20 Random Facts About Sybill Trelawney

1.) Sybill Trelawney loved Albus Dumbledore for his generosity, understanding, and the protection he provided her, but most of all, she loved him for his belief in her abilities. He was like a second father to her, and her heart broke a little when he died.

2.) Sybill knew that no one else—except maybe a handful of students—took her seriously, or even really liked her.

3.) She told herself that it didn’t matter because every great and important witch or wizard in history had been hated by just about everyone at one point or another. But at night, when she was sitting alone in her quarters, it was hard to think of herself as anything great or important.

4.) Sometimes, in her dreams, she remembered giving a prophecy that changed the world. When she’d wake up, she couldn’t recall any of the details, but the feeling of having made a difference clung to her, and when people scoffed at her and rolled their eyes, she held her head high.

5.) The only person Sybill hated more than You-Know-Who was Dolores Umbridge. She knew that was backward and people would call her crazy, but everyone called her crazy, so she didn’t care. Umbridge was the first person to ever make her feel worthless, and in her mind, that warranted pure hatred.

6.) If she were honest with herself, she’d had a drinking problem for twenty years. It got worse after Umbridge, but it wasn’t exactly a new thing. Getting drunk during school hours and letting the students see her that way, though… that was new.

7.) Sybill knew that her class was often considered ridiculous, and she always seemed to have trouble keeping the students under control on the first day of school. As a precaution, she began telling them every September that one of their number would die before the end of the year. It usually kept them quiet and subdued, at least for a little while.

8.) She was less than pleased to find out that Minerva McGonagall had begun to tell each class of first years that her prophecies of death weren’t to be trusted.

9.) Still, she couldn’t bring herself to be too angry at Minerva after she’d defended her against Umbridge.

10.) When Minerva led her back to her quarters, Sybill kissed her. She’d never really been attracted to Minerva, but she knew that Minerva did like women, and maybe she was (just a little) drunk. It seemed like a good idea. Later, she was grateful for Minerva’s gentle rejection; anything more than the one kiss would have made things awkward.

11.) One night in the school kitchens, Sybill found that depressed house-elves were the perfect drinking companions for depressed Divination professors. Winky could not only match her drink-for-much-weaker-drink, but she would scurry off to get Sybill another bottle or a bit of food whenever she wanted it, and that was just perfect.

12.) The downside to the school kitchens was that all of the other house-elves looked at Winky like she was the epitome of disappointment, and it reminded Sybill of how most of the staff was beginning to look at her.

13.) It took Sybill three weeks of asking before she convinced Winky to come to her quarters instead, where they could be miserable together in peace.

14.) Sybill was not the least bit ashamed that one of her best friends and closest confidantes was a displaced house-elf.

15.) Sybill’s other best friend was Charity Burbage, and Charity took being lumped into a group with a house-elf in stride.

16.) Sybill was a little bit in love with Charity, but never told her.

17.) The night she learned that Charity had been taken by the Death Eaters and was presumed dead, she gave serious consideration to just leaving Hogwarts—the entire school thought she was a ridiculous drunkard, and the only people who seemed to understand her were gone. So she’d leave, and let the Death Eaters kill her if they so wished. It didn’t matter.

18.) She didn’t actually leave because Winky refused to let her out of her quarters, and so she cried on the elf’s tiny shoulder for the entire night.

19.) By the next morning, she’d sworn revenge. She spent most of the next school year not even attempting to teach her classes effectively, and instead focused on making Snape and the Carrows’ lives hell.

20.) Sybill worried that feeling satisfaction at the sight of a crystal ball crushing in a Death Eater’s skull was probably not a good thing—getting excited over death was hardly normal. Still, she kept picturing all of the horrible things they could have done to Charity before they killed her, and she didn’t feel guilty at all.