the “tony stark hogwarts house” debate is as fun as it is neverending but also consider: tony stark, a squib. utterly rejected by his dad. resorts to developing technology to make up for the wizarding conveniences he can’t get with a wand. tech wands and other wizarding accessibility devices for squibs everywhere. funds protection programs for homeless and rejected squib & muggleborn children. consider pro-squib inclusion activist tony stark
here’s this in honor of september 1st
this makes so much sense with his story as well?? like howard would probably have some amazing tech with the wizarding world, but Tony made it better. They said he couldn’t do it because he was a squib, but Tony just grins and says that stupid quote that all wizards and witches have come to hate: “Magic is just science you don’t understand yet.” He creates technology that can make things float, and he created a flying car without an enchantment, so ha Justin, suck on it.
No acceptance to Hogwarts? No problem. He doesn’t necessarily care, because from what Steve says, the sorting hat would take ages for Tony. He goes to regular school and gets a degree in just about everything. He combines it with the wizarding world. For the first time in ages, squibs are finally getting a good name.
He’s known as the man to go to. He sets up houses for fearful children who have been rejected because they show no magic ability, or something else. He is fierce, showing up to Ministry of Magic meetings in a sharply tailored suit. (Always American-made, just to piss them off a bit.) He and his friend Rhodey make sure that the people they have get good futures.
They get into fields like physics and travel and all sorts of other fields because they think differently. They still have the influence of the wizarding world, no matter how much some of the wizarding world doesn’t want them to. They create a better future for all involved. And, as much as Tony always says it wasn’t him, they all know it was. (that’s why he finally gets his own chocolate frog card. he cries, and then realizes he’s the first squib to be on one.)
Odysseus spends like an hour in the bed section being aggressively cuddled by some strange drunk woman who fell on top of him while he was testing out mattresses and has too strong a grip for him to pull free
Meanwhile Penelope is sitting behind the checkout with the bed they bought eating ice cream with Telemachus and trying to ignore the pack of dudebro frat boys trying to hit on her
When you consider how small the Mediterranean actually is … this makes even more sense.
I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”
For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.
The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.
Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”
Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.
In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.
Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.
But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.
It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.
3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.
So moral of story is be specific
I was thinking it was stupid that they didn’t specify seawater but then I had the thought that we don’t specify to use chicken eggs in baking because DUH so we just write eggs
2000 years in the future people are going to be making scrambled fish eggs and crying bc the ancient recipes make no sense
concept: instead of hedwig, Harry goes into the pet store and this little snake in the back of the store talks to him, obviously gets his attention more than the other animals, and harry feels sorry for it so he takes it home. Then the snake helps Harry throughout his years at hogwarts as harry carries it wrapped around his hand all like “pssssst, haaarryyy, the dark lord isss coming sss” or just petty shit like “haaaarrryy, now is the time, assskkk out cho chaaannngg”
The snake getting really agitated in second year and Harry like ‘Aw, what’s wrong little friend?’
And snake’s like ‘Nah don’t worry it’s cool, it’s just that big fuck-off snake in the pipes that keeps making you think you’re hearing things—it’s like, ten thousand foot long, and I’m a corn snake, so you know. Bit intimidating.’
Third year he eats Scabbers and saves them all a lot of time
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 