of magic working in whimsical and mysterious ways, more than the school of thought that makes magic more 'technical'. The way Harry Potter's story is, I feel like I've been conditioned to enjoy the interplay between "magic" and "luck".

This to say, I'd always imagined Peter as a powerful wizard that few recognized until Voldemort. I imagine Dumbledore never had a clue-- he makes mistakes, he misses things. I like to imagine either James or Lily had a subconscious inkling, but never really thought about it. James just knew Peter was a self-conscious little fool at times, when he didn't need to be, really, see Peter! you became a freakin animagus! idk why you doubt yourself...

Voldemort canonically sought out the Potters at first (the motivations of which, is a whole other topic to whcih I want insight). Peter was a last resort, a means to end, but I imagine Voldemort was clever enough to realize that Peter was meant for the inner circle. Of course, anyone close to his plans for immortality automatically were held close out of necessity. No doubt, Snape initially entered that inner circle not for his Sectumsempra, but because he had been attracted to 'prophecy'/'destiny'. Both Voldie and Harry gradually develop a "sixth sense" for these things.

I personally subscribe to the headcanon of Peter deliberately blasting a nearby gas plant that fateful Nov day. Not only does that theory satisfy my personal belief that Peter was the creative escape-artist of the Marauders (james was most creative at inventing problems, sirius at getting into problems, remus at avoiding problems, peter at getting out of problems), but also allows the Muggles a shred of truth. It's both logical and 'lucky'. (Did Peter set the location of their confrontation deliberately, or was he drawn near to a gas plant through magic?)

Anyway, great Peter meta. Yes to Voldemort negging Peter. GoF Peter is a disgusting pitiful mess. It's fascinating to imagine a 'toxic relationship' there

Voldemort constantly belittling Peter throughout GoF is so interesting because he, Voldemort, is probably the person who best knows Peter's abilities at this point. He expresses surprise at Peter being able to convince Bertha Jorkins to go with him. And like...dude, you of all people KNOW how much of a manipulative snake Peter is, you Know how he convinced Lily and James and Sirius to trust him...why are you acting so surprised? Like Voldemort is the last person who should underestimate Peter. But he does: I think because he knows full well Peter is actually competent but belittles him to keep him loyal. Ohhhh the psychology of these two. It's so fascinating.

(....petermort? someone stop me.)

Voldemort feared the halfblood boy more than the pureblood boy because only a halfblood straddles the line between inexcusable weakness and birthright power. Only a halfblood boy would have the hunger to rise up against him, especially since Voldemort had positioned himself to be aligned with the pureblood upperclass.

I don't think he intentionally thought of Harry as an equal over Neville. I don't recall whether or not he heard that portion of the prophecy from snape. But we do know that both the Potters and the Longbottoms 'defied' him thrice. I'd always understood the Longbottoms as older, old enough to be well established and known aurors. Perhaps they fought for years during this 11-year-long First Wizarding War, perhaps neville was a conscious choice that may have seemed like an act of defiance but certainly wasn't an act of defiance to Voldemort himself. The Longbottoms no doubt had ample opportunities to clash with Voldemort's plots and plans. The Potters on the other hand joined the Order as teenagers with nothing more than some vicious schoolyard scrapping to their resume. I'd always liked the theory that their choice to marry and keep the baby (that became Harry) in that political climate when they were only 20 years old was itself an act of defiance. But the other two instances during which the Potters 'defied' him must have resonated. Lily must have said something that stuck with him, that forced him to forever associate her with his weakness, with muggles, even though she was not a muggle but a mudblood. A talented witch that even he noticed enough to consider snape's plea to spare her but also unforgettably "muggle". And James must have made enough of an impact for Voldemort to memorize his countenance years to come -- voldemort doesn't usually remember all his murders unless they meant something personal to his journey to immortal power. Yet somehow Voldemort recognizes the need to turn Peter so thoroughly and somehow Voldemort remembers James standing tall and formidable enough to try to taunt Harry with it at the graveyard.

Both Lily and James Potter had been living rent-free in Voldemort’s mind for enough time that their halfblood child was the first kid to pop into his mind at the news of the prophecy.

