Work Text:
Looking back, it's all so stupid.
Hundreds of years of secrecy, through entire wars, and it's because of a bunch of Quidditch fans who got a bit too drunk, a bit too careless during the World Cup. And of course there's a muggle around at just the right moment to catch them transfiguring a couple of empty bottles into their team's mascot, of course it's a teenager who records it on her cell phone then immediately posts it on the internet. Of course even after the poor girl's Obliviated, the wizards don't think to censure the video - no, of course not, what do wizards know of muggle technology?
Is it any surprise that the teen was concerned to find she posted a - very popular - video one YouTube but couldn't remember it at all? That, at the time the video was posted, she very clearly remembered that she was at a store to buy milk.
And compounding this, the wizards in charge of the poor girl's Obliviation don't think to check her cell phone. Of course the girl is going to freak out when she finds that she was texting her friend about this amazing thing she saw, that posted on YouTube, and she realizes that she can't remember a single thing about it.
Honestly.
Wizards at large don't even try to keep up with muggle technology, it was inevitable that muggles find out about magic.
At the time though, I remember the great panic about it all - the fear, on both sides, of finding out and being found out. The uncertainty of what it means for the future.
Mostly, when I found out about the reveal - about the muggle panic and fear and anger over the realization that magicals had been not only hiding among them but modifying their memories - I remember a deep, all consuming moment of terror because I wasn't ready to go to war.
Not again, not against the world I grew up in, not against my parent's world.
- Hermione Granger
