Ask Us Anything!

[alt_moderator]

The cast thread is filling up rapidly, and while we don't have to fuss about comment collapse, it is getting difficult to navigate...

So here's a new post, where we're asking YOU to ask US: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?

Comments

[ivorygates]

What happens to Lana?

[lucky_guess]

Ah, Lana.

http://alt-lana.dreamwidth.org/61102.html

[stormyhearted]

(To anyone who wants to comment.) Is there anyone you wish had been a played character, but it just didn't work out?

[reenie]

I always thought it would be interesting to see what Nanella (Narcissa and Bella's mother) would add to the game. I was always really intrigued by Sarah Yaxley, too, mostly based on Deb's creation of her as reflected in Lana's posts. I'm really curious about Maureen, too.

A lot of the NPCs felt really real to me, despite not having journals. Remy Jugson, for example; Astoria Greengrass; Teddy Nott (who started as a PC, yes, and gave us something to work from); Mrs Professor Carrow; Lizzie Stevens and Samantha Montgomery. Many more besides.

[gwendolyngrace]

It might have been interesting to have a played Aristotle Baddock, or Ptolemy's wife and Linus's sister Karoline Moon.


Early on we tried a bunch of characters who just didn't work out (either because the players didn't have a firm hold on them, and then the players dropped out) or because the character just didn't fit within the platform of the story format (Moaning Myrtle was an interesting concept, but...no. Why would a GHOST even have a journal???). One of the things we found quickly was that there needed to be a critical mass of voiced characters with whom each new one could reasonably interact.

I also miss us having more sycophantic Hogwarts kids, like Su Li (who, like Seamus, Padma never, ever betrayed, despite her being a fostered halfblood), or some of the other Ravenclaw Tower nerds. I think that colored the perception that Padma was a lone force of meanness in the school. Lana's arrival helped that somewhat, and boy did she help shape Padma's arc.

I had had a plan for Parvati's story with Inderpal to be the dark (or light?) mirror to the marriages of both Sinistra/Razzer and Daphne/Barty. That never really worked, though, because Parvati was too off-screen as an unvoiced character.

[naomikritzer]

The NPCs I would've really loved to see as PCs were the Archer kids.

Aloysius Archer was an Order affiliate who committed suicide in order to avoid interrogation (using a poisoned ring that later inspired the ones Sally-Anne and Hermione made for the ISS kids.)

Aloysius left behind a son, Gareth, who was a Gryffindor. We suggested a few times that he had committed himself firmly to the Protectorate, trying to avoid the taint of his father's suspect death.

He had been estranged from Gareth, but quite close to his niece, Aurelia, a Slytherin from a mostly-Gryffindor family. Aurelia was Susan's girlfriend for a while, and a Galleon holder. She was solidly in the Order-leaning, subversive camp.

And Aloysius was betrayed by his own brother, who was trying desperately to get his children out of a muggleborn camp. Igraine Archer was one of those children, and had a fascinating tragic backstory -- her awful secret, which she revealed to Seamus under Imperius, was that she would sometimes steal food from her brother, justifying it because if he'd never been born she wouldn't have lost her halfblood status and been condemned to the camps. She felt tremendously guilty about this, and willingly followed Seamus's orders to protect her secret.

There was a lot of interesting angst there, but we never hit the point of thinking they needed to be played characters. The whole family was really damn interesting, though, from Aloysius outward.

[jenett]

I sort of regret we didn't have Irma Pince, who we see really interesting hints of here and there.

And in very general terms - but it was hard, because original characters not tighly connected to other characters are hard to play and tended not to work - I wish we'd been able to get out more 'this is the general population and their reactions'.

I think that got a lot more clear once we got Bill and Rachel and Jeremy and several other consistent NPCs who could get referenced at the Ministry in the final years, but I keep wishing we'd been able to do more with that from the publishing world, or something.

[longstrider]

I wish I'd joined at least a year earlier as Cedric so we'd have had him, through the tourney.

I offered to channel my librarian and pick up Pince but it didn't work out at the time. We added Rookwood instead.

[keshwyn]

Why did Frank get his magic back but George didn't?

[gwendolyngrace]

Ah!

Because the Neo-Fidelius spell is highly unpredictable and no one knows what effect it would have.

There were three instances of its use in canon: Frank used it, lost his magic for a while, and it came back. George used it, lost his magic forever. Dumbledore used it, and it killed him.

For this reason the Neo-F was considered a brilliant effort, but ultimately a failed piece of spellcraft.

[stormyhearted]

Who has Neville's herbology journal, and what will happen with it?

[keshwyn]

And did anyone rescue his Lionwort cultivars from the greenhouses?

