Sometimes when I’m sad I like to imagine what would happen in a crossover universe between Discworld and Harry Potter, and what Granny Weatherwax would make of their style of magic.
But then I think about more important things, like what would have happened if Granny Weatherwax ever met Albus Dumbledore, and I can’t help but feel a whole lot of shit could have been avoided if he’d had a good clip round the ear and a strong talking to about the whole “my hands are tied” bullshit that enabled years of abuse and suffering at the hands of adults in a position of authority over young, vulnerable people.
Like oh, this spell requires the bond of blood to keep him safe, all right. So that just means we’re not going to hold these adults accountable for their torment and abuse? I think the entire fuck not, Albus.
Snape is a double agent who is actually working for the greater good. All right, but that doesn’t stop him from being an absolute fucking shit weasel who shouldn’t be around children until he learns to control himself and works out his issues in a safe and sane manner, what the fuck, Albus.
You have an entire school system that ascribes to ideas of inherent morality when in fact this is a thing that needs to be taught? Well no wonder there’s one house in particular that keeps going off the rails, you keep telling them they’re evil. Tell people something for long enough they’ll start to believe you. There’s nothing wrong with being selfish and cunning, sometimes that’s what it takes to survive. Teach them how to use those traits for good. As strength. My land, my home, my people (not my daughter, you bitch) how dare you try to hurt them. Teach them, Albus, you have to bloody teach them and realize that evil isn’t born. It’s made. In a thousand small deplorable ways. And it starts with treating people like things and I cannot be having with this.
Of course there’s also the other flipside to this thought process, which is imagining Gytha “Nanny” Ogg shouting “watcher Molly” as she thumps Bellatrix Lestrange on the back of the head with a cauldron, and drops her like a fucking stone. Later they’ll sit together and grieve, later there will be time to pick up the pieces and mourn. But for now there are things to fight for, people to keep alive. And people to keep from doing what they shouldn’t ever have to do, so you find a way to do it for them, by hook, crook or blunt force trauma.
And because my head wont let go of this thought:
“You always was a right little miss,” she said, taking a puff from her pipe and resettling her weight with a hefty bounce as the younger witch struggled to get out from under Nanny’s considerable girth. “Giving yourself airs and graces and such. Pretending you was too good to scrub a pot. Well, let me tell you something, Mistress Lestrange, you ain’t fit for nothing no more except maybe a noose. And if I had my way that might be the end of it. But we don’t do things like that no more, we don’t rule by blood.”
“Then you’re weak,” Lestrange shot back, still struggling to claw her way free. “A weak, old woman with nothing left but tricks up your fat sleeve.”
Nanny puffed in silence for a few more moments, then reached up her sleeve. “And your wand, dearie. Walnut is it? With a dragon heartstring core? Very nice, painting it black was a bit much, but you always were fond of your dramatics.”
She pulled out her own wand, holding it out under Bellatrix’s nose, whose face went cross eyed and then wide with panic.
“You know, I’ve only ever heard of Priori Incantatem,” she said, puffing on the end of her pipe until the pit glowed cherry red then white hot and she exhaled smoke like a dragon, “but I wasn’t about to risk it, not in front of all those kiddies. But I reckon now might be a good time…”
Also, for your consideration. Feegles.
“Haul yoo, aye yoo, the great big ugly gangly scunner wi-oot a nose. Can yesew? Well stitch this.”
Harry watched in consternation as Voldemort staggered back, dropped to the ground like a ton of bricks and lay still.
“That’s it?” he demanded, lowering his wand. “That’s all you had to do?”
Rob
Anybody, perched on his shoulder, looked up at the young wizard out the
corner of the eye, which was to say he looked him in the nostrils.
“Weell,”
he said, gesturing towards the chaos that had been unleashed as the
full force of the Nac Mac Feegle was unleashed upon the band of Death
Eaters, primarily by running up the inside of their trousers. “That’s
the thing about the lads. Once they’ve decided tae dae something, they
dae it good and hard.”
“But you just headbutted him!”
“Aye, weill,” Rob said, feeling as though the lad wasn’t quite grasping the practicality of the situation, “he might be a bloody great dark bigjob wizard, but he cannae cast a spell wi-oot a heid.”
Ok but the one I want to see is Dolores Umbridge vs Munstrum Ridcully, becuase that would be the Petty Academic Slapfight of doom.
Because Ridcully, for all his faults, probably understands that the actual learning of magic relies on a certain degree of both freedom and madness and sometimes explosions.
