alt_fen | The CAST of Alternity

Well, there we are, folks! Seven Years. What a long trip it's been.

As we said Monday night, the game may have reached its conclusion, we are not exactly done! We have some fun and exciting extras planned for you. In the coming weeks, we'll unveil some additional "bonus content," host some AMAs from player- and character-perspective, talk about the process, and of course, celebrate the achievement that this story represents for all of us, and we hope, all of you.

Before we get to that, though, allow me to introduce OUR CAST.

In the course of seven years, players come and go, some characters work or don't, and often characters have changed hands. Some have remained constant since the beginning (shown with an * below). Of course, we've also killed a lot of them (ahem), but that doesn't change who played them, only that those players retired the character in service to the plotline. Pretty soon, we'll be opening our wiki (because how ELSE do we keep all this information straight?), which has a complete list of who played which character, including past role assignments.

In the interest of privacy, we're not revealing details, but the players are encouraged to post below in the comments with bios, tales of how they joined Alternity, and any other creds they would like to provide.

And now, here is the list of our current players, and the characters they played as of the last time said characters were seen:

Brook: Cedric Diggory*, Rabastan Lestrange, Augustus Rookwood*

Deb: Regulus Black, Barty Crouch, Jr., Poppy Pomfrey*, Lana Sandoval-Pennifold*, Ron Weasley, Blaise Zabini*

Denise: Antonin Dolohov*, Severus Snape, Charlie Weasley*

Elise: Megan Jones, Linus Moon, Jeremy Stretton*

Erin: Susan Bones*, Lavender Brown*, Pomona Sprout**

Gwen: Ptolemy Baddock*, Sirius Black*, Michael Corner, Justin Finch-Fletchley*, Hermione Granger, Minerva McGonagall, Lucius Malfoy*, Narcissa Malfoy, Padma Patil*, Horace Slughorn, Zacharias Smith*

Jenett: Albus Dumbledore, Lee Jordan, Aurora Sinistra, Pomona Sprout**, Dolores Umbridge*

Linny: Penelope Clearwater, Colin Creevey*, Alice Longbottom, Evelyn Longbottom*, Frank Longbottom, Ernie Macmillan, Pansy Parkinson, Nymphadora Tonks (Ponds)

Naomi: Savitha Desai*, Seamus Finnigan*, Rachel (Lamont) Brodie*, Remus Lupin, Harry Marvolo, Corax Mulciber*, Sally-Anne Perks*, Arista Selwyn*, Dominic Selwyn*, Ginny Weasley

Peg: Hannah Abbott, Terry Boot*, Amycus Carrow, Neville Longbottom*, Luna Lovegood*, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Arthur Weasley, Bill Weasley*, Fred Weasley, George Weasley, Molly Weasley*, Percy Weasley*

Rene: Millicent Bulstrode, Daphne Greengrass, Bellatrix Lestrange*, Hydra Lestrange*, Rodolphus Lestrange*, Walden Macnair*, Draco Malfoy, Eloise Midgen*, Jason Montague*

(**This character was shared by both players)

In Alternity, at the memorial services, people were encouraged to offer memories of their loved ones. Let's get the ball rolling here by inviting the players to offer up their favorite memories of their own characters and of others. We also want your feedback! What goes in your book of "Best Alternity Moments?"

In the next few days, we'll start holding AMA sessions with various players and their characters - understanding that some players may want some of their character information to remain nebulous or open to interpretation, of course!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

naomikritzer

Yeah, all we know about her in canon is that she gets Sorted in Y1, and isn't around to take the OWLs in Y5, and she's clearly not in Gryffindor or Slytherin in canon. (I think she's usually presumed to be a muggleborn Hufflepuff who got pulled out in Y2 due to the Chamber of Secrets stuff. Or her parents saying, "wait, they don't teach you maths, any of the sciences, literature, the history of anything other than wizards? This school's academic standards are shocking and we're moving you to the local comprehensive.")

The convenient thing about writing someone who's practically an OC was that I didn't have to figure out how to make them both like and unlike their canon personality. (Draco would be one of my favorite Alternity examples of someone who is both like and unlike his canon self. Right to the end, you can see that it's Draco -- just, a Draco from profoundly different circumstances. That's a very different challenge.)

From:

kiya

I wonder how many muggleborn kids get pulled from Hogwarts early on because this school's academic standards are shocking (in the bad way) or because of the magical mayhem level for pranks ("someone went to the nurse because WHAT?").

From:

naomikritzer

Probably MOST OF THEM, is what I figure.

Hermione was clever enough that she probably did her regular academics during her summers. (If my older daughter were admitted to a wizard school, and I said, "but wait, they're not going to teach you Chemistry or Physics or math or history..." this is what she would do, I think.)

From:

kiya

... I'm suddenly pondering the thing Tosha said about how he thought cultural assimilation was the only way of managing the magical/muggle divide and wondering how much of the neglect of muggle-relevant subjects was a deliberate choice to force assimilation (and how much was that the Hogwarts curriculum was set a thousand or more years ago and hasn't really changed...).

From:

naomikritzer

Oooooooooooooooooooooooh.

Yeah. I think that is a very compelling theory, actually. (Well, although it's also the case that the British educational system tends to do certain things because We Have Always Done It That Way. Although the story about the student demanding "cakes and ale" while sitting an exam is not true, alas.)

From:

kiya

My hobby: wild-ass speculative fantheories that might actually be true.

