I can never understand how Snape apologetics can stand up for him when he CANONICALLY does this shit.
I can maybe, maybe, understand those who haven’t read the books standing up for him, because honestly the movies don’t cover all the horrible stuff he does. But those who have read the books and still stick up for him baffle me.
I mean, you don’t see anyone sticking up for the Dursley’s or Umbridge, when they do the same stuff to Harry as Snape. How is Snape any different?
SNAPE IS GARBAGE
LOVING SOMEONE DOESNT MAGICALLY MAKE YOU A GOOD PERSON
remember in goblet of fire when minerva says ‘potter’s a boy, not a piece of meat!’
imagine harry telling her everything after the battle of hogwarts, telling her about how dumbledore raised him like a pig for slaughter, and how he had to die and mcgonagall gets so goddamned mad
she loses control for the first time that harry’s EVER seen and she’s actually yelling, she’s so pissed that harry was seventeen and he had to accept death and dumbledore KNEW he would have to die and NEVER TOLD HIM
and harry’s about to cry because yeah his friends would be devastated if he was gone but NO ONE got this damn pissed that dumbledore had raised him so that he could die at the right time and mcgonagall’s in the middle of a rant and he just shoots up and hugs her and she’s stunned into silence but after a moment she hugs back and it’s great
and then she goes up to her office and starts screaming at dumbledore’s portrait because ‘i don’t care if it had to happen, albus, he is a CHILD-’
how good would it be if luna, who believes in the crumple-horned snorckack and nargles, thought that dinosaurs were made up by muggles
Okay, but consider:
Someone (probably Hermione) takes Luna to a muggle museum of natural history, in a last ditch effort to convince her that dinosaurs really did exist. They go through all of it: full and partial skeletons on display, fossil imprints of skin textures, a little video about carbon dating, exhibits on the evolution of all life from tiny one-celled sea creatures, bird-hipped vs. lizard-hipped, living giant isopods and coelacanths, the whole spiel about how the dinosaurs aren’t actually completely gone, since some, like the anchiornis and archaeopteryx, were the predecessors from which today’s birds – including every owl in the Wizarding World – evolved.
Luna takes all this in with her usual calm demeanor until the very end, when her eyes seem to grow even more enormous in her face, but doesn’t say anything. After a full minute of Luna’s silent astonishment, her companion prods her for a response. “Of course!” Luna exclaims, “no wonder I’ve never found them. I’ve been going about things the wrong way!” She launches into a lengthy explanation that the records that she and her father have been using for references were copies of copies of copies of absolutely ancient scripts, so in order to find the creatures as described in them, she needed to be looking for fossils.
Luna (with Rolf as her assistant) begins searching through areas of Wizarding Britain, using magical equivalents of the muggle tools she read about at the museum (a variation on Tempus to determine the age of a magical item or creature, Cryptozoam Revelio as a substitute for ground-penetrating radar). She finds the remains of a number of magical creatures from various ages, as well as accidentally uncovering a nest of Knuckers, a relative of the dragon previously thought to be extinct. After this discovery, she and Rolf are given a bit more credence than before, and they gain the support among creature-handlers, especially dragonologists. Because of this, they get access to more regions of the world, and their team grows. Eventually Luna ends up founding the Wizarding Archaeological Society, the first institution to combine both muggle and wizard research methods at a single institution.
On the 50th anniversary of the Society’s founding, they open a museum of their own (”Everything that was, at the WAS!”), to display the various fossils of magical creatures that they’ve managed to locate over the years. Unveiled at the opening ceremonies was what would become the pride of their collection, a diorama of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in every stage of development, along with details about their habits, average lifespan, and a map of the full range of their habitat at their peak population in the mid-17th century. Their extinction at during the 20th century was attributed to rising global temperatures, as their most flourishing period coincided with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age, and no specimens from any later than the 1976 Heat Wave had thus far been recovered. The disappearance of the Snorkacks, it was said, had been an early warning sign of the global climate change which had troubled the entire world, wizarding and muggle, for the better part of the last half-century. A cooperative partnership had been reached between the WAS and the Royal Society a scant decade after the WAS’s founding , allowing research witches and wizards to pool their resources with muggle scientists, in time to prevent a catastrophe that the wizarding world would otherwise have been unlikely to survive.
