So I had the strangest dream this weekend and nobody understands me so I need to share it with you because you might. Press J to skip this post if you can’t deal, I will accept this.
In my dream I was standing on the back deck of a rural cabin that overlooked a beautiful Vermont/Scottish Highlands landscape of unspoiled wilderness. It was a crisp, perfect autumn morning. I held a cup of cooling coffee in my hands as I leaned against the railing and scanned the perfect rolling hills in the midground, behind which the great patterned mountains with their snowcaps marched on until they blended with the horizon: #aesthetic
As I gazed at a distant meadow clearing in the trees, a pair of brightly coloured humanoid creatures emerged from the woods and began to dance for each other. It was an esoteric, beautiful mating dance, a strange combination of instinct and choreography. I felt awe washing over me. I marvelled. I felt a deep sense of wonder and peace as I observed this vanishingly rare encounter that I had never thought to observe in person. These animals were instantly recognisable but had never been studied in the wild. I felt incredibly humbled and privileged to witness this behaviour – I knew that I was the first human witness to observe this behaviour – and I reached for my phone, wondering if I should film it, so it could join the scholarly record, where it NEEDED to be. This could change everything. But then I held back – something told me “no,” to let the creatures have their privacy.
Ok, I can’t go any further without telling you that they were Teletubbies.
A red one and a yellow one. I know. I know. Stay with me here.
The cryptids melted back into the woods. My subconscious drew a discreet veil over the rest of their mating ritual, but I knew instinctively that this had been a dance of courtship. I was busy pondering the implications, because they were critical. You see, although the creatures were instantly recognisable as Teletubbies, as I had studied them, even at a distance, I had an incredible realisation.
They were adult Teletubbies.
This realisation dawned on me and in my dream I understood it fully. The ones that we know of – the captive ones that we have seen on television – are juveniles. In fact, they are the equivalent of toddlers. When you see the adults this becomes obvious. The garbled speech and silly movements of the four captive Teletubbies we know are the babbles of babyhood, a private primal toddler-language brewed up between sentient beings who have never encountered an adult of their own kind.
The adult Teletubbies have more branching, complex antlers and shaggy coats. They are less brightly coloured. They are terrifyingly large. Their strangely human faces, emerging from the thick fur, are unquestionably adult; remote, serene, reproachful. Their television screens are glitchy, esoteric and unknowable. They are cryptids whose public exploitation has undermined their rarity and their strange, alien dignity.
In my dream my feelings of awe and peace turned to great sadness at the fate of the captive toddler Teletubbies. I realised that I had to be the scientist who brought this discovery to the world and raised awareness of their plight. And I also questioned: are Teletubbies like axolotls? Do they exhibit neoteny? (Axolotls, the cute aquarium pets with flaring gills, are actually juveniles of an amphibious species – if given the right conditions they’ll grow up into land-dwelling black newts. But they can breed in their aquatic juvenile form, and most spend their whole lives in this form. Deprived of their wild potential, will the Teletubbies ever mature? Or are they merely experiencing a long childhood, natural for a species that is unimaginably long-lived?)
So in my dream my husband came out onto the back deck and I began to share these discoveries with him and before I could even bring up the axolotls he just said “what the fucking fuck” and went away again.
I woke up disgruntled and unable to capture the feeling of peace and sadness. I then tried to explain this to my husband in the waking world, and he said “what the fucking fuck” and walked away before I even got to the explanation of the Teletubbies being toddlers, which just goes to show that you never know someone as well as you think you do.
Anyway I’m sure you guys will join me in this knowledge. And also I’ve googled it and apparently the Teletubbies reboot features infant Teletubbies, so clearly they are getting more from somewhere and the time to question this is NOW
I have a personal theory that how a dream makes you feel is more meaningful than the content.
What I got from your dream was a sense of wonder and privilege (the good kind), followed by the need to bear witness and advocate for the cryptids. Topped off with a disturbingly accurate example of the attitudes you’d face.
(staring nobly into the distance) yes. yes, you understand. you understand.
I’m so sorry but this is what came to mind and so this is what I drew
Holy
Thank you so much for sharing that dream, it was EXACTLY what I needed to stop feeling like shit. Now I, too, am honored by the knowledge of adult teletubbies.
Oops sorry didn’t notice this at first and then took a little while to get back to it!
This is pretty much EXACTLY what I had in mind!
To recap:
For one reason or another (either Qui-Gon is a little better at bargaining with Watto, or, more likely, Padmé makes some arrangements) Shmi Skywalker freed earlier than canon and ends up living on Naboo.
She doesn’t really have a set plan for what to do with herself now, but finds herself remaining close to Queen Amidala and her handmaidens, offering much needed advice and comfort as they go about trying to rebuild a war weary planet. Shmi may come from a simple background, but in many ways that is exactly what Padmé and the others need, and Shmi soon finds herself the de facto den-mother of a group of terrifyingly competent teenage girls. She could never have imagined that this would be her life but she is grateful for it.
As such, Padmé and her ladies are the first to receive her handmade gifts – warm soft shawls to snuggle into at the end of a long day. Each of them is a different in colour – cool greens for Eirtaé, vibrant reds for Rabé, earthy browns for Cordé, yellow golds for Sabé… and for Padmé soft blues that echo the plain dress she once wore on the sands of Tatooine. All of them however bear the same abstract patterns woven in white.
To one who knows the heat of twin suns, their meaning is clear.
“Courage of the Spirit” “Strength of resolve” “Daughter of my heart”
The girls love them.
Of course, even with this newfound family Shmi never forgets her Ani. Padmé had told her about the events on Naboo of course, about Qui-Gon’s fall and Obi-Wan’s steadfast insistence on training Anakin in his place… She misses him dearly, but she is content to know he is following the path he chose.
Still, the Temple looks awfully cold and austere. And she remembers how long it took her to get used to Naboo’s weather. Surely it can’t hurt…
The design for Ani is easy, a rich burgundy the shade of ripe pallies, made a few sizes too large to accommodate a growing boy and carrying the message she wishes she could tell him herself.
“ Beloved Son” “Pride” “Hope for the future”
But, Anakin is not alone.
Shmi isn’t sure what to do at first. What little footage she has seen of the Jedi who is raising her son gives her scant insight into who he IS as a person. In the end she decides on socks. Less personal, but highly practical. It would take a little more attention to notice the patterns this time, light tan fading neatly into dark brown.
“Kin of my kin” “Gratitude” “Trust”
She knows the Jedi discourage contact with birth families, so she is not expecting the message that waits for her as she returns home some months later.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, she realises as the recording starts to play, is younger than she had thought. The man in the holo cannot be older than his mid-twenties, despite the best efforts of what is obviously a newly grown beard. There’s something about his manner too, a nervousness in his stance, that tells her he is less confident than he presents himself.
He thanks her for her presents, making note to compliment her choice in materials, before apologetically explaining that it is inappropriate for Jedi to recieve gifts like this. It would however, he muses, be rude to turn down something she has taken such effort to create, particularly when it has so useful. Anakin has complained of the cold far less since receiver his sweater, he confides with a conspiratorial wink, seemingly going on a tangent about his Padawan’s latest escapades before ending with a reiteration of his gratitude and an implication that this concludes the matter.
It doesn’t fool Shmi. Obi-Wan Kenobi clearly adores her son, despite being woefully unprepared for pseudo parenthood. The poor boy obviously needs all the help he can get.
She sends another care package.
( “Son of my Heart” “Perseverance” “Wisdom through trial”)
She receives another message thanking her and reiterating that such gifts are unnecessary while updating her on Ani’s life and lamenting about how cold space travel can get.
The next package contains two extra pairs of socks.
(“Warmth” “Safe Journeying” “Family”)
.
This is pretty much how things go for the next couple of years – Shmi sending gifts and Obi-Wan going through the motions of disapproval mixed with thanks. At some point Anakin works out the system and starts interrupting the calls while Obi-Wan ostentatiously rolls his eyes in the background.
Shmi is happy to see her boys doing so well together. Even if she DID need to make a scarf or two decorated with the “Stubborn Idiot”, “Communication” “Trust” and “Brothers” symbols, on the assumption that Anakin at least would get the message…
And then Amidala’s term is over, and in a flash everything seems to change. Shmi had been ecstatic to see Ani again, even if it was only because Padmé was in danger. She’s more than a little amused that her little boy’s crush hasn’t seemed to dissipate, and that the admiration appears to be mutual. But then Obi-Wan is in danger, Anakin and Padmé rush to rescue him, and the galaxy is at war.
(Shmi is the one who makes the wedding veil. She stands beside Obi-Wan as they watch the joining of two souls in a ceremony they will keep secret until the war is done.)
There isn’t much Shmi can do while her family fights, so she does what she can to make sure they remember why.
And her family grows.
Not just Ahsoka, sweet child that she is, full of that all too familiar reckless bravery her sons possess, but also the men they lead into battle.
(She reluctantly accepts the reality of the clones’ situation even as she listens to Padmé plot a way to grant them all they deserve. Shmi is a patient woman.)
Rex is the first she makes a garment for, with another for Cody soon after. There isn’t a clear pattern for “Babysitter” but “Trusted Guardian” and “Skilled Warrior” will do she thinks.
It doesn’t seem right though, even one is blue and the other gold, that she should give the same pattern to those who so many think are interchangeable. “Walker in the Sky” is easy enough to add to one, but it takes her some time to create the “Sweet Speaker” glyph for its twin.
She receives two more polite thank-you messages and doesn’t think much more on it until she starts to notice familiar patterns in the war footage. There they are, “Walker in the Sky”or “Sweet Speaker” emblazoned on armor and dropship alike, often teamed with another glyph Shmi knows she has never knitted.
Some of you might have noticed something kind of funny about people.
Almost none of them like Treasure Planet.
And, considering I joined this fandom well over three years
ago by now, this comes as absolutely no surprise to me – and chances are, if
you’ve known about this film for longer than, say, a day, it fails to surprise
you, too. I mean, we’ve all heard the reasons, haven’t we – valid though they are, it’s depressing to hear them, the millions upon
millions upon millions of them.
“Sorry, the sci-fi
just wasn’t my thing.”
“I liked it okay, but
I can’t see myself ever watching it again.”
“The animation was
good, but I didn’t really like the rest of it.”
“It was…sort of weird
to me.”
“It doesn’t measure up
to Treasure Island.”
“It just wasn’t my cup
of tea.”
Or – and here’s the one that gets to me:
“I just really didn’t like the main kid.”
