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gwendolyngrace posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
alt_fenAliethen asked:
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?
I felt like that sort of thing deserves its own thread, so here. Discuss!
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?
I felt like that sort of thing deserves its own thread, so here. Discuss!
Speaking as Draco's player
Date: 2015-09-02 08:22 pm (UTC)Draco began as a snotty little shit, of course. Harry was actually quite clueless, as well. But with so many forces trying to pull Harry away, toward rebellion (Sirius, Hermione, then Snape), I knew that Draco would either follow, or totally turn away from Harry and all that he stood for. For many years I did not know if he would be a part of the Order. But Harry and Draco's bond remained so strong (and was strengthened by the addition of Hermione) that I did not see how Draco could abandon him. In a way, this is what he had been trained to do since childhood: always stand by Harry.
The fact that Harry always stuck by Draco meant that Draco followed (followed while trying to lead, mind you)...but he went dragging his feet, that's for sure! And then he had to encounter his own prejudices, and work through the self-loathing that followed.
I can honestly say that if Draco had NOT become a fugitive at the end of Y6, he may not have been able to complete his journey into a full-fledged, 100% committed member of the Order.
Draco/Hermione was not planned, and for some time I thought it might even be an unrequited, one-sided situation. I was aware that Flourish, Hermione's original player, was attracted to the idea of that pairing, but that was so early on, where I couldn't even fathom Draco/Hermione happening.
I started to think differently around the time that Draco and Pansy were dating. Something about the pairing didn't click for me - this is NOT any sort of criticism of Pansy, mind! But I realized that Pansy was not the person who was going to push Draco to be anyone other than himself. She embraced his every flaw and didn't judge him, much like she did with Lucius.
And then Gwen took over for Hermione and made her a bit more crisp and aggressive. She and Draco started locking heads a lot and it hit me that THIS was what Draco needed. He needed someone to call him on his bullshit. Harry wouldn't do it. Pansy wouldn't do it. But a muggleborn dared to.
At first it annoyed him, but Hermione was so clever and SMARTER than him that in time he started to value her opinion, even if he didn't show it.
And it was all downhill from there! But yeah, I didn't really ever know if Hermione would ever return his feelings. There were so many issues of power imbalance to navigate, for starters. And the whole "forbidden" aspect, as well. If they had both remained at Hogwarts for Y7, I am quite sure it would not have happened.
Re: Speaking as Draco's player
Date: 2015-09-02 08:29 pm (UTC)When we started plotting the Gringotts' bank heist, I knew that she was going to snog him immediately after they got off the dragon. I just didn't tell Rene that until it happened!
Likewise, I didn't know for sure when she was going to actually say "I love you" but I knew I wanted to find a moment, and find it I eventually did.
Re: Speaking as Draco's player
Date: 2015-09-02 08:30 pm (UTC)Re: Speaking as Draco's player
Date: 2015-09-02 08:41 pm (UTC)Re: Speaking as Draco's player
Date: 2015-09-03 12:44 am (UTC)Re: Speaking as Draco's player
Date: 2015-09-02 08:29 pm (UTC)Re: Speaking as Draco's player
Date: 2015-09-02 08:37 pm (UTC)He actually believed Hermione wrote that note (he was drunk at the time, so there's that), which is just so funny it hurts.
I also like that moment because it shows just how crafty Teddy could be, and how insightful he was. Other than Sally Anne, he was the only one who figured out that Draco had a Thing for Hermione.
Re: Speaking as Draco's player
Date: 2015-09-02 08:54 pm (UTC)Re: Speaking as Draco's player
Date: 2015-09-02 08:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-02 08:41 pm (UTC)1. Bill/Rachel was in fact planned from the first introduction of Rachel. We had intended there to be a longer buildup before sparks flew, but Rachel was definitely a character who took on a personality of her own extremely quickly as I thought through her personality. I knew at the outset, though Peg didn't, that she was the daughter of the Auror described by Sirius in his Grim Truth when Dolohov arrived. We both knew that she was in Dogstar, but had to roleplay the conversation when they met at the muggle camp. (On pondering it, I decided that she would try to recruit him.)