In her speech at that evening’s gala, Luna told the story of how it all happened, to reveal the person who had singlehandledly started this series of events, which resulted in not only a golden age of discovery in the field of cryptozoology, but also an era of peace and cooperation between both worlds, allowing restrictions imposed by the Statute of Secrecy to be loosened for the first time in nearly five hundred years, all in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Hermione Granger, who had been grumbling in her chair the entire time, rose when acknowledged. Luna Lovegood beamed at her aging friend, the witch who had gone from being her most skeptical critic to her most dedicated – and most challenging – supporter in a mere half-century.
I want to see a fanfic where Harry hatches a basilisk.
I want to see a fanfic where he looks up “magical snakes” as soon as he gets to Hogwarts because that thing at the zoo always bugged him, and so the Trio works out that it’s a basilisk immediately after the first petrification in Second Year. But they don’t know how it’s getting around or where it is or anything, so Harry is just like WELP SET A BASILISK TO FIND A BASILISK while Hermione and Ron are like HARRY NO.
I want to see a fanfic where Harry sticks a chicken egg under a toad and makes all these plans about how he’ll talk to his huge deadly snake and get it eye-blinkers and shit so it doesn’t kill people and make sure it’s not too aggressive, and somehow it never occurs to his twelve-year old brain that the chicken egg has a total volume of about four tablespoons and he is not going to get the giant King of Serpents he is expecting.
I want to see a fanfic where it finally breaks out of the shell and Harry finds himself with a bb!basilisk too smol to even have the murder-eyes yet, who can only petrify someone for about half an hour before the effect wears off. She eats spiders and gets tired very easily and demands that he wear a hood she can curl up in and sleep.
(She is also the same vivid green as his eyes and already hideously venomous, but doesn’t like using her fangs because she says they get cold and give her brain freeze when she unsheathes them.)
I just… I really want Harry with a haughty, demanding, arrogant danger noodle who has an overinflated sense of her own importance, views Hedwig as a TERRIFYING MENACE because she isn’t big enough to eat owls yet and keeps up a steady stream of insults hissed in Harry’s ear whenever she’s near someone who has a Dark Mark (which she can sense at close range). And who is basically useless as a familiar because she refuses to slither across anything other than sun-warmed stones or Harry, hasn’t got a very powerful gaze yet and doesn’t like biting people.
(Except snake-arm-people. She finds snake-arm-people confusing and annoying, and would probably make an exception on the no-biting thing where they’re concerned.)
I mean there are obviously a lot of factors influencing snake growth rate but if we assume basilisks just get stupidhuge because they grow their whole lives and are immortal, this snake is probably going to be at least 8 feet long by Deathly Hallows, which is a significant and intimidating chunk of scaly muscle that is intelligent enough to do what it is told. Like, you know, hey, bite this necklace.
So I mean by like his fourth year it’s going to be pretty hard to hide this snake that is nearly as long as he is tall and it’s not going to do much for his reputation that the Boy Who Lived has a pet fucking basilisk but holy damn does it make book seven a whole hell of a lot shorter.
I feel like I should write this
can you just imagine him ron and hermione coming up with increasingly ridiculous excuses trying to hide their pet baby basilisk in the dorms (hagrid would be so proud). how long do you think it’d take before harry’s pet basilisk is just a really badly hidden secret between all of gryffindor? and the ensuring antics of the entire house as they try to keep mcgonagall from finding out? (she knows something is up, but even just thinking of what could be big enough the entire house is trying to keep it from her makes her want to break out the firewhiskey)
ron gets the idea to try and practices parseltongue with baby basilisk since he hears harry talking in his sleep with it all the time anyway (and ngl, baby basilisk is kind of adorable and eats all the spiders in the dorm so he doesn’t have to deal with them, he’s pretty smitten once she hatches), and as soon as hermione overhears him trying it, she’s dragging him and harry to the library because, well, parseltongue is a language, why can’t they learn it? so it’s the two of them alternating between hissing at harry and hissing at the basilisk and harry is trying so hard not to laugh because 90% of what they’re saying is utter nonsense and the basilisk doesn’t even bother, because she likes these two humans but wow are they dumb, that’s not how words work.