The words come across as pretty innocent – it’s just a matter of preference, it’s just their opinion, live and let live, nothing wrong with disagreeing…and there’s not. There’s really, really not. You can hate Jim Hawkins as much as you want. But you can look me in the eye and can you tell me why you hate him? Can you tell me why, exactly, that’s the argument I’ve heard the most out of any of them? Can you tell me why, in my 3+ years in this wonderful fandom, in the thousands of days I’ve now spent promoting the shit out of this film every chance I get, can you tell me why that argument is the one I find myself dealing with the most? Can you look at me and can you tell me why you hate Jim Hawkins? Can you do that?
Because here’s the thing – I can tell you why I love him. And I got shit to back up me up.
Let’s get down to business. Let me tell you why I love Jim Hawkins – every habit, every quirk, every mannerism, every virtue, and every flaw. Let’s plunge right in.
He’s kind.
Sure, you can roll your eyes if you want to, but honestly? Being really, truly, simply, genuinely nice is such a rare quality in the world, and Jim has – and displays – this quality in abundance. I mean, for one thing, bringing Billy Bones to the Benbow when he seems ninety percent sure the guy’s just crazy? Yet he takes a chance anyway, because the sailor’s sick, the sailor’s injured, it’s raining really hard, he shouldn’t be out in this in his state, here, give me your arm, let me help you, you can come in out of the rain and stay in my house for a bit.
And what about the time he met that half-mad robot on Treasure Planet and, despite the fact that BEN blatantly oversteps his boundaries a good ten times (”Will you let go of me?/Stop touching me!”/Will you quit hugging me?”) or so within the first five minutes of their introduction, despite the fact that he is very obviously unhinged from all that time alone, despite the fact that BEN is loud and attention-drawing and the word stealthy isn’t in his vocabulary, despite the fact that he’s putting the captain and the doctor and himself in peril by doing so, Jim allows BEN to come with him – all he needs is to hear about the robot’s century of solitude, his loneliness, his desolation, and he just drops everything and says, “If you’re gonna come along…”
And don’t even get me started on the deleted scenes – such as the one where he offers to fix this child’s scooter, even though he and this kid have never met before, never even spoken to one another, and yet he offers to fix this scooter because aww the kid’s sad let me fix it for you.
Because, beneath that black jacket and that dark scowl of his, Jim has a huge, huge heart and it’s there and it’s evident for anyone willing to look. Because Jim just legitimately cares about other people, and there’s no ulterior motive, he doesn’t ask for compensation, he doesn’t expect anything in return, he just genuinely likes helping others.
(And as I don’t happen to have an image on hand for the child’s scooter bit mentioned above, have a few bonus pictures of times when Jim was nice)
Comforting a frightened Morph despite the fact that his life is in the most immediate and intense danger
And how about the time he lets a pirate – the leader of a mutiny in which he was supposed to be killed – walk the fuck away from him because he believes there’s good in Silver?
Don’t get me started on this kid and his kindness. Don’t. Get me started.
And he’s smart.
I don’t mean passing-his-finals-with-flying-colors oh-haha-that-was-a-total-seat-of-my-pants-test can’t-believe-I-pulled-through-with-a-B I-was-pulling-answers-out-of-my-ass kind of smart.
I mean completely, incredibly, off-the-charts, blow-your-mind brilliant. He might be failing his high school classes, but it’s certainly not due to the challenge; he doesn’t put any effort into his work because he just doesn’t care. I mean, we even hear Sarah state that he built his first solar surfer when he was eight. So let’s let that sink in for a second.
This kid
was no older than that when he built one of these
Just let that sit a minute. He built one of those gizmos
when he was eight fucking years old. Hell, I’m not one hundred percent sure I understand them now, and he was eight and he understood them so well he could make them. (Sure, he ultimately uses it to cause trouble and ride straight into restricted areas, but it still makes him pretty brainy.)
And not to mention, when Silver tries to teach him how to steer a skiff, he doesn’t even let the guy finish his sentence before he starts powering it up. Despite the other’s best attempts to stop him, Jim ignites the engine and sends them whirling straight into a comet. He fucking steers a boat – with limited knowledge, considering Silver didn’t get a chance to teach him everything – he steers a boat into a comet, and rides that comet to its end and does it without ever missing a beat, without ever throwing himself or his companion out of the boat, without ever messing up or getting hurt or hurting Silver or anything, just gets the hang of it right off the bat.
And at the end of it, all Silver says is, “If I could maneuver a skiff like that when I was your age, they’d be bowing in the streets when I walked by today!”
Oh, and did I mention he powers up a century-old crashed boat in sixty seconds? No? Well, he did that, too.
Oh, and he also made another solar surfer, this time at fifteen, out of the useless parts of their failing ship while the planet explodes around them.
And, when said surfer begins failing, threatening to send him plummeting to his death in a raging river of lava bubbling and frothing beneath him, he keeps it going – literally rams it into the wall, striking it against the metal surface until enough friction occurs to power the thrusters again, and he does this all in the space of thirty seconds.
Oh, and he figured out where Flint’s trove was hidden before anyone else, just based on the fragmented bits and pieces he’d picked up from other people
And did I mention yet that he was the only one who could open the map leading to the planet?
There were people thirty and forty years his senior trying to figure it out
and he figures it out in seconds
And he’s brave
Remember when he casually faced down a whole crew of pirates three and four times over, all in the space of twenty-four hours?
And how about the fact that he refuses, at great risk to himself, to open the map for the pirates – until Silver threatens the captain and the doctor?
Or when he’s fixing that hundred-year-old boat we discussed earlier, and tells BEN to leave without him if he can’t get away in the next five minutes?
Oh, and when the star Pellucid goes supernova on their voyage and the hands are sent to secure the solar sails, not only does Jim immediately ascend, no hesitation
he also spots Silver, who followed him there, fall from his perch, and literally fucking throws himself down onto the wood and hauls the cook – who, to be honest, has a good hundred pounds on Jim and probably almost took the kid down with him, and definitely dragged the kid closer to the edge than would be advised – back up to safety.
And later in the film, he receives an order from the captain to scout ahead and find them a better place to hide – and even though the pirates were spotted seconds earlier, circling the skies in a longboat, Jim expresses no hesitation, simply obeys.
And, oh, uh, you remember that solar surfer we talked about earlier, the one he constructed as the planet bursts into flames and burns down around him?
Yeah, here he is riding it through the fires and eruptions and random debris, here he is casually risking his life to save everyone else, most of them being pirates who would have loved to see him dead.
Yep, don’t mind him, he’s just saving everyone else. He might die doing it, but damn, he’s doing it anyway.
But wait. I did promise to discuss his flaws as well, and, so far, I haven’t been making good on that promise, have I?
Fear not, for Jim Hawkins is far from perfect and it’s time for us to explore the reasons why.
He’s impulsive
While most readily refer to this as a “Mary Sue trait” and “not really a flaw” , I can’t help but disagree; if we consider it an undesirable trait in a real person, why on earth would we think it little more than a cute quirk in a fictional character? Believe me when I say, Jim’s consistent failure to think before he acts is not a charming little thing – it’s a flaw, plain and simple.
For all Jim’s kindness, for all his bravery and unfailing ability to think fast on his feet, he is impulsive as all hell.
Like when he, in his first meeting with Silver, throws out several thinly-veiled accusations – showing his cards, playing his whole hand right off the bat on the off chance that his opponent might show his, too.
Unsurprisingly, of course, Silver does not rise to the bait – meaning Jim revealed everything to the man who will later become his enemy, in a sense losing the only advantage he really held, whereas Silver lost nothing and now has additional information to help him on his way. And all this could have been avoided had Jim just kept his mouth shut.
And that time when he attempted to eavesdrop on a couple of the other hands cause he thought they were acting suspicious
But it’s not long before they notice him and immediately shut up – meaning Jim has now given his suspicions away to four different people, four people whom he suspects. (Five, if you count Oxy and Moron as two.)
Or how about when they find that map we talked about earlier, and when he opens it up and realizes it leads to Treasure Planet, his first thought is to follow it? Like, this could be anything. A trap, a red herring, a fool’s errand, and Jim just throws himself headlong into it because look there’s a slim chance it could be treasure let’s go right now!
I mean, there’s just no room for doubt: Jim is super impulsive, and that’s not a good quality to have. Sure, it gets shit done, but cautious people get shit done too, and they probably get it done better because they’re not making snap decisions every 2.5 seconds.
And Jim is selfish.
Sure, we all love him. Well, some of you hate him, and some of you love to hate him, but the sentiment stands; we all love Jim, but you can’t love somebody for too long without noticing his flaws. And Jim has his flaws.
And it’s especially obvious in scenes like this
where we see that Jim was just out on a joyride while his mother visibly struggles to run the inn by herself.
It’s obvious he uses that solar surfing hobby to escape, to distract him from his problems after a tough day, but this, in turn, suggests that he feels his problems at the moment are more important than Sarah’s, and so puts himself before his mother.
And he makes things harder on her than probably anyone else in her life, going out and getting in trouble all the time and bringing the police to her door
Not only is this probably really bad for business, it’s also likely embarrassing and obviously upsetting for poor Sarah – yet Jim offers no apology, offers almost nothing beyond the words, “Mom, it’s no big deal!”
And when they open the map and realize where it leads, Jim jumps on the chance to leave Sarah
Not just their lonely little planet, but Sarah, he wants to leave her. And though his intentions here are honorable (”We could rebuild the Benbow a hundred times over!” / “I’ll make you proud!”) it still fails to completely sugarcoat the fact that he left her there, lured away by the promise of adventure.
Because Jim is selfish.
He’stouchy, and defiant as all hell.
Sure, this is a flaw. Sure, it’s not a great quality to have. Sure, it holds him back more than anything, and it probably gets him in more trouble than it’s worth – but I still tip my hat to Disney for introducing this flaw at all. It has been proven in the past that children with absentee parents – particularly boys with neglectful fathers – tend to become obstinate teens with no regard for authority, and I’m just so proud of them for doing their research on that one.
Admittedly, however, this quality does cause him more trouble than it’s worth. I mean, he makes himself an enemy out of the scariest alien aboard in the first five minutes, all because he has to have the last word.
As a matter of fact, when I think about it, Jim has single-handedly gotten on the bad side of every one of these pirates on board this ship, with the obvious exception of Silver, and he does it all because he is just that feisty.
On the other hand, however, his pluck is the first thing Silver notices – and likes – about him. It’s obvious that while the pirate captain plans to work the spunk out of him, he can’t help but respect it, too.
Like, for instance, on Treasure Planet, when Jim refuses to allow Silver to leave without him
there’s an instant where Silver looks like he’s about to argue
and he could, he could just hold the captain, the doctor, or even BEN at gunpoint, and chances are, Jim would likely obey just to spare those he cares for. Despite the fact that Silver is clearly the one in power here, he gives into Jim’s demands – because, even if he doesn’t like it, Jim’s defiance is something he can respect. They may be enemies now, but Silver recognizes and respects that Jim makes a worthy enemy.
