I show not your face but your heart's desire

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

Assuming alternity continues to incorporate big canon events, we should expect Harry to find the Mirror of Erised in a little under a month.

"It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts." -Dumbledore

What do you predict Harry Marvolo will see there?

Comments

[wintercreek]

So if he does see himself in the mirror with his real parents, based on some really distant memory, I think it could be pretty shocking to him. It might start making him ask questions that could lead to some interesting truths about his past. Especially because we have reason to believe both Draco and Pansy *do* know about Harry's real parents, and I can certainly imagine one of them letting it slip.

You know, that might be the key to sorting this out. We don't actually know that the Mirror is at Hogwarts. If it was there in canon due to Dumbledore, it wouldn't necessarily be there now. What if the Malfoys have the Mirror? What if it's Harry and Draco rather than Harry and Ron who encounter the Mirror?

The problem with this is, of course, where then will the Philosopher's Stone be hidden? Unless! If I recall correctly, in canon they encounter Fluffy first, then the Mirror elsewhere, and then later both together. So since we know Fluffy's around (and wasn't that a Harry-Draco-Ron-Neville adventure too? But who was number five? Not another Slytherin, it sounds like.) and we suspect that the Philosopher's Stone is hidden somewhere under McG's influence, then perhaps the Malfoys have the Mirror Erised until Harry stumbles on it and they then move it, much as Dumbledore does in canon, but for different reasons. In canon, Harry finds the Mirror and has a rather gentle encounter with Dumbledore about his potential addiction to it; Dumbledore moves the Mirror, I think, both in response to Harry and because he was going to relocate it anyway for Stone-hiding purposes. What if the Malfoys have it (decoration, part of their magical artifact collection, whatever), Harry finds it and it raises uncomfortable questions about his past, Lucius squashes those questions and ships the Mirror off to Hogwarts to stop Harry from encountering it anymore, and then McG takes advantage of it as a hiding place for the Stone? (Phew!)

*tinhats, happily*

... I think I'd better reread HPPS over Winter Break. I'll need better recall to keep doing this kind of (totally awesome) (wild) speculation.

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

I remember thinking at the time that the 5th person was Hermione. I can't remember what I based that on, though.

Mirror of Erised at Malfoy Manor, huh? That would fit, and it would actually work with the version of events where Harry ends up working *with* Voldemort and *against* someone else when he tries to keep the stone out of someone's hand (very possibly still Quirrel). So Voldemort AND the Hogwarts staff both want to keep the stone protected, with Voldemort in this case actually stepping a little into Dumbledore's role.

1. Voldemort knows the stone is in danger, and sends it to Hogwarts to be protected by some trustworthy professors, possibly adding his own protective spell to the series that Fluffy is using.
2. Minerva can't use the stone to make gold for Xeno Lovegood, because Voldemort knows she has the stone and would therefore know who had been responsible for bailing out Xeno. And that would make him suspicious or at least annoyed, since using the stone is not part of her role as protector.

In fact, it could then be Voldemort himself who Harry goes to about the mirror, and who has the idea of putting it as the last protection for the stone.

Am I crazy for this to sound plausible to me?

[wintercreek]

I really want it to be Hermione, because that supports the awesome canon connection that we saw in Halloween's troll fight - not one but TWO prophesied boys, not one but TWO pureblood sons of iconic families, and one Hermione (disenfranchised as she may be).

The Harry-Draco connection is really interesting in this game when compared to Harry-Ron in canon - in both cases, Harry doesn't have much of a family of his own (maliciously neglected by the Dursleys in canon, benignly neglected by the LP in Alternity) and is taken in by a family that really symbolizes the predominant thinking about magical castes (the Weasleys in canon, who support the dominant and accepted opinion that Muggleborns and Muggles are human beings worthy of respect; the Malfoys in Alternity, who support the dominant and accepted opinion that Muggleborns and Muggles are less than human). The bit that's pinging my "awesome!" radar here is that Alternity is doing what fandom always wanted - Harry's bridging the gap. He's still friends with Ron, still drawn to Gryffindors despite his *cough* reassignment. He's still using both sides of himself and reaching out to both Draco and Ron, who arguably represent the Slytherin and Gryffindor facets of Harry. Without the small but powerful influences he has in canon that drive him to reject Slytherin so forcefully, is this a Harry who can strike a balance between cunning and courage? Between the aristocracy and the working class? Between his wizardly heritage (by blood and adoption) and the idea of rising from humble circumstances (by blood - Lily was a Muggleborn, after all - and by friendship with the Weasleys [lower-class purebloods], Hermione [Muggleborn] and maybe others [oh, how I would love to see Harry's sense of right and wrong come up against the Muggle internment camps ... although maybe not until he's done some preliminary thinking against the regime]).

