Thomas Sanders has come to this planet with only one purpose: to be the Viner King and ban every other crusty mayo sexist/homophobic/racist etc viner that literally no one needs in their lives
Ok but hasn’t it been shown that a single stupefy wouldn’t be enough to have an effect on hagrid due to his giant blood?
clearly this means that hagrid pretended that the stupefy knocked him out, gently laid down on the ground so the baby wasn’t jostled, and pretended to snore while sirius ran the fuck away
possibly interrupting himself mid-snore to offer advice
*Hagrid sits up*
“SUPPORT ‘IS LI’IL HEAD, YE GREAT IDIOT!”
*lies down*
*Sirius climbs on motorbike*
*Hagrid sits up again*
“DON’ FERGET TO BURP ‘IM AFTER A FEEDIN!”
*Motorbike zooms off*
*Hagrid sits up, cups hands and yells*
“AN’ MAKE SURE ‘E SLEEPS ON ‘IS BACK!”
*lies down again for another five minutes for good measure*
Let’s talk about an Ariel who walks away—limping, mouthing inaudible sailors’ curses, a sea-brine knife in her belt.
Ariel traded her voice for a chance to walk on land. That was the deal: every time she steps, it will feel like being stabbed by knives. She must win the hand of her one true love, or she will die at his wedding day, turn to sea foam, forgotten. The helpful steward tells her to dance for the prince, even though her feet scream each time she steps. Love is pain, the sea witch promised. Devotion calls for blood.
But how about this? When the prince marries another, nothing happens. When Ariel stands over the prince and his fiance the night before their wedding, her sisters’ hard-won knife in hand, she doesn’t decide his happiness is more important than her life. She decides that his happiness is irrelevant. Her curse does not turn on the whims of this boy’s heart.
She does not throw away the knife and throw herself into the sea. She does not bury it in the prince and break her curse—it would not have broken. She leaves them sleeping in what will be their marriage bed and limps into a quiet night, her knife clean in her belt, her heart caught in her throat. Her feet scream, but they ache, too, for the places she has yet to see.
Ariel will not be sea foam or a queen. There is life beyond love. There is love in just living. Her true love will not be married on the morn—the prince will be married then, in glorious splendor, but he had never been why she was here.
Ariel traded her voice for legs to stand on, a chance at another life. When she poked her head above the waves, it wasn’t the handsome biped that she fell for. It was the way the hills rolled, golden in the sun. It was the clouds chasing each other across blue sky, like sea foam you could never reach.
(She does reach it, one day, bouncing around in the back of a tinker’s cart, signing jokes to him in between helping to tune his guitar. They crest up a high mountain pass and into the belly of a cloud. Her breath whistles out, swirls water droplets, and she reaches out a hand to touch the sky. Her feet will scream all her life, but after that morning they ache just a little bit less).
I want an Ariel who is in love with a world, not a prince. I don’t want her to be a moral for little girls about what love is supposed to hurt like, about how it is supposed to kill you. Ariel will be one more wandering soul, forgotten. Her voice will live in everything she does. She uses her sisters’ knife to turn a reed into a pipe. She cannot speak, but she still has lungs.
Love is pain, says the old man, when Ariel smiles too wide at sunrises. It’s pain, says the innkeeper, with pity, as Ariel hobbles to a seat, pipe in hand. At least you are beautiful, soothes the country healer who looks over her undamaged feet. The helpful steward had thought she was shy. Dance for the prince even though your feet feel stuck with a hundred knives.
Her feet feel like knives but she goes out dancing in the grass at midnight anyway. She’s never seen stars before. Moonlight reaches down through the depths, but starlight fractures on the surface. Ariel dances for herself.
She goes down to caves and rocky shores. Sometimes she meets with her sisters there. Mouths filled with water cannot speak above the sea, so she drops into the waves and they sing to her, old songs, and she steals breaths of air between the stanzas. She can drown now. She holds her breath. She opens her eyes to the salt and brine.
Ariel uses canes and takes rides on wagons filled with hay, chickens, tomatoes—never fish. She earns coins and paper scraps of money with a conch shell her youngest sister swam up from the depths for her, with her reed pipe, with a lyre from her eldest sister which sounds eerie and high out of the water. The shadow plays she makes on the walls of taverns waver and wriggle like on the sea caves of her childhood, but not because of water’s lap and current. It is the firelight that flickers over her hands.