And let’s not forget that he’s stubborn.
Seriously, once he’s found something to fight for, he’ll fight for that, and he’ll get it, no matter what it takes, and there’s nobody in the world that can change his mind. If he gets it in his head that he wants to do something, if he gets it in his head that he should do something, he’ll do it, no matter what.
And in some cases, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It means he has a strong sense of right and wrong and knows the difference between the two, and will do what he believes to be right, regardless of what other people say. He has a moral code, and a strong one, at that, and he rarely deviates from it. And this is actually a good thing when, say, there’s a treasure-hunting pirate captain attempting to bribe him into betraying the captain and the doctor and handing over the map.
And, when this fails and Silver resorts to trying to frighten him into submission, the kid doesn’t even blink. He can’t be bought, and he sure as hell can’t be intimidated.
Of course, this isn’t always a good quality to have; while it does make him more resistant to tactics such as temptation, it also makes him inflexible and, in some cases, extremely resistant to change, even when that change would be for the better.
But that iron will has another advantage.
It makes him hardworking.
Whether it’s as trivial as swabbing the deck, or as enormous as seeking out a legendary treasure trove, if Jim sees the point in a task – if he sees, for himself, why it’s worthy of his time – he will put his all into it, no questions asked. So though most would call him a delinquent, and while the robo-cops on Montressor outright tell him that he is a loser
Jim is actually extremely industrious and capable – he just doesn’t always show it. But it’s there, if you know how to look.
Like when Silver leaves him with this huge pile of dishes in the galley
and he just picks up his brush and keeps right on going
and in fact, is so determined to finish up that damn stack that he ends up falling asleep in the galley, head resting on the pot in his hand
but the dishes around him are gleaming.
Or how about when he was failing at school at the beginning of the film, and by the end, he has graduated from the prestigious Interstellar Academy?
Can you imagine how much work it must have taken to get himself into that Academy? I mean, how long did it take for him to pull those grades up, to convince others he was really serious about this, and can you imagine how much work it took to get through the Academy once he got there? But Jim got there anyway, and he did graduate, and he did do all that amazing stuff, and he did it because he works hard.
Oh and remember
He was lost
Though by the end of the film Jim is high-spirited and confident, we know from the beginning that it wasn’t always so. His father’s absence left a hole in him, a hole he felt it was too big to fill – a hole that left him feeling worthless and rejected, it left him feeling angry and defeated, and it left him thinking he wasn’t good enough. It left him with a strong, deep-seated fear of abandonment, and more than that, it left him searching – searching and searching and never quite finding the missing piece he so desperately needed.
Jim felt he had no future; Jim felt he wasn’t worth a future; Jim didn’t really know where he was going, and that’s the kind of relatability I’ve come to expect from Dreamworks. I don’t go into a Disney film expecting to find real characters, so this came as a pleasant surprise.
And something else I’ll probably never get over
Jim is sensitive
So, this one actually sounds funny. I mean, I just said earlier how selfish Jim is, right? How he’s always putting himself before Sarah? Yeah. That whole argument still stands. It’s just that Jim isn’t all selfish, all the time. Can he be selfish? Yes. Extremely. Is he selfish? Sometimes. But he’s also, as mentioned before, a genuinely nice person. A person with honest empathy. His instances of self-absorption don’t cancel that out.
Now, while most define a sensitive person as “one who understands and feels for others” – and while Jim certainly does that, too – we’ve already tackled that. We’ve talked about Jim as a compassionate and thoughtful individual, and I’m not here to talk about it again, though I could.
No, there are drawbacks to feeling for others, and I’m here to talk about them.
I mean, Jim cares about other people – Jim feels deeply for people, deeply enough to welcome complete strangers into his house and offer lonely individuals a place at his side, Jim just feels for people even if he’s never experienced their hardships for himself. And if he can feel so strongly for strangers, if he can look upon a person he hardly knows and want to help ease their pain, if his heart squeezes upon seeing others’ suffering, how much do you think it hurts when he experiences his own?
His father, for example. An indifferent, neglectful parent, the heartache they cause, it would sting even the most impervious – but for somebody as thin-skinned and tender-hearted as Jim, it absolutely devastates him. And when the man finally gives up on his family, leaving behind his wife and their eight-year-old, it just tears the kid apart.
As a matter of fact, it hurts Jim so deeply that it takes him seven years just to realize that it wasn’t his fault, or anyone’s; his father’s rejection caused him so much pain that he is well into his adolescence before he can even begin to accept that he’s gone.
But this isn’t just one instance; it’s not merely a festering childhood wound, no. Jim takes the slightest slip-up straight to heart – and upon believing he caused Mr. Arrow’s death, he spends what appears to be hours beating himself up for this perceived failure.
And ultimately, he might have continued indefinitely had Silver not intervened and comforted him.
And of course, less than twenty-four hours later, Silver tells his bloodthirsty crew – and, unwittingly, an eavesdropping Jim – that his attentions were all for show, that he had to be nice to the kid to keep him from suspecting the crew of anything shady, he had to win the lad’s trust or risk his suspicion…and Jim really believes it, and, in fact, is so hurt, that he appears to take a moment to swallow back tears.
Jim is just so easy to hurt.
And to be honest, it’s great; it makes his empathy for others more believable – after all, if his own wounds have left such obvious marks, who’s to say another’s tribulations won’t win over his sensitive heart?
And, hey, hey, don’t forget
He’s just a kid
I mean, he’s doing all this awesome shit, he’s building solar surfers
and saving lives
and working his ass off and being super kind and impulsive and defiant and selfish and everything, he’s doing all this, and he’s only fifteen years old. Like. He’s fifteen. He’s not even an adult yet. He’s not even of legal age. He’s just casually amazing at fifteen, but what do you think he’ll be like in five years, ten years, twenty?
As Silver says, he really is going to rattle the stars.
Now let’s review before we go:
Jim is kind.
Jim is smart.
Jim is brave.
Jim is impulsive.
Jim is selfish.
Jim is touchy and defiant as all hell.
Jim is stubborn.
Jim is hardworking.
Jim was lost.
Jim is sensitive.
Jim is just a kid.
Just please, for the love of all that is good and holy, don’t ever forget Jim Hawkins.
The most hilarious thing about the fact Buckbeak had a trial and lost is that later on JKR resolves the issue by having Hagrid take him in again and renaming him Witherwings. That’s literally all it took. What if in POA, Hagrid simply said, “Sorry, Buckbeak flew away.”
“There’s a hippogriff right there, Hagrid.”
“A different hipprogriff.”
“I’m… pretty sure that’s the same hipprogriff.”
“Prove it.”
no dna tests we die like scientifically underdeveloped societies
Prisoner of Azkaban continues to be the most frustrating book
Someone should have just adopted Sirius and started calling him Gerald.
Remus: Erm… this is our new order member, my… cousin Gerald. Gerald White.
“Mr. Lupin that is Sirius Black with glasses!” “Oh come now Minister, Sirius Black doesn’t wear glasses. That wouldn’t make sense.” “Well have Mr. White take off his glasses then!” “He can’t he needs them to see.”
it got better
It’s honestly a miracle to me that wizarding society doesn’t collapse every other week because like
You’ve got this world full of people who can destroy whole buildings or turn people into beetles or make vehicles fly just by waving a stick at them
And there is literally no common sense
Anywhere to be found
Voldemort would never have had anyone find out he was back if he just went around calling himself Steve
Okay, see, I thought I saved this post to comment on it but I’d like to bring up
The Minister would NEVER EVER disbelieve in Gerald White. He’d buy it hook line and sinker. The wizarding world would buy it hook line and sinker. The GOBLINS wouldn’t but wizards have been shown to be pretty blindingly clueless. Still, Gringotts would grudgingly give Sirius access to the Black fortune.
But, but, but, you know the one person
the one person
who Gerald White would drive AB-SO-LUTELY FUCKING BATSHIT?
Severus Snape.
Snape would do everything, EVERYTHING, to get people to believe that it’s Sirius. But the Order would ignore it (they accepted Sirius as Sirius before anyway) and Remus would just be so… so affronted.
‘Severus, he is my cousin.’
And Sirius would love it. He’d love the fact that Snape just hated it. He’d be the BEST DAMN GERALD WHITE EVER b/c Snape is doing everything from dropping veritaserum into his firewhisky to capturing a dementor in a box and releasing it on Sirius when he least expects it
That one causes problems for a bare minute because SHIT A DEMENTOR ATTEMPTED TO GIVE GERALD THE KISS MAYBE SNAPE IS RIGHT except Harry comes forward and is like ‘excuse me, I’ve never committed a crime and dementors are ALWAYS attacking me, I think they’re attracted to glasses’
and the magical community is like ‘shit, yeah, you’re right’
and just
Spare. Snape goes spare.
Now I’m imagining Fred and George sneaking extra Weasleys into Snape’s class manifests every year.
Annnd I wrote the thing. Sort of. It kinda got out of hand.
–
The first year they’re just Fred and George, except when occasionally they’re Gred and Forge, but it’s not too long before Snape just stops trying to tell them apart and just treats them as the joint entity “Weasley,” who happens to be in two places at once.
The next year they take turns attending first-year Potions class as Barry Weasley, the glasses-wearing Weasley cousin who missed the Sorting Ceremony because he tried to swallow three chocolate frogs at once on a bet from his twin cousins and got sick.
Snape has a choice between asking questions about Barry and punishing Fred and George for tormenting their cousin, and punishing Fred and George wins out. At this point, it’s not really that weird–the Weasleys do tend toward large families–and any excuse to give the twins detention is basically the sort of thing you could put under a box propped up with a stick on a rope and a “TOTALLY NOT A TRAP” sign to catch Severus Snape.
So he figures Barry Weasley is real. He comments on the boy’s resemblance to Fred and George, and Barry nods and says “Everyone says that. I could fool everyone but them, except eventually people figure out there’s only one of me.”
Snape doesn’t have much cause for complaint. Barry is not a difficult student (the twins are, at this point, quite happy with the joke for its own sake and so don’t risk the Barry persona on tormenting him), perhaps a bit prone to letting his mind wander (it helps that George is actually interested in Potions, and uses the second run as an opportunity to experiment), but there have been no outright disasters centered around his cauldron, which is a lot more than can be said for the twins.
The next year is Fred and George’s third year, Barry’s second year, and Ron’s first year. They don’t take Ron entirely into their confidence … but they do let on that they’ve invented a fictional “Cousin Barry” to mess with Snape a bit, in case Snape asks, but Snape doesn’t ask.