Also, Voldemort believes in pureblood supremacy the way Jordan Peterson is a Christian who believes in Christianity as salvation...aka, its largely a cloak for the pursuit of power, gets him the connections with the right people, he's conviced enough people with his narrative that it almost seems like he's convinced himself, but there’ll always be signs.

I wasn’t sure how to incorporate this into the options, but add in the tags if you think he also hated purebloods!

I think Remus was a tiny bit inlove with Lily.

It was safer for him to have cruches on unavailable ppl. That's why he was so surprised when Tonks fell in love with him and was able to reciprocate his feelings. In his mind, she was too young, free and vivacious to notice him.

(I'm not a wolfstar believer in Canon)

Ooh I think it is totally in character for him to pick safe crushes he never thought would like him back

What a shame Tonks actually reciprocated lol

here’s your not so gentle reminder harry’s not piteously pathetic at potions. here’s a refresher:

fifth year, he sat for his owls and scored an exceeds expectations. not an acceptable, or poor, or dreadful, or troll (an ee in owls most probably equals a >75 in gsce o’s during the 90s)

he didn’t duplicate hermione, shrink her, and sneak her into the exam hall to pluck answers off her brain. he didn’t scribble a cheat sheet a la fa mulan on his arm

fifth year he has yet to clap eyes on the half-blood prince’s notes

as always, he didn’t feel confident about his answers/abilities, but he bloody exceeded expectations

he got into newts potions, a class of only twelve students

so harry got an ee, ron got an ee, maybe everyone else got an oustanding. or maybe only half a dozen got outstanding, and the rest exceeds expectations.

it still means the entirety of hufflepuff sixth years aren’t promising potioneers except ernie macmillan. poor boy probably tutors the others in the common room. all of the slytherin sixth years, excluding four, are absolutely worse off than harry and ron at potions. ravenclaw sixth years are shamefully inadequate at potions too, aside from four students.

harry’s not a marvel at potions. he doesn’t enjoy potions. but he’s good at potions, he’s capable enough. he isn’t blowing up cauldrons every month, that’s seamus. he can differentiate the ingredients. he knows how to cut, dice, chop, and stir. the spirit of sixteen year old severus snape didn’t possess him via the pages to help him brew his elixirs and essences in slughorn’s class. harry deciphered snape’s spidery, crammed annotations and executed them perfectly.

i’m bloody tired of these rancid ‘harry sucks so bad at potions except when he’s got the prince or hermione’s help’ takes.

tom riddle is a yapper. he loves his monologues and dramatics.

draco malfoy is a yapper. he, too, loves the sound of his voice and dramatics.

ron weasley has no qualms about being loud and seen. he grew up in a large household, fighting to be heard over his siblings.

harry potter grew up in a cupboard, friendless except for the spiders, and learned to subdue and suppress and submit at the dursleys. he isn’t loud, he isn’t boisterous, he isn’t talkative, he doesn’t like socialising, he keeps his opinions in his head and his feelings buried inside, he has very few close friends, he doesn’t reveal his worries and struggles easily, he dislikes showing his pain and weakness, and he sure doesn’t give up his secrets and personal details freely, sometimes not even to ron and hermione.

this is what canon harry’s like—very quiet and an introvert, someone who speaks when spoken to or has cause to broadcast his voice, and someone who’d rather blend into the walls than draw unnecessary attention to himself.

controversial headcanon is that Sirius black didn’t play quidditch while at Hogwarts

Potter Children Headcanons

JAMES

James is Ginny with black hair. Her eyes, her nose , the only out of the three to get her extreme freckles. I imagine him to be mid height but Albus is taller.

Ginny is his best friend. Absolute mammas boy yes James is the rebel child but so is Ginny. They have the same humor have the same interest they are very close. He made her a mum and they will always have that bond.

James is also very protective of Lily and Albus. Yes he had very caring and present parents but they are busy people so James stepped in a lot as he got older to be there for the other two. James and teddy are incredibly close James was Tedds first brother and they spend a lot of time together once James graduates, they even lived together at a point.

