evesaintyves

[evesaintyves]

thank you for the mention, i absolutely love this, especially what you say here about how we approach casual or transient relationships in fiction: plenty of people aren't interested in or oriented toward romantic love, especially the way it tends to be represented in fanfiction; the presence of that kind of romance is neither necessary nor sufficient for a relationship to be worthwhile or durable or good for the participants, and relationships that are unserious or unhappy or difficult or don't last are still important and fascinating and worthy of exploration in storytelling! yes!

i've also got to recommend everybody read Leather, @saintsenara 's gorgeous character study of tonks as a young queer person figuring out relationships and her sense of self - it's one of my favorite fics.

i have to say i've also been disappointed by some of the conversation i've seen lately on queer readings of tonks. it's no mystery at all to me why she resonates that way with so many of us. tonks the shapeshifter, born different, master of concealment and disguise? who uses a gender-neutral preferred name and loudly insists on being known by it? tonks the punk, whose presence offends suburban tory petunia more than any other wizard in the room? tonks whose trademark color, done up in spikes, is a counterpoint to the (as canon would have it) malignant hyperfemininity of dolores umbridge in ootp? tonks, who, from the moment we meet her, is joyfully exploring and and experimenting with the way she inhabits her body and shows herself to the world? tonks who has an ostensibly infinite ability to modify and calibrate her gender expression - who may even be able to try on different sexual anatomy, or invent some new kind nobody's ever seen before? tonks who makes it clear she won't be told how to live her life, even if it makes her an outcast? like...?

Thoughts on remadora?

thank you very much for the asks, anons!

while they are by no means my otp, i really enjoy remadora as pairing - and i think they’re fully up there among the canon couples in terms of being an amazing vehicle through which to explore all sorts of questions about life and love - which i am aware is a sufficiently controversial statement that it involves an immediate engagement with some discourse…

because remadora girlies [gender neutral] get an enormous amount of shit within the fandom, particularly from fans who consider wolfstar to be a more plausible pairing for lupin than tonks. i have seen remadora shippers called homophobes for simply enjoying the couple, justified with the bizarre idea that it disrespects remus' relationship with sirius [so... the non-canon one?] to put them together. i have seen tonks turned into a pathetic shrew who is trying to keep remus from the real love of his life by trapping him with an unwanted baby. i have seen remadora shippers get a lot of the usual stuff that people who prefer the canon-endgame couples do [that to ship a canon pair is boring, that it is indicative of a lack of talent, that it indicates an uncritical support for jkr] magnified to eleven because tonks has the temerity to be a barrier to remus’ relationship with the fandom’s favourite hot and brooding man.

obviously, this is bullshit - primarily because its unreasonable and cruel to invest so much time and energy being mean to people because of their harry potter shipping preferences [fandom should never be that deep].

but it’s also a disappointment to me personally because it means that it can be very hard to find the sort of remadora i like without looking like i’m coming to contribute to the pile-on. because where many remadora fans and i don’t see eye-to-eye is that i have absolutely no interest in thinking about them as a relationship which is actually functional. and, all too often, i find myself sifting through fics which do prefer to interpret them like this - as romantic and passionate and stable - largely, i think it’s fair to say, as a defensive move against the tide of “urgh, imagine shipping that” nonsense - even though all the evidence of canon is that they are… very much not.

i am aware of the pottermore article which smoothes the edges of lupin’s canonical reaction to tonks’ feelings for him in half-blood prince - but, while i read this as something of a retcon to make the relationship more palatable, i also don’t think that assuming that both tonks and lupin’s attraction to each other was sincere precludes them being as dysfunctional as they canonically are. i don’t go in for the common anti-remadora argument that tonks “forces” him into a relationship with her - it’s clear in half-blood prince that it’s not only her who has discussed her feelings with molly and arthur weasley, lupin is definitely flirting with her when they pick harry up in order of the phoenix, lupin is an adult man [no matter other power imbalances between him and tonks - such as the fact that she is an agent of the state which oppresses him] who possesses the capacity to refuse her advances, and - since teddy’s conception is not immaculate - he has no issue with enjoying a sexual relationship with her even if he then wants to run away from the product of that.