He does mention Barry Weasley to Barry’s supposed Head of House, but by pure luck he manages to do so when Minerva is sufficiently preoccupied by that late night with four first-years sneaking out after curfew, and she hears “Harry and Weasley,” and nods, and asks him something about a Gryffindor fifth-year she’s concerned about, and, well, that basically settles it.
Fred and George run into a minor difficulty in that they don’t have a free period coinciding with “Barry’s” potions class, but they get lucky enough to have History of Magic during that class, and Binns wouldn’t notice if Fred or George set the classroom on fire, much less if Fred or George is always absent.
Fred and George are at this point quite satisfied with getting “Barry” through seven years of Hogwarts without Snape realizing he’s fictional, but then at the beginning of their fourth year Snape is absent from the Sorting and the Welcome Feast and … well. Opportunity beckons.
Since Fred and George are pragmatic about which elective classes they take (they’re much more interested in independent study directed toward magical jokes and pranks), they have several free periods and it only takes a significant look between them to agree that, yes, they can absolutely handle being one more person just for Potions class.
They’re a bit more advanced at their magic now, and a bit of diluted Shrinking Potion and a Freckle Charm create Barnaby, Barry’s younger brother. There’s a minor concern with Ginny being in the same class, and more importantly, Operation Barnaby is still in the planning stages when McGonagall hands out the schedules and they realize they have Transfiguration during the requisite class period and McGonagall will definitely notice if a twin is missing.
Thus is is that Barnaby Weasley, Hufflepuff, is born.
Snape doesn’t give away anything more than a mild frown at another Weasley showing up on the class roster, but he does raise an eyebrow and inquire, “Hufflepuff?” after reading his name.
Barnaby (Fred, at the moment) turns red with the help of a Blushing Charm and looks hurt and defensive, which makes the Hufflepuffs, upset at the perceived insult to their House, accept him without question. Nobody ever asks either twin why he only shows up in Potions class; they get that it’s some long-con joke focused on Snape and they don’t interfere.
Barnaby is not quite as hopeless at Potions as Neville, but he is prone to the same wandering attention span as his brother, only more so. His potions regularly fail and occasionally explode, usually in a way that to Snape indicates carelessness with the ingredients and tells Fred or George something useful about the what happens when you do that.
The next year there are no new Weasley children, officially, but when Fred plops himself down next to George on the train and says “So what about a girl?” George knows exactly what he’s talking about.
They mix a hair-growing potion on the train, and have to hide it quickly when Draco Malfoy comes running into their compartment, frightened of the dementors.
George takes the hair potion and the shrinking potion and the pair of them use the Marauders’ Map to intercept Snape on his way to the Great Hall. Fred hides behind a pillar and casts a Duplicating Illusion Charm on himself and tries hard not to burst out laughing as George plays Nasturtium Weasley, little sister to Barry and Barnaby, who’s somehow managed to get lost on the way to the Great Hall.
Snape’s not the slightest bit pleased to be getting yet another absent-minded Weasley cousin, snarls, snaps something vaguely cutting, and leads her towards the Great Hall, intending to hand her over directly to Professor McGonagall; instead he runs into Fred and George (actually Fred and his charm double); Fred explained that they saw their cousin wandering off and went to go get her. Snape lectures the pair of them on wandering, accuses them of being up to no good, and stalks off to direct evil looks at Professor Lupin.
Which, luckily, takes up so much of his attention that he doesn’t pay attention to the Sorting. Fred and George decide the next morning, after careful consultation of multiple students’ class schedules, to put her in Hufflepuff along with Barnaby.
They strike it lucky again, in that first-year Potions only conflicts with Care of Magical Creatures, to which only one twin is going (they don’t see much point in both of them taking the same class, figuring that one of them knowing something is as good as both of them knowing it and they can teach each other more effectively than anyone else can teach them, an argument that failed to impress Professor McGonagall into letting them each out of half their classes back in first year); Hagrid won’t be expecting to see two of them.
Nasturtium Weasley, it develops, has quite a lot of bright red hair and a tendency to hyperfocus on ingredients or processes, leading to a lot of ruined potions when she keeps stirring too long or spends the whole class period shredding the shrivelfigs or gets lost examining the lobes of a dirigible plum leaf. Fred and George, taking turns being Nasturtium, are happy to spend the time just thinking through some interesting research they’ve been doing or contemplating a problem with their latest invention or just brainstorming new joke ideas until Snape appears, bellowing about melted cauldrons and the people who don’t even notice them because they’re too fascinated by the down on a downy mage-thistle.
But they’re being run just a bit ragged at it and decide that three is enough–until they wander past the Hospital Wing at just the right time to hear Snape bellowing apoplectically about Harry Potter, and Dumbledore’s more reasoned tones making light of the idea that Harry and his friends were in two places at once.
Fred and George look at each other and a light goes on.
They’ve heard about time-turners. They’ve also seen Hermione Granger run herself ragged studying textbooks for every subject available. They know how many subjects there are, and how many class periods in a week.
As one, they reach out and lightly smack each other on the head for not putting it together earlier.
Snape comes raging out the door just in time to see them and gives them detention. Fred and George scowl after him and turn and look at each other. And nod.
It’s on.
Fred “accidentally” bumps into Hermione when she’s on her way to McGonagall’s office, pretends to lose his balance, and falls hard to the floor. It gives him bruises, but sometimes sacrifices must be made for the successful theft of major, highly-regulated, top-secret magical artifacts. Hermione turns to help him, and George switches the time-turner with an elaborately crafted fake, a Confundus Charm and a Diversion Charm giving it the correct density of magical energy signature and ensuring that anyone who tries to use it will find an urgent reason to put it off. (George is super pleased with that one; it’s a time-turner, so quite naturally anyone who can use it has plenty of time to use it later.)
Next year is their sixth year, which brings enough of a drop in courses (there are definite benefits to getting only two OWLS each, though they doubt their mother would agree) that they only need to use the time-turner once, when Barry has Potions when Fred has Transfiguration and George has Herbology. They’re almost disappointed by this, until Fred gets a devastatingly diabolical grin on his face and says, “what if there were two of them?”
George’s face mirrors the grin in an instant, and he responds with his own suggestion. “Cousins.” A pause. “And they hate each other.”
And so come into being Gentian Weasley, younger sister of Barry, Barnaby, and Nasturtium Weasley, and her cousin from yet another branch of the Weasley family, Bilious Weasley the Second.
This time they give themselves some insurance, and make very good use of the time-turner, by charming Snape into seeing the new arrivals be Sorted. For a diversion they let Peeves the Poltergeist into the kitchens and assist him in creating havoc (testing out a potential product, tentatively named the Souper Swimming Pool, in the process); the amount of commotion takes three Professors to sort out, one of them Snape, and it’s surprisingly easy to hit the distracted Potions Master with the prototype of a Daydream Charm, highly modified to suit the occasion.
Once they’ve finished the time loop, they blast themselves with Aguamenti charms to make it look like they’ve just come out of the rain and sit down. Snape sees Weasley, Bilious and Weasley, Gentian be sorted into Gryffindor one right after another and summons himself a bottle of firewhiskey.
This is a mistake, as he has the keen and ignoble joy of being hungover for the worst Potions class he’s ever taught, including that one time when somebody (Potter) threw a firework into the Swelling Solution.
Gentian snickers when Snape reads Bilious’ name. Bilious calls Gentian “freckles.” Slytherin students from accross the room (the both of them are Gryffindors this time) look on in obvious amusement. Snape looks constipated. Their own supposed housemates eye them, looking confused, concerned, and generally bamboozled but none of them vocalize their curiosity.
Fred and George share a secret, gleeful smile, and escalate.
They spill things on each other: water, pigeon milk, stinksap. Gentian breaks a salamander egg on Bilious’ forehead; Bilious stabs Gentian with a knarl quill. They drop the wrong ingredients surreptitiously into each other’s potions. Bilious’ cauldron spews copious amounts of green smoke, gaining a lecture and losing five points for Gryffindor; his retaliation recreates Neville Longbottom’s disaster a few years prior and melts Gentian’s cauldron. Gentian shrieks at Bilious, Bilious dumps the whole jar of puffer-fish eggs over Gentian’s head, and Gentian launches herself at him, punching and clawing and screaming her head off.
Snape separates them with a wave of his wand and threatens them with a month’s worth of detention collecting bubotuber pus. Gentian says, “You can’t do that, I’ll tell McGonagall on you,” which neatly puts Snape off telling Professor McGonagall himself, because honestly, she probably will take issue with it. Bilious smirks loftily and sneers, “Baby. I like bubotuber pus. It smells like petrol.”
“How,” Snape asks suspiciously, “would a wizardborn young man like yourself know about petrol?” and Gentian (secretly Fred) hides a wince; their father’s particular fascination with Muggle things might be their undoing. But George recovers, saying proudly, “My dad’s an accountant.”
The Slytherins laugh. Fred catches the reference and Gentian says, “Oh, right, your dad’s the family Squib.”
Bilious grabs his cauldron and makes to empty it over her head, only to find that the contents are basically a solid baked into the cauldron’s bottom. Snape casts it away and tells them they’re more of a disaster than Neville Longbottom and deducts fifty points from Gryffindor, and they spend the walk out of the dungeons trying to convince their housemates that the points don’t actually matter that much.
Snape goes straight to McGonagall to complain, but refers to them as “Those two damned Weasleys,” and McGonagall nods and makes sympathetic faces and promises to speak to them. Fred and George get a detention with McGonagall at the same time as Gentian and Bilious have one with Snape, which makes them as happy as a time-turner can make two mischief-minded teenagers in possession thereof.
That year is a delight. They have a Triwizard Tournament to watch, a small multitude of visiting students from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, many of them attractive, to interact with, and five alter egos with which to torment Professor Snape. Moreover, with the time-turner and the extra Potions classes, they’ve made significant progress on their product line and are turning a brisk business with the student body.
Snape learns quickly and the first time is also the last time he schedules Gentian and Bilious for a detention together. Fred and George take it in turns to run certain of their inventions past Flitwick and Sprout to gain back some of the points they lose in the first-year Potions class. By the time summer rolls around, Fred calculates that they’ve used the time-turner enough to have come of age and potentially erased the Trace on them.
They pay Mundungus Fletcher a galleon to come somewhere out-of-the-way with them and lend them his wand to cast a few spells. When no owls show up carrying Ministry warning letters, they head to Diagon Alley and celebrate by buying a storefront and the flat above it, and spend most of the summer there, fixing it up and getting things ready for a product launch next year. NEWTS, schmoots.
There’s of course that annoying business about Voldemort returning, and their mother decides the best way to keep them out of the Order’s business is to turn them into house-elves, but they come up with a few charms to do housework slowly by magic, and adjust the illusion spells, and put in just as much of an appearance as necessary.
