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great pyrenees are so fucking awesome theyre just big. if i didnt think that owning one was a supremely bad idea for me in particular id get one. i just think itd become my boss or something. im too lazy for a working breed truly

What do you think about Molly Weasley?

I have a lot of thoughts about Molly Weasley. I think she’s a fantastic character,  just not in the way that JKR intended. 

I think the intention was to make Molly kind of a mama bear. Fiercely loving, fiercely protective, hot tempered… but you know. In a cute way. In a warm way. I do think that Movie!Molly threads this needle. (I also think that her bear-ears hairstyle is perhaps intentional.) 

Movie!Molly gets her big duel with Bellatrix, she gets (reasonably) annoyed at the boys for stealing the car. Her only spicy moment is the Howler… which is softened and made more comedic by 1) including a nice message for Ginny at the end 2) including a tongue-sticking-out moment, which turns the whole thing into more of a joke on Molly. Now it’s your mom being kind of weird and embarrassing… versus her public shaming you, toxic tik-tok mom style. The Howler is much worse in the book: “​​I THOUGHT YOUR FATHER WOULD DIE OF SHAME, WE DIDN’T BRING YOU UP TO BEHAVE LIKE THIS.”

So let’s talk Book!Molly, because there’s a lot there. She’s a Prewett, growing up in a more *typical* pure blood family as opposed to being a “blood traitor” Weasley. (Cedrella Black was disowned for marrying a Weasley, Lucretia Black married a Prewett no problem.)  Molly also married Arthur really young, and really quickly. It’s even lightly implied they married too quickly - 

“I just think [Bill and Fleur] have hurried into this engagement, that’s all!”  “They’ve known each other a year,” said Ron (...)   “Well, that’s not very long! I know why it’s happened, of course. It’s all this uncertainty with You-Know-Who coming back, people think they might be dead tomorrow, so they’re rushing all sorts of decisions they’d normally take time over. It was the same last time he was powerful, people eloping left, right, and center —”  “Including you and Dad,” said Ginny slyly.  “Yes, well, your father and I were made for each other, what was the point in waiting?” said Mrs. Weasley.

There’s some psychological truth to that. (Also, Molly and Arthur were 100% hooking up while at Hogwarts:)

“[The Fat Lady] was here in my time,” said Mrs. Weasley. “She gave me such a telling off one night when I got back to the dormitory at four in the morning —”  “What were you doing out of your dormitory at four in the morning?” said Bill, surveying his mother with amazement. Mrs. Weasley grinned, her eyes twinkling.  “Your father and I had been for a nighttime stroll,” she said.

And the timeline’s too fuzzy to know for sure…  but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Molly getting pregnant with Bill was one of the reasons she and Arthur got married so fast. 

It’s hard to say, because you never get a great sense of their relationship, but I’m actually not sure how compatible the two of them are, or if they would have gotten married at all if it hadn't been for the war and all these external factors. There is an ongoing conflict between them: Arthur is a political radical who seems to enjoy upsetting the Malfoys - he’s not playing nice, he doesn't have a prestigious job, he’s not getting a promotion anytime soon, and he’s fine with this. His interest in muggles is fringe counterculture stuff, and his hobby is illegal. And Molly… is pretty establishment. She wants her sons to be Head Boys and Prefects, and then she wants them to get jobs at the Ministry:

“Mum went mad at [Fred and George after finding their prank candy.] Told them they weren’t allowed to make any more of it, and burned all the order forms. . . . She’s furious at them anyway. They didn’t get as many O.W.L.s as she expected.” “And then there was this big row,” Ginny said, “because Mum wants them to go into the Ministry of Magic like Dad, and they told her all they want to do is open a joke shop.”

Like we hear about this interaction secondhand, which softens the emotion, but I’m sorry? Molly burned their order forms? She wants them to do jobs they very clearly have no aptitude for, instead of being entrepreneurs? Arthur sides with the twins, and of course he does. They’re anarchists just like he is. But it *really* bothers Molly, and this conflict just keeps coming up. 

[sidenote. You cannot tell that Arthur Weasley, once he was in his late 20s/early 30s, once he had grown into himself a bit. Tell me that this man didn’t once think “you know, I really should have married a Muggle. That would’ve been perfect.”’]