And Umbridge would crawl right up his skin with her concept of a “Defense Against The Dark Arts” Course, and in the middle of a lecture on recent runes, would go on a “tangent” on the history of various dark wizards and the means by which they were defeated and here Why Don’t We Have A Practical Outside, The Weather Is Nice (The weather is not nice. It’s Scotland. In Late November.) But everyone is really curious to see the old man actually take his wand out for once, only to discover that that’s not a wand at all, that’s a Burleigh & Stronginthearm and they’re all going to pass it around and whoever shoots the weathervane off the top of Ravenclaw tower gets 50 points. Hannah Abbot puts a bolt through Umbridge’s window, taking out a kitten plate and gets 100 points.
Fred and George turn the third floor corridor into a Swamp and Umbridge is pleased to hear Ridcully bellowing at the Weasley boys about “BLOODY INSONSIDERATE, NEVER HAVE I EVER MET SUCH WRETCHEDLY-” but the second she’s around the corner it changes to “-brilliant young men, how much is this setup you have here? That potions-master could do with some aggravated moisturizing. Speaking of moisturizing, what would it take to get you two gentlemen to work on the faculty baths? Disgustingly substandard, nowhere to put your nail trimmings-”
Ridcully would like the students there too, I think. Especially the Slytherins, because he’s perfectly aware how important being a cunning bastard and willing to get your hands dirty or bloody if needed is, especially in the world of Magical Academia. They’re socially intelligent and disenchanted with the system, not Evil, Albus. The Malfoy boy would be a lot less trouble if he had something to do besides practicing subject’s he’s bored with. Fratricide, perhaps. I’m kidding Albus! (he’s only sort of kidding. Maybe not murder. Just turn him into a toad and keep him as a familair in a bowl on the mantlepiece.)
He’d be so mad about the Chamber of secrets though. Potter! A Basilisk! Why didn’t you bring the head back up it’d be magnificent hanging over the great hall. Oh I see. Well why didn’t you go BACK? Perfectly good potion ingredients going to waste, doesn’t that brooding mop of a potions master teach you anything about looti- er, collecting spell components?
I forgot I wrote this haha, and I’m glad @gallusrostromegalus made it better.
Okay but feagles and house elves tho
Obeyin’ the hag is one thing, but any hag that’d that inna worth the title
(Dobby takes it up first, under his breath: “no lords and no masters”)
Havelock Vetenari is not a man to “Go Spare”, and certainly not without good cause but that shambling mountain of paperwork and prejudice they call “The Ministry Of Magic” is several thousand good reasons. He doesn’t even WANT to take over this disaster but he can’t rest so long as it continues to exist.
But. He’s better than that. Why waste time in pointless rage when there are things he can actually do to fix this?
“Mr. Lipvig.” He says, conversationally. “Did you know that the currency conversion rates haven’t changed since Gringotts was founded? Seventeen silver sickles to a gold galleon since the 1100’s”
He doesn’t really need to say anything else. Moist blinks a few times, then gradually begins to vibrate as every instinct he possess is called to the forefront.
“They’re just down the street if you wanted to see their facilities-”
Moist’s chair actually spins with the force of his rapid departure.“
An autistic friend of mine just said this to me “The harder I work at communication the more people expect from me and the less they are willing to compromise.” and it is the most fucking heartbreaking thing I’ve heard.
This is very much a thing, though – and I’m sure people across the board with other disabilities can verify that it happens to them, too.
People will turn any progress you make toward being “normal” – no matter how straining or difficult it is for you, no matter how little it actually helps you – as either inspiration porn, or proof that you don’t really need accommodations, you just need to “apply yourself! :)))))”
Alright so now I want to talk about how amazing the Discworld universe is, because there are some crazy events and characters in it such as:
The primary city in the series, Ankh-Morpork, getting infested by a living shopping mall
Havelock Vetinari, tyrant of Ankh-Morpork, master manipulator and former assassin and his endless struggle against the fiendish crossword puzzles of a sweet old lady
Death is actually a huge dork
Death takes up farming for a bit because he gets fired for being a huge dork
The worlds greatest conman gets coerced into becoming the worlds greatest mailman
SAMUEL FUCKING VIMES
All vampires think that if they spell their name backwards nobody will know it’s them
A gang of crotchety old barbarians go to Mount Olympus so they can blow it up
Garfield starts a Pied Piper protection racket
A bunch of overweight elderly wizards attempt to take up football (soccer)
There’s so much more but this is what I’ve got for now.