[stormyhearted]

Oh, and another- Dolohov told Sally Anne that Neville and Harry's bodies had been cremated. Did he lie, or was he lied to? If so, who told him that- Barty, or Bella? Why did Rod know where they were- and why weren't they cremated?

[reenie]

Barty suggested that he and Bella burn the bodies (interesting, given that he must have known that Dolohov wouldn't be too happy about it). Bella said she didn't care. They did whatever they did off journal, but Dolohov was told the bodies were burned.

I believe Bella and Rod decided to hold on to them (ew, by which I mean put them in a secure location) for a couple of reasons:

1) leverage for later, if needed (as employed by Rod in his plea bargain)
2) Both of them wondering if Voldemort's remains might have some mysterious power or value attached to them, given what an awesomely dark wizard he was. Rod was an experimenter, remember.

[stormyhearted]

What is your favorite thing created for Alternity? (Place, spell, item, whatever.)

[lapin_agile]

Himalayan HotWot. Salve for treating frostbite.

[kiya]

Okay, the big thing that's been on my mind basically since he was introduced is of course a Jason question: we saw that he was always at least a little subversive with his Glasgow contacts and how he covered for them.

The thing with the near escape and bomb in Ireland, did he do that on purpose to try to disable or take out some major DE figures, or was it a genuine inexperienced fuckup?

[reenie]

Before Jason was a played character I think it was intended to be a fuckup.

But having played Jason, I think it's totally something he would do. He loves to take a gamble.

Please do note that he was likely not trying to take out major DEs because they were "bad buys," but because it would provide him with something beneficial, one way another. Jason is a good-natured opportunist, and little past events like these helped me to shape his character from NPC to PC.

[stormyhearted]

I know I'm asking ALL THE QUESTIONS but I have one last query- what happened to Peter Pettigrew? The last mention of him I can find in the recaps in 1 February Y7 when Sirius said he'd come to collect Peter from Harry. I think I remember him going to Saltash or something? But I can't find any mention of it.

[gwendolyngrace]

Yes, he was imprisoned at Saltash. He was in the same "house" but in different quarters from Lucius.

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

Is the fan theory that Margery Birdwhistle=Margaret Thatcher true?

What did Tim Berners-Lee do after the war? Was he involved in Bill's journal project at all?

With the cast list coming out, it was revealed that a lot of characters who played opposite each other in storylines were in fact played by the same person. How did you balance that? Was it ever hard?

What happened to that pop singer character who vanished around Y3?

Can you give us a sense of (a few of the) plots which were surprises but worked really well in the end? For example I always had the impression that Terry/Hermione was supposed to be endgame at first but Draco/Hermione ended up evolving organically...was I right? (Was it even known at first that Draco would be in the Order in the end?) Did you always know Harry and Neville would die?

What was up with the spelling of Seamus's name? In canon it was Finnegan, I think, and in the beginning people seemed to go with either that or Finnigan half the time, but by the end it was always Finnigan.

What is Bea like when she grows up? Does she remember her other dads?

Sorry for the torrent of questions! I'm a journalist IRL and now that I can ask I can't stop! I'll probably have more later.

[keshwyn]

Ooh, and not just What is Bea like, but what is Charlotte like? What effects did she have from all of Rod and Lana's potioning/dark magicking while she was in utero?

[keshwyn]

Is there anything you would go back and change, if you could?

[gwendolyngrace]

Loaded question. Maybe that's its own thread, too!

No, seriously? (ha) There are some little tweaks I would make here and there. A few missed opportunities where I didn't think of the perfect reply on a thread until the moment had passed. But that's life, isn't it?

As far as the larger arcs... I can't think of anything right now. Maybe that's the glow of it finishing on such an unbelievably high note, but I have to say that I really got everything for my characters that I wanted for them.

Well, except poor Michael and Zach. In retrospect I wish that I had not killed at least one of them at the Battle for Hogwarts, but at the time, I really just wanted to sunset their stories and give myself a few fewer characters to juggle. I do regret that because in coming up with their codas (which was a spur-of-the-moment decision, as we started expanding those far beyond the original plan!), I found some material there that could have enriched the final weeks of play. But they also weren't strictly necessary, either, and if we hadn't all suddenly decided to revisit every character ever, almost, then I probably would never have realized that I might have been able to come up with more to say.

[annia]

By the end of year 7, can anybody still access the ISS lock? (Sorry, I can't remember the ages of the younger characters. )

I know Charlie uses stuff from the Order Only lock for his books, but does anybody save the stuff under the ISS lock? I'd hate to think that it never gets read again because there's so much important stuff in there.

[gwendolyngrace]

The ISS lock ages out at 17. I think it probably gets quietly retired until the ISS have children of their own old enough to attend school....

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

Oh! Two Bellatrix-related questions...

