Fanfic / Harry Is A Dragon, And That's Okay

aka: Harry Is A Dragon And Thats OK

Art by amalgamzaku

Harry Potter is a dragon. He's been a dragon for several years, and frankly, he's quite used to the idea — after all, in his experience nobody ever comments about it, so presumably it's just what happens sometimes. Magic, though, THAT is something entirely new.

Harry Is a Dragon, and That's Okay (also posted at Archive Of Our Own) is a Harry Potter fanfic by Saphroneth, the author of Ashes of the Past, Vulpine, Legendarily Popular, and Saruman of Many Devices.

The premise is... Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Somewhere during his childhood, Harry Potter turned into a dragon, but since no-one seemed to notice or care, he assumed that it was just something normal that happened to some people, even though he never saw any other dragons anywhere. That lasts until his 11th birthday, when a giant named Hagrid appears and sees him as a dragon for the first time, and Harry is soon drawn into a world that's much more interesting and magical, where being a dragon is, while certainly not normal, still just as okay.

The story was developed and community-reviewed on Spacebattles, then assembled into completed chapters and published to FanFiction.Net. As of July 4, 2021, it is fully complete with a total of 102 chapters including the epilogue.

---

Harry Is a Dragon, and That's Okay provides examples of:

A-D

• Accidental Aiming Skills: In the last moments of the Gryffindor vs. Ravenclaw Quidditch game in Harry's 6th year, while both Cho and Ginny are diving for the Snitch, the Gryffindor Beater Melody hits away a Bludger in such a way that it knocks the Snitch right out of Cho's path and right into Ginny's, thus clinching the win for Gryffindor. No-one, Melody included, expected that.
• Accomplice by Inaction: Discussed during the first conversation with the three-headed dog sisters Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, when they're asked what happens if only one of them does something punishable and the others protest that they shouldn't be punished along with her. Cottontail says they had tried that argument and their dads had just said that the innocent sisters should've stopped the guilty one.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • Harry gets lost inside of Hogwarts one evening while trying to look for the Gryffindor Common Room and winds up near the Ravenclaw dormitory and is questioned by the Doorknocker when it spots him, which unknowingly allows Harry entry into the Ravenclaw dormitory.^note For context purposes, the way to access the Ravenclaw dormitory is to answer a question that the Doorknocker asks of them.
  Doorknocker: Good Lord, are you a Dragon?
  Harry: Yes? I'm fairly sure I have everything you need to be one.
  Doorknocker: Wait, I didn't... oh bother.
  • After Harry and Co.'s foray down the third-floor corridor to find the Mirror of Erised, Harry notices an odd red stone in his pocket. He decides to put it with his snacks. Turns out that the fact that Harry likes to hoard 'valuable things' meant that he met the "wanted to find it, but not use it" criteria to retrieve it.
  • Harry and Co. come up with a book translation spell "Xenographia", while figuring out a book-copying spell "Xerographia".
  • Harry was merely conversing about The Lord of the Rings, comparing Kreacher to Gollum, and talking about his role with the evil relic ring, but that inadvertently gains him Kreacher's trust and convinces the house elf to tell him about Regulus, Voldemort and the locket.
  • George was just making a Pun when he uses "Flipendnote" as a spell to navigate to a book's endnotes, but it actually works.
  • Ron's dream to be the first wizard to land on the moon is mainly driven by his passion for space and his desire to stand out from his brothers. It doesn't occur to him until he finally accomplishes it that in achieving this goal, he's made it into the history books. The world history books.
• Actually a Good Idea: While waiting for the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang delegations to arrive for the Triwizard Tournament, Ron gets the idea to ward off the October chill with Bluebell Flames. McGonagall tells him off at first, but Dumbledore decides to go with the idea, and as such, Hogwarts greets their international visitors all Wreathed in Flames.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • Draco falls over laughing when Moody tries to give Hermione an Imperius order he thinks is impossible, and she succeeds (specifically, turn into a dinosaur).
  • Everyone can't help but get the giggles when the Durmstrang students arrive, see the Hogwarts students Wreathed in Flames (Cold Technicolor Fire), and Karkaroff makes a Black Comedy joke.
    Karkaroff: It seems your old Salazar Slytherin was right. The policy on Muggleborn students did lead to witch burnings.
  • Hermione has a bit of a giggle, then feels bad about it, upon learning that Salazar Slytherin named his basilisk "Empress" in Greek: βασίλισσα, or "basílissa" in English. She appreciates the pun, but he wasn't a very nice person and she isn't sure she should speak well of his memory.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Because their schooling isn't being constantly interrupted by life-threatening situations every year, Harry, his friends, and the population of Hogwarts in general are much more competent than their canon counterparts. Multiple students master advanced magic such as becoming animagi, and some take their studies more seriously due to having their own goals they want to achieve (such as Ron, who wants to be the first wizard in space).
  • Harry, being a dragon, is generally stronger than his canon counterpart by default, due to his ability to No-Sell most magic and being able to fly without having to use a broom.
  • After largely being a non-entity for most of the story, Voldemort reclaims some of his canon threat by allowing his spirit to possess a massive dragon, convinced that is the only way he'll be able to finally defeat Harry. He then proceeds to attack the school with his followers, starting the story's version of the Battle of Hogwarts.
• Adaptational Early Appearance:
  • First year introduces: Charlie Weasley (flew over to see Ron's new dragon friend), Sturgis Podmore (Quirrell's replacement as Defence professor), Remus Lupin (got in contact with Harry over the summer), Dolores Umbridge (present at Harry's Wizengamot hearing).
  • Second year introduces: Cormac McLaggen (mentioned last year as the Gryffindor seeker, only conversed with Harry this year), Peter Pettigrew (discovered by accident), Sirius Black (released as a result), Kreacher (upon being invited to Grimmauld Place), Nymphadora Tonks (incognito as Sue D. Nym as Lockhart's Defence replacement), Andromeda Tonks and her family (invited over by Sirius for the summer).
• Adaptational Explanation: The canon story doesn't explain how the Marauders substituted Peter for Sirius as the Secret-Keeper for the Potters' Fidelius Charm without Dumbledore, who cast the spell, finding out. This fic explains that Peter took Polyjuice Potion to look like Sirius, so that Dumbledore would cast the spell on who he thought was Sirius.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • Slytherin's basilisk is an Ax-Crazy Attack Animal in canon. Here, while Empress is certainly not all that friendly at first, it's because she's been a Tyke Bomb her entire life; being shown kindness causes her to have a Heel–Face Turn and befriend Harry.
  • Pius Thicknesse isn't used as a patsy by Voldemort, and shows up in his regular Ministry job in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
• Adaptational Intelligence:
  • While not exactly duffers in canon, Ron and Neville are a lot more involved in their studies, Ron because he's motivated to learn more about space, and Neville because he's going with the flow. It's even Lampshaded when Ron interprets some concepts he's learning about in terms of rocket science.
  • There was never any hint in canon that Fluffy's intelligence was greater than any normal dog's. Here he's a Talking Animal of at least human-level intelligence, and quite eloquent at that.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Snape, as per Adaptation Relationship Overhaul, isn't as mean towards Harry or the Gryffindors as a whole, in part because Harry is a dragon and not a living reminder of his lost friend and hated rival sitting in front of him all the time. He's not even Neville's greatest fear.
    • After being the one to discover Peter Pettigrew and the one to capture him, Snape is in relatively higher spirits, as he thinks that by getting Sirius out of jail, Sirius now owes him, and for good measure, he's put one of the other Marauders there, the one who truly betrayed Lily to her death. As another consequence, Snape is distinctly more mellow to the students as compared to canon and even willing to correct their mistakes, though still caustically critical.
      Snape: Only one rat spleen. Your book says two, because it was clearly written by a dunderhead. Do not be a dunderhead.
  • Downplayed with Ron, who is just as personable and a good friend to Harry as in canon, but has the factors leading up to his Always Second Best inferiority complex removed, like Harry not becoming Seeker in his first year or a Triwizard Champion. Also, a Muggle book about space has given him a goal to aim for that no wizard in history, let alone his brothers, has accomplished: becoming the first wizard on the moon. As a result, their few canonical fallings out (such as during the Triwizard Tournament) never occur.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Umbridge is simply not the threat she was in canon. Since she joined Hogwarts on her own rather than as an appointment by the Ministry, she has no official power over Dumbledore, meaning that she can't enforce her will over the school. When word gets out about how she runs her classes, Dumbledore and McGonagall are quick to put new rules in place, preventing her from doing anything. Eventually, the students stop attending her classes entirely in favor of self-study with the Defense Club, and without the Ministry's backing, she's incapable of doing anything about it.
  • Zigzagged with Voldemort. He's still every bit as competent as he was in canon; it's just that a combination of Harry being a dragon (and thus able to No-Sell most of the magical threats directed his way) and everyone acting smarter and more sensible means he doesn't pose as much as a threat. His resurrection and return are delayed until the summer between Harry's sixth and seventh year, and his initial attempt to kill the latter ends with him being blown up again and most of his followers being captured by the Ministry. Ultimately, he's only able to become a serious threat again by becoming an Adaptational Badass via possessing a dragon, and even then the damage he causes in the long run is rather minimal.
• Adaptation Expansion: Applies to the Ancient Runes and Arithmancy classes, given that Harry takes these classes for his third-year electives instead of Divination. In fifth-year, Harry even ponders the "Ehwaz/Eihwaz" OWL question that had tripped up Hermione in canon.
  • These are expanded when Harry goes into NEWT classes for Ancient Runes, and also Alchemy. The latter is especially prominent since we get to see Dumbledore in a full teaching role.
  • Also, Harry's not off on a hunt in his 7th year, so we get to see what a final year at Hogwarts looks like.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • Averted. When Harry gets his snowy owl, he has a lot of ideas of what to name her from his literature collection, but she rejects every one he suggests except her canon name, Hedwig.^note Out-of-Universe, the author did consider other options, but kept accidentally writing Hedwig anyway, so decided to expand on Harry's canon reasoning for naming her that way.
  • Hagrid's Norwegian Ridgeback is hatched under the supervision of Professor Kettleburn, who informs him right away that the dragon is female, as opposed to canon not revealing that until seven books later. As a result, she ends up going by Nora.
  • Fred and George's joke shop is called Marauders' Magical Miscellany instead of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
  • Downplayed with the Dursleys; while they're certainly not welcoming to Harry as he's growing up, Harry doesn't really think badly of them due to him shrugging off anything bad they try to do, and being able to fly off for some alone time. As Harry spends more time outside of Privet Drive either visiting friends and even being with Sirius for the majority of the summer, and thus not causing trouble with any magical mishaps, their interactions hew towards neutral, and Harry's final departure on his 17th birthday is quite amicable.
  • Snape's view towards Harry is much less antagonistic, since he looks like a dragon and not a Generation Xerox of his father with his mother's eyes that is much easier for Snape to loathe. Also, Harry can at least appreciate the seriousness Snape delivers to something as dangerous as potion-making, so he treats him with respect.
  • Similarly, Harry isn't as antagonistic towards the Slytherins as a whole. He is fairly friendly with Daphne Greengrass (who is his partner in Potions), Tracey Davis and Blaise Zabini, doesn't have a problem with talking to the Slytherin students Tyler and Anne Smith, and addresses Draco Malfoy by his first name (even if Draco still has an axe to grind with him).
  • Kreacher undergoes a complete about-face with his relationship to Harry and Sirius after Harry accidentally promises to help Kreacher with Slytherin's locket and Regulus's last request.
• Adapted Out:
  • Since there's no crisis about Voldemort returning in 6th year, Rufus Scrimgeour doesn't replace Fudge as Minister for Magic, and isn't even mentioned anywhere in the story.
  • Similarly, there is no need for Snape to take the Defence job and thus no need for Horace Slughorn to come out of retirement to replace him. Harry only sees Slughorn in Dumbledore's Pensieve.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Introduced as an axiom of Transfiguration named "Aliss Archer's Alliteration Aphorism", where a Transfiguration spell works better if you can phrase the transformation in an alliterative way, like turning a meddling man into a monkey.
• Adults Are Useless: Averted in many ways. A lot of problems throughout the books are easily solved by simply asking the teachers for help.
  • When Hagrid receives his dragon egg, Harry and co. convince him to get Professors Dumbledore and Kettleburn's help, the latter of whom is fully qualified to hatch dragons. The newborn Nora even ends up becoming Hogwarts' new mascot.
  • When Harry brings up Umbridge's targeted detentions and provocations of Hogwarts's non-human students, Dumbledore and McGonagall are quick to implement new rules.
• A Kind of One: Averted. It's made clear in a few conversations that the proper names for some beast species are "three-headed dog" and "winged horse", and Cerberus and Pegasus are just famous members of said species. And Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail Barlos would know, since they're a three-headed dog themselves.
• Alchemy Is Magic: Alchemy is a NEWT elective taught by Dumbledore himself, though it hasn't been offered in a while because Dumbledore forgot to tell anyone that it was an option. It is essentially a combination of potions, transfiguration and Muggle chemistry in the sense of manipulating material properties through experimental processes, but with a lot of arbitrary and metaphysical properties that have to be taken into account, from the origin of the materials used and the shape of the alembics, to the alchemist's ideas of what properties a material is thought to have and even the identity of the alchemist themselves.
• The Alibi: Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Draco says that his parents were in a Gringotts meeting at the time. Blaise asks him if it was one of those retroactive meetings that Gringotts offers for a lot of money.
• Alliterative Name: Courtesy of Hagrid, all the baby dragons growing up at Hogwarts have this naming convention, with a dash of Species Surname.
  • Nora the Norwegian Ridgeback is the first (due to Hagrid's deal), and she soon becomes Hogwarts' mascot.
  • In Harry's 4th year, more soon follow for Empress the basilisk to teach Parseltongue to see if they grow up sapient: Sarah the Swedish Short-Snout, Gareth the Welsh Green, and Oliver the Antipodan Opaleye.
  • Then even more show up in Harry's 6th year: Christie the Chinese Fireball, Billy the Hebridean Black, Lucy the Romanian Longhorn, Vicky the Peruvian Vipertooth, Horst the Hungarian Horntail, and Ivor the Ukranian Ironbelly.
• All-Loving Hero: If there's one word to best describe Harry, it's easy-going, even against those that try and mistreat him (and usually fall flat due to how tough he is). Even through all of the Dursleys' canon mistreatment, including making him sleep in a cupboard, he just brushes it off and keeps sending them Christmas presents, doesn't try and antagonize them, and even manages to rebuild a better relationship with Dudley. When he learns that Dobby was trying to hurt him and send him home, he gets more mad at the fact that Dobby was being mistreated than any of his "assassination" attempts. Though, as Lockhart finds out, hurt his friends, and you'll quickly remember that he's still a dragon.
• Already Done for You: Nagini the snake is the only one of Voldemort's Horcruxes that Harry doesn't destroy personally; Empress the basilisk eats her during the Battle of Hogwarts instead. Also, Harry and Dumbledore don't learn that Nagini even became a Horcrux until Richard (the dragon Voldemort was possessing) lists out all of Voldemort's Horcruxes and they realize that all of them have been dealt with.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Comes up In-Universe in a bit of History of Magic homework, where the group takes historical magical figures and tries to come up with alternate explanations for their depictions. One example is Wendelin the Weird who was burned as a witch many times because it was said she enjoyed the sensation, but alternatively imagined as a martyr who came forward as a witch to protect mistakenly accused Muggles, and who gave the "enjoyed being burnt" excuse because other wizards would scorn that motivation.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Hermione counts, as she goes to the Yule Ball as Clever Girl the deinonychus, with all her feathers colored in a shiny green-to-blue gradient.
• Ambiguous Situation: Lucius Malfoy's involvement in the Death Eaters from Harry's Sixth Year onwards is unclear. He isn't present during Voldemort's failed attack on Harry during the summer between Sixth and Seventh Year, which saw all the associated Death Eaters immediately captured, and it's unclear if he took part in the Battle of Hogwarts. Either he managed to escape the latter before anyone could notice him, or he just cut his losses from Voldemort entirely in the name of self-preservation (and his son's increasingly tolerant and more progressive views).
• Ambiguous Syntax: In second-year, Ernie yelps "Dragon!" and just as Hermione is reminding him that Harry has been their classmate for over a year, Harry gets bowled over by the dragon in question, a much bigger Nora.
• And Here He Comes Now: During Lupin and Tonks's wedding reception, just as Sirius is wondering where Snape is, the Potions Master makes his eye-catching Big Entrance, complete with his signature billowing cloak.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: The response at the end of fifth year when Dumbledore says the following:
  "The position of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher is now vacant."
  Umbridge looked as though someone had hit her over the head very hard, possibly with a classroom. Everyone else just sort of sat there in surprise for a moment, and then — and Harry couldn't have told you where — the cheering started.
• Animal Athlete Loophole: Averted. Even as Harry joins the Gryffindor Quidditch team in second year, no fuss is made that the newest Quidditch player is a dragon. In later years, Isaac (griffin), Melody (vampire) and Dominic (manticore) are seen joining their own house's respective Quidditch teams.
• Animal Motifs: In reference to his name and his prideful attitude, Draco's Patronus is a frilled dragon (the mundane lizard).
• Animorphism: Animagi. Though the ritual to become one is long and involved, doing it becomes a lot easier after Sirius is released and offers his advice, and Hermione devises a more efficient schedule to do so.
  • In Harry's second year, Percy achieves his Animagus form of a heron. Harry immediately thinks of Issola, which becomes his Marauder/Animagus name. As Harry puts it, herons are all about being polite, courtly and respectful, while reminding everyone of their very sharp beak.
  • Later that same year, Fred and George achieve their forms of mustelids (a mink and a pine marten, though it's not said which twin is what). They are named Trouble and Strife.
  • In their third year, all four of Harry's friends attain Animagus forms before Halloween. Neville becomes a panther (Lapcat), Ron becomes a squirrel (Nutkin), Dean becomes a crow (Upstart. It was initially named Jim), and Hermione becomes a deinonychus (Clever Girl).
  • In Harry's fourth year, Ginny attains her Animagus form. Fittingly, she's a peregrine falcon, nicknamed Perry.
  • By the time he's graduated, Cedric has his Animagus form of a badger, as the archetypical Hufflepuff. The year after, we see Cho Chang reveal her Animagus form of a swan during a Quidditch match.
  • For a non-Animagus example, there are the Trickster Twins Tyler and Anne Smith, who can turn into foxes as a natural aspect of being kitsune. Often, they each pretend to be the other twin's pet to fool other students.
• Anti-Climax:
  • Harry's second-year Quidditch match against Hufflepuff ends with Harry catching the Snitch within a few seconds.
  • The search for Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem takes exactly twelve seconds due to Dumbledore asking the House Elves to look for it.
  • Umbridge's sacking is just Dumbledore announcing it at the end-of-year feast.
  • Voldemort's attempt on Harry's life in the summer of 1997 abruptly ends in an Epic Fail when he blows himself away with his own Killing Curse again. The real climax of the confrontation is the rounding up of all the assembled Death Eaters.
• Apron Matron: Granny Longbottom, as in canon; Harry instinctively compares her to Granny Weatherwax, which is why he calls her "Granny" instead of "Madam". She is the one to break up the argument between Mr. Weasley and Mr. Malfoy in Diagon Alley before Harry's second year, and even after Neville demonstrates his new panther Animagus form to his family (and to shut up his condescending Great Uncle Algie), all she's concerned about is making sure her grandson eats his vegetables.
• Archnemesis Dad: Discussed after Harry watched The Empire Strikes Back and saw its iconic scene, as he wonders if Tom Riddle might be his father. Hermione rebukes that idea quickly: his father James Potter is a well-known man, and Tom Riddle is too old.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • Harry wants to know whether Grimmauld Place has a library, but Sirius warns that the books aren't the kind he'd like.
    Sirius: You know, horrible things like curses and hexes and jinxes and dark rituals… and historical romance novels, my mother really liked those, there's at least fifty of them and they all have the exact same plot.
    Remus: Which is worse?
    Sirius: Definitely the romance novels.
  • Inverted in chapter 101, which lays out the benefits of Harry finally defeating Voldemort — saving many lives, vanquishing the worst Dark Lord in recent history, gaining an Order of Merlin, First Class, and, since it all happened during his Defense Against the Dark Arts practical NEWT, earning him the highest score ever attained for that exam in history.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Dean Thomas is part of Harry's inner circle of friends, since he was the first Hogwarts student that met Harry while traveling to King's Cross and saw him in his true dragon form.
  • Neville Longbottom is also one of Harry's close friends, having met him in Madam Malkin's.
  • The Ravenclaw prefect Penelope Clearwater shows up a few times, especially whenever Harry drops into Ravenclaw's library. When Percy is otherwise occupied, she is the prefect Harry approaches for help.
  • Nora, Hagrid's dragon hatchling turned Hogwarts mascot.
  • Silvanus Kettleburn goes from The Ghost and Living Prop to side character, keeping his Care of Magical Creatures professorship since the truth about the Chamber of Secrets isn't made public and Hagrid isn't exonerated. At least, not until after the Battle of Hogwarts at the end of Harry's 7th year.
  • Dedalus Diggle becomes the DADA professor in Harry's 6th year.
  • Blaise Zabini, Daphne Greengrass and Tracy Davis are mere bit characters in canon, but are Harry's first Slytherin acquaintances in Hogwarts, and he often chitchats with them.
• A Wizard Did It: Even in this universe, this happens a few times:
  • When Harry gets his Invisibility Cloak and Percy points out that something that old shouldn't still be perfectly transparent.
    Harry: Maybe it's magic?
    Ron: ...that shouldn't be an explanation. But somehow, I know it's the best one we're going to get.
  • When Hermione hears about how heavy Bludgers are and how strong Beaters have to be to hold them off, Dean just tells her to remember it's magic.
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: Played for laughs at least as far as Harry's Slytherin friends goes, they take offense when someone calls them trustworthy, since that's not Slytherin-like in any way.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The Triwizard selection is underway, the champion for each school has been chosen, and then the Goblet of Fire spits out a fourth piece of parchment that reads "I had to see if I could do it. Your move, headmaster". Sadly, it's typewritten, so Alastor Moody can't participate.
  • Harry's fifth year has two new non-human first-years, Isaac the griffin and Melody the vampire. It'd at first seem obvious which houses those two would go to, but Isaac ends up sorted into Slytherin and Melody becomes a Gryffindor.
  • When Peeves starts heckling some new students, Harry brings out his Patronus. Peeves starts jeering that Patroni don't work on poltergeists, but Harry was just using it to call someone — the Bloody Baron.
  • In 7th-year, Harry is briefly surprised when he reads in the Quibbler about an assassination attempt on the Minister for Magic by a centaur, until the last parts of the article reveal that the Minister in question was in office in 1865. Luna admits that she was surprised too when she read it in her History of Magic textbook.
• Beam-O-War: In addition to the canon instance of the shared phoenix-core wands, Harry gets into this twice with Dragon!Voldemort breathing Fiendfyre. The first time, Harry smothers it with Bluebell Flames, the second, he absorbs it with his own Fiendfyre.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: In return for Harry giving Empress the basilisk her first Christmas present ever, she tells him about Salazar Slytherin's Geas — that if anyone gives her an unambiguous order in Parseltongue, she has to obey it no matter what — giving Harry a new problem to solve.
• Berserk Button:
  • Downplayed for Harry; as a dragon, he is very protective of his possessions and doesn't take kindly to anyone taking anything from him without permission. However, because Harry is so easy-going, he rarely gets upset over it if it was for a good reason, though he does have to consciously tamp down his irritation.
    • A more obvious button is hurting those he cares about; he instantly chases after a fleeing Lockhart because he tried to Obliviate Sirius.
  • Neville's is pressed during Professor Lupin's first Boggart lesson, when it turns into Bellatrix Lestrange. Instead of panicking, however, Neville goes ballistic, grabs the iron bar he was carrying for sword exercise and cracks the Boggart about the head — which when coupled with Lupin's Riddikulus spell, causes Circling Birdies.
  • Voldemort has a particular distaste for the idea of wards (probably because they're purely defensive magic and have no offensive purpose). Not only does it bleed over into Quirrell's lessons (insisting that spells with such effects are jinxes or curses, and that there are no such things as wards), he even Cruciates Amycus Carrow when he says he put up an Anti-Disapparating Ward, telling him that it's a jinx instead.
• Beware My Stinger Tail:
  • Lupin comes up with the idea for a tail-holster for Harry's wand, so that he can cast spells but still walk comfortably on all fours.
  • Dominic Alexander the manticore has a more traditional stinger.
• Bigger on the Inside:
  • With his book collection ever-expanding, Harry buys a magical tent with the intent to use it as a portable library.
  • As their circle of friends grows in later years, it becomes tradition to expand the interior of the group's compartment on the Hogwarts Express to make it big enough to fit all of them. An accidental cast one year ends up with the compartment's interior being as big as Hogwarts' Great Hall.
• Big Man on Campus: Surprisingly, Ron. While Harry is still arguably the most popular student in the school and many of his schoolmates admire him, he's still a dragon, and therefore none of the (human) students have any physical attraction to him. Therefore, Hogwarts' most eligible bachelor ends up being Ron, due to a combination of his proximity to Harry, his status as Gryffindor's Quidditch Captain, and his own ambitious goal of being the first wizard in space.
• Big Sister Instinct: Maybe not a blood sister, but the sphinx Tanisis takes her Ravenclaw year-mate Luna being bullied and having someone try to steal her belongings very badly, with the latter prompting her to frighten the offender quite a bit.
• Bilingual Bonus: Harry is a bit puzzled when he notices someone named "βασίλισσα" hanging around Nora's room on the Marauder's Map, and translating it from Greek just gives "Empress", which is no-one Harry knows. However, transliterate it, and you get "basílissa".
• Black Dude Dies First: Conversed after Dean's first Divination lesson, when Professor Trelawney predicts that he'll die.
• Black Widow: Blaise is unperturbed by his mother's "bad luck," with a string of husbands tragically passing away and leaving her all their worldly goods.
  Blaise: By the way, do you want an invite to my mum's wedding in August?
  Harry: I don't really think I'll be able to make it. My aunt and uncle probably wouldn't like it. Who's your mum marrying?
  Blaise: Oh, I don't know yet, but she just married someone so there'll probably be another one by then. Possibly two.
  Harry: Your stepfathers really have dreadful luck. Maybe this one's going to be more lucky?
  Blaise: [snorts] Maybe. But… no.
• Blunt "No": When Empress the basilisk reveals herself during the final battle, Voldemort gleefully orders her to kill everyone who resists him, only for her to give this answer and bite him.
• Bookworm: Harry loves to read. Even when he was young he would often fly to London and spend the day in the library there. And if he's not reading books, he's sleeping on them like a literary Dragon Hoard.
  • When he gets lost in Hogwarts, he finds the Ravenclaw common room, gets accidentally let in by the doorknocker, and ends up falling asleep in their library.
  • Harry even gets permission from Professor Dumbledore to fly all the way from Hogwarts to a nearby Muggle town to buy more Muggle literature.
