Changing Courses in the Alternity-verse....

[gwendolyngrace]

Aliethen 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!

Comments

[synecdochic]

Also, the circumstances of Snape's membership in the Order, and his backstory, was kind of a case of changing courses, although mostly it was brought about by changes in players!

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!

[lucky_guess]

I am so glad she winkled it out of him.

(And she was OH SO FURIOUS.)

[synecdochic]

You have NO IDEA how much her being furious helped him come to terms with things, too. Because there was always a part of him that thought he deserved that kind of treatment, and for Alice (someone whose fairness and even-handedness he admired a great deal) to be so fucking incandescently angry on his behalf really did a lot to shake him out of the self-loathing.