Cho Yule Ball

Cho Yule Ball

Dress designs for Cho at the Yule Ball ❄️✨ In the book, her dress robes were described as silvery Chinese-style robes. Now, I don't know nearly enough about traditional and modern Chinese fashion, so I took the description with a very large grain of salt. For a few designs, I took inspiration from the Hanfu, a traditional Chinese garment, and I wanted it to look witchy. After all, this is a Wizarding BALL. It's all fancy fashion and odd influences from wizarding culture. I imagine Cho was very careful to choose her dress robes. She wanted something that felt like 'her'. After all, it's one of the few times they're allowed out of their uniforms and into something personal. She's a pretty popular girl, so she would wear something flattering, yet not too complicated. Cho doesn't need much to look and feel beautiful <3 Like the dress robes for the Patil twins, I took inspiration from Chinese culture, but just a little. Cho is not defined by her heritage, she's her own person. It's up to her to choose whether she wants to dress traditionally or not at all. I added some sapphire and bronze touches for Ravenclaw because she would be proud of her house. Also, I can't draw JUST silver, because then I would lose my mind :) I already did silver for Fleur and two in a row is a lot of one colour... 💙🧡 What do you think? I personally really like 1 and 6...

Harry Potter, the “Perfect Victim” mentality, and the fandom’s treatment of him in Order of the Phoenix

“Harry is an asshole in Order of the Phoenix!”

“Harry is so unlikable in book 5.”

“My enjoyment of Order of the Phoenix was killed by Harry’s attitude.”

Odds are that if you are part of the Harry Potter fandom, you’ve seen a version of these sentiments echoed many times. A large part of the fanbase seems to hate Harry in this one book, even going as far as ranking this book last in book rankings because they can’t stand his “attitude”

But in this book, Harry is suffering from severe C-PTSD. He meets all of the diagnostic criteria, and it’s clear that he’s struggling immensely throughout this book. But there seems to be a lack of empathy for Harry in this book. Why?

The “Perfect Victim” Mentality

For those who do not know, the “perfect victim” is a mentality where people seem to only believe and/or empathize with victims of trauma if the person is a “perfect victim.”

But what is a “perfect victim”? Since we will be focusing on the treatment of Harry after his trauma, I’ll be focusing on the perfect victim mentality post trauma

A “perfect victim’s” trauma isn’t visible from the outside, and if it is, it only results in the victim crying and having nightmares. All of their trauma just results in them being sad and anxious after their trauma. All of the messy parts of PTSD are not present

Harry is not a perfect victim

As you can tell from the description above, Harry is not a perfect victim (because no one is). Harry gets angry and screams at his friends. He becomes hyper vigilante; always ready to pull his wand out and fight to defend himself. He keeps his wand tightly in his hand around Snape or Malfoy. His PTSD is what actual PTSD looks like, not the “acceptable” trauma response looks like

There is definitely an empathy gap between Goblet of Fire (when Harry gets his trauma) to Order of the Phoenix. Because honestly, in Goblet of Fire, one could argue Harry was a perfect victim. He is weaker than Voldemort, he was vulnerable, he fought back, he reported it immediately. That fits the criteria for perfect victim when the trauma actually happens. Yes, in universe by Fudge he’s not a victim at all for specific reasons, but we, as the audience that actually saw what happened, he comes across a perfect victim

Even in Goblet of Fire afterwards, Harry is still a perfect victim post-graveyard. His trauma results in him being sad and distant for the rest of the school year. As I stated above, that is the perfect victim’s response to trauma

This is why the audience has no trouble feeling empathy for Harry at the end of book 4. He was a child who got kidnapped, watched someone be killed and tortured by someone much older, stronger and more powerful than him. He tells someone (Dumbledore) what happened as soon as he got back. And then he spends the small amount of time at Hogwarts being sad and disassociating. What happened to him, and his response, is easy to digest, so everyone feels bad for him