instead, what i like with remadora is that they reveal something which goes against the grain of the rest of the series: that love is not always enough. throughout the seven-book canon, we see time and time again the idea that love - and, crucially, love-as-noble-suffering and love-as-sacrifice - is enough to overcome any problem. entire civil service collaborating with a terrorist regime? don’t trouble yourself, love has won. your mother dying in childbirth leaving you to be neglected in a state institution? your own fault you’re not interested in love.

i understand the genre reasons for this, but i also love the way in which lupin especially exists on the margins of these genre conventions [just as he exists on the margins of wizarding society!]. i’m always struck in deathly hallows that he’s the only person who’s actually realistic about the demands of war - particularly when he tells harry that it is breathtakingly naive for him to think he can get through the fighting without having to shoot to kill - and that part of him having to be shuffled out of the way when harry tells him to return to the pregnant tonks is because, were the story focused on realism, the idea that a wanted man who is considered an unhuman by the state fleeing in order to guarantee the safety of his wife and unborn child becomes eminently reasonable and harry's defense of the nuclear family embarrassingly unradical.

and so i like the idea of lupin seeing tonks - and tonks seeing lupin - initially as just a bit of fun, as the two of them being just two chill single people who think the other is hot and interesting and want to bang because of it.

[which is something fandoms in general really struggle with as a concept. we like epic love stories - and you won't find me objecting to that! - but we're less good at thinking about casual sexual attraction or transient friendships, and how these can be transformative and meaningful without having to end up going any sort of distance.]

and i then like the idea of the relationship being forced into a profundity it doesn’t really have the juice to sustain by the sheer avalanche of grief which besets the two of them - sirius, dumbledore, mad-eye, ted - and by the pressure of the war and the fact that the order is scrambling and the hangover of remus' self-destruction in half-blood prince which makes each cling to the other as a life-raft. i like remadora as something codependent and messy and strange and sad, and i don’t think this prevents it being sincere and fun and based in mutual attraction, but instead that these positive qualities can exist in conjunction with the fact that, without the war, it would have been a summer of fucking and that was probably it.

on tonks herself, i don’t think i can say it better than @evesaintyves in this meta on her character. i’ve been really uncomfortable with quite a lot of stuff i’ve seen recently which has taken against the idea that tonks can be meaningfully read as queer on the basis of what we find in the text, above all because it so often comes with the implication that one cannot imagine her in her canon endgame pairing and presume that she’s something other than straight or cisgender. eve sets out an excellent case for tonks as bolshy and liberated and in tune with herself and fun and confused and in flux and still figuring stuff out about who she is and where she’s going - and this translates, may i say, to an astonishingly beautiful way of writing her, lupin, and the dysfunction inherent between them which i highly recommend you read.

#remadora #tonks

[evesaintyves]

i wrote this for remadora fest | explicit | ~3k words | prompt: their first time being intimate after months of mutual pining and awkwardness.

“Come lie down with me,” she says. 

on ao3

image: william mortensen, ho ho off to sabbath (1928)

[evesaintyves]

Ana Mendieta was an amazing artist who incorporated the natural elements and her own body to create amazing works of art.

(PS rest in piss Carl Andre)

#an art professor friend once told me: #take any famous male artist and look at what his wife is doing because it's probably 1000% more interesting #honestly

[evesaintyves]

mildly drunk and starting a prisoner of azkaban reread and listen ok. justice for aunt marge. vernon dursley's gender nonconforming lesbian sister with pcos. radical self-acceptance. getting turnt at the family dinner. living the dream with no kids, 12 dogs, and a huge garden. a fat butch fuck you of an existence. y'all can't handle it

#hp

[evesaintyves]

a new short fic from me, that i actually wrote a very long time ago

the bluebell, a young hermione gen fic set in the forest of dean

#this is a lovely look at hermione's curiosity and her nascent pre-hogwarts relationship with magic #SO MUCH in a few hundred words #fic rec

[evesaintyves]

i wrote this for remadora fest | explicit | ~3k words | prompt: their first time being intimate after months of mutual pining and awkwardness.