ALBUS

Everything about Albus looks like Harry. But, Albus has a warmness in his face that came from his mama. He has Harry’s wider shoulders but Albus got Ron’s height. Something James will forever be jelous of.

Albus was closer to Ginny as a toddler because he was so shy but moving through adolescence he noticed how similar he is to his father. They are both people watchers, don’t like big crowds, crave the quiet. He always goes to Harry when he has questions or concerns. Don’t get me wrong they fight a lot and when they do it’s bad but Harry is his favorite parent and deep down he would never admit it Albus is Harry’s favorite child.

Albus’s family mate is Rose she does all the talking for him and they get along very well. Teddy has always looked out for Albus as well always making sure he had eaten dinner and including him in things with the other cousins.

LILY

Everyone says lily looks like Ginny at first but, Ginny and Harry both agree she looks more like her father. She has her mums fair skin, her brown eyes, and a light dusting of freckles not like James and Ginny have. But if you look closer she has Harry’s eye shape. His check bones, his nose, his jaw. Her eyebrows her lips that’s all from her dad. When she’s standing right next to Harry that really shines through how much she looks like her father. She is also crazy petite like Ginny very small in stature.

She’s the baby so obviously she gets away with everything. If James and Albus want something then they make Lily go ask for it. She’s close with Ginny because they enjoy doing stuff together like getting nails done going shopping talking about boys all the usual mother daughter things. But just like Ginny and Molly holy hell those two could row if they fight the whole neighborhood will know. But that’s where Harry comes in if Lily runs to her room crying after a fight with her mom Harry will be the one to comfort her till she falls asleep.

Lily wasn’t that close to the boys growing up especially not James because she was so much younger but when they all got older they started to bond more. She always admired Aunt Angelina Lily could always tell her things she could never tell her mom.

Basically agree with all of this but damn, a 13 inch height difference is mad!

Canon Couples and the Random Heights I Assigned Them

Just because I recently re-read this post and it's on my mind. Here's what I think these canon couples' final heights came to be and some justifications behind my thought process, as well as some headcanons. Let's start with my OTP -

Harry (6'1") and Ginny (5'0")

I'm kinda obsessed with the idea that 17yo Harry being the same height as his 21yo deceased father would grow just a couple more inches

Ginny being 5ft fits with her being the noticeably "smallest one" in the DoM during OOTP and with Harry being able to easily look over her head during the infamous First Kiss scene in HBP, putting her head at chest height of Harry (as of HBP)

Ginny is the only one who knows about Harry's petty satisfaction when he ran into Draco Malfoy some years after the war and realized he had continued to grow and Malfoy hadn't

James (5'11") and Lily (5'8")

Because they're both tall enough to be considered "tall", but not the kind of tall that is shocking

Lily being 5'8" makes her tall enough to have to look down at 14yo Harry in the graveyard scene of GOF

Ron (6'5") and Hermione (5'8")

In order for Fred and George to be "shorter and stockier" than 14yo Ron, but still slightly over 6ft so as to shrink to 5'11" in DH, I have to assume Ron's final height came to be one that most people would put in the "Holy shit you're tall" category

I know I'm going to get shouted at for Hermione's height, because she's never described as particularly tall in the books HOWEVER she's never described as particularly short either, just shorter than Harry

This 9 inch height difference give Ron & Hermione the perfect height difference for Ron to comfortably rest his chin on her head without having to hunch over awkwardly like Harry does with Ginny, so I'm sticking to it

Arthur (5'11") and Molly (4'11")

I know the movies made Arthur short and round, but he was described as thin in the books and all the Weasley boys wind up being pretty tall, so they had to get that from somewhere.

Molly is consistently described as short and dumpy throughout the series, and while Ginny is often compared to Molly physically, I just like the idea that Ginny managed to grow that extra inch that Molly never did.

