the attack dog of wizarding britain

Monday’s feature in The Prophet called him the attack dog of Wizarding Britain. Some of the things he’s done, no one else has. Some of the things they’ve made him do, no one should have ever done. How many of them have sighed in relief from the side of podiums while he quelled their people, gave his voice and body to their cause? But sod all of that. He’s not theirs, he’s mine. Because he holds me like water in his scarred hands, because he sleeps soundly only on my lap. And when he comes in like a lion through the front door, embers from the last raid still sizzling miles away, I know to look past his shadow and see him as a man. A man who’s always, always coming home to me.

i'm in love, and i keep trying to think of ways to articulate it, but i keep coming back to this.

third brightest star

my aunt was a terrorist and a killer and an arsonist. in most of my memories she's screaming, but even the times i've heard her speak softly were still just to extend threats, to toy with her prey in new ways. my mother's memories of her all turn sour by the end, littered with violence and casual cruelty at an early age. she killed my lover's guardian and the list of children orphaned by her hand would extend far past her harlequin shadow. if she didn't die before He did, I wonder if she ever would have stopped.

in one of kreacher's fox holes at the house, tucked in between hat boxes and bags of moldy grain, i found a rolled up page of glossy magazine paper, cut out neatly at the edges with a precise gouging spell. a muggle advertisement: a vast green field at the foot of a mountain range tipped with snowy peaks, extending far beyond the page. a car, some old cheerful model, driven into the middle distance, the driver's side door left open - and then past that, traced against the bluish haze of the mountain and almost right up against the edge , a woman in a red dress, caught mid run. a softened spot in the paper and a faint crumpling, as though someone had run their thumb right over that small detail many times.

she drove someone's kind mother to murder and spent half her life in a cell. i don't think of her. i go to germany for work, i wake up early. i wander out of the hotel yard until i'm in a field that extends to the zugspitze. the morning dew is cold against my ankles. i run.

sorry draco

recession core drarry

imagined draco and harry's post-voldemort panic attacks from @aibidil's always already, which literally saved me from going crazy at work this week

art inspired by first watch of night by @tackytigerfic

art inspired by first watch of night by @tackytigerfic

This fic took a lot for me to write — in a good way, but it was still a lot. Time and energy and commitment and thought and all of those juicy things. And then it was done and posted and part of me missed it, is still missing it. I've spent so long in its world that being without it feels weird. So to see this art emerge from one of the scenes feels like closure or, dare I say, fulfillment. I wrote that scene to be a moment of harmony and community in the middle of a war. This art takes that feeling and expands it into a new realm, and brings it depth and vividness and a sense of magic and energy. It is this writer's dream to be seen and understood in such a way, and to get in turn to bask in the way joy saw and shaped the world. I saw the art less than a day ago and have already pored over it so many times, zooming in on every tiny space and getting to see the intuition, the transformative and collaborative mingling in such beauty and character and detail. This scene is everything that i could have hoped for in that it feels exactly as i wanted it to feel (Rosie so perfectly childlike and joyful, the focus and contentment of harry and draco who are finally becoming friends after years of hurt and loneliness, a moment of joy and distraction for malfoy who is alone in another world, his red string trailing out of the world, seeking.... plus all the DETAILS there is so much to marvel at) but it feels like the essence of joy's art too, which takes it out of my brain and puts something else into the world, and I'm so grateful.

To have joy with us again feels like Good Things distilled, something precious and very much hoped for. Thank you joy, I'm honoured to have this, it has made me more happy than i can even convey. And to have it as a gift from sweet and Maester too - my two dear friends, who poured more energy, time, and thought into this fic than anyone has a right to ask, to do it so generously without ever making me feel like the horror i was (let me stress again... THREE YEARS of listening to me and talking me through and reading hundreds of thousands of words and taking all the shit and helping me fix it). Not to sound trite but I'll never forget this. Thank you.

Have you ever had a day that just went completely to shit? That was the entire month of November for me. I had planned to have this Happy Hour ready then, but between work and home life and hosting for the holiday and everything else...a ball had to drop. I was so disappointed, because I love doing Happy Hour and I love speaking with the creators who help with the guest fic recs.

@ihopeyoubothstaysafefromharm could not have been more gracious and understanding about postponing his rec. I always thought his artworkand fics were lovely, but being on the receiving end of the his kindness makes the works even lovelier to me. I love that even in moments of violence, he portrays characters as vulnerable and soft, the gentleness of moments of solitude, and the joyfulness of the mundane. If you haven't checked out Joy's art before, I cannot recommend it enough.

So after waiting for several months, I am finally so excited to share his incredible fic rec. Our first Happy Hour guest rec of the year is by the lovely and gracious @ihopeyoubothstaysafefromharm.

