The Alternity Re-Read: October, Year 1

[alt_moderator]

As with September, here is the October pdf file.

This post is spoiler-free, but there is no need to avoid spoilers in the comments.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

Oooh, unintended foreshadowing. From a post by Teddy on October 6th.

Neville: Do you remember seeing aeroplanes?
Sally-Anne: I do. They looked a bit like paper darts.

[gwendolyngrace]

Yeah, I hit that post last night, too, and had the same thought!

[flourish]

I also sort of missed Teddy. Good ol' Teddy.

[naomikritzer]

Milli, October 8th:
"Yesterday my cat was sick on my bed because someone fed him fish and he is aler gick alergic to fish so it smelled bad until the house elves came to clean up the sick but Daphne wont come upstairs now because she says it still smells of fish. Daphne is a stupid swot Fergus is a nice cat he cant help that he can't eat fish without being sick."

This wasn't unintended foreshadowing so much as a thing that became a callback for us over the years. I may have regularly forgotten the name of Pansy's kneazle (Pyewacket) and had to check on it, but I never forgot that Fergus was allergic to fish and would puke if he ate it. Fergus puked a lot, and he was clearly the sort of cat that would eat any damn thing someone offered him, even if it always make him puke later.

[naomikritzer]

FTR, Sally-Anne liked Fergus just fine. But cleaning up someone else's cat's puke when it's landed on your shoes, jumper, books, or bed is never NOT annoying.

I've always imagined that Fergus was one of those very affectionate cats that would solicit ear skritches from pretty much anyone handy, which is why the rest of that dormitory put up with him despite the puking.

[flourish]

That's also what I thought Fergus was.

(Am I right that I was the one writing Millicent at that point? I can't remember!)

[gwendolyngrace]

The Order used to have dead drops. That's entirely sensible. Wonder what happened to those?

Also, I know I wrote them myself, but I'd forgotten how those early Lucius posts how couched his language was. Things like, 'was flattered that Our Lord asked me for advice' - all of which was calculated to make his role (and culpability) in governmental decision-making look far less executive and more influential.

Also, OMG, Pansy was a brat!

[naomikritzer]

Arthur posts about Jane Tanisbee. We called back to that, later, with the plot about Strangeweale's device.

[gwendolyngrace]

Well, another inconsistency, one of many I am sure:

Lucina Prewett Crouch was lost and became Norah Robards Crouch.

[reenie]

And Pansy says she's never met Bellatrix Lestrange, which seems really unlikely.

(This was Pansy's first player, for those who don't know)

[naomikritzer]

Yeah, Pansy knowing who Nietzche is, but not who Bellatrix is, seems odd.

[lapin_agile]

THAT.

[reenie]

Everyone was pretty much terrible (to varying degrees) at sounding even remotely British. or 1990s-ish.

[gwendolyngrace]

Students particularly - there are a lot of things that we later Britpicked and got much better about, yeah. More than British-sounding or not, I think these first few months are just terribly clumsy. There are glimpses of more graceful storytelling but we're still clearly feeling our way.

[longstrider]

Or eleven. I remember commenting on that as a reader wayyyy back in the day on alt-fen.lj

[gwendolyngrace]

Yeah, but when we brought in characters (Padma) who really were more eleven-sounding / writing, there were complaints about it being too hard to read. So Padma's spelling improved markedly in the space of a few weeks.

Can't win.

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

FWIW, though, I remember being impressed with how the change in Padma's spelling illuminated her characterization, so I think it was made into a win!

[flourish]

It would have been much better if we had come up with an excuse for not having bad spellings, like the Dictaquills. Eleven year olds are usually much more articulate in speech than they are in writing, and it's easier to write eleven year old spoken voices than eleven year old writing.

[lapin_agile]

You are SO right. And you had non-Yanks playing then, too. Why no Brit-picking?

[reenie]

I don't recall us having non-Yanks? But I might be mis-remembering.

[gwendolyngrace]

We had one Brit and very briefly one Australian. The Aussie didn't stay as being real-time the time differences made regular play too difficult - the player was never around when everyone else was - and the Brit was Remus 2.0 for a couple of years.

I think we *were* Brit-picking but we weren't being militant about it.