But back to Molly Weasley, nee Prewett. She wants a big family, and there is no way this doesn't have something to do with the fact that both her brothers were just brutally killed. She’s trying to distract herself, fill some void, find some meaning. The fact that it doesn’t work (because how could it, she’s got just buckets of unprocessed trauma) is maybe why she is so set on having a girl. Maybe a little baby girl is what she needs. 

In the main timeline of the book, Molly 100% needs enrichment. She needs to start breeding alpacas or join a book club or get a job. (Job could be cool, especially since she has no kids at home and money is an issue.) Like come on, Molly is intense, Type A, and powerful. Possibly one of the best duelists in the entire series. She takes out Voldemort’s number two, and Bellatrix has already defeated Sirius - incredibly talented and powerful in his own right. I do think that the reason JKR made this choice (instead of letting Neville have a confrontation with Bellatrix, which would have been more narratively straightforward) is because (whether consciously or unconsciously) she doesn’t like the idea of one of her good-guy GUY characters hurting a woman. So Molly defeats Bellatrix with magic mom powers, which is the same reason Narcissia can lie to Voldemort’s face I guess.

What Molly definitely does NOT need to be doing is obsessing about her kids' significant others. Like take Fleur. (Who I think we as readers were meant to dislike more than we actually did?)  Fleur is great. So when Molly has a problem with her… then starts trying to matchmake Bill with Tonks… until Tonks (another fan favorite) also starts annoying her… it makes Molly looks really unreasonable. Also, let Bill have his long hair and earring. 

She gets weird about Hermione in Book 4, after she believes Rita Skeeter’s write-up that she's some sort of temptress playing Harry and Krum off each other. Instead of, idk, asking Harry (who she thinks of as a surrogate son) she sends Hermione a passive-agressive comically undersized chocolate egg. Harry and Ron get huge ones. That’s not cute, or funny.

Also, Percy and Penelope Clearwater. I know the real-world reason Percy hides his relationship in Book 2 is so he can be a red herring acting all suspicious… but in universe, I guess Percy just wants to date someone without his mom being weird about it? Like Penelope Clearwater is nice and normal and fine. Why is he hiding this relationship?

Then there’s Molly the disciplinarian, which we mostly see in the context of Fred and George (although there is also Ron being public-shamed by the Howler.) She is constantly giving the twins a hard time about their life choices, their jokes. Ron says “I remember Mum walloping Fred with her broomstick." Then yeah, she burns their order forms. She does feel bad about this later, and after the whole thing at the Quidditch World Cup hugs them and says, “What if You-Know-Who had got you, and the last thing I ever said to you was that you didn’t get enough O.W.L.s?” It’s meant to be a sweet moment, but this would annoy me just a little. It’s a little like saying, “I’m glad I don’t have to think of myself as being a bad mother.” 

I also want to point out Molly's pretty clear favoritism. Fred and George are the problem children, Ginny is the baby (although we almost never see her and her mother interact, so it’s actually very hard to say what their relationship is like), and Percy is the golden child. We see how this sort of sets him apart from all his siblings, how he's described as pompous and full of himself, but also how he’s secretive and hides things from his family. It’s kind of precarious being the golden child, and when he finally does stop pleasing his mother he falls hard. (Although I will always be a big believer in Daddy Issues!Percy. That has to be why he commits that hard to Barty Crouch Sr that fast, and then ignores that many red flags.) 

And of course Ron is the invisible child. Almost the first thing we hear him say is, “She always forgets I don’t like corned beef.” I’ll let that one slide. Molly’s got five kids at home, she made corn beef sandwiches, not everyone is going to be equally happy. But Ron’s clothes.  Molly makes her own clothes, she's defined by her facility with household magic. She knits Ron sweaters... but at least two of them are maroon despite the fact that Ron hates maroon. His room is  plastered top to bottom in bright orange Chudley Cannons merch. She couldn’t make him an orange sweater? There’s also the issue with the dress robes. Ron clearly doesn’t like them (“Mum, you’ve given me Ginny’s new dress.”) But he is the one who cuts off the lace trim later, and he doesn’t do an amazing job. I know that it's a joke, but like. That sounds like a job for Molly.

We do get Horcrux!Hermione telling Ron that he is the “Least loved, always, by the mother who craved a daughter,” so this idea of Molly picking favorites is *kind of* in the text. But Horcrux!Hermione is wrong about Harry/Hermione being a thing, so maybe we’re meant to read this as Ron’s baseless anxiety? It doesn’t feel like that though. What it actually feels like is an unresolved plot thread. 