From:

naomikritzer

A random fact about me, by the way: although I'm an American, I actually spent one year (when I was 13, and in American 8th grade) attending a Comprehensive school in London, England. Which does not actually make me an expert per se but did in fact give me a very different perspective on some of the stuff that Americans sometimes see as implausible in the HP books generally.

Like the super poorly enforced "no magic in the corridors!" rule. At lunch time at my British school, we would line up for lunch. They lined us up by grade. 6th Form ate first (and the teachers, obviously) -- those were the equivalent of 11th and 12th graders. Then 5th, and there weren't enough 6th formers that the 5th years really had to wait. The 4th year students would wait in line in a sheltered stairwell for lunch, and the 3rd years would wait outside in the elements. And this line was 100% Lord of the Flies, let the strongest survive!, people would just ruthlessly cut in front of you and the question was, "can I bodily hurl him back out" or else "is this someone who scares me enough I'm going to just let him do it"? (The really scary kids would just saunter to the front, just before we got called into the stairwell, and no one would stop them.)

There was absolutely zero enforcement of the line from the adults at the school. They did not give a shit. They also did not break up fights (there were several very dramatic ones), intervene in any way with bullying, enforce the rules against smoking in the bathrooms (rather, they would helpfully lock the bathrooms during the school breaks to keep people from going in there to smoke, except they delayed just long enough that all the smoking kids could book it and get in there and the kids who had to pee were kept out), etc.

I've compared notes with Americans who went to British schools during that time period that were fancier, and this whole experience was pretty standard. Things may have changed -- they've certainly changed in the U.S. -- but JKR is about my age, and would've been attending British schools in the 1980s. At least no one at my school had a wand!

(It was a truly terrible school academically. This was during the Thatcher years, and was the nadir of the London municipal educational system, according to friends. But for instance, in our science class, they would hand out worksheets with a lab on it, and we would copy out in our notebooks the process and the results, all without actually doing the lab, because that required materials we didn't have. We didn't ever get homework in math class because there weren't anywhere near enough textbooks to go around. I learned a TON that year, even so, but a lot of it was just from the experience of living abroad.)

From:

lucky_guess

Pansy was a touch less successful in that regard, I think, but when I read her in canon, I could see echoes of her protectiveness -- of the people in her house, people who were threatened constantly -- and, of course, her concern and love for Draco. (I saw her canon meanness as primarily defensive/protective in nature.)

I think she evolved as she did because a.) Slytherins in Alternity were in a position of comfortable power and didn't need to close ranks, and b.) the awesome transformative power of Sally-Anne and Ron's friendship.

(I did like that when they asked for Harry, she got to very publicly say, "HELL NO" in a nice subversion of canon. That was nice.)

From:

naomikritzer

There were some dynamics from the very, very early days of the game that pointed things in a very specific direction.

I got recruited to play Pansy's half-blood Slytherin bestie. I needed a backstory for why Sally-Anne got Sorted into Slytherin in the first place. (When asked in-game she said it was because Padma and Pansy got Sorted right before her -- Parkinson, Patil, Perks -- and she liked the looks of Pansy better than Padma. The real reason: one of her very deep fears was that she'd somehow be forced to betray a friend. She figured that any of her friends in Slytherin would be above suspicion. THAT worked out really well for her, didn't it?)

Anyway -- when I started playing Sally-Anne, I expected to be playing a conflicted mean girl, but I was also following Pansy's lead, and her first player ran with her as a likeable subversive, a slightly-neglected pureblood girl who didn't like rules and questioned everything. Pansy's course was really set in those very first weeks -- when you took her over, that hand was dealt. (I really liked what you did with her, mind you. Sally-Anne and Pansy's friendship was one of my favorite parts of the game.)

The other really key dynamic in those first days was that we all wanted to have our characters talk to other characters, and there just weren't that many, and who was on and posting was even more limited, so....the upshot was that Pansy and Ron incessantly talked incessantly to each other, because they were around.

In-world, this actually made sense -- it demonstrates the ways in which technology is disruptive and lets people transcend certain divisions. The journals were kind of like a late-1980s or early-1990s BBS. My college (early 1990s) had a VAX-based BBS system called NOTES, and the students who were NOTES geeks all knew each other regardless of where on campus they lived, their class year, their major, etc. The journals worked kind of the same way -- it was, in fact, entirely plausible they would bring together natural enemies like Pansy and Ron. ;-)

From:

reenie

I really liked Pansy and Draco's relationship, even though it did end in a way that probably left Pansy hurt and thinking "wtf?" (as relationships do at that age)

Draco needed to date Pansy (and then pseudo-date Daphne) to learn that he did NOT want or need an endlessly supportive partner who was willing to overlook his flaws or make excuses for them.

He needed someone who would tell him the truth about himself and force him to be accountable.

From:

naomikritzer

I was glad that in addition to the True Love relationships like Hydra and Justin, we had what looked like True Love that ended in breakup (Pansy/Draco) and one relationship that was clearly doomed from the outset even though they were both perfectly nice people (Sally-Anne/Michael). I mean, teenage relationships tend to involve a whole lot of mistakes!

From:

synecdochic

Yeah, the extrapolation-from-canon was really fun (Draco! Pansy! Even Hermione, in a way!) but the characters who had two lines were certainly a lot easier!

I find it funny that I got most definitely one of each -- Tosha has one appearance in canon (at the battle of the Department of Mysteries), and Snape has, well, many. And Charlie is sort of the middle ground. There were definitely upsides and downsides to each!