But then in Order of the Phoenix, when the PTSD truly sets in, Harry is no longer a perfect victim. He gets angry and lashes out, at Dudley at first, then Ron and Hermione later, and then Dumbledore way later. He is ready to defend himself at all times, thinking about cursing Dudley, clutching his wand in Potions, etc. Suddenly, the messy parts of his PTSD rise to the surface

The fandom’s treatment of Harry in Order of the Phoenix

This causes the fandom to say all kinds of things about OOTP: That Harry is cold, Harry is a bully to Ron and Hermione, Harry is unsympathtic

The fandom’s treatment of him does a 180 compared to Goblet of Fire, because his trauma is no longer digestible. He is no longer a perfect victim, so he no longer gets empathy

I think this plays into why people say they like the movie more. In the movie, Harry stays a perfect victim. The movies remove him screaming at Ron and Hermione, remove his anger and jumpiness, remove him destroying Dumbledore’s office. He is just sad and distant. The movie’s were afraid to show just how deep Harry’s PTSD is in favor of the perfect victim narrative and in turn, people prefer the movie

The most disturbing thing about this is the implication behind it. If people can’t even have empathy for a fictional child, who is the main character of the most beloved children’s series of all time, who got kidnapped and tortured, what does that say about their response to real people who have trauma?

THIS IS US BTW :3 IF U EVEN CARE ^_^!!

I love you hated female characters. I love you female characters who are flawed. I love you female characters who mess up and try to do the right thing after. I love you female characters who get the undeserved vitriol from fans. I love you female characters who fans completely condemn because of one mistake they made. I love you female characters who fans completely condemn because of one mistake they made as a child. I love you female characters who people blame for ripping apart their ships instead of the larger forces that be. I love you female characters who get all the hate as the male characters who do worse in canon get absolutely none. I love you female characters who get hated on because they told a man “no.”

I think the one thing I disagree with you on is the marietta thing lol.

Like idk, maybe it's because I grew up in a dictatorship where we had to hide normal activities because if we were caught doing certain normal things, we would face strong punishments (a beating, torture, prison, even death) but for me reading those books, as horrible as it was, it seemed fitting.

At 15/16 years old, you're old enough to know better. A spineless coward deserves to face the consequences of their actions.

Marietta betraying everyone, including her best friend, out of cowardice, could've resulted in serious consequences. Any of them being expelled and having their wands taken from them could've been a death sentence.

Like it was serious.

Hermione pisses me off for a lot of reasons in the books, and she goes way too far in her physical violence throughout the books as well, but this instance was not one of them. At least in my opinion.

Maybe it's a me problem, but it's difficult to sympathize with cowards, especially when those cowards hurt other people. This wasn't a "I'm gonna snitch on a few students sneaking past curfew and they'll get a dozen points taken as well as a detention cleaning a classroom" this was literally giving a disgusting evil woman the opportunity to torture students who are just trying to prepare themselves to survive in the middle of a war, because all the adults are failing them.

"Marietta didn't know" she's not a child. She has the ability to think. "Her mother" she sees her mom 2 months a year and has been living away from her for 6. This is not a 12 year old repeating what her parents tell her, this is a grown ass teenager who had the ability to literally ask her own questions and make her own research and critically think, but chose not to and instead chose ignorance.

It's war. You betray people, and cause horrible consequences to everyone around you which results in so many students being abused and harmed, you get the permanent curse.

Anon I think you misread me, I completely and totally agree with you ❤️ I meant that I would defend Hermione, not that I defend Marietta. I’ve written more about this topic here if you’re interested.

It’s like people ignore that Hermione was nearly murdered by Tom Riddle at 12 years old. In addition to everything with Umbridge that year, the consequences in this war for her as a Muggleborn are very real and very personal.

Also, when Hermione was cursing the parchment, it’s not like she knew the culprit would be someone trying to protect their mother or whatever - she was likely assuming the worst motivations.

I think to villainize Hermione for this is a very sexist take and minimizing the impact of blood purity - especially if you defend fascist men like Regulus, Tom Riddle, Snape, Barty, etc.

my precious  boy 🥺 ⚡ 💖