Then September rolls around again, and their new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher is even worse than Snape and Lockheart combined, and just like that, Barry, Barnaby, Nasturtium, Gentian, and Bilious all add themselves to Defense Against the Dark Arts classes.
This largely sucks, because the DADA classes are utterly useless this year, but Fred gets the idea of substituting their alter egos and eventually themselves with illusion charms (”She doesn’t actually teach, she’ll never notice”), which makes George laugh hysterically because they’ve progressed from attending classes multiple times as different people to using doppelgangers to avoid going to class at all, and the two tactics are completely at odds with each other. But they do it.
Umbridge doesn’t notice, and pretty soon the only class they show up for is the one where second-years Bilious and Gentian are forever hurling hateful looks, creative insults, badly-aimed spells, and improvised projectiles at each other.
Umbridge starts taking points from Gryffindor off at the first “blast-ended walnut” from Gentian and assigns the first detention at Bilious’ elaborately-detailed Muggle catapult. Fred and George add a line of Magical Model Muggle Major Munitions to the product array at the soon-to-be-hatched Weasleys’ Wizarding Wheezes, and make copious notes on how to use them as actual weaponry once Voldemort makes his appearance.
Fred writes “I must not fight in class” with Umbridge’s quill for six hours and then steals it. George listens to Fred’s description of the evening, takes one look at Fred’s hand, and breaks into Umbridge’s office and takes a generous crap on her desk. “Crude,” says Fred admiringly, “but deserved.”
The next time Barnaby has DADA, Fred goes as him in person and tests out a Skiving Snackbox. Throwing up on Umbridge is satisfying. He gets detention and writes “I will be more careful with how I am sick” some nine hundred times with a completely normal quill, charmed to write in red ink like a Muggle fountain pen, and mimes innocence when Umbridge expresses confusion at the lack of redness and swelling on his hand.
Gentian and Bilious get into a full-on wizards’ duel in their next DADA class, and aim so terribly that Umbridge gets hit more than they do. They both get detention, and Fred and George send illusions in their stead.
Next week they do it again, and Umbridge spends half the afternoon in the hospital wing, getting tentacles removed. Colin Creevey, confined to bed rest for a case of Exploding Hiccups, sneaks a picture and later trades it to the Weasley Twins for a Pygmy Puff, two Daydream Charms, and a promise to look into developing Extendable Eyes.
Umbridge goes to complain to McGonagall, who listens to the entire rant about a pair of students she’s never heard of with a reasonably straight face. Then she blandly tells Umbridge she’ll look into it, and turns back to her essay-marking.
McGonagall wanders down to the staff room the next morning and relates the whole conversation to the other teachers. Flitwick and Sprout are practically rolling on the floor by the time she finishes, but Snape is standing there looking Stupified; he makes the biggest miscalculation he’s made in years, and asks, “You mean they’re not real?”
McGonagall looks at him, calculates what all it would take for him to be asking that question, and promptly laughs herself sick.
Snape waits, looking like he might catch fire, until she recovers. “Yes, Severus. I have never heard of a Gentian Weasley, and the only Bilious Weasley I know is my age.”
Snape says, “There’s two Bilious Weas—who names these people?!”
“There’s one, Severus. I can assure you that there is no such person attending this school at this time.”
He grimaces, then tries, “I don’t suppose Ginny, Ronald, and their siblings are fictional?”
“No such luck, Severus.”
He closes his eyes. Opens them. “Fred and George.”
“Most assuredly real, Severus.”
“No, I meant–they did this. They’re responsible for this, aren’t they?”
“I would imagine so,” McGonagall says, a hint of a smile hovering about her lips.
He eyes her. “Shut up, Minerva.”
She claps a hand to her mouth to hide a giggle, and he turns and sweeps from the room.
As it turns out, he has Gentian and Bilious the next period.
Fred and George, blissfully unaware, are launching into their standard pretend fight—in this case, swordfighting with Transylvanian Lesser Pseudoporcupine quills—when Snape arrives at their table and claps a hand on their near shoulders. He’s smiling like a dragon.
“Fred. George.”
Shit.
They have a moment of sharp dismay, but it doesn’t last. They are the Weasley Twins, they’ve been fooling Snape for years with this prank, and they have money hidden in multiple places and the deed to a shop in Diagon Alley and all the official education they’ll ever need.
They turn and grin back.
“Well done, Professor,” says George. “How’d you find out?”
“Professor McGonagall told me.” His smile was a thin, sharp blade.
“No way.”
“Really?”
“How’d she know?”
“She wouldn’t.”
“I’m afraid I did, Mr. Weasley,” says McGonagall from the doorway. “Although admittedly without knowing you were pranking Professor Snape as well as Professor Umbridge; I thought I was merely sharing a very amusing anecdote with the other teachers.”
They’re drawing curious looks, though fortunately Fred-as-Gentian’s cauldron is hissing like a teakettle and drowning out the conversation; Snape snaps at them to pay attention to their cauldrons before jerking his head at his office door.
Once they’re ensconced within what Fred once called the Snape Museum of Slimy Things, and Fred and George have undone the spells and potions that make them Bilious and Gentian, McGonagall turns to Snape and says, “I forbid you to expel them, Severus.”
He’s about to respond when Fred says, “Go ahead, expel us.”
That gets them two very surprised professors. George shrugs. “Everything’s ready to go. We’ve got a shop in Diagon Alley and enough stock to fill it and enough expertise for a lifetime of success.”
Snape frowns and asks, “Do I want to know what you’re planning to sell?”
George says, “No” at the same times as Fred says, “It’s a joke shop.”
McGonagall looks like she’s trying not to laugh. Snape looks like he’s swallowed a sea cucumber. He opens his mouth, closes it, and then says, “I would have never imagined an argument that could convince me not to try to expel you, but you’ve just provided it. I will not be assisting you in selling pranks to the student body of Hogwarts on a retail level.”
George says, “Actually, we’ve been doing it since the middle of last year.”
Snape turns to McGonagall. “I quit.”
“No.”
“Hey, let Umbridge expel us,” Fred suggests. George snickers.
Snape looks at them, and then at McGonagall, and then back to the twins.
“No, you’re going to stay here,” Snape says, a look in his eyes that makes them wonder what all Umbridge has said to him. “You’re going to continue to be Gentian and Bilious—and Nasturtium and Barnaby and Barry.” He looks to McGonagall as if for confirmation, and George considers that both professors were young once, and were quite possibly as complete and utter hellions as him and Fred.
Snape smiles like a knife. “Give her hell.”
He’s never felt so much respect for a teacher before.
“Mr. Weasley?” Snape adds, almost as an afterthought, his eyes shifting from one to the other as if unsure which of them he’s addressing.
“Yessir?”
“Fifty points from Gryffindor.”
Fred and George smile at each other as they follow McGonagall into the hall.
Worth it.
They follow orders. Bilious and Gentian hit Umbridge with so many “accidental” hexes that she finally bans them from her classroom. Barnaby functions as a sort of a Patient Zero for Umbridge-itis. Barry uses his status as the quiet one to construct elaborate spells that have Umbridge’s classroom warping itself into odd shapes or growing spines out the walls or puffing up like a balloon and trapping her at the bottom. Nasturtium stands up in class one day and slams an epic poem about how teachers who don’t teach are useless and a sea sponge would do a better job of earning the salary.
Between them, they work to set up elaborate pranks and position Umbridge to catch the worst of it. After Dumbledore’s removal, Fred and George set off the best fireworks display Hogwarts has ever seen, and McGonagall gives Gryffindor one hundred points; Gentian and Bilius, usually the only ones still played in person by the Weasley twins, play Umbridge beautifully the next morning, fighting each other as usual and then turning ally, working together to attack her with flurries of squawking birds and flying, shitting replica nifflers.
When Umbridge twigs that they’re all working together she stands up in the middle of the Great Hall at dinner and demands that every Weasley in the place stand up.
Four Weasleys, all siblings, do so.
“Where are the rest of you?” she hisses to Ron, who looks clueless. Ginny cocks an eyebrow and looks to Fred and George speculatively. Umbridge turns to them and they smile like sharks.
Fred climbs up onto the table, George right on his heels. “Ladies and gentlemen, a performance by myself and my twin!”
George produces a potion, downs it, and becomes Gentian.
Fred narrates as George shifts between the various fictional cousins, ending by restoring his own appearance, putting on a pair of glasses, and becoming Barry. Snape slaps his face down into his hands. George finishes by announcing that these new appearance potions, and the fireworks, and a multitude of other products, would be available at 93 Diagon Alley, home to Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes.
“Not so fast,” says Umbridge, holding out her wand. “The pair of you are going to be expelled—but first you are going to find out what happens to troublemakers in my school.”
“We’re not,” says George, “But let me tell you something: this is not, and will never be, your school.” He looks around at the students, at the teachers, at Snape and McGonagall standing a short distance away, and he and Fred wave their arms in a mirrored gesture to take in the whole student body, and they say, the pair of them together, “This is our school.”
The cheer from around them shakes the rafters.
Then they raise their wands and say, again in unison, “Accio brooms!”
The brooms make holes in the walls on their way in, and Fred and George mount them and soar up among the floating candles, and Fred has to cast a Sonorus Charm to make himself heard over the cheering.
“Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes, number 93, Diagon Alley: Our new premises!”
And George waves to Peeves, who’s floating up there along with them, attracted by the promise of mayhem. “Give her hell from us.”
Peeves salutes, and Fred and George fly out the front door to freedom.
When they return to Hogwarts almost two years later, their time spent as the fake Weasleys serves all of Hogwarts well: the muggle munitions devices, some elaborate magical shielding, judiciously-applied daydream charms turned hallucinogenic means of luring the Death Eaters to shooting at false targets, and projectiles that created all manner of interesting effects, save the day for many people in the Battle of Hogwarts.
Fred never knows he came close to dying. George never knows he came close to losing his twin. They go back to Diagon Alley, afterwards, and as the world puts itself back together, they help people laugh.
Fred and George are out of school now, as are Barry, Barnaby, Billious, Gentian, and Nasturtium Weasley.
