The Alternity Re-Read: April / May, Year 1

[alt_moderator]

Here are the links to the pdfs:

April

May


Comment away, as you get there!

Comments

[gwendolyngrace]

I am now into May, and I have to say that while I naturally went back and checked all of Sirius's posts regarding tracking down Justin, I had forgotten that his existence was tipped off by a disturbance big enough to require the French Ministry cleanup crew....

Justin being a virtual shut-in, btw, was inspired by Colin from The Secret Garden. That's also why he starts off as a bit peevish and spoiled and immediately gets way better once he's no longer kept prisoner in his own house!

[gwendolyngrace]

Also, Sally-Anne says:

I got an owl today from the Half-Blood Affairs Office saying that the
Strettons don't want me back. Well that's not exactly what it said. It
said that on consideration they felt that they did not have the time and
resources to manage a foster child right now. So they're going to do
another placement for me for summer but they don't know where yet.
I wish I could go stay with Pansy but her mum's still not entirely well
and I doubt it will work out.

I remember that Sally-Anne was originally with the Strettons as an Anne of Green Gables nod and that she was meant to have a progression of awful foster-families, but then (I think?) what happened was Naomi was too happy with the fully-realized Stretton family, and felt she had put much good effort into creating NPCs who had real voices and personalities, and so in the end she chose to contrive reasons Sally-Anne wound up staying with the Strettons all the time.

Which is lucky, because Jeremy wound up being a great NPC and then a great PC, and we had a grand time with Stretton-related stuff throughout the game. But it does make me wish we had had the space to tell about SOMEONE getting bounced around from foster home to foster home, even if it had just been an NPC that we heard about in passing. It strikes me that to put a PC in that position might have wound up being abuse porn instead of subtle storytelling, but it also might have offered us interesting windows on different aspects of the Protectorate.

[naomikritzer]

That is pretty much exactly what happened. I realized after writing about the Strettons (and then about the Woods, during the summer) that creating fleshed-out NPCs was a lot of work. Jeremy, Gemma, and Mrs Stretton all had pretty distinctive personalities. (The babies, Philip, and Mr Stretton were a bit more in the background.) As large-scale growers and manufacturers, the Strettons also filled a worldbuilding niche in various ways.

An NPC half-blood who got bounced around endlessly would have been fun. We could've done that with Su Li and let Padma tell that story.

[gwendolyngrace]

That's right - we're coming up on the Wood interlude! (Ah, Oliver Wood. Hydra's second husband, lol. I guess with Percy dead....)

[naomikritzer]

...does fandom like to pair Oliver with Percy?

[gwendolyngrace]

Yep. It's like Seamus/Dean but not quite as ubiquitous.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search%5Bquery%5D=percy%2Foliver


Though sadly it looks like Etakyma's (that would be my Amy) "In This World of Strangers" has been lost from the Interwebz. Hers was one of the very first P/O fics (and IMO one of the best).

[gwendolyngrace]

Here's a better Google search:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=percy%2Foliver+fanfiction

(115,000 results)

Of course, it helps that they are the ONLY Gryffindor boys in their year ever mentioned....

[gwendolyngrace]

Oh, and she reminds me that her stuff is under the name AjesBlue, and yes, it's still there - but it looks like some of her pieces have had some funky formatting woe.