2. Ron/Sally-Anne was entirely organic. But worked for both me and Deb. Ron, clearly, likes very smart girls who are somewhat snotty to him.
3. Seamus/Jason was organic but swift!
4. Remus/Sirius was planned, I think, before I took Remus over, there were some odd twists and turns, and we had to struggle a bit to make it happen. They're kind of an OTP for both Gwen and me, though, so we really wanted it to happen.
Of other plots, some were intensively planned a long way in advance, others were organic or spontaneous. It took us a very long time to work out how Harry would defeat Voldemort -- so no, his death was not always planned, nor Neville's. Sometimes we planned stuff out and then had to rethink it. I'll try to think of some good examples.
None of my characters were marked for death from the start (though Harry was at the point I started playing him) although I remember saying that Corax was such a raging asshole that if someone wanted to kill him, they should consider him fair game.
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Date: 2015-09-02 08:51 pm (UTC)What we couldn't decide, for the longest time, was HOW and WHY he would die. It took many, many, many, many long and circuitous conversations for us all to devise a satisfactory ending for Lord Frenchy.
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Date: 2015-09-02 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-02 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-02 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-02 10:14 pm (UTC)So many. SO, SO MANY
Speaking as Daphne's player
Date: 2015-09-02 08:48 pm (UTC)At some point - two years ago, I think? - I had the realization that Daphne was the sort of person who would fall in love with someone awful, someone who would hurt her badly or kil her. That she really had not learned enough from her experience with Barney Bole. She was convinced that there was good in everyone, and that any "bad" they possessed was due to mistreatment of some kind.
I kept joking that she should date Barty Crouch Jr. and then be killed by him, based on the fact that she'd had such an obvious crush on him in Y3. I didn't really expect it would happen, but then some things fell into place that made it possible.
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Date: 2015-09-02 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-02 09:53 pm (UTC)We'd established (oh boy had we established) that Tosha thought Inferi were shambling abominations -- a wrongness so great that having to work with them on Voldemort's orders weighed on him for a very long time. But when somebody (I think it was Deb) proposed that the remaining Death Eaters go for Inferi as a plan to try to up their numbers quickly, I found myself immediately thinking OH YES YES, and it took me a second to realize why I was so enthusiastic for the idea: that it could show just how desperate they were, and as an example of Tosha being willing to compromise his principles when he had to because of previous choices (and when Barty asked him to -- there was very little he would not do for Barty).
One of the things I came up with early on with Tosha was his personal definition (fairly idiosyncratic in-universe, but a guiding character principle for me in writing him) of the Dark Arts, namely: the Dark Arts are the category of spells that have some long-lasting effect on you/require the caster to pay some kind of price. Some of them are pretty obvious: they temporarily weaken you, they make you have to spend days recovering, they have long-term physical effects that take a very long time to manifest -- but some of them are more subtle. A lot of the Dark Arts Tosha uses are of the sort where the price is "the price of getting what you want is getting what you thought you wanted", or "the price of casting this spell is that it turns you into the sort of person who would cast this spell".
So there Tosha is, and the only thing anyone could come up with was for them to do something he found anathema. And because he believes in not ducking his prices, and because he understands that sometimes consequence makes you do things you hate, he did it. And it cost him Barty.
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Date: 2015-09-03 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-03 12:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-02 10:09 pm (UTC)I took over Snape in November (I think) of Y5, and got him with a few things already established, but I realized when I looked it over that it had never been established precisely why he'd been put into Azkaban, or why he would be willing to work with the Order. I thought about it a bit and decided that I wanted Snape to have seen through the Death Eaters at Lily's death, just like in canon, and to have come over to the Order before Azkaban, with Dumbledore as his handler -- and the only person who knew that he was a member of the Order. (Which helped to retroactively explain why Albus showed up just long enough to go "no, swear him and Macnair in" without elaborating! Which I believe at the time was "we want to get them in the Order but can't figure out how the Order would ever trust them", although I wasn't there for it.) He could have revealed that he was already an Order member there, but he's so proud and so prickly that he'd rather have them suspect him for a long damn time than tell anyone what his motives had been.
