I know that the YA genre has still a ways to go before becoming truly perfect (if that’s even possible) but can we just acknowledge how far it’s come in just a few years? When I first got into it, when I was around 12/13, it was full of books like Twilight, Hush Hush, Vampire Academy, or The Fault in Our Stars: completely white and heterosexual, a lot displaying abusive relationships, misogynistic ideals, and/or racist tropes.
Now some of the most popular young adult novels are about a Black Snow White and a Chinese Cinderella, or women like a bisexual plus-size girl that’s still considered beautiful and badass by everyone who meets her and a brown girl with an incredibly deep backstory that’s usually reserved for white girls. A bisexual black guy with “superpowers” and a disabled boyfriend. We also have lesbian!Cinderella, lesbian!Hades and Persephone, a disabled MENA anti-heroine lead with a black romantic interest, a Chinese dystopian heroine, and another dystopian couple that includes two geniuses: a Native American girl and a Mongolian guy. A series inspired by West-African culture and religion. A reimagining of London where it’s brown/black people ruling. A magical, dystopian society where the heroine is a brown latina.
And that’s just off the top of my head! I’m not even thinking a lot about it! I read like half of those only this year. I KNOW that a lot of them are far from perfect, but do you guys know just how much all of this means?
Young Adult literature is always looked down on because it’s just that thing nerdy teen girls enjoy, and it’s hilarious to make fun of them, but do you know how much more enjoyable and relatable it’s becoming now, for TONS of them? YA lit has become one of the most diverse types of media out there, and despite the very real need for improvement, I’m just so happy to see it get better all the time! ~mod ara
C’mon, you can’t dangle these amazing stories in front of our noses and not give us titles!
In order: The Lunare Chronicle, Six of Crows, Ash by Malinda Lo, The Dark Wife, idk this one, Warcross, idk this one, maybe Children of Blood and Bone, The Darker Side of Magic, idk.
my problem with the ‘harry becomes lord of 2/¾/5 ancient noble houses’ trope is so unbelievably petty because its that fic writers don’t take it to the potential extreme. like, okay, you wanna make harry the bossest of bitches i get that, i understand, i have that urge too from time to time, but c’mon, be a little more creative about it please
so how about a fic where harry goes to gringotts after the fighting is all over to try to make peace with the goblin nation because this boy does not need more problems and after much hostility and some groveling and promises of future payments for damages caused a plucky goblin lass comes and shuffles harry into her tiny cube office to discuss the nature of his financial situation
(this is a grave insult among goblins. getting handled by a female, first of all, because they are supposedly less capable bankers, hello misogyny among other species, and because they consider anyone who needs help with his money to be lower than cave scum. harry doesn’t know about his. and if he did, he wouldn’t care because he does, desperately, need help)
and plucky goblin lass (who we will call PGL for short) brings out this MASSIVE tome of parchment and slams it down on her desk. a cloud of dust rises. harry sneezes and gets a terrible feeling. some of the parchment is mildewing. the stack is taller than his hand is wide. this can only end badly
PGL tells him that he’ll need to read the entire book to fully comprehend the new scope of his property and harry kind of weakly says “what??”
and it turns out that heyo, when the death eaters swore to follow voldemort with all their lives and souls and magic in their little racist hearts they actually swore a modified liege lord oath which also has the coincidental side effect of ceding all titles (and property connected to said titles) held to the lord in question too. haha how funny who knew
and that’s an ongoing thing. so voldemort was the de facto head of two dozen magical houses at the beginning of the war and he just picked up more as he gained more followers and he probably could have just voted himself and his crew into every position of the government and run the country like that if he cared to do it but voldemort was not about dat political life. he wanted change and he wanted it now. he wanted to MAKE AMERICA MAGICAL BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN. so he started a civil war and just never informed his loyal death eaters of that little fact because they didn’t need to know.
and you might think that gringotts vaults are tied into bloodlines but they’re really not. the malfoy family vault belongs to whoever is the current head of the malfoy family. normally, that’s a malfoy and his malfoy spawn becomes the next head and so it passes through the family, accumulating inherited wealth. it was a working system until voldemort got involved and exploited the ever-living hell out of it.
now this all becomes harry’s problem because it turns out that Right of Conquest is an actual thing. what was voldemort’s is now his and voldemort has has the time to accumulate A Metric Fuck Ton of stuff.
also connected to titles are votes in the wizengamot. and whoo boy, this is where harry’s problem becomes really really really problematic. because the noble families squabble over those votes like children, hoarding them and passing them down, occasionally trading them for advantageous marriages and such, but mostly jealously guarding them like the politcal gold they are. it’s such a bitterly tight-fisted market that any one family has ~maybe~ three or four votes.
and now harry bloody potter has a hundred of the things and a completely unintentional stranglehold on the government. whoops
and then hermione would shotput harry straight into the
wizengamot
against his protests and things would become so hilarious i just
some jerkass attempts to increase his own salary for doing basically nothing
“how about no,” harry and his hundred votes say.
