Rick Fox retweeted
Fleur Delacour’s arrival at the Burrow in Half-Blood Prince is framed as a test of Weasley hospitality that the family largely fails. She has already chosen Bill over a return to France, accepted a job at Gringotts, and moved into her future in-laws’ home specifically “to get to know them better before the wedding.” Yet Ginny’s repeated nickname “Phlegm,”
Hermione’s participation in the mockery and Molly’s open skepticism about the engagement create precisely the reception the post describes “Imagine leaving your family,moving into your future in-laws’ home and getting that kind of reception.”
The books never show Fleur demanding deference,they show her enduring the dismissals while still preparing for a life in England,the turning point arrives only after Greyback’s attack,until that night, the Weasleys treat Fleur’s beauty and veela heritage as evidence that her feelings cannot be genuine.
Once she sees Bill’s scars and refuses to abandon him, Molly’s attitude shifts abruptly,as the original text notes, “Fleur Delacour had to watch Bill get mauled before the Weasleys finally understood that she genuinely loved him and that says a LOT about how they saw her.” The narrative itself withholds full acceptance until she has performed visible, public devotion under extreme circumstances an expectation never placed on any pure blood British fiancée in the series.
By Deathly Hallows, Fleur’s practical loyalty is already established long before the wedding.
She participates in the Seven Potters operation, opens Shell Cottage to Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ollivander, and Griphook, and later fights at Hogwarts,none of these actions were required of a French national married into the Order,she could have remained outside the conflict. The post correctly observes that “She wasn’t British and she could’ve stayed out of the war.
She chose to help anyway,” and that “Fleur showed more loyalty to the Weasleys than some of them showed her respect.” The books reward her with survival and a stable marriage, yet they never fully revise the earlier, beautybased underestimation that made those proofs necessary in the first place.
Does anyone else think Fleur Delacour was treated ridiculously unfairly?
The more I reread the books, the more I feel like Fleur deserved so much better from the Weasleys, especially Molly and Ginny. I mean, think about it. She fell in love with Bill, chose to build a life with him in England and was even staying with his family to get to know them better before the wedding. That's a pretty big deal. And instead of making her feel welcome, Ginny calls her Phlegm, Hermione joins in on the mockery, and Molly doesn't seem particularly happy about the engagement either. Imagine leaving your family, moving into your future in-laws' home and getting that kind of reception lol.
Fleur Delacour had to watch Bill get mauled before the Weasleys finally understood that she genuinely loved him. And that says a LOT about how they saw her.
She was a Triwizard champion, worked at Gringotts, helped shelter Harry and his friends during the war, risked her life in the Seven Potters operation, and fought at Hogwarts.
She wasn’t British, and she could’ve stayed out of the war. She chose to help anyway.
Fleur didn’t need to prove her love. The Weasleys needed to stop underestimating her.
I'm not saying Fleur was perfect. She could be rude, judgemental and pretty full of herself at times. But I definately think she was one of the bravest and mlost loyal characters in the series, and people spent way too much time judging her for being beautiful, French and a little annoying to notice it.
Honestly, I think Fleur showed more loyalty to the Weasleys than some of them showed her respect. Anyone else feel this way?
It’s an often made point but Avada Kedavra was a very poor edition to the series that flattened a lot of creativity in the spell casting.
It’s especially silly when, if all it does is kill someone, something like Sectum Sempra is objectively worse.
Rick Fox retweeted
"you know what i'd really like?"
"tell me"
"a campaign"
"...we can do a campaign"
"a real campaign, no west marches, no morally gray villain bullshit"
"i'll make you a very good traditional campaign. traveling through the forest, kill a dragon, get loot and everything"
Rick Fox retweeted
“You know what I’d really like?”
“Tell me.”
“A Spider-Man comic.”
“We can do a Spider-Man comic.”
“A real Spider-Man comic. No multiverse-spanning, editorial mandate, torture-porn bullshit. A real Spider-Man comic.”
“I’ll make you a very good, very traditional Spider-Man comic. I don’t think you can imagine how good it’s going to be.”
Rick Fox retweeted
You know how much I dislike the George R. R. "Can't Finish a Book to Save my Life" Martin "there are no heroes, everyone is morally grey" trope.
You can err in the other direction, though, and make the hero just too pure.
When a hero falls, I mean really falls, and does something he'll regret for the rest of his life, something he can never take back nor truly make up for, it can become an enduring lesson in moral humility and make him strong.