  • Charlie decides to classify his new species as the Black-Backed Bookwyrm.
• Brain Bleach: Sirius manages to gross out Harry and himself when he jokes about hooking up with Dolores Umbridge.
• Breath Weapon: As a dragon, Harry can breathe fire, though it isn't particularly strong due to his young age. As his time in Hogwarts progresses, he learns to cast spells with his breath, most often fire-based spells like the harmless Bluebell Flames, the fire whip spell, and even Fiendfyre.
  • In his second year, he even learns how to cast Aguamenti to breathe water.
  • In his fourth year, he learns how to cast the Bubble-Head Charm using his breath so that he can use it to breathe while underwater, due to the spell not working on him normally.
• Brick Joke:
  • At the end of Harry's third year, which is the end of Percy's seventh and thus his entire time at Hogwarts, it's commented that he probably won't be coming back to Hogwarts except as a teacher. While he does initially come back the following year as one of the judges for the Triwizard Tournament, he takes the Defence Against the Dark Arts teaching post for the last few months of the year after Moody quits.
  • Umbridge's first chosen book for teaching Defense in fifth year is by a wizard called Slinkhard, whose writing is so dry and inappropriate for students (especially of fifth year) that Moody elects to send a Howler complaining about it. That doesn't stop Harry from mentioning Slinkhard's work multiple times during his exams.
  • Midway through Harry's Defense NEWT practical, Professor Marchbanks suddenly asks “What in Merlin’s name is that?”, moments before a Voldemort-possessed dragon lays siege to Hogwarts. After all the excitement is over, Harry sees Marchbanks and answers her question, and the overwhelmed examiner mumbles "Outstanding" and faints.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • A literal example when Draco tries to get Harry in trouble for an illegal after-hours duel. See Hoist by His Own Petard for how it turned out.
  • Later on after the exams of the '91-'92 school year, Fred and George try to prank Nora the dragon. This action is described as indicating them to be terminally stupid.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Voldemort's dramatic comeback, cornering Harry at wandpoint, makes a rather limited impression on Harry, who is only mostly sure of who he even is. And that's a guess based on another wizard calling him "my lord". Since Voldemort then proceeds to kill himself with a Killing Curse reflected off Harry's forehead again, Harry may have a point.
• …But He Sounds Handsome: When the house elves decide to have a pizza dinner night at Hogwarts, Fred and George wonder out loud who had the wonderful idea of getting them Muggle cookbooks.
• Call-Back:
  • Dean had plenty of suggestions for Dumbledore to make the obstacle course to the Mirror of Erised not only challenging, but practically Unwinnable by Design. Dumbledore consults with him for protection ideas while setting up the Goblet of Fire.
  • When the five friends get a look into the Mirror of Erised, they see dreams that, in future chapters, would someday come true.
    • Dean's vision in the Mirror of Erised was him riding Harry (the only dragon he knew). In 6th year, one of the dragons growing up at Hogwarts is now big enough and interested enough to offer him a ride.
    • Ron's vision was him becoming an astronaut. In his NEWT years, he manages to develop a prototype spaceship that eventually reaches the moon.
  • In Harry's first few years at Hogwarts, Dumbledore is mentioned teaching the Alchemy NEWT-level elective but hasn't had to in many years since there's never been enough interest. After he finally remembers to mention it to the students, there's enough interest in it for Harry to join a class in his 6th year.
  • In Chapter 91, Tanisis the sphinx finally demonstrates the sphinx-specific spell of Growing Wings, which she has mentioned being eager to learn over the past few years.
  • Draco's initial attempt at antagonizing Harry turned into a complimentary Insult Backfire when Harry pointed out that if Draco, a Slytherin, really wanted to wish Harry harm, he wouldn't tell him outright and would instead be more subtle about it. Later on, after Draco's Heel–Face Turn, he is overheard pointing out to one of his house-mates that it wouldn't be very smart of them to suggest that Harry should be criticized for beating Voldemort a second time, and even if they really were supportive of Voldemort, it wouldn't be very Slytherin to admit it.
  • After a griffin gets sorted into Slytherin, jokes are made about a basilisk being sorted into Gryffindor to match. In the epilogue, there is indeed a basilisk in Gryffindor, and he's the fifth-year prefect to boot.
• Calling Me a Logarithm: Hermione gets briefly offended when Ron exclaims "Merlin's lugholes!" until she remembers that a lughole is an ear.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Implied in the case of Draco and Lucius Malfoy, after the former learned the latter is responsible for installing the incompetent Umbridge as DADA teacher during one of the two most important years of his son's education and nearly compromising his OWL scores as a result. Whatever reasons Lucius had for that decision, Draco found they were "not worth it", and it's implied that Lucius's relatively minimal involvement with Voldemort and his fellow Death Eaters from that point is in part because of this confrontation.
• The Cameo:
  • Chapter 78 has a guest appearance by Newton "Newt" Scamander, looking to interview Hogwarts' oddly-shaped contingent.
  • Chapter 99 has Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel proctoring Harry's Alchemy NEWT exam.
• Captain Crash:
  • Harry can fly with his wings, he can at least manage on a broom, but this is the result if he tries flying with both at once. Even when Madam Hooch works out another method with a broom affixed to each wing, it is a lot better but still has teething problems. By second year, he manages to improve enough to be part of the Gryffindor Quidditch team.
  • The three-headed dog Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail Barlos have similar stories about their own flying lessons. As brooms are also responsive to thoughts, it can get messy if one sister wants to keep going, one wants to slow down, and one sneezes.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: Harry takes a page out of Dumbledore's book and makes the following statement during a fight, as if he's not fighting an aerial battle with Dragon!Voldemort. This really infuriates his opponent.
  Harry: You seem a bit stressed. I know the feeling. I'm in the middle of exams.
• Catapult to Glory: After Harry moves into Grimmauld Place after turning 17, Sirius and the Weasley twins set up a catapult room to launch Harry out the window into flight. When asked why, Sirius says that the twins didn't want all their research doing the same to Percy (a heron Animagus) to go to waste.
• The Cavalry: The whole Book Club together, even with Harry, can't do much more than annoy and distract the troll, until Professor Snape turns up and casts a single spell.
• Cavalry Betrayal: An inverted example happens to Voldemort during the final battle. When the Basilisk breaks out of the castle, Voldemort is delighted and attempts to use her to kill, but Empress has, with the help of Harry, been able to break free of her Geas and has absolutely no intention to help the man who forced her to kill. She bites him in the leg, poisoning him badly instead, and later eats Nagini.
• Character Development:
  • Once Draco Malfoy decides that working with Harry is more worthwhile than antagonizing him all the time, and forms the Defense Club in fifth-year as a result, he really starts to mellow out and become less haughty. He even manages to make a good-natured joke about Gryffindors without anyone getting offended. This is later lampshaded by Draco himself during the Battle of Hogwarts, when he notes that Umbridge's bigotry (anti-magical creature and anti-muggle alike), in addition to her incompetence as a teacher, has made him completely revaluate his once-deeply held beliefs. He then complains that he didn't want to do that.
  • Dudley's opinion towards his magical cousin grows more positive over the story, mostly due to Harry's cooking. After a Heel Realization, things between them improve that Dudley often lets Harry watch him play video games and occasionally be player 2, and Dudley even bakes Harry a cake for his 17th birthday, right before he leaves Privet Drive for the last time.
• Chekhov's Gag: All of Harry's jokes about how dragons can easily hide above wizards because wizards don't look up take a turn during his DADA NEWT when someone does look up and sees a dragon: a giant magical dragon laying siege to Hogwarts.
• Chekhov's Gun: As is natural for a Harry Potter story.
  • The spare set of communication mirrors that Harry bought (and didn't need because Sirius gave Harry the Marauders' old set) becomes important in Harry's plan in finding out Empress's identity. He gives the set to Hagrid and Nora the dragon, asks to borrow Hagrid's during the Easter holidays, then uses it to eavesdrop when Nora is visited by Empress during the night, which is how he confirms that Empress is indeed Slytherin's basilisk and that the language that he and Nora were speaking is not Dragonish, but Parseltongue.
  • In their 6th year, Neville mentions some news about his father hurting himself, with quite a bit of blood involved. The next chapter, Voldemort is back, and the readers figure out where the "blood of the enemy" for the resurrection ritual came from.
  • A few times, it's mentioned that Dolores Umbridge was shunted to the Beast division of the Ministry's department for magical creatures, and separately, Charlie has made mention of a dragon egg going missing. Then Voldemort shows up again, this time possessing a magically-grown Hungarian Horntail.
• Chekhov's Skill: All of Harry's experience with using and neutralizing Fiendfyre comes in handy when Voldemort tries using it against him.
• Clothing Damage: Implied to have happened to Dumbledore during the Battle of Hogwarts, which is understandable since the first salvo blew up his office; he shows up in the aftermath not wearing any of his usual brightly-coloured wardrobe, but a set of plain black robes that don't even fit him.
• Cliffhanger:
  • Invoked example during Harry's D&D club campaign based on Tolkien's Legendarium — just as the party finds Eärendil's boat and makes it fly, Harry ends the session, which is the last one before the end-of-year exams.
  • Chapter 99 has Harry in the middle of his Defense NEWT practical exam, when suddenly, a giant green dragon appears and blasts Dumbledore's office with a breath-casted Banishing Charm.
• Comically Missing the Point: After Kreacher tells the story of Regulus, Sirius wonders whether his actions were more worthy of Slytherin or Gryffindor.
• Condescending Compassion: Neville's Great Uncle Algie acts like this towards him, viewing him as too idiotic. At the Longbottom Christmas dinner, he says that Neville's friends are good for helping out his less-fortunate grandnephew, and that Neville is brave for overcoming his disadvantages. None of them (not even Percy) take those comments well, and it takes Neville demonstrating his new Animagus transformation to shut his uncle up.
• Confronting Your Imposter: Lockhart is confronted by an Australian named Michael Freeman, who tells him that there's no way his book about him subduing the Wagga Wagga Werewolf is true. How does Michael know that? He is the Wagga Wagga Werewolf.
• Contrived Coincidence: What are the odds that the Smith twins would decide to infiltrate the Gryffindor dorms to prank the Weasley twins, and get the room wrong and enter Harry and Ron's dormitory instead, at the exact moment that Scabbers a.k.a. Pettigrew decides that now would be a good moment to read that Redwall book the Potter boy had been talking about? Possibly justified, they'd both picked a time when all the Gryffindors would be out of the dorms for several hours, depending on how long Scabbers actually spent reading, whether they chose that room randomly or were going through them systematically hunting for the right one, and whether being kitsune has any effects on their luck.
• Cool Starship: The Ratatoskr, Ron's prototype Magitek spaceship. It may only be squirrel-sized, but it's fully capable of flying to the moon. Or teleporting there.
• Cool Sword: Harry's Ancient Runes OWL project, the sword Panthera, is a downplayed example. On the one hand, it's a clearly magic sword, marked with runes that make it lightweight to Neville and distinctly heavier to everyone else, and is made of an alchemically-created pseudo-Mithril. On the other, Harry's no blacksmith, and his forging techniques (shaping the molten metal like play-doh) leave a lot to be desired; Nearly-Headless Nick says that it's quite good for a first effort, but has a few areas for critique otherwise.
• Cool Teacher: Dumbledore proves to be this, going out of his way to assist Harry whenever he needs it, acting as a (somewhat eccentric) Reasonable Authority Figure, ensuring that all non-human students of Hogwarts are comfortable (such as allowing typewriters for those without opposable thumbs or firing Umbridge), and teaching the fine art of Alchemy. When serving as a Prefect, and later Gryffindor's Head Boy, Harry explicitly models himself after Dumbledore, copying his Trickster Mentor tendencies and assisting other in the same way - though he notes that he hasn't gotten Dumbledore's eye twinkle down yet.
• Cool Versus Awesome: Everyone in the crowd is elated when Fleur's turn during the Triwizard's first task turns into a fiery game of keep-away between transformed Veela and young dragon.
• Could Say It, But...: When Draco gloats about how his father is about to inspect the school and get the unusually shaped students expelled, Harry stops to think for a moment, then thanks him, assuming it was a friendly warning in disguise. Draco, who really was just gloating, is completely flummoxed.
• Covers Always Lie: On Harry's first visit to Flourish and Blotts, he buys every fiction book he can find with a dragon on the cover. The results are rather mixed, with a couple books barely having dragons involved at all (A Chick Lit series where the miniature dragons are treated as half-pet, half-personal transport, and a Romance Novel with dragon tamers).
• Crafted from Animals: Harry has a few thoughts about dragon parts having various magical uses, but it takes another turn when a manticore shows up as a student in his 6th year, after he'd been using manticore-skin gloves in some of his classes. Dumbledore assures him that, like dragons, manticore body parts are only used after the manticore has died, and only with their explicit permission.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • The second-year Halloween feast has Saumon a la Rothschild as one of the dishes, but it's restricted to the upperclassmen as it's cooked with alcohol. It's enchanted to vanish if anyone too young tries to cut a piece, making for some great dinner entertainment when Fred keeps trying.
  • As per Moody's Properly Paranoid personality, his hip-flask during 4th-year is filled with Mandrake draught, so as to stave off petrification in case his Magical Eye sees through Hogwarts's walls and makes eye contact with Empress the basilisk.
  • Sirius admits to getting carried away with some of his enchanted Muggle creations, like Harry's 17th birthday watch that can cast Shield Charms.
    Sirius: Well, you know how it is, you start fiddling with things... one thing leads to another and there's a button on your motorbike which drops a wall behind you...
• Creator Cameo: The summer of 1996 has Harry visit Godric's Hollow for the first time, before flying off to the nearby coast town of Clevedon to clear his head. Clevedon is also where one of the author's grandmothers used to live, so he appears as a little boy giving Harry some tips on skipping stones.
• Creation Sequence: In Chapter 77, Dumbledore demonstrates to Harry the wonders of alchemy and helps him with his Ancient Runes project at the same time — by creating an ingot of aluminium-iron alloy that is lightweight, strong, and durable to everything except Harry's own dragon fire, which Harry thinks of as pseudo-Mithril.
  • Then later, we get a full-on Forging Scene when Harry uses the alloy to create a rune-marked magic sword for Neville, by molding it with his fire breath and bare paws.
• Crossover: One chapter with Sunset Isekai, where Harry gets some advice from an interested bartender.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Remember that random, extremely complex Homorphus Charm that Lockhart claimed to use to cure the Wagga Wagga Werewolf, and which he decided to teach to Harry on a lark? Turns out, it actually works.
• Cue the Flying Pigs: Ron wonders if Hogwarts has turned upside down when Draco Malfoy is being helpful, the twins aren't pranking a hated teacher (instead running a Paranoia Gambit), Ron himself is doing more teaching than the DADA professor, and there's a griffin in Slytherin. Neville replies that they'd have noticed by now if Hogwarts had turned upside down, and then Fred hexes him so that he falls up to the ceiling.
• Culture Clash: Harry is rather startled to hear the Gryffindor Tower security portrait introduce herself as the Fat Lady, but she just laughs and tells him that to call someone plump was a compliment for centuries.
  Fat Lady: It entertains me so to hear everyone calling me beautiful.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Bellatrix's attempt to duel Neville during the Battle of Hogwarts does not go well for her at all. Having just escaped from Azkaban, she's still recovering from the effects of the Dementors and is nowhere near her full strength. In addition, she's completely unprepared to face Neville, who has grown up to be a Magic Knight who both wields an Anti-Magic sword and is a panther animagus. The duel ends with Neville cutting her wand in half and stunning her, then using a Tongue-Tying curse and a Body-Binding curse to restrain her. Judging by his account, he had more trouble trying to fight Nagini than he did Bellatrix.
• Curse Escape Clause:
  • Up until Voldemort's finale defeat in Chapter 100, this is how Alastor Moody, Dedalus Diggle, and Aberforth Dumbledore all escape the curse on the DADA position. They simply quit a few months/weeks before the end of the term, technically fulfilling the curse while at the same time avoiding all the nasty side effects.
  • Likewise, end-of-year replacement teachers such as Sturgis Podmore and Percy Weasley are able to avoid the curse because they weren't the original teacher for the year and because they are only teaching for a couple of weeks/months. However, it's for that reason that they all refuse to come back and teach a full year, for fear of the curse reacting to that accordingly and dealing a nasty fate to them.
  • Subverted in one instance mentioned in Hogwarts: A History, where the staff tried to subvert the curse entirely by renaming DADA to something different. The chosen teacher barely managed to make it past teaching one class before falling down the stairs for over half an hour, via a previously unknown route in the castle, dealing him grievous injuries that took him out for the rest of the year. His replacement is stated to have not been very good, but she at least survived the year.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Charlie promises the Twins that if they test their prank products on him, he'll feed them to Nora.
  Harry: I don't think Nora would eat you. She has very good manners and knows humans aren't for eating.
  Fred: I said that, and he said she'd never recognize the results as human.
• Cutting the Knot: Fleur Delacour's solution to the Triwizard Tournament's third task hedge maze is to burn her way through the walls.
• David Versus Goliath: Harry vs. Dragon Voldemort in chapter 100.
• Daywalking Vampire: Vampires in this 'verse don't die in sunlight, but just sunburn very, very easily. When Melody Vaughn comes in as a Hogwarts student, Harry makes sure that she is comfortable in all aspects of school life, from regular lessons to flying lessons, but Melody just shrugs, wears large hats and gloves, and toughs it out. There's a reason she was sorted into Gryffindor, after all.
• Dead Person Conversation: Done via the Resurrection Stone, as in canon, but Harry eventually figures out the trick to using it right. Rather than talking to loved ones that have passed and getting too enamored with death to focus on life, the people you summon ought to be from times long past or characters you have little to no personal relationship with, so you can converse with and collect information from them and not get attached. Such as, for example, asking Rowena Ravenclaw what happened to her diadem.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Fenrir Greyback makes the mistake of attacking Remus Lupin in the summer between Harry's third and fourth years, when both are werewolves, but since Lupin has maintained his sanity by taking Wolfsbane potion and kept ahold of his wand, Greyback ends up being reduced to Ludicrous Gibs via a Reducto Curse. Counts as The Dog Bites Back, since Greyback was responsible for making Lupin a werewolf in the first place.
  • The centaur Bane dies during the Battle of Hogwarts. Professor Binns is also killed (as completely as a ghost can be) by a pair of Dementors during the ordeal.
• Death Glare:
  • Implied to be what McGonagall does to everyone in the Leaky Cauldron when a dragon pops out of the fireplace in chapter 11.
    McGonagall: Is something wrong?
  • When Wood complains about Hedwig showing up at Quidditch practice to give a letter to Harry, she gives him a glare good enough to make him flinch.
  • After Umbridge gives her own welcoming speech at Harry's fifth-year welcoming feast, Dumbledore says that having new staff members introduce themselves is a novel idea and wonders if he should get Professor Snape to do so. Snape glares at his boss so hard that Harry is surprised that Dumbledore isn't incinerated.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Since Harry doesn't take Divination, Professor Trelawney never shows up in her teaching role. Harry runs into her once while exploring Hogwarts during his first Christmas there, but after that he never encounters her personally again.
    • In a case of an extra being demoted even further, Argus Filch is mentioned a few times but never shows up at all either.
  • Wilhelmina Grubbly-Plank only shows up for a scene or two in Harry's fourth year observing some dragon hatchlings, instead of being the CoMC substitute professor, as Professor Kettleburn is still working. She's later mentioned taking the seventh year CoMC students on a field trip.
  • Snape takes a back seat in the narrative from 6th year onward, since he remains as the Potions Master and Harry doesn't take NEWT-level Potions.
  • Voldemort appears far less often as the various changes sprung from the Point of Divergence end up delaying his resurrection and return until Harry's Seventh Year, in addition to decreasing the actual threat he poses to the main cast. While he's still a concern, he's hardly at the forefront of Harry's Hogwarts journey.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The title of the reference book about Protean Charms is named "The Self Referential Guide To Self Referential Charms Is A Self Referential Guide To Self Referential Charms."
• Destination Defenestration:
  • A rumor going around Hogwarts one morning was that the sixth-year Percy got so frustrated at Lockhart's non-Defense Defense lessons that he finally snapped and blasted Lockhart out a window.
  • Percy winds up on the receiving end over the summer of 1997, when Fred and George launch him out of a window at home with a catapult.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • Not even Hermione could've predicted that conducting the Animagus sensitization ritual for a month while constantly using a Time-Turner during the same period would give you a dinosaur for an Animagus form.
  • Judging by his reaction, Moody definitely didn't expect for there to be not one, not two, but four Animagi in his DADA class. And certainly not one who can turn into a dinosaur!
    Moody: I didn't think any witches had even heard of those...
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Lockhart, maybe you should have actually done more concrete research and travelled to the locations of your books before you wrote and published them, beyond just tracking down the real heroes and copying their memories. After all, there might be other people in those locations that do remember how things actually went down.
  • He doesn't actually get in trouble for it, but Zacharias Smith deciding to save money by doing a bulk order from the new Marauders' Magical Miscellany store doesn't go as subtly as he'd like when the overloaded owl flying into the Great Hall attracts the attention of several prefects, Harry included.
  • Implied during one of the Alchemy lessons where they try imparting the properties of diamond into another material (the process of which requires molten rock), and Hermione asks how they will shape it.
    Dumbledore: It is that sort of inquiry which separates an alchemist from someone with a puddle of diamond-hard magma on the floor of their work room which they will not be able to remove short of digging up the foundations.
  • Normally, encountering this trope would be disastrous while in outer space, but this incident is fairly benign: Ron is in space about to test the EVA capabilities of the Ratatoskr, but he and his friends realize that the submarine-style airlock doors aren't built to be opened by squirrels, and they don't want to magic it open for fear of Ron losing his wand.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In this fic, Nagini is Eaten Alive by Empress the basilisk instead of being decapitated by Neville.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • According to Professors Flitwick and Babbling, Ancient Runes and rune-carving when making magical objects is this compared to simply enchanting an object. Wand-casting is much quicker and more versatile and convenient as compared to precisely carving in runes into a craft (which could take weeks or months) and the runic language interacts with itself in potentially unexpected ways, but the runic object retains its magic permanently and its effects can last for centuries.
  • In a similar vein, alchemically modifying the material properties of a substance requires long, arduous and complicated magical/chemical processes, and the outcomes can be unpredictable based on the personality of the alchemist, but the modified materials retain their new properties permanently, their properties cannot be removed by disenchanting them like you would if they were transfigured or charmed, and can be incredibly varied in scope and depth — such as water that crystallizes and solidifies at room temperature like iron pyrite.
• Disapproving Look: Hedwig gives Harry one when he asks her to send a letter from Sirius' second house in Hogsmeade to Dumbledore's office up at Hogwarts, feeling insulted at such an easy job. She's very good at looks.
• Dissimile: Harry's first impression of Floo travel.
  After thinking it over for a bit as they went to Ollivanders' and got Ron his wand, Harry decided that Floo was sort of like if you had to use a waterslide to get somewhere, except that there was fire instead of water and you didn't land in a swimming pool.
• Does Not Like Spam: Tanisis the sphinx, while able to eat most human food, doesn't like broccoli. At all.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • The werewolf Fenrir Greyback is slain by one of his victims, Lupin, by showing how a werewolf that has retained their human mind while transformed can out-magic one that is feral and savage.
  • With her Parseltongue Geas nullified, Empress takes a quite literal (and venom-infused) bite out of Voldemort when he tries to command her to kill the defenders of Hogwarts.
• Double Take: When Isaac the griffin is Sorted, the Gryffindor table starts applauding before they realize he was sorted into Slytherin.
• Down to the Last Play: The Quidditch World Cup victory has the last Quaffle goal scored while the Seekers are in mid-dive for the Snitch — just enough to edge the scorer's team's final point total past the other's.
• Dragon Hoard: Invoked by Harry from a young age upon reading about fictional dragons and how they curl up on piles of treasure. As Harry is a Book Worm, his preferred treasures are books. In fact, when he first arrives to the Hogwarts dormitories, he gets comfortable on his four-poster bed by piling some letters onto it and sleeping on them.
  • And then when he sees his Gringotts vault full of actual gold, he dives headlong into it.
• The Dragonslayer:
  • Parodied with Lord Ridley, who is very keen to slay Harry, but has no success, mostly because he's a ghost and therefore insubstantial.
  • Harry reflects on the whole concept after reading a history book, and finds it dubious.
    He could see how a wizard could do it, using magic (which was always a help), and Lord Ridley wanted to repeat the feat, but if a Muggle knight tried to slay a real dragon then Harry thought that the result would be about the same as putting the knight in the microwave.
• Dramatic Drop:
  • When Harry, on his first visit to Diagon Alley, asks Hagrid about whether Madam Malkin knows how to do robes for dragons, he hears a crashing sound, and turns around to see someone having dropped a glass beaker.
  • Lampshaded aversion — when Hermione realizes that the magical mirrors connecting them to Ron on the moon transfer information faster than light, Harry observes that she looks like she would've dropped whatever she was holding, if she was holding anything.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • After a griffin is sorted into Slytherin, a discussion comes up that maybe a basilisk should be sorted into Gryffindor to match. Empress the basilisk is very amused when Harry tells her about it later that evening, and in the epilogue, one of the Gryffindor Fifth Year prefects is indeed a basilisk.
  • When Harry takes a summer job at Gringotts and asks about the other dragons there, the head goblin tells him that they've recently put their dragons out to pasture and are considering hiring more under a reconsideration of policy. In canon, the only dragon seen at Gringotts was a blind one chained up underground as a guard, something that this Harry would've been most displeased to hear about. Moreover, if sapient dragons are becoming available at Hogwarts, it only makes good business sense to gainfully employ them instead.
• Dramatic Thunder: Discussed and averted.
  • When "Mad-Eye" Moody makes his entrance into the Great Hall at the start of 4th year, Harry thinks it would've been better for his entrance if it was a thunderstorm night instead of a breezy summer night (and the author actually looked up the weather on September, 1994!).
  • Later on, Harry thinks the same thing when Umbridge interrupts their first meeting of the new Defense Club, in that her entrance would've been a lot more ominous if it was a dark and stormy night instead of a pleasant sunset (and also due to Umbridge's "smile" and pink outfit).
• Dreadful Musician: The whole school is effectively this during the school song. After the headmaster tells them all to pick a tune, there's a scene cut to several minutes later, when Harry can finally take his paws off his ears.
  Harry: What was that? That – that's not music...
• Due to the Dead: At the end of Harry's 7th year, Dumbledore gives a speech to this effect for all the casualties of the Battle of Hogwarts, regretful that the students had to face the darkness of Tom Riddle after so many perceived years of safety.