What about once the basilisk gets a bit big the eyes start being an issue and after Ron accidentally gets petrified one evening and it sticks until he misses History of Magic the next morning (he isn’t complaining and Binns sure as hell didn’t notice but if it’s Transfiguration next time there will be a Problem) they have to find a way of dealing with the eyes because one of these days there will be enough power for the permanent kind.
So after a lot of false starts with, like, goggles and shit, Hermione appears with a stack of advanced transfiguration books and the beginnings of a plan to give it eyelids or at least nictitating membranes that the petrification can’t pass through, but even with her being super smart it’s a few years beyond her abilities.
And then Harry sets eyes on the invisibility cloak and says “if you can’t see the eyes, they can’t petrify you.” Well a snake in a cloak doesn’t work too well, but Hermione has heard of the Disillusionment Charm, and that would also solve nearly all of their problems keeping a snake hidden in the dormitory.
So Sibilance Gloriana Theophania Sunstone (she didn’t quite completely name herself, she and Harry had a little conversation about what she likes and what human names mean and also she’s like a six-year-old in snake years so she is named after hissing, two queens, and her favorite thing to sleep on) is now the Invisible Snake of Gryffindor.
Out of necessity, her existence ends up being shared with a few people, either because they’ve tripped over her (Neville, Oliver, Parvati), they’ve accidentally been petrified by her (Neville, Fred), or their twin has found out about her and shared (George).
Fred and George are very keen to have an invisible house snake, and are brilliant at finding new spells to help out: she gains the ability to crawl up the walls like they’re more floor, to levitate and slither in midair, and to fill her venom sacs with substances other than venom; it is extremely rare that she wants to actually kill anything besides dinner, and it is so much more enjoyable to be able to bite people and use her fangs as a delivery system for itching powder or the line of nondrinkable potions Fred and George are in the process of inventing.
By the time the dueling club rolls around, she’s about three feet long and plump on rats and spiders and mice. She bites Lockhart when Snape sends him flying, and Snape ends up taking over the dueling club entirely while Lockhart hurries to the hospital wing with a set of massive boils on his ankle.
When Draco summons the snake with Serpensortia, Harry squeaks with delight and grabs the snake, hissing at it in greeting, and so the whole school learns Harry Potter is a parselmouth by means of an adorable scene with a very friendly, cuddly snake, which doesn’t strike anyone as particularly Dark Lordly at all.
The new snake, of course, can detect the presence of Sibilance, and Sibilance is delighted to have a serpent companion, so they’re happily engaged in conversation as Harry, Ron, and Hermione return to the dormitories. This scene of adorable domestic bliss is interrupted when they get up to Harry’s dorm room with one more snake than usual, and Ron’s pet rat Scabbers suddenly turns into a man and runs shrieking down the stairs.
(Harry has explained Scabbers to Sibilance back when Sibilance was smaller than Scabbers, and she has never attempted to eat him. The new snake, however, has not received this conversation and it’s a very different thing hanging around with a snake who you watched come out of the egg than meeting one that’s several times your size from the get-go. Absent introductions, the new snake assumes it’s dinnertime and Peter Pettigrew, faced with something very like what the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets would look like from Harry’s perspective, decides discovery is a slight improvement on dying and drops his animagus form.)
It is Peter Pettigrew’s poor luck to run into the Entrance Hall just in time to meet Severus Snape, who can put two and two together as well as most people and who is, easily, one of the fastest duelists Hogwarts has seen in recent decades.
Pettigrew’s capture and interrogation result in the release and exoneration of Sirius Black, who has one conversation with Harry, one conversation with Albus, and one conversation with Vernon and Petunia Dursley; the deal they all come to is that after precisely two weeks at Number Four, Privet Drive, during which time Vernon and Petunia will be scrupulously polite, Harry will go and live with his godfather.
Professor McGonagall and Professor Dumbledore agree that a snake is an acceptable pet, and the new snake takes the name Hex, quite a bit of delight in the spells Sibilance has had adapted for her, and the unofficial position of Gryffindor house mascot.
There is widespread interest in learning Parseltongue, and with Harry translating, a number of students take time to learn at least some basic words. Chief among these is Ginny Weasley, who is desperate for someone else safe to confide in about the blank spaces in her memory.