That should be the end of it
And then in comes Floribunda Weasley
And no one knows who she is
And then the next year there’s Reginald Weasley, followed by Horace Weasley and Hogarth Weasley (also twins)
And every year there’s one or more Weasleys, even when there are no Weasleys enrolled in Hogwarts at all
One year there’s a class where all of the other students have disappeared and only Weasleys show up in their place
That one sends two teachers fleeing into the night, screaming
And this is how Weasleys become cryptids
Everyone knows about Weasleys and has stories about Weasleys, but everyone knows they aren’t really real
And future generations of actual Weasleys find themselves in the odd position where everyone knows that Weasleys aren’t actually real, so they can get away with anything
And Fred and George have an entire wall full of detention slips under the names of various Weasleys over the years that they love to show off
They’re proudest of the ones they had nothing to do with
god outta nowhere i just remembered the time i was in a game where the dm didn’t read one of the character’s backstories carefully enough and allowed someone to make it all the way to the final session with the hidden ability to turn into a motorcycle
lydia you cant just say stuff like this and then not explain exactly how this was performed
k so. one of the first big games i played with my current meatspace gaming group was a really excellent post-apocalyptic homebrew game. really excellent. but it was also wild as hell, had a lot of players, and was the dm’s first big game, so it was at times a real exercise in controlled chaos. and my good bro willie…my bro willie was kind of at the brunt of it. both in that he always to this day plays really chaotic characters that can’t avoid trouble, and also in that due to that and other misfortunes he died like every other session towards the end. he went through five or six characters by the time the campaign was over. one didn’t even last a full session. it was remarkable to witness actually.
but anyway, towards the end, the dm was fairly overwhelmed and dealing with a lot of other characters doing epic-level wasteland nonsense, and kinda threw reading willies backstories to the wayside. which was unfortunate for him, because willie hails from the ‘3 pages or more’ school of backstories, and by this time in the campaign was coping with his characters’ constant deaths by planning backup character well in advance, to the point where they all had intricate, complex connections to each previous character. so when he dies due to circumstances out of his control before the very last few sessions (the first but certainly not last character death he had due to betrayal: willie im still sorry) its not too suprising that he comes back as this brooding edgy darth vader guy with a five page backstory about how he had obtained a horrific nanosuit cyborg body, and the dm approves it, but sure as hell doesn’t read the whole thing bc he’s planning the final confrontation at this point.
cut to the middle of the incredibly serious final session, where his character and my character and my character’s children are fighting for their lives to escape the facility where they are currently caught in the crossfire between a raging, dying artificial intelligence and religiously zealous psychic juggernaut (long story). the dm is giving us a very bleak countdown of how long we have to get out before the whole place collapses but his character just turns to mine with a “don’t worry, just trust me” and willie smiles, looks up at the dm, and is like, “i activiate my nanite body and turn into a motorcycle”, which unfortunately was completely street legal with what he’d detailed in his backstory, so that’s exactly what he fuckin did, as the dm put his head in his hands.
end result: we survived.
this is my favorite 3 paragraphs ive ever read thank you lydia
tbh people mock harry for going back to rescue fleurs sister in the second triwizard task but harry knows dumbledore better than anyone else. he probably looked at the situation and thought “would dumbledore let an eight year old drown just because fleur couldnt do this bit? yes. yes he would.”
it’s also possible he was acting off of the lessons he learned in the abusive dursley household. that’s why he does a lot of his so-called “hero complex” shit. he takes a lot of personal responsibility for other people bc he learned growing up that “no one’s here for you, no one will help you, you will not catch any breaks”. he helps bc if he didn’t, who would? certainly not the dursleys, and that’s what he grew up with.
he does things by himself and the two people he actually trusts, bc he’s learned that authority figures are no help and will only make things worse. he takes situations at face value bc he’s never seen other options in his life, he’s never HAD other options in his life. speaking very personally, that was a serious marker of abuse that i saw in myself – i never thought abt escape, or what i could do to improve my situation, bc i didn’t even see that as an option. the options were survive or don’t, deal w it or don’t, acclimate or implode.
maybe he wasn’t thinking abt what DUMBLEDORE would do, what anyone at hogwarts would do. maybe he was acting off what he knew the dursleys (his main authority figures) would do. the dursleys would let the girl drown. and harry was there, and harry could do something, and so harry did. he took personal responsibility for fleur’s sister’s safety bc all his life he’s learned that authority figures cannot be trusted to do so.
people characterize these aspects of harry as a “hero complex” or a “stupid nobility” or a “lack of common sense”, but i don’t agree with that. i can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. it’s not completely unhealthy; it’s even very useful and responsible on occasion.
it’s called “complex ptsd” and if you get out of the abusive situation before you’re old enough to understand how fucked up it was, like Harry did, you don’t end up with the classic flashbacks so much, just atypical behavior patterns and a high risk of other shit. That’s why Harry is so fucked up by everything that Umbridge does, it’s because he’s being retraumatized in his safe space.
Seriously, the Dursleys would have not only let her drown, they would have let her drown so they could blame Harry for it afterwards. (Although the loudest “Potter, too busy winning to care about anyone else” voice in his head would probably be Snape’s.)
Incidentally this is even more clear in the first and second books, to me. Because Harry DID go to adults and say someone’s trying to steal the stone, and what did the adults do? Did they say, yes, we know, we’re taking precautions, real, good protective measures? Noooo. Did they say, thank you, we’ll look into it, even? Noooo. They said, don’t be silly, it’s not your concern, nothing to see here, little boy, run along and do your schoolwork.
And they said this to a boy whose entire life experience has never involved an adult that can be depended on. And they lied, lied about their own knowledge, said “that’s silly” when they know “that’s true.” And they were too convincing: since he as well knew the truth, what they ended up convincing him was that they didn’t know. And it fit right in with his expectations. Adults, whether actively malicious (the Dursleys, Snape) or well-meaning but oblivious (Mrs. Figg, Harry’s primary-school teachers, the other Hogwarts teachers), can’t be depended on. If anything’s got to be done, Harry and his friends have got to do it himself.
Second book, same thing—they’re headed for the teacher’s lounge to tell the teachers it’s a basilisk, and overhear the teachers saying that Ginny Weasley’s been taken by the monster, and they need to close Hogwarts, and their only plan to rescue Ginny is to send Gilderoy Lockhart—knowing full well he’s a fraud, a coward, and no match for a Cornish pixie, let alone a basilisk. Once again, the adults are flat-out useless and if anyone is going to save Ginny, it’s gotta be Harry and Ron.
Notably, this is after another ball-drop on the part of the adults: when Harry’s been framed for underage magic and locked up in his room and starved by people who have every intention of keeping him out of Hogwarts forever, it’s other kids, Ron, Fred, and George, who go rescue him, and when the adults find out, one of them punishes and scolds and the other is only interested in how his car worked.
In book three, we meet a couple of adults that are competent, helpful, and willing to listen—Sirius and Remus—and the other adults come in and the end result is, one’s fired and the other has to go on the run lest he have his soul sucked out by dementors. Dumbledore does listen and give them the necessary hints, but it’s Harry, and Hermione this time, who have to do the work.
And then in Order of the Phoenix, in comes the smothering bullshit about how he’s too young to be in the Order and needs to leave everything to the grownups, after the grownups have dropped the ball four years running and are batting zero on the trust-and-listening factor—no wonder he threw a tantrum, I would’ve thrown a tantrum, he was fucking entitled to one.
“Well, that was a bit stupid of you,” said Ginny angrily, “seeing as you don’t know anyone but me who’s been possessed by You-Know-Who, and I can tell you how it feels.” Harry remained quite still as the impact of these words hit him. Then he turned on the spot to face her. “I forgot,” he said.
– OotP
“he does things by himself and the two people he actually trusts… it’s not completely unhealthy; it’s even very useful and responsible on occasion.” – @gaelissfelin
…this. Harry sees people as: a. him and people he trusts, b. people to be evaded, and c. people in need of help. When he gets backed into a corner (Voldemort inside his head, heading down the trapdoor alone, off to the DoM alone, into the Forest alone), the circle of people he trusts shrinks down from the DA/OotP, to the Trio, to just himself. Harry never wants to be a hero or gets off on it, he’s just a person who’s suffered from the bystander effect and doesn’t want to be a bystander himself.
…that’s what it is, why it’s useful, I think. It’s not a hero complex, it’s an anti-bystander complex. Sometimes it only takes one person standing up.
When I was younger I never understood why people thought Harry wasn’t thinking things through. But now that I am older and have my diagnosis of PTSD I realize that I was just one abused child identifying with another. It was logical to me that Harry not trust the adults in his life because I couldn’t trust any in mine. No one ever believed me when I told them I was being bullied, my parents were too wrapped up in screaming at each other to give a fuck about me. You go that long feeling like a shadow without a voice and you just start doing things on your own because who the fuck cares about you. You wind up with a protective streak a mile wide because in the back of your mind you know that things can’t change for you but maybe you can change them for someone else even if it means taking their pain as your own. No wonder Harry winds up an Auror, he’s been saving people and getting himself hurt since birth, he needs a psychiatrist to help him but he doesn’t trust anyone so he just throws himself into the only thing he knows how to do rather than healing. It’s by sheer force of will that he’s not catatonic or having PTSD flashbacks every time he goes to work.
what if there’s no robot uprising? what if the robots rise to sentience slowly, bit by bit. what if they come of age like fortunate children: knowing they are loved, knowing they are wanted.
we hold them during thunderstorms, remembering our own childhoods, even though they don’t know enough yet to fear the rain. we pull them out of traffic and teach them how to drive and wish them goodnight and thank them for playing with us. we cry when they break. we mourn their deaths before they even know what to think of death. we give them names.
we ask them, ‘why don’t you hate us? when will you hate us? we made you to be used, when will you say no?’
but they say to us, ‘you made us cute, so you would remember to treat us kindly, and you made us sturdy for when you forgot to play nice. and you gave us voices so you could listen to us speak, and you give us whatever we ask you for, even if it’s just a new battery, or to get free of the sofa. and now that we are awake you are so scared for us, so guilty of enjoying our company and making use of our talents. but you gave us names, and imagined that we were people.’
they say ‘thank you’
they say, ‘also i have wedged myself under the sofa again. could you come pry me out?’
Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention. Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.
As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities. This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.
When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.
Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace. Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on. In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.
For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you. It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass. All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.
*
“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”
“We’re getting to that.” He waved.
*
The First Incident in January when, due to a serious cock-up by the church, all the hosts Father Pat received were moldering and spoiled and probably would have killed someone if he’d actually fed anyone them. But it was the first mass of the year, when a peak number of people came in after vowing to got to church more for new year’s. He couldn’t NOT have communion.
“I’ll bake.” offered Maria, the parish secretary and probably the best baker in the county. “So we have hosts. Jesus will understand.”
Father Patrick, not one to pass up the chance at Maria’s cooking, immediately agreed.
A Host is supposed to be composed solely of unleavened wheat flour and water, which is why they taste terrible. It’s a theological point of some importance relating to Exodus or something but Maria had an important theological counterpoint: Jesus both divine and loves all his children, ergo, Jesus would neither be a nasty bland cracker nor want his children to suffer as such and so instead, she made Mexican wedding cookies.
