What if, when Petunia Dursley found a little boy on her front doorstep, she took him in? Not into the cupboard under the stairs, not into a twisted childhood of tarnished worth and neglect—what if she took him in?
Petunia was jealous, selfish and vicious. We will not pretend she wasn’t. She looked at that boy on her doorstep and thought about her Dudders, barely a month older than this boy. She looked at his eyes and her stomach turned over and over. (Severus Snape saved Harry’s life for his eyes. Let’s have Petunia save it despite them).
Let’s tell a story where Petunia Dursley found a baby boy on her doorstep and hated his eyes—she hated them. She took him in and fed him and changed him and got him his shots, and she hated his eyes up until the day she looked at the boy and saw her nephew, not her sister’s shadow. When Harry was two and Vernon Dursley bought Dudley a toy car and Harry a fast food meal with a toy with parts he could choke on Petunia packed her things and got a divorce.
Harry grew up small and skinny, with knobbly knees and the unruly hair he got from his father. He got cornered behind the dumpsters and in the restrooms, got blood on the jumpers Petunia had found, half-price, at the hand-me-down store. He was still chosen last for sports. But Dudley got blood on his sweaters, too, the ones Petunia had found at the hand-me-down store, half price, because that was all a single mother working two secretary jobs could afford for her two boys, even with Vernon’s grudging child support.
They beat Harry for being small and they laughed at Dudley for being big, and slow, and dumb. Students jeered at him and teachers called Dudley out in class, smirked over his backwards letters.
Harry helped him with his homework, snapped out razored wit in classrooms when bullies decided to make Dudley the butt of anything; Harry cornered Dudley in their tiny cramped kitchen and called him smart, and clever, and ‘better ‘n all those jerks anyway’ on the days Dudley believed it least.
Dudley walked Harry to school and back, to his advanced classes and past the dumpsters, and grinned, big and slow and not dumb at all, at anyone who tried to mess with them.
But was that how Petunia got the news? Her husband complained about owls and staring cats all day long and in the morning Petunia found a little tyke on her doorsep. This was how the wizarding world chose to give the awful news to Lily Potter’s big sister: a letter, tucked in beside a baby boy with her sister’s eyes.
There were no Potters left. Petunia was the one who had to arrange the funeral. She had them both buried in Godric’s Hollow. Lily had chosen her world and Petunia wouldn’t steal her from it, not even in death. The wizarding world had gotten her sister killed; they could stand in that cold little wizard town and mourn by the old stone.
(Petunia would curl up with a big mug of hot tea and a little bit of vodka, when her boys were safely asleep, and toast her sister’s vanished ghost. Her nephew called her ‘Tune’ not ‘Tuney,’ and it only broke her heart some days.
Before Harry was even three, she would look at his green eyes tracking a flight of geese or blinking mischieviously back at her and she would not think ‘you have your mother’s eyes.’
A wise old man had left a little boy on her doorstep with her sister’s eyes. Petunia raised a young man who had eyes of his very own).
Petunia snapped and burnt the eggs at breakfast. She worked too hard and knew all the neighbors’ worst secrets. Her bedtime stories didn’t quite teach the morals growing boys ought to learn: be suspicious, be wary; someone is probably out to get you. You owe no one your kindness. Knowledge is power and let no one know you have it. If you get can get away with it, then the rule is probably meant for breaking.
Harry grew up loved. Petunia still ran when the letters came. This was her nephew, and this world, this letter, these eyes, had killed her sister. When Hagrid came and knocked down the door of some poor roadside motel, Petunia stood in front of both her boys, shaking. When Hagrid offered Harry a squashed birthday cake with big, kind, clumsy hands, he reminded Harry more than anything of his cousin.
His aunt was still shaking but Harry, eleven years and eight minutes old, decided that any world that had people like his big cousin in it couldn’t be all bad. “I want to go,” Harry told his aunt and he promised to come home.
Tag: interesting
Social skills: noticing when repetition is communication
So there’s this dynamic:
Autistic person: The door is open!
Other person: I *know* that. It’s hot in here.
Autistic person: The door is open!
Other person: I already explained to you that it’s hot in here!