“Come lie down with me,” she says. 

on ao3

image: william mortensen, ho ho off to sabbath (1928)

#remadora #tonks #remus lupin #hp fanfic

[evesaintyves]

Remadora Fest 2024 Roundup

Before author reveals take place on Monday, here is a full listing of all 11 fics we got for the fest! Take the weekend to read through them, leave comments, kudos, bookmarks, and all your unhinged love for the amazing authors who contributed to the fest.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, G, 2727 words

Duelling Club, M, 3839 words

Yours, M, 3959 words

"Remus, I'm Fine", G, 1039 words

Fifty-five, T, 2748 words

At the Close of Day, M, 3172 words

The Way a Glass Asks to be Broken, E, 2912 words

“What a fool you must be," said my head to my heart, M, 1333 words

Like a Vice, G, 7550 words

Moments of Longing and Jealousy, G, 1824 words

Metanoia, T, 13,665 words

We've got h from fluff, to sex, to tragedy up above! Dig in over the weekend and PLEASE be sure to let all our authors know how much you loved their stories!!

[evesaintyves]

I'm only just catching up on @remadorafest, but I loved this one! Fun premise, exceptionally well-written duels which is so impressive, all of these fantastic glimpses of a ton of characters getting sassy and rowdy at Grimmauld Place during OoTP, sexual tension that is actually sexy - yessssss!!!

Remadora Fest Day 2

It's day 2 of Remadora Fest 2024! That means a brand new fic for all of you Remadora lovers to enjoy!

Duelling Club

Summary: A casual duelling club forms in the drawing room of Grimmauld Place. The kids in the house are banned from watching. Naturally, they find a way to watch anyway.

Rating: M

Word Count: 3839

Snippet:

Tonks came to stand over Lupin, one clunky boot on either side of his hips. Lupin had gone very still rather suddenly, and Harry experienced a brief moment of panic wondering whether his former professor might have suffocated in his prison of tangled robes.

But then Tonks was crouching over him, wand stowed in her back pocket while her hands lifted the fabric from Lupin’s face. She left his arms entangled over his head.

“Had enough?” She asked lowly, nose nearly brushing against Lupin’s.

“Never,” came Lupin’s hoarse reply.

Next to Harry, George gasped and Fred whistled.

“Didn’t see that coming,” said Fred.

Harry wasn’t sure quite what they meant, but then there was a rush of motion below. Lupin must have kept a hold of his wand, because his robes shot away into a bundle on the other side of the room, freeing his arms and allowing him to wave away the restraints around his ankles. In a move that was difficult to follow, though probably not difficult to accomplish against someone as clumsy as Tonks, Lupin knocked her off balance. He followed her as she tumbled onto her back, mirroring the way she’d crouched over him moments before, except he trained his wand at her heart.

#remadora #fic rec

[evesaintyves]

@hprecfest Day 10: Fest Fic

Fic Title: The Rougarou (written by @evesaintyves for @thethreebroomsticksfic Pride Fest, summer 2023.)

Word Count: 9.916

This. Fic. Is. EVERYTHING. This fic is exactly what I think about when I think about transformative fan fic--the potential of this genre to take canon and fully actualize on the promise it contains.

It's one possible rendition of one of Remus Lupin's lost years, placing him in New Orleans exactly at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Gorgeous, humane, incredibly compelling.

#thank u turanga 💕

[evesaintyves]

thank you ashes!! gotta cosign almost everything here - everything i have ever read by @saintsenara and @whinlatter has been fantastic, and @lunapwrites three knocks upon a door is super fun, weird, surreal horror-romance? love it

@hprecfest Day 10, 11 and 12

Posting three days worth of recs cos real life got in the way of posting it on their said days :P enjoy!

Day 10 - A fest fic

Nymphadora by @bluethepineapple

Written for the @womenofthehouseofblack , this fic is dark fairytale about families - families you are part of, families you have left behind and the complicated love that runs through both. The implied parallel in conversation between Andromeda and Tonks to Andromeda and Bellatrix is particularly haunting.

Summary:

Nymphadora (Greek) n. "The gifts of the Nymphs"

Andromeda could only watch as her daughter set off to war.

The Rougarou by @evesaintyves

Wolfstar.