Alice was so furious at Dumbledore when she found out, oh my god.
He had intended to keep that secret to his grave, and he said as such several times, but when Draco was tapped for Who Wants To Be A Death Eater, Snape realized he had to tell Draco the truth. (If for no other reason than their Occlumency lessons would be of a far more intense version than the other kids got -- the other kids he was just teaching to shut people out of their minds, while Draco he was teaching to construct plausible mindscapes that V would not see through -- and there was a good chance Draco would see some bleedthrough. But also because he wanted to give Draco as much as he could in the way of preparation, and part of that was sharing his own experiences and his own change of heart.) And eventually he realized that there was some information in there that Alice needed to know, strategically, and so he told her. And eventually after that, he realized that his story could maybe be a good inspiration to the other DEs, and they were at the point where maybe if they got one or two more defections it could really turn the tide, and he made his big last public confession in the form of the message to the other Death Eaters. (I was SO GLAD I got a chance to write that before he died!)
But boy, did it surprise me!
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Date: 2015-09-03 02:58 am (UTC)(And she was OH SO FURIOUS.)
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Date: 2015-09-03 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-02 10:17 pm (UTC)Back when everyone was taking their OWLs in 5th year, I was creating a spreadsheet with everyone's results and so on.
What I didn't tell them was that I wrote the OWL results letters and I individualized them for each PC (which was at that point MOST of the 5th-year class), as well as did up "teacher" versions of the letters informing them who would be eligible to continue in their lessons the next year.
On a day after these were ready to go, I sent them out to each player's individual email accounts, the letters they would have received, with a little note saying "Owl post for you" or something like that.
I think everyone was pretty surprised.
It wasn't an invention - though I did write up the format and the form letters - but I was really, really happy with my little gift to my fellow players.
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Date: 2015-09-03 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-09-02 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-02 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-03 03:31 am (UTC)Toward the end, when we were gearing up for the Battle for Hogwarts, we asked players to think carefully about which characters they would be willing to risk, and then, too, what endings they saw as being suitable for their characters. We also asked what they definitely would not want to have happen, and what they could live with if it had to happen to satisfy part of the story. We used those thoughts to help figure out ways to protect characters who weren't supposed to die and to explain what might happen to those who were potentially (or definitely) on the chopping block.
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Date: 2015-09-03 01:27 am (UTC)Even more, I wanted Bill/Tonks to happen. But then Denise joined the game and Charlie stole her heart away. ;-)
Which was good, actually! Interesting character development, and it emphasized his loneliness, which made an excellent set up for Bill/Rachel.
I think we settled on Harry dying much sooner than figuring out what the hell Neville's fate would be, because we were clear early on that Harry didn't have a curse scar and so that he didn't have that tie with Voldemort anchoring him to the world.
I think I tried to keep an open mind on Neville. And then by year 7, the idea was that he would have his mind broken, so it would be an inversion of canon. But the original idea was that they'd get him back, and he would live out his life in St Mungo's, as his parents did in canon.
It was only AFTER his mind was broken, and we were trying to hammer out the plot for how Voldemort would die, that we decided Neville would die as well. It was partly because I liked the balance that if Harry died in Alternity, Neville should too. And it was, IIRC correctly, not until the week before May 16 that we figured out WHY he would die: his death was required for the ritual to transfer Voldemort's soul to Harry's body.
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Date: 2015-09-03 02:51 am (UTC)And she and Bill were in different places about what they needed: she wasn't looking for another relationship and wasn't ready to try to fill the hole in her heart--a space that wasn't yet entirely empty because she really was still in love with Remus. In some ways, Bill just wanted too much from her.
Then, yeah, Charlie arrived, and he was funny and already partnered and didn't want anything but to flirt and play with Bea, and Tonks was just totally charmed.