somebody attempts to tighten restrictions on where magical creatures like vampires and werewolves can work
“how about no.” harry crosses his arms. “actually, how about we repeal those bullshit laws already in place that make it almost impossible for werewolves to get a job right now, hmmmm? and how about we put something in place to catch abusive owners of house elves? and make sure they get paid? and vacation days? and healthcare? actually how about we get healthcare for EVERYBODY HOW ABOUT T H A T?”
ten generations of purebloods cry out in horror. look upon him ye mighty and despair.
the years after voldemort’s defeat don’t go down in history as The Golden Era. in fact, thanks to harry bloody potter (and some incessant nudging by hermione granger), they go down as The Decade of Frankly Astonishing Strides Toward Equality *cough* enforced by a semi-plutocracy.
(all thanks to a third tier plot never really explored by a would-be dictator YOU’RE ALL WELCOME)
Omg this is beautiful.
Harry as an accidental Lord Vetinari, oh my god.
Harry dealing with that all these pureblood families outright hate him. They were loyal to the Dark Lord, loyal to blood supremacy, loyal to their own enrichment and empowerment via the casting down of others, and now here’s Harry Potter, who opposes all of these things, who killed the Dark Lord and vanquished their dreams: their new Lord and Master.
And they can’t do anything about it because not only is it a binding magical contract but it’s their tradition, their law, their way of doing things, and they can’t attack Harry without shattering their own foundations in the process; they can’t even really convey their dislike of Harry because it would be disloyal to their own House.
So, all these pureblood wizards from old families who both hate Harry Potter and everything he stands for but also as a point of honor are perversely proud of him. He’s a wizard; he’s a half-blood, but he’s also the scion of a House of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, and he’s a powerful and talented wizard who vanquished the greatest Dark Lord history has ever seen. And he’s the Head of a dozen great and ancient wizarding Houses, he’s their Head of House so to speak, and they tie themselves in knots trying to figure out how to feel about him.
And the ones who don’t have a noble House, but only have their votes in the Wizengamot that Harry Potter owns, and you just don’t throw tradition out and start casting votes on your own inclination, well, they aren’t honor-bound and pride-bound to claim and embrace him, but they make their social standing from copying the greater Houses, and when their betters are quietly and gracefully saying “he’s a chaos-minded tyrant, but he’s our chaos-minded tyrant,” well, they buck up and agree.
Harry Potter, unlike Voldemort, isn’t lashing out at random or threatening to kill their children, so it’s sort of an improvement in many ways, even as they want to scream and throw things over all his reforms.
And after all, the old Houses value power. And Harry, above all, has power.
He goes down in pure-blood history as the Tyrant. The most powerful Lord their family lines have ever known. The man who reshaped their world. Elderly wizards tell their great-grandchildren long after his death that “I knew the Tyrant.” “I beheld him when my father took me to the Wizengamot, and he spoke to me.” “When I went to Hogwarts, he gave a guest lecture.” This far removed, at the end of their lives, the details of his rule are forgotten, the overturnings of tradition lost to history, and he is remembered with pride, even with adoration.
Their Tyrant. Their Lord. Harry Potter, the Greatest Wizard that Ever Lived.
(There are pictures of Harry at Hogwarts, at the Ministry, at St. Mungo’s, outside the Auror Office and in front of the Minister’s Office and in the entrance hall to the Wizengamot and in both the entrance hall and the Headmaster’s office at Hogwarts, and in every House he ruled. He wears stately robes and an impressive hat, gold jewelry, a beard (dark in some pictures, silver-shot in others, pure snowy white in still more, for he lived to be an old man himself, older than Dumbledore, older than Griselda Marchbanks, who lived to dance at his wedding), his glasses accentuating his brilliant green eyes, his scar more prominent in the pictures than it ever had been in life, surrounded with such trappings as the Sword of Gryffindor and the Elder Wand and a skull that purports to be that of Lord Voldemort.
Also at Hogwarts, in a back corridor next to a set of of dancing trolls and an overzealously combative knight, is a portrait commissioned by the executor of Harry Potter’s estate, in response to directions left in his will. This portrait depicts an eleven-year-old boy in brand-new wizard’s robes, with broken glasses and untidy hair that happens to cover his forehead. The portraits of his older selves go wrapped in the lofty dignity of the position he attained later in life; this child, filled with the untarnished wonder of the magical world, goes freely among the portraits with an anonymity Harry Potter never found in life, and loves it.)
GIVE ME THESE BOOKS.
it turns out that Right of Conquest is an actual thing. what was voldemort’s is now his
also connected to titles are votes in the wizengamot.
and now harry bloody potter has a hundred of the things and a completely unintentional stranglehold on the government. whoops
Here’s how I’d end it:
The sudden accumulation of power to Lord Potter means that the long delayed proposals to reform the Wizengamot into a fully elected body suddenly become very popular. Strange bedfellows are made between muggleborn reformers whove been campaigning for decades and pureblood plutocrats. Suddenly press elements ike the daily prophet discover a long held belief in representative democracy. And a popular movement rapidly forms.
