Okay, now this has probably been mentioned before, but I love the idea of James Potter’s family being Bengali.
The UK has a large Indian community, particularly in and around London, Birmingham, and Manchester. However, a lot of people who moved from India to the UK changed their names to sound more “British”, so that they wouldn’t be as discriminated. So it would be totally legitimate for the Poddar family of Kolkata to have moved to London and changed their surname to Potter.
Imagine how wonderful it would have been for Sirius to have gone from this very strict, white, traditional family, the kind that eats at opposite ends of long tables, with many different sets of fine silver cutlery, to the Potters’ loud, colourful house, where Mrs Potter would be singing along to Hum Tum Ek Kamre and Inhi Logo Ne while making chor chori. He would get to eat it with his hands, and sit close enough to everyone to talk and laugh. And how wonderful would it be the first time Sirius celebrates Holi and Diwali with them. They would even take him to Kolkata with them for Durga Puja, where they’d go pandal hopping, and Sirius would think it was more magical than anything his pureblood family had ever shown him.
The longer he lived with them, the more Sirius gets why James loves the Gryffindor colours so much. Red is prosperity, the eternal colour, gold is good fortune, a symbol of Lakshmi. Being a Gryffindor, for James, was a sign of good things to come. And you can just imagine how he would feel seeing the girl he has a crush on wearing red and gold … totally ignoring the fact that every other Gryffindor girl would also be wearing red and gold, he would declare it to Sirius as a sign that they were meant to be.
And the reason Vernon hated James so much was that he was horrifically racist. Not believing that a brownie could get a decent job. He used racial slurs and referenced “the colonies” during that fateful dinner, and James wouldn’t have been as used to the racial abuse due to the prejudices in the Wizarding world being different, so nearly hexed him when he dared insult his heritage, and that was the reason they never tried having dinner again.
“James Potter is a good English name. He is not English.”
“Actually, I’m from Hounslow.”
Then, after James and Lily’s deaths Sirius would wear nothing but white, and refused to let anyone help carry their bodies out. He was the one who washed and dressed James, as the only real family he had left, and made sure he was cremated properly, and his ashes scattered appropriately.
This is why my James headcanon is always Indian. It just makes sense. I also feel like the Potters not being white would be a reason for why the other pureblood families would look down on them a bit.
My only objection to this is that he wouldn’t be a Bengali. Poddar is typically a Marwari name. He could still be a Calcuttan!! Kolkata has a huge Marwari population, and typically big/middle businesses tend to be run by Marwaris so that might be one more reason why other purebloods would look askance at the Potters, because they made their money from business and trade and weren’t respectably unemployed.
Yo! Thanks for that correction, I had no idea!
That’s a really cool facet though, and one very in keeping with British traditional prejudices, i.e. Old Money versus New Money. Even if race wasn’t a thing, the New Money Potters would definitely be disdained by the other Old Money Purebloods. Working for a living? How dare they!
i hate when ppl make fun of me for trying 2 be positive and spread good vibes like fuck your bitter ass i spent a good portion of my short life being bitter and angry and suicidal if i wanna shoot sunshine out of my ass then i fuckin will
the worst part is when their all “we can’t all be neurotypical, Karen” like listen, I’m not neurotypical I’m just trying to get better jesus
Can you believe we live in a society where people are kissing Elsa’s ass and viewing her as a great big sister despite neglecting Anna through their whole ass childhood just cause she has the ability to make fucking freezer ice cubes while Nani, a dedicated brown woman who despite lost her parents by a lethal storm had to push her grief aside because Lilo was now her main priority, took care of her, fed her, probably paid money for her hula classes, busted her ass at her job to financially support Lilo, busted her ass to emotionally support Lilo, supported Lilo’s photography talent even though Lilo’s theme was a little weird, got her a dog and even during moments where Nani hit was hitting rock bottom (ex: getting fired but didn’t put her frustration out on Lilo) she did whatever it took to keep her little sister from being taken away, and wanted nothing but happiness and safety for her.
Okay I see your point,
and Nani is definitely an amazing big sister (the best one in Disney Canon; I love her so much)
and Frozen definitely shouldn’t be held up as the only Disney movie to show sisterhood when Lilo and Stitch is right there with this fantastic sisterly relationship and serving out some quality representation in the process, cmon guys.
