Imagining alternate realities for popular stories is par for the course in fandom, but some of them inevitably hit harder than others. We came across this AU version of Harry Potter, where Tumblr user ink-splotch postulated what the saga might have been like if Petunia Dursley had found some love in her heart for little Harry, and left Vernon to raise her two boys on her own.
The result is beautiful, but it hurts so much.
This story tells the tale of Petunia divorcing her husband and choosing to raise Dudley and Harry as a family. Rather than pitting them against each other at every turn, the boys grow up as brothers:
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 eventually, the wizarding world comes for Harry, as it always would:
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.
And when Harry meets Ron on the Hogwarts Express, he has a different story to tell:
When the little Evans family got back to their apartment with Harry’s crumpled letter in his tiny hand and Dudley’s bigger ones empty, Petunia sat them both down, in their kitchen with its weird stain on one wall and the weird musty smell, and told them they were not allowed to hate each other.
Harry looked up from the summer school essay he was editing for Dudley and Dudley peeked under the ice pack he was holding to the swelling black eye he’d got convincining some local tough kids from behind the candy shop to give Harry his pocket money back. “OK, mum,” they chorused.
When Harry met Ron on the Hogwarts Express, Ron told him he had five older brothers and Harry said, “I have one.”
Petunia gets drawn into the world that took her sister, meeting Harry’s friends and their families:
Harry brought home other things too–a bushy-haired, buck-toothed girl and a freckled boy who shouted over the telephone–very improper. Mrs. Weasley though Petunia was quaint, stiff, a little sharp. Mr. Weasley thought she was fascinating, and Ginny thought she was hilarious, the way those lips would twist, spit out something polite and damning. The twins tried to prank her once. They didn’t do it twice.
Harry wrote home and whenever he mentioned that people called Hermione ugly or shrill something in Petunia seized up with fury; whenever he wrote that people called Ron stupid, not kind, not loyal, not practical, Petunia would cast her eyes over to Dudley, frowning over his homework, and want to set things aflame.
She never wanted to be a part of this magical place, but she joins the fight anyway, because Harry is hers:
“This ain’t a war for Muggles,” said Moody and told her eight ways they might die bloody.
“If he is my son, then he is my son,” said Petunia, and she and Dudley packed their things. When they reached Grimmauld Place, Tonks knocked over a coatrack under Petunia’s disapproving gaze, and Molly Weasley came out and hugged Petunia tight. She had known Lily Potter– remember. Petunia had lost a sister in the war and people like Molly, Arthur, Minerva, Lupin; they had lost a beautiful young friend.
They holed up in there with Sirius, who never grew on Petunia. When Petunia was frustrated with Lupin’s moping or Molly’s frenetic energy, or the way Dudley tagged along behind the twins, Petunia would go tug the covering down off the portrait of Sirius’s mother and they would scream at each other until Petunia felt her stomach settle.
When the war came, when the Order of the Phoenix rekindled itself, Dudley joined up. He worked as a messenger thoughout the war, ran missions that didn’t require spells, but did require a pocket of joke shop tricks and a tendency to be underestimated and overlooked.
These are just fragments of the story ink-splotch tells, and it goes all the way through to the end of Harry’s journey. What’s remarkable about the retelling is how it allows Petunia and Dudley to participate in one of Rowling’s critical central themes; the underestimation and maligning of people who are perceived as different. Rather than the violently enforced “normalcy” that the Dursleys represent in the Potter books, Petunia and Dudley also struggle to find out where they belong and find themselves allying with other people who face those same challenges.
We’re just going to… sit with that for a while. Sniffling into our tea.
Tooooo many feels.
I remember being a bit disappointed when Rowling said she had initially intended Dudley to have a son that showed up at Platform 3/4 in the epilogue, but decided Vernon’s muggleness was too strong. But I always loved that story she told about them hainging out a few times a year just drinking tea.
Sorry, but I turned off as soon as I got to “He got cornered behind the dumpsters and in the restrooms”. Harry Potter, even in an alternate universe, would never have encountered either, although he might have been cornered behind skips and in toilets. If you’re going to write about an English character, it’s important to learn to write in English English rather than American English.