Autistic person: The door is open!
Other person: Why do you have to repeat things all the time?!
Often when this happens, what’s really going on is that the autistic person is trying to communicate something, and they’re not being understood. The other person things that they are understanding and responding, and that the autistic person is just repeating the same thing over and over either for no reason or because they are being stubborn and inflexible and obnoxious and pushy.
When what’s really happening is that the autistic person is not being understood, and they are communicating using the words they have. There’s a NT social expectation that if people aren’t being understood, they should change their words and explain things differently. Sometimes autistic people aren’t capable of doing this without help.
So, if this is happening, assume it’s communication and try to figure out what’s being communicated. If you’re the one with more words, and you want the communication to happen in words, then you have to provide words that make communication possible. For example:
Other person: Do you want the door to be closed, or are you saying something else?
Autistic person: Something else
Other person: Do you want to show me something outside, or something else?
Autistic person: Something else
Other person: Are you worried about something that might happen, or something else?
Autistic person: Worried
Other person: Are you worried that something will come in, or that something will go out?
Autistic person: Baby
Other person: She’s in her crib, and the baby gate is up. Is that ok, or is there still a problem?
Autistic person: ok
Holy fuck.
This changes everything.
*leaves for reference*
Applying my biology boner to Steve Rogers and the super serum: What this shit might actually have changed
This is for actualmenacebuckybarnes, becase this shit is way too long for an ask.
Okay, so what we know the serum did:
- Put on muscle and bone mass.
- Increased his metabolism by 4, according to the Marvel Guide Book
- Gave him increased endurance and strength, super healing and increased natural faculties
- Cured him of all his illnesses
To address 1 and 4, I think the serum was mostly a growth hormone that triggered stem cell growth throughout his body. In a normal human, stem cells are found only during fetal development and very early childhood, resulting in cell differentiation. If this is triggered en mass in an adult, it would cue mass cell turnover, effectively allowing the manipulation of very specific disorders, such as Steve’s scoliosis and color blindness and coupled with a growth hormone not unlike ones they have today, this could also lead to drastic increases in muscle and bone mass. This would also lead to new neurons, making his brain larger and opening new pathways.
For number 2, metabolism is really controlled by one organ, the thyroid. In humans,over or under active thyroids lead to pretty gross side effects including severe mental retardation, but given a perfect case, altering the thyroid’s behavior could lead to increased need for food, partially explain his increase in mass, and increases in endurance.
Speaking of endurance, the serum would have had to change the way he sweats to result in increased heat tolerance, change the way he digests to get more nutrients out of food, and things that aren’t food but still could be eaten. (Steve has eaten some really gross stuff in canon to little effect.) He also would have more efficient lungs and oxygen transfer, reducing physical stress and load on his body even during high physical activities.
There is a good chance the PH buffers in his body also changed to have a higher threshold for pain and injury, and increased healing would probably be related to the stem cells I mentioned earlier, plus enhanced metabolism leading to faster cell turn-over.
And if we’re going with a stem cell theory, this would probably not drastically alter his genetics, though things like metabolism could need to be altered at a genetic level, which explains why a super soldier breeding program would be unlikely to work very well.
!!!!!
applying my biology boner to your biology boner (it’s not gay if our science dweeb balls don’t touch??)
Actually, they’ve found stem cells in adult humans, the only specific place i can remember is in the hippocampus (one of the deep brain structures implicated in the formation of long-term memories!) (goes on a long bucky ramble about if the serum rly bumps up yr stem cells, and how it might affect his memory after having the ever-loving shit zapped out of him!)
