ilyena_sylph: excited monster in lightning cheers "so cool!" (MLC: so cool)
[personal profile] ilyena_sylph
Hi everybody, and good morning alt-fen! (One of the Players said 'look, it's not too late for you to join the fen-comm, so here I am!)

Good gods, where to even start?

Well, I suppose with 11:29 PM last night, when His Noselessness did an incredible job of showing his true colors.

Or then again, maybe Sirius' latest, possibly greatest, Grim Truth.

Gotta give a Hella Shout Out to Zack Smith, for The utter brass ones of this, knowing how he'd pay for it.

And Justin, that was a fantastic bit of doublespeak, there.
kiya: (Default)
[personal profile] kiya
... it occurs to me that the world thinks Harry killed Umbridge. And thus that the 'you know, the last person who was like this was Umbridge' is actually readily interpretable as a threat.

I wonder if Harry noticed that.
wintercreek: Silhouette of a person with an umbrella under a multi-colored rain with the text "starshowers." ([misc] starshowers)
[personal profile] wintercreek
So Ginny has just told us two very interesting things:

1. The diadem is a horcrux in this universe, too
2. Ginny Weasley has been influenced by a horcrux in this universe, too

On its own, this looks like a bit of "Well played, players! Way to bring it back around."

But in light of Lucius's comment and Cedric and Harry's plans, it looks like some other things may be true in this universe, too. Like Cedric Diggory not living to finish school at Hogwarts, and Harry being unable to cast AK even when he's been driven to try.

I'm concerned, given that canon shows us Harry attempting AK against Bellatrix in revenge for Sirius's death, that Harry in this 'verse is going to be driven to AK against Umbridge in revenge for Cedric's death, after Cedric is the one to "slam the bludger right down the middle" and stand against her.

On the other hand, if Harry takes action against Umbridge and succeeds in destroying the diadem that would ultimately be helpful toward Voldemort's downfall.


And speaking of things coming back around, is anyone else simultaneously worried that Crouch's tracking spell will lead to the Institute being caught AND hoping that it fills the role Grawp had in canon and provides inspiration for someone(s) leading Umbridge into the Forbidden Forest and ultimately into the path of the centaurs?
wintercreek: Silhouette of a person with an umbrella under a multi-colored rain with the text "starshowers." ([misc] starshowers)
[personal profile] wintercreek
Okay, bear with me here because I just moved across the country and so I have not researched this post properly. But. I want to talk about the end of the term in-game and how it compares to the end of HPSS. (We may have listened to the audiobook of HPSS in the car. *g*)

First off, Ron's still involved in the chess match even though it's Harry, Draco and Hermione down there. Interesting that it's Draco who sacrifices himself as Ron did in the book - this sets Draco up as the heart, the role that Ron arguably fills in the original heart-mind-hand reading of the trio. (They could also be read as body-mind-soul - in both cases, Hermione's the mind. More on this immediately!)

Second, Hermione's able to use Draco's wand to defend Harry because "their turn of minds are similar enough that his wand worked perfectly well in her hand". Now Draco's being paralleled with canon-Hermione as the mind. Fanonically Draco is very intelligent; one AU even had him sorted into Ravenclaw, to his father's displeasure. Draco seems to be standing outside the canon trio rather than slotting into one of their roles - he's borrowing from them and creating his own element.

Third, in canon Harry makes it to the final confrontation on his own and is protected by his mother's love and sacrifice. In-game, it's Hermione's actions that protect Harry. I am only a sometime-H/Hr 'shipper and this is not an argument for romantic love between eleven-year-olds, but it does seem that Hermione acted out of her affection for Harry, saving him at great risk to herself. Hermione may be here paralleled with Lily-and-James, in that she both cares for Harry, placing herself in harm's way as Lily did, and actively fights for him as James did.

Finally, it's Hermione's parents that end up making the sacrifice. Just as we know that Harry's parents canonically died for him, McG tells Hermione that she "needed to remember that my parents were strong and they loved me and they would rather them than me." And although they are, as Hermione says, not dead. Just werewolfed it comes to something very much the same in this universe. In-game-Hermione and canon-Harry are connected here; in-game-Hermione and in-game-Harry are connected here as well, possibly, if Harry knows that his parents died protecting him before he was "adopted" by the LP.

Also, Percy telling off Sally-Anne strikes me as similar to McG's telling off of the trio in canon as they try to contact Dumbledore. And yet it's quite different in that Sally-Anne is seeking help during the climactic scenes rather than before and is not directly involved. That Percy's a prefect and not a professor seems to be a good in-game translation of the increased visibility and power of prefects, who did not seem as prominent in canon.