St. Peter, in his darkest hour, denied Christ. This doesn't make him Judas. It makes him, after going through the fire, the prince of all the Saints.
I think it makes Harry a deeper character if he has done a thing he can never take back, something he has to live with for the rest of his life.
It also makes more sense in the Draconia AU because it creates a degree of balance: she has done some heinous stuff. It's complicated, of course, from her upbringing, her family's expectations, Voldemort's threats and manipulations. But she still did it.
Sectumsempra gives Harry a perspective where he can more naturally forgive her for the various things she's done, because he also has done something he feels to be unforgivable.
There's a lot of talk in the books about Unforgivable Curses, but this is primarily a legal category in HP. They are not actually treated as "curses which are absolutely evil and no non-evil person would ever use them," because that's simply not what the are. Harry uses 2 of the 3 in book 7, and it isn't treated as a big deal or as compromising his moral character deeply.
They're tools. The AK curse is just a gun. They're neutral. It all depends on how you use them and why. Sectumsempra is morally neutral too.
It wasn't the casting, it was the consequences.
In the Draconia/SS timeline, Harry isn't even morally unjustified in casting the damned thing. She is in the middle of throwing a Crutiatus at him, which certainly justifies a Sectumsempra if you know what it does, and justifies a spell that you don't know what it does too.
(I am setting aside that in the Draconia/SS timeline, although she TRIES to cast a Crucio at Harry, she fails, because she can't do it: she doesn't hate him enough to WANT him to suffer. This is true and important, but HE doesn't know that. It happens too fast. He only hears her start with "Cruci—".)
On the surface, Harry hasn't even done anything strictly wrong — stupid and reckless? maybe. But wouldn't you use an unknown spell if it was all you had when someone's aiming a torture curse at you?
People could even tell him this. That he was justified. That he didn't do anything wrong here. He's a hero.
But Harry knows he did something wrong, something unforgivable.
He can't take it back. He can only resolve never to do something like that again, no matter what. He will not hide behind "It was technically justified, because it was self-defense. Her injuries, while unfortunate and more than I meant to do, don't really reflect badly on me."
One of the serious deficiencies in the Harry Potter books is that there isn't very much of a redemption arc. There's Snape, but his loyalties and decisions are complicated. It isn't a clear and decisive turn away from the darkness.
Draconia can do that. She can really repent. That has weight.
Harry needs to be able to meet her there too. And that means he has to understand what it is to have done something unforgivable, and ask for forgiveness anyway.
Preferably done something unforgivable to her. "Preferably" in terms of the story, the narrative.
Contrary to that twatwaffle who was calling the SS scene "torture porn," you don't do this Draconia or to Harry because we enjoy their suffering.
You do it because stories are about human beings, and sin and redemption are at the core of that.
You do this to these two so that later on they can truly unite, the two of them holding a single wand and destroy the dark lord.
You do Sectumsempra so you can have Two Hearts, One Wand.
You show them HERE, at their lowest points, so when you see them much later, married and surrounded by at least 8 kids, you can appreciate more deeply what that MEANS.
[NEWS] “Marnûkh is a character meant to challenge long-held perceptions of Orcs. He’s such a departure from past depictions that within the production, Marnûkh has picked up the catchy nickname, “the Orc with an arc.”
#TheRingsOfPower
Rick Fox retweeted
The frustrating thing is that the Harry Potter books actually give us reasons to believe Flitwick was far more dangerous than the films ever let him appear. In Chamber of Secrets, Hermione mentions that Flitwick was rumoured to have been a duelling champion when he was young. That detail alone changes how you should view the cheerful little Charms professor. His expertise wasn't limited to making objects fly or teaching students Wingardium Leviosa; charms are among the most versatile forms of magic, and an experienced wizard can use them offensively, defensively and creatively. In Deathly Hallows, Flitwick helps build Hogwarts’ magical defences, confronts Snape when he believes Harry is in danger, and fights during the Battle of Hogwarts. The official Wizarding World account even highlights his confrontation with Antonin Dolohov, a Death Eater notorious enough to have killed Remus Lupin. Flitwick was never established as being on Dumbledore or Voldemort’s level, but the books make it clear that his small stature and gentle personality shouldn't be mistaken for weakness.