I am big champion of reading everything written by Eve, but this fic is my favourite from her! This fic is steeped in grief and death post First War, and even as Remus tries his best to hide away from it all, New Orleans haunts him. It's a beautiful piece and I keep rereading it time and again.

Summary:

After the end of the first war, Remus goes to New Orleans to forget.

Day 11 - A dark fic

Three Knocks Upon the Door by @lunapwrites

Lily/Tonks.

This fic! Such effective imagery and contextaulisation for the quotes we know from canon. The Lily in this story has a hypnotic quality to her, and you can't help be drawn in - like Tonks.

Summary:

Knocking on wood three times is said to bring good fortune; but three knocks on your window or door without a clear cause is an omen of death.

In this case, it's a little of both.

(In which Tonks gets suspended from field duty, and takes matters into her own hands.)

First and Last and Always by Vermoulian

Sirius Black/Severus Snape.

The Snirius discord server is in love with this fic - and I can see why. It is beautifully written and makes you sit viscerally in Snape's headspace, to the point that sometimes you are discomfited.

Summary:

Black had been nearly skeletal when he came out of Azkaban, but he’d put on muscle again.

He prowled, and he loomed, and whatever earthy animal quality he’d had as a younger man had transmuted into something feral and predatory, during his twelve years of imprisonment.

Severus had his wand. He swallowed hard. His wand. Magic. His only defense, because Black outweighed him by at least three stone. But magic was more than enough. Severus had never needed physical prowess. His magical strength, and the keenness of his mind, gave him the advantage.

Except when it didn’t.

Day 12 - A WIP you are following

Beasts by @whinlatter

Ginny Weasley coming of age fic? Ginny Weasley fic that addresses all the canon gaps of Hinny relationship in a layered way? Sign me up! I have always liked Ginny, but beyond wondering about how Chamber of Secrets affected her - I never cared for her. Whinlatter makes you care about her interior life, makes you see that post war Hinny isn't going to be as easy as breathing. Basically, it's love.

Summary:

Ginny Weasley comes of age among them: the beasts, the wild things of their world.

(or: how the youngest Weasley won the Hanging Out With Hagrid Award).

Canon compliant, multi-chapter, non-linear narrative, Golden Gen, PS through post-DH (1981-1999). Harry/Ginny.

The War of Roses by @saintsenara

Sirius Black/Severus Snape.

A canon divergent Snirius fic from asenora? I slammed the subscribe button even before reading it - but having read the first chapter, I greatly enjoy the emphasis on what Azkaban has done to Sirius and I cannot wait to see where she takes this.

Summary:

Sirius Black does not die. But this does not mean that it is easy for him to live.

Or: a butterfly flaps its wings and Sirius does not go to the Department of Mysteries. What follows from that twist of fate is a story about the long, destructive shadow of a schoolboy rivalry; a story about surviving, and how surviving is sometimes more difficult than dying; a story about the fragility of beauty, the gentleness of hope, and the value of choice.

It is also a love story.

Scylla and Charybdis by @saintsenara

Severus Snape/Lord Voldemort.

I love the way Asenora writes Snape - his insecurity, his attraction to power, danger and darkness. I love how the narrative has cuts from his older self reflections, and I am really curious to see where she will take this. It also has Snirius crumbs so large that we could make a sandwich.

Summary:

Severus Snape just wants somewhere to belong.

This will turn out to be a curse.

[evesaintyves]

14 and 17 for ao3 wrapped! 🦕

Oh hi!! 💚

14. What's your shortest work of the year?

Nirvana, a 100-word drabble.

17. Your favourite character to write this year?

James Potter is my darling, but I found myself slipping into Lily's POV more often than I'd planned. I think it's because I love writing about James through her eyes! 😊

AO3 wrapped writer's edition here!

[evesaintyves]

6 & 19 for ao3 wrapped 🐳

Thanks for the ask @remadoramicrofics!

6. Favorite title you used

I'll go with All That Remains. It's my only Regulus Black-centric fic and I incorporated a lot of religious/Catholic themes into it. All That Remains refers to both a line in the story and a verse in the Bible (translation varies), from James 1:21. Therefore, putting aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness, in humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls. (NASB)

Regulus does indeed need to shed some of his wickedness in order to give life to another.