That being said, it’s not like Elsa just decided to fuck off and abandon Anna. She was manipulated into isolating herself from a very young age, after a tragic accident that basically gave her depression and anxiety, if not outright PSTD.
The adults in her life decided everything for her, and treated her powers as something to be feared (which didn’t help when she was already suffering from guilt over accidentally hurting her sister).
The atmosphere of fear led to Elsa believing that she was dangerous to be around. Couple that with the mantra of “Conceal, don’t feel,” implying that Elsa should be working to suppress her emotions and not release them, and you have the recipe for a mental health disaster.
Because Elsa loved her sister Anna so much and didn’t want to hurt her, she stayed away from her even though it pained her to do so.
As Elsa got older and her powers grew stronger, her parents focused on her more and more, neglecting Anna. This is not Elsa’s fault. If anything, it’s her parents’ fault for choosing to isolate her in the first place (there were so many other options available, and they took perhaps one of the worst and most damaging ones), and Pabbie’s for being so cryptic about what Elsa needed (Curse the Fair Folk for not being clear with their prophecies).
They could have supported Elsa in her time of need; instead, they took an incredibly vulnerable little girl and taught her to fear and hate herself. No wonder she continues to isolate herself after her parents’ death— she’s terrified of hurting her sister again.
…..
TL;DR : Elsa didn’t “neglect” Anna; she was dealing with the aftermath of being manipulated and neglected herself, leaving her with mental illness and a fear of harming her sister. Anna’s neglect is mostly the fault of the adults in her life; they could have made sure she wasn’t isolated as well, and completely failed to do so. Frozen is about two sisters healing from the people in their lives who didn’t know enough to help them when they could have.
But seriously, if alien PLANTS ever show up, citrus and oaks are going to be trying to breed with them IMMEDIATELY.
We make fun of ourselves for being willing to fuck aliens, but I guarantee you that citrus and oaks are right there with us, aggressively trying to cross-pollinate with any new and interesting conquests.
if you spent any amount of ur life in iowa literally surrounded by endless fields of maize (’beautiful rolling hills of gold’ or whatever bullshit people who dont live here call it) and you remain unwilling to call plants out about the rate at which they fuck, always, constantly, ceaselessly, aggressively, than you have learned nothing and i hope u walk into the bathroom in the middle of the night and experience a scene like the bloody bathtub one in scream where u pull back the curtain and theres maize growing up the drain into ur home
I haven’t lived in Iowa for three generations and the urge to talk smack about plants still runs strong.
Please tell me about oak hybrids! I’ve learned a lot about citrus hybrids recently, but not about oak hybrids!
Full disclosure: I’m not an arborist, but this is how i remember it being explained to me by DBG’s Dan The Arborist:
It’s not actually clear if Oak Trees HAVE species.
To elaborate:
One oak tree looks/grows/and even tastes very much like another, to the point where some botanists and arborists are going “Can you really call this a different species when the changes are so miniscule that they could be chalked up to differneces between individuals?
Yes, Taste. sometimes the only way to tell one oak tree from another is that the bark is slightly more bitter than a different kind fo oak.
FURTHERMORE, when you DO find two very different-looking Oaks from different parts of the world whose last common ancestor was back in the goddamn Pliestocene, you can plant them next to eachother and they will gleefully comingle their DNA into a perfectly viable new tree.
Which will somehow manage to look exactly like another, unrelated tree.
So the theory espoused by Dan The Arborist, on that cold march morning after he’d spent 5 minutes loudly and somewhat profanely rambling in front of the most Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Tree-Looking Motherfucker of an Oak Bastard Child as mentioned above, goes as such:
Dan thinks that Quercus is a genus comprised of a single, highly variable species of tree that’s managed to take over most of the temperate parts of the world by being a little whore, unquote.
Those variants are the botanical equivalent of breeds, and a scrawny little Scrub Oak and a majrestic Burr Oak are the same species in the same way that a Chihuahua and a Newfoundland are both Dogs.
This is very much up for debate in botanical circles but if Dan discovers another redheaded bastard oak growing in the gardens he will take it to the next conference and thrash it about until they see it his way.
Quercus is a genus comprised of a single, highly variable species of tree that’s managed to take over most of the temperate parts of the world by being a little whore
I need this as an illuminated botany text page or something. I have not laughed this hard in weeks.
i just walked past the apartment beneath mine and through an open window i could hear my downstairs neighbor crying faintly while the song jolene played in the background and im just like… bitch are you okay…?