Dear Stubby,
Why did you remind me this exists? These feels are uncomfortable.
Interesting!
I never got the impression that Dudley was dumb, just that he was sharp but lazy about learning, not interested in cultivating his intellect, like most people I know who are sharp (well, everyone I know is sharp) but anti-intellectual (and many of them have degrees).
@2, Never mind that the Harry Potter books themselves say “restrooms and dumpsters”
Oh my goodness….. The feels… This is so precious and good, and I would have loved this version of the story probably more than the actual one if Rowling had written it instead.
Aeryl @5. No, in fact they don’t. They are translated into American by their American publishers, and they say “restrooms and dumpsters” in the same way as the French translations doubtless say “toilettes et bennes” or something similar. Try reading the originals, not the translations.
@2, @5 — In the US, the Harry Potter books were translated into American English. I’m sure someone could do the reverse translation – American into British for inksplotch’s story.
@7 – it’s pretty darn hard to FIND the original in the US. You certainly can’t buy it here.
@5, @7 ditto. (I also just found out that my version of Neverwhere was Americanized, I need to find a UK original.)
Hi everyone – let me give a quick preface here…
My dad died when I was 7. My mother abused me daily until I was 10 and my older sister, obtaining guardianship thru the courts, took me in. She was only 22 at the time. She tried, but by then I was already pretty screwed up, so she sent me to an all-boys place for kids like me. There, the staff, a mix of men of women but very much a patriarchy, helped give me the tools to be successful in life to the point where now I’m a pretty good husband and father (the hands on kind), so……
….forgive me if I say this lost me right at the beginning where Petunia is redeemed and Vernon is tossed aside. What sexist, stereotypical horseshit.
I love tor.com, and the folks I (occasionally) interact with here, but this kind of crap needs to be challenged.
This article actually brought home (yet another) point about how terrible the wizarding world is to muggles and muggle-borns. They don’t announce themselves to muggle-born children and their parents until they turn 11. Now apparently, some children manifest earlier than others, and 11 might be ok for some, but wouldn’t it be a better idea to put some kind of surveillance on muggle-borns so that they and their parents could be offered counseling and access to wizarding resources when they start to manifest. True, it wouldn’t have helped Harry in the original, but imagine if Tom Riddle had been adopted by some loving wizarding family as soon as the Ministry detected him manifesting magic in the orphanage?
And another thing, why would Pentunia Evans and family have to be poor? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to access some of the Potter family’s gold? Under supervision of a court or Ministry-appointed adminsitrator maybe, to make sure Harry’s money wasn’t being misused during his minority. Buy why (especially in this alt-Potterverse) must the Evans family be poor?
@11, I don’t think the idea is that awful jealous petty bitchy Pentunia is “redeemed” by the baby Harry, rather that she was never awful, jealous, petty and bitchy to begin with. There are some parents who leave awful spouses for the sake of their children. Given JKR’s set-up and backstory (especially on Lily, Pentunia and Severus), I think the original is fairly reasonable, if slightly exaggerated. But it’s not impossible that a different Petunia would have sacrificed for her nephew (and gained some wonderful new friends and family in the mix.)
*And especially not unrealistic if there was some kind of ombudsman’s office between wizards and muggles so that someone could tell Petunia,
“Harry has money of his own you can access for needful expenses.”
Moderator note: I deleted a few duplicate messages (#13 and 2 #14s, for some reason — I think the system was hiccuping there.)
@@@@@ #2 I have to agree! “Jerks” is what did it for me.
@15 – sorry – can’t buy that explanation. here’s a quote from the top of the original post:
So, she hated Harry too, but was redeemed, unlike Vernon. So, I’m going back to calling sexist and stereotypical. Let me provide a touch more background. When my sister took me in, she was able to because she had just married, and my brother in law, who was probably looking forward to newly-married bliss, took me in as well (and remember, I was a pretty screwed kid by then). He never once made me feel unwelcome or uncomfortable (which in all fairness, can’t be said of my sister).