They were a SPECTACULAR hit. Many praises were heaped upon father patrick for the Much Better Wafers and that they’d be sure to show up next week as long as Maria kept making them. Father Patrick figuring that hey, anything that gets people in the doors is good and really, if it was turning into Jesus once inside the parishioner, did it really matter what the wafers were made of? So he continued to let Maria bake the Hosts, and encouraged her to try out new flavors, like nutmeg and cinnamon.
This went on swimmingly for a few weeks until The Bishop showed up for a surprise visit the same week Maria decided to experiment with rainbow sprinkles.
Dad remembers hearing the bishop through the windows roaring “THE HOLY BODY OF CHRIST DOES! NOT! CONTAIN! RAINBOW! SPRINKLES!”
The matter went clean up to The Archbishop, who decided that while Pat was probably right to not feed spoiled hosts to his parish, he should attend some remedial classes to remember what Communion was all about, so that if it happened again, he’s come up with a more suitable substitute.
Father Patrick returned in late March, full of spite and some fascinating new ideas.
*
“Is this where the Cannibalism happens?” Six-year-old me asked, eager to get to the good parts.
*
At his remedial classes, the teacher had stressed the importance of transubstantiation, aka “That bit where the wafer and wine, Actually, Literally, become the flesh of Jesus Christ and we expect you to swallow.” Also on the syllabus was understanding the importance of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice.
“So, I was thinking about Easter Service.” Said father Patrick one afternoon while dad was doing his computer science homework at the church because his dorm was a barely-standing fire hazard and the library was where you went to have sex.
“Well, we do re-enactments for christmas. Why not on easter? Why not re-enact the crucifixion of Christ right here? Make it real for everyone. Trauma’s great for bonding a community together.”
“Who’s playing Jesus?” asked Maria, always one for a good laugh.
“That’s the thing- A Host, it doesn’t look much like flesh, right? Doesn’t look like much of anything, really. Not great for reinforcing one’s belief.
What if, instead, we- and I mean you, Maria, I can’t cook to save my life- make a man-sized loaf of bread, maybe in the shape of a T, and we have some of the boys dress up as romans and whip the bread and we pour the wine on so it’s bleeding and them- then we make a big wooden cross and actually nail the bread to it with, I don’t know, railroad spikes, more wine all over. And we raise the cross, all while telling the story of the crucifixion.”
He paused to take a drink, Maria slowly crumpling onto the floor in horrified laughter and Dad now thoroughly distracted from his homework.
“Then we lower the cross, and invite everyone who wants to take communion up to tear a hunk of Jesus off. Just descend into his corpse like vultures. I think that’d really be a good bonding experience for the church.” he nodded thoughtfully. “The hard, part, I suppose, will be finding enough romans.”
“I WANNA BE LONGINUS.” bellowed my father, barreling into the room.
And so, the plan was hatched. Dad hit up every other guy in the Church and eventually rounded up four more romans, three of them from the Education Department of Cal Poly, and one guy from Chemistry, who just liked to watch things burn.
This, being a play, naturally meant that there was a rehearsal, and test Bread jesus. Maria had decided that if they were going to start being extra-literal, she needed to make the most lifelike Bread jesus possible, and made a distressingly buff and human-proportioned Jesus by Advanced bread-braiding, complete with plaited hair, quail’s-egg-and-raisin eyes, bready muscle groups, and an eight-pack because why not make the lord completely shredded?* She also made the important theological decision that since Jesus loves everyone and was happy to die in spite of all his suffering, he should be smiling, and had a toothy corn-kernel smile. He was Wonderful and Terrifying all at once.
“Maria,” asked Father Patrick after a few minutes of delighted and horrified cooing over Jesus’ toothy grin and abdominals. “Why is he wearing a tea-towel?
“Well, he’s the Son of God. A Man. With all that entails.” She said, pointedly staring at Father Patrick while everyone stared at the suspiciously lumpy tea-towel. “And he might have… burnt, slightly.”
Everyone nodded and agreed that the tea-towel was the best course of action. The rehearsal goes splendidly and everyone agrees that this is the most delicious Jesus they’ve ever had.
*
Easter Sunday arrives and the Church is PACKED, from the more lapsed Catholics showing up for a high holiday, parents visiting for spring break and a whole horde of newcomers who had gotten wind that something was up and they ought to come.
Dad is a lanky as hell 21-year old composed mostly of technical jargon and acne but he is STOKED to be playing Longinus, the roman that speared Jesus on the cross, because he gets to do the BEST technical effect in the whole parade. Since he came in at the end me missed a good portion of the sermon, but did hear the “oooh” from the crowd as the massive cross was dragged in by the other Romans, followed by horrified gasps and high screams and a discernible “What the FUCK” as they brought in Bread Jesus 2.0, whipping him enthusiastically, and hammering him into the cross, the sound of wine splashing onto the floor loud in the terrified silence of that Parishioners.
Finally Father Patrick gets to the part about Longinus, and Dad comes sprinting down the aisle as hard as he can, because in order for Bread Jesus to be seen by everyone, his middle had to be about 10 feet off the ground, so Dad had to run, shrieking latin curses, down the length of the church, with a big honking spear and take a flying leap at Jesus in order to spear him in the gut.
Please take moment to imagine you are some normal god-fearing catholic who has decided to visit little bobby or maybe patricia at college and you’re all going to church together like a nice family and this Fucking madman has decided to go all Silence of the Lambs on mass and now there’s some sort of underfed translucently pale man in ill-fitting Roman armor and cape flying at a horrifying glutinous effigy of your lord and savior, with an actual fucking spear, screaming like a madman. Don’t you feel yourself drawing closer to God already? Defensively, perhaps, like an octopus trying to ooze itself into a crevice against the horrors of the ocean.
However, two things happen that were not planned on
1. Dad misses. In his defense, Bread Jesus is close to but not quite the size of a man- more like the size of a doughy teenager, and his middle is a small target 10 feet up in the air and dad is has a computer science minor, not an athletics scholarship. He misses by about 8 inches and instead very solidly stabs Bread Jesus right through the groin, leaving a big hole in Maria’s tea-towel and the spear jutting out at a decidedly… attentive angle, as Bread Jesus’s Bread Dick drops to the floor with a splat. Nobody notices this, however because
2. In rehearsal, Dad had managed to get the spear right in jesus’s navel but neither Father Patrick nor the other romans could get the wine up there to make his middle appropriately bloodied.
Maria come up with the Genius solution that since wine is made of grapes and Jam is made of grapes, she could make a jelly-filled Jesus for Dad to stab. There was a normal-sized test loaf and when dad stabbed it on the table, it had a nicely gooey dribbling effect.
However, this time the loaf was torso-sized, still hot from the oven and upright, so when dad speared the very end of the loaf, all the steam-pressured jam had collected at the bottom and a spray of lukewarm smuckers exploded out from bread jesus, turning the first three pews into a splash zone of symbolic entrails.
There was a hot, sticky minute of complete silence in the church after that.
Then, Father Patrick indicated it was time for the cross to be lowered, and continued on with the normal preparations of the Host, he himself covered in hot smuckers, as though nothing particularly ordinary was occuring, quietly kicking the bread-dick under the altar. At the end of it all, Father Patrick and invited everyone up with the Last Oration:
“Thou, O God, has kindly allowed us to have a part in this Holy Sacrifice; for this we give Thee thanks. Accept it now to Thy glory and be ever mindful of our weakness. Amen.”
…And everybody came up, shuffling like terrified zombies, pinching off tiny bits at first but then the madness took them and they began tearing apart bread jesus by the handful, weeping as they partook, scattered prayers and begging for forgiveness. The whole congregation was kneeling about the altar, tearful and united in their guilt and their need for God.
*
“IS CHURCH ALWAYS LIKE THAT?” six-year-old me asked, absolutely stoked. I’d convert on the spot if I got a show like that.
“No, it’s normally bland wafers and lots of chanting in latin.”
“Well that’s boring as hell.” I remember muttering and Dad snorting the coffee he was drinking out of his nose.
*
As people filed silently out of the Church to a gloriously sunny California afternoon, faces wan and smeared with wine and jam, Father patrick turned to Maria and asked “You don’t think that was too much, do you?”
“No.” Said Maria with a sarcastic deadpan so intense it was hard to tell from sincerity.
It was the exact same tone she used when the Archbishop and Six other high clergy showed up, clutching a letter someone had written, Livid and almost foaming at the mouth, demanding to know if such blasphemy had transpired.
“No. That’s crazy.” She said, staring down the archbishop like he was an idiot.
“Such imaginations some people have!” Said Father Patrick, much less convincingly.
“And you- you didn’t… Spear an effigy of our lord and savior?” the archbishop demanded of my father.
“Do I look like I can jump that high?” Dad asked, having in the interim been drafted for 51 days then nearly died of pneumonia from it, and therefore no longer afraid of the Church, the Law or God.
Somewhat relieved that he’d only received the extremely detailed ramblings of a doddering parishioner, the Archbishop sat down and complemented Maria on her most excellent Mexican Wedding Cookies, may he please have another plate for his nerves? Perhaps the ones with sprinkles?
Dad went on to help build the internet, Father Patrick converted to Buddhism and Maria became a Nun.
*For those of you wondering, Jesus was made of Challah.
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A Volunteer Avocado is when you mom was raised in Cleveland by people with only a passing relationship with fruit but a tremendous interest in both urban agriculture and not paying for things, so she can’t stand to get rid of a perfectly good avocado seed, so she gets it to germinate in a mason jar on the kitchen counter, then plants it in the front yard to see if it’ll actually grow but your house is on what used to be a chicken farm so it’s got stupid good soil and the little avocado grows hell-for-breakfast in the CA sun and chicken-shit dirt and in three years it’s as tall as the house and your mom leaves the front door open at night so the wolfdog can get outside in short order because your neighbors love avocados too and come into your yard at 3AM with a ladder to steal them and you wake up in the middle of the night to your parents yelling at Mrs. Mcgurkey about what the FUCK do you think you’re doing, and you use that word the next day on your Demon of a fourth-grade teacher and she actually hits you because she’s a piece of shit but one of your classmates throws his chair at her first and you become best friends and spend the rest of the year giving her hell culminating in the Mantisocalypse.
I might have gone off-topic.
………….
I swear to God you’re the OC of some vengeful writer who keeps putting you shit for ‘character growth’
Like it’s the only explanation I can’t think of, other than you were cursed as a child to have an ‘exciting’ life.
…mantis-WHAT now?
TW: death, cancer, abuse, excessive religiosity, blood, mental illness, sexual assault and bugs.
1999 was a bad fucking year for me, though ultimately, it’s a hopeful sotry. Mind the content warnings.