19. What's one pairing you want to explore next year?

TEDROMEDA. I have already explored them with some shorter works. I've written them as a background pairing for many of my stories, but I've got a story in the works, Supernova, that makes Tedromeda one of the central, if not the most important, pairings of the whole fic. It's a super duper slow burn and I hope to begin posting it before Christmas.

ao3 wrapped asks

[evesaintyves]

y'all wanna see some 19th century erotic snuffboxes

tw: antique pussy

my favorite ofc:

here's a bonus chastity device, aka "the dicklocker"

this was all at m.s. rau, the evilest antique store ever

#nsfw #art #19th century art #shunga #sapphic art

[evesaintyves]

author's note: chapter 10: reared & chapter 11: hatched 🐣🎇

thank you for reading chapters 10 and 11 of beasts (and especially for being patient with the bumper doubled up author's note). this time, ginny has a bad new year's eve (attends the world's most triggering party, slops booze down her old love rival, loses to her boyfriend at butterbeer pong) and then an even worse new year's day, featuring boggarts, the hangover from hell, the inevitable consequences of her own actions, and cormac mclaggen. nightmare. if you slog through all this you'll get a sneak peek of chapter 12 so that's my ploy to try and get you to endure my takes on liberal subjecthood and girlhood again. shameless! alright - let's do this.

✨ spoilers for this chapter below the cut  ✨

writing notes and headcanons:

parties: i almost called chapter ten party animals. you can be glad that i didn’t. but wow writing parties is hard! you have to keep track on like 30 different attendees! it ends up like choreographing a musical number. and then i had to come up with costumes for all of them AND fun drinks names. nightmare. never again. i only did it to make all the memes

haunted house: ‘they have a house party then ginny gets trapped in the house with both her ex boyfriends, her boyfriend’s ex and also cormac mclaggen’ was a chapter concept i mentally wrote back in february lol. it’s too delicious. i wanted the teenageness of it - the sloppy lazy hangover vibe the day after a house party, but added all these layers of fear and the waiting game with all the left-behind characters. the garden as relief was important, but also the wild overgrownness of it, unmanageable untamed. i have lived in flats in the kinds of london townhouses grimmauld is based on and they very often have these big scooped out brick walled gardens below street level that are just so atmospheric and oasis like but also usually kind of a mess and overgrown. so count this as a love letter to a london garden

ginny and sirius: in these two chapters, the flashbacks are entirely ginny’s memories of sirius black - specifically, of teenage ginny’s attempts to connect with this veteran, someone she canonically cares for and admires, who i think would be something of a god in her eyes, partly because he’s hot/cool/can turn into a dog (slay) but mostly for his enormous self-sacrifice and martyrdom for his friends and for the cause, even before his actual death. i’ve talked about the canon parallels between these two characters in the first of a two part meta here, which lays out my thinking behind sirius and ginny’s relationship as rendered here (ie. sirius would quite like ginny, perhaps see shades of james in her - hence the snitch - but she would always care more about him, and about impressing him, than he ever would about her). one of the most important lines of sirius’ in canon for me is the one he yells at the weasley children the night their father is attacked: they (understandably) just want to go and see their dad, but sirius, as kindly but as firmly as he can, tells them that this is both naive and also counter to what the order of the phoenix exists to do: a resistance organisation that is all about self-sacrifice for the greater good (“This is how it is — this is why you’re not in the Order — you don’t understand — there are things worth dying for!”) through sirius, we learn, ginny began to form a set of ideas about some very important things for her: about how to survive, how to preserve a mind, and about what it means to fight, especially when being held back and deliberately kept out of the fight. all pretty formative in ginny weasley’s book, i’d say. i wanted ginny’s memories of sirius to be very triggered by place, trapped back in this very claustrophobic, very sensorily dense and evocative house. i knew i wanted moments where we have ginny actively drift off into reminiscences in the present timeline (getting caught drifting off fleabag style by ron before the party) or seek out spaces to remember (going into walburga’s bedroom). where previously the flashbacks have been less active and less visible acts of ginny remembering, more standalone cutaways than examples of a character actively going into a memory, it was important to me to start to show memories becoming much more like intrusive thoughts ginny can’t push away as her defensive coping mechanisms come under increasing assault.

