She Laughs. I Forgot. You Are Best Mates With My Brother, Arent You? His Forehead Creases, Like Hes Uncomfortable

She laughs. “I forgot. You are best mates with my brother, aren’t you?” His forehead creases, like he’s uncomfortable with the reminder. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.” I’m rereading the Changeling and I actually laughed out loud at this part. Oh sweet, naïve Ginny.

Ah, The Changeling, chapter 5. Harry being adorable and Ginny being oblivious. Bless. Doubly funny because without that untimely reminder, Harry might have actually gathered up the nerve in time to ask Ginny to Slughorn’s party like he was kind of trying to at the end right before she gets up and leaves.

You can imagine his internal dialogue: “Look, Harry, she has to go to the party anyway. And she just clearly said that she and Tobias aren’t anything (not that you cared one way or the other), and yeah, you were supposed to be just trying to get some information about Draco out of her, but you really like just kinda…being around her, so it wouldn’t be all that awful to ask her, right? I mean, it’s just…reconnaissance. And the fact that her hair smells nice is, like, completely beside the point. You’re doing Ron a favor, really. Making sure she’s not going with some other bloke that they clearly can’t trust. Wait–what? Oh, bloody hell, she’s leaving? Now? Why? Stop her! Ugh. She’s gone. Great, Harry. Just great, you absolute ninny.”

It was fun to get to play with Ginny’s obliviousness, especially because I could trust the reader to know that Harry is a lot more interested than she realizes. But really, we all love it to pieces that Harry goes with Luna anyway, don’t we?

I remember you writhing a what if Harry and changling Ginny got together earlier but i can't find can you link it?

You mean this?

Ravenclaw: Are you two fighting ot flirting?

Slytherin and Gryffindor: Yes

Two questions on the girls and women of the Parlor: First, how much do they know about what happened during the early books of Harry Potter? What does Theodora think happened to Quirrell, and just what was he trying to steal, for example. Second, will we ever see Harry interact with them after the relationship goes public?

That’s an interesting question. Because I seem to recall Dumbledore saying something to Harry like, what happened with Quirrell is a complete secret, so naturally everyone knows. So my take from that is that everyone knows about Voldemort being in the back of Quirrell’s head? I doubt anyone knew about the philosopher’s stone, really. And to judge from everyone’s reactions in the fifth book when Harry starts smart-mouthing Umbridge over Quirrell being an alright teacher except for having VOLDEMORT in the back of his head, I wonder if people ever really believed it? Or if they just kind of wrote it off? I think even the idea of Voldemort was so scary and the idea of war so foreign to most of these kids, it was easier to try to forget. Or assume it was an exaggeration.

As for Theodora, who would have been a fourth year at the time, I think she would be less likely to brush off the information as rumor. Like most things, she quietly collected it, thought about what it might mean for her and her future, and then carried on, ears always open for more. The fight against Voldemort wasn’t hers, but a thing to be navigated. Men could carry on destroying each other to their heart’s content as far as she was concerned.

Harry will get a chance to interact with the former Parlor girls. Though more Antonia than Theodora. Though now that you’ve put it in my head the idea is tantalizing! Especially if she tried to give Ginny another little ‘test’ of hers and Harry lost his shite over someone talking to her that way. Ha. That would be fun. As for Astoria…yes. Meaning Draco will more than likely drift back into Harry’s sphere. That will be fun. 

I'm really surprised they've never done a body switching episode!!! that's a cartoon staple 🤌

I'm re-reading The Changeling (for the umpteenth time, no less) and I'm once again struck by your particular take on Occlumency and Legilimency. Is this something you can talk more about? I'm interested to hear how you came about it since it's more or less unique when compared to other fics I've read. Also, will we see Ginny using her skills again in the Armistice series?

