So we all know the Potters had a cat, right?
All we have per descriptions of this cat is that 1. It was enough of a Potter to make the list when they went into hiding and 2. Harry scared it with his new broom he got from Sirius.
There is further no mention of said cat.
On the other hand, don’t we know another, really old, beaten down, ugly, sad, sad cat?
A cat that befriended Sirius Black and seemed to KNOW Peter Pettigrew’s smell, hold a grudge against him, even?
Part-kneazle, so it has a remarkable ability for finding things that are shiny and that it has a connection to, like, say, a family member.
A cat that knows it’s way around Hogwarts, around the Whomping Willow, almost like it had been there before with another owner.
A cat that absolutely REFUSED to let Hermione leave that shop without him after seeing a certain rat, was CRAZED, almost.
We have no mention of this cat/kneazle’s age, except that it had been in the shop for a while and no one had wanted it. Magical creatures live a long time. Cats live a long time. It’s within reason that this cat could be 30, even 40 years old.
It makes too much sense.
The Potter cat is Crookshanks.
This is by far one of my favorite HP headcanon and no one can convince me that this isn’t real.
do you think after Ron and Hermione got out of the trapdoor and raised the alarm and were being patched up in the hospital wing
do you think they were given the most royal proud mama smackdown by McGonagall like “ how DARE you infiltrate a death maze you are ELEVEN and miss granger how on earth did you solve my chessboard i”
and hermione interjected like “oh professor it wasn’t me. i’m useless at chess. it was ron.”
and McGonagall turned to look at Ron Weasley in total amazement at this 11 yr old kid who had been pretty ordinary in all her classes but had apparently beaten her in death chess and he just shrugged like “rookie mistakes, professor. you made some rookie mistakes.”
#AND THIS WAS THE DAY MCGONAGALL LEARNED NOT TO UNDERESTIMATE RON WEASLEY#AND HE NEVER GOT A BREAK FROM HER EVER AGAIN#‘you beat me in death chess i’m sure you can handle transfiguring an own into a spoon mr weasley’#ron weasley#‘damnit i should have just let myself be killed in there she’s making me LEARN THINGS’ (via alchemistc)
every year, some joker gets mcgonagall some cat toys as a present
every so often, when she’s feeling stressed, she opens the drawer that she secretly keeps them in, takes out the toys and puts them all over the floor, locks her office door and just goes wild
Imagine if Dudley did have a magical child though.
He and Harry haven’t spoken since ‘I don’t think you’re a waste of space’ and he’s matured enough to realise his parents were not good to Harry, especially since the birth of his own little girls because God forbid anything happened to him and they were treated like Harry was.
On Daisy Dursley’s eleventh birthday theres a knock on the door and his wife, Anita, just stares and he feels his stomach drop because the stern lady on the doorstep is wearing a cloak and pointed hat.
They listen to the woman – Professor McGonagall – explain and Anita is surprised but receptive, Daisy is excited and Dudley is terrified of what this means.
It’s a surprise to his wife and little girl when at the end of her explanation, while Daisy’s flicking through a book with moving pictures and Anita peers over her shoulder, Dudley blurts out ‘it’s safe now then? Your world?’
Professor Mcgonagall gives a wry smile and assures him that the magical world is indeed safe. It dawns on him that she was expecting this, that she’d perhaps researched him and was aware of his relation to Harry.
He then admits to Anita and Daisy that his cousin is a wizard, before turning to the Professor and asking if she by chance knows a Harry Potter. Looking amused, professor Mcgonagall acknowledges that she does.
’D’you know where he lives?’
That does surprise her a bit, and she tells him that yes, she knows and that though Daisy’s acceptance into the school has been confidential up until this point, Harry would likely not mind a visitor if he wanted a word.
Daisy begs to come along and he relents eventually, bringing Anita and their youngest, Poppy, along.
All four of them stand on the doorstep of a modest house that Dudley would call nice if there weren’t squat little creatures snickering and running around the front garden.
The door is opened by a slouching boy with turquoise hair who arches a purple eyebrow at them. He yells over his shoulder for someone named Ginny and steps back to let them in, and, when he notices Daisy staring at his hair, he smirks and a second later it’s bubblegum pink.
Daisy squeals in delight and Dudley is still trying to get his head around that when young girl and boy around Daisy’s age with bright red hair and thick brown curls respectively, hurtle down the corridor.
‘Teddy you promised you’d practice the sloth grip roll with us!’ The girl yells in an accusatory tone.
A woman with hair the same shade of flaming red as the little girl appears with what Dudley recognises as a wand in her hand as the boy with blue hair flashes a grin at them before chasing the two younger children outside to a shout of ‘No higher than the treetops Teddy!’
Harry is much like Dudley remembers him, lanky with a pointed face, straight nose and mess of untameable black hair. It’s awkward, but, apparently forewarned, Harry greets him pleasantly and introduces his wife before Ginny goes outside to reign in a gaggle of children he assumes aren’t all Harry’s.
A woman with thick, bushy hair pulled into a messy bun with a wand stuck in it smiles and makes an effort to talk to Anita. She’s not too strange, he thinks, and reassures them that her parents were just as baffled when they found out she was a witch.