The films' biggest missed opportunity was Deathly Hallows Part 2. The Battle of Hogwarts should have been the perfect moment to show Flitwick using his mastery of charms in a serious duel, but the adaptation prioritised Harry's confrontation with Voldemort and the most central character storylines. Several book duels were shortened, omitted or left out of focus, including Flitwick's fight with Dolohov. There's also a filmmaking issue: the films often made Flitwick memorable through his appearance and eccentric charm rather than building him up as a formidable combatant. Warwick Davis himself explained that Flitwick's film portrayal changed during production, with the choir-conductor version introduced after an earlier script had little for the character to do. Imagine a battle scene where Flitwick calmly dismantles a more physically imposing opponent with precise, rapid-fire charms, turning the environment itself into a weapon. That would have shown something the films largely missed: the most dangerous wizard in a duel isn't necessarily the one who looks intimidating, but the one who knows exactly what to do with a wand.
Rick Fox retweeted
In free nations, we investigate crimes to see who is guilty of them.
In communist tyrannies, they investigate men to see what they can be punished for.
Rick Fox retweeted
Part 3. My brainstorming sessions on how to drop in a female replacement for Draco Malfoy seem to turning into a sort of character workshop.
But I'm having fun.
We've talked about "Malfoid"'s basic character, why she falls for Harry Potter, and reimagined her father and his relationship with her.
But we haven't touched on an important part of making this whole story work: why does Harry fall for her?
It's not enough to appeal to Japanese "tsun-dere" tropes. That's just the name of a story convention. It might say something about why people like the story, but it doesn't make the story make sense, according to its own internal logic.
For that, we need to do some actual thinking.
Well, where does he come from? He's the unwanted foster child of a family that sees him as an unchosen responsibility and nothing more.
So, for the first few years of his life, he is resented, ignored, and utterly unloved by anyone.
So what does this do to a boy?
Rowling has a little bit of trouble with this one, because she has some pretty advanced women-writing-men problems. Understandable, given her history.
But an ordinary little boy, who is written as an actual boy, gets angry. Resentful. That's what Rowling couldn't write, because to her, a good man is a non-threatening man.
Now, this would impact Harry's character and story in a lot of ways, but since we are looking specifically at why he falls in love with the Malfoid, we must look first at their initial encounter on the train.
What she says to him isn't an attack. From her worldview (discussed in the quoted article), she's trying to help him. He's an important person, but he's not familiar with her world, so he has fallen in with the wrong sort.
Come sit with us, instead.
Come sit with the cool kids and the pretty girl.
Now, on one level, this is exactly what an unloved boy raised in a closet wants. Acceptance. To be treated as important.
But on another level, this is his first Hero's Trial. The boy who was treated like dirt can have status and be somebody. All he has to do is inflict the same rejection and contempt he experienced on his new friends.
Of course, he passes this trial.
And Draecena, or Lyra, or whatever name we wanna call her, doesn't take it well. She's vain, and not used to hearing the word "no".
In reality, it's her fault. She could have sat down beside him. Or simply said, "come with me for a while, I'll introduce you around".
But she doesn't see it that way, and so she does say something nasty. At this point, they become rivals. They have hurt each other's pride.
For her, it is the pride of a haughty heiress, who not only things she is better than everyone else, but that she must be, because that's her responsibility in life.
For him, it is the pride of a boy with nothing, loved by no one, who will therefore not tolerate the slightest insult.
But the import thing to realize is that he doesn't hate her and want nothing to do with her. Oh, no. Not a bit of it.
She's the popular girl. The wealthy girl. The pretty girl. And everything about her, everything she has, everything that has been given to her in life, tells him that she is loved in ways that Harry was not.
All the time she is envying him because he doesn't have to fit in, he envies her because she has somewhere she belongs.
He doesn't want nothing to do with her. He wants what she has.
He desires her, abstractly at first, then more concretely when puberty hits, but boys without mothers who love them will not chase girls. Their wounded pride simply will not sustain it. They want girls to chase them.
He doesn't want to hurt her. He wants to humble her. To make her accept him on his terms, not hers. He doesn't want to orbit her universe and petition for acceptance. He wants her to come to him, to admit with her words and actions that he is not, in any way, beneath her.
What do we covet? That which we see every day and cannot have.
He wants her to yearn for him, the way he does for her.
And as circumstances, and her hidden desires, repeatedly throw them together, small hints come to light that her feelings for him might not be just contempt.
Harry misses all of them.
Why? Not because he's stupid. Not just so the plot can happen. Not because they're too subtle to see. For the reader, they're pretty obvious.