I know there are plenty of deadbeat men out there, but damn it, there are a lot more men who are stand-up guys who would have taken Harry in without a beat. If a story is going to redeem one character, but not the other, on the basis of sex (and in spite of family resemblences), then I’m calling bull shit.
@18, that’s fair, I didn;t read the original tumblr, just the tor post. I think a better Petunia could have acted differently. If this story is meant to be that the original Petunia was saved by Harry, I don’t buy it either. Not many people would take food out of their own child’s mouth for the child of a sister you jealously hated, not to mention get divorced over him.
Of course, it would only take a few words to change the premise of the story. The rest — how far could a muggle parent be integrated into the wizarding world and how would it change them — is a fairly interesting idea.
Is it problematic that the story dismisses Vernon as a deadbeat dad and a terrible stepfather? Yes. The story probably could have been made to work without contributing to those narratives. But it wouldn’t work if Vernon was a good father.
The whole point of the story is that selfish, vicious Petunia could have a been a good mother. That a temp from Chiswick (whoops, wrong story) who is a thoroughly unpleasant can still be on the side of angels. What the story says about class and manners won’t work if she still has a house in respectable neighbourhood and a husband with a decent job. To get the feels, Petunia has to sacrifice for Harry, has to demonstrate in actions what she cannot–the selfish, nasty creature that she is–say in words. All of which requires that Vernon be a bad father.
That’s not to say a similar story couldn’t redeem Vernon, but it wouldn’t be this story and it would do something different that this story does.
Is it based on sex (maybe, subconciously) or the actual family tie? I think in later books there is some indication that Petunia didn’t really hate Lily as much as she said she did, and if she did hate his eyes, it may have also been due to the reminders of what she had lost.
Which is not to say there isn’t an interesting story there about Vernon coming around. But, from what we see in the text (and also from things JK Rowling has said in Pottermore), Vernon is the way he is due to flat out bigotry and it goes way deeper. Petunia just kind of gets swept along out of the jealousy/insecurity that came from having a witch for a sister.
@21 – please see my reply on #18 – the author makes it clear that Petunia decides to love Harry despite the family connection and resemblence.
@20 – well, if the whole point of the story is tell a “women are awesome and willing to live in poverty to be able to love their children and men are assholes” story, then, yes, the story has to be told this way (and I call bullshit). If the story is to tell a tale of what if Harry had been loved, then Vernon could have been included. For the rest of the struggles you aluded to, they could have been poor. Problem…solved.
It’s so horrible and sexist to imagine a woman loving a child?
I’m curious: how does your species reproduce? Spores?
@23 – no, but it is horrible and sexist to imagine that a man can not.
I’m curious – what species do you suppose I am?
@22 No, that wasn’t the point of the story. Nor is the point to say what if Harry had been loved. The story is about Petunia and how she might have been different.
But the Dursley’s weren’t poor. Making them poor as an intact family would require a fair amount of exposition, which would detract from the minimalist nature of the narrative.
@23 @24 Please keep the discussion civil and refrain from attacks on other commenters, as outlined in our moderation policy. Comments that do not abide by these guidelines will be unpublished. Thanks.
Honestly, it’s a lot harder to imagine a story of Vernon redeemed. He is given no redeemable qualities in the original, AFAICT.
One of the twists that makes Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality interesting is that Petunia is redeemed there, too…but not without some intervention.
FSS, the joy of fanfic is being able to spin that material you love the way you would like it to go. If you do want to see Vernon redeemed, have a go at writing him that way.
LisaMarie- I don’t think Petunia really did hate Lily either. How hard must it be at that young age to know your sister is magical, while you are only clay. And then your sister gets to go to MagicWorld (TM), and you get left behind. Petunia’s love for her sister got so twisted up with her yearning to be magical herself, that when the magical rejected her, she has to reject everything that smacked of the magical to maintain a shred of her own self-esteem.
I think the one Petunia really did hate was James Potter, for so thoroughly taking her sister from her. And I do wonder what Petunia would have been like if her sister had lived, and they’d been able to establish an adult relationship.