E-L

• Eccentric Mentor: Headmaster Albus Dumbledore is at his very best in this fic, especially after he returns to teaching as Alchemy Professor. A good portion of the time he is simply managing his role and school, giving out strange but useful bits of advice to everyone he passes by, and occasionally remembering to answer questions that hadn't been asked yet, while also showcasing his century and a bit of experience in all forms of magic.
  Dumbledore: Today, after more than a year full of lovely learning, I am afraid we will have to talk about your NEWT exams. It's a pity, I know, but I have been informed by the board of governors that exams are in fact necessary. So I thought the simplest way of making sure everyone heard about this would be to explain it right now, as I am in fact doing.
  (Beat)
  Hermione: Professor, I think you forgot to actually tell us anything about the exam.
• Epic Fail:
  • Draco's attempt to get Harry and Hagrid in trouble by tattling about Norberta/Nora the dragon falls flat when he is told that Dumbledore already knows about it.
  • Umbridge's first attempt to interrupt and shut down the new Defense Club (that is completely undermining her) ends with her getting chewed out in public by Professor McGonagall.
    • When even getting the board of governors doesn't help, Umbridge decides to stick propaganda posters with messages like "Teachers know best" around the Hogwarts halls. Dumbledore thinks it's a fantastic idea and gives permission for everyone to put up their own posters for the week, and soon, the propaganda is drowned out by jokes, funny pictures, and even heartfelt thanks to Harry and the other non-human students.
  • Voldemort's attempt on Harry's life after his resurrection (during the summer between his 6th and 7th years) works about as well as the first time, if not worse. Not only does he blow himself away with a rebounded Killing Curse again, which unknowingly deals with the Horcrux in Harry's body, the Death Eaters bungle their escape and instead alert the Ministry to their very location, ending in the capture of virtually all of them.
• Epic Hail: Midway through the Acromantula attack, Harry suddenly remembers what he'd been learning and sends a Patronus message to Dumbledore. Dumbledore arrives and stops everything in quick order.
• "Eureka!" Moment: In the middle of his battle with Dragon!Voldemort, Harry suddenly puts together the pieces of Umbridge working at the Ministry's beast department, a missing dragon egg, Voldemort bleeding black ichor after being bitten by Empress, and the Priori Incantatem silhouette of a chained dragon, and works out just how Voldemort got his dragon body.
• Evil Me Scares Me: Harry's greatest fear turns out to be this, as his Boggart turns into a future version of him that had succumbed to his dragon Greed and gone all Smaug.
• Exact Words:
  • When Harry asks if other dragons use Gringotts to store their money, Shardmouth says "I can assure you the only bank used by dragons is Gringotts." He is, of course, referring to Harry himself, since as far as he knows Harry is the only sapient dragon in existence, and he pragmatically would not tell a young dragon about the blind guard-dragon they keep chained up down there.
  • According to Percy, Harry is free to explore Hogwarts and any doors he isn't supposed to go through will either be password-locked or just plain locked. Well, a lot of people have been secretly exploring the third-floor corridor and finding Fluffy, and they didn't exactly lock the door behind them... the trapdoor that Fluffy is guarding isn't locked... and it's not really a locked door if the key is right there flying above your head...
  • While Percy is working with Mr. Crouch, he gets his boss to sign an approval for "cross-language classes for below-age foreign visitors to Hogwarts". Once Mr. Crouch leaves, Percy hands the forms to Charlie, saying that everything's been approved — and later, Dumbledore requests Harry to ask Empress the basilisk to teach Parseltongue to baby dragons (brought in from overseas) to see if they grow up sapient, like Nora. Charlie is impressed by Percy's underhandedness.
  • When Moody (who hasn't been replaced by Barty Crouch Jr. due to Luna exposing him during the Quidditch World Cup) is demonstrating the Imperius Curse during DADA, he tells Neville to 'act like a cat'. Neville promptly shifts into Lapcat, his Animagus form — which happens to be a panther!
    • He then tells Dean to jump as high as he can. Dean promptly turns into a crow and flies towards the ceiling.
    • The same happens with Ron and Hermione — both of them shift into their Animagus forms shortly after being hit by Imperio. Professor Moody reacts to Ron with exasperation, and his reaction to Hermione's transformation sets off laughter from everyone — even Draco.
  • Empress's Geas forces her to obey every instruction given to her in Parseltongue. However, it won't force her to obey instructions in other languages, even if she knows what they are, so if she is Geased to think of the snake language as Dragonish and not Parseltongue, even if they sound functionally the same, she won't interpret any future instruction as being said in Parseltongue and thus won't be forced to obey it — as Voldemort finds out later.
  • Depending on how the law is interpreted, Harry technically counts as human. This is also extended to June Forrester and the other wargs of the Forbidden Forest, since they're the descendants of werewolves.
• Expressive Ears: Harry's draconic ears often prick up when interested and flatten when upset. The former action often flicks his glasses off and he has to scramble to catch them.
• Extreme Omnivore: Harry hasn't found anything he hasn't been able to eat and digest in some way. He eats food in the packaging, hedge trimmings, often eats his cutlery if distracted, and Snape has had to tell him off for eating leftover potion ingredients. It should be mentioned that this is unique to Harry; Charlie later tried some experiments with other dragons eating stuff like leaves and they didn't take.
  Harry shrugged, then picked up a pot pie and ate it.
  "...that was in a china dish," Dean pointed out. "I'm kind of afraid you'll eat your books one day, mate."
  • His first ever Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Bean is jet black and tastes of motor oil. Harry doesn't mind.
  • Fred and George even use him to dispose of a Howler from their mother, lightly peppered. Though he had to keep his mouth shut while digesting it, lest he start involuntarily yelling in Molly Weasley's voice.
  • The one exception turns out to be Dumbledore's sherbet lemons — the fizz gives him a fiery sneezing fit.
  • As the house-elves get more creative with their cooking, they start serving Harry-only dishes, marked with dragon flags. Examples include a glazed ham with steel shavings^note "They were pretty nice and crunchy, as far as Harry was concerned, but Ron turned pale before saying that he'd rather just have what was available on the other plates instead.", a metal cleaver covered in tomato sauce, with the mix of metals in the cleaver providing an unusual taste^note "It's… well, the difference between copper and iron is sort of like the difference between bread and rice, only not? But the iridium is more like a spice… it's kind of hard to tell which metal is what when they're all together like this, but it's nice.", and even a solid steel croissant with molten brass as filling.^note "Very carefully making sure he didn't spill any, Harry nibbled his way through the unusual breakfast while trying to work out how he could tell the eager elves that it was nice but also probably too dangerous for the breakfast table… or, indeed, any table that could conceivably be referred to as 'old', 'valuable' or 'flammable'."
  • In second year, Dobby attempts to make Harry ill and get him sent home by adding large amounts of hemlock to the special Harry-only meals. Harry just considers it a sauce.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • When Draco Malfoy comes into Harry's train carriage looking for him as a dragon, he doesn't notice said dragon lying in the luggage racks above his head.
  • Charlie Weasley was so excited to meet Ron's new dragon classmate, that after he flew straight from Romania to Hogwarts, he didn't notice said dragon watching him, nor did he realize that the dragon is Harry Potter.
  • Harry overhears a conversation between Warrington and Pucey of Slytherin, where Pucey is complaining about how all the other houses have non-human students but Slytherin doesn't, and that he wouldn't mind some non-human students in Slytherin if they could pass for human. An exasperated Warrington comments that he'll let Tyler and Anna educate him, much to Pucey's confusion.
  • Umbridge's bursting into the new Defense Club and trying to shut it down may have gone slightly less badly than it did if she had noticed Professor McGonagall supervising it.
• Failed Future Forecast: An in-universe example in one of the books Harry gets on his first trip to Diagon Alley — one of its main characters is from "somewhere in the USSR", and as the fic takes place in 1991, during the USSR's collapse, Harry gets the uniquely surreal experience of watching a book's premise be invalidated while he's reading it.
• Famed In-Story: Harry, as per usual, but later in the story, Ron joins him as the first wizard in space, then the first wizard on the moon and finally as the first human on Mars during the epilogue. Ginny points out that in trying to surpass his older brothers, Ron has actually made his way into world history books.
• The Family for the Whole Family: Dolores Umbridge may be fully willing to harm students, especially the unusually-shaped ones, in her Fantastic Racism crusade, but her lack of authority in Hogwarts or political capital from the Ministry means that she can't really do much, and if she does overstep her boundaries, Dumbledore and the rest of the faculty are quick to block her with new school rules. It gets to the point that the majority of the student body just quit showing up to her classes and instead learn everything from the new Defense Club, and at the end of the school year, she is anticlimactically and ignominiously dismissed by Dumbledore.
• Fanservice:
  • Quite a bit during the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament. The girls are enthused at Cedric discarding his robes after Nora sets them on fire (wearing jeans and a shirt underneath), and the boys are enthused at Fleur wetting down her clothes to protect herself from the fire. There's also visible female disappointment when Krum doesn't get burned enough to discard his robes, even from Hermione.
  • Later, Krum gets his fair share of Clothing Damage during the third task, when he ends up wrestling a wild boar.
• Fantastic Racism: Dolores Umbridge, in full form. Harry first encounters her at a Wizengamot hearing, to judge if he counts as human enough to keep his wand. Later, she ends up becoming Defence professor at Hogwarts, and wastes no time singling out the non-human students: trying to provoke the sphinx Tanisis with a deliberately mis-answered riddle, forcing the vampire Melody to sit in a sunbeam, denying the use of a typewriter to the warg June, and giving detention to the selkie Tiobald, who can only speak in sign language or Mermish, for not answering a question verbally.
• Fatal Fireworks: The Smith twins use an entire arsenal of magical fireworks to bombard Dragon!Voldemort during his siege on Hogwarts. At least until Voldemort blows up the tower they're firing them from.
• Fat and Proud: The Fat Lady of Gryffindor. When she introduces herself to Harry, she says that to be plump was a compliment for centuries, and that she enjoys hearing everyone call her beautiful.
• Feather Fingers: Averted. Despite being fully sapient, mammalian Hogwarts students like Tanisis the sphinx and June the warg (talking wolf) still have paws, and thus have to manipulate quills and wands with their mouths. When this comes up as an issue at exam time, Harry asks Dumbledore for permission for them to use typewriters. It's also mentioned that they also took flying lessons, but it's not seen how.
  • The Barlos sisters, a three-headed dog, don't have it as bad since they have two extra heads that can do the wand-holding while another does the spell-casting, but it does mean they all have to be in sync, and they still have the writing problem.
• Feet of Clay: Gilderoy Lockhart is eventually exposed as a fraud like in canon, but it's downplayed in this fic since in addition to mind-wiping the original wizards and witches of their feats, he also copied their memories for additional accuracy, so that he actually did have their skills and could teach Harry the Homorphus Charm; he just never practiced with them and thus proved to be a complete incompetent.
• Fighting from the Inside: The climax of Harry's battle with Dragon!Voldemort, after he was weakened by Empress's bite, is Harry blasting his opponent in the eyes with a supercharged Confundus Charm, confusing Voldemort enough to give the dragon Voldemort is possessing a chance to break free and expel his possessor.
• Finale Title Drop: The last line of the pre-epilogue chapter is "Harry was a dragon, and everything was okay".
• Finally Found the Body: After Harry's graduation, he, Dumbledore, Sirius and Kreacher make an expedition to Voldemort's Inferi-filled cave to retrieve Regulus Black's body.
• First Contact: The epilogue has Ron locate an alien planet with sapient life and even magical potential, and the final scene has DADA professor Harry watching some of the new panitheria enter Hogwarts as students.
• First-Name Basis: In contrast to canon, Harry refers to every student in Hogwarts by their first names, even the Slytherins, and even in his internal dialogue.
  • Krum is an exception, and his reasoning is pondered on in Chapter 59 (the conclusion is that his last name is shorter than his first, so it rolls off the tongue better).
  • Ron is a particularly stubborn exception in that he keeps calling Draco by his last name, but he eventually comes around in fifth year after Draco proves his change of heart in helping with the Defense Club (and after a moment in which both Draco and his father Lucius Malfoy are in the same room).
  • In 7th year, Harry refers to one of the professors by his first name, specifically Aberforth Dumbledore, since he needs a way to differentiate him from his headmaster brother.
• First Snow: Not quite first snow, but Harry's first Christmas at Hogwarts is his first snow that's more than an inch deep, and he loves it.
• Flat "What":
  • In Harry's third year, the centaur Ronan has this reaction when Harry asks why, if Hogwarts has wargs, sphinxes and selkies as non-human students, there isn't a centaur student at Hogwarts yet.
  • A Beauxbatons student gives the French equivalent when they see all the non-human Hogwarts students.
    C'est un loup. Pourquoi. ^TranslationIt's a wolf. Why.
• Food Porn: Quite a number of feasts, especially the holiday feasts, have the food described in loving detail, which contrasts well with Harry's tendency to eat anything. Just as an example from Harry's second-year Halloween feast, one dessert is a brownie and sponge layer cake, cemented with caramel, covered in a chocolate shell and shaped into a full-sized pumpkin! With lemon aftertaste!
  • And then the Hogwarts house elves are gifted Muggle cookbooks by the Weasley Twins and foreign and modern food starts showing up, like pizza and paella.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Harry's first year, all of his friends, not just Ron, look into the Mirror of Erised and are able to see their heart's greatest desire. Throughout the story, in part because they put in the effort to try and achieve these goals, those dreams eventually come true.
    • Ron sees himself dressed in a muggle spacesuit and being proudly clapped on the shoulder by his oldest brother Bill. Ron eventually becomes the first wizard in space, achieves his dream of walking the moon, and becomes one of the main pioneers for the wizarding world's burgeoning space program. In addition, all his accomplishments do end up making his family very proud of him.
    • Hermione sees herself teaching a class that has some non-human magical sapients as the students, using a textbook she herself wrote. As noted below, more non-human students besides Harry are enrolled into Hogwarts starting their second year. In the epilogue, Hermione publishes her first book: a comprehensive guide to all seven years of the Hogwarts curriculum.
    • Neville sees himself wielding a sword in one hand and his wand in the other while fighting off evil dark wizards to protect his Gran. This inspires him to take up exercise and swordplay, which pays off during the Battle of Hogwarts, when he manages to use his new skills to easily defeat the torturer of his parents, Bellatrix Lestrange.
    • Dean sees himself riding a dragon (more specifically, Harry, the only full-grown dragon he knew at the time). Third Year onwards shows that he has a knack for Care for Magical Creatures, which he ends up taking to NEWT-level, and he does end up riding a dragon.
  • From Harry's first year onwards, after non-human magical sapients are allowed to be enrolled as Hogwarts students, at least one non-human character is foreshadowed (or even makes an Early-Bird Cameo) before they show up as a new student the following year.
    • In 1st year, June Forrester the talking wolf (or warg, as Harry calls her) shows up getting English lessons from Fluffy, so she can attend Hogwarts the next year.
    • In 2nd year, Dumbledore is noticed in the middle of the Great Lake having a conversation with some merfolk. The next year, the selkie mer-boy Tiobald MacUalraig appears as a new student.
    • In 3rd year, Harry talks with Ronan the centaur about how come there aren't any centaur students at Hogwarts yet. The next year, Ronan's son Conal is enrolled.
    • In 4th year, a griffin named Isaac shows up in the Care of Magical Creatures class as an example of a sapient magical creature that can communicate (but can't speak). He becomes a student the next year. Also, before the Triwizard Tournament's first task there are rumors that Dumbledore was seen in the forest speaking to a manticore; this one takes an extra year to come to light, and a manticore student joins the cast in Harry's 6th year.
    • In 5th year, Harry has a wonder about goblins and trolls counting as Beings, and over the summer, has a discussion with Dumbledore about one of Voldemort's Horcruxes being in Gringotts. The following year, Hogwarts gets its first goblin student.
  • The summer of 1993 is when Jurassic Park comes out, leading to Hermione wondering whether dinosaurs actually did have feathers. She later finds out when her Time Turner usage throughout the Animagus sensitisation ritual gives her the Animagus form of a feathered deinonychus.
  • During the third year, June Forrester the warg notes that her family in the Forbidden Forest is having trouble finding food this year, and the centaurs are also shown to be stepping up patrols when Harry runs into some of them. Right after the final exams, a group of the more hot-headed Acromantula, agitated by rumors of the basilisk's activity, stage an attack on Hogwarts.
  • Before a Quidditch match, Harry and his friends are involved in a discussion about how a Quidditch match would end in a draw (as in the case of an equal point total post-Snitch catch, whichever team's Seeker actually caught the Snitch is used as the tiebreaker). In that very match, they find out: the match ends when Cedric and Ginny collide in mid-air and smash the Snitch to pieces between them, meaning that neither team gets the catch or the points. Since both teams had the exact same point total when that happened, the game is declared a history-making draw.
• Foreign-Language Tirade: During the Triwizard Tournament's first task, Fleur gets a little too annoyed at Bagman's emceeing and amplifies her voice to tell him to shut up — making Hermione squeak at the amount of swearing in it.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: The Barlos sisters (three-headed dog) do this as their Halloween costume in Harry's 7th year, with the two outer sisters Flopsy and Cottontail wearing obvious Papier-mâché dog heads (much to Flopsy's chagrin) so that they look like an ordinary dog dressed up to have extra heads.
• Friendly Fireproof: Utilized when a troll crashes Harry's book club; Harry gets into grappling range with the brute and tells everyone else to start launching spells, knowing his draconic spell resistance is stronger than the troll's.
• Friendly Neighborhood Vampire: Melody Vaughn, who is a vampire student that enrolls in Harry's fifth year.
• Friendly Rivalry: Fred and George have this in the form of Tyler and Anne, another pair of trickster twins, in Slytherin.
• Full-Boar Action: One obstacle that Viktor Krum's encounters in the Triwizard maze is a regular wild boar, in contrast to all the other magical creatures in the maze. He subdues it by wrestling it to the ground, but gets his robes torn in the process, much to the delight of his fangirls.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Ron Weasley, with the help of his friends, constructs a full-on prototype of a spaceship, that actually succeeds in circling the globe, all in his later school years. In his defense, it is a wizarding school.
• Genre Savvy: Due to Harry being a Book-Wyrm, he often applies what he reads to his new life as a dragon learning to be a wizard.
  • When Draco tries challenging him to a duel, he applies what he was just reading about duels, and makes it into a public, supervised affair.
  • When he learns about the existence of Horcruxes by means of Kreacher and Slytherin's locket, he asks Dumbledore if they'd be dropping it into Mount Etna to destroy it. Dumbledore humorously disagrees on account that if they were wrong, it'd be very hard to get it back out.
    • From the same source, Harry knows that putting on a ring that's known to be cursed is a Very Bad Idea, which is why he knocks the Gaunt Ring out of Dumbledore's hands and sets it on Fiendfyre before the headmaster can put it on.
• Gentle Giant:
  • Fluffy the three-headed dog turns out to be this. Even better, he can speak!
  • Nora, the 25-foot-long dragon mascot of Hogwarts.