‘Why don’t you take Daisy outside to see the broomsticks, Al?’ Harry suggests to Daisy’s obvious delight and Dudley swears Harry’s trying not to laugh.
By the end of the visit Dudley is more informed about the wizarding world than he ever thought he would or wanted to be. Daisy, with a bruise on her forehead and scraped knees, because despite both his and Harry’s warning she hadn’t been able to resist trying to fly, is bouncing off the walls because ‘daddy how could you not tell us?!’
They visit Harry’s a lot over summer and Daisy befriends Lily Luna Potter and Hugo Weasley. Dudley doesn’t feel up to the trip to Diagon Alley but regrets his decision to not go when Daisy comes back with two owls, ‘uncle Harry bought the second one for me! So you can write without having to wait for me to send my owl!’
Petunia Dursley faints when she finds out, and Vernon spends a good half hour cursing and brandishing things aimlessly before retreating to his shed.
Dudley being introduced to what he calls ‘all those bloody gingers’ some of whom are only just on the right side of civil to him (one cheerfully introduces himself as someone who once visited his childhood home in a flying car and asks if he’s going to need to do the same for Daisy or will she be allowed to attend without punishment).
Daisy is shocked to find out Harry’s famous, and finds out as much as she can about him during her first term, which she relays to an increasingly guilty feeling Dudley, who’s gradually coming around to the idea.
It’s not as bad as his parents made out it was. He’s learned to understand Daisy’s ramblings about her subjects and spells and is proud of her achievements at school. He’s met a handful of witches and wizards through Harry and the world that he’s always been told is terrible doesn’t seem too bad anymore, after all, how could it with his little girl in it? He is prepared come excitable little Poppy’s eleventh birthday, for her to join her sister at Hogwarts instead of standing jealously on the platform as she leaves.
Poppy Dursley never gets a letter.
I TRUSTED YOU
No, but imagine. Three generations later, this family FINALLY gets the one wizard kid/one Muggle kid thing right. Poppy is never made to feel less, even though she’s disappointed. Daisy is never made to feel like a freak. Poppy is accepted by Harry’s kids, they play with her and she doesn’t need magic to play wizard chess or toss gnomes and Teddy takes her flying sometimes (she becomes a hell of a Quidditch referee and strategist with Ginny’s help, though she never plays).
Anita and Dudley talk to Poppy about what she’d like to do for school and she goes to a prestigious Muggle school, and as it turns out she becomes really, really good at tech and coding. She takes lots of time off to visit Daisy at Hogwarts where she becomes a favorite of McGonagall (so many clever questions). Eventually she meets Luna and spends most of a summer with her, following Crumple-Horned Snorkacks with the help of some trackers Poppy built to work around magic. Everyone is terribly impressed, and although Poppy tries to be blasé about it, she’s actually really proud.
And soon enough Daisy is graduating and working at the Ministry in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office with Arthur Weasley, who has been working on loosening some of the legislation, and when Poppy graduates she has a marvelous idea. She and Daisy open a shop in Diagon Ally for all these Muggle technologies that Poppy has fixed to work around and with magic. Dursley’s Muggle Magic, they call it.
And suddenly wizards are running around with iPhones and Kindles (Hermione made a digital copy of Hogwarts, a History RIGHT AWAY) and everyone is catching up on decades of video games and a century of movies. Scorpius Malfoy has an Apple Watch. And it’s all thanks the Poppy Dursley, the Muggle.
My “Snape the dysfunctional mum” feelings are becoming unmanageable, honestly.
#Also please picture Disney’s ‘The Jungle Book’ as a mismatched godparents comedy starring #Snape as Bagheera #Sirius as Baloo #and Harry as Mowgli. #Thank you.
I mean The Jungle Book already kind of is a godparents comedy with Bagheera and Baloo, so this would work really well.
Sirius is all “Let’s ignore the rules and have a good time!” and Snape is all “If you do that you will literally get killed off in an hour.”
And obviously Voldemort is Shere Khan with his single-minded focus on killing Harry/Mowgli. But who is Kaa? Who is King Louis? (Actually King Louis might be Arthur what with his fascination with Muggles/humans. Maybe Tom Riddle is Kaa because of his fascination with controlling people and only tangential interest in Harry?)
#someone make art of this? #harry potter #the jungle book #AND WHO ARE THE ELEPHANTS???
Umbridge is Kaa, for the same reasons cited for Riddle–a fascination with controlling people and an only tangential interest in Harry.
Lucius Malfoy is King Louis–”I have an entourage of loyal minions, I want your power, and I am not above using said entourage of loyal minions to kidnap and threaten you into giving it to me,” but he also prefers to work within the established power structure rather than outside it like Shere Khan.
The elephants are 100% the Ministry of Magic, collectively.
