I actually had old plotbunnies from before the series ended (yep, been in the fandom that long) about Hermione as a Hogwarts professor and just kind of like. Seeing the fucked-up ways they treat Muggle-born kids and estrange them from their culture and families and instill in them this sense of shame to hasten assimilation, and even potentially coerce or deal with the non-magical parents in unethical ways and how awful all that shit actually is in a way she couldn’t when she was eleven and desperate to be approved of and just thinking anything that wasn’t challenged openly was “normal.” I don’t know, I really wanted that. For her to have that growth and resolution, for her to get to a place where she could not only see it, but even challenge it, start to change it.



I do like that for Harry, too. I feel like a lot of his arc was, he was coming from a place of being deprived and traumatized–having no memories of his dead parents, growing up in an abusive home, restricted in everything, from space to clothing to food to education, having no friends and quite literally unloved. And from the start, the story is about rebuilding everything he’s lost or never had the chance to have, slowly filling that void in his heart and his life. First he’s protected by Hagrid–he learns that he can be protected, that he’s worthy of someone protecting him. He’s given access to material wealth and education. He makes the first friends he’s ever had. He learns more about his parents. But it isn’t all easy wish fulfillment. He loses things, too. He thinks he’s in a place where no one can abuse him now, and he’s abused anyway, even in his safe haven. There are still moments when absolutely no one is there to protect him, when it’s defend himself or perish. He finds something deeply meaningful in his relationship with Sirius, then loses him. It’s about how trauma isn’t just this debt you get time and space to repay and then everything’s all better. Parts of you are destroyed and some of it can never be rebuilt, and even if you do your best to find love and safety and meaning it can all be snatched away from you again at any moment. But what he really wants stays so steady: he wants family. He wants the family he didn’t grow up in. I think it’s significant how much he wanted to essentially be an honorary Weasley and just have Molly and Arthur be his surrogate parents and Ron his brother before he was even really aware Ginny existed. It’s really a dream come true to him to be connected by marriage to the Weasleys and have some kids and make the home for them he never had for himself.



Sometimes part of trauma is, you heal your own wound as much as you can, and the only way to heal it more is to heal the same wound on someone else. Like it symbolically acts on your own wounds too, being the figure in someone else’s distress/trauma that you wish you’d had when you were there is the closest thing we have to time travel. And while it’s a healing exercise for Harry to have a family that’s loving and there for each other and everything he wished he’d had as a kid, healing to raise kids who never have to dream of what it’d be like to be loved, another part of him is going to connect with the kids who aren’t so lucky. He remembers what Hogwarts meant to him, when he was 11 and very eager to get away from home. Being able to provide that shelter for other kids–and even, as mentioned in the Hermione bit, see the parts that are actually quite fucked up with adult eyes and realize that his childhood sanctuary could be a lot better, it could help even more kids and do better by them–I feel like that would be deeply fulfilling.



Another important motif here is how Harry was in some ways paralleled with Voldemort/Tom. Both orphans with shitty childhoods, both people who found sanctuary in Hogwarts and felt safe and supported there for the first time. Voldemort’s intense, personal feelings for Hogwarts, and even in a sense his twisted love for it, came up as a plot point several times. Because in a lot of ways, I felt like those similarities were set up to show what Tom could have been if he hadn’t chosen to be a wizard-supremacist mass murderer and all-around awful person. If instead of looking for ways to feel superior, he’d been able to heal himself through helping others who need it. If he’d even allowed himself to seek healing instead of causing more wounds in himself and others. If his love for Hogwarts hadn’t become so twisted, and he’d been able to value it for the sanctuary it had been to him and could be to many more. He was a talented wizard and could have done a lot of good in the world if he’d chosen that path. And then Harry actually carries a piece of his soul inside him from infancy, so it’s not just thematic repetition–a piece of Voldemort was with him, as he healed from abuse and chose to be kind, allowed the vulnerability of admitting he wants to be loved by others, learned to be protected and as he grew, learned to be a protector. Even how Voldemort becomes obsessed with immortality and destroys himself trying to become immortal, while Harry, even at seventeen, accepts the inevitability of death. History repeats, and Harry solves the riddles Voldemort couldn’t, excuse the pun. This shows up even from the first book, when Voldemort can’t even want properly in the Mirror of Erised, while Harry’s longing for family and love, while tragic in that moment, is the thing that’s going to save his soul. Because he can’t have that, he can’t have his parents alive and with him, but he can have something like that, he can have love and family, and being able to want that is everything.



