(01) Top-Five Lists

[constance]

This is my first awesome-things entry for the month, and it's a little bit of a cheat, because it was in the making for like a week, but it still works! Because top-five lists, as Rob Fleming will attest, are among the world's most beautiful and consequential means of expression. There is something so ridiculously satisfying about ordering preferences. And making lists within lists? Yeah, baby.



from tilney, five times Castiel really, really hated Dean

I don't really think of Castiel as being capable of hate! (This is likely a failure of imagination on my part.) Righteous wrath, sure. Maybe, sometimes, some resentment. So, wrath or resentment, go!

1. "There's a right and a wrong here, and you know it."


2. "Don't make me push you."


3. "I dragged you out of Hell. I can throw you back in."


4. "Pamela. You know, psychic Pamela. You remember her? Cass, you remember her, you burned her eyes out. Remember that? Good times."


5. "You and your brother ended the world, and I lost everything. For nothing."

from zedmeister, five ways Albus Severus Potter resembles his namesakes

1. James has his Uncle George's sense of humor, and Lily's quixotic like her mother, but Al displays a sense of inquisitive whimsy that seems entirely unrelated to anyone Al's ever met.


2. Even before he started Hogwarts, he'd pretty much surpassed his brother and sister in innate understanding of how potions work. He'd also surpassed Harry in this, but, you know, that's not really saying very much.


3. Even if not actually secretive -- Ginny and Harry work hard to foster an open environment for their children -- Ally's a child who tends to keep his own counsel, and confide carefully and in small measures.


4. He loves him some candy.


5. He is possessed of a Nose. A nose that grows more aquiline the older he gets. It should be impossible -- neither Harry nor Ginny possess much in the way of beakiness themselves, and it's not as though Snape is directly related by blood -- but it's definitely there. Harry's come to a deeper understanding of Snape, of course, but secretly he's thankful that it's the nose and not the hair.

also from zedmeister, top five fictional spaces of all time

I adore writers who create spaces that shimmer in and out of the world we see each day and are in many ways like it, but at the same time so much more.

1. The Wizarding World from Harry Potter. I tried to pick just one space, but there are so many, Hogwarts and No. 12 Grimmauld Place and Diagon Alley and The Burrow and more than that even, but I think I can make a case for its being a single space, since it exists alongside and sometimes inside the physical space of the Muggle world. I love the inventiveness and copious detail of it, and Rowling's clear and present love for it.


2. The House in Danielewski's House of Leaves. There's so much going on in the book that I feel a little guilty admitting that the House is the one thing about it that I find memorable; it's terrifying and mysterious, and it's stuck with me for years.


3. The Dreaming from Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Infinitely mutable and literally fantastic, populated with all of our deepest and strangest ideas, in the most unexpected forms (hi, Gilbert!).


4. Faery from Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Hurtfew Abbey's good too, but I love that Faery is so menacing and unsettling in the way that it jostles the scholarly world of Napoleonic England, that the two worlds collide in such a way that it's possible to occupy both at the same time, and that few people understand this and even fewer can see it.


5. Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I say that Charlie was my first literary crush, and that's true, but the chocolate factory was my first spatial one.

from amelia_eve, five female names the Weasleys would have used if they'd had daughters instead of sons

1. Serafina Muriel


2. Cecilia Melisande


3. Phyllida Jane


4. Persephone Caroline


5. Diandra Evadne

For the record, Ginny considers herself to have had a lucky escape.