Thats because the point of paying for a service like Netflix is so you DONT have to see ads. You’re paying a monthly fee so that they dont need the revenue from ads to pay the bills. That’s it. Thats the whole point. The catalog for streaming can be lackluster but there’s some good stuff there and ads during a marathon of Dexter would be obnoxious. Why do you think so many millenials dont even do TV anymore unless their ISP forces them to buy at least their bare minimum TV package to get that internet? Because it’s overpriced and you get to watch a show all of 7 minutes before youre now basically paying to watch ads (on top of all the channels you will never watch). You get what? Something like 6 minutes of ads in a show with a runtime of 30min? Its annoying.
I am not advising anyone of anything or speaking on behalf of any company, you didn’t hear this from me, and with that said: if you paid for a product like a fancy canvas bag from Bethesda and you did not receive a product that matched the description of what you were promised, and the company will not refund you, you have the right as a customer and as a cardholder to contact your bank and dispute the charge on your account through the bank to get your money back that way.
Typically you have 4 months from the date you received the merchandise to dispute its quality.
Tumblr seems to be in potential death throes or at least, incredibly volatile and unreliable lately, but we’ve done some pretty good and informative work on canon analysis and reference guides so I was looking for ways to back it up without losing it…and the solution became obvious to me:
Archive of Our Own, aka AO3.
“What?” you might ask if you are less familiar with their TOS. “Isn’t that just a fanfic archive??”
No! It’s a fanWORK archive. It is an archive for fanworks in general! “Fanwork” is a broad term that encompasses a lot of things, but it doesn’t just include fanfic and fanart, vids etc; it also includes “fannish” essays and articles that fall under what’s often called “meta” (from the word for “beyond” or “above”, referencing that it goes beyond the original exact text)! The defining factor of whether Archive of Our Own is the appropriate place to post it is not whether or not it’s a fictional expansion of canon (fanfic), though that is definitely included – no, it’s literally just “is this a work by a ‘fan’ intended for other ‘fannish’ folks/of ‘fannish’ interest?”
The articles we’ve written as a handy reference to the period-appropriate Japanese clothing worn by Inuyasha characters? The analyses of characters? The delineations of concrete canon (the original work) vs common “fanon” (common misconceptions within the fandom)? Even the discussion of broader cultural, historical, and geographic context that applies to the series and many potential fanworks?
All of those are fannish nonfiction!
Which means they absolutely can (and will) have a home on AO3, and I encourage anybody who is wanting to back up similar works of “fannish interest” – ranging from research they’ve done for a fic, to character analyses and headcanons – to use AO3 for it, because it’s a stable, smooth-running platform that is ad-free and unlike tumblr, is run by a nonprofit (The OTW) that itself is run by and for the benefit of, fellow fans.
Of course, that begs the question of how to tag your work if you do cross-post it, eh? So on that note, here’s a quick run-down of tags we’re finding useful and applicable, which I’ve figured out through a combination of trial and error and actually asking a tag wrangler (shoutout to @wrangletangle for their invaluable help!):
First, the Very Broad:
– “ Nonfiction ”. This helps separate it from fanfic on the archive, so people who aren’t looking for anything but fanfic are less likely to have to skim past it, whereas people looking for exactly that content are more likely to find it.
– while “Meta” and “Essay” and even “Information” are all sometimes used for the kinds of nonfiction and analytical works we post, I’ve been told “ Meta Essay ” is the advisable specific tag for such works. This would apply to character analyses, reference guides to canon, and even reference guides to real-world things that are reflected in the canon (such as our articles on Japanese clothing as worn by the characters). The other three tags are usable, and I’ve been using them as well to cover my bases, but they’ll also tend to bring up content such as “essay format” fanfic or fanfic with titles with those words in them – something that does not happen with “Meta Essay”.
– I’ve also found by poking around in suggested tags, that “ Fanwork Research & Reference Guides ” is consistently used (even by casual users) for: nonfiction fannish works relating to analyses of canon materials; analyses of and meta on fandom-specific or fanwork-specific tropes; information on or guides to writing real-world stuff that applies to or is reflected in specific fandoms’ media (e.g. articles on period-appropriate culture-specific costuming and how to describe it); and expanded background materials for specific fans’ fanworks (such as how a given AU’s worldbuilding is supposed to be set up) that didn’t fit within the narrative proper and is separated out as a reference for interested readers.