So here’s my take on Molly Weasley. This is someone who is pretty high-powered, who suffered a period of emotional upheaval, then got married and started having kids because she kind of thought that was what you do - and it wasn’t as fulfilling as she thought it would be. I think a lot of her comments come off as *meaner* than JKR intended, because let’s face it - JKR has a kind of mean sense of humor. And if I want to speculate further… I think there are quite a few parallels between Molly Weasley and JKR. I don't think she put them there consciously.

I LOVE the version of Lucius in your fic Prison of the Phoenix. He's different from a lot of portrayals I've seen. Why did you decide to write him how you did?

A lot of the fun of writing a book-accurate fix-it fic comes from taking the events of the book, and removing JKRs (simplistic, misleading, sometimes just weird) narrative framing. Slytherins = baddies, Gryffindors = goodies, you know. 

This is especially fun with Lucius Malfoy, who just like… isn’t very evil? Chamber of Secrets is his most villainous book, and I’ll get to that, but otherwise? He tries (unsuccessfully) to get the animal that attacked his kid killed. He donates to hospitals (but in like, an evil way.) He is a hilariously incompetent Death Eater, and then he's Voldemort’s punching bag. 

That’s kind of the point of Lucius. He looks the part. He commits to the aesthetics of the thing, with the hair and the peacocks and the snake-wand-cane. He likes the mystique of walking into a room and knowing that you know (but can’t prove) he’s a dark wizard. It allows him to be… kinda lazy. He can coast on his family name, money, reputation, privilege. I really think that if you sat Lucius Malfoy down and asked him to walk you through all the wizard-supremacy talking points he wouldn’t be able to do it. He’ll toss around words like “mudblood” and “mudblood-lover” no problem, but in the end he doesn’t really care. Lucius is not a true believer. The way the world is set up benefits him tremendously and he doesn’t want Voldemort back. That’s just text:

“Use your brains, Ron,” said Bill. “If they really were Death Eaters… I bet they’d be even more frightened than the rest of us to see him come back. They denied they’d ever been involved with him when he lost his powers, and went back to their daily lives… I don’t reckon he’d be over-pleased with them, do you?”

Lucius and friends had too much to drink at a sporting event, put on the old outfits (again with the aesthetics) and started levitating muggles. Which obviously isn’t GOOD, but they’re not killing or torturing, or furthering any kind of agenda. It’s important that Barty is so insulted and pissed off by the way they’re basically playing Dark Wizard that he casts the Dark Mark to “show [them] what loyalty to the Dark Lord meant, and to punish them for their lack of it.” Which kicks off most of the events of the book. 

Prison of the Phoenix is going to have a companion, parallel fic told from Harry’s POV (tentatively titled Harry Potter and Malfoy’s Suspicious Interest in Werewolves.) Lucius does show up in that one, and I was honestly surprised by how much more frightening and intimidating he is when filtered through Harry’s perspective. Because with a Severus POV… when Severus is used to spending time around Voldemort, Greyback, Bellatrix, honestly Dumbledore and Sirius Black…. Lucius is not scary. Lucius wants to buy presents for his son, go to high-profile events with his beautiful wife, and wear a variety of snake-themed accessories and extravagant hats. 

I wanted a kind of college-roommates-who-stayed-friends feel for the Severus + Lucius relationship, because they are friends. Sirius calls Severus Lucius’ “lapdog,” and Narcissa calls him Lucius’ “oldest friend.” Lucius is also part of the welcoming committee when Severus is first sorted into Slytherin. He’s five years older (I think Jason Isaacs is the only Harry Potter adult the same age as the character he plays), which would have affected the dynamic between him and Severus a lot in school. Personally, I think it makes sense for Lucius to be a little protective of this brilliant half-blood kid with no money. And as an adult, there’s some guilt mixed in there as well. Severus probably would not have been sucked into the Voldemort thing nearly as deep or nearly as fast if it hadn’t been for Lucius, and the war kind of destroyed him. Lucius remembers a younger Severus who was modding potions, inventing spells, coming up with cheeky nicknames for himself, and that person is gone. That’s a big part of the reason he’s so invested in the Severus/Remus relationship in Prison of the Phoenix. Something about Remus has managed to wake up parts of that younger Severus, and Lucius thinks that’s fantastic.

