We all talk about the mother-son relationship between Molly and Harry but barely of McGonagall and Harry
McGonagall
spent hours spying on the Dursley’s and didn’t want Harry to be put in their care
she bought him a Nimbus 2000 with her own money and since it was new at the time, it must’ve cost a lot
she put Harry on the quidditch
team without checking with Oliver Wood and if it had been another student who was caught flying, they would have been expelled on the spot
she defended Harry in front of Umbridge “He has achieved high marks in all Defence Against the Dark Arts tests set by a competent teacher”
“Potter. I will assist you to become an Auror if it is the last thing I do! If I have to coach you nightly I will make sure you achieve the required results!”
when Amycus spat at McGonagall, Harry cast the cruciatus curse on him which worked meaning Harry truly meant it, and when McGonagall called him foolish, Harry replied as if his actions didn’t need explanation
“The scream was the more terrible because he had never expected or dreamed that Professor McGonagall could make such a sound” when
McGonagall thought Harry was dead
she was one of the first to reach Harry when he defeated Voldemort
But how do you not mention, “Have a biscuit, Potter.”!?
Mary Shelley’s father taught her to spell her name by taking her to the graveyard and having her trace the letters on her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s gravestone.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses – but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms – they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
“when connie is president what will that make me? first boy?”
honestly I think that might be my favorite (non-singing) line in all of steven universe because it makes my imagine the craziest/best presidential term in U.S. history.
“Mr. Universe, many republicans are claiming that your birth certificate was faked and that you are an illegal alien. What would you say to these allegations?”
“Well definitely not illegal, but I am an alien.”
“you were born outside of the country?”
“no, I was born here”
“then how are you an alien?”
“I mean a literal alien, from outer space. My mother and guardians are all aliens.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Well I’m half alien anyway. I thought we made that clear from early on in the campaign?”
(conspiracy theorists have a field day)
“Madam President, why is your husband carrying a huge crystal disc out onto the white house lawn?”
“oh, that’s a warp pad, It lets Gems travel around”
“Isn’t that a security issue?”
“Well only gems can use it, and the only gems on the planet right now are friendly”
(the secret service has their work cut out for them)
and then theres other things- like the time the president and her husband combined into one person at a state dinner. Or how the president is ridiculously badass with a sword. Or how the fist gentleman has five (or possibly six?) adoptive mothers. Or that time the president, her husband, and an insane eldritch monstrosity defended Washington DC from an alien spaceship. (approval ratings skyrocketed)
what I’m saying is: Take some time to imagine the shenanigans President Maheswaran would get up too. It will not disappoint.
Take a moment to imagine President Maheswaran pondering the details of a foreign war that the US has to get involved in.
“What should we do, Madam President?”
The President contemplates a large map. Pushes her glasses (lenses tinted but with no correction) up her nose. Stands. “There’s no choice; we send in the big guns. We send in my husband.”
The table glances out the window to see a balding middle-aged man in sandals laughing while he plays frisbee with a pink lion. “Are… are you sure that’s… wise, ma’am?”
“It is extreme. But it’s our only chance.”
Two weeks later, the postcard arrives. Steven has his arms over the shoulders of the two warring foreign leaders, one of whom is laughing at a joke the other is telling. They are surrounded by shelter puppies.
President Maheswaran smiles. It’s good to have backup.
The more I look at this, the more I can’t stop smiling
east coast blogger: today i murdered a rat with my own crystalized rage and hatred
west coast blogger: this beach is so relaxing my body melted right into the sand
midwest blogger: o Lords of corn, what sins have we committed for the weather to punish us so
southern blogger: y’all’d’ve
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 home or things 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.
Leaving tungle.hell like rats on the Titanic 