Fans of Alternity

I know I have been posting a lot lately, but I don't want anyone to miss this: Pansy's going back through old posts, thanking Harry and Terry (and Dudley) for their support, and she went back to Sally-Anne's post from the 15th and wrote the loveliest comment that has made me all teary. It's a testament to the strength of their friendship, which is also obvious in their exchange on Pansy's most recent post.

And it's an answer to the Order's question about the diversity of the Institute's members and the strength of their loyalty to each other and dedication to making a better world out of the Protectorate. What's stronger than lies and social pressure and the crushing weight of what's enforced as the rightful order of things? We see it from Harry and Hermione, from Hydra and Justin, from Pansy and Sally-Anne. It's friendship, it's trust, it's Dumbledore's message from book five writ large:( Excerpt from the end of book five )
It's love. It's Pansy writing to Sally-Anne, "You are my heart. And you will always be my heart."

But go read the whole comment. It's beautiful.

Players, I take off my hat to you as always. But to Pansy's player and Sally-Anne's player, especially: bravissimo. <3

When Umbridge decided to punish Sally-Anne in a way likely to make her fail exams and then Slughorn and Dolohov vowed to help her anyway, I started to wonder if that part of the book 5 plot belongs to her - the "Potter will never be an Auror" / "I will help Potter become an Auror if it's the last thing I do!" bit.

And now, in light of that and of Cecilia Perks coming to Grimmauld this week, I'm starting to wonder if that means Sally-Anne's going to be the one to lose a parent(al figure) at the end of the year.

Anyone else have speculation about which parts of HP5 belong to which characters in-game? Or about the mechanism by which Umbridge will receive her well-earned and possibly fatal comeuppance?

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?