[flourish]

We were definitely trying to Brit-pick as we could, but there were so many other issues about figuring out the tone, etc. that it was the last thing we were worrying about and tended to slip through the cracks.

[naomikritzer]

The Marie plot. Sigh. In retrospect, I kind of think we should have used that plot to hint at the coming horcrux stuff. (Marie seems almost like a horcrux gone wrong -- like, someone tried to make a horcrux, but didn't quite pull it off.)

[gwendolyngrace]

Yeah.

For readers, this is a good example of a plot that did not go as planned. In fact, it didn't really have any planning, it was a player flying by the seat of her pants. It's probably one of our biggest ret-con plotlines, as it will play out in December / January, when the player left and the character changed hands.

[lapin_agile]

I feel as if the game began with a cast that had one mode of playing and they almost all evacuated (I don't know all the reasons why because I wasn't there, but maybe just because By The Seat Of Our Pants with NO Thematic Planning was not a sustainable way to play??). After that, the game settled into a long-range plotting scheme and with pretty minor bumps along the way, we hit the road and carried on from there.

[reenie]

Yeah, I think that's partially accurate. I think the player who did Teddy and original-blend Narcissa understood the game dynamic pretty well, but she clashed with some of the other players (and when she left, she took some friends with her, like the people who played original-blend Crouch, Reg, and Michael).

I never really understood what original-blend Pansy was trying to do and had a very difficult time playing Draco opposite to her (they were supposed to have grown up as friends, but Pansy was always pretty combative with him at all times).

[gwendolyngrace]

I agree that Teddy's and Narcissa's original player had a great sense of the dynamic, and if you look on AO3 there's actually a piece of Teddy fanfic she wrote that is really quite good. I think she and I clashed on Lucius and Narcissa's dynamic rather a lot, though, or more than she wanted, and I know that she had issues with the "level of detail" and background worldbuilding that other players (like me) wanted to infuse into the story.

Which is ironic, considering how detailed we wound up getting on some plots. I did think that original Crouch, Reg, and Michael were also good voices to have had, and I never really felt like I did justice to Michael afterward.

Speaking only from my personal perspective, I think Pansy's player's difficulty was an over-reliance and over-indulgence for impulse play - that is, she may or may not have had a plan, she verbally committed to trying to fit her character into the lines better - but then in the moment of play she would impulsively 'improvise' in ways that were not necessarily consistent with what she'd agreed to before. It made play very frustrating, and we were often concerned that Pansy was bringing up what we thought of as "year 6 issues" right at the beginning of the game.

It also looks to me like these early posts were setting up Pansy/Ron - or at least that Pansy had a bit of a crush on him.

[flourish]

Well, part of the problem had to do with differing ideas about what made the game fun. About half the players initially (maybe more) didn't think of the game as a collaborative writing exercise; they thought of it as an RPG, intended for pure improv. So I think they tended to leave when they realized they'd need to consult with everyone about plots, negotiate what would happen, etc.

[flourish]

I do like the idea of the creepy doll. Certainly there are plenty of 11 year olds who still love their American Girl dolls or Madame Alexanders or whatever. And Pansy might have been a great person to have that kind of thing going on (much more interesting than making it Hannah or whoever, who's easy to despise as a "baby"). But it definitely had Issues as it was played out.

[lapin_agile]

Okay. So just to show how far I'm lagging behind in reading... I just came to Poppy's first post, and that's not me writing her. I went and looked it up. I didn't answer the casting call until January.

I had totally forgotten that someone else played her first. (But I'm kind of glad because her voice in this first post really doesn't sound like my writing. Phew.)

[gwendolyngrace]

Obviously, we all forgot that it wasn't you, too!

Huh. I wonder who the heck was the first Poppy?

[lapin_agile]

Going back and looking at old email was sort of funny because the character you really wanted to cast when I came along was Ron, and I said (basically), "Oh, dear, no. I don't think I can play Ron. I don't even like Ron!"

[flourish]

Perhaps the old YahooGroup can shed light? (I don't remember either.)

[(Anonymous)]

ha! Umbridge complaining about terms like "toadies" and "head bullfrog" being bandied about :)

qwerty88