• Global Ignorance: Lockhart is guilty of this when writing his books — such as that the real-life Wagga Wagga is a lot bigger than a village. ^note It's a major regional city, and the largest inland city in the state to boot.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: Harry comes up with a pair of oversized, rune-inscribed swimming goggles for Empress the basilisk, to block the amount of light coming out (keeping anyone from seeing her eyes) and prevent her gaze from killing anyone. By the time of the epilogue, she's taken to wearing a pair with googly-eyes.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: This contrast is highlighted in Harry's Final Battle with Voldemort. Voldemort's draconic fire and his Fiendfyre are frequently described as oily red-black flames, which Harry counters with Bluebell Flame and his own golden-yellow Fiendfyre.
• Good Old Fisticuffs:
  • This seems to be Neville's backup strategy if his magic doesn't work and he panics. After seeing himself wielding a sword in the Mirror of Erised he decides to start an exercise regime; his second-year DADA dueling exam ends with him punching his opponent in the nose, and Harry wonders if his default magic strategy should just be conjuring up some weapons to use.
  • When Viktor Krum runs into a mundane wild boar in the Triwizard's third task maze, his solution is to wrestle it with his bare hands.
• Gratuitous Latin: Dumbledore converses with the spirit of Rowena Ravenclaw via the Resurrection Stone in Latin to divine the location of her diadem. Justified in that English and Gaelic have evolved from her time to the modern day, while Latin has mostly remained the same.
• Grave-Marking Scene: Harry spends his 16th birthday at Godric's Hollow, near his parents' graves and memorial.
• Growing Wings: Sphinxes, once they're old enough, can learn special magic that enables them to grow magical wings. They're not exactly durable, but Tanisis uses them in one instance to block a spell from Dragon!Voldemort, and if they're destroyed, she can just regrow a new pair in a blink.
• Hated by All:
  • The lack of political tensions and the overall more progressive atmosphere of Hogwarts thanks to the inclusion of non-human students for the past four years means that by the time Umbridge shows up at the start of Harry's Fifth Year, it takes only minimal time for her to become the most hated person in the entire castle. Not even the Slytherins support her, helped by her incompetence as a teacher undercutting their education.
  • Gilderoy Lockhart, after he's exposed as a fraud. Draco scornfully remarks that having Lockhart as a teacher is the only reason Umbridge can't be unanimously considered the worst professor they've ever had.
• Heavy Sleeper: Dumbledore uses this as a joke when he arrives mid-way through Ron's orbiting of the earth, having apparently slept through the deafening take off of the rocket. When Ginny comments on this, Dumbledore says that it helps to have had a banshee as a housemate in one's younger years.
• Heel–Face Turn: Draco goes from Harry's Unknown Rival that is flummoxed by Harry's good nature, to his dubious acquaintance after Harry tells Krum to ask him for popularity management advice, to his co-founder of the Defense club. He even stands up to his father when the board of governors takes a look at the new club at Umbridge's urging.
• Heel Realization:
  • Dudley finds himself taking a second look at how he treated his wizarding cousin after he secretly watches Carrie and realizes that bullying someone with magical powers doesn't end well for the bullies. Harry is easy-going enough to not hold it against him.
  • A minor example shows up in Harry's 7th year, when he observes some of the Gryffindor 1st-years bombarding their new school-mate, Hans the dwarf, with questions about his life. Harry then starts bombarding one of the girls with similar questions, and when she protests, apologizes for overwhelming her, causing her to realize what she was doing to Hans.
  • Draco Malfoy had been mellowing out for the majority of his later Hogwarts life, and as he points out to the more virulently-racist and newly minted Death Eater Dolores Umbridge:
    Draco: You know, the terrible thing about you is that you're so dreadful at being anti-Muggle that you've actually managed to make me rethink deeply held beliefs. I didn't want to do that.
• Hell Is That Noise: Harry really does not enjoy the school song being sung at the welcoming feast. At least until Hogwarts gets a proper choir in his third year.
• High-Altitude Battle: The climactic battle between Harry and Voldemort occurs in the skies high above Hogwarts, with Voldemort having gotten a dragon body of his own and he and Harry facing off against each other with magic and flame.
• History Repeats: Between Harry's 6th and 7th years, Voldemort revives himself, goes after Harry again and casts the Killing Curse on him. As Harry himself describes the events later, "it worked about as well as last time".
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Draco's ploy to lure Harry out of bounds for an illegal duel backfires when Harry looks up the rules and decides to make the duel official, with Professor Flitwick presiding.
  • In a roundabout way, Lockhart brought his exposure as a fraud on himself. After teaching Harry the Homorphus Charm to get out of not teaching them any practical magic in class, Harry tested it on Lupin and found out that it worked for real. Lupin then decided to investigate the other werewolves Lockhart supposedly used it on and tracked down the real Wagga Wagga Werewolf, who does remember how he was cured and by whom, and it wasn't Lockhart.
  • Twofold during Voldemort's first confrontation with Harry after his resurrection:
    • For one, since Voldemort never encountered Harry at the end of his first year (Harry was with Dumbledore in the Wizengamot and Quirrel fell afoul of the Stone's revamped defenses), he has no idea of his mother's blood protection. As such, Voldemort just uses Frank Longbottom's blood to revive himself... and thus gets blown away when his Killing Curse rebounds on him again, which also is implied to deal with the Horcrux in Harry's scar at the same time.
    • For another, after the rebounding and Harry goes on the attack, the disarrayed Death Eaters panic and try and Disapparate, but can't due to their own Anti-Disapparation Jinx. One of them casts the Dark Mark to break the Jinx via the Taboo effect, but after the World Cup debacle, the Ministry retooled the Taboo to break all magical effects except the Anti-Disapparation Jinx, meaning that all that does is alert the Ministry to their exact location.
• Horrifying the Horror: Downplayed; when the Hogwarts ghosts fly in for their first meetings of the new First-years, they are the ones dumbfounded by the fact that there's a talking dragon amongst them.
• Hugh Mann: The dragons depicted in the in-universe novel Tooth and Fang are prone to Paper Thin Disguises to pass themselves off as human at Beauxbatons.
  "Monsieur Joseph finished his lecture, and asked if there were any questions," Harry read out. "Red saw his chance, and spoke up from the back of the class. 'What's the password into the staff room?' he asked."
  "What, really?" Ron said, trying not to laugh. "That was his big plan?"
  "It gets better," Harry replied. "'I'm sorry, I don't think I've met you before?' Monsieur Joseph asked. 'You are?'
  Red answered quickly. 'Indigo Disguise,' he said, and adjusted his fake beard and moustache, sure he was completely undetectable."
  Over the giggles from the rest of the compartment, Harry continued reading. The dragon called Red, it turned out, hadn't quite made his disguise perfect… but only because there was another student in the class called Indigo Des Guise.
  The subsequent four pages described the dragon and the real In. Des Guise getting into a duel of honour, and Red's plan to win the duel without exposing his true identity.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Percy Weasley is this as assistant to Crouch Sr. When he's arrested, he's the guy who keeps the Department of International Magic Cooperation running, getting his political career off to a flying start. The epilogue has him becoming Minister for Magic.
• I Am Spartacus: After Umbridge singles out Conal for standing in class, the rest of the class all stands up in support of him and everyone remains standing for the rest of the lesson.
• I Can't Hear You: The aftermath of Harry and Ron testing out one of Ron's prototype magical rocket engines.
• Immunity Disability: Harry's draconic magic resistance may allow him to No-Sell virtually all magic used against him, but it also prevents him from using some forms of magical transportation. He can use the Floo, but not Portkeys, and can Apparate himself, but cannot be brought Side-Along.^note In other words, he can send himself somewhere via magic, but nothing external can pull him.
  Then everyone reached out to put a finger or a hand on the Portkey – which had been made out of an old boot – and Mr. Weasley started counting down with all his attention on his watch.
  A moment later, Harry was alone on the hill.
  "Oh," he said.
• In-Joke: One of Harry's favorite wizarding book series is "Tooth and Fang", which is about a family of dragons living inside Beauxbatons, who always remain hidden because wizards don't look up. After the Triwizard Tournament, Fleur Delacour, via Cedric, sends Harry a bunch of photos showing hiding spots around Beauxbatons, and no dragons to be seen. In the epilogue, when Harry becomes the new Defense professor, his classroom contains a gantry on the ceiling, to test who actually bothers to look up.
• Infraction Distraction: Non-crime variant. Even though Harry's Weirdness Censor will mean he appears as a regular boy to Muggles, that still won't stop him getting odd looks if a magical child sees him in a Muggle-populated town and calls him a dragon in front of everyone. The first time after that happens, the wizarding parent buys him a t-shirt with a dragon on it, to mislead people as to what the child is talking about.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • Oliver Wood insists on calling the training Quidditch balls in his trunk practice Quaffles, practice Bludgers, and low, intermediate and high difficulty practice Snitches, even though Harry and Dean can clearly recognize them as footballs, cricket balls, tennis balls, golf balls and marbles respectively.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • With no escaped Azkaban prisoner wreaking havoc in Harry's third year, there are no Dementors around and no reason for him to learn the Patronus charm, but Harry still learns it anyway, as a stepping stone for him to learn Fiendfyre.
  • Even though the Barty Crouches have already been dealt with before the Triwizard Tournament starts, a fourth name slip still comes out of the Goblet of Fire. It turns out to have been Moody seeing if he could get around the restrictions for a lark, and nothing serious becomes of it.
  • Despite Crouch Jr. being foiled, Voldemort's resurrection not occurring, and no reason for Fudge to be paranoid about Dumbledore's authority, Umbridge still becomes Defence professor in Harry's fifth year. Apparently, she was the only applicant to the position that year.
• Insult Backfire:
  • A lot of Draco Malfoy's gloats turn into these on account of Harry simply taking the most positive interpretation of them (knowingly or not) and thoroughly befuddling Draco who's looking for subtext that doesn't exist.
    • When Draco gloats at Harry by saying that he and all the other animals will be expelled soon due to his father and the board of governors, Harry ends up thanking him. Harry reasons that since Draco is a Slytherin, if he wanted Harry to be expelled he wouldn't tell him outright, so the only reason he would have for gloating at Harry is to warn him about the expulsion without actually warning him. Draco is left in sputtering disbelief at the logic.
    • After Dobby leaves the Malfoys' service to volunteer with the Weasleys, Draco sneers to Harry that their new house-elf works much better than Dobby, which Harry is pleased to hear since now everyone's happy.
  • When Lucius Malfoy tries bringing up the warg June Forrester's exam results as a pretext for expelling her, Dumbledore points out that she was a little less than halfway up the class rankings, and if he had to expel everyone who was as bad or worse than her, they'd lose half of Hogwarts, including Malfoy's son Draco. Similarly, trying to paint the sphinx Tanisis Sanura as a vicious beast (specifically describing the following incident as "unprovoked") fails badly because she only "attacked" her housemate when she caught them stealing from Luna, only really shoved and scared the offender and has promised to never do such a thing again.
  • When Harry reads a vitriolic bigoted letter to the Daily Prophet editor, going on about his actions at Hogwarts, he's somewhat pleased, because he figures that "Disgusted of Uxbridge" seems to be the kind of person who, if you're upsetting them, you're probably doing the right thing.
• Interrupted Intimacy: This is the explanation Aberforth Dumbledore gives when one of his DADA students asks him where he got his reputation with goats from. According to him, he was with a lady friend when they heard someone coming up the stairs, and as it would've been embarrassing for the lady to be found with him, he panicked and transfigured her into the animal he was the most familiar with (he'd owned goats for decades). It's later implied that said lady was Madam Amelia Bones.
• Interspecies Friendship:
  • All of Harry's friendships, naturally. Probably the closest to his own species is Nora, but she's still quite a different sort of dragon.
  • Luna and the sphinx Tanisis Sanura, being Ravenclaws in the same year. This leads to Luna being less bullied than in canon, since Tanisis doesn't take kindly to people stealing her friend's belongings.
    • The following year, Luna befriends the new mer-boy student Tiobald MacUalraig, being one of the few students who can speak Mermish and sign language.
  • After making contact, Harry often chats to Empress the basilisk through a mirror, and reads her stories.
• Interspecies Romance: In the epilogue, Tyler Smith (kitsune) marries Lavender Brown.
• Irony:
  • Dean has a chuckle when a boy named Draco comes into his train carriage looking for a dragon.
  • In Harry's sixth year, Colin Creevy lampshades that Gryffindor, the house with a lion motif, is currently the only house without a non-human student that is related to lions in some form. Ravenclaw has Tanisis Sanura the sphinx, Slytherin has Isaac the griffin, and Dominic Alexander the manticore was just sorted into Hufflepuff.
• Is This What Anger Feels Like?: As he hears about Hogwarts's unusually-shaped (i.e. non-human) students being mistreated by Umbridge, the normally even-tempered Harry wonders if he'll finally know what it's like to actually hate someone.
• It Can Think: This is the twins Tyler and Anne's reaction when they sneak into the Gryffindor dormitories to play a prank on the Weasley twins, only to get the dormitory wrong and find Ron's pet rat Scabbers reading Redwall. This is what leads them to accost the rat and uncover his true identity.
• I Thought Everyone Could Do That: While "everyone" is a stretch, for most of Harry's childhood, he assumed that randomly turning into a dragon for no apparent reason was something that happened often enough for people to be used to already and not care or notice, since no-one seemed to react to his becoming a dragon. It's not until Hagrid comes to visit that anyone else sees him as a dragon, and he realises that the lack of reaction was due to a Muggle Weirdness Censor.
• I Warned You: The Quibbler has this moment after Barty Crouch Jr. is discovered and both him and his father are arrested. It reprints all its previous articles about Crouch in a special issue with the headline, "TOLD YOU SO". Harry thinks that although it's not professional, it's very funny.
• Jaw Drop: Professor Moody gets this when Hermione succeeds in his Imperius order that he thought was impossible: transform into a dinosaur.
• Joke Name Tag: The badge-giving telephone box at the Ministry often has some fun with the reasons for being at the Ministry. When Harry comes there to discuss his humanity and his eligibility to hold a wand, the badge is titled "Philosophical Conundrum". Dumbledore has an entire collection of these badges; one visit about a magical accident had his badge saying, "Albus Dumbledore, Probably Responsible".
• Kaleidoscope Hair: During the '92-'93 school year, the Weasley twins unknowingly eat some cookies the Smith twins spiked with a potion that causes the victim's hair to change color everytime they hear the word 'hair,' or other similar-sounding words.
• Kill It with Fire: Harry is advised to learn to use Fiendfyre after Dumbledore is put on the trail of Voldemort's Horcruxes. It does indeed prove immensely useful in destroying them.
• Lame Pun Reaction:
  • George gives his twin a Dope Slap when he tries to define mad magic, as opposed to mad science, as "Madic".
  • When the twins name Ginny's peregrine falcon Animagus form Perry, as in "Perry, Gin, Falcon", they have to skedaddle before their sister starts cursing (magically, not verbally).
  • After talking with Sirius about his confusion over going to the Yule Ball, Sirius jokes about James having always gone "stag," prompting Harry to hit him in the face with a cushion.
  • There are a lot of groans when Professor Flitwick calls the new rule to allow other professors to overturn detentions if they judge the reason to be frivolous, appealing.
• Lampshade Hanging: Harry and his friends do a lot of this, mostly about certain turns of phrase or whatever strange idea has come up.
  • In Harry's first year, Fred and George are moaning that they haven't won since Charlie left, only for to Ron to point out that Charlie left last year. Fred admits that Wood's been so zealous that he'd actually forgot.
• Late to the Punchline: During the Goblet of Fire ceremony, after Fleur Delacour is selected as Beauxbatons's champion, Fred, in a Call-Back to an earlier conversation, comments that she is a "quiche". Hermione tuts and explains to the others that she told Fred that a quiche is a "savoury French tart", and then realizes that she just delivered the punchline.
• Laugh Themselves Sick: Upon hearing about the destruction of the Diary and the Locket, Richard the dragon "started coughing and sputtering and laughing all at once, obviously trying to get control of himself and just as obviously having such difficulty that it was outright impossible." It takes him several seconds to get enough self control to continue the conversation.
• Liar Revealed: What happens when Lockhart is confronted by Michael Freeman a.k.a. the real Wagga Wagga werewolf. Lupin tracked him down to find out if the Homorphus Charm also worked on him, and Michael does remember the warlock who helped stop him, and it wasn't "no poncy blond pom".
• Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: Used as a joke on the 4th year train ride to Hogwarts, referencing a joke that Ron made a while ago. Anyone looking into the cabin is stunned at the sight of regular human students, a panther playing chess, a wolf (warg) practicing sheet music, a sphinx solving puzzles, and many other animals (including a dinosaur) reading books, all in the same room.
• Literal Metaphor:
  • Used as the reason why the Ravenclaw prefect Penelope didn't wake Harry up after he fell asleep in the Ravenclaw library — it's in the school motto: "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus".^note Never tickle a sleeping dragon
  • Also, Hogwarts's new Dungeons & Dragons club is Exactly What It Says on the Tin (if in singular form) — given that it's run by Harry in the first basement of the castle.
• Literal-Minded: Harry takes everyone very literally. It seems to work well for him.
  Voldemort: Relying on help isn't very Gryffindor, Harry. What would your father say?
  Harry: I think he'd first be surprised that his son was a dragon.
• Living Crashpad: Anna firmly thinks that, after Voldemort blasted her and her twin off the Astronomy tower from where they were shooting fireworks at him, Tyler deliberately cushioning her fall with his body was incredibly stupid. Tyler points out that, since it earned him another kitsune tail, it was a good thing anyway.
• A Lizard Named "Liz":
  • Played for Laughs when Neville is being fitted for his school robes at the same time as Draco Malfoy, but can't turn around when he hears someone approach behind him.
    Neville: Is that you, Draco?
    Harry: Well, sort of. But my name's Harry Potter.
  • Empress the basilisk counts. How? "Empress" is the English translation of her Greek name, "βασίλισσα", pronounced "basílissa".
• Loophole Abuse:
  • So, a new Obvious Rule Patch says that the only non-human sapients that are allowed to carry wands are those with accredited magical education or are learning (obviously made for the boy/dragon-who-lived)? Well, now Dumbledore has the perfect excuse to invite more magical non-human sapients to learn at Hogwarts, like wargs and sphinxes!
  • The charm on the Mirror of Erised prevents the stone from being acquired by anyone who would want to use it. As Harry shows, this doesn't preclude someone who wants the stone for the sake of having it.
  • Percy runs an allowance form for importing dangerous animals into Britain, and an allowance form for "cross-language classes for below-age foreign students", past his boss Mr. Crouch, thus allowing Charlie to bring baby dragons into Hogwarts to be taught Parseltongue by Empress the basilisk, to see if they become sapient like Nora. His brothers are amazed.
    Charlie: Blimey, Percy, what happened to you over the last few years? You're scary now?
  • Harry points out a third-year could take a third-year date to the Yule Ball (which is normally only for fourth-years and above), by getting two fourth-years to take them as their dates and then swapping around once inside. Once the idea spreads, most of the school attends.
  • Slytherin's basilisk Empress has had a Geas put on her by her master, that compels her to obey every direct order given in the language of the serpents, no matter what. Well, what if the language she hears and understands is not one she recognizes as the language of the serpents, but as the language of the dragons instead?
• Loose Lips: Hermione lets slip about her time-turner to her friends before Halloween after realizing that using it throughout the Animagus sensitization ritual (carrying a Mandrake leaf in her mouth for a month) has caused her Animagus form to be a deinonychus.