What do you all think? Are these specious parallels? Or ones worth following up on? How do you think the roles of the in-game characters shook out relative to canon?
wintercreek: Silhouette of a person with an umbrella under a multi-colored rain with the text "starshowers." ([misc] starshowers)
[personal profile] wintercreek
In her Order Only post Hermione only refers to Harry on a firstname basis - they seem to be getting quite familiar and he seems to be treating her well. I wonder if Hermione has the potential to be Harry's first real friend - for all the differences in their stations she's not afraid to say that she's "ever so much more advanced than he is" rather than deferring to him because of his relationship to the LP.

That Order Only post is also tagless, as is the Happy to be Mr Marvolo's Mudblood post before it. Is Hermione keeping a low profile, or expressing something in these posts for which there's no tag precedent? Here's the previous discussion of Hermione's tags, now a bit outdated.

Somewhere, I suspect that Harry/Hermione 'shippers are very happy about this. :)

Christmas

Dec. 26th, 2008 12:22 pm
[identity profile] longstrider.livejournal.com
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

So which Uncle of Sirius's do you think he was referring do? I defy anyone to come up with a theory that doesn't make the Grim Truth he just posted as anything other than Sirius, Regulus and the Houses of Black and Potter.

Also Harry's continual references to whatever project they've been working on (sticking charms, melted cauldrons and all) is MADDENING.
[identity profile] brimtoast.livejournal.com
Assuming alternity continues to incorporate big canon events, we should expect Harry to find the Mirror of Erised in a little under a month.

"It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts." -Dumbledore

What do you predict Harry Marvolo will see there?
ext_11796: (Default)
[identity profile] lapin-agile.livejournal.com
Okay, I've got to say it. I've been wondering, but now it's grown to the size of an elephant in the room that everyone's pretending isn't there...



...what about Peter Pettigrew? Where is he in this AU? What's his story? Has he somehow been erased? (Has he been mentioned?)

It's impossible to understand the grounds for the Order's apprehensions about Remus when they don't ever refer to the fourth Marauder.


Relatedly, do you guys have theories about what happened on the night the Potters were murdered? What are all of the differences? I'll start.


    1. Tom Riddle didn't die.
    2. Harry seems not to have been cursed. He seems to have no scar. (In other words, it seems not to have been Tom Riddle's plan to kill Harry, just to steal him. What interpretation of the Prophecy does this hint at? How much of the Prophecy does the Lord Protector know? Is the Prophecy the same?)
         2a. Harry's status: he is not the Boy Who Lived; he is (only) the Lord Protector's son.
    3. Sirius is not the friend suspected of treachery. (And, since the event did not play out as in canon, he did not "kill" Peter and did not get sent to Azkaban.)
    4.
    5.

    What else?


A small point, since in this AU Tom Riddle has established himself as "Lord Protector," I'm finding it hard to call him Voldemort. And now that enough playing time and so many posts have slipped by, I can't remember whether anyone in-game has called him Voldemort. It seems to me there was an early reference to his given name, but I can't think whether he's been called anything besides "Lord" and "Lord Protector" since.

Pansy

Oct. 3rd, 2008 10:51 am
ext_11796: (the_road_goes_on_forever)
[identity profile] lapin-agile.livejournal.com
I find Pansy very interesting. She seems to have a solidly dysfunctional family background (most promising!); she's prickly; and she's the most conventionally Slyth-centric of the students we are meeting (yay for someone who feels canon-familiar!). I don't, by the way, mean that as a complaint about the other Slytherin characters: I'm very interested in the way this game is showing them to have developed differently than their canonical counterparts. Certainly their life experiences and perhaps their ideological training has been substantially different than in the books -- and I'm really enjoying the glimpses we are getting of cause and effect with regard to these (and other) pureblood children. It's just that I'm glad to have one character who reminds me of the fierce rivalry between the Houses.

Zorb, I think you were the one who prompted us to think about what difference the circumstances of this AU might make in the Slytherin children's ability to see beyond the ideologies of their parents. I'm still cogitating on this and am watching the game with great interest as we continue to get hints. (It will obviously be central to Harry Marvolo's experience in this game.)

But back to Pansy...
The other thing that has really struck me about this Pansy is that she calls other people's parents by their first names -- or, anyway, she calls Lucius Malfoy "Lucius". I can't wait to see what this is meant to signal about her or about her parents and their connections. (She refers to Lucius as her father's best friend.)

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