When she has limped and hitched rides so far that no one knows the name of her prince’s kingdom, she meets a tinker on the road with an extra seat in his cart and an ear for music. He never asks her to dance for him and she never does. She drops messages in bottles to her sisters, at every river and coastline they come to, and sometimes she finds bottles washed up the shore just for her.
They travel on. When she breathes, these days, her lungs fill with air.
Some nights she wakes, gasping, coughing up black water that never comes. There is something lying heavy on her chest and there always will be.
Somewhere in the ocean, a sea witch thinks she has won. When Ariel walks, she hobbles. Her voice was the sunken treasure of the king’s loveliest daughter, and so when they tell Ariel’s story they say she has been robbed. They say she has been stolen.
She has many instruments because she has many voices—all of them, hers; made by her hands, or gifted from her sisters’ dripping ones. Ariel will sing until the day she dies with every instrument but her vocal cords.
She cannot win it back, the high sweet voice of a merchild who had never blistered her shoulders red with sun, who had never made a barroom rise to its feet to sing along to her strumming fingers. She cannot ever again sing like a girl who has not held a dagger over two sleeping lovers and then decided to spare them. She decided not to wither. She decided to walk on knives for the rest of her life. She cannot win it back, but even if she could, she knows she would not sound the same.
They call her story a tragedy and she rests her aching feet beside the warming hearth. With every new ridge climbed, new river forded, new night sky met, her feet ache a little less. They call her a tragedy, but the tinker’s donkey is warm and contrary on cold mornings. The tinker’s shoulder is warm under her cheek.
Her feet will always hurt. She has cut out so many parts of her self, traded them up, won twisted promises back and then twisted them herself. She lives with so many curses under her skin, but she lives. They call her story a moral, and maybe it is.
When she breathes, her lungs fill. When she walks, the earth holds her up. There is sun and there is light and she can catch it in her hands. This is love.
harry and ginny accidentally moving in next door to draco and astoria
and when harry realises he’s like shit shit shit aboRT MISSION WE HAVE TO MOVE SOMEWHERE ELSE I CAN’T DO THIS GIN
but ginny is like come on don’t be ridiculous it was just a childhood rivalry you can do this just be cool
(but harry has absolutely zero concept of being cool around draco malfoy obviously)
and at first they very maturely and very stoically shake hands and avoid each other’s eye and nod and mumble about ‘burying the hatchet’ and ‘starting fresh’ but it all goes to shit very quickly
it starts with harry planting some fuchsias
draco is watching him over the fence, offended at the very impertinence of the thing, because he’s clearly just trying to make his garden look BETTER than their’s and draco will NOT stand for it
so he makes a trip to the local garden centre the whole time grumbling like ‘oh he’s a GARDENER now is he? stupid potter with his GREEN THUMB and his WATERING CAN and his FUCHSIAS. i’ll show him what a REAL GARDEN LOOKS LIKE’
and the next week harry goes into his garden to find draco’s garden overflowing with fuchsias and pansies and marigolds and sweet peas and sunflowers and freesias and harry automatically understands the message:
they are back to being Arch Enemies
they’re never actually rude to each other openly, they’re both too proud for that, but they both take it in turns trying to make their gardens bigger and brighter and greener than the others
(even though neither of them really give a single shit about gardening if they’re totally honest)
draco sets up a large, extravagant bird house thats like a small castle complete with a moat
harry spends a sunday afternoon swearing and complaining trying to install a gigantic water feature
eventually magic gets involved and there are colour-changing daisies and singing sunflowers and exploding hydrageanas and it`s all just generally ridiculous
(draco and harry are the only two that are rivals. little 7 and 5 old james and albus have a jolly old time playing with scorpius over the fence, and ginny and astoria regularly go out for brunch and don’t get home til late afternoon after a few too many glasses of wine)
but anyway
the entire saga culminates on a boiling hot afternoon in august when both the potter and draco parties are in their gardens eating bbq food and playing frisby and sunbathing and just generally doing typical uk-families-as-soon-as-the-sun-comes-out-things
the kids are squealing together and throwing the frisbee back and fourth over the fence
ginny and astoria are laughing together
draco and harry are carefully avoiding looking at each other
but then harry is like ‘ginny look how well the fuchsias are doing’ really loudly bc he’s a little shit and draco CANNOT resist being like ‘really? I’d say they’re looking a little peaky.. ours on the other hand’
and it escalates
it escalates until theyre both yelling at each other over the garden fence about who’s garden looks better
and then draco loses it and dumps and watering can full of water over harry’s head
and harry FREEZES and then goes for the garden hose and soaks draco
and everybody just stands in silence for about 30 seconds whilst they both stand there dripping wet and glaring at each other
and then at the exact same time the two of them just BURST OUT LAUGHING because this is ridiculous even for them
how did they end up SCREAMING at each other over fuchsias???