M-S

• Magi Babble: Wilkie Twycross does this a few times when he is brought in to teach the 6th year students Apparition, the rest of the time giving out Non Answers that make perfect sense to an expert like him. Only after persistent questioning gets more useable descriptions out of him do the students manage to make any headway at all.
• Magic Harms Technology: The characters manages to get to the bottom of why various electronics don't work at Hogwarts: Hogwarts has spells to protect it from lightning, which have the side effect of preventing valves, spark plugs and cathode ray tubes (which all use arcing electricity) from working. Once that's sorted out, certain newer types of technology are able to be introduced.
• Magic Knight: A combination of having more supportive friends at a younger age and an interest in sword-fighting sees Neville develop into this as the story goes on, even getting lessons from Lord Ridley and Sir Cadogan in his spare time. This leads to him curb-stomping Bellatrix Lestrange, who isn't prepared for how competent a wizard he's grown up to be.
• Magitek:
  • Ron is slowly delving into this as he tries to develop working rockets out of magic. Chapter 73 illustrates him testing out a new rocket engine with a self-refilling fuel tank for his OWL Runes project, and his NEWT years have him building out a full rocket prototype.
    • Chapter 95 demonstrates the full testing of his new rocket, the Ratatoskr, and all the magical features that go into it, including the broomstick charms that it uses for braking, the structure enchanted to be Unbreakable, the globe of alchemic silver enchanted with a Protean Charm that his friends use for navigation, and the bevy of concealment enchantments borrowed from the Knight Bus and Beauxbatons's flying carriage to make it Invisible to Normals.
  • With the investigation of some Muggle technology working around Hogwarts, Sirius's present for Harry's 17th birthday is a digital watch, which can also cast Shield Charms.
  • Harry's NEWT-level alchemy project is to design alchemically-made transistors.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": When Harry first walks into the owl emporium, nearly every bird in the place panics at the sight of a dragon so close. Except for one snowy exception — and it's pretty obvious who it is.
• Master of All:
  • Subverted. Unlike in canon, Hermione sticks with her decision to take all the classes Hogwarts has to offer up to OWL-level, and succeeds in getting Os in all of them come Fifth Year... except for Diviniation, which she only gets an Acceptable in. By her own admission, she did well enough in the theory but was badly let down by the practical.
  • Played straight with Percy, who gets OWLs in all twelve classes, including Divination.
• Master of None: Cormac McLaggen for the Gryffindor Quidditch team. He's fairly competent at all positions but is often relegated to reserve player if a better option is available, and sometimes not even that if there's another reservist for that position (like Harry and Ron for Seeker and Keeper respectively).
• Mathematician's Answer: Percy's response to Fred and George as to if his initial obliviousness to Sirius being an Animagus was because he was being obtuse, deadpan, or honestly didn't know? "Yes, actually."
• Meaningful Name:
  • Ron's prototype space rocket is named the Ratatoskr, after the squirrel from Norse Mythology that climbs the World Tree Yggdrasil. Its bigger brother that Ron builds post-graduation is named the Nidhogg and is capable of interplanetary travel.
  • Richard is chosen as a name by the dragon formerly possessed by Voldemort, because it's common (which Tom the Dark Lord would hate) and because "any Tom, Dick or Harry can be a dragon these days."
• Mermaid in a Wheelchair: When Tiobald the merman enrolls at Hogwarts, he uses a magical wheelchair to travel around. It can even climb stairs by itself. He still needs a translator, though. Notably, having non-human students is normal enough by then that the news of a student in a wheelchair spreads faster than the news of a merfolk student.
• Mission Control: Ron's friends use a set of enchanted two-way mirrors and a silver globe with a Protean Charm (and later a pair of Protean-paired typewriters) to keep track of him while he's orbiting the Earth in his spaceship.
• Mistaken for an Imposter: Played for Laughs. Voldemort's attempt on Harry's life during the summer between his sixth and seventh year is such an Epic Fail that the Daily Prophet decides he had to be a fake. Considering Voldemort poses nowhere near the amount of threat he does in canon, neither Harry nor Dumbledore see any reason to correct them and cause unnecessary panic, so the public remains unaware that really was Voldemort until his attack on Hogwarts in Chapter 99.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • When the topic comes up of whether some magical creatures that aren't mentioned in "Fantastic Beasts" are sapient Beings or not, Professor Kettleburn is pleased at the questions, before soberly telling them that the reason some creatures (like cockatrices and rocs) aren't in "Fantastic Beasts" is because they're extinct.
  • Chapter 91 has Harry going through the summer of his 17th birthday, moving into Grimmauld Place, enjoying his birthday with his friends, taking part in his first summer job at Gringotts as a defense-tester (and destroying Hufflepuff's Cup in the process), but it ends with the news of Princess Diana's car crash.
  • At the end of chapter 99, during Harry's DADA NEWT, an enormous green-and-silver dragon shouts a Banishment Charm at the castle, around where Dumbledore's office would be, damaging the castle in the process.
• Morton's Fork: Draco ends up stuck in one of these when his illegal past-curfew duel with Harry becomes a presided, official duel, leaving him stuck between backing out of his own challenge, or agreeing to a duel with a dragon. His best option at that point is to agree and fight dirty, which doesn't impress Professor Flitwick one bit.
• Muggles Do It Better: Comes up a few times.
  • Ancient alchemists required many ingredients from specific locations around the world, a complex formula, and a slow and tedious process to create a specific metal. Muggles, meanwhile, can mine the same metal (aluminium) in staggering quantities in much less time.
  • Due to Ron's interest in space, he often brings Muggle science magazines with the latest discoveries to Astronomy class. The pictures taken by the Hubble Telescope, in particular, take Professor Sinistra's breath away.
• Multiple Head Case:
  • As a magical being and thus sapient, Fluffy the three-headed-dog counts. His right head is gruff, his middle head is formal, and his left is cheerful.
  • His niece(s) Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail also count when they enroll in Hogwarts in Harry's third year.
• Mundane Solution:
  • Being naturally quadrupedal, Harry isn't sure at first how he can carry his wand without it constantly hitting the ground. Mr Ollivander suggests putting it in his pocket.
  • What's the solution for unusually-shaped Hogwarts students like the sphinx Tanisis or the warg June to finish their exams on time when their paws aren't built for writing? A normal Muggle typewriter!
  • A dive to the bottom of the lake is impressive for a Triwizard Task, but not very appealing to a live audience. The solution? Two-way mirrors (cameras), and diving cameramen!
    • The same solution is used during the third-task maze... but since they're affixed to the champions' chests, the view can get a little bit disorientating if things get active, and a few moments are lost if the champion isn't facing the right way.
  • What to do when there's a spell to page directly from a reference in a book to its endnotes, but no way to get back to where you were reading? Luna suggests a bookmark.
• Mundane Utility:
  • The Hogwarts mascot Nora uses the Whomping Willow as a massager. Then again, it helps to be a 25-foot-long dragon.
  • Ron uses his small Animagus form to eat Every-Flavour Beans, since they're relatively larger that way.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg:
  • Ron observes that the Hogwarts grounds are entirely white, "Except for, you know, the hundreds of fellow decent students having snowball fights… and the Slytherins."
  • In the Epilogue, the first-years of 2017 include "thirty-seven or thirty-eight normal humans and two Weasleys".
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: Invoked by name when, during a New Year's party with the Forbidden Forest wargs, the Weasley Twins slip the Smith Twins some doctored Translation Toffee, causing Tyler to keep saying the trope name without knowing what's happening.
• My Instincts Are Showing: This is a topic that comes up in the Unusually Shaped Club, Harry's new Hogwarts club for non-human magical sapients.
  • Examples include Harry's own experiences suppressing his Dragon Hoard behaviour, and Tanisis the sphinx repressing her normal (violent) reaction to a wrongly-answered riddle.
  • The way the latter phrases it in an interview with Newt Scamander, it's sort of like putting in a lot of effort into making a very good riddle, and when someone gets it wrong, it feels like they didn't put in the effort to answering it in return and one wants to smack them for wasting one's time making it. Not something ignorable, but something that can be acknowledged and put aside.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: The centaurs of the Forbidden Forest on balance would prefer keeping to themselves away from wizards and are more or less ambivalent on the subject, though there are both hardline human-hating isolationists like Bane and more liberal-leaning ones like Firenze. The Acromantula attack and the Hogwarts denizens assisting them have swayed them more to the wizard-appreciative end, and by Harry's 4th year, Conal, Ronan's son and Firenze's nephew, has decided to register as a student.
• Mythology Gag: It's packed with them.
  • Probably unintentional, but Ron's random boast to the Veela in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire of making a broomstick that will reach Jupiter takes a new light in this fic, when he learns about Muggle society going to the moon and gets a new fascination with space. The Mirror of Erised even shows him becoming an astronaut.
  • When Sirius learns about Tom Riddle's diary, he quips that it probably all started because he had a crush on a Muggleborn Gryffindor. That origin, of course, belongs to canon Snape.
  • Hermione drinking a potion that causes her to have an unexpected transformation happens both in canon and in this fic. In canon, it was a Polyjuice Potion that accidentally turned her into a Cat Girl. In this, it was an Animagus potion (as part of the Animagus ritual) that, due to her Time-Turner usage, turned her into a deinonychus.
  • The capture of the Snitch at the Quidditch World Cup has one Seeker bail during a dive race to the ground, while the other (Krum) gets his arm busted by a Bludger, crash-lands, and nabs the Snitch anyway — a very similar parallel to how canon Harry caught the Snitch in his second-year game with the rogue Bludger.
  • Nora apparantly mistakes the Beauxbatons carriage for some kind of flying creature and goes to meet it before Hagrid assures her they're friendly. In the book when the Beauxbatons carriage arrived, one first-year girl mistook it for a dragon.
  • A fourth piece of parchment comes out of the Goblet of Fire that was written by Professor Moody. Only in this case, the note is typewritten and just says "I had to see if I could do it", so nothing comes of it.
  • Harry's fifth-year is full of unexpected rule changes by the authority. Only, these rules are things like "typewriters will be allowed to submit homework" (which is good for non-humans that have trouble using quills) and "Detentions cannot last for too long, cause undue harm or distress to students, and can be overturned by other professors if they judge the reason to be frivolous".
  • A Defense Club is formed in fifth-year because Umbridge is worthless as DADA professor, only instead of the Slytherins being excluded, Draco was the one to suggest the idea to Harry, and to organize it to include everyone, even the Slytherins.
  • Thus far, there hasn't been a single Halloween feast where something has gone wrong for Harry and co. The closest one was in 2nd year, and that was simply Tyler informing Snape that Peter Pettigrew had been found in the Gryffindor dormitories and didn't involve Harry at all.
  • The giant magical fireworks display in Harry's fifth year is for Fred and George's departure from Hogwarts — at the end of year feast, doubling up as a celebration of Gryffindor winning the House Cup (partially due to the lack of pranks the twins had been playing throughout the year), and advertisement for their new store, "Marauder's Magical Miscellany".
  • In the summer after fifth year, Harry asks Sirius whether students who want to take a subject, but don't yet know whether their marks will allow it, are supposed to buy the books. Sirius isn't sure. In canon, Harry had to use a second hand Potions textbook from the classroom, which turned out to belong to the Half Blood Prince.
    • On that subject, since Snape is still the Potions master in 6th year, he often makes corrections to the recipes in the given textbook. Hermione ends up writing them down in her textbook copy, much to her embarrassment.
  • Harry becomes a prefect in 5th year, and Ron becomes Quidditch captain in 6th year. In canon, it was the other way around.
  • One time, Dumbledore eats a Marauders' sweet that turns his hair and beard rainbow-coloured, as a nod to Dumbledore's homosexuality.
  • The Gryffindor Quidditch team captain encounters a particularly-talented First Year and wants to put them on the team, even though First-Years aren't technically allowed on the team. In this case, the captain is Ron, who wants a new girl named Kayleigh on the team due to her natural talent on a broom.
  • Harry still gets into a fight with a Hungarian Horntail — a magically-grown Hungarian Horntail possessed by Voldemort.
  • Even though it's now too small for him, Harry's Invisibility Cloak does come in handy during the Battle of Hogwarts — as a makeshift blindfold so that Empress can enter the battle without her deadly gaze killing anyone.
  • Harry eventually encounters a winking snake - during the epilogue where Harry is DADA professor, the fifth-year Gryffindor prefect is a basilisk wearing a runic blindfold and winking false eyes.
• Naked Freak-Out: When the Homorphus Charm used to untransform a werewolf actually works, Remus just manages to duck under a bedsheet, before asking for some clothes.
• Never Heard That One Before:
  • A variation — by the end of Harry's first Hogwarts express ride, so many people have asked him the same five questions ^note 1. Are you really Harry Potter? (Yes.), 2. Why are you a dragon? (Don't know, sorry, it was a while ago.), 3. How did you stop You-Know-Who? (I was a baby, I don't know that either.), 4. Can we see the scar? (It isn't as if I'm wearing anything in the way) 5. What magic can you do? (None yet, that's why I'm going to school.) that Harry's new friends can answer them by rote for him.
  • Melody Vaughn the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire has heard all the vampire jokes, including those that think her last name is spelt "Von".
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • If Umbridge (or rather, Disgusted of Uxbridge) hadn't raised the issue of Harry's humanity and thus fitness to carry a wand in the Daily Prophet, the issue would never have gotten enough traction to reach the Wizengamot, and thus the clause to allow non-human magical sapients to carry wands if they have taken magical education would never have been implemented and none of Harry's non-human friends would've been able to attend Hogwarts.
  • It's implied that Voldemort casting the Killing Curse at Harry during the summer of 1997, in addition to rebounding and destroying his renewed body, also destroyed his soul fragment that was unknowingly hiding inside Harry's scar.
  • When Voldemort sees the basilisk, he engages in some Evil Gloating that reveals Hagrid was innocent of raising the monster that killed a student and got him expelled from Hogwarts. As a result, Hagrid is able to retake his Hogwarts lessons and the epilogue has him telling Harry about his OWL results.
• Nice, Mean, and In-Between: Fluffy's three heads fall into this. The right head, who is gruff and surly, is mean, the left head, who is cheerful and friendly, is Nice, and the middle head, who is polite and formal, is In-between.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Blaise Zabini often casually converses about his many stepfathers and his mother's bizarre tastes in cooking that may have brought them about. Harry, who can digest even hemlock, doesn't notice anything wrong.
  Blaise: I'm starting to think I should invite you around one of these days. You'd probably like Mother's cooking. You wouldn't even need anything from the pepper grinder with it.
  Dean: Bezoar in the pepper grinder?
  Blaise: Bezoar in the pepper grinder.
• "No. Just… No" Reaction: Ron's understandable reaction when an invitation comes for Aragog's funeral.
• Noodle Incident:
  • During a morning in Harry's second year, there's an ongoing rumor that the studious and straitlaced Percy finally hit his Rage Breaking Point with Lockhart and blasted him out a window.
  • At one point, Blaise gets into a spirited debate with Snape over the benefits of having crushed bezoar added to any antidote brewed.
• Non-Answer:
  • As Harry is unable to Portkey to the Quidditch World Cup, he has to fly there himself, but doesn't know where to go. Unfortunately for Sirius, who is trying to help him via mirror, the officials don't exactly know either.
    Sirius: If I walked ten miles... that way, where would I be?
    Official: Lost.
  • The time-telling charm Tempus can give unhelpful results, since time is a human invention and the charm is very dependent on the caster's interpretation, location and language. If you don't cast it right, it might give answers like "Now, in this galaxy".
• Non-Indicative Name: After a day at the Ministry, Dumbledore suggests to Harry that they have a bite to eat at a nearby Muggle restaurant with a Scottish chef. The name of that chef? McDonald's!
• The Nose Knows:
  • Fred and George's Running Gag of pretending to be the other becomes harder to pull off once their other friends become Animagi, as they can figure out which one is which by smell, specifically, which one smells like a mink and which one smells like a pine marten.
  • After Harry becomes a prefect, he intercepts a package of chocolates for Ron that smells rather odd to him (and the Barlos sisters). Some assistance from Professors McGonagall and Snape later, Romilda Vane has detention for using love potion.
• No-Sell: Harry is a dragon, and being magic-resistant/immune and exceedingly tough comes with the territory.
  • One of Madam Malkin's assistants accidentally jabs him with a pin while measuring him for robes. Madam Malkin then has to use her wand to fix the pin, which was bent at the tip by his scales.
  • When Harry was being Sorted, he found that the Sorting Hat couldn't feel or communicate with him if he closed his eyes.
  • In second-year, Dobby's rogue Bludger does nothing more than annoy Harry during the game.
  • An attempt to poison Harry (by Dobby; intended to be non-fatal) runs right into Harry's Extreme Omnivore nature. He only realizes somebody might have tried to harm him when the Hogwarts Elves serve him a dinner seasoned with hemlock a few weeks later and he notices the familiar flavor. His friends agree the first lot was probably intended to hurt him.
  • Harry can ward off a lot of manipulation spells by blinking: Legilimency, a Veela's glamor, the Imperius Curse...
    • The last is downplayed when Moody explains that someone only has to make their first Imperius order to Harry, "Don't blink".
  • A legal one, when Dumbledore demolishes Umbridge's attempt to have Harry thrown out of Hogwarts in about five seconds flat. To add insult to injury he's able to use the resulting Obvious Rule Patch to bring in even more non-human students and he also casually reveals Umbridge's true blood status which demolishes any influence she has left with the pure-blood lobby.
  • When Harry tries to use Umbridge's black quill in his detention with her, the quill catches fire from his dragon blood.
  • Because Harry’s blood wasn’t used for Voldemort’s resurrection, Lily’s sacrificial love is still in effect when the Killing Curse bounces off of Harry, much to everyone's surprise.
• Not a Date: Harry's date to the Yule Ball is Tanisis the sphinx, since as a third-year at the time, she wouldn't be able to come normally and wants to see what the party is all about. Harry finds it hard to call it a date since they both made it clear to each other what's going on.
• Not His Sled: The Horcrux present in Harry's scar is not even acknowledged in this fic; in fact, Voldemort is vanquished without anyone even knowing it existed. It's implied that when Voldemort's Killing Curse rebounded for the second time during his attempt on Harry's life, it also got rid of the soul fragment inside Harry.
• Not Himself: The normally easygoing Harry doesn't particularly like it when he molts, since it makes him itchy, irritable and grouchy for a day or so. In 7th year, his friends witness an irritable Harry for the first time, and though they are initially surprised, the trouble is quickly identified and Harry goes to Madam Pomfrey for help.
• Not in Front of the Kid: The centaurs Conal and Xenia, when discussing the centaur-wizard relation politics within their herd, mention how their parents get wary whenever they talk about the subject around the young ones, and ask them to go to bed whenever the hardline isolationists speak up.
• Not So Above It All: Alastor Moody is a paranoid old Auror, but he's not above putting a piece of parchment into the Goblet of Fire with the message "I had to see if I could do it. Your move, headmaster", just to test its protections.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Umbridge was pretty much The Family for the Whole Family during her tenure as Defense professor — very ill-intentioned, but so incompetent with her bigotry that it was a simple matter for her colleagues to stymie her efforts. Then she turns out to have played a huge part in Voldemort's second resurrection as a dragon.
• Now You Tell Me: Mid-way through Dean's third-year Divination exam, Professor Trelawney receives a prophecy about an Acromantula attack. Which occurs on the other side of Hogwarts moments later. ^note At least that's what the characters believe. In fact, the exact phrasing implies it's about a completely unrelated event, the founding of the company Amazon a few weeks later.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • To resolve a dispute as to whether Harry counts as human and thus is allowed a wand, Dumbledore proposes a law amendment that says that non-human creatures are allowed to carry wands if they are taking or have completed an accredited magical education. Of course, Harry is the only non-human doing anything of the sort... at least, until the following year and the years after that.
  • When Umbridge starts trying to throw her weight around in 5th year to target the unusually-shaped students, Dumbledore often instates new school rules to counteract them. For example, when Umbridge disallows special consideration for some of the students with paws who need to submit their work written with typewriters, Dumbledore announces the new school policy that use of typewriters is perfectly acceptable for everyone.