animagi: one of the big things ginny first badgers sirius about is how to become an animagus. ginny’s interest in becoming an animagus does, at first, come from a place of childlike awe (especially from an animal lover). but, as ginny eventually hints to sirius, it’s also a reflection of young ginny becoming very interested in possible survival strategies to get out of facing awful memories she’d rather not think about every time a dementor comes to town. she sees sirius becoming the dog as an escape both from literal prison and from the prison of the mind. sirius suggests it’s not quite as simple as that. we’ll be returning to these ruminations in due course…. 

traitors: as @ashesandhackles’ gift of a question suggests, one of the big themes at work in these chapters, particularly chapter 11, is betrayal and - particularly - the figure of the traitor. as ashes points out, we see a whole lot of traitors mentioned to varying extents (from canon: pettigrew, percy, regulus, sirius himself, marietta, mundungus, kreacher, xenophilius, snape, andromeda…). in c.10 these themes are more dormant, little passing asides (the banality of evil, lol, and geri halliwell betraying the spice girls aka the worst act of treachery in 90s britain). but in c.11, we see the memory of past traitors and the prospect of future ones come to bear: the DA’s interrogation and fear that dean might not be all that he seems, and then rabastan lestrange getting killed by his own brother for, as harry suggests in his analysis of rabastan’s murder, betraying a set of ideas and a worldview that pre-existed voldemort and now survives him. so far in the fic, we’ve seen ginny reflect on questions of the soul as an inherently moral entity, its existence imbuing all who have a soul with the capacity for good, if not compelling them to always do it. here, i wanted to start introducing questions of where the choice to do bad comes from, the big nature vs. nurture, question, because i think this question would not just interest ginny given her own set of experiences (and you can speculate what those might be, because we will be returning to them!), but also because it speaks to a broader set of themes and questions that beasts is trying to expand upon that thread through canon. i don’t want to spoil too much for a future plot point, but needless to say this is a fic that tries to ask questions about selfhood, people’s nature, about motivation, intent, and choices, about childhoods and why people grow up to be who they are and make the choices they make – and also about wizards’ claim of superiority over all other magical beings because they have a monopoly on morality, on conscience, on justice, and therefore, as the most rational, civilised, self-governing political subjects, have the right to make and enforce law over other magical species. the existence of the traitor, for these characters who made moral choices to resist during a war fought over right and wrong, is a fascinating litmus test for any society grappling with the enforcement of justice, what it means to try to do good, and the circumstances under which people choose not to do good - as kingsley’s speech at the end of c.11 suggests, what it is in a person’s development that might lead them in one moral direction or another. “is this who we are?” kingsley asks, and the answer really might be: yes, actually.

the girls’ getting dressed: a) it’s literally always the best bit of any party and b) yes it’s important that hermione granger not just looked hot but wanted to, and that her and ginny had the first meaningful conversation they’ve had with each other while they’re pulling on hoe fits and doing sleakeazy treatments. female friendship arc engaged. also nymphadora tonks just definitely had hot cool 90s clubbing fits don’t know what to tell you (recs below)

the DA: what was fun about writing the party, though, was getting to try and show ginny among her fellow soldiers, and, especially, harry getting to see it. we know that canon ginny is popular and well liked by her classmates pre the war, but the experience of the DA under the carrows (as future flashbacks will show…) would be an intense bonding experience for many, and, i think, of the three leaders (neville, luna, ginny), it would be ginny that would become perhaps the most important emotionally to her fellow soldiers on the basis of her personality, compassion and empathy. in these chapters, you see those who *were* at hogwarts during the war have their guard up, exercise stiff safety procedures, and those that *weren’t* - especially harry - start to clock how much the war changed the DA from duelling fight club to a resistance organisation with military capabilities and procedures. what this means for hinny, of course, is harry, knowing that ginny is keeping things from him, starting to put together that that persecution and torture neville spoke breezily about in the hog’s head tunnel that time might actually have been, er, real, and that ginny might have had her own direct experiences of it that she hasn’t shared with him…