No, he misses them because of who he is and where he comes from.
He grew up without love. And some part of him will always fear that he is unlovable. Of course Draecina Malfoy hates him. The Dursleys hated him, didn't they?
And she keeps saying she doesn't like him at all.
It never occurs to him that she says it with increasingly shrill desperation. It never occurs to him that she says she wants to avoid him, but she always seems to be around.
And he has absolutely no idea why his scarves keep disappearing.
He won't take the hint. He won't pick up the dropped handkerchief. He won't chase her the way pretty girls expect to be chased. Because a boy who has never experienced a mother's love can never bear to risk rejection.
He nicknames her "Malfoid", and it sticks. And she would rather die than give the slightest hint of how hard she cries into her pillow that night.
The next day, she hides a Strong Toad in his locker.
All he would have to do is face down her pretended scorn. Offer her one kind word. One gesture. And she would melt into his arms.
But he can't.
He may be the big hero in public, but in his heart he's just as broken as she is.
To have the love of the girl he desires, he must grow up and become a man. He must stop looking to the world, or to her, to heal the injuries that are uniquely his.
He cannot, must not, must not try to break Draecina's spirit so she will love him unconditionally. Unconditional love is for children alone, and it is not her fault that he will never experience it.
It is not her job to make it up to him.
It is Tom Riddle, not Draecina Malfoy, who deprived him of a mother's love.
And as long as he doesn't see that, he will keep fighting her. But she isn't a vicious dog, biting at him for no reason. She's a scared kitten, hissing and clawing because she is afraid... her heart is bound to a man who offers her no patience and no mercy.
He will have to rise beyond his own pain, accept that it will never heal, accept that he still has responsibilities beyond it.
Accept that is it only her job to love and support him, not to give him back what cannot be given, because time only flows one way.
Just as she will have to take a leap of faith to be worthy of him, to offer her heart without certainty or deniability, he will have to catch her before she falls. To bear her claws until her fear subsides and she can love him without lashing out in a desperate need to protect her heart from the man who holds it.
She's not a monster. She's just a girl.
Replacing Draco Malfoy with the "Malfoid", Draecina sends ripples through the whole edifice that Rowling built.
It's how stories grow.
Build one corner, and that corner makes you ask the questions that help you build another.
If you replace a cardstock bully with a prideful and complex debutante, who yearns for forbidden things, and must eventually choose between her family, her heritage, her entire world, and the boy she loves, then this fills out the next part of the story by making us ask "why?"
Why does she fall in love with Harry Potter?
That answer depends on what she wants. And what she wants depends on where she comes from.
And both these questions ultimately wind up at her father. Because a little girl learns about men, and about love, from her father.
Now, it would be easy to declare that Lucius Malfoy is to be a cold, vicious, domineering, hypocritical, selfish, and abusive man.
And therefore loving Harry Potter becomes an act of defiance. Becomes that tired old trope of kissing the motorcycle hoodlum to piss off daddy.
But that's not love. That's daddy issues. And daddy issues will not change a girl. They will not carry her though the fire. They will not make her a hero.
We can do better than that.
Try the opposite. Lucius Malfoy's creed and values, repugnant though they are to our original author, are deeply and sincerely held. He does not believe in elites merely because he wishes to be one of them.
He believes that the gifted, the talented, the blessed, are needed by the world, and their privileges come with a price of responsibility.
So he has raised both his children with love, holding back nothing that it was in his power to give. But he has raised them for a mission in life, and never made his expectations anything less than clear.
Draecina is to spend her childhood and teenage years preparing herself to lead. And she is to marry wisely, to preserve and improve a bloodline that is precious to the world.
Now we know both why she falls in love with Harry Potter, and why she is terrified to admit this, first to herself, then to others.
Harry Potter, you see, has all the traits of an attractive boy, courage, competence, athleticism, popularity, the respect of children and adults alike. He is always the main character, and a heroic one at that.
But he is also a rogue. A scamp. A mischief maker. He does not do as he is told. He acts of his own accord. And in so doing, he always seems to end up saving the day, to wild applause.
How could she not admire him? How could she not yearn to be part of his little band of troublemakers, sneaking about at night and breaking the rules?
And when she is just a bit older, with early puberty bringing on thoughts of boys, how can he not represent the one thing she has been told she must not have, as the price of all her privilege?
Passion.