Outside of things that become fanon, we all travel the worlds of transformative works building up our own personal sense of canon. A lot of that process is wish fulfillment and self indulgence on little pleasures and minor vanities, which is what carves out this perfectly molded comfort that we all shelter ourselves in, what comes together to broadcast our unique wavelengths of bliss. But there is also another part of the process, one that I find myself unconsciously engaging in at times, which is an attempt to rewrite, rewire, recolor the places in which the source material has dulled, or to find cracks and fissures for interpretations that will allow me to engage with the source more meaningfully in the long run while honoring the directions in which I’ve grown and changed. There’s been a lot of work in the Harry Potter fandom that took on the form of a kind of hermeneutics, or that used the setting and characters as a kind of convenient vehicle to make a point about The Real World, in a way that sometimes makes it feel like we, the naive and spirited readers of the source material are somehow distant from the world and must be gently pulled back into it in the language of our distraction. Harry Potter and Welcome to the World of Grey was the first AU retelling of a larger segment of the HP canon where I felt like I was encountering something completely new, something that had the distant shape of these previous approaches at first glance but that, right from the first page, has that almost physical pull of the complete and precious new. 

Harry Potter and Welcome to the World of Grey by @sobsicles (456,640 words, rated E)

When Harry fails to keep his anger at bay and Voldemort possesses his mind, the events that follow lead him down a long road to realizing the world isn't as black and white as it seems.

Chaos, hilarity, and tragedy ensue with a Dark Lord being honest all the time, a rival becoming something else, and a world demanding to be saved. Featuring frightened Death Eaters, deep conversations with a monster, Pureblood traditions being ridiculous, and the fight to do the right thing with no true options.

Harry's life just gets more and more bizarre with each passing moment.

Or, the one where Harry's life gets split in half, and he has to figure out how to bring it back together.

The summary is immediately gripping, and I’ll leave the reader to discover the shapes of the AU on their own, but the basic premise of the story is that Harry, at the end of 5th year, does something he would never do in the book, and that as a consequence of (?), or despite (?) or alongside (?) this, him and Voldemort begin to, on a relational and intellectual level, engage in a way that would otherwise be impossible. This story works on so many levels, all of them incredibly crafted and so masterfully sustained over the behemoth length of the first installment. The Harry in this story is funny and young and troubled in the most delicious ways all the while wading in and out of the crushing solitude of predetermination (and also maybe just humanity). I generally read exclusively fics in which they’re adults, or at least on the brink of adulthood in 8th year, but the author has crafted such incredibly convincing teenage characters in both Harry and Draco here that by the end not only do they both end up under your skin but they also become these people that sit alongside you, whose adolescence you’ve literally gone through as both a sympathetic spectator and as a mirror of them, drawn into the irresistible sweet delights of their love, the painful bonding of people captive in their lives, the hope of the future born out of surviving something together. 

There is also a tendency in fics to paint the adults of the HP world as traitors, because that’s what the majority of them are, and this is something I also usually engage with. In this fic, while we maintain that the state of the world and the fates that befell all our favourite characters are largely the result of a kind of treason of goodness and responsibility, we also get to have these incredible deep insights into why each adult character is the way they are, through relations made possible only by this unlikely scenario that the author proposes. We also get to have the warm joy of seeing a child empathize with (and pity, and comfort, and teach) people who they owe nothing to, and this is an absolute treasure that shines brighter as we move through the story.

Finally, as this is Happy Hour, apart from all the things I’ve briefly mentioned up there that make this fic a delightful and comforting experience that I constantly go back to, I wanted to talk about a strange way that made this story become my source of comfort. This story made me like Voldemort. Not the terrifying and irredeemable one from the books or the movies. There’s this feeling that I have about fics and fandom, and I think it’s shared by a lot of people who’ve been around for a while, and it’s that these characters and settings and storylines are almost… nebulous things that always existed in us and around us and that we had maybe some slight hope for, but that were first snatched out of non-being and formed by the source material authors. This is also just how art and creativity is, in general - an antenna that beams signals and sometimes someone gets the whole message first. And you grow up and sometimes things are shaped by the source material to make you think oh I’ll feel this way forever and then of course you change your mind, but this was more like an intense, emotional journey in which I realized there was all this personal negativity that I’d always shove into this concept and this being - and that when I encountered the newly formed shape that this author’s Voldemort takes on, my resentments and my fixed darknesses, once unmovable and heavy at the bottom of this big thing in my life, were suddenly things I could walk up to. That the previously unapproachable veil of evil - which is simple, and undebatable - had lifted, and suddenly I could decide to do something else with them, to pick them up and carry them or throw them away, or live alongside them as awkward housemates until suddenly the shame and fear they represented wasn’t something I had to run from. So for happy hour, I picked a story that made me, and continues to make me, engage with not only happiness but a kind of lasting adult joy that comes from letting something come in and help you redraw the city lines of your own story. It’s very precious to me. I read the entirety of this fic in two days next to the crisp Adriatic sea, but I’ve reread it in many settings since then, and it’s always made me both hungry and full in the way that good home cooking does. I hope it does the same for you too.

This was such an honor to participate in, genuinely, I respect @thedrarrylibrarian's work (and the work of all of our community reccers) boundlessly. Here's a little reading of my review, in my crunchy tired voice.

Love you all, joy.

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