I dig the chapter opening here, with the back-and-forth between Polixenes articles and dialogue from background students. Moves time forward, moves plot forward, shows how a rumor only grows, and how Umbridge is inevitably going to catch wind of the Debate Association. Hm. Without Dumbledore’s name on the list in this timeline, he won’t be able to take the blame for the group on himself. But it’s also going to make Umbridge sound really stupid when she tries to tell the Ministry, “The students are engaging in an illicit—” checks notes “—debate club! They can’t modulate the key then not debate with me!” Let’s get Skeeter to do something useful for once, and write a smear piece about Umbridge being terrified of students discussing topics!

Man, the conversation in Dumbledore’s office takes SUCH a turn! I was expecting Cormac’s parents to be all worried and sad, but then Madam McLaggen just starts dunking on her son, like it’s Cormac’s fault he got lost (I mean, it kind of is, but not really?) And then she starts dunking on her husband, and then on her brother/in-law, and then on Umbridge . . . (You wrote Umbridge chastising someone for homophobic comments? Stop making me feel conflicted, Lily!) She pretty much dunks on everyone in the room, and some people who aren’t even there, and feels no fear or shame. Maybe she should be playing Quidditch, what with all the goals she keeps scoring. What a lady! Absolute fire in her soul! I’m definitely never getting married!

Now . . . now Umbridge banning Harry from Quidditch “for life.” She can’t actually do that, right? Like, through the end of his school career, sure, she clearly has that authority. But she can’t like, block Harry from pursuing the career of his choice after he enters the employed adult world, right? Right?

“Naturally, this lends an extra air of mystery to the whole Dinner, along with speculations about what sort of alliances may be brokered within the hallowed halls of Lindenhill…”
♪No one really knows how the game is played, the art of the trade, how the sausage gets made . . . ♪

I was going to say something about how nice it was that Qiu appreciated Harry’s occasional talks so much, and that they were helping her get through her mourning over Cedric. But uh. By the end of the chapter, it becomes clear she’s actually quite a bit more into Harry than I realized? (Dang my asexuality causing me to read ordinary friendship into all interactions!) So she’s not actually handling the mourning process as healthily as I thought last chapter . . . It’s almost as though allowing underage people to enter magically binding contracts that also brainwash them is like, bad or something? Who could have foreseen this?! Have the Ministry employees who work in the Love Room been informed of this?!?! (Oh, ye gods, I actually forgot the Love Room exists until I started typing this paragraph. The one in canon is uncomfortable enough; I am abjectly terrified to know how the Bonding culture in this timeline has warped it. But I’m getting way off track . . .) Also, I’ve got to say, after mulling over it at work throughout today: I’m not real impressed with Marietta! She keeps saying she’s trying to protect Qiu, but it feels more like she’s trying to protect the rules. Qiu clearly needed emotional support way before the designated mourning period ended. Maybe, if she had been able to have normal interactions with Harry right away, and they both deconstructed their trauma over Cedric’s murder together, Qiu’s desperation for comfort wouldn’t have built up to the point where she threw herself into Harry’s arms, in a way that Harry can’t say “no” to without hurting her feelings further. And for that matter, Marietta has arms of her own; she should have been noticing how lonely Qiu was becoming long before it reached this point. Hug your friend, Marietta! Your friend who is sad needs hugs! You are some kind of garbage friend, Marietta!

Man, Harry just can’t listen. Severina said to stay away, and he follows and eavesdrops. I’m worried his finding out, and forewarning Sirius, will prove to have made the situation worse, somehow. On the other hand, it was fun seeing Severina and Lily in that class together as kids, and I’m hoping that discussion they had together means Lily has knowledge of the cure available on-hand. Honestly, I would have assumed the poisoning was pre-rehearsed and Lily was just acting, except Harry seemed to be feeling a poison’s effects during his bond dream. And speaking of the dream, the whole nightmare/bond vision sequence was excellently written, and also I’m extremely amused that Harry is so subconsciously cued in to the attraction between Ron and Hermione that they’re just a couple by default in his dream!

