harry: ex-auror, healer at st. mungos, specializing in pediatric care, bisexual as hell
hermione: defense attorney mostly dealing with magical creature, squib, and muggleborn cases, hasn’t stepped foot in the ministry in years, 3rd year in a row witch weekly’s most successful under 30
ron: stay at home dad, loves his hot wife, took time out before getting married to visit charlie on the range and has a nasty burn because of it, thinks it’s cool and shows it off whenever he’s drunk
ginny: harpies chaser, lesbian with a cute gf, probably has a full back tattoo
draco: has written like 5 books on potion brewing and antidotes, spends too much time in his home office, wears reading glasses, still gay
Concept: fantasy world where dragons are A Thing™ but instead of them being these rare, semi-legendary creatures who exist solely to terrorise and wreak havoc and mayhem and burn inconveniences to a crisp they’re like… dogs… vaguely domesticated cats…
They come in loads of sizes and it’s a common thing to hear them scritching across your roof or rummaging in your garbage. You pass by like four every time you go to the market.
There’s even some snoozing at market stalls and strays playing with children and stealing scraps of food that fall in the street, with mottled scales and mixed textures of feathers and mismatched jewel colours.
Your favourite baker has three tiny western diamondtips who are in charge of keeping the ovens fired up and don’t always eat all of the bread. Sometimes.
Linda Bagshot on the corner has a ground rooster who can’t fly but always reaches up and stretches her neck out as far as she can to try and scrounge pets as you pass her garden wall.
A local inn is named after its summer aura who is the length of the room, all careful length and soft scales, with breath perfumed like spring breeze and scales that emanate just enough warmth to comfort, just enough that you won’t fall asleep, just enough that it’s tempting nonetheless.
The school you went to has a forest guardian older than the town itself who spends all his time slowly ambling down the corridors, and his favourites are the kids learning their first letters who like to read to him, sound out letters and marks that don’t have any correlation just yet, and you know that nobody has conclusively proven that dragons understand human tongues but you also know that if anyone understands, it’s him.
There’s a festival of dragons, a public holiday where banners are strewn and candles glow even into the wee hours and rainbow confetti and paint clogs the streets and maybe some overexcited babies set things alight but that’s ok, the town prepared better this year, far fewer people will lose their gardens and eyebrows this time, they promise.
And yes ok, there are big dragons. Ferocious dragons. Dragons that only come out once every ten years to feed and pillage. Dragons who rule the seas and shake mountains, who take flight and block out the stars. There are reasons you don’t go into the woods at night, reasons some wells are avoided, reasons entire villages up and vanished without a trace.
But there are also dragons who curl up with your children to rock them to sleep, and ward off nightmares. There are dragons who open doors and fetch supplies and guide those without sight. There are dragons who mimic words and whistles and delight in your joy when they get them just right.
There are dragons who adopt orphaned piglets, kittens, lambs, calves, puppies, ducklings. There are dragons who sunbathe and dragons who need kept on ice and dragons who climb atop weather vanes in storms to conduct electricity. Dragons who sparkle like jewels in the light and dragons who glow in the dark and dragons with flora creeping in and around their scales and dragons who sound like windchimes when they fold their wings.
Universal constant: Kirk leans stage right in the chair when he’s being a dick. Apparently the gradient of the lean is proportionate to the level of dickishness.
I like to think that this is a tell the bridge crew starts to recognize—Kirk thinks he’s so smooth but he doesn’t realize they can read him like he’s a Subaru due for a realignment.
“Careful today, guys; he’s practically planking across the armrests.”
wait….are any americans aware that the cia overthrew the democratically-elected premier of iran in 1953 because he wouldn’t concede to western oil demands….and how that coup was the reason for the shah’s return to power, the iranian revolution, and the resulting fundamentalist dictatorship…..like, america literally dissolved iranian democracy and no one knows about it???
No. No we don’t know about it.
Americans aren’t told this shit.