I started to feel for Petunia in the books when Harry told the Dursleys that Voldemort had returned, and, rather than matching Vernon’s dismissive bluster, she reacted with fear, because she knew just what that meant, and how little she could do about it. I think this is when Harry first started to see her as a person as well, not just the cartoon she’d been before.
@FSS I’m completely confused as to what you are on about.
Just because in your singular experience your mother was not a good person does not mean that every narrative ever has to follow that theme. That is a bonkers way of judging it.
The AU is easier to write in this manner because Petunia has a specific connection to the wizarding world and loss that Dursley doesn’t. If it had been HIS sister killed, it’s more than likely the AU would have written him as the redeemed parent.
Since the “Petunia redeemed” story is fanfic, there is no reason why someone couldn’t write an equally compelling story, where Vernon Dursley stands up like a hero and loves and cares for Harry despite his wife’s prejudices.
The problem with ‘Harry is loved’ stories is that at least some of the narrative drive of the books is based on Harry’s search for maternal and paternal figures in the wizarding community. If Harry is raised in a supportive and happy home, his interactions and bonding with Hagrid, Dumbledore, Molly Weasley, and especially Sirius Black are altered and made less intense.
@22 – I think I just interpret that introduction in an entirely different way, then. Yes, at the start, the family connection is what causes her to recoil. But then she changes. I don’t see a ‘despite’ but a change. The family connection is both a source of sadness/jealousy/bitterness and healing for her.
Heck, if you want to take it that far, the whole Harry Potter saga is sexist becuase it’s Lily’s sacrifce, and not James’s, that saves him (something I have actually wondered, about, heh).
The OMG MISANDRY reading of this misses one important point: if Vernon had left Petunia for being a bad mom & taken Harry, Harry would have been in mortal danger, since the spell that protects him at the Dursleys is based on Petunia being his mother’s sister and the blood relation. That’s canonical. If someone were to write a Redeeming Vernon story that managed to work around that bit of canon successfully it’d be fascinating. But that’s the beauty of fanfic. If it doesn’t exist and you want to explore the idea? Create it for yourself. It doesn’t lessen anyone else’s fic to do that. Tearing this down because not all men are bad dads is ridiculous. Not all teachers are mean, but Snape. Not all rich kids are terrible, but Draco. It just makes no sense at all.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3446796/1/Magical-Relations
For those wanting a redeemed Vernon. Great AU, no over powered characters or Ron-the-Death-Eaters.
I’ve always thought Lily and Petunia’s parents had a lot to answer for. Would Petunia have been so bitter and hateful if they had treated her with the same love and attention they apparently treated Lily? In SS, she says something to the effect that they were so proud of Lily and it was Lily, Lily, Lily all the time. (Snape also had a crappy childhood, which obviously contributed to his bullying nature. Voldemort, however, was irredeemable. He seems to have been born a sociopath.)
There’s an obvious parallel here between Petunia as a single mum, and the situation JKR was in when she first wrote the books.
@35 – yeah, I always wondered about that. It sounds like her parents showed some blatant favoritism (although it is possible Petunia’s rememberance is a bit skewed) or at the very least, were not sensitive at all to what was going on between their two children.
Just to look at the sacrifice angle, Petunia could have had middle class or better money, and still be taking life and death risks in the wizard wars.
@@@@@ FSS
You’ve probably moved on from this discussion, but I still feel a little compelled to tell you my point.
I was brought up in multiple different households as well. My mother, a single parent for as long as I can remember because my father wasn’t interested in his mistress’ whelp, was in the Army and my brother and I were often left behind for months or even years with friends and family. The first home I remember, a high school friend of my mom’s, was horrible. We were practically starved and my brother received beatings regularly for any transgressions either of us committed (mostly because the first time she tried to hit me, he nearly broke her arm). She was an evil woman and it took a year and multiple run away attempts before our grandmother found out and rescued us.