I actually ended up going back downstairs to check on her and brought some leftover cookies I baked this afternoon. she’s very sweet and going through a Breakup Mood™️ after being cheated on. she’s coming over to my gf and I’s annual bad movie night on Friday and she even let me pet her cat named Clarence
my gf thinks it’s funny but very fitting that our downstairs neighbor was able to summon a concerned lesbian just by playing jolene while crying about being done dirty by a man
there’s some assholes out there just letting their baby “cry it out”?
what the absolute fuck?
It’s a baby. It can’t fix its own problems. And it does, indeed, have problems they don’t just cry for no reason. Best case scenario you’re leaving a kid terrified and alone during its most formative years, more likely you’re risking serious health problems or even death by letting it sit in its own filth or starve or whatever because you can’t be bothered to take care of your fucking kid.
If you’re not willing to respond to a plea for help from somebody who is absolutely defenseless, you should not be anywhere near an infant. Put it up for adoption, hire a nanny, whatever, just don’t force them to rely on you for anything.
Oh yeah, that comes from this mentality people that have no idea of how to be oarents fall.
The “I’m not their slave and I won’t let them order me around” kind of mentality.
It’s really really dumb
Worse- these types of parents believe that their children requesting any kind of support, or expressing emotional responses, is a sign of manipulation. They’re a fucking infant. They can’t manipulate the colorful blocks yet, nevermind a whole human person.
Letting babies “cry it out” used to be common parenting advice, specifically meant to help babies sleep through the night better. My mum was advised to do it, but I remember her saying that she really struggled with it (I’m not sure if she ever wound up following it).
It’s not just bad parents who have terrible practices. First-time parents in particular can be prone to following bad advice through fear, particularly if the advice comes from authority figures.
Oh yeah, totally. I was pointing out the logical flaw of assuming that kids crying was for anything that wasn’t immediately necessary (even if that immediate necessity is “attention”) and kids crying is “bad” and “manipulative” and should be “trained out.” A lot of abusive parenting in general is obscured by ignorance, especially of power structures. For example: telling young boys not to cry, not helping them do things and letting them get hurt needlessly.
I was a baby with a lot of health problems (surprise!) who cried a lot, and the health provider that used to come to our house (a midwife I think) to see how my mother was doing, once told her to put me in the garage to let me cry myself out to “show the baby you won’t be dictated to”.
My mother never followed through with that particular suggestion, but the one time she let me “cry myself out” alone through the night on the advice of the midwife, she opened the nursery door to find me floppy and unresponsive. I was rushed to the hospital where I stayed for some weeks due to a viral infection that ravaged my immune system. After that my mother never let one of us “cry it out” ever again, despite the fact that doctors, nurses and midwives told her to do it again with my much sicker and disabled younger brother.
So yea, it’s ingrained in the system, particularly with older people who were raised by people who were also raised by people who believed that too much affection would “spoil moral character”. And it is some bullshit.
Also just to add, if you are feeding formula to your baby? Thank you for taking care of your child and making sure they get food. Breastfeeding while beneficial for some reasons, is not the only correct way to take care of baby, and people need to stop shaming parents for not breastfeeding. That shit is hard for some people, it can hurt and cause infections and the pressure they get put under to persevere with it to the point of drawing blood is horrible.
Y’all should just know that these recommendations are not a thing of the past. Parents are being told by their health care providers that they need to teach their kids to “self soothe” by leaving them to cry it out. RIGHT NOW. TODAY.
Also some mental health professionals are saying the same, but NOT because there is any research to back it up. They say it because it’s what they did or what was done to them.
The research is overwhelmingly in favor of responding to a child’s needs at night- EVEN WHEN THEY ARE NO LONGER BABIES. Nighttime is scary for small people. They NEED their caregiver. Emotional comfort is a NEED. A requirement for healthy brain development. There is a reason your instincts are screaming at you to respond to your baby. Don’t let fools who can’t be bothered to read a peer-reviewed article tell you to ignore your baby or your instinct to care for them.
I have NOT, but I’m so happy for the furry that designed this, out there living their best life. Go You, mystery gov’t contractor that saw this opportunity and took it.
