River Writer

you know a fic is good when it has this

Mini Buttermilk Biscuits

Come back, I have to tell you the plot of a fic I’ll never write and get you excited about it so we can all be disappointed with me later

HP Rants: Order of the Phoenix:

Anybody else still angry that Harry didn’t believe Hermione in OotP about the Ministry being a set up, and even when she concocts a plan to allow them to get rid of Umbridge in order to go rescue Sirius (who was- as she stated- not in danger) he’s mad that she didn’t do it faster. And then when she still follows him to the Ministry, is almost mortally wounded, he still makes it all about him.

The way he just loses all hope when she does go down somewhat makes it OK. He does have one of the most powerful magical beings in history pushing into his mind trying to make him go. That he held out as long as he did is impressive.

But when Hermione is hurt and everything in the world stops as Harry panics until Neville confirms she's alive...

And she forgives him for it. She understood what he was going through. What he lost that night. She doesn't hate him, even though she fully could. She latches onto him even harder because she knows that next time he will try even harder to keep her from coming along and he'll get himself in even more trouble.

Yes, Harry messed up. But there were extenuating circumstances. We don't have to fully excuse it, but we should try and understand just how mentally fatigued he was that entire evening.

Harry has been traumatized about a thousand times over. That doesn’t mean he’s allowed to treat other people badly. (To clarify my thoughts, Harry didn’t just mess up, he made a series of decisions over a matter of hours, long after his Voldemort driven vision and as far as we know, he ever apologized for any of it. If we accept that he couldn’t control himself at all with the horcrux in his head then we have to accept that he had no agency at all during the entire series)

There is no "after the revolution." No "ideal world." I don't care how much progress we make, we will always fail someone, hurt someone, and the best thing we can do is accept that, and keep striving to make it better as we go.

And don't get me wrong, I don't say this to discourage anyone from trying to make that ideal world. Quite the opposite.

I feel like it's very naive to continue to approach these big changes we want to make in the world as if there's an "after it's all over" when we don't have to worry about it anymore.

We should always be striving to make life better, even when life seems pretty damn good.

@nothingbuttrashhere tags

Oh my god

I hadn’t thought to call it “rapture culture” but that’s EXACTLY what it is

--Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Dispossessed"

Professor Malfoy 🧪

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

I think that’s a reason why so many of us learn to love Darcy. He’s not an actual threat to Elizabeth. She sees this and, while even while she’s disgusted by his behavior, she’s not afraid of him, she banters back.