When I was nine, my mother decided she couldn’t handle two kids and the military. I was adopted by an elderly couple who were “friends of the family”. I was happy for a time, but after a couple years, the difference in age and beliefs (many Southern 80-year-olds are a bit racist and I was never brought up to believe that crap) took it’s toll and the abuse started. My father believed the belt was the answer to any back talk and that was something I could understand, even as a child. It was how he was raised. But my mother … I love my mother, but she needed help. She would go from congratulating me for my grades to pulling out my hair as she screamed obscenities at me to sobbing and begging for forgiveness in minutes.
However, instead of damning this story out of hand based off my experiences in life, I gave it a chance and was brought to tears by a beautiful and well-written story. I refuse to ever be like the people who hurt me. I will keep my heart and mind open and I will not judge without even knowing the content that’s being judged, whether it’s a person or a story. I will be a Harry. And I agree with many of the commenters, especially charming.quark (29), puck (30), and Pope Lizbet (33).
You want to say that because a man “saved” you, not all men are stereotypical dead-beat dads? Well, the converse is true as well; just because a couple of women hurt us, not all women are abusive mothers.
“Heck, if you want to take it that far, the whole Harry Potter saga is sexist becuase it’s Lily’s sacrifce, and not James’s, that saves him (something I have actually wondered, about, heh).”
that’s…that’s huuuge… so now really why? he also sacrificed himself out of love, so why was Lily’s sacrafice accounted for?
Someone… write a thread about it. plz
I actually thought James Potter was a bit more important in the series. After all, it was his cloak, and his Patronus, that Harry used.
I agree with FSS, @11, why shouldn’t Vernon be redeemed too? It becomes clear in Order Of The Phoenix that it’s Petunia who wears the pants in this marriage and Vernon is simply following her lead in abusing Harry. Ergo if Petunia was positive about Harry Vernon would be too.
so I thought about it @41 (answering myself- weird :{ ) – James sacrifices was not the same as Lily’s. Voldemort gave the “silly girl” the choice to flee, unlike James, and she still chose to stand between baby Harry and Voldy. Maybe that’s the little something that makes the difference, I don’t know.
I always assumed (although I suppose there’s nothing in the text), that Lily was somewhat involved in the magic that protected Harry, whether by accident or design. We’re told over and over how smart she was, perhaps she was trying some kind of shielding spell that was (possibly unintentionally) powered by her death.
@45/phuzz: It’s strongly implied, but never explicitly stated, that Lily’s sacrifice cast a charm that prevented Voldemort in particular from harming Harry, a charm that was later somewhat neutralized when Voldy used Harry’s blood to rebuild his body.
As for the charms protecting 4 Privet Drive, those were cast by Dumbledore, probably something akin to those used later to protect 12 Grimmauld Place, the Burrow, and Shell Cottage.
This really is a beautiful story.
@45phuzz/ That was my way of thinking too until the last book, were Harry did a Lily without the book mentioning that he did or learned a difficult spell for that, just that he went to die for the school, as Voldy threatened them, choose either give up harry or war and death.
47@/ You talking about Harry potter in general? or the sacrafice out of love in particular?
@46/ hhmmm… but if that was Dumbledore’s work, how come it lasted after his death? and how come such knowledge was limited to 4 privet drive as he told harry that he can’t come live in Grimmauld’s place (?) as there is no charm there to shield him? if AD did that charm he could easily do that on headquarters as well… so if that actually was triggered as a side effect of that sacrafice, love spell (is there no name for that spell? like expelliarmus?) than how come Hogwarts wasn’t immediately shielded from Voldy to enter?
@48/the-schwartz-be-with-you: JKR is a bit inconsistent with what spells do and do not persist after the death of the caster, but blood relationships do seem to play a role. Petunia Dursley was blood kin, Sirius Black was not. As I mentioned over here, a bit of special pleading with regards to love-based sacrifice make plot+theme+story_structure hang together a bit better.
Hey Ian I wrote you back in ” literary-merits-of-potter”, so feel free to check it out.
ohh yes I forgot the bloody thing. Yes that explains a lot more… hhmmm now I must ponder