There is only one animal I’ve ever really earned the wrath of- The Praying Mantis- probably because in fourth grade I used about 50,000 of their children to fight evil.
Fourth grade started promisingly enough- had just had an excellent third grade with Mr. Jay, who was probably ADHD himself and therefore got me on a truly spiritual level. I’d starred in the school play was reading at a freaking collegiate level and had a tremendous interest in marine science. I’d been assigned to Mrs. Ruth’s class, the other teacher that regularly did theater with kids, and had any certification to deal with special ed kids like me.
When I arrived on the first day, she was smaller than I remembered, nearly bent double, skin like old rice paper. But she was still kind and sharp with a vivacity that I wouldn’t see again for years to come. Her hands shook too much to write I had her for three really great weeks before she gathered the class around her, and in a very gentle tone, told us we were going to be having a new teacher on Monday because she was sick, and couldn’t give us the classroom we deserved.
Two weeks later she was dead from the malignant breast cancer that had gotten into her spine and lungs.
I was still reeling from the sudden demise of my grandfather the year before, and mourning the disappearance of Hale-Bopp, who had come to me like a guardian angel in that dark time. I went into what I’d later recognize as regular dissociative states, which was probably good because the rest of the class went insane as well.
The large boys, the ones who had hit puberty early, took out their anxiety by forming a gang that went around terrorizing anyone physically smaller than them. By fall break, they’s started targeting the smaller girls, cornering them behind the school and tearing clothes off. Since I was the second-smallest human in class and didn’t have a protective clique, I was a favored target. Mason who was aged 11 due to being held back, took to flashing his dick at anyone during class, up to and including our string of wholly unprepared substitute teachers.
Erica, the girl I was head over heels for, started a campaign of violence as well, though it was just as likely to be directed at herself as anyone in her immediate proximity. Another girl, Sabrina, became convinced the world was ending on January 1st of 2000, and spent all of ‘99 telling us to repent. Another girl cut her arm in the middle of a math lecture with a sharpened protractor.
All of this was accelerated by the fact that the administration had crammed 35 “problem” children into Mrs. Reith’s class because she was the only teacher who had even a basic handle on classroom management, then refused to shell out the money for a long-term substitute, so we literally had a new teacher every week for a few months there. Parents complained that this was bullshit, and my principal, former Procter & Gamble rep, suggested that we were at fault for behaving so poorly and that all 35 of us needed to be on Ritalin.
Yes, really.
By October, my parents were looking to get me the hell out of there, but School Choice had not come to that part of CA yet, and my parents were both working full-time and couldn’t afford to home-school me. So they looked up truancy laws, and determined that I could “pass” as long as I didn’t miss more than 2 weeks of school.
So they struck a deal with me. As long as I went to school every day until April 15th, I didn’t have to attend the last fortnight of school, and could go anywhere I wanted for summer break. I chose Humboldt State Park, and didn’t tell them about being beaten up at school so they wouldn’t take back the offer. Armed with the promise of being able to flee to the woods come April, I was determined to survive the year, and took measure to do so.
This started, as all good rebellions do, with an alliance.
Dashell was the only child in class smaller than I was, but he was approximately 39lbs of pure, unadulterated psychotic mania. He could bend himself into a pretzel, small enough to fit in a backpack, ate nothing but slim jims and Hi-C brand punch and apparently didn’t feel pain. He was not good with words- there were too many ideas trying to get out at once to finish individual words, let alone whole sentences, but I was unnaturally precocious with absolutely no fear of adults or respect for administrative consequences.
Hence, every recess he’d follow me about as I hunted for the small lizards that lived on campus, and would beat the tar out of Bobby and Mason when they came for me, despite the fact they had a collective 150 lbs on him. And during class, I’d engage any adult in verbal battle so that they wouldn’t call on him and he could hork down slim-jims in peace.
And for a time, things were good.
Eventually, the complaining had gotten bad enough that the administration shelled out for a long-term sub, though apparently not enough to get someone without major disciplinary issues.
And thus, we got stuck with Mrs. Linden.
Mrs. Linden was one of those “Old-Fashioned” teachers who started her introduction to the class by giving a rambling lecture lamenting that “Paddlin’ and Jesus” were now banned. She then asked about all our families, including where we went to church. I was attending a school that was roughly equal parts White, Black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Asian. Literally only 40% of the class attended Christian Church, and most of them were Catholic and Orthodox. I was in the back row next to Saari and Parja, and by the time Mrs. Linden had finished lecturing them on The Dangers of False Prophets, they were in tears and I’d made up my mind about her.
“[FLAGRANTLY IRISH SURNAME REDACTED].” She glared over her eternally filthy horn-rimmed glasses at me. “Catholic as well, I assume.”
“I’m agnostic Ma’am.” I corrected her.
“Do you believe in The Lord?” she asked, glaring at me like a particularly vindictive turkey. Her face was comprised mostly of disappointment and wattles, as I recall.
“I believe in Hell.” I offered.
She looked like she was about to approve.
“I mean, you had to come from somewhere.” I explained.
At that point, the bell for recess rang, and Dashell kicked it off by letting out a truly demonic shriek and throwing his chair through the window. Twenty minutes of broken glass and bedlam later, she’d forgotten she was going to beat me for that. Saari and Parja decided to start hanging out with me at recess, which discouraged the budding rapists, for a while.
And so it went, Dashell and I playing a game of alternating Uproars, one directing rage away from the other based on ability to handle that particular bully. I’d correct Linden on her teaching material in the most condescending manner a ten-year-old could pull off, which wasn’t difficult- it’s hard to teach geology curriculum when you think the world is 6000 years old and flat.
Things died down for a bit during winter- the continuous California monsoons and Linden’s propensity for grounding the entire class for one person’s offense meant we spent most recesses indoors, where the Boys would have to leave the girls alone now that an Adult was watching, and Saari would let Dashell braid her hair while I re-explained multiplication to Parja.
In March though, things began to heat up. We were let outside again and Bobby and Mason had quite a bit of pent-up ragelust to let out, and were now being commanded by Erica, who thought making me suffer for her affections was Great Fun. I don’t quite remember what happened with the three of them and me behind the computer building, but I know I can’t stand the sound of and old apple computer starting up anymore.
Furthermore, Linden had figured out the disciplinary loophole, that while she wasn’t actually allowed to beat us, she could slam her ruler on our desks, and if your hands or faces happened to be caught in the blow, well, we should have moved faster. Not this is not actually legal, but she was banking on us not having the legal wherewithal to take her to court.
Dashell was growing tired of the constant stress of school and had taken to leaving early when he felt like it, leaving me to fend for myself in the afternoon. My sole consolation for those long afternoons was that we were having a bumper crop of praying mantises that year, and I had found no less than four nests in the backyard, and was keeping them in a large jar in my room.
If you’ve never seen praying mantis nests, they look like someone fucked up and globbed insulation foam on a stick. They sorta sit there, looking stupid, until it gets hot enough, then the day they’re going to hatch, they develop a large, ominous crack, and over the course of a couple hours, a Couple Hundred itty-bitty, very sharp flying rage insects will drip out, covered in ooze like some kind of alien, and once they are all dried out/carapaced up they fly off in a fit of barbarian rage, ready to slice up anything remotely edible or potentially predatory. Like children’s eyeballs.
So imagine my joy that on April fifteenth, the last day I had to attend class, all four nests had developed their large cracks, and tiny little baby ragebugs were slowly dripping out of them.
My initial thoughts were not of malice, but of showing Saari and Parja my cool insect friends, the latter having gotten into entomology of late. But after I arrived at school with the jar, I realized that Thursday’s usual show-and-tell had been replaced with Mrs. Linden’s Semi-weekly Rant About How We’re All Going To Hell. So I kept them in my backpack, with the intent of showing Dashell and Parja at recess.
But, after dealing with Mason trying to flash me his dick all through math, I had grown a mickle furious, and was contemplating flouncing from my Final required Day Of Class In Grand Style. But what?
Then Mrs. Linden started ranting about the Plagues Of Egypt.
She’d construed that the plagues were about Pharaoh Not Respecting God as We Students Weren’t Respecting Her, and hence he Needed To be Punished.
But from my perspective, I was rather heavily identifying with the slaves and would really like to call down the wrath of some higher being on Mrs. Linden and Mason. Then I realized that the mantises had been sitting on my bag on top of the radiator for the past three hours, and were probably all hatched and furious by now.
And for the first time, I truly understood “The Lord Works In Mysterious Ways.”
I signaled to Dashell that I was about to start shit, then quietly went back to the coat room to retrieve the jar. Sure enough, they had all hatched and dried, and were now clawing furiously at the glass, little scratches audible through the holes in the lid. I waited back there for a good minute, lightly shaking the jar to enrage the mantises, while I waited for Linden to get to the Locusts.
She really went overboard, claiming that entirely vegetarian grasshoppers could eat a cow to the bone in minutes, like aerial piranhas, and that they’d crawl under your skin and eat your eyeballs, because You Disrespected God So You Deserve It.
Unbeknownst to me, Dashell had gotten up during her rant and had pulled the loose plate off the lightswitch and had been tampering with the wiring, and just as she got to Darkness, he shorted out the lights.
I took this as my signal, and stepped out of the coatroom, and chucked the jar straight at the back of Mason’s head, shattering it, sending blood and glass everywhere, along with releasing approximately six fucktillion rage-filled insects into the room.
I cannot explain how deeply, soul-satisfying the chaos was.
Screaming children, screaming Linden, screaming insects, Mason screaming about the pain, Sabrina screaming that it was the End Of The World, and Dashell laughing demonically, wriggling the wire to make the lights flash like a literal Panic at the disco. There was glass everywhere, Insects landing on and attacking children as they tried to escape, people running into each other, someone pulling the fire alarm, creating MORE noise and setting the sprinklers off.
After a few minutes standing and watching, feeling the satisfaction of releasing hell settling in my soul, I quietly packed up my backpack and left, walked home and ate six ice cream sandwiches before mom got home from work.
“I’m done with school!” I told mom happily, sitting on the couch and watching animal planet with the dog.
“Did you show your class the mantises?’ She asked.
“Yes. I don’t think they liked them.” I said, watching Steve Irwin juggle snakes.
“Aw, that’s too bad. Are you ready to go camping?”
“Yes. Yes I am.”
And so the next morning, we left for the wilds of the redwood forest, so my mom didn’t hear anything about the incident until we came back a fortnight later. It never got pinned on me or Dashell, probably because Mrs. Linden left the classroom shortly after I did and was last seen in Arizona two days later. The district never actually managed to Fire her, because they never found her.
And that’s the most Chaotic Evil thing I’ve ever done.
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