Draco (6'0") and Astoria (5'11")

we know in DH Draco was slightly taller than Harry at the Malfoy Manor scene (p.457, U.S. edition of DH), so if we assume the like linked post above that Harry was 5'11" during DH, then I'd put Draco at 6 foot.

we literally know nothing about Astoria (CC doesn't count), but I picked 5'11" because it is the curse of all tall women to wind up with men roughly the same height

Lucius (5'10") and Narcissa (5'10")

we know Harry and Narcissa are the same height in HBP, so I put her at 5'10"

correct me if I'm wrong, but Lucius is never described as particularly tall, while Narcissa is. And of course, tall for a woman is average for a man. I put Lucius to be around around the same height as Narcissa because I just don't see Lucius' personality allowing him to be with a woman taller than himself.

also, see the curse of tall women above

Arguing that James Potter’s death meant nothing is such a fundamental misunderstanding of the narrative that it makes me wonder if people have even read the books.

This is a man who ran headfirst toward his death in a desperate attempt to give his wife and son a chance to escape. A selfless, brave act of love that stands in contrast with Voldemort's personal war against death and Snape's desperate plea to bargain for the life of Lily while not caring if her husband or child dies.

James isn’t just a character who dies early, off-page, before the main character is introduced—he becomes a specter who haunts the entire story.

James’s absence profoundly shapes Harry’s journey as he struggles to define himself. His sense of masculinity and self-worth is deeply tied to the father he never knew but constantly strives to emulate. Sirius and Remus, broken by their shared loss, are mere shadows of their former selves, their lives forever marked by James’s death. Even Voldemort acknowledges James with a twisted form of respect when he taunts Harry in the graveyard.

To say James’s death means nothing disregards the emotional heart of the series. Harry’s story is fundamentally about grief—his desperate longing to connect with the family stolen from him, and his eventual journey toward acceptance. It’s about learning to live fully in the face of loss, choosing life over despair, and understanding death not as an enemy but as an inevitable companion.

James’s death isn’t meaningless—it’s pivotal. It echoes throughout the series.

James’s death means everything.

#fantastic horcrux meta

One thing I find really compelling about ronmort is that the horcrux which targets ron is the one most "maternal"-- tom's mother's locket, which you so cleverly pointed out was also the one which he erected a complicated defense for in a place that was meaningful to his childhood. Everything the locket says to Ron just feels so charged? Wym you've seen his heart and it's yours? Wym you've seen his dreams and his desires? The fact that Ron can hear the locket's heartbeat before anyone else... I don't know how to explain it except that the locket's antagonism of Ron feels almost intimate in a way. The shenanigans would be sexy. Not least because Ron can apparently do a passing imitation of parseltongue (hot).

that each of the trio destroys the horcrux which most connects to something fundamental about themselves is a detail which obsesses me.

the diary

harry - an orphan, desperate to meet someone else who can understand the strangeness and isolation of his experience; searching for the truth about himself, and what in his life is inherited, but unable to ever fully uncover it - destroys the diary, not only the sole horcrux which is an explicit link to lord voldemort's upbringing as an orphan in the muggle world, but also a metaphor for the state of orphanhood itself.

the diary is a quasi-palimpsest - an object which has to be written in; an object in which a layer of text is written and then overwritten by another; an object in which these layers of text can be stripped back until only the original layer remains only with extraordinary difficulty - just like the orphan's search for meaning, trying to decipher the layers of themselves which were inherited from their parents, but only ever being able to see these partially, with the text missing or corrupted.

voldemort's creation of the diary-horcrux is explicitly connected in canon to him coming to learn about himself, his parents, and his heritage - and, connected to this, to him refusing to sit with the grief of orphanhood, refusing to understand his parents as whole, complex people, and refusing to embrace his "real" identity [which, as the text understands it, is that of a half-blood named tom marvolo riddle] by creating a fake one [that of lord voldemort].

harry destroys it after rejecting voldemort's self-constructed view of his own exceptionality - "the greatest wizard in the world is albus dumbledore" - his refusal to acknowledge the complexities of lineage and orphanhood, and his refusal to embrace his muggle heritage - "my mother died to save me. my common, muggleborn mother". he does this using a tool directly connected to voldemort's rejection of all but his slytherin heritage - the basilisk's fang - in a location similarly connected to voldemort's rejection of his muggle blood - the chamber of secrets.