and then there’s a massive potter vs malfoy water fight and after that they’re bros
(but there will always be a competitive edge when it came to who had the better garden)
LET ME FURTHER ELABORATE ON THE HILARITY OF THE BEST AMERICAN POLITICAL PRACTICE TO EXIST, “THE ANNUAL RUNNING OF THE INTERNS”:
RECORDINGS ARE NOT ALLOWED INSIDE THE U.S. SUPREME COURT. SO WHEN A DECISION IS MADE, COPIES ARE HANDED TO MEMBERS OF THE PRESS INSIDE THE BUILDING IN A PRESS ROOM WHO THEN LEAVE THEIR ROOM TO HAND THE COPIES OF THE RULING TO THEIR INTERNS (WHO AREN’T ALLOWED INSIDE THE PRESS ROOM)
(PICTURED: INTERNS FROM 2013, WAITING FOR THEIR RUN)
AND THEN THE INTERNS HAVE TO DELIVER THE COURT RULINGS WHILE THE JUSTICES ARE ANNOUNCING THEIR DECISION INSIDE THE COURTROOM ITSELF.
SO THE INTERNS RUN THROUGH THE SUPREME COURT BUILDING FROM OUTSIDE THE PRESS ROOM TO OUTSIDE, ACROSS THE PAVED WALKWAYS, AND DOWN THE STAIRS OF THE COURTHOUSE AREA INTO THE BROADCASTING PRESS PEN IN THE STREET.
(A PREVIOUS YEAR’S INTERN RUN WINNER)
INTERNS ARE TOLD THEY MAY TO THROW SOME ELBOWS IF NECESSARY.
AND ALL ARE RACING TO BE THE FIRST TO DELIVER THE COURT RULINGS TO THEIR RESPECTIVE BROADCASTERS WHO ARE WAITING TO GO ON AIR
PICTURED IN FRONT IS YESTERDAY’S INTERN WINNER LAUREN WHO SAID SHE “JUST LIKED TO WIN” WHEN SHE PULLED CLEAR AHEAD TO DELIVER THE OBAMACARE RELATED DECISION.
Okay no. This shit is so fucking satisfying. I can not tell you the joy it brings me when an underage kid tries to buy GTA and when I tell them they need a parent, they go get said parent, and then I say “hey, this game is rated M for these reasons” AND THE PARENTS GET SO APPALLED AND SAY “NO WAY YOU ARE NOT GETTING THAT GAME.” And the look of hatred the kids give me is so raw and pure it gives me fucking life. Damn I miss GameStop.
Keeping online matches safe from annoying 13 year olds.
OKAY FRIENDS SINCE YOU LIKE HEARING ABOUT 13 YEAR OLDS GETTING OWNED LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT ONE OF MY GREATEST ACHIEVEMENTS SO FAR AS AN EMPLOYEE OF GAMESTOP.
It was spring 2014, early in the week. Pretty sure it was a Tuesday, but it’s been awhile. It was so dead in our store, I hadn’t seen anyone in over 40 minutes. Eventually, in comes this mom and we start chatting. She said she was here to buy her son a game he wanted, Grand Theft Auto 5, and could I help her find it?