I also think Lucius might be the character who knows Voldemort the best. He’s one of the only Death Eaters who Voldemort calls by their first name (Bellatrix, Severus, and Draco are the others) and he’s weirdly familiar with his “slippery friend” Lucius, addressing the whole speech about how/why he returned to him, for some reason? Anything that helps Voldemort make sense as a person I’ll take, and to me it makes sense that young Tom Riddle charmed Abraxas Malfoy, Lucius’ father, first. The dates are right, and he’s exactly Tom’s type - rich, pureblood, probably easily flattered (let’s be honest) and sitting on a pile of magical artifacts. It’s very Hepzibah Smith vibes, is what I’m saying. And rich, posh, popular seventeen year olds don’t join cults. But if Lucius’ father was already in a cult… 

It also makes sense to me that Tom Riddle got sort of stuck when he killed Marvolo Gaunt, and made his first horcrux at sixteen. He has this sort of fascination with sixteen year old pureblood wizards (so Barty, Draco, and Lucius would have fit this profile.) He sort of wants to be them, but also sort of wants to break them? It’s messy, and complicated. It’s creepy and compelling, that Lucius is aging but this spectre that’s dominated his life isn’t. 

And so when Lucius gives Ginny the diary in Book 2… it makes sense that he’s just trying to get rid of it. He was just at Borgin and Burkes selling dark artifacts, but knows that the diary is worse. He needs to make sure it can’t possibly be traced back to him. So he gives it to the daughter of the head of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts office. (It is an enchanted muggle artifact, after all.) If Arthur Weasley finds it and deals with it, fine. If Ginny is discovered with it in a way that blows up in Arthur’s face, also fine. If it does get to Hogwarts and does open the Chamber of Secrets - well Draco is going to be fine, and it might undermine Dumbledore. If it was really important to Lucius that the diary rid the school of muggleborns… he would have given it to Draco had him use it. Or given it to Draco, and told him to leave it somewhere for an enemy to find. But Lucius doesn’t do that, because he doesn’t want Voldemort back and his politics just aren’t that important to him. 

The one trait I did give Lucius that doesn’t go back to the books is just being madly in love with Narcissa. My Lucius is an unrepentant wife guy. (And I mean… it doesn’t contradict anything. There isn’t anything in the books to suggest that he isn’t a wife guy.)  I honestly did that for structural reasons. I’m writing a romance with Severus, who has the emotional awareness of a stack of roofing tiles. He just really, really needed a friend he could ask for relationship advice. 

on narcissa malfoy

i always joke with my friends that the malfoy family is matriarchal, partly because i, personally, would let narcissa boss me around in a heartbeat, but also because i actually think there’s a solid canon backing that she’s like. the Head Bitch of the family. especially later on in the series. (it’s also why i think reading lucius as abusive is a misreading of their relationship, but whatever.)

just in general, i will never understand the reading that she’s meek or timid. we see so little of her character but with what we do see, she defies voldemort twice (lying about harry and going to severus for help), doesn’t shy away from standing up for herself/her family, seemingly holds the family together when lucius has his fall from grace, is not the least bit scared of her sister, and is more than willing to throw hands with her son’s rivals in public. to me, she’s very much lucius’ equal, even if she isn’t a sadist like her husband or sister (and i suppose there’s not a whole lot of canon material on that either way, so you can’t say for sure what she is). her capacity for compassion does not automatically make her kind, nor weak, especially since her compassion does not seem to extend past her family. 

personally, narcissa gives me a lot of lady macbeth vibes. particularly the whole ‘look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.’ (‘s also why i think she’s aptly named—daffodils are pretty and poisonous.) but back to my point: 

the example of narcissa’s authority pre-everything going to shit is obviously this:

which is easily passable as an insignificant win in a family discussion, but then 

you’ve got

stuff like

this

i haven’t read the books in a couple of years, so these examples are just the ones i can pluck from the top of my head, but i think it’s very interesting that narcissa is generally the one who defends the family, who lucius and draco turn to for guidance, and who is also just. the only malfoy the other death eaters seem to really respect (dh era).

there’s also the matter of movie canon, which i’m pretty eh with, but i do prefer the malfoy family ending in the films to the one in the books. and the fact that it’s narcissa who instigates it—who gets draco to come to them after he’s ignored lucius’ call, who walks away and calls for lucius to follow (and then he does)—is a nice representation of the authority she has in the books, i think. and then there’s also this:

which i could wax poetic on for hours, but it’d mostly just be shippy ramblings. 

anyway. tl;dr: the timid, meek narcissa you sometimes see in fanon is ridiculous.