the slytherins: @titaniasthings sent me this ask ages ago about slytherins and i very rudely banked the ask to talk about another day. and i'm not even going to answer it now! i am hugely sorry about that, but i will answer it in due course, so this is me publicly apologising and basically promising to get back to this question, because i think it’s both very interesting and also one of the weakest points of canon that fanfiction can help right in really interesting and productive ways. for now, let me just say theo nott and daphne greengrass’ presence at the party is me flagging that i DO think there are ways that slytherins would have engaged with the DA and with resistance during the war, for lots of different motivations, and look forward to developing this further as this lovely little inquiry gets underway…

deamus: is this deamus or is it dean/rio ferdinand (unrequited)? who’s to say

cormac mclaggen: yes everyone is under attack from a renegade bunch of vigilante wannabe death eaters but you should never let that stop you from going to pound town

cho and ginny: me, posting a sneak peek that looked like it was ginny dialogue but it was actually from cho… 😈

i’ve talked a bit about my thoughts on cho and ginny’s relationship elsewhere, and had this scene written for ages, because i a) think it’s funny when surprising characters call the protagonist out on their shit and impart the most useful wisdom (michael and cho have both played this part so far lol) and b) i wanted ginny’s insecurities about cho, which are understandable but come from a place of teenage rivalry and are quite juvenile, to have to give way to something more mature between them, as part of a coming of age growing up arc. in c 10 we get their petty interactions, judging each other for their outfits, clearly frosty, but in c 11, we see ginny and cho accidentally have probably the most important conversation ginny's had with anyone in ages. ginny has to face up to the fact that since 1995, cho chang has grieved and lived with a reality that ginny fears enormously - the death of the boy she loves - and also all the repercussions that came with it, including the impact of it on her own quidditch ambitions. the cho we see has done a lot of work on her own grief and now has a remarkably healthy reflection on what it is to grow up and to both forgive yourself and release yourself from dreams you had as a child, while also recognising it’s ok to mourn the future you hoped you’d have when life gets in the way. for hinny purposes, i also wanted the memory of cho’s distress and harry’s inability to handle it to resurface before the hinny fight, because i think cho’s weepiness and attempt to ask harry for emotional support would be pretty influential on ginny’s decision to try to avoid doing that at all costs. (ashes also pulled out my agenda behind the cho changing in front of ginny moment: “the difference of Cho's comfort with changing in front of people i.e women vs Ginny - it shows how differently each have built friendships and at what stage in their lives”. cho chang had close female friends before ginny or hermione really ever did and it shows!

rodolphus lestrange: ‘a huge day for rodolphus nation’ - aka just @saintsenara. i have never bought the idea that rodolphus is pure flop and bellatrix is the instigator in their marriage for them joining the death eaters - my personal take is that the lestranges are the gateway for the black sisters being drawn into the orbit of death eaterdom, and am especially a fan of a big age gap between bellatrix and rodolphus, meaning that rodolphus was in the first wave of death eaters/voldemort’s school gang or at the very least an early follower, and that that’s how bellatrix gets drawn from low key pureblood supremacist politics of the black family into the paramilitary activities of the death eaters. i *like* the idea of death eaters who aren’t just thugs for hire but have a real political worldview and a programme that they will continue to pursue after voldemort’s death, and am excited to explore that in the fic (and what it means for plans for postwar reform and societal rebuilding). slay from roddy, basically

ginny’s boggart: thank you to this lovely anon both for the regulus-ginny parallels note and also for asking about ginny's boggart! i am however going to be an arsehole and stay zipped lip on this one for now (we will find out i swear), but just for now to say: i wanted the boggart to both add atmosphere and a lovely sense of oppressive dread (hiding in a broken clock, a forever waiting game), but also ginny’s inability to bring herself to draw it out and face it to be a sign of her struggling to force herself to process dark memories that are proving stubbornly haunting…