I like the stem cell + growth hormone hypothesis because you can solve a lot of sci fi problems by throwing stem cells at em
I don’t get the cell turnover —> fixed scoliosis connection though? from what little i know of scoliosis and bones in general, rapid cell death & regrowth wouldn’t do much in the short term to change the structure of his spine. it’s more likely that his spine was literally pulled back into shape when the muscles supporting it were suddenly strengthened. that’s the general treatment for adults w/ scoliosis today—exercise to strengthen your back, torso, and leg muscles, plus pain management, plus maybe a brace in severe conditions
colorblindness also wouldn’t be fixed w/ cell turnover, because it’s generally caused by your retinal cells not producing the photopigments that chemically detect different wavelengths of light. the cells literally don’t have the genes that instruct your RNA to make those pigments. your retinal cells are already replaced about once a day! part of me is wondering if steve is really actually colorblind, or if it’s just something they threw out there to pad his list of conditions, because it was only briefly on screen and never mentioned by any of the characters. was he colorblind in the comicsverse?
having more neurons or a bigger brain (not mutually inclusive things) does not actually lead to increased intelligence/reflexes/aptitude/whatever! because neurons are hungry little fucks, they use up a LOT of glucose & oxygen, so adding a bunch of them all at once would just starve out the whole lot. intelligence and reflexes come from the synchronization of neuronal firing, from the pathways you set down through repetition. you actually had about twice as many neurons as an infant than you do today— all those neurons grew and divided rapidly and threw down connections with everything the could get their grubby little dendrites on, and the ones that didn’t make enough connections, or didn’t connect in useful enough ways, were killed off mercilessly. i don’t actually know how they’d improve his reflexes or heighten his senses just using some mystery serum. still tryna work that one out.
the metabolism thing is a bit tricky, cause there’s a couple different ways of defining metabolism. if we’re just talking about energy+oxygen usage, there’s a really simple explanation: he’s bigger. he’s got more muscle mass, so he burns more glucose, no thyroid fuckery necessary. the increased metabolism would be a side effect of the serum, in this case.
if we’re defining metabolism as the ability to extract nutrients from things, or as the ability to metabolize poisons and toxins that would lay out a normal man [side note: alcohol is technically a toxin. steve can’t get drunk in the mcu. thus, the serum at least caused the second thing], then yeah they’d have to fuck with his entire digestive system somehow. especially the liver. i basically don’t know shit about the liver, i’ll have to research this & get back to you
yes to the more efficient lungs thing, apart from increasing his muscle & bone mass the serum mostly seems to have made all his organs more efficient. how did they do this? SCIENCE. i have no fucking idea abt the specifics
rapid cell turnover WOULD lead to more rapid healing. i can’t decide if this would make him more or less likely to get cancer, though?? because turnover includes cell growth AND cell death, and if his cells are dividing more often than normal that means there’s more opportunities for potentially-tumor-causing mistakes to be made when copying the DNA, but if you’re also bumping up the rate of natural programmed cell death then that would also kind of kneecap any tumors that tried to get off the ground? maybe ???
could the op explain the pH buffer-pain tolerance connection, please? idgi
i’m leaning more towards the stem cell/growth hormone cocktail theory rather than the genetic-alteration theory if only because widespread genetic alteration wouldn’t produce immediate or reliable results. the state of our CURRENT gene therapy is ridiculous, basically you chuck a bunch of programmed viruses at a cell culture and hope they correctly rewrite the DNA there, and then you hope the DNA change is correctly read by the RNA, and then you hope the DNA change produces the altered proteins you thought it would, and then you hope the DNA change is passed on to the daughter cells when your altered cell splits or else all of this was completely useless. the chances of all of the serum’s changes working on steve the first time, and not leaving him a bag of tumors & various defects, are ASTRONOMICAL.
As for Ph buffers, they prevent chemical reactions in blood and cell fluids because they absorb acids and bases. So having a stronger, more adaptable buffer in your body means you’d have a higher tolerance for acids, bases and the chemical effects of temperature. So things that would be damaging for a normal human like acids, heat or any chemical that attacks cells, would do a lot less damage. (I just realized that this is not quite the same thing as pain tolerance.)
Part of why I think stem cells would be a big part of fixing a lot of the chronic injury is that new cells would be much easier to realign than existing ones, and coupled with the massive growth would be much more elastic for differentiated growth. Also, seeing as there are forms of colorblindness that are caused by an absence or reduction in certain vision cells, it is possible that a mass triggering of stem cell growth would also fix his eye issues. (This would be dependent on the cause of his color blindness.)