I honestly hadn’t seen much about Occlumency or Legilimency other than what little we see in the books, so I had a lot of room to come up with my own ideas. (Even Fantastic Beasts hadn’t come out yet, Queenie’s Legilimency clearly very different from how I portrayed it.) It seemed to me that there were only three people in canon that we saw or suspected had these skills–Dumbledore, Snape, and Voldemort. That’s quite a group. So I thought about those people and I thought about how they had to be skills with a high cost or difficulty or why wouldn’t everyone want to be able to read minds? Also, we saw how much Harry struggled with Occlumency, and I think that wasn’t all just because Snape was a horrid teacher. Harry is a pretty open, impulsive person over all, and I don’t really see him ever mastering shielding his thoughts and emotions. His emotions are what drive him, for better or worse.

While Voldemort is just straight up evil and wouldn’t care about invading people’s trust or privacy, Snape was rather more protective in his use of the skills, basically, he was most concerned with saving his own ass. I find Dumbledore’s rather casual use of it throughout the books more interesting. If every time Harry thinks it feels like Dumbledore can see into him is actually Dumbledore using Legilimency, that’s quite a lot. I think it fits with Dumbledore’s characterization though. He’s someone who honestly believes in the greater good, just as much as an adult as he did as a young man with Grindelwald. And his willingness to put the greater good first is his greatest Achilles Heel, in my opinion. He has a good heart and blind spots a mile wide. And I think that just like a level of detachment from the individual pieces is required to be a good mastermind (for him to be willing to raise Harry knowing that more than likely he’ll have to die to serve the greater good), Legilimency requires that sort of detachment too. Can you imagine seeing inside people and being empathetic? It would drive you crazy. I think Dumbledore’s use of Legilimency fits in with his tendency to forget the human in the individual. He saw them as pieces with potential and often just seemed to hope for the best.

As for Ginny, she was already inclined toward Occlumency from her experience with Tom. She knows what it’s like to be a stranger in your own head. And she has the drive to never leave herself that vulnerable again. But I also wanted room to explore that our world often defaults to one way of viewing an approaching things, usually based on men’s views and histories. So I wanted there to be room for her to be different than Snape, but also realize that the one answer you are given in school is usually an incomplete one. Part of growing up is realizing how much of a constructed narrative you’ve been living in. So while building defensible barriers seemed a stereotypically masculine approach, I thought about how women are often forced to hide in plain sight, aren’t often given the right to openly fight and resist, and how blunt defense is not the only way to undermine. So the idea that Ginny might use her experience of compartmentalization to create an image of herself to please the intruder…that it might not even occur to the outsider to look for anything deeper, having had their assumptions so well fulfilled, well, isn’t that what women are trained to do all the time? To please and become a sight and an experience for others, while our true selves are hidden out of sight? There’s a cost though. Women often function as strangers to themselves. And they are never truly alone. Always performing. Even when completely alone.

As for Legilimency, again, I thought it had to have a high cost or people would just do it left and right, wouldn’t they? And I thought about what that cost would be. I like the idea that you can take, but you have to keep it. So, maybe you steal that bit of information from someone, but you also have to carry around their fears and wants and you will never be free of it. Dumbledore dealt with that by detaching himself, floating far above. Snape dealt with that by dehumanizing the people he used it on. If they were things, their feelings don’t matter. Ginny, again, subverting gender stereotypes, does neither. Which is fortunate, because I think she is in far too much danger of becoming the thing she fears (Tom) if she did that. Her tendency to shut down her emotions is when things fall apart the most for her. So Ginny’s refusal to dehumanize the people she takes from gives her a greater burden, but it keeps her human too. In fact, humanizing people is how she deals with it. But it’s also why she never uses it unless she absolutely has to.

As for her use of these things in the Armistice Series, I will say that she is rarely if ever not using Occlumency on some level (which is as much of a problem as it sounds like). She will consciously use Occlumency again. But we will only see her use Legilimency as a last resort. I don’t see that happening right away. But I doubt Harry will ever stay out of trouble long enough for her not to find it useful at some point. :)