I’ve been thinking, if house points are mostly awarded for scholary achivements, then how come we have never seen the house full of smarts, ravenclaw ever win the house cup? by all means, they should be trouncing the others.
my theory is that ravenclaw outdoes all the other houses both in gaining, and in losing points. they rack up all the possible points for classwork, assignments AND extra school work. But they also lose a buttload in their other pursuits of knowledge:
– not returning books on time
– staying in the library after hours
– sneaking in the restricted section
– setting up secret potion labs for RESEARCH purposes
– throwing things off the tower FOR RESEARCH
– throwing things into the lake FOR RESEARCH
– taking small field trips into the forbidden forest to get samples and take notes on the wildlife
–illegally tampering with muggle stuff FOR RESEARCH
– “borrowing” school equipment and ingredients for said research
– that pet kidnaping incident they never talk about that was sparked by a conversation about muggle schools “wait, you dissect frogs in class? WE SHOULD TOTALLY DO THAT TOO”
– combining random spells and testing them on the student body
– using said student body to test the secret potion lab’s latest creations
– referring to non-ravenclaw students as test subjects in the vicinity of disapproving teacherswhat I’m saying is that while the other houses may preceive ravenclaw as a group of quiet bookworms, they are actually more troublesome than the other three combined. FOR RESEARCH.
FOR SCIENCE!
What if, when Petunia Dursley found a little boy on her front doorstep, she took him in? Not into the cupboard under the stairs, not into a twisted childhood of tarnished worth and neglect—what if she took him in?
Petunia was jealous, selfish and vicious. We will not pretend she wasn’t. She looked at that boy on her doorstep and thought about her Dudders, barely a month older than this boy. She looked at his eyes and her stomach turned over and over. (Severus Snape saved Harry’s life for his eyes. Let’s have Petunia save it despite them).
Let’s tell a story where Petunia Dursley found a baby boy on her doorstep and hated his eyes—she hated them. She took him in and fed him and changed him and got him his shots, and she hated his eyes up until the day she looked at the boy and saw her nephew, not her sister’s shadow. When Harry was two and Vernon Dursley bought Dudley a toy car and Harry a fast food meal with a toy with parts he could choke on Petunia packed her things and got a divorce.
Harry grew up small and skinny, with knobbly knees and the unruly hair he got from his father. He got cornered behind the dumpsters and in the restrooms, got blood on the jumpers Petunia had found, half-price, at the hand-me-down store. He was still chosen last for sports. But Dudley got blood on his sweaters, too, the ones Petunia had found at the hand-me-down store, half price, because that was all a single mother working two secretary jobs could afford for her two boys, even with Vernon’s grudging child support.
They beat Harry for being small and they laughed at Dudley for being big, and slow, and dumb. Students jeered at him and teachers called Dudley out in class, smirked over his backwards letters.
Harry helped him with his homework, snapped out razored wit in classrooms when bullies decided to make Dudley the butt of anything; Harry cornered Dudley in their tiny cramped kitchen and called him smart, and clever, and ‘better ‘n all those jerks anyway’ on the days Dudley believed it least.
Dudley walked Harry to school and back, to his advanced classes and past the dumpsters, and grinned, big and slow and not dumb at all, at anyone who tried to mess with them.
But was that how Petunia got the news? Her husband complained about owls and staring cats all day long and in the morning Petunia found a little tyke on her doorsep. This was how the wizarding world chose to give the awful news to Lily Potter’s big sister: a letter, tucked in beside a baby boy with her sister’s eyes.
There were no Potters left. Petunia was the one who had to arrange the funeral. She had them both buried in Godric’s Hollow. Lily had chosen her world and Petunia wouldn’t steal her from it, not even in death. The wizarding world had gotten her sister killed; they could stand in that cold little wizard town and mourn by the old stone.
(Petunia would curl up with a big mug of hot tea and a little bit of vodka, when her boys were safely asleep, and toast her sister’s vanished ghost. Her nephew called her ‘Tune’ not ‘Tuney,’ and it only broke her heart some days.
Before Harry was even three, she would look at his green eyes tracking a flight of geese or blinking mischieviously back at her and she would not think ‘you have your mother’s eyes.’
A wise old man had left a little boy on her doorstep with her sister’s eyes. Petunia raised a young man who had eyes of his very own).
Petunia snapped and burnt the eggs at breakfast. She worked too hard and knew all the neighbors’ worst secrets. Her bedtime stories didn’t quite teach the morals growing boys ought to learn: be suspicious, be wary; someone is probably out to get you. You owe no one your kindness. Knowledge is power and let no one know you have it. If you get can get away with it, then the rule is probably meant for breaking.
Harry grew up loved. Petunia still ran when the letters came. This was her nephew, and this world, this letter, these eyes, had killed her sister. When Hagrid came and knocked down the door of some poor roadside motel, Petunia stood in front of both her boys, shaking. When Hagrid offered Harry a squashed birthday cake with big, kind, clumsy hands, he reminded Harry more than anything of his cousin.
His aunt was still shaking but Harry, eleven years and eight minutes old, decided that any world that had people like his big cousin in it couldn’t be all bad. “I want to go,” Harry told his aunt and he promised to come home.
Best tags so far omg:
# NOT THE AUNT PETUNIA GOTHAM WANTED# BUT THE AUNT PETUNIA GOTHAM DESERVED (via katiewont)