the hinny fight: you all have had the patience of saints waiting for this scene fr. pls know this fight took me absolutely bloody ages to write lmao. fights are hard when you want people to be flawed but neither person really be in the wrong! here we have ginny, finally letting out seven years of resentment at being left out, patronised, and over-protected: harry, calling her on the fact that she’s clearly trying to protect him from things that really bothering her, letting her know how hurt he is that she’s excluded him from her ongoing ordeal - but also, in getting her to finally tell the truth, having to face up to the thing he hasn’t wanted to face up to, the possibility of ginny’s enormous sufferings during the war that he literally broke up with her, naively, to try to avoid. it’s a long scene – 4k words lol - but i really wanted the fight to have distinct stages, a crescendo, a cooling off period, building ultimately to a quiet moment of confession from both characters. harry finally says out loud what ginny has become to him, his fears about what happened to sirius happening to her, how lost he feels in a world where he is no longer the chosen one, and the hopes he has for him and ginny as a little family around which he wants to build a future amid uncertainty about literally everything else. ginny finally admits what it is in her past that has shaped how much she is prepared to trust and confess to another person about her fears. and so we leave them having finally aired out things that needed to be said, but lacking direction about how to resolve them. they’ve got work to do, baby (and i’m super excited to share how they’re going to do it). will be posting part 2 of the sirius and ginny meta v soon, which discusses in more depth how the memory of sirius, and especially of his death, influences harry’s ideas about familial love and especially his overprotectiveness when it comes to ginny. stay tuned for that. it’ll be real sad, sorry!

harry left holding all of his eggcups once ginny’s gone back to school: 

songs from the playlist for these chapters:

i would personally like to take this opportunity to call out ginny weasley for having such a sad adolescence that i had to write about it and listen to phoebe bridgers the entire time and therefore fuck up my spotify wrapped. that is all

the songs for chapter ten (party party party) are wall to wall bangers. two tribes, with siren, right before the auror alarms go off! yesssss. also slow show is the most romantic song ever written about a party and a person’s dick (‘standing at the punch table swallowing punch’, ‘you know i dreamed about you/i missed you for 29 years/before i saw you): 

playing around before the party starts by childish gambino | i predict a riot by the kaiser chiefs | paint it black by the rolling stones | two tribes - we don’t want to die version by frankie goes to hollywood | slow show by the national

the songs for chapter eleven are much more subdued, quiet (hangover-proof), songs for a waiting game. the mitski song is this chapter's manifesto and also is the harry-sirius-ginny arc anthem, i will not be persuaded otherwise (you're an angel, i'm a dog/or you're a dog and i'm your man/you believe me like a god/i'll destroy you like I am). i wanted duets, too, especially men and women duetting together, to echo the conversations that happen across both of these chapters (between sirius and ginny, dean and ginny, and then harry and ginny). and had to have auld lang syne cos it’s bloody new year for GOD’s sake: 

i’m your man by mitski | no doom for doubt by lianne la havas and willy mason | house of the rising sun by alt-j | birch by big red machine and taylor swift | waiting room by phoebe bridgers | new auburn by big red machine and anaïs mitchell | auld lang syne by mairi campbell and david francis

ps. the new beyonce song could easily be harry to the DA at the end of chapter 11. get the fuck out of my house!!!

reading list: 

on tonks being a hot girl with party streak and a wardrobe that is major:

Leather by @saintsenara/asenora  (self-rec! embarrassing!) dead ends by whinlatter

on dean and his mum: 

Lifelike by @evesaintyves

on sirius and grimmauld place:

Toys in the Attic by @ashesandhackles and thecat_iswriting Lux Aurumque by @saintsenara/asenora

on peter pettigrew: 

All I ever wanted was a life in your shape by saptashati 

on cho chang: 

overemotional: in defense of cho chang by dirgewithoutmusic

plus the smallest of sneak peeks of chapter 12, coming in january...

They're different, his letters. She knew they would be, though it doesn't make it hurt any less.

#go read beasts it's fucking good

[evesaintyves]

Do you ever plan to continue The Last Mission? ❤️

yes ❤️

[evesaintyves]

Your trademark is raw, honest storytelling, not shying away from saying the difficult or complicated or unsavory things - you inspire me!

😭 thank you @alohaemora

[evesaintyves]

Trademark: doomed lovers, precise pictures of intimacy and nature of human experience

thank you ashes!!!

from here