Basically, if it’s an original fan-made reference for something specific to one or more fanworks, or a research aid for writing certain things applicable to fanworks or fannish interests in general, then it can fall under that latter tag.
– You should also mark it with any appropriate fandom(s) in the “Fandom” field. Just like you would for a fanfic, because of course, the work is specifically relevant to fans of X canon, right?
If it discusses sensitive topics, or particular characters, etc., you should probably tag for those. E.g. “death” or “mental illness”, “Kagome Higurashi”, etc.
Additionally, if you are backing it up from a Tumblr you may wish to add:
– “ Archived From Tumblr “ and/or “ Cross-Posted From Tumblr ” to reference the original place of publication, for works originally posted to tumblr. (I advise this if only because someday, there might not be “tumblr” as we know it, and someone might be specifically looking for content that was originally on it, you never know)
– “ Archived From [blog name] Blog ”; this marks it as an archived work from a specific blog. And yes, I recommend adding the word “blog” in there for clarity- Wrangletangle was actually delighted that I bothered to tag our first archived work with “Archived From Inu-Fiction Blog” because being EXTREMLY specific about things like that is super helpful to the tag wranglers on AO3, who have to decide how to categorize/”syn” (synonym) various new tags from alphabetized lists without context of the original posting right in front of them. In other words, including the name AND the word “blog” in it, helps them categorize the tag on the back end without having to spend extra time googling what the heck “[Insert Name Here]” was originally.
Overall, you should be as specific and clear as possible, but those tags/tag formats should prove useful in tagging it correctly should you choose to put fannish essays and articles up on AO3 🙂
Oh, and protip sidebar for those posting, especially works that are more than plain text: you can make archiving things quicker and easier for yourself, but remember to plan ahead for tumblr’s potential demise/disabling/service interruptions.
The good news: You can literally copy and paste the ENTIRE text of a tumblr post from say, an “edit” window, on tumblr, straight into AO3′s Rich Text Format editor, and it will preserve pretty much all or almost all of the formatting – such as bold, italics, embedded links, etc!
But the bad news: keep in mind that while AO3 allows for embedded images and it WILL transfer those embedded images with a quick copy-paste like that, AO3 itself doesn’t host the images for embedding; those are still external images. This means that whether or not they continue to load/display for users, depends entirely on whether the file is still on the original external server! As I quickly discovered, in the case of posts copied from the Edit window of a tumblr post, the images will still point to the copies of the images ON tumblr’s servers.
What this means is that you should back up (save copies elsewhere of) any embedded images that you consider vital to such posts, in case you need to upload them elsewhere and fiddle with where the external image is being pulled from, later.
Personally, I’m doing that AND adding image descriptions underneath them, just to be on the safe side (and in fairness, this makes it more accessible to people who cannot view the images anyway, such as sight-impaired people who use screen readers or people who have images set to not automatically display on their browser, so it’s win-win)
Thanks for this helpful guide! I haven’t used some of these tags so far for the fandom stats work I’ve cross-posted to AO3, but that’s because I didn’t know about them. Great ideas! 🙂
I keep meaning to mass archive my Toastystats work to AO3, but I am always stymied by image hosting when trying to overcome inertia and do so. It takes time to repost all the images to external hosting (like imgur). So thus far I’ve only done it for a few major analyses, and even in some of those cases, the images are hosted on Tumblr. But I should finally get around to it. At least I’ve exported my Toastystats side blog recently, so most of my stuff should be preserved if anything should happen. But maybe this holiday break I’ll finally make more progress.
I second all of this!
I’ve also found that AO3 is the best way for me to distribute my vids. I do have to host them elsewhere, but AO3 gives me a consistent URL and a way to have useful headers with fandom/ship/etc. even if I switch hosting a hundred times.
Frankenstein got written because Mary Shelley was the only person in her peer group to finish Nanowrimo
Wasn’t her peer group full of horny frat boys who were constantly having parties and in her desperation to have one chill day with no one trying getting all handsy, she mentioned that there’s this writing thing and vaguely insinuated that they wouldn’t be able to do it and then all the boys were like “YES I CAN JUST WATCH” and at the end of it all Mary Shelley finally had time to write about this idea she had dreamed about without some dumb horny boy trying to tell her how women should be in his bed instead of writing?
that is technically an accurate historical recap, yes
Also, while stuck with all these intellectual dude bros who were constantly going on about how great they all were, she wrote a main character who thought he was the greatest and smartest but then refused to take responsibility for anything leading to the destruction of his entire life.
