I. Succession (2018-2023), Jesse Armstrong / II. Abject Permanence, Larissa Pham / III. ???, Jorge Mascarenhas / IV. I'm Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I've Wasted My Whole Life, Heather Havrilesky / V. Swallowtail, Brenna Twohy

𓃴𓃴𓃴

              Morrigan Crain comes from a long line of violence.

        Categorical data of The House of Crain states: A long line of violence, a long line of pain, a dynasty of dragons.

        Crain is a last name belonging to an old pureblood family hailing from an island of magic that ceased to exist a century ago. Crain is a noose, a shackle, a karmic lineage of doom from a lost empire that is only meant to subjugate others with nooses and shackles. They are the last of the blood of the dragon. Everyone always said that the Crains were closer to gods than men. Morrigan knows better. They only say that because of their dragons.

        Morrigan has never remembered the exact theory in her remedial healing lessons, yet through a haze of cigarette smoke she can picture Poppy Pomfrey moving her hands around and words falling through pursed lips: the eldest sibling leaves traces of their magical signature in the womb of their mother for the next sibling to absorb. If this is true, Morrigan, not the eldest daughter nor the youngest, carries a piece of Mare- set to succeed The House of Crain- while Margaret-set to inherit nothing, carries her. She hates them.

       She hates Mare for being everything to her father simply by coming first in the birth order. She hates Margaret for being a perpetual haunted house of a person with her whispered dragon dreams and glassy-eyed looks. She hates herself for being a spare, something along the middle stranded nowhere. Logically, she is aware that hating them is wrong. As far as she knows, even The Black brothers have some semblance of love for each other, but this emotion is just an unfortunate condition that comes with their last names. Morrigan knows nothing about love. She'd kill anyone she ever gave her love to. And isn't love just that? Violence?

     Her father had hated his siblings too, and now one was six feet under and the other too bitter at her loss. It was discipline that got him to helm their house, their island of prisons. And it is the punishment he craves, whispering poison into The Minister of Magic's ear to funnel gold into the wrong vaults and create a society filled with blood-stained halls and wailing portraits-a society with no room for a select few. Morrigan cannot understand why he cannot love his children the way he loves such power, why he'll never value her the way he does her idiot bumbling male cousins. Every part of her: his voice crooning in her ear and coming out of her mouth, the way she grasps her wand-is him. She holds more of him in her body than Mare or Margaret do. And she's proud of it, choosing not to bury it deep down the way they, or at least Margaret, tries to. In the end, none of it truly means anything. These days, Volo Crain is merely an extension of The Dark Lord.

     When she was seven years old, Volo held a glass of firewhiskey in his hand, stroked her hair, offered her a sip, and told her the whole world would be hers someday. She had knocked a bludger right into a girl's arm and had had the bone slice right up through her flesh at quidditch day camp. She hadn't meant to, really, but Volo just gave her a warm wink and threw galleons at the problem until it went away and Morrigan was struck with how much she craved that warmth. He had promised her a future outside of walls and swollen bellies up until she turned sixteen and her mother died. Then he ripped it out because she looked too much like her. All he knows is how to destroy. It is a sick joke that Morrigan's hands, hands that are essentially his, had wanted to heal.

     But the burden of all this grief has never really had to be taught to Morrigan. Morrigan and her sisters are nothing more than graveyards for their parents to bury their sadness and pain. The ugliness doesn't keep them from wanting to inherit the painful legacy. So they end up biting their tongues hard enough to draw blood and run themselves ragged, desperately trying to prove they are more than an Abraxan ready to sell off to the highest bidder. They hurt each other and then they do it again. Volo never really takes them seriously. This is what the continuous data states.

     Plotted on a graph it is still hard to picture where the root of the problem begins. If it were to be thought about a little more systematically, then Morrigan can theorize that it is her family's motto "Discipline and Punish" that keeps the spokes on their fucked up wheel churning. The insatiable need for control. Regardless, how does one continue when they wholly belong to their family?