So part of Harry’s healing is literally just improving his own life, finding safety from threats and people to love and love him, because yeah you need that shit. Part of it is rewriting history with the future, giving children the childhood he wanted when he was a kid, being the dad he couldn’t have, and (in this headcanon/alternate ending) being the teacher he needed and preserving/improving Hogwarts as a sanctuary for the kids who need it most. But then the other part is rewriting the past that came before him with his own victories. Obviously there’s fictional stuff that doesn’t map to real life things (like literally being a horcrux) but honestly I’ve seen and felt this kind of healing in my own life. The moment when you understand that someone you’re connected to (a parent, an ancestor, someone who’s just similar to you in personality or life events) has struggled with this problem and they never won, they never found resolution, they gave up or died unfulfilled, they never healed or moved past this thing, but you can, you can overcome it, there’s this mingled joy and grief in that. Because you can’t actually help them, and you doing better doesn’t give them anything directly, so it’s hard, and it’s sad. But you know that they’d want you to, or if they’re too damaged by it their best self would want you to, because it is human nature on some level to want future generations to have it better than we did, and because someone should make it. Because you want the things that harmed you to be defeated, even if you can’t. So in my own life, I want to thrive, I want to heal the wounds of the past by thriving in ways those who came before me dreamed of but couldn’t reach, and I want to reach out to others and make it easier for those coming up behind me. And that’s why Harry being the chill Hogwarts DADA professor is healing on so many levels: it’s that connection and normality he wants for himself, it’s the opportunity to change children’s lives for the better, and it’s–yeah, it’s a middle finger to Voldemort because Voldemort was terrible and deserved it, but it’s also a form of lived empathy in some strange sense? He killed the version of Voldemort that had gone wrong and was past stopping any other way and had hurt so many people. But the reason he could do more than just kill a bad guy, the reason he could heal a wound older than himself, is because simply by living his own best life and being happy, history doesn’t repeat, history is rewritten, the story changes. He succeeds everywhere Voldemort failed, he has the job he wanted, the love he couldn’t open himself to want, and ultimately the death he feared and couldn’t accept with honor.



So yeah. Harry as DADA professor is pretty damn fulfilling as an ending, however one of my other favorite headcanons/wishes for his ending was that he’d be a stay-at-home dad/house husband. For a lot of similar reasons about him valuing family and being there for kids, and also because the actual epilogue had a weirdly sexist bent in that regard? Like I’m not saying smart women can’t enjoy parenting, but Hermione for example has so much potential and ambition, I feel like she’d go stir-crazy having nothing to do but raise a kid 24/7. And just because Molly Weasley had All the Babies and loved being a mum, doesn’t mean Ginny wants the same exact thing for her life. That actually being Harry’s dream more than hers made a lot of sense to me. I really like the idea of him being professor as well! But him taking some years off to focus on being a dad hits me in the id nicely. So much of HP is, as I said, about Harry yearning for and ultimately making the family he was cruelly denied, I’d love to see it shown that not only is it okay for men to want kids, but that it’s normal and okay for them to want and enjoy the rewarding labor that goes into childcare, that being a dad can definitely be more than getting someone pregnant and saying hi to the kids on nights and weekends. And also because of the fact that while raising children can be an absolute gift and a blessing if you want to be raising children, if it’s not the number one thing you want to be doing, it’s very consuming of time and energy and the amount you’d have to sacrifice of what you actually want to be doing can be deeply frustrating and even heartbreaking. So it’s really important to be honest about who actually wants to make that commitment, and how everyone in the relationship feels about it.



There’s also some stuff JKR was playing with there about immortality through children, immortality through legacy (as with Dumbledore), vs the twisted and unnatural immortality through dark magic/murdercrafts. Where it’s like yes, live on in your kids/descendants, live through your accomplishments, live through your positive impact on the world and the people who made it because of you–don’t do whatever the fuck it was Voldemort did, don’t try to subvert the possibility of death itself, be as ready as you can be for death by leaving the world better than you found it. And some of it rubbed me the wrong way, like when Molly, who’s primarily defined through motherhood, is paralleled with Bellatrix, a childless and hateful woman, and it’s even maternal love that gives Molly the strength to kill her. A lot of people found that satisfying and I do get why! But there’s some complicated and fraught stuff tangled up in saying that women in particular are redeemed through motherhood, and that women who don’t have children are bad, empty people–underscored by the way it seemed all the “good” female characters went on to have babies, stuff like Narcissa’s love for Draco also being redemptive, and I mean true we do have McGonagall, but we see very little of her personal life and she wasn’t part of that Bellatrix/Molly parallel or the overall themes about motherhood/non-motherhood in women. But making fatherhood important to Harry, backing that up with his love of teaching, makes it, I don’t know, about this pro-social desire for the next generation to be happy rather than Voldemort’s selfishness? Like Dumbledore was an important figure to Harry even though he had no kids of his own, Sirius never had children but was still invested in Harry’s happiness, it’s not about literally bringing a child into the world yourself (though it can be that!) but just this sense that, man, wounds aren’t healed in a single generation and the future is bigger than us, which is pretty much the antithesis of everything Voldemort stood for and something he couldn’t even comprehend. That makes it less skeevy and all “it’s women’s job to make the babies, they all love being babied up, it’s their purpose and they’re hard and empty and unfulfilled if they don’t” which naaaaaah.