I don't remember the exact threads, but it's implied at several points in the game that Narcissa is a match for Bellatrix, in terms of power and maybe as a duellist. (Most recently in her last thread with Hydra, where she said if she knew how bad things had gotten with Bella, she would have acted, the implication being she would have been successful.) Is this the case? Also, the Lucius/Narcissa and Hermione/Draco parallels at the end make me wonder how much of a closet badass Narcissa really is, and why she chose the path she did, if she is.

And what about Molly? Ginny's brainwashing made me think we were setting up for a "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" moment, which would have been glorious. Could Molly still wipe the floor with this Bellatrix, or would the fact that she's in top form as opposed to having been in Azkaban made it too much?

[gwendolyngrace]

Narcissa's no slouch. I don't think she's a match for Bella, though. Not in a direct duel. When she says she would have acted, she means that she would have made Rod and Druella and others aware of the ways that Bella was treating her children, and would have either found a way to convince Bella to give up her custody or have got someone else to stand with her and do it.

I don't know if she would have succeeded, but the other thing about that is that up until the time she wanted to secure the Manor, she was supremely confident that Bella would not actually try to kill her, so long as she did not actually try to kill Bella.

As for why she chose not to be a wand-wielding kickass...? They had enough of those. Her interests lay elsewhere, and her talents lent themselves to assisting Lucius in his role so that together they would be the Protectorate's First Couple (second only to the LP himself).

I will let Molly and Bella's players speak to that, but IMO while that moment was a triumphant note in canon, it's also a problematic one. Molly uses the Killing Curse and we're supposed to cheer, for one thing. But beyond that, I think Molly had the advantage of surprise in that instance. Then again I really only read DH once....

[kiya]

Other thread has reminded me:

Bella implied that she knew a way of saving V and wanted Rod's help to implement it. What was it? Did she need Rod particularly or was it just that he was the person she thought most likely to obey?

[reenie]

She didn't know a way to save V. She was hoping Rod might have some ideas, but he was like "LOL thanks I'll pass."

[(Anonymous)]

Not sure if you guys are still answering on this page, but if you are: what was going on with Dean? He was in a position where he pretty much NEVER had the chance to put his real thoughts on paper--but from the hints it seemed like there may have been stuff happening behind the scenes that we never got to see.

[pegkerr]

Sometimes what's going on with a character is, in reality, all about what's going on with a player. Dean's player eventually left the game.

[stormyhearted]

Were it not for Bellatrix's interference, would Justin have been able to best Tosha at Penzance?

[synecdochic]

Gwen and I debated that back and forth between us for a while (Justin has conviction on his side! He's younger and stronger! He's really motivated to deal with Tosha because he thinks Tosha is escaping justice! He's less experienced, and is not necessarily thinking straight! Tosha is older and more experienced in battle, and more cunning and canny! He's a month out from being dead, and still hasn't fully recovered! He's also not necessarily thinking straight! They both know each other's style really well and can spot weaknesses in action!)

It was likely that if the duel had continued much longer, Tosha probably would have won it, were it not for the fact that in the middle of things he sort of lost heart a bunch. (At one point during the "oh God how are we going to get all these moving pieces pointed in the right direction" conversations, I floated the idea that their confrontation would happen before Justin's encounter with Bella, and the idea was that Tosha would critically wound Justin but not be able to follow through with killing him. In that version, Tosha would have traded Justin to Sally-Anne with the belief that he could be healed, the Healers would get Justin back on his feet, and then he'd fall in battle with Bella. We had to go with another option in the end for a bunch of reasons, though, and at least this way Justin and Hydra got their goodbyes.)

(I do feel the need to clarify, though, that Tosha was not certain it was the Black Curse that Bella cast on Justin. I mean, Sally-Anne's right, you sort of have to assume it is, but he didn't see or hear it; if he'd been certain, he would have told her that was what it was. He also thought that maybe -- since they clearly had figured out how to cast the curse -- they might have a way to cure it, although he still wasn't sure if he wanted them to be able to or not.)

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

I checked the wiki but couldn't find anything (which of course doesn't mean it's not there) but I'm wondering about the theory behind binding spells for marriage. Did you guys create these for the game? How do they work...people have said there are different ones, but not what the differences are.

[jenett]

Actual links about it over here under the Charms section.

We don't have a writeup on it, currently, because our discussions about it are fragmented over a couple of years on the list. In summary, though:

Like a lot of magics, there are a bunch of different approaches to this. Some are familial, some are personal choices, some are sort of flukes of who does the actual ceremony and their preference, etc. Sort of like weddings themselves, there's some common default things that are often in there, and some things people vary, and some things one couple may care about a lot and other couples may not care about at all. Likewise, them breaking can have lots of different effects, depending on personal circumstances, the specific charms, etc. in play.