The new words you taught me today: “couturier” and “sky-clad,” neither of which I’m ever likely to need to use!

Harry looked, too, and saw her watching a game of go between Qiu and Ron over by the fire.
I’m not sure if it matters, but everywhere else, you used a capital “G” for the game’s name?

—doctorlit loves Draco and Love working to help Luna keep her . . . self!

“. . . the school’s tendency to read romantic interest into even the most innocuous of things.” I can’t remember if I commented on this in an earlier year or not, but yeah. Raising children with this overemphasis on romantic pair-ups leads them to view every aspect of life through a romantic lens. It’s unhealthy in so many ways! It can lead to Draco’s situation, where he feels so obligated to seek a Bond that it affects his ability to form natural, casual relationships; it can lead to the misinterpretations with Harry and Hermione in first year, leading to teasing and public embarrassment; it can erasure of nonnormative relationships, like Liu/Jacques/Jenni’s, as well as of ace/aro folks choosing to abstain from relationships; and it can lead people to deemphasize other aspects of life, like schoolwork and social progress. Good thing we don’t see an overemphasis on romantic relationships in real world media, leading other types of relationships to get viewed as lesser by comparison! . . . >_>

Speaking of the real world, I see Umbridge has reached the “we need to segregate board games because girls like me are too dumb to compete with boys” stage of self-hurting TERFy feminism! Good for her, I’m sure all her female friends and relatives are so proud of her achievement. On the emotionally opposite end of chess, I adore the scene you wrote of Luna and Ginny playing Fanfiction Chess against each other. I was only able to read it in chunks, because I kept having to stop and laugh! “My king is full of hubris,” indeed. Also loved the quote from Qiu’s (dad/grandpa?) that “. . . winning distracts you from playing the game . . . rankings and prizes will only distract you from what you need to be doing . . .” Aside from being objectively true, this also has a tie with real world transphobia, and the accusation that kids are transitioning “just to win a medal.” Kids just want to have fun with each other; it’s the parents who are being weird about who gets the medal!

Qiu is such a well-written character, you’ve made her into such a supportive figure for Harry! Maybe it’s just that I haven’t read canon in so long, but my impression of Cho is that she was yet another schoolgirl character that doesn’t rise up to Rowling’s exacting standards of Good Female, and gets treated awfully by the narrative as a result. I like that Qiu is still clearly and understandably heartbroken over Cedric, but it isn’t turning into her only personality trait, and she can still have functional conversations with Harry about other topics, even doing her best to offer him advice, rather than needing him as an emotional crutch.

Oh look, overt, on-page proof that amab mages can absolutely store magic in their hair! Almost as though the insistence that witches exist to be magic banks for their husbands to withdraw power from is socially constructed or something, weird!

Ha ha, get cupboarded, idiot! See you in like five chapters, Cormac!

Aaaaaaaaaaah at last, the title gets referenced! I’ve been wondering of the title’s significance all year. I was expecting it to be some misogynistic old Avalonian fable (“Did you ever hear the Tragedy of Lady Polixenes the Wise?”), but it seems the lady is someone a bit more contemporary to out heroes! An antiauthoritarian someone, who places value on education and free reading materials, and doesn’t respect the social privileges of the Circle. Someone who’s willing to spend time doing further writing work after their homework is finished. Anyway, can’t wait to read the next chapter of “Lord Harry Potter and the Whispers of Hermione Granger.” Bye!

—doctorlit learned the slang word “skint” today

What a shock, Umbridge was harping on Draco for his hair and gender performance last chapter, and now McLaggen and a bunch of other students are calling him a girl. Almost like modeling bad behavior to young people makes them internalize that it’s an acceptable thing to do or something, what a shock, who could have foreseen this? McLaggen is being vile in this chapter, and frankly, I’m glad he got socked. It may not have been the right thing to do on Harry’s end, but bullies need to learn they can’t just torment other with impunity. (Frankly, any and all nearby Hogwarts staff should have intervened after the singing started and forced the students to stop, in the name of respectful sportsmanship.)