Now, I’m sure many of you are aware how awful Grand Theft Auto 5 is in terms of violence, gore, and sexism. But in case you don’t, the Grand Theft Auto series has always been one of the most violent series that you can buy in stores. The very first GTA was banned in Brazil and condemned in several countries, GTA 5 has a graphic torture scene that is player initiated. GTA: San Andreas had the Hot Coffee scandal which happened in 2004 when modders found unused code in the game for a sex minigame that was player controlled. And that’s only the beginning of the controversies surrounding the GTA series (click here to read more! XXXXXXX )
Anyways, back to me and the Mom. Who will now be referred to as Mom because she is that awesome. Since I was behind the counter I pulled a copy of GTA 5 from backstock and started ringing her up while making polite chitchat, the usual cashier stuff. But everything changed when I asked for her ID because of the M rating. At first Mom replied, “Oh sure thing let me grab it.” And started digging in her purse. But then what I said registered with her and she paused and looked at me.
“M rating? What does that mean?”
“Oh GTA 5 is rated M for violence, gore, bad language, and other stuff”. I won’t bore you with the whole spiel I go into when I’m asked about the M rating but basically I just explain why the game is rated M, what the M rating means, and that they can go on ESRB.org to see why it got that rating.
So I tell Mom about the website and she whips out her cell phone and gets on the site and starts reading. And she got MAD. She starts telling me about how her son knows she doesn’t like this sort of game and how he is going to be in so much trouble because he knows better than to ask for this sort of thing as she doesn’t tolerate this in her house. And he is so grounded for thinking he could get away with this. Then, Mom looked me in the eye and asked me to look up several other games for her to see if he’d done this with any other games.
“Yea sure thing, which games would you like me to look up?”
“Bioshock 2.”
“I can already tell you without looking that Bioshock 2 is rated M.”
“MY CHILD IS SO GROUNDED FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR. What about the first Bioshock?”
“Yep, that’s also rated M.”
“OH MY GOSH, what about Gears of War?”
“That entire series is rated M.”
To spare y’all from another 10 rounds of that, basically take every popular M rated title from the last 5 years and insert them in the above dialogue.
Eventually, Mom says “Oh my gosh, you must think me a horrible parent. I can’t believe I let him have those games.”
“Ma’am, I don’t think that at all. The fact that you’re concerned about this tells me that you are a good parent. And just so you know instead of throwing out those games you’re more than welcome to trade them in here and get some store credit or cash back for them.”
“Really? I’ll have to do that, I don’t want him playing those games anymore.”
“Yea, we also take gaming consoles, iphones, and tablets too!”
“Oh that’s wonderful! Thank you for being so patient with me and telling me all about this. I’m going home and to go through his gaming collection right now!”
And off she went, leaving me bored till I finally got to leave for the night.
BUT THAT’S NOT THE END. THIS IS WHEN SHIT GETSAWESOME.
The next day I’m working again, bored out of my goddamn mind. There’s only so many times you can alphabetize the store before going insane. As I’m looking out the window I see a car pull up and Mom hops out and then pulls out two huge duffel bags and walks in.
“Hey welcome back to Gamestop! What can I help you with!”
“Oh I’m so glad you’re here! So last night I went through my son’s game collection and most of them are rated M! So I decided to teach him a lesson about why you don’t lie to your mother. Seeing as I bought him these consoles and most of the games were bought with my money, his game consoles and games actually belong to me. Therefore, I would like to trade in all this." And proceeds to pull out his XBox 360, PS3, and every game he had for both consoles (over 50!) as well all the extra controllers and headsets he had.
"Are you sure?”
“Absolutely." I will never forget her smile when she said this nor the look in her eye. This is not a woman to be crossed.
So I traded everything in and she got back over $300 in store credit for everything. And with it she bought a Wii, a couple extra controllers, and a couple games rated E. Then she looked me in the eye and asked if we had any extra boxes laying around for the XBox One and if so could she have one?
"Are you going to put the Wii in it and give it to him?"
"Yes. Along with a note saying that this is what happens when you abuse the trust of your mother. I’m going to make sure this never happens again." It is at this point that Mom ascended to God Tier status with all Gamestop employees falling to their knees for a chance to bask in her glory.
I got her an XBox One box and sent her on her way after asking her to take the survey on the receipt.
"Oh of course dear, you’ve been such a big help. Let me write down your name so I don’t forget it.”
“Of course! I’m Lexi, but if your son asks my name is Deegan." (Deegan was my store’s manager at the time.
And then she left, leaving me with the best trade numbers of the month and the greatest story I’ll likely ever be apart of at GameStop. Mom, I never got your name, but you are my personal Gamestop Hero.
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 