the cup

hermione - an outsider, whose place in the wizarding world is unstable - destroys the cup, one of the horcruxes to which voldemort has the least personal connection, but which he selected to hide his soul because of its historical significance, anchoring him to a millennium of wizarding history and culture he was otherwise brought up disconnected from.

voldemort's creation of the cup-horcrux comes at the end of a period of his life in which he is disadvantaged in wizarding society purely on the basis of his name and background. he rejects the ministry jobs which would have made him dependent for the rest of his life on slughorn's patronage - and, therefore, pressured him to do what slughorn wanted - and ends up, as he himself puts it, as "a poor shop assistant". hepzibah smith is a pureblood, who is also descended from one of hogwarts' founders - yet she doesn't make use of this superiority ["all sorts of powers it's supposed to possess too... i just keep it nice and safe in here..."], and she doesn't realise [and he can't prove to her and hope to keep his job] that voldemort is someone she should think of as her equal [or even superior]. she - as harry observes - essentially treats voldemort as doll she can play with, posing him with her treasures and pretending his glacial politeness is really repressed affection, she speaks to him like he's an idiot, and she evidently considers him to be her social inferior.

hermione destroys the cup after seven books in which the discrimination she faces on account of being muggleborn is explicit. obviously, she's the victim of violent bigotry - she's petrified, she's called a mudblood, she's the only one of the trio who also has to worry about the muggleborn registration commission - but she's also the victim of seemingly benign, genial bigotry too - the muggle world is treated as a quaint side-show, even by characters like the weasleys; she's praised for her intelligence by slughorn, but this intelligence is still considered in some way unusual for someone with muggle heritage. she gets spoken to by many wizards in ways which aren't far removed from the way hepzibah speaks to voldemort.

as a result, she - like voldemort - spends a lot of time trying to acquire enough knowledge of the wizarding world that she appears to be native to it [this is why she's so obsessed with hogwarts: a history]. but - unlike voldemort - she then embraces her heritage and refuses to hide it - "mudblood and proud of it!".

and - shortly after this - she destroys the cup, in a place - the chamber - and using a tool - the basilisk's fang - which are both directly connected to the bigotry she experienced, since they're part of slytherin's belief that people like her should be driven out of hogwarts and out of the magical world more broadly, and therefore send a big "fuck you" to voldemort's blood-supremacy.

the locket

and ron... whose greatest desire is to be recognised for his individual achievements, who has a complex and uneasy relationship with his place in his family [simultaneously longing to be something other than "one of the weasleys" and fiercely loyal to his parents and siblings], who is the only pureblood of the trio, whose childhood we hear the most about in canon, and whose childhood appears to have been happy...

destroys the locket, which is voldemort's only link to his mother, and the only horcrux for which he constructs an elaborate defence in a place meaningful to him from childhood.

we don't actually know who voldemort kills to create the locket-horcrux [jkr has said in interviews that it was a muggle tramp, although this contradicts dumbledore's statement in half-blood prince that voldemort created his horcruxes from murders which were significant to him], which is a neat metaphor for how little he knows about merope - since he doesn't know morfin's name, for example, we can assume he doesn't know hers; everything he ever tells harry about her is something he's invented [especially his belief that his parents' marriage was consensual, and that tom riddle sr. abandoned her because she was a witch].

the horcrux attempts to torture ron with his insecurities about being a mammy's boy who's always been afraid that he's a bit of a flop at the task - especially when compared to siblings like ginny, bill, and percy. and ron is so susceptible to it because voldemort is also an inherent mammy's boy [ronmort nation, rise up] who never got a chance to have a mam, and who responded to the grief this caused him by suppressing it, pretending it never existed, and convincing himself that the only viable thing to be is unique.

ron destroys it after he returns to the trio - having attempted to strike out on his own [the thing he's wanted since philosopher's stone, when he sees himself standing alone in the mirror of erised] - and accepts his place as part of a group. he does so using the sword of gryffindor, which again represents him embracing not being exceptional - his entire family have been in gryffindor, something he's shown to feel simultaneously proud of and uneasy with right from his first appearance.