I’m thinking about Hermione’s rather random detention with Bonnefoy, and wondering . . . did she produce that cursed rune, rather than Draco? (Don’t answer that.)

I . . . wow. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by Umbridge being racist/anti-immigrant against Liu, but it kind of did catch me off guard? I guess I assumed his status as coming from the equivalent of a Noble and Most Ancient House would ingratiate him to Umbridge well enough, but clearly that isn’t enough to bypass her level of prejudice . . . And on a more general note, with the enmity between school houses going on, and Harry’s argument with Ron at the end, it feels like Umbridge is having the opposite effect that she did in canon; instead of most of the school uniting against her strict rules, she’s successfully dividing the students from each other. The ruling class does love to dismantle solidarity . . .

Oh dear, I spy a Vanishing Cabinet, hopefully not filled with foreshadowing for year six in this timeline . . .

I have major respect for Draco here. Even with all the drama and insult that happened in this chapter, he’s still able to articulate clearly to Harry why his responsibilities to his family still matter to him, despite his lack of faith in Mother Magic, and how Harry’s inability to respect that is hurting Draco. I still don’t want him to marry Astoria, of course, but he’s keeping his head above water and making his priorities clear in the midst of all the turmoil going on around them. He's quite a kid, has a good head on his shoulders!

—doctorlit has never felt so much solidarity with Peeves as when hearing him refer to Quidditch as “sportsball”

The reason I went there was because the original worldbuilding claimed to be trans-inclusive, but was still incredibly, deeply gender essentialist. In the original worldbuilding, witches store magic in their hair. Wizards and Wixes (fanon-popular term for nonbinary magic-users, first started in 2013) literally cannot store magic in their hair according to the og worldbuilder. They've doubled down on that recently. I think they justify it by suggesting that if you change your gender, magic automatically recognises it and you suddenly get magic hair, or your magic migrates into a ring or a cuff? But to me, honestly, it feels like too many extra steps when the more inclusive idea that still fits within the broad strokes of the setting is that anyone can put magic anywhere they like, and you're only able to wield the magic in your hair if it's past your shoulders.

Also, the ways in which the og worldbuilder approached nonbinary mages felt like they were just creating a third gender with third gender roles (which is, in a nutshell, to be in the exact middle between Witch and Wizard rather than anything that would take them outside binary gender). They also said, in a comment on their lexicon, that "Mother Magic just knows" whether or not you're trans, which... if Mother Magic is all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful, then why would She not bother to make your bits match your gender before you were born? Why would She choose to make someone uncomfortable in their own skin? The worldbuilder also refuses to engage with the implications of the gender essentialist structure of "only witches can keep magic in their hair" which is like... so then what happens if an AFAB mage can't store magic in their hair? Is that how they know early on that they're not a witch? But what if they did want magic hair because they don't like rings or cuff bracelets? What would their family say?

And, ofc, the worldbuilder says that trans mages would just take a permanent gender-change potion (which, I suppose, would make their hair magic, or take the magic out of their hair depending on the destination) which speaks to this overall push to be nice-smiling-people-at-the-church-ice-cream-social normal and to conform to prescribed gender roles and etiquette based on the ability of one's body to store magic. It's respectability politics gone wild. It's "oh, it's okay to be LGBTQIA because magic exists to remove the barriers between your queerness and being normal." (As Luna is going to say in a couple chapters, Merlin forbid a girl swap out her broomstick and Bludgers for a nice pair of cat ears or something!)

Anyway, all of this had to be condensed into plotlines and dialogue, so it was a struggle to get right to the point of what I wanted to say without pontificating on how restrictive/gender essentialist this piece of worldbuilding was. I hope it did come out but not like... too heavy-handed? I'm glad you enjoyed the shoutout to the Frog Choir and Harry's burning urge to Throw Hands for his friends :D Thanks for reading!