• Offhand Backhand: At the beginning of one Quidditch game, a Bludger decides to go for Madame Hooch first, but she just nonchalantly pulls out a spare club and knocks it away.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • During Harry's third-fourth year summer, Remus Lupin is attacked by Fenrir Greyback, but successfully kills the mass-murdering werewolf.
  • Abound during the Battle of Hogwarts, by virtue of Harry being busy fighting Dragon!Voldemort in the sky.
    • Neville managed to defeat Bellatrix Lestrange with Panthera, but he had a little more trouble with Nagini until Empress ate the smaller snake.
    • Colin Creevey ended up with the Sorting Hat on his head, drew the Sword of Gryffindor, and used it to fight off a Dementor.
    • Dennis Creevey remained in the Owlery throughout the whole battle, taking pictures of everything including Harry and Voldemort's aerial dragon fight.
    • Luna transfigured Nott Sr. into a completely new species of animal, that's also so magically-resistant there doesn't seem to be a good way to change him back.
    • Ron and Hermione were playing Battle Couple against some Death Eaters, with Ron managing to blast Rodolphus Lestrange with liquid oxygen. Considering that Ron was trying to conjure peroxide i.e. rocket fuel, Rodolphus got off lightly.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Downplayed; Snape is very briefly mortified (but conceals it quickly) when he learns that he sent his doe Patronus with a message to Dumbledore... in front of Harry.
  • Ron has this reaction after he gets back from his orbit around the Earth, to find his mother marching up to Hogwarts demanding to know why her son has been travelling (as shown on the magical family clock) for over an hour.
• Once a Season: In Harry's first year, his legal status as a non-human carrying a wand is resolved by a Wizengamot hearing and an Obvious Rule Patch, which rules that sapient non-humans are permitted to carry a wand under the condition they take and complete an accredited magical education. As such, subsequent years always have at least one new non-human student join Hogwarts.
  • 2nd year: June Forrester the warg (Hufflepuff), Tanisis Sanura the sphinx (Ravenclaw), and Tyler and Anne Smith the kitsune twins (Slytherin)
  • 3rd year: Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail Barlos the three-headed dog (Gryffindor) and Tiobald MacUalraig the selkie mer-boy (Ravenclaw)
  • 4th year: Conal the centaur (Hufflepuff)
  • 5th year: Matthew Forrester the warg (Hufflepuff), Isaac the griffin (Slytherin) and Melody Vaughn the vampire (Gryffindor)
  • 6th year: Dominic Alexander the manticore (Hufflepuff) and Skara the goblin (Ravenclaw)
  • 7th year: Hans Roser the dwarf (Gryffindor) and Xenia the centaur (Slytherin)
  • During the Epilogue, in April of 2003, Nora Rubeus gets her Hogwarts letter, and ends up sorted into Hufflepuff. Also seen is an Acromantula Ravenclaw student named Cerag.
  • At the end of the Epilogue, during Harry's eleventh year as the Defense professor, the Hogwarts student body includes a few dragon students as well as a basilisk Prefect, with two wargs, two goblins, a centaur, two panitherias, the first extra-terrestrial students, and probably a Veela about to be sorted that year.
• One Degree of Separation: Tanisis Sanura is a new Riddling Sphinx student of Hogwarts. Her mother is employed to be an obstacle during the Triwizard Tournament.
• One Season Athlete: Harry only joins the Gryffindor Quidditch team in his second year, and doesn't stay on the team beyond that because his interests lie elsewhere.
• One-Steve Limit: An aversion: In Harry's 6th year, a new student named James Tuckett is sorted into Hufflepuff, causing some confusion for the third-year James Tuckett already sorted into Hufflepuff. The only consolation is that they both look different.
• Only One Name: Conal the centaur, like other centaurs. During his house Sorting, someone asks what his first name is, and Professor McGonagall replies that that is his first name.
• Only Smart People May Pass: Applies to Ravenclaw's riddling doorknocker as in canon, but when it asks Harry, "Are you a dragon?" in amazement, you can figure out what happens next.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: When Sirius shows up to help Professor Lupin with the DADA third-year final exam obstacle course, he allows Seamus Finnegan a couple of questions, and Seamus's second question is if he bribed his way out of Azkaban as alleged by his mum. Sirius isn't impressed, and on an unrelated note, Seamus is going first.
• Original Position Fallacy: Umbridge has been putting up transparently pro-human and authoritarian propaganda posters around Hogwarts, but the students have no qualms in taking them down — especially since they don't even have her name on them, so they look like simple clutter. When she complains to Dumbledore, he agrees that she has a point and that maybe a week of poster hanging would be worth a try. In fact, it's such a good idea that everyone should be able to put up posters without fear of them being taken down! Cue walls covered in pro-nonhuman posters that are much more creative and interesting than Umbridge's efforts, some of which even directly ridicule her.
  Dumbledore: Of course, it occurs to me that it would be dreadfully lacking in variety for there to just be the one person making posters… but, well, there you go. Please do not take any posters down, and thank you all in advance.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Harry is utterly bizarre compared to most dragons in the setting - he's sapient and capable of speech, he is an Extreme Omnivore, hoards objects that are valuable to him (in his case, books), and Was Once a Man.
• Our Manticores Are Spinier: Dominic Alexander, a manticore who comes to Hogwarts in Harry's sixth year and becomes a Hufflepuff. He has wings and a stinging tail, but apart from that he seems fairly bog-standard.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: As of the epilogue, Professor Snape has devised a new kind of Wolfsbane potion using moon dust that allows werewolves to retain their minds constantly, and transform even outside the full moon, making them similar to Animagi.
• Out-Gambitted:
  • When the Goblet of Fire stands ready to receive applicants, Fred and George ask Dean if he has any suggestions for getting past Dumbledore's protections. Dean replies that he has loads of ideas... problem is, Dumbledore asked him first. That doesn't stop the twins from trying, of course.
  • Then Dean himself is out-gambitted when Professor Moody, on a lark, manages to circumvent the protections anyway.
• Overly Pre-Prepared Gag: Why is Dean taking the time to fly around the Hogwarts Express in his crow Animagus form looking for confused 1st-years? So that he can fly back to tell the new Head Boy Harry about them and get him to go help, and when they ask how he knew, he can say that a little bird told him.
• Paranoia Gambit: What the Trickster Twins of Hogwarts are inflicting on Professor Umbridge: pranking everything around her except her or her class, and slowly driving her barmy with paranoia. They have a regularly updated "Coulda" list of pranks they've planned, but not carried out, and they trade notes with the Smiths.
• Parental Substitute:
  • When Harry describes to Nora that Sirius is to him what Hagrid is to her, Nora calls Hagrid "Dad". Hagrid gives her a Bear Hug for that.
  • Played for Laughs in the case of Lupin after he accidentally takes over as alpha for Greyback's old pack after killing the latter. When Harry explains that in the wild, "alpha" is just an interchangeable term for the parents of a pack of wolves (which he learned from June), the werewolves decide Lupin is their new father instead. Lupin, despite understandably being confounded by all this, later comes to embrace his new role and spends the next couple of years educating and taking care of the pack as if they were his own family.
• Pig Latin: What Hermione makes her Boggart of Professor McGonagall start saying.
• Poe's Law: As conveyed by Luna in a meeting of the Unusually-Shaped Club in 6th year, her father Xenophilius thought that Umbridge was actually trying to spread tolerance because of how bad she was at being prejudiced. Draco complains about this while fighting her at the Battle of Hogwarts, that she made him rethink his own prejudices because of how awful she expressed her racism.
• Point of Divergence:
  • The Dursleys don't move out of Privet Drive in an attempt to avoid the Hogwarts letters. As a result, Hagrid and Harry arrive at Diagon Alley much earlier, and the latter's first meeting with a fellow student is with Neville, not Draco. Subsequently, Harry has a better idea of how to get onto Platform 9 3/4, and his meeting a fellow student at King's Cross is done with Dean Thomas on the Underground platforms instead of with the Weasleys on the main concourse.
    • Since Harry is in Neville's train compartment, he joins the search for Trevor when he escapes, during which he meets Blaise Zabini, Daphne Greengrass and Tracey Davis, giving him a more amicable introduction to later-Slytherin students.
  • Harry saves Neville during his first flying lesson with his wings and doesn't involve him catching his Remembrall, so Harry doesn't become part of the Gryffindor Quidditch team that year. Cormac McLaggen becomes the Seeker instead... and let's just say Gryffindor's winning streak abruptly ends.
    • Since Harry doesn't play in the Quidditch game, Quirrell doesn't try and kill him during it, instead using the distraction to try and get past Fluffy. That's what the later troll is for.
  • Harry and his friends find their way into the secret corridor midway through the second term.
  • A debate in the Daily Prophet about Harry's humanity during his first year leads to a discussion in the Wizengamot and Dumbledore allowing non-human sapients to learn magic in Hogwarts the following year.
    • During the debate in the Prophet, Harry finds out about Lupin early, and gets in contact with him via letter. And they meet during the summer holidays before Harry's second year.
    • Fred and George hear about Lupin and the Marauders that year from Harry, and they decide to pass him the Marauder's Map.
    • Two of said new non-human students, the kitsune Tyler and Anne Smith, inform Snape about something odd in Gryffindor's common room, and Snape ends up finding Scabbers, or rather, Peter Pettigrew. This leads to an investigation and Sirius's release before Christmas that year.
    • The Wizengamot debate has Dumbledore neatly torpedo Dolores Umbridge's blood status and standing in the council. As a result of her reduced influence, her anti-werewolf laws don't get nearly as much traction, which when coupled with Hogwarts' new inclusion of non-human magical sapients, has Remus Lupin become an openly-werewolf professor at Hogwarts with hardly any fanfare. While Umbridge still becomes the DADA professor in Harry's fifth year, she has no special powers afforded to her by the Ministry, all of her attempts to get the non-human students ejected fall flat, and at the end of the year she is bluntly fired by Dumbledore with no fanfare.
    • Quirrel uses Dumbledore's absence during the Wizengamot meeting to try and reach the Philosopher's Stone. He completely fails due to the improved gauntlet courtesy of Dean, and implodes in rage. This happens during the Easter break when many students are at home, so the student body is oblivious to the truth. Also, since the confrontation between Harry and Voldemort never happens, the latter never finds out about Harry's blood protection, meaning that when they do finally meet in the summer of 1997 Voldemort's Killing Curse rebounds again.
  • Harry convinces Hagrid to get Dumbledore's help with Norberta's egg, and Norberta/Nora is allowed to stay around as Hogwarts' mascot. She even gets to take part in the Triwizard Tournament's first task!
  • Tom Riddle's diary ends up with Harry Potter instead of Ginny Weasley. Having learned Voldemort's true name last year, Harry knows something's up and decides to give it to Dumbledore as soon as he is able to.
    • As a result, the Chamber of Secrets never comes up at all that year (except when mentioned once by Dobby). That means Hagrid's case never comes up, and Professor Kettleburn remains the Care of Magical Creatures professor for the rest of Harry's time at Hogwarts. Hagrid is only exonerated at the end of 7th year, after Voldemort gloats about the basilisk in public.
  • In the summer before second-year, Harry spends August at Longbottom House with Neville instead of at the Burrow with Ron. As a result, when September comes around Harry arrives at King's Cross station early, and when Dobby seals the portal into Platform 9 3/4, enough of a crowd builds up that Magical Maintenance arrives and unblocks it.
  • Harry only joins the Quidditch team in his second year. He also decides to not stay on beyond that year despite a perfect catch record, because he has so much more he wants to do, like book club. This eventually leads to Ginny becoming Seeker the following year.
    • Similarly, Ron becomes the reserve Keeper for Gryffindor in his third year, and even manages to play in one game after Wood takes a Bludger in a very unfortunate place. He even becomes captain in 6th year.
  • With an inadvertent comment, Harry manages to gain Kreacher's trust and is told of Slytherin's locket and Regulus's request. This, coupled with the diary, puts Dumbledore on the trail of Voldemort's Horcruxes a lot earlier, and he advises Harry to learn to use Fiendfyre to destroy them.
    • Once Harry learns Fiendfyre to a suitable level during the summer between third and fourth year, the diary, locket and ring are destroyed in quick succession. Moreover, since Harry is present when Dumbledore finds the ring in the Gaunt shack, he is able to knock it out of Dumbledore's hands before he is tempted to put it on, meaning Dumbledore is not cursed.
    • Once Dumbledore has the Resurrection Stone, Harry gets the idea of using it to ask Rowena Ravenclaw herself what happened to her diadem. With the help of her, her daughter Helena a.k.a. the Grey Lady, and the Hogwarts House-Elves, the diadem is quickly found and destroyed.
  • Harry doesn't take Divination as a third-year elective; he takes Ancient Runes, Care of Magical Creatures and Arithmancy. The rest of Harry's friends take a mixture of other subjects, with Hermione being her usual sign-up-for-everything self.
    • As a result, in third year, the boys all notice when Hermione is in the same class as all of them, despite each of them having different classes at the same time. This eventually leads to Hermione coming clean about her time-turner when the topic arises later in the year.
  • Dobby doesn't get released by Harry at the end of second year. He does however petition to the Ministry's Office of House-Elf Relocation at Hermione's prompting, manages to win his case, and ends up with the Weasleys as a 'volunteer' House Elf.
  • Harry's friends all learn to be Animagi in their third year, thanks to Sirius's help. By a mixture of animal senses, Luna's eccentricity and raw bad luck, Crouch Jr. runs into them at the Quidditch World Cup after casting the Dark Mark, and is subsequently captured and unmasked in front of everyone, including his father.
    • As such, the real Alastor Moody becomes the 4th year DADA professor, and subsequently, there is no plot to resurrect Voldemort or get Harry's name into the Goblet of Fire. Harry still takes part, however, as one of Nora's minders during the first task, and as a camera-dragon during the second.
    • Cedric Diggory is thus not killed by Voldemort when he grabs the cup and wins the Triwizard Tournament.
    • Without Voldemort, there's no reason for Dumbledore to ask Hagrid to parley with the giants, and as such Grawp never shows up. Also, Percy doesn't have a falling-out with his family.
  • Ron and Hermione go to the Yule Ball together at Dean's urging, while Dean goes with Parvati, Neville goes with Luna and Harry goes with Tanisis. Krum's date isn't someone anyone recognizes at first, but is implied to be Anne Smith the kitsune.
  • To keep things interesting, Sirius copies the Marauder's Map and gives one copy each to both sets of Trickster Twins, the Weasleys and the Smiths. During the Triwizard Tournament's second task, Tyler Smith notices something odd and ends up nabbing Rita Skeeter when she tries to spy on Krum and Tyler's twin sister Anne.
  • Because of all of Harry's leadership and support to the non-human Hogwarts students, it's an easy choice for Dumbledore to make him prefect during his fifth year, and later in his 7th year, Head Boy/Dragon.
  • By Harry's 6th year, events have conspired such that Snape remains the Potions master and Dedalus Diggle becomes the DADA professor. Harry also doesn't take Potions in 6th year, choosing instead to focus on the new NEWT subject of Alchemy.
• Politeness Judo: Harry slowly takes a few lessons of this from Dumbledore. After a reporter is keeping him from boarding the Hogwarts Express, he excuses himself by apologizing for taking up the reporter's time and mentioning that he'd probably missed a few of his friends.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Dean relates how, during the Battle of Hogwarts, he dueled a posh-sounding enemy wizard that kept shouting how he wasn't meant to be English and wasn't meant to be a wizard. That doesn't stop Dean (who is Muggleborn and black) from stunning him, however.
• The Pollyanna: Downplayed. The Dursleys' treatment of Harry during his childhood wasn't any less abusive or neglectful than in canon, but Harry is arguably more at ease with his lot in life, since he's able to shrug off most of it due to being a dragon, which enables him to eat anything from garden clippings to plastic packaging, ignore any attempts at physical violence, and fly off for some alone time whenever he likes. This is exemplified when Remus starts teaching him the Patronus Charm.
  Harry: It's hard to concentrate on one thing, and it's hard to pick which memory is the happiest. I've got a lot.
• Pooled Funds: What does Harry do the first time he sees his vault at Gringotts a.k.a. piles and piles of gold? Dive headlong into it! It takes 20 minutes and eight goblins to get him back out.
• Propaganda Piece: In-Universe examples courtesy of Dolores Umbridge — she tries putting up posters all over Hogwarts espousing humans as superior over other magical creatures, and when that doesn't work, she changes the class textbook to a new one titled Dark and Dangerous Creatures that very pointedly paints dragons, kitsune, three-headed dogs and the like as dangerous, uncivilized beasts that must be controlled by wizards. By the time she's finished her first class reading, she's taken points from every student in the class for pointing out all the blatant inaccuracies in the text, and given Hermione detention. Later, Lupin finds out that she wrote it under a pseudonym, which hardly comes as a surprise.
• Properly Paranoid: Alastor Moody has a reputation for paranoia, but Dean Thomas points out how many scars Moody has collected as evidence that it's necessary. "At that point it's just being, you know, sensible."
• Pull a Rabbit out of My Hat: Professor Diggle does this in Harry's first NEWT Defense Against the Dark Arts class — a parlor trick that Muggles commonly associate with wizards — and also a good demonstration of silent casting.
• Pull the Thread: Umbridge is present at Harry's hearing to determine whether or not he is a human and thus if he is allowed to hold a wand, and is already pressing the point that Harry isn't human and thus stole his wand from somewhere, only for Dumbledore to puncture her tirade by asking about her family, which clearly shows her not being as pure-blooded as she claims to be.
• Punny Name:
  • Harry's official dragon species name, according to Charlie Weasley? The Black-Backed Bookwyrm.
  • Sirius's second house in Hogsmeade is named Dogwarts.
  • Why is Richard a good name for a dragon? Because after Voldemort possessed said dragon and he was finally exorcised, it is now true that any Tom, Dick or Harry can be a dragon these days.
• Purely Aesthetic Glasses: Harry can see perfectly well without his glasses; he just likes wearing them. Except when his Expressive Ears prick up and make them fly off.
• Put on a Bus: At least as far as Professor Lupin teaching at Hogwarts after Harry's third year is concerned — over the summer, he is attacked by Fenrir Greyback, and his injuries (and stewardship of Fenrir's old "pack" as their new alpha) mean that he'll be unavailable as DADA teacher.
• Queer Colors: On Harry's 17th birthday in the summer, a Marauder sweet turns Dumbledore's hair and beard rainbow-colored, and he likes it so much that he keeps it right to the next Welcoming Feast. A meeting of the International Confederation of Wizards has an Australian ask him if he is a poof, though Dumbledore keeps the accuracy of that statement to himself.
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: Averted. Dumbledore's pre-feast speech rarely gets longer than a few words. In Harry's first year, it is exactly "A Few Words."
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: A Howler finds its way into Umbridge's class and delivers a fantastic, full-volumed screed from Alastor Moody to the "complete cardiganed moron with a cat obsession" of a DADA teacher that used a book written by the dry, long-winded, narrow-minded Wilbert Slinkhard, which was specifically written for gung-ho idiot Aurors and Hit Wizards, as a textbook for fifth-year defense students. And his description of whoever would use the book for first-year defense students is apparently even worse.
• Real Dreams are Weirder: After reading up on ways to get around Empress's Geas to follow all of her master's orders in Parseltongue, Harry ends up dreaming dreams mostly full of Mara Jade running in with a pink lightsaber to save Empress from the Witch King.
• Reassignment Backfire: After Umbridge's "tenure" at Hogwarts, she is shunted into the Ministry division in handling magical beasts. This is, unfortunately, how she procures a dragon egg for Voldemort to use as his new body.
• Redemption Equals Death: Downplayed; though he's not seen posing any major obstacle, the centaur Bane is constantly highlighted as one of the centaurs vehemently opposed to the idea of interacting with humans. He dies during Voldemort's attack on Hogwarts, charging to the defense of the castle, leading Harry to think that maybe he wasn't as human-hating as he first thought.
• Relieved Failure: During some Hogwarts's Quidditch matches, if the weather is horrid enough and the game goes on long enough, even the losers cheer when someone catches the Snitch, ends the game and allows everyone to go back inside.
• Remembered I Could Fly: It's only midway through the Acromantulas' assault that Harry remembers that he has a way to call for help, and he uses his Patronus to send a message. Dumbledore shows up in prompt order.
• Revenge by Proxy: Since Umbridge cannot punish Moody, who sent a Howler that lambasted her in the middle of class, she gives a detention to Harry, who was the unwitting recipient.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • How did Harry become a dragon in the first place? Only a few questions in Harry's early Hogwarts life even broach the subject, and by the end of the story, everyone has accepted his condition and has lost interest in finding out the answer.
  • Why did Empress the basilisk start teaching dragons Parseltongue in the first place? We will never know.