This game is so cool.

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

As is this fan community. I am having so much fun thinking through these possibilities. :)

Also, this crystallizes why I *don't* want the prophecy to be about Neville in this AU, as cool as it in some ways would be. I think Neville's really important, but I'm really interested in Harry's journey to saving the world from Voldemort, now his own adopted father. And I want to see how he gets there from his new position in Slytherin. It is actually a little bit of a Slytherin redemption story, isn't it? And... I'm not putting this into words very well, but yeah, I really like what you say in your post. I'm going to tag this thread "best of alt_fen" in its honor!

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I hate to say it, but I think that the Harry-Draco set up here is showing us what Harry will lose (reject and be rejected by) when he learns the truth of his past: we may be being set up to say, "Alas! If only he could still be friends with Draco! If only he'd been able to persuade Draco to re-evaluate things, too!" It could be that Draco and other Slytherin kids will turn with Harry against the LP when he learns that Voldemort murdered his parents, but what I'm seeing so far is a Draco who will be bound up by wounded family honour, pure-blood ideology, and Slytherin chauvinism. (I expect him to align with Theodore against Harry when Draco feels Harry has betrayed their friendship. Maybe Pansy will still be free-thinking enough to stand with Harry.)

The game may be letting us see a small idyll here in the first year of the game while these kids are young enough and the political situation is stable enough to allow cross-House and cross-party connections. While it's still possible for young brains to formulate questions and learn to keep them quiet/alive. I expect that we will spend a lot of time later on saying, "Do you remember when they all played chess together?" "Do you remember when Draco and Harry and Neville and Ron ALL explored the castle together?" "Isn't it a shame..."

[brimtoast.livejournal.com]

It makes sense, and would be very sad. I wonder if there's a little part of Draco, who has been overshadowed a little by Harry for most of his life, that would take pleasure in everybody turning against Harry, though.

Sometimes I think that things are already a bit strained between them. They get along, but not really like best friends, you know? Have you noticed that, unlike some other friendships (like Pansy and Ron), we never really see Harry and Draco being relaxed and joking and having fun with each other? I wonder if it's happening "off-screen" or if it's just not a part of their friendship.

I mean, and apologies for using an example from a game you haven't read, but I am messing with making an offline version of This Is Now, and yesterday I saw this thread (http://the-boy-who.livejournal.com/9374.html) of Harry and Ron and Hermione just sort of having fun and being friends, and I can't imagine alt_harry and alt_draco acting that relaxed and comfortable with each other. The closest they get is something like this (http://alt-harry.livejournal.com/1197.html?thread=7597#t7597). And it has a very different tone.

So maybe it's just because they're 11. Or that Draco's personality is very different from Ron's. Or that they've both been raised to be very restrained. Or that this is just a tenser world. But... do you see what I mean?

[lapin-agile.livejournal.com]

I totally agree about this Draco and his relationship with this Harry. It keeps coming back to me that Draco has grown up receiving punishments on Harry's behalf. That has surely shaped the way they feel about each other. It is part of Draco's programming to be loyal to Harry, but that doesn't add up to a relaxed, fun friendship.

And it seems to me that we've seen signals already that Draco is jealous of Ron. I fully expect that tension to grow over time. Ron and Harry have fun exchanges -- in part because Ron did not grow up being taught to defer to Harry as a princeling. (And Harry gets prickly with students who seem awestruck by him -- he nearly took Hannah's head off, I think -- so I can see why Ron's unfussed response to him would be so appealing to Harry.)

I'm intrigued, too, by Draco's report that Madam Pomfrey told him he needs to fret less: I think this Draco is pretty tightly wound. (That strikes me as canonical, too.) We've already seen that he worries about measuring up to his father's expectations, that he's programmed to be anxious about getting in trouble (and about being held accountable if Harry gets in trouble), and that he worries that something bad might happen to his father (Draco was angriest with Pansy when Lucius let slip that he was taking heat for Pansy's behavior). I expect to see Draco put under increasing pressure as this game moves forward, and I expect it will take a measurable toll on him.