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Date: 2015-09-03 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-09-03 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-03 04:21 am (UTC)Oh Lord YES.
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Date: 2015-09-03 04:08 am (UTC)That is pretty much exactly what we were doing in Alternity -- revisiting a fairy tale, but without shying away from the unpleasant consequences. So it's not surprising that "Into the Woods" really speaks to a lot of us.
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Date: 2015-09-03 04:28 am (UTC)Oh, absolutely. (And it's one of the reasons why I love Into the Woods so much, and always have.) 'Consequence' is one of my absolute favorite things to explore in stories, hands down -- part of the reason Tosha is SO MUCH one of my characters is that I love playing the sort of character who makes choices fully aware of consequences and does them anyway because he HAS TO.
Parents and children, and the influence of parents ON children, was another thing ItW and Alternity have in common. In Alternity's case it's most often "older generation and younger generation" more than a literal "parents and children", but "careful the things you say, children will listen; careful the things you do, children will see and learn" and "careful the spell you cast, not just on children, sometimes the spell may last past what you can see and turn against you. Careful the tale you tell, that is the spell."
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Date: 2015-09-03 02:23 pm (UTC)Makes me think of the line "Every knot was once straight rope."
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Date: 2015-09-03 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-03 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-03 03:50 am (UTC)Which is another thing, really, that I love about Alternity. There were so many different relationship plot lines, so many different ways that love could arise, be expressed, be organized, be shared. And Bill's quest for a lover could just have looked like this: A. Bill is lonely and needs to find love; B. Tonks got shoved out of her marriage by Sirius, so she's a single female; C. Actually, Tonks is the only single female of Bill's generation in the Order; so D. Bill must ask Tonks to marry him, and that will make all the maths work out in neat pairs!
But Alternity didn't do maths that way, and really it is much more interesting to have told a story where Bill was sure he wanted Tonks, but Tonks just didn't return the feeling, and that was hard for Bill, and awkward for her, and then more awkward when his brother turned up and she DID find Charlie sexy and exciting and just more her type. And Bill was hurt, but over time it got to be okay. That's so much more interesting than Some Enchanted Evening--or Some Enchanted Evening (The Only Two Single People in the Room Hooked Up Because What Else Can You Do?)
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Date: 2015-09-03 04:21 am (UTC)I really do think there were very few moments where we took the easy path, which is one of the things I'm most proud of. (Out of all the other things I'm most proud of! THERE ARE A LOT OF THEM, OKAY.)
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Date: 2015-09-03 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-03 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-03 03:42 am (UTC)Terry was never going to be her mate because, just as in canon with Ron, the relationship would have been far too lop-sided. Ron eventually stepped up in canon, but IMO she spent way too much energy grooming him and hoping he would turn into the boy she thought he could be. In Terry's case, she appreciated him, loved him for their common bond as two muggleborns in a horrible situation, but she was never going to think of him as more than a brother - in part because his worship of her was too abject and put too much pressure on her, and because she feared his fragility (of spirit, because lord, the boy could endure physical privation) would mean she was in too constant danger of hurting him.
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Date: 2015-09-03 03:59 am (UTC)And yet, if Justin had been interested in Hydra, and Hydra (or Hydra's player) had not and the relationship had never happened, then Justin just wouldn't have changed in the same way.
It would have been interesting, I think, to see the way that Terry would have changed if he had ended up with Hermione, in a way that both of them would have been a full person and it would have been a relationship of equals. I wouldn't have been willing to have it any other way. I think it could have been done if we had tried--we would have had to sort of feel our way along. But since there wasn't the vision on one side (and things ended up nicely between Draco and Hermione), I'm really very content with the way Luna and Terry ended up together. Although it was a surprise.
If Luna and Colin had ended up together, I would have had a much harder time writing Terry's coda! I hope it would have been a good one; I would have wanted him to end up happy somehow. But having Colin live would have made Terry's future quite opaque again to me.
(Sorry, Colin! You and Luna would have been great together, too.)
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Date: 2015-09-03 04:20 am (UTC)