Lord Potter is a reform minded fellow himself, so is naturally onboard with such proposals, not having wanted to be in charge of anything anyway, so the laborious process of drafting the legislation begins. The question of franchise is a bit difficult, as noone had ever bothered to make a proper census of the wizarding population. But a compromise is reached that any individual who can perform an act of magic on rquest is allowed to vote.
The purebloods are quite happy with this arrangment. They’re quite happy to surender their symblic status for a system where, as the richest, best connected and most politically experienced segment of the population they expect to be able to exercise more actual power.
With great fanfare and ceremony the last session of the old Wizengamot is closed. And they wait for hte results delivered via floo and apparation from across the land.
Harry Potter wins by a landslide. He seems just as surprised as everyone else by this development. Though later historians will debate whether he really was.
His victory is attributed to his personal celebrity and popular among the younger and muggle born voters. Also the, seemingly overlooked minor detail, that “individuals able to demonstrate magic” does not specify those individuals have to be human. House elves do not forget their friends.
odin is like “when thor was born the sun shone bright upon his beautiful face. i found loki on the sidewalk outside a taco bell”
Oðinn spake:
Bright the sun shone | at the time of Þor’s birth, And bathed his count’nance fair. Loki, wolf-father, | the trickster, the liar, I found on the cold pavement While returning in glory | from a grand hunt For a 3 AM quesadilla.
i wanna translate this into icelandic so imma do it
Sólin skein, björt og gullin við fæðingu Þórs á stígnum við Taco Bell Þar lá Loki
The amount of quality going into these shitposts is amazing
This is not shitposting, this is transformative work!
so fun fact yall. A certain someone splurged out the cash to get this remastered with illumination, what do yall think?
someday archeologists are gonna find this.
which is why i made things like the soft taco just as detailed as the emblems of thor (goat, hammer, rune) and loki (Baldersbrow holding back the fenriswolf, Jörmungandr, rune)
This is the man you must fight at the gates of Valhalla to prove you’re worthy of that mighty hall
It somehow gets crazier. this teenager trained for months. he staged fights in his parents’ swimming pool to train for this epic match. he choose halloween night for the final showdown. and it was for a school project. he could have chosen any seafood, but he decided on, in his own words, “that big fucking octopus.” magnificent bastard.
Y’all missed the part where he dragged it ashore and divers saw him, got upset and sent some pretty rough stuff to his family. Then, at the Washington Fish and Wildlife meeting, he showed up and was like “yeah, it should be protected.”
Except that the giant pacific octopus is nowhere near extinct and actually doing just fine.
So not only did he wrestle, kill, and eat a giant octopus– he got it protected from hunting in several locations even though the species doesn’t need protecting.
Fucking legendary indeed.
So the only person they need protection from is this guy.
…what sort of school project requires you to wrestle sea life?
That’s just how Washington is
to be clear, the school project was to “draw something from nature.” nobody asked him to wrestle an octopus.
…now, I have misunderstood the spirit of a lot of art projects before but
straight men repress their feelings so severely with their friends and family, and then they come across a girl (whos been socialized to be Empathetic and Nurturing) and they find that they can tell this girl about their Feelings ! everythings great she’s The One ! in reality they just have a normal human bond but actually connecting with anyone is so foreign to men and their emotionally barren male relationships that it seems like something great and wonderful. so now girl is put on a pedestal that she’ll eventually fall from bc she’s human and not just a Male Feelings Receptacle and everyone loses all bc fathers refuse to cry in front of their sons
Me: I don’t know if I ever want to be pregnant, I’d rather adopt a kid or two that are a bit older
Someone: Are you SURE? Older adoptees present UNIQUE CHALLENGES
Me: We are discussing human beings not digital pets
Literally every child every born and/or parented presents unique challenges. It’s like people are unique individuals…..or something………….
An amazing and revolutionary concept
When people ask me, “Why do you want to adopt teenagers?” I always answer, “Because you asked like that.”
I’m real over it.If I become a foster mom to a 17 year old kid and I get the privilege of the option to adopt them? You better believe I am legally making that kid mine.
“They’ll be a legal adult in no time, why spend the money to adopt? They’ll be aged out of the system.”
There’s no aging out of family, Marvin.
“They might be rebellious or smoke or do drugs or steal things! What if they won’t listen to you?”
Then I guess I’ll have to step up and do some fruxking parenting, Stanley.
“You want to adopt problem children then?”
All. Children. Are. Problem. Children. If you’re not prepared to deal with the fact that at some point, any child ever, whether you birthed them yourself or adopted them at any age, could become a problem? Then you are NOT ready to have children, and should really just step off and let the people who actually want to be parents live in peace with their kids.
Hey I’m so glad this post is picking up
“Older children are so difficult why would adopt them??” ALL CHILDREN ARE DIFFICULT GUESS WE SHOULDN’T HAVE ANY GODDAMN
Artisan Scribbles 