The only thing we’re taught about any Middle Eastern country in school is that 1) the region exists 2) it’s where The War is happening and 3) Muslim people live there. That’s it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get into the Hammurabi Code and some early Babylonian stuff but American schools seem to think that if it happened outside Europe and before the colonial period, or makes America look bad and isn’t about A Very Watered Down Version of What Slavery Was, it’s not important.
Info on this is almost notoriously hard to find. It’s not in any texts on American and Russian involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War that I can find. You have to specifically look for a book about the Shah’s return to power, and even then you’d be hard pressed to find a book like that at your local bookstore. Once you get into some higher level college courses you might know about it, but the people who can afford those are more likely to already be indoctrinated into a certain Way of Thinking (read: they’re racist as shit) by the time they get there. And it’s almost like you have to know about it beforehand if you want to find information on it.
The only reason I knew about it is because there’s a thirty second summary of the event in Persepolis. Those thirty seconds flipped my entire worldview.
“All the Shah’s Men” by Stephen Kinzer is a good, accessible text for people who want to know more about this.
!!!
I had to explain literally this to one of my co-workers, who is so fuckin racist against Middle Eastern people it’s insane.
She’s 60. She never heard of this.
As I was explaining this and how, during the Regan years, we funded Osama Bin Laden to fight against Russia, leading to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the region, one of the plant workers came in to get his badge fixed.
He works in the quality control lab. He served 15 years active duty in the Army. Super smart guy, has a masters in chemistry and another masters in biology, raises saltwater fish in his spare time for sale, has the saltwater aquarium setup of the gods. Raises rare corals too, some of which he donates to be used in re-seeding reefs around the world, but that’s a side tangent.
And he listened for a minute, then nodded and said “Yeah. I was there during that. I helped train people to fight. They wanted us to help them build schools and hospitals, after, but we were only interested in them as cannon fodder. Left the whole area in ruins. I wasn’t surprised when they hated us for it later. Told people then it would happen. We let them know then that they were only valuable to America as expendable bodies. Why wouldn’t they resent us for that?”
And she just looked floored.
“So…” She started, after a few minutes. “What do you think of Trump?”
“I hate him. He’s a coward and he’s going to get good people killed.” He didn’t even blink. “
She looked back and forth between us for a second, and then asked how I knew all this.
“I research things.” I said. “Google is great.” He nodded enthusiastically.
And she just sat there for a second and then said, really quietly, “I didn’t know.”
She lived through it.
American schools don’t teach you any of this sort of thing.
American schools don’t want you to learn how to think for yourself and find knowledge. If you’re lucky you run into a piece of media that mentions something, and you investigate on your own, or you had super left-leaning parents who insisted on teaching you critical thinking from the age of 2 (still a little bitter about that – I got into a LOT of trouble for proving teachers wrong), or something along those lines.
But most Americans?
They don’t get that kind of luck. And the desire to learn has been beaten out of them.
*sigh* Someone save us from ourselves. Please?
the only reason i knew that was because i took a class on middle eastern history in college. it filled a degree requirement and seemed interesting, and it was. my professor even was retired from working in the us government and often went overseas to the middle east, so once we reached the modern era portion of the semester, he would sometimes go into anecdotes of his travels (what he could tell us, anyway).
but, yeah, only reason i knew that was because of a specified history class in college that not everyone winds up attending.
American education leaves you so ignorant of the ways of the world, glorifying American triumphs and glossing over, diminishing, or outright omitting American fails and tragic events we committed.
i see your ‘nowhere in the nursery rhyme does it say humpty dumpty was an egg’ and raise you ‘nowhere in the legendarium does tolkien say that elves have pointed ears’
Mary Shelley didn’t give the monster bolts.
Arthur Conan Doyle never put Holmes in a deer stalker (also “elementary my dear Watson” is never said in the books, and he doesn’t smoke a curved pipe)
There are boys at Beauxbatons and girls at Durmstrang schools
Edgar Allan Poe wrote the earliest essay on the big bang theory
kototyph 