• Riddling Sphinx: Tanisis Sanura, a sphinx student that enrolls in Harry's second year thanks to the new law passed in the Wizengamot. On her first night at Hogwarts, she and Ravenclaw's doorknocker end up spending ages asking each other riddles while the rest of their house are stuck outside! After she makes friends with Luna Lovegood, the Quibbler starts providing larger puzzle sections in its issues.
  • Also, her mother is the sphinx employed as an obstacle during the hedge maze third task of the Triwizard Tournament.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: After Harry stumbled his way into the Ravenclaws' library to sleep in his First Year, many Ravenclaws admitted that the horse-sized black dragon from Gryffindor curled up and sleeping on a pile of books was an acceptable sight.
• Rule of Funny: In one conversation, Daphne says that they can make Gryffindors cheer for anything and then says "Three cheers for the exams!", to which Hermione cheers because it would be funny.
• Rules Lawyer: The Smith twins try to pull this on Harry (as Head Boy/Dragon) when they set off fireworks on Fireworks Night, by saying that they're not fireworks, and specifically not fireworks made by Dr. Filibuster or Marauders' Magical Miscellany, they're the result of Potions and Charms experiments, made at school, and they're disposing of them safely. Harry, however, outmanoeuvres them by saying that they're not being fair setting them off here (as they're setting them off in clear view of Gryffindor's and Hufflepuff's common rooms but not for Ravenclaw or Slytherin), and insists they reschedule things for a time and place where everyone can see them, like New Years.
• Runic Magic: With Harry taking Ancient Runes as an elective through his OWL and NEWT years, we get to see how this works in this universe. While runes carved into an object will produce their magical effect as long as the runes remain intact, there are many rules for how each individual rune interacts with others, including what each rune means individually, the overall meaning of the word as a whole (both translated and untranslated), how each rune is oriented, and even the element of each rune. And that only applies to Futhark; other runic systems like Nahuatl and Egyptian hieroglyphs have completely different rules.
• Running Gag:
  • Harry and Hermione constantly attempting to convince their friends: specifically Ron, to read Tolkien's Classics of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
    • In many cases, this leads to moments of Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure whenever either of them talk about details from the books.
  • Harry not being able to tell Fred and George apart. At least until he uses his nose.
  • One of Harry's books depicts a secret colony of dragons hiding within Beauxbatons Academy, protected mainly by the fact that wizards don't look up. He and his friends have plenty of fun speculating about it when the Beauxbatons delegation arrives for the Triwizard Tournament. Even when Fleur later sends a collection of photos of locations in Beauxbatons (especially ceilings) without dragons, Harry decides it isn't conclusive proof that there aren't dragons in other places, or in those places at other times. Even in the epilogue, Harry's classroom has a gantry intended, in part, to test whether anyone will look up.
  • Ron charming his food with Bluebell flames, to heat it up just right before eating it.
  • Harry forgetting who Sturgis Podmore is.
  • The... questionable diet of Blaise Zabini's mother, and Blaise bonding with Harry over it.
• Sanity Has Advantages: The main reason how Lupin wins against Fenrir Greyback. They're both in werewolf form, but Lupin had taken Wolfsbane Potion and kept his mind against the more feral Greyback, and had managed to grab his wand and use a Reductor Curse on him.
• Scaled Up: Voldemort decides to take a cue from Harry and possesses the body of a rapidly-grown Hungarian Horntail to attack Hogwarts.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Without any fanfare, Moody abruptly walks out mid-Defense lesson a few months before the end of the year, so as not to fall victim to the curse. Percy Weasley takes over for the rest of the year.
  • Professor Umbridge's classes eventually get so biased that students just stop coming to them altogether, electing to use the Defense Club as their main source of DADA study instead.
• Semantic Superpower: In a Defense Club meeting, Luna applies this to the Disarming Charm, which normally only works on weapons that the target is holding. She manages to disarm someone of a dreamcatcher because she thought of it as an affront to her wishes to dream whatever she wants.
• Separated by a Common Language: Isaac is from Liverpool and sprinkles his words with Scouse slang, so much so that Dean asks for a Scouse to English dictionary at one point.
• Serial Escalation: During Harry's time at Hogwarts, he notices that the House Elves keep one-upping themselves for each holiday feast, as their food creations grow increasingly larger, more elaborate, and more magical. In his second year, one of the highlights of a Halloween feast is a sculpted pumpkin made of brownie, sponge cake, chocolate and caramel, then in later years, the highlights include giant sugar trees growing confectionary fruits, chessboard cakes with moving chocolate chess pieces, large jellies with moving fondant dragons inside them, and even giant griffin, wolf, sphinx and dragon dessert sculptures!
• Serious Business: Neville is morbidly (and possibly jokingly) insulted when Dean tells them about his Divination OWL and that his examiner puts the milk in first while making tea.
• Shipper on Deck: Dean outright says that if Ron doesn't go to the Yule Ball, he'll disappoint Hermione. Both his friends seem to take it to heart, as they do indeed attend the Yule Ball together.
• Ship Tease: After they attend the Yule Ball together, Ron and Hermione are seen spending a bit more time in each other's company. Hermione is quick to give him a congratulatory hug when he mentions his new role as Quidditch captain, and they are seen together on subsequent Valentine's Days, testing out some of Ron's inventions.
• Shout-Out: With all the books that Harry reads, there's plenty.
  • The The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are the most-often referenced series, with Harry and Hermione often pestering their friends to read the series for themselves.
  • Elphias Doge's comment of "very exciting, wow" is a nod to the "Doge" memes.
  • Harry's Marauder name is technically Puff, but he rarely uses it.
  • Harry thinks of Issola when he sees Percy's heron Animagus.
  • Blaise explains why his Black Widow mother is still looking for her next relationship even though she's engaged:
    Blaise: She believes in planning ahead. You have to when you enjoy Iocaine powder in your wine.
  • Peter Pettigrew's cover as an ordinary rat gets blown after the Smith twins catch him reading Redwall, a book containing villainous rats.
  • During the summer of '93, Harry nearly steps on one of Dudley's SNES games, which is all but stated to be Star Fox.
  • Fluffy's niece(s), a three-headed-dog named Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail Barlos (left-to-right) becomes a student in Harry's third-year. All of them are fans of Beatrix Potter, especially Cottontail, who asks if Harry is related to her.
    • Talking to the Barloses is also why Ron's siblings decide that his squirrel Animagus form should be named Nutkin.
  • Why is Dean's Boggart fear a severed hand? He watched The Addams Family as a kid and Thing freaked him out.
  • Hermione's Animagus form turns out to be a deinonychus on account of all the Time-Turning she was doing. Well, she is a "Clever Girl".
  • When discussing how Animagus forms work with clothes, Ron suggests that Neville could wear a glove to go with his panther form, a Shout-Out to Michael Jackson and his single white glove and how he transformed from a panther in his Black or White music video.
  • Harry's Christmas gift from Sirius in his third year is a Game Boy (that curiously works in Hogwarts) with the game The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.
  • While doing homework, Neville muses about making Sting, and Dean mentions his mother listening to Sting. Naturally, there's a little In-Universe confusion there.
  • Harry's Patronus is a small white dragon whom he names Ruth.
  • In the summer of '94, Dudley and Harry play either Sonic the Hedgehog 2 or Sonic the Hedgehog 3 together. It's not really specified which.
  • In a Muggle Studies textbook, there is a whole page on Ziggy Stardust as an example of a Muggle that knows how to dress sensibly. And Snape evidently knows him and his music.
  • Dudley and his friends got ahold of a copy of 'Carrie'' to watch behind their parents' backs, and the subject hit a little too close to home for Dudley.
  • Harry takes a look at The Last Command when attemping to find a loophole to Empress's obedience geas.
  • In chapter 82, Harry's latest books include "a new series about people turning into animals, if he'd read the book blurbs correctly, though the covers showing people turning into animals was quite a good clue".
  • The Weasleys agree on what's fun about Quidditch: "To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their Seeker." Harry, naturally, recognises it not from the original film, but from the Discworld parody, Cohen the Barbarian.
  • One of the textbooks assigned for 7th year DADA is The Art of War (Sun Tzu). Professor (Aberforth) Dumbledore spends several lessons going over the axioms in it and informing them how they apply to modern combat and defense situations.
  • For Halloween in 1997, Dean and Colin dress up as the Men in Black, as per the just-released movie.
  • Also for that Halloween, June dresses up as a 12-foot-tall red dog.
  • The Battle of Hogwarts starts with a giant dragon shouting and blasting Hogwarts with a wave of pure force.
• Shown Their Work: As the story's plotline progresses through The '90s, the author does his level best to tailor background events in the world to match and have the cast react to them. Harry catches up on newly-published Muggle books and watches new movies like Jurassic Park, Ron and Hermione sometimes bring up new scientific discoveries, and the characters even react to Princess Diana's death in 1997.
  • Care is even taken to check on weather reports for specific days (see Dramatic Thunder above) and which plot of Eastenders would most likely be on the telly.
  • As a particular example, September 1st, 1993 (Hogwart's welcoming feast in Harry's third year) was a full moon, and as such, Lupin is a werewolf that night. Fortunately, thanks to wolfsbane, a more mellowed Snape, and two previous years with non-human students, no-one thinks twice about him being at the staff table during the Welcoming Feast in wolf form.
• Show Within a Show: Harry is interested in all forms of literature, both Muggle-written and wizard-written. Of the latter, the most oft referenced is Tooth and Fang, a fiction book about a whole Wainscot Society of intelligent dragons that live inside Beauxbatons, that try and maintain a Masquerade from the wizards inside it.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: While Harry is introducing the first Defense Club, Umbridge does her level best to interrupt him and try to shut it down, until the presiding Professor McGonagall has had enough and shuts her up.
• Sidetracked by the Analogy: The topics that Harry and his friends discuss often drift from subject to subject mid-conversation; Harry equates it to having one large conversation that they've been having since they all first met, which just changes subject every so often. One example is how they start off talking about mis-cast Summoning Charms which then transitions to wondering what the female word for "bloke" is.
• Signature Move:
  • Harry, in addition to his Patronus Ruth, makes frequent use of Bluebell flames and Fiendfyre, especially after it's shown that the former is useful for diluting and smothering the latter.
  • Dean lampshades in Chapter 97 that Bluebell flames, the Patronus Charm, and the Protean Charm are this for the group as a whole.
• Simplified Spellcasting: Comes up as topics in several NEWT level classes, regarding how to cast well-known spells silently, with fewer wand movements, or both. Wandless casting seems to be even more advanced than that.
• Sitcom Archnemesis: Lord Ridley the dragon-slaying ghost to Harry the dragon.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • What has Hermione most in a tizzy after her Animagus form turns out to be a deinonychus due to all the time-turner usage is that she now has definite proof that dinosaurs had feathers, but she can't show it to anyone. Neville comments that the freakout is very Hermione.
  • One of Dean's sisters is less concerned about the fact that a griffin goes to Dean's school than she is about the fact that said griffin is an Everton supporter.
• Slice of Life: Compared to the adventure-heavy source material with overarching plots, most of this story's focus is on Harry and his friends' everyday life at Hogwarts, with bits of plot progression in between. Hogwarts's fantastic feasts, the annual Christmas snowball fights, specific magic lessons and even just time spent with friends and dragons all hold prominence in the story's scenes.
• Smart People Know Latin: Dumbledore is of course fluent in Latin, enough to communicate flawlessly with the ghost of Rowena Ravenclaw, who obviously wouldn't know modern English.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat:
  • After Kreacher turns over a new leaf, he and his Dogmaster Sirius engage in this quite often. When Kreacher says that dinner will be ready in a moment, and then snaps his fingers to make it appear on the table.
    Sirius: That moment, presumably.
    Kreacher: Master is correct. Kreacher will make a note on the calendar.
  • Sirius and Snape also seem to have fallen into this dynamic.
• So Proud of You:
  • Harry gets a rather pleasant feeling when Professor McGonagall says that, in the face of an incompetent DADA professor and a curriculum insufficient to prepare students for their exams, she is proud of the students who took the initiative to learn on their own and organized this club, as well as every student that decided to attend.
  • After learning that her youngest son had just orbited the Earth in a school-made spaceship, Molly Weasley complains that she thought Ron was more sensible like Percy. Percy (who is there to supervise the project for the Ministry) points out that after all the proper preparations, procedures and safety checks, he'd be quite proud to be like Ron, the first wizard in space.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • The plans of both Barty Crouches (Sr.'s plan to keep his Death Eater son hidden and Jr.'s plan to regain support for his master) is upended by a group of meddling kids who can turn into animals and sniff the latter out.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Slytherin's basilisk, in this fic a fully sapient individual named Empress, is not killed by Harry.
  • Cedric Diggory's participation in the Triwizard Tournament passes apace with no abnormal hiccups or schemes by Voldemort or Crouch Jr., and thus no moment to "kill the spare". He even wins the tournament outright!
  • With Voldemort still out of commission in Harry's fifth year, there is no attempt to raid the Ministry for the Prophecy, and thus no chance for Sirius to fall into the veil.
  • With the ring destroyed 2 years prior, Dumbledore ends Harry's 6th year hale and in good health.
  • The casualty count for the Battle of Hogwarts is much lower than in canon (though still not zero), and excludes Fred, Lupin, Tonks, Colin, and many others.
• Speak Friend and Enter: With virtually no progress from anyone during the Apparition lessons, the instructor finally gives enough of an explanation that says with sufficient determination and a sufficiently specific destination, at least some Apparition will happen (Splinching is a separate matter). Once he gets that, Dean marks the hoop he's trying to Apparate into with a scarf (to make it stand out from all the other hoops in the hall), and makes the first successful Apparation of the whole workshop.
• Speech-Impaired Animal:
  • Nora the Norwegian Ridgeback is an unusual case. She is sapient enough to communicate with Harry in a dragon language (but obviously cannot speak human), but only for her; other dragons cannot speak that language. It turns out that she is actually speaking Parseltongue, taught by Slytherin's basilisk Empress while growing up, the very act of which seems to have made her sapient. After getting in contact with Empress, Dumbledore prepares an experiment to see if Empress teaching other baby dragons Parseltongue will make them sapient as well.
  • Griffins are another such creature that are properly intelligent, like sphinxes, but the griffin that Professor Kettleburn introduces can't properly speak English yet. The lesson becomes about how to communicate with such magical creatures, with solutions like sign language, spelling and talking with chalkboard and slate. It takes Isaac, the griffin in question, until the end of his first year in Hogwarts before he feels confident enough to speak in public, surprising everyone in earshot.
• Spell My Name With An S: The Smith twins Tyler and Anne sometimes have their names spelt as "Taira" and "Anna" throughout the story, referencing their Japanese ancestry and how Harry himself is unsure how they're spelt.
• Stating the Simple Solution:
  • During Snape's first potions lesson with Harry, when he starts asking Harry his questions, Harry just opens the textbook and looks it up.
  • After Quirrell is out of the picture, Harry wonders why Dumbledore didn't just use the Fidelius Charm to hide the Philosopher's Stone. Dumbledore just chalks it up to his growing senility.
  • Dean seems to like doing this. Ever since he offered Dumbledore some suggestions on the obstacle course to get to the Philosopher's Stone, Dumbledore has consulted him on how to best handle the more Mundane Solutions, such as protections for the Goblet of Fire.
  • While wondering where some of the Founders' items are, Harry suggests using the Resurrection Stone to summon one of the Founders and ask them, since they'd already found Slytherin's ring and the stone inside it earlier.
    • After this leads to looking for either Ravenclaw's diadem or Hufflepuff's cup at Hogwarts, Dumbledore asks the House Elves to do it. They find the diadem in twelve seconds.
  • Harry points out that if Dumbledore wanted to get more people interested in alchemy, he ought to do a demonstration to more students than just Harry.
• Stealth Insult:
  • When the Board of Governors turns up to question the presence of the "unusually shaped" students, Professor Dumbledore tells Grosvenor Pucey that, "It is as much of a pleasure as always to see you." (Since Grosvenor turns out to be spearheading the push to expel non-human students, with less-than-honest embellishments of the year's happenings as his justification, it's pretty clear just how glad Dumbledore is to see him.)
  • After Umbridge introduces the all-but-Propaganda Piece Dark and Dangerous Creatures as the new Defence textbook, Dumbledore stands up at dinner that night and congratulates her for the impressive effort of finding a textbook so suitable for demonstrating author imperfection, as it is so thoroughly wrong that any actually true sentence in it will be contradicted by another sentence somewhere else in it. And then he starts a round of applause. As an added bonus layer of stealth insultitude, it's later revealed that Umbridge didn't just select it, but actually wrote it under a pseudonym.
  • After Voldemort's summer attack on Harry literally backfires on him again, the news states that a wannabe lookalike managed to convince enough Death Eaters to go after Harry only to badly fail. While commenting on the article, Elphias Doge manages to get in a good dig when he says that the fact that the Killing Curse backfired on him again is ample proof that it was the real Voldemort.
• Stealth Pun:
  • Chapter 78 has Harry having a think about goblins teaching trolls how to speak English, how it didn't actually prove that trolls qualified as Beings, how one had to talk to a troll without a goblin translator to really find out, and how all it would take is one creative goblin prankster taking delight in repeatedly inflicting trolls on the wizards.
    There should probably be a word for that.
  • One of the House Elves' custom snacks for Harry are some party ring cookies with metal baked into them, including tin. The author's notes mention that one of them had heard of a "biscuit tin".
• Stunned Silence:
  • Snape is rendered speechless when Harry approaches him for advice on how not to be noticed after he first appears in the Prophet, which is a far cry from the egotistical Attention Whore that his father was. He even has to grab a headache-reliever potion.
  • Everyone in the train carriage is speechless when Isaac the griffin, who had spent the whole year only writing on slate and speaking a bit of !Kung, speaks perfect English. There was a reason he was in Slytherin.
• Sue Donym:
  • The second DADA teacher in Harry's second year after Lockhart gets the boot is literally named Sue D. Nym. It's actually Tonks in disguise.
  • Harry sometimes reads a few racist screeds in the Daily Prophet, usually penned by someone named "Disgusted of Uxbridge". No prizes for guessing who that is.
• Sugary Malice: Draco certainly isn't going to denigrate a Hogwarts Professor or question their teaching ability, even Dolores Umbridge — openly, that is.
  Draco: Because she's very good at teaching her curriculum. It just happens that her curriculum happens to not align with anything anyone else wants us to be taught, and that includes the OWL examiners.
• Suicidal "Gotcha!": Quite a few people let out cries of shock the first time they see Harry jump off a high landing and down Hogwarts' huge stairwell, until they remember that he's a dragon with wings.
• Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: During a Care of Magical Creatures lesson, Transgender student Samantha Ackerley (formerly Stewart) successfully bonds with a unicorn (a creature that is more comfortable in the presence of females than males). Professor Kettleburn even reassures her that her initial fears of being rejected are unfounded.
• Super Prototype: Lupin reverse-engineers the Marauder's Map into lesser Hogwarts Maps that are given out to younger students to help find their way around the school, without any of the tracking function. The activation phrase is "I'm lost". Justifiable since giving everyone the full power of the Map would cause serious privacy problems.
• Super-Toughness: Harry is ridiculously durable. Not only is he magic-resistant, immune to poison, and covered in uncuttable scales, he can take repeated 50 MPH crashes without harm. All this means he finds people trying to bully him mildly bemusing.
• Super Wheelchair: Tiobald MacUalraig, a Ravenclaw mer-boy student (or selkie since he's Scottish), uses a magical one to get around, which can go up stairs without trouble.
• Super Window Jump: When he is exposed as a fake, Lockhart tries making a break for it by flying out his office window on a Firebolt. Shame Harry is right behind him.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: Sirius gives Harry a literal superpowered penknife.
  He was sort of aware that Muggle penknives, or Swiss Army knives (even though they seemed like an odd sort of weapon for the Swiss Army) could have a lot of attachments, but when you could tease out one of the bits of metal and unfold it into a chair that was the sort of thing that only a magical one could do.