And both bits are the kind of thing where people have *all* sorts of different theories, and people read the observed data in a dozen different ways, some of which are probably accurate and some of which probably aren't, but it's really hard to tell.

For example, my personal take on Siz's effects after Raz's death is that it hit her harder partly because of the particular familial charms they used - from her side of the family, which, shall we say, does not normally run to sudden unexpected death, and partly because they were gearing up to try and have a child, and that was something particularly focused on in the charms they chose.

(If Raz had not died, she'd have stopped using any contraceptive charm in September or October, hoping for a baby over the following summer, because school-year timing is a thing if you both teach. I never quite decided if she'd already stopped using the monthly charm she'd used for years by the time Raz died, and swapped to something shorter-acting, but if not, she was really close to doing that, and thinking a lot about that whole process.)

She and Raz talked a fair bit about the choice in charms before they got married, but Siz's family set had some benefits she really wanted, particularly higher chances of easy pregnancy and a bunch of general health and well-being stuff.

Basically, complex magic, some defaults lots of people use, but in application, they can get really varied.

[(Anonymous)]

Am I too late to ask a question or two? Is there some newer thread I should be using?

- What exactly happened between Sally Anne and that Healer when she was a kid? We were never given specifics (I don't think?) and I kind of got a "molesty" vibe from it all. Did he assault her?

- Rowena Robins - what's her deal?! How did things end between her and Lucius? Did she really kill that guy, or was it a set up?

- Why does Lucius seem so much more reluctant to forgive Pansy than his son (or Harry)? He threw her letter in to the fireplace and ignored her for years? Isn't that a little extreme?

- What did Severus think about Hermione's crush on him? Because she definitely had one. And he definitely knew about it. :)

- Someone said up above that Dean's player left the game early. Is that why he was killed off in Year 6? Was there originally a different plan for him?

(I also just want to say that Ernie's, Blaise's and Cedric's codas all made me incredibly sad. Feels. So many feels.)

[naomikritzer]

What happened with the Healer:

Sally-Anne's father pushed her into an open fire, resulting in some pretty bad burns. There's a molesty vibe but the Healer did not sexually assault her; he sent her parents out of the room and poked at the burns without healing them for a while, told her that if she couldn't hold still or stop crying he wouldn't be able to heal her, then eventually healed them but in a way that caused a lot of extra pain. Her understanding was that her parents took her to a bad Healer because they couldn't afford a good one. In fact....they probably had to take her to a bad Healer because a good Healer would have reported her father's abuse. (Bad Healers will take statements like "she tripped" at face value with no awkward follow up and don't fuss over evidence of old injuries.)

Basically: the guy was a sadist and took advantage of the family's vulnerability to make Sally-Anne suffer physically when she was already badly injured.

[(Anonymous)]

Omg, I'm so sorry. I know I'm approximately one jillion years late to this entry, but I just finished an epic re-read of years 5-through-7 and on the off-off-chance anyone is still hanging around and willing to provide answers, I HAVE TO ask:

- The long lost Sandoval sister. Tell me EVERYTHING. Was she really a squib? Where did she end up? Is she aware of her own parentage/origin story? (She should have her very own spin-off fic. I'm obsessed.)

- And on that note: Mr. Sandoval's first marriage. WHY did he produce so many squibs? Before I read Alternity, I never thought of squib-ism as a potentially genetic thing, but...maybe?

- What was up with Tony Parkinson? Was he a loyal Death Eater who just happened to have "questionable" musical tastes, or was there more to it than that?

- Did Dudley ever see his parents again? (Also, did he and Harry ever meet face to face? I wasn't completely clear on that.)

- Was it a conscious choice to have Harry die a virgin, or did it just kind of happen that way?

- Not part of my re-read, but it's been on my mind: When Dennis was killed (in Year 2?) Alice left a message in Draco's journal under the order lock, not intending for him to ever see it. I'm just wondering if he ever did, and if so, what were his thoughts?

Thanks! This has been the reading experience of a lifetime! In the past two weeks I've watched at least six Saoirse Ronan movies, and I place all the blame on Alternity!

[naomikritzer]

Re virginal Harry:

1. Most of our in-character shipping happened sort of organically. Nothing ever really emerged for Harry. At the point when we started thinking about it, nothing really felt right.

2. As we got closer to the end of the game, it felt increasingly like writing a romance plot for Harry would feel very shoehorned-in. His primary relationships throughout the game were his friendships (which in fact is an echo of canon -- canon!Harry's romance with Ginny never has the vibrancy of his relationships with Ron and Hermione). So we focused on those.

So in a sense it was a conscious choice, because we did discuss it. But it was mostly just how the chips fell.