And you’re right to point out that an increase in brain size alone wouldn’t lead to increased ability for sure, but it would almost guarantee increased emotional response thanks to growth in the hippocampus and amygdala and the rest of the limbic system along with potential for enhanced memory. (We Steve remember a HYDRA map perfectly after just a glance, so his memory is pretty photographic after the serum.)
As far as the liver, increased liver function would have to be a change in enzymatic functions, which would also bear out changes in blood, including increased red blood cell turnover potentially enhancing the body’s ability to carry oxygen.
Fun fact: Captain America would probably pee more than the average person.
My question is: what is Steve Rogers’s body count?
…
We don’t talk about that a lot because he’s an American Hero ™ and American Heroes don’t ever actually kill people even when they’re, you know, soldiers in the actual fucking Army. The American Hero has to show mercy and give everybody a second chance and any time the Bad Guy dies, it has to be because he made a mistake that lead to his own death. The hero can never actually just fucking murder him in our stories because that would be wrong and a true American would never do something like that.So, like, has Steve Rogers ever shot a dude in the face? Has he ever snapped anybody’s neck? Has he ever been struggling for his own life and used his shield to take a life?
If you have either canon comics knowledge or just Opinions and Feelings, please feel free to share. Because, like, dude was a soldier in WWII on the European Front fighting Nazis, kicking open doors with gun literally blazing, so he’s obviously killed people, but we never discuss this. How does Steve reconcile killing? Does he feel guilt? Is he comfortable with his actions? Has he killed people since he got pulled out of the ice? How does he feel about taking human lives? Does he talk to anybody about it? Does he just internalize it and let it eat him up inside?
This is an excellent question, so I decided to look into it (in MCU, not the comics, sorry). Turns out it’s incredibly difficult to determine Steve’s on-screen body count because 99% of his kills are unconfirmed/ambiguous—which, given that Marvel is now owned by family-friend Disney, is obviously deliberate, and made easy by the fact that Steve’s weapon of choice is his shield (blunt force trauma, no penetration, leaving no obvious marks). A metal Frisbee doesn’t look like much of a weapon, right?
However, as a traumatologist in spe, I know for a fact that a shield thrown hard enough to embed itself in a metal bulkhead would definitely kill anyone it hit, especially if—as here—it’s aimed directly at the person’s head:
There’s a good chance almost everyone Steve hits with the shield full force ends up dead/severely incapacitated and probably disabled for life.
In 1952, an American attaché in Moscow was innocently fiddling with his shortwave radio when he heard the voice of the American ambassador dictating letters in the Embassy, just a few buildings away. He immediately reported the incident, but though the Americans tore the walls out of the Ambassador’s office, they weren’t able to find a listening device.
When the broadcasts kept coming, the Americans flew in two technical experts with special radio finding equipment, who meticulously examined each object in the Ambassador’s office. They finally tracked the signal to this innocuous giant wooden sculpture of the Great Seal of the United States, hanging behind the Ambassador’s desk. It had been given as a gift by the Komsomol, the Soviet version of the Boy Scouts.
Cracking it open, they found a hollow cavity and a metal object so unusual and mysterious in its design that it has gone down in history as ‘The Thing’.
‘The Thing’ had no battery, no wires, no source of power at all. It was was just a little can of metal covered on one side with foil, with a long metal whisker sticking out the side. It seemed too simple to be anything.
That night the American technician slept with ‘The Thing’ under his pillow. The next day they smuggled it out of the country for analysis.
The Americans couldn’t figure out how ‘The Thing’ worked, and had to ask the British for help. After a few weeks of fiddling, the Brits finally cracked The Thing’s secret.
That little round can was a resonant cavity. If you shone a beam of radio waves at it at a particular frequency, it would sing back to you, like a tuning fork. The metal antenna was just the right length to broadcast back one of the higher harmonics of the signal.
The resonator sat right behind a specially thinned piece of wood under the eagle’s beak. When someone in the room spoke, vibrations in the air would shake the foil, slightly deforming the cavity, which in turn made the resonant signal weaker or stronger.
As the attaché discovered, you could listen to this modulated signal on a radio just like a regular broadcast. ‘The Thing’ was a wireless, remotely powered microphone. It had been hanging on the ambassador’s wall for seven years.