     Morrigan lives in cycles of thinking she doesn't need them and then realizing she is wrong- she'd die without them, she'd do anything for them. They are wretched and they are filthy. They, their dragons and their bonds, are her blood and this is her duty. A war is coming and her cousins, with whom she is expected to placate with honeyed words as they invade her home, all bear the mark. The Dark Lord begins to sit at her dinner table and cajoles her into showing him their dragons, their holding of bodies, with a type of malignancy that Morrigan has never seen in a man, even in her father. There is no morally good obligation to find in the sea of apathy that is her family. And yet, Morrigan, seventeen and privileged to the bone, cannot help but want the whole damn world.

...She is nothing without her last name.

Ella Purnell.                 MORRIGAN CRAIN

As Described. JAMES POTTER

Emily Carey. MARGARET CRAIN

Cailee Spaeny. MAREENA "MARE" CRAIN

Mads Mikkelson.                 VOLO CRAIN

Matthew Mcfayden.                MAVEN CRAIN

Havana Rose Liu. LILY EVANS

Jemima Kirke.                MELISANDRE CRAIN

Sandra Oh.                ILYA MA-EUM

HOUSE OF CRAIN
discipline & punish / igne et sanguine
Rebecca Ferguson... Irulan Crain neé Rosier
Hong Chau ... Elora Crain neé Rowle
Jeremy Allen White ... Malachai Crain + Samara Weaving ... Narcissa Black

𓃴𓃴𓃴

Nicholas Galitzine.                Bastien Flint
Drew Starkey. Edward Fitzroy
Taylor Russell.                 Catherine "CAT" Fawley
Chase Sui Wonders.                   Pandora Greengrass
Megan Suri.               Mahika Ahuja
As Described.                   Regulus Black
As Described.                    The Others

𓃴𓃴𓃴

Salman Rushdie.

𓃴 edit 2025 / listen, the game is afoot, regular scheduled programming SOON

2023

𓃴 HEYYYYYYY!! been working on this all summer and fall aka peak harry potter szn is approaching. anyway mor's got a marianne sheridan sun, shiv roy rising, and alicent hightower moon.

𓃴 obvi this is very targaryenesque/wizard succession and all elements of the crains and their dragons are very loosely borrowed frm asoiaf i say loosely bc they are more of a plot device really and are barely featured in the first act until the more political mechanizations play out in the second act. the sense of righteousness the crains have is WILD compared to other purebloods and that's mostly due to having dragons and being the only house able to speak to them + they're use in the police state/island they're in the midst of solidifying. the second half will also try and heavily interrogate the validity of prisons and safety but there are hints earlier, hence discipline & punish!!!

𓃴 morrigan is absolutely not a good person and i do not approve of the very morally grey choices she makes. a lot of the heinous decisions she makes are for her family because as twisted as the crains are she is conditioned to love them anyway and do what she thinks is best to keep their house alive. her more so called "progressive" beliefs are a commentary on neoliberals and neoliberal white feminists + their shitty identity politics, though she isn't personally a blood purist she is complicit and none of her morals really matter bc she still wants to inherit a dynasty quite literally rooted in blood purity and further such dynasty. much of her narrative arc surrounds character development, of separating abuse from love, of gaining some sort of agency over herself and furthering her own beliefs and not her family's. unfortunately, for much of the beginning, she is the definition of "maybe the poison does drip through."

𓃴 a lot of morally grey characters and a lot of just plain morally black characters in this fic. james...despite actively trying to make himself personified revolutionary optimism is at the end of the day a privileged pureblood that capitalizes off such privilege and is equipped with a narrow lens of looking at the world so he is wholly not THE good guy. obviously fuck jk rowling and make sure you consume your media critically.

𓃴 goes without saying, updates will be sparse bc unfortunately i am sparse on this app and university is HARDDD and time consuming!!! majoring in cuntology minoring in slay. BUT they'll prob become more frequent once winter comes in full force.

𓃴 content warning: descriptions of violence and murder, war, gore, alcohol/drugs, addiction, smoking, profanity, disassociation, depictions of anxiety, genocide, eugenic ideology, microaggressions, misogyny, mild body horror, mentions of incestous practices, hate speech, hospitalizations, issues with not looking after yourself i.e sleeping & eating, PTSD, unhealthy family dynamics, depression, emotional abuse, panic attacks, intrusive thoughts, child neglect, and sexual themes.

I've torn the good wing off myself / SHADOWBOXER.
© 2023 𓃴