T-Z

• Take That!:
  • One chapter has Dumbledore take a slight dig at the Philosopher's Stone being changed into the Sorcerer's Stone for American readers.
    Harry: What's a Sorcerer's Stone?
    Dumbledore: I don't have the faintest idea. I believe that our cousins across the Atlantic may know, but I would not care to guess -– that is surely for them to tell.
  • One of the group's conversations mention Apparating from Hogwarts to Manchester, and Dean, the resident football fan, comments that their football team is overrated.
  • Sirius's present to Harry on his 17th birthday is a watch, as is tradition, which can be locked with a password. Ginny's question for why one would need a password for a watch may be a dig at anyone who uses their smartphone as a watch (although most smartphones will display the time without being unlocked, so perhaps not).
• Talking Animal:
  • Turns out, three-headed dogs like Fluffy are sapient and can talk. Why? Well, they're not included in Fantastic Beasts, which means they are Beings!
  • The 'werewolves' that live in the Forbidden Forest are actually the offspring of a wolf and a transformed magical werewolf, resulting in wolves with magic called wargs. As a result, a few of them can talk, and Harry ends up meeting one named June Forrester, whom Fluffy is teaching how to speak, so she can enroll in Hogwarts later.
• Talking in Your Sleep: According to Dumbledore, Fawkes does this.
• Tastes Like Friendship: Between 3rd and 4th year, when Dudley's diet begins, Harry offers to cook food that's both tasty and filling, as well as offering suggestions for exercise, and Dudley invites him to play video games with him afterward. Things improve considerably between them from that point on, and Dudley even repays the favour by baking a cake for Harry's 17th birthday.
• Taught by Experience: During the World Cup, the altercation between the Death Eaters and the Ministry wizards ends when the Dark Mark is cast, which invokes the Taboo on it and breaks all magical effects in the area, including the Anti-Disapparation Jinx, allowing the Death Eaters to escape. Later, after an attack on Harry goes awry, one Death Eater casts the Dark Mark to break their own Anti-Disapparation Jinx and escape, only to find out that the Ministry learned from the experience and modified the Taboo's magical disruption to specifically exclude Anti-Disapparation Jinxes.
• Team Pet: In addition to the canon examples, there's also Ron's stone griffin, which he got out of a Christmas cracker in 1st year and is often seen fluttering around. Unfortunately, it's destroyed when Voldemort attacks the school.
• Technology Marches On: The In-Universe reason for why newer Muggle technology works at Hogwarts. The culprit for Hogwarts's anti-tech aura is its anti-lightning wards, which interfere with the cathode ray tubes, vacuum tubes and spark plugs (which all rely on arcing electricity) used in earlier Muggle devices and vehicles. Now that Muggle technology in the later 20th century has advanced to LCD screens and transistors, they're unaffected by the lightning ward and thus can work at Hogwarts.
• Tempting Fate: Going to Platform 9 3/4 at the start of 4th year, Harry thinks about his experience up to then and muses that people can see he's a dragon, and they just don't care about that fact. Cue the Creevey brothers (specifically Dennis) gushing about him.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: At the third-year welcoming feast, the main indication that the three-headed dog that walks in is/are female are the pink, yellow and white bows on their heads. It's a correct assumption, since their names are Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail Barlos.
• This Is Gonna Suck: In their first Defence lesson, when Neville's Boggart shapeshifts into Bellatrix Lestrange, Professor Lupin mutters, "Oh bugger."
• Threaten All to Find One: When no-one admits to talking in class, Professor Umbridge punishes Conal the centaur for not telling her who it was, "saying that she wasn't going to let people defend their friends from punishment like that because it wouldn't be fair." The other students, however, suspect that no one was talking, and she just wanted an excuse to target him for not being human.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • For Harry's first Christmas, his gift to Ron is him and Professor McGonagall taking him to Ollivander's and replacing his hand-me-down wand with a new one.
    • Later on, Ron notes a similar problem with Neville's wand (which belonged to his father), and he finds that his mother's wand is a better fit for him.
  • Dobby's freedom from the Malfoys comes with the help of the Ministry's Office for House-Elf Relocation, which Dobby successfully petitions at Hermione's prompting. He then finds "employment" with the Weasleys as a "volunteer" house elf.
  • Hagrid achieves his dream of raising dragons when his smuggled dragon egg in Harry's first year is not only not confiscated, but hatched with Professor Kettleburn's help and even becomes Hogwarts's mascot. And then even more dragon eggs come into Hogwarts.
    • The epilogue even has him exonerated and retaking his wizarding exams, with the implication that if he gets a CoMC NEWT, Kettleburn will pass the professorship job to him when he retires.
  • Lupin in the epilogue. Getting Spared by the Adaptation and married to Tonks aside, during the wedding reception, Snape brings him his wedding gift - a special dose of Wolfsbane potion created with moon dust that will put his lycanthropy completely under his control.
  • In the epilogue, Empress the basilisk gets a magic blindfold to protect others from her Deadly Gaze, and becomes Hogwarts's Professor of Magical Linguistics.
• Throwing Down the Gauntlet: As per canon, Draco challenges Harry to a wizarding duel in the trophy room at midnight. However, Harry innocently turns it into a public and supervised duel at lunchtime. It's not at all what Draco wanted, but he can't see a graceful way to get out of it without losing face.
  Flitwick: And is the dispute one that can only be solved by a duel, or does one of you want to back down?
  Draco: I don't want to back down.
  Harry: And I'm not quite sure what the issue is. But I don't mind having a duel.
• Time Traveler's Dinosaur: Hermione regularly uses a Time Turner to travel several hours back in time to attend more classes, during the month where she's holding a mandrake leaf in her mouth as preparation to become an Animagus. As a result of mixing transformation and time magic in this way, her Animagus form is a velociraptor.
• Title Drop Chapter: A variant. The title of Chapter 100 is an Ironic Echo of the story's title: Voldemort/Voldie Is A Dragon, And That's Not Okay.
• Token Human:
  • Luna Lovegood is this to the Unusually Shaped Club, with all its other members comprising of the other non-human Hogwarts students from all houses. She's usually present as the selkie Tiobald's Translator Buddy, as he only knows how to communicate in Mermish or British Sign Language until Harry's seventh year. This is Played for Laughs when it's brought up, for one thing because it's Luna, but also because Harry (dragon) and the Forresters (wargs) also qualify as being human depending on how you actually define "human", because they all have human ancestry.
  • The Ministry's Invisibility Task Force employs some Muggles as testers to check if any Invisible to Normals effects they encounter actually work. One shows up as part of the delegation to see if Ron's prototype spaceship passes muster.
• Took a Level in Kindness:
  • After Harry helps Dudley with his diet, things improve considerably between them. Dudley gradually grows used to his cousin hanging around, bakes a cake for Harry's 17th birthday, and even mails a letter to Hogwarts (which Hedwig has to fish out of a mailbox) hoping to stay in touch.
• Touché: When Sirius complains about Hermione breaking out the reference books during their foray into figuring out Hogwarts's Walking Techbane aura and how some devices still work, complaining that it seems too much like homework, Hermione points out that working out the uses for a self-referential Protean Charm (used in the Marauder's Map) is just as complicated and just as fun. Sirius flounders for a while before giving up.
• Tough Room: Hermione is a little disappointed that only Harry gets her joke about the laws of robotics, because he reads more fiction than anyone else.
  Harry: I don't think they have the foundation to find it funny.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Subverted. Despite being kitsune, only one of the Smith twins likes inarisushi; the other doesn't.
• Translation Convention: Harry doesn't notice that he's speaking a different language when he talks to Nora the dragon; if they talk directly it sounds to him like she's speaking English, but to everyone else, Harry just started speaking dragon. However, things start to get strange when it turns out that no other dragon speaks the language that the two of them do, and Nora reveals the next year that she hears the words in her sleep. It turns out that Nora was actually being taught Parseltongue by Slytherin's basilisk Empress in her sleep, and Harry as a Parselmouth could naturally understand her.
• Trash the Set: The final battle at Hogwarts does no favours to the castle, especially due to a draconic Voldemort. Dumbledore's office is demolished, the Astronomy tower is toppled, and more than a few walls are torn down.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: This is how Nora awakens her magic - during the Battle of Hogwarts, she sees her junior dragon Sally being downed and Macnair advancing on her with an axe, and then Nora shouts at him and sends him flying in a burst of accidental magic.
• Trickster Twins: Aside from the usual Weasley twins, two new twins named Tyler and Anne Smith show up in Harry's second year, are sorted into Slytherin, and quickly build up a pranking rivalry with the other set of twins. Fitting, since they're kitsune.
• The Triple: Norberta's early training for how to properly interact with the world includes humans (not allowed to set them on fire), the Beings of the Forbidden Forest (not allowed to set them on fire), and Fawkes (physically can't set him on fire).
• Trip to the Moon Plot: For pretty much all his time at Hogwarts, ever since Ron read a Muggle book about space travel, his dream has been to reach the moon. With the help of his friends, he finally gets there by Chapter 98, in his final year.
  Ron: (taking his first steps on the moon) It's taken a long time, but I'm finally here.
• Two First Names: Dominic Alexander, the manticore who joins in Harry's sixth year. Lampshaded by Neville.
• Unknown Rival: Draco Malfoy still has an axe to grind with Harry and goes out of his way to cause trouble — and mostly falls flat. For Harry's part, he just shrugs off Draco's attempts and finds him rather strange.
  Hermione: Don't let him get to you. He's always trying to wind you up.
  Harry: He is? He's not very good at it.
  • He finally gives up in 4th year, after Harry sends Krum his way to get some advice, and from there, slowly starts to change his viewpoint towards Harry.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • As Harry's first year goes on, most of the Hogwarts denizens soon become used to the talking dragon amongst them, even when he does things like eat cutlery or jump out a window.
  • Things quickly get more unusual and then normal again, as Dumbledore opens Hogwarts' doors to non-human magical sapients the following year. After a whole year of dragon, sphinx, and warg students, a werewolf professor the year after that barely rates a mention, even when he's sitting at the staff table in wolf-form during the opening feast.
• Unwinnable by Design: After Harry and Co. make it all the way past the Mirror of Erised's protections on the third-floor corridor, Dean makes a few suggestions to Dumbledore that turn the obstacles into this. Aside from putting a password on the first door, there's also filling all the potion bottles with the Draught of Living Death (since there's nothing that says the instructions must lead to the right bottle), and even if an intruder gets past everything, they'd still be stuck because the Mirror would have been moved to Dumbledore's office — and even knowing that would be useless thanks to Harry unknowingly removing the Stone from the Mirror! While Dumbledore ultimately elects not to move the Mirror, Quirrell falls afoul of the potions trick, and his possessor is not happy one bit.
• Uplifted Animal: As shown with Empress the basilisk and Nora the Norwegian Ridgeback, the former teaching Parseltongue to the latter in her formative years also had a side-effect of attaining sapience. This theory would later be tested with three more dragon hatchlings: Sarah the Swedish Short-Snout, Gareth the Welsh Green, and Oliver the Antipodan Opaleye, in hopes that they can achieve sapience as well. Turns out they can.
• Values Dissonance: A few In-Universe examples.
  • Harry reacts with surprise when the Gryffindor portrait introduces herself as "the Fat Lady", but as she explains, being plump was a compliment in her time, so she's quite pleased to be known by that name.
  • The topic of the Sword of Gryffindor comes up during an Unusually Shaped club meeting and Skara the new goblin student offers her perspective on it, turning the discussion to goblins' and wizards' differing views on property law. Given the facts (Godric Gryffindor commissioned it from Ragnuk I, Ragnuk tried to take it from Gryffindor by force), Harry concludes that Both Sides Have a Point and neither is in the right, as since Gryffindor's name was goblin-etched onto the sword, the sword was obviously made for him and Ragnuk had no right to take it by force thus making the theft attempt one of greed, and Gryffindor either didn't know or didn't care about goblins' view of possession after his death, thus making his possession after his death an issue in goblin culture. Skara concludes that historical figures are jerks.
• Victorious Loser: Cho Chang certainly thinks so at the final Gryffindor-Ravenclaw game in Harry's fifth year. With Gryffindor too far in the lead for even a Snitch catch to allow Ravenclaw to win, she decides to catch the Snitch anyway so that neither team has an overwhelming point lead in the end, meaning that while Gryffindor wins the game, Hufflepuff (and by extension her boyfriend Cedric), who won their last game by a large-enough margin, takes the Quidditch Cup.
• The Von Trope Family: Subverted. Despite being a vampire, the new student Melody makes clear that her last name is "Vaughn", not Von.
• Walking Techbane: Zigzagged. When the topic of magic interfering with Muggle technology comes up (which is why Hermione bought an old-fashioned clockwork watch), Dean points out that his cheap quartz watch still works even at Hogwarts. And then later, Sirius sends Harry a Nintendo Game Boy as a snack, and everyone is astonished when it actually works on campus. Even Dumbledore doesn't know the reason at first, relating an incident about a World War 2 era pilot landing near Hogwarts, who had none of his gear nor his plane work until they got it far enough away. Further experimentation finds that torches and radios work fine, but televisions only produce sound, not pictures.
  • Hermione eventually figures out that the castle's anti-lightning protections, which prevent all arcing electricity (including cathode ray tubes, vacuum tubes and spark plugs), were what was interfering with all the earlier technologies at Hogwarts, preventing them from working. The newer Muggle technology now uses LCD screens and transistors, which don't arc electricity and thus can work at Hogwarts. Once that's figured out, Sirius and Remus bring in a modern Muggle projector to play The Sword in the Stone for the school on Halloween.
• Weak, but Skilled: Nora and her adoptive siblings aren't weak by most standards, but they are smaller than the Hungarian Horntail possessed by Voldemort. However, unlike Voldemort, they have long experience of scuffling with each other, meaning that they know how to fight a dragon, how to shield themselves from fire breath, and how to hit a dragon so they hurt.
• Weaponized Animal: One obstacle in the Triwizard's third task maze is an acromantula, wielding a knife. Much to Ron's horror.
  Ron: Would you rather be dealing with an acromantula or an acromantula with a knife?
• Weirdness Censor:
  • Harry is a dragon, yet Muggles don't notice due to magical creatures being rendered Invisible to Normals. All they see when they look at Harry is a perfectly ordinary human boy, not noticing even when he does stuff like fly or eat rocks. It's the main reason why Harry doesn't find becoming a dragon weird; no-one else seemed to find it weird, so he quickly came to terms with it. Hagrid is the first person to see Harry's dragon form other than himself.
  • The mechanics are explored when Harry visits the Grangers during the summer between first and second year. Mr. Granger is a little befuddled when Harry moves his wings and his forelegs separately (his human glamor deciding whether his wing or his foreleg should equate to his arm) and when he is videotaped while flying, all Mr. Granger can see in the recording is a boy jumping and then suddenly becoming unimportant.
• Wham Line: To Mr. Crouch at the Quidditch World Cup, when after the fiasco with the Death Eaters and the Dark Mark, Luna Lovegood says four words he absolutely does not want to hear.
  Luna: Besides, we caught him.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • Becomes a topic of several chapters when Umbridge publishes an editorial in the Prophet that says Harry shouldn't be allowed a wand due to being a dragon and not human. For his part, Harry is puzzled since there's so many magical ways humans can turn into other things and other things can be turned into humans. The debate eventually culminates in a discussion at the Wizengamot, upon which it is agreed that non-humans will only be allowed wands if they are doing or have completed an accredited magical education.
  • Ron is saddened when his animated stone griffin toy is killed in the Battle of Hogwarts.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Sirius says as much when he, Harry and Dumbledore go to track down a cursed ring that is one of Voldemort's Horcruxes, only for Dumbledore to try and put it on when he sees it, and would have if not for Harry's reflexes.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Defied in the first lesson of 7th year DADA, with the newest Professor Aberforth Dumbledore. After six years of learning magic to the point that it can be used without thinking, his lesson topic is to recognize when not to use it, and to never use magic without thinking.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The epilogue chapter shows moments from 1998 to 2017, nineteen years later. These include Nora getting her Hogwarts letter, Ron reaching Mars and then other planets with life, Hagrid passing his OWLs, Snape coming up with a permanent remedy for lycanthropy, Hermione becoming a published author, Xenia becoming Head Girl, Tyler marrying Lavender, Percy becoming Minister for Magic, Empress becoming Hogwarts's Professor of Magic Linguistics, and Harry, after several years of curse-breaking experience, succeeding Sirius into the position of Hogwarts's Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.
• "Where? Where?": The following exchange that occurs in the Unusually Shaped club, where Luna is the Token Human who serves as her selkie friend Tiobald's Translator Buddy:
  Skara: Well… you know. Non goblins, because there’s only one human in this room.
  Luna: Where?
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: Ron takes a dose of Felix Felicis before choosing a new planet to explore. The planet he chooses turns out to have sapient life, and magical sapient life at that.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing:
  • The outcome of Harry's first duel with Draco, supervised by Professor Flitwick. Between Harry's draconic spell resistance, his wings and Draco's limited spell knowledge, the best Draco could hope for was to hit Harry in the eyes during the count-off and at least try and save face with his house by being cunning, which of course led to Professor Flitwick disqualifying him. And even that didn't work when Harry closed his eyes while bowing.
  • Cornelius Fudge's term as Minister for Magic. The most he ever does on-screen is agree to Dumbledore's Obvious Rule Patch to allow non-human magicals to study at Hogwarts in Harry's first year, which has several knock-on effects (see For Want Of A Nail above). For the rest of the story, the miscarriages of justice done by the previous administration coming to light and being dealt with (secret Death Eater Peter Pettigrew being found, the jailed-without-a-trial Sirius Black exonerated, Crouch Sr. discovered covering for his Death Eater son and helping him escape from Azkaban) earns the Fudge administration significant approval, with the cherry on top being Voldemort's final defeat. In addition there is a cultural renaissance, falling political tensions, a world leading space program and what's implied to be a flourishing economy. As such, in the epilogue, Fudge is viewed as one of the more successful Ministers in history, purely due to the events that happened while he was in office.
• Wizard Classic: After watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Sword in the Stone, Dumbledore comments that Gandalf and Merlin are both wizards after his own heart.
• Wizards from Outer Space: Or "Wizards To Outer Space" in this case; after reading a Muggle book about space and humans reaching the moon, Ron becomes really interested in space, and the Mirror of Erised even shows him in a spacesuit. He even starts taking an interest in Astronomy, and introducing Muggle discoveries about space into the class. In their NEWT years, it turns out that combining modern knowledge about spaceflight, with a Hogwarts education, is enough to let teenagers build a craft that is not only space capable, but would make NASA engineers turn green with envy, such as having unlimited fuel and instantaneous communication.
• Wreathed in Flames: In fourth year, while waiting for the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students to arrive, Ron gets the idea to cast Bluebell Flames on himself to keep warm in the chilly Scottish October. Dumbledore runs with the idea, and as a result, the foreign students are all nonplussed to see the Hogwarts delegation all on fire (in their house colors, no less).
• Wrestler in All of Us: What's Viktor Krum's response to encountering a regular wild boar in the Triwizard maze? Magically slow it down, then power bomb it!
  Dean: (spectating via magical mirror) I have no idea what I'm watching but it's amazing.
• Writing Lines: Just like in canon, Professor Umbridge subjects Harry to this and tells him to write "I will not disturb class" as punishment for Moody's Howler sent to Harry going on a rant on Slinkhard's book being used as a textbook for students. Unfortunately for her, it doesn't go as planned. Her Black Quill isn't quite adapted for dragon blood, and catches fire.
• You Can Talk?: The Stunned Silence reaction of everyone when Isaac the griffin, after spending the whole year only writing with slate, speaks perfect English with a Scouse accent. It was apparently easier to write rather than speak in broken English (which he practiced with a friend over the year). Slightly downplayed in that Harry had heard him speaking in the clicky !Kung language earlier that year.
• You Didn't Ask:
  • Harry and Dumbledore spend some time wondering where Gryffindor's sword is and whether Tom Riddle managed to turn it into a Horcrux, until the Sorting Hat overhears them and says that he's had the sword inside him all along.
  • An inversion: Dumbledore wonders why no-one ever bothers to take Alchemy as a NEWT, and it's because he never made it clear it was an option. After he mentions it to the school in Harry's fifth year, enough students sign up to make a full class, including Harry.
• You Say Tomato: One conversation has a new First-year asking what a new food he'd never seen before is, and Neville, Dean and Ron all telling him it's a scone, with all three pronouncing the word differently.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: After Remus kills Fenrir Greyback, he finds himself as his old pack's new "alpha". There's some debate as to whether it means "leader" and/or "dad".
• You Meddling Kids: Luna gives the full quote when Barty Crouch Jr. is captured at the Quidditch World Cup, complete with Invisibility Cloak Dramatic Unmasking. Dean and Hermione find it hilarious.

---

He was home, and the rest of his life was just waiting for him. He had his friends, and his things, and there was a place for them and they were all happy there.
Harry was a dragon, and everything was okay.