Today we have a name for what ‘The Thing’ is: It’s an RFID tag, ingeniously modified to detect sound vibrations. Our world is full of these little pieces of metal and electronics that will sing back to you if you shine the right kind of radio waves on them.
But for 1952, this was heady stuff. Those poor American spooks were up against a piece of science fiction.
Today I want to talk about these moments when the future falls in our laps, with no warning or consideration about whether we’re ready to confront it.
Another amazing talk by the creator of Pinboard. I first heard Maciej speak at XOXO, he blew me away. This transcript of his Webstock talk was also amazing.
Technically outside the scope of this blog, but this was way too interesting/cool not to share.
The moment that you realize Agent 13’s cover was not an accident. Stay classy, S.H.I.E.L.D.
As I mentioned here:
The question is, why was Sharon assigned to watch over Steve in the first place? Fury already had Steve’s apartment bugged; if anything happened, Fury would know about it even before Sharon called it in. Protection? If someone broke in and overpowered Captain freaking America himself, chances are Sharon on her own wouldn’t have been able to stop them either—could she have stopped the Winter Soldier if he’d gone for an up-close kill rather than sniping Fury from the opposite building? No way.
So if she’s not there to spy on Steve or to protect him, why? My guess is emotional manipulation. Here’s a guy from the 1940s thrown into the 21st century, in shock after the trauma of losing basically everyone and everything he ever knew, and on top of that he’s a war veteran showing symptoms of PTSD—and the world depends on him to save it from rogue gods and aliens and who knows what else. That’s not a man you’d dare leave to muddle through things on his own, but what can you do when he refuses to talk about it and declines every offer of help or therapy?
Solution: The nice girl next door. Someone his age (the age he considers himself to be), someone he can relate to, a nurse like his mother—she works in the infectious disease ward just like Sarah Rogers did, imagine that! Steve can’t help admiring her bravery and selflessness in caring for her patients, knowing what it cost his mother. She even reminds him of Peggy, the way she smiles. Just seeing her reminds Steve of why he keeps fighting, why he keeps going back to S.H.I.E.L.D.: to keep people like her safe.
And then it turns out it’s all a carefully crafted lie to give him a reason to get out of bed in the morning, put on his uniform, and do Fury’s dirty work. If I were Steve, I’d be pissed too.
Nextwave: Agents of HATE #7
Wait does this mean we have canonically bisexual Janet van Dyne?
Seriously, I’m not even kidding here.
DID THIS COMIC JUST OFFHANDEDLY GIVE US CANONICALLY BI JAN?
Autism’s First Child
As new cases of autism have exploded in recent years—some form of the condition affects about one in 110 children today—efforts have multiplied to understand and accommodate the condition in childhood. But children with autism will become adults with autism, some 500,000 of them in this decade alone. What then? Meet Donald Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with autism. And his long, happy, surprising life may hold some answers.This article was written 2010 and some questionable language terminology is used, but it is an interesting read despite that.
“As new cases of autism have exploded in recent years—some form of the condition affects about one in 110 children today—efforts have multiplied to understand and accommodate the condition in childhood. But children with autism will become adults with autism, some 500,000 of them in this decade alone. What then? Meet Donald Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with autism. And his long, happy, surprising life may hold some answers.”
I was thinking on the list of Steve’s illnesses when I was re-watching (for reference, because I do that a lot), and I couldn’t help noticing that when he’s still tiny Steve, you can hear the wheeze and sputter in his breathing, specifically sinus-related congestion. And it’s not just done by the breathing: Chris Evans manages to work it into the way he speaks, so it’s natural.
It’s such a little thing to incorporate into a character, but it’s there and it adds layers, driving home the point that Steve is genuinely not a healthy puppy before all this happens.
I really noticed it when he’s with Peggy in the car (“I think this is the longest conversation I’ve had with one”) and with Erskine (“it’s a little big”), just before the procedure.
And immediately after the procedure, the first thing he’s doing is taking big breaths of air, in a way he hasn’t been able to his whole life. It’s a very subtle thing, but I really like it.
knitting in the dark 