She doesn't want to sit in a parlour, silent save for a loudly ticking clock, and make awkward conversation with a series of well-bred boys who have been ushered into her presence for the sake of their race-horse bloodlines.
She wants to feel. She wants to run barefoot in the rain. She wants the school's handsome and popular rogue to kiss her and tangle his fingers in her hair.
But she is terrified.
Too terrified to admit her feelings even to herself. And when she cannot avoid that, too terrified to act on them, hiding away from the boy she desperately yearns to follow after, pushing him away with words of scorn so that no one will suspect, then seeking him out only to fight with him, because if they are fighting, then at least he is looking at her, and anything is better than his absence.
Why is she terrified? Of what? Of who?
Of her father.
Not of his scorn. Not of punishment. Not of his hard hands, for he has never struck her and never would. He has never shown her anything but love.
And this is the cruelest trap of all.
She is terrified of disappointing him. Daddy's girl cannot bear the thought of losing his love. He can never know who she has chosen to love, because then his patient, quiet disappointment would force her to choose.
And she cannot.
Every day she is tortured by guilt. She is a Bad Girl. She has been given everything, had every advantage, and still she cannot put her heart into the small measure of responsibility that the world asks in return.
But while she cannot bear to choose Harry Potter over her family, or her family over Harry Potter, her choice is already made, and it is inevitable, because she has chosen him over any suitor that their quiet, thoughtful calculations of bloodline and political advantage could ever bring to her door.
This is why she taunts him for his "low-class" behavior, and seeks to part him from "the wrong kind of friends". Because she harbors the fantasy, impossible though it is, that he, Harry Potter, the boy who holds her heart, can somehow become, be accepted as, one of the elites, as defined in the rules of her world.
It's impossible, of course. He's a half-blood. Sure, he has power and skill in his own right, even fame, but for a child of the Malfoys? Never.
So she yearns for him, succumbing sometimes to temptation and pulling him near, only to drive him away again as she is wracked by guilt and shame.
She cannot choose him, cannot commit to her love for him, until she begins to see that her father, following his beliefs, has made reckless choices with dire consequences.
Until she begins to think the unthinkable... that her father, the lordly, infalible Lucius Malfoy, might be wrong.
Oh, not wrong that some people are better than others. She believes she is one of the elite, deserving of privilege, and she will believe this to her dying day.
No, her father is not wrong about the order of the world. He is merely wrong about how those elites are to be discovered and known.
Harry Potter, in the final dark days before the war, has shown his nobility. He is one of the elite, whether her father can see it or not.
That is the moment she can say, in the privacy of her own head, I love him. I love him, and the question is not, was never, whether he is worthy of me.
But whether I was worthy of him.
She does not know. But she must try. She must run to his side, to stand with him, fight beside him, to add her strength to his in the hour of greatest need.
To declare to the world that she chooses him, to declare it even without knowing, in that moment, if he will choose her in return.
A leap of faith.
Because she has loved him, but up to this moment, she has loved him selfishly, making her feelings of love, of being in love, more important than him.
So now she must declare what she hid, without protecting herself, heedless of risk.
It is not sacrifice itself, but choice to sacrifice, willingness to sacrifice, that calls the power down.
(That's how I'd write it, anyway.)
Rick Fox retweeted
If there’s anything Brazil has taught us over the last four years, it’s that Leftists will rig elections, call themselves defenders of democracy while they’re doing it, hijack the courts after they’ve won, use them to convert the country into a soft dictatorship, and then arrest their political enemies, ban free speech, and attack social media platforms they can’t control in order to guarantee that they never lose power ever again.
And with that power they will construct an inverted hierarchy that places troons, third worldists, criminals, drug addicts, and mentally ill lunatics at the top of the social pyramid, all while acting like they’re fighting for equality and just being a heckin’ decent human being.
1. They get to be nice to Harry, a kid they both like and one that actually needs the map to have a chance to go to Hogsmeade.
2. They get to pick on Ron by not giving it to him (and he wouldn’t use it as well anyway).
3. They know Ron will still get the benefit of it because Harry has it.
Win/win/win
Rick Fox retweeted
So... Snape is official a black incel from a broken lower class family with an abusive deadbeat drunk father who was obsessed over some white girl and got lynched by all his white classmates... reminder that they looked at all that and chose to make him black...
Why do they never think this shit through!?
Jasper Talbot and Hannah Chinn have been cast as James and Lily Potter in HBO’s ‘HARRY POTTER’ series.
(hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-…)
