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

[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?

[gwendolyngrace]

Oh, wow, lots to unpack here....

I had nothing to do with qu's one or two, so I'll allow others to answer.

I'll come back to 3.

The pop singer was Owain Pritchard, and it was a combination of things that found him excised from the game. The first problem was that we didn't really have enough of a nexus of people for the character to interact with, and it wasn't clear really where we would need him to be. We got much, much better as time went on at identifying who was necessary and why, and how they would enhance the game by their presence as a voice. The other factor, IIRC, was that the player who proposed him left the game, and no one else felt like picking him up. If you're asking what happened to him in Albion.... I have no idea! Fanfic?

Seamus's name is Finnigan in canon. (http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Seamus_Finnigan)


As far as relationships... you know what, we should do a WHOLE SEPARATE THREAD about the ships, and playing them, and playing both halves vs interacting with another player.

[synecdochic]

I actually came up with a ton of alternate-history thoughts to figure out how the tech world developed without all the influence from UK scientists/researchers/etc. I need to figure out how to best share it. (Long story short: the WWW does exist even without Sir Tim, but delayed by about 4-5 years and in a somewhat different form. In Real Life, by 1998 you already had the First Tech Industry Bubble and more and more people outside academia were getting internet access every day. In Alternity!verse, the WWW (or whatever they called it instead) would still be mostly confined to universities and research labs, with the first generation of college students who'd gotten used to internet access at college starting to demand better non-university ISPs and access, and we're just starting to see people thinking about how you can use the internet for business/commerce and not just communication/research.)

I think there would be a lot of people who are overjoyed to find Sir Tim is still alive, but it's going to take him a lot of time to catch up on what he missed over the last 20 years. Which is a problem that a lot of Muggles, not just the newly-awakened Sleepers, are going to have as soon as the wards come down -- they missed a whole generation of science and tech advancements, really.

(We did think about including some of that kind of aftermath, but the logistics of it were just so daunting, and I'm sure it would have taken a lot of wrangling to come up with something we were all happy with. And ultimately, Alternity wasn't that story. But it's a fun thing to speculate about.)

[jenett]

The Margery Birdwhistle part:

Margaret Thatcher was actually Prime Minister in 1982-1983, when the first war happened. Here, let me quote the squence from the wiki, for ease:

Early March: Fall of the Ministry. The Death Eaters make their move to take over the Ministry during a hearing of the Wizengamot to consider Harry's guardianship case, hoping to capture Dumbledore and Sirius, but both escape. Dumbledore flees, retreats to his safe house and grabs Trelawney, and flees to America. Sirius flees to France. (Alice is pregnant pregnant with Evelyn during this event.) Serena Baddock is killed in the fighting.
March 30 : Assassination attempt on Voldemort, using a Muggle gun - Raz gets in the way.
April 2 : Falklands War begins. Muggle government presumably entirely distracted.
May 20 : Regulus flees.
June 20 : Falklands War ends.

(Which makes so very much sense if you realise the combination of the timeline, really.)

The following year, when the wards come down, they take the Muggle government entirely. Margery Birdwhistle had lost her seat in the previous election (so she was known to a wide range of people, but not actually in the government) but you can assume that most or all of the current Muggle politicians died, got put in camps, got put in camps and then died, etc.

[edschweppe]

I am so looking forward to seeing the full timeline!

[naomikritzer]

I am torn between thinking that Margery Birdwhistle = Margaret Thatcher is a really fun theory, and thinking that one of the ABSOLUTE LAST people I'd write RPF about where she got to be heroic was Maggie Thatcher, lol.

Anyway, our intent was that Margery Birdwhistle is just some random MP who had lost her seat and thus survived in a camp when most of the rest of the government was massacred.