It is Sibilance, not Hex, that finds out about the diary, sneaking down from Hermione’s dorm looking for spiders (really, where have they all gone to?) in time to overhear Ginny crying as she writes in a book that really, really reeks of dark magic.
She bites the book, of course, and then there’s an awful mess and Ginny furious and distressed that the diary, and with it, her friend Tom, are no more. It takes some doing for Sibilance to explain her existence, the nature of the book, and what was likely happening to Ginny; eventually Harry has to be tracked down to translate.
With Tom Riddle gone, they all speculate on the Chamber of Secrets and it’s Ginny with the suggestion that Moaning Myrtle might be the one who died last time the monster was released. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Sibilance, Hex, Ginny, Fred, George, and Neville all head to the bathroom, and from there to the Chamber, where they stand with their eyes closed while Sibilance calls out the massive basilisk.
It’s a long, interesting conversation, and it ends with several spells cast, promises made, and a fascinating comedy of errors as they sneak an invisible basilisk out of the Chamber, through the school, out the main doors, and into the Forbidden Forest where its newfound flying, climbing, and poison-switching abilities will enable it to joyously predate upon the acromantula colony for decades to come.
They all get detentions over the matter when they are caught sneaking back in, less for the Forbidden Forest trip and more for McGonagall’s near heart attack at hearing the whole thing, but there are no more petrifications, the affected students are eventually awoken, and Gryffindor wins the Quidditch Cup, much to Oliver’s joy.
Hex and Sibilance enjoy warming themselves curled up on the fireplace hearth until Sibilance gets too big, and eventually Snape discovers her existence by tripping over her, but that’s another story.
Has anyone done a “Lily and James Live” AU where Lily takes over as Potions Master after Slughorn retires instead of Snape?
Professor Potter, patient and kind with all students and especially helpful to overwhelmed muggleborns.
Professor Potter, whose dorky husband randomly pops up in the school in odd places with their infant son, though never seems to come in from the front door.
Professor Potter, whose little boy sometimes helps her add potions ingredients to her cauldron when she’s giving a demonstration during class.
Professor Potter, who will pay responsible prefects a few galleons to watch Harry for a few hours while her dorky husband insists on taking her out to dinner.
Professor Potter, the subject of many adolescent crushes.
Professor Potter, who has tea with Professor McGonagall and Professor Sprout regularly, often interrupted by her dorky husband who passes up no opportunity to drop in on his lovely wife and bother McGonagall for old time’s sake.
Professor Potter, who attends every Quidditch match with her dorky husband at her side and her son on her lap waving a small Gryffindor flag.
Professor Potter, pregnant with her second child and brewing anti-nausea potions to get through all her classes despite all the smells.
Professor Potter, who earns Professor Flitwick ten galleons because he bet that she would go into labor the moment the O.W.L.s began.
Professor Potter, who regularly writes with Professor Slughorn about all the star pupils she has.
Professor Potter, who really tries not to favor Gryffindor, really, but the Weasley boy truly showed so much improvement since last class, the points were well-earned!
Professor Potter, who creates a safe and encouraging environment for students to learn in.
okay but neville longbottom as head of gryffindor house and there’s all these stories of him going head to head with an army of werewolves, being tortured by death eaters and killing Voldemort’s snake with godric gryffindor’s actual sword but when the students see him he’s like cradling a pot plant and crying cause he saw someone lost their pet on the noticeboard and they’re like “that guy? are you sure it’s that guy”
BONUS: one of the older student’s get dared to go up and ask him if it’s true and neville just makes direct eye-contact and says “voldemort was a punk bitch” and continues knitting a lil baby sweater for a mandrake
okay but neville longbottom as head of gryffindor house and there’s all these stories of him going head to head with an army of werewolves, being tortured by death eaters and killing Voldemort’s snake with godric gryffindor’s actual sword but when the students see him he’s like cradling a pot plant and crying cause he saw someone lost their pet on the noticeboard and they’re like “that guy? are you sure it’s that guy”
BONUS: one of the older student’s get dared to go up and ask him if it’s true and neville just makes direct eye-contact and says “voldemort was a punk bitch” and continues knitting a lil baby sweater for a mandrake
what i do is not up to you 