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madampince-rph · 4 years

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everybody always makes alice longbottom in the same families: fortescue, selwyn, prewett. which do you think is best? or do you have better suggestion? thnx

Honestly I really don’t like Alice as a Prewett. It doesn’t make sense to me. I mean we know that Molly is really big on family, basically adopting Harry after five minutes conversation, so if Neville was a nephew or something like that don’t you think she’d have been part of his childhood? Even just a small part? Don’t you think the Weasley children would consider him family, even distant family, if he was a direct Prewett descendant? Making Alice a Prewett makes me uncomfortable, because if you project that lineage out to what we get in the books later it just doesn’t work. imo: bad idea, one of the worst.

Between Fortescue and Selwyn, I prefer Selwyn. We don’t get to really meet any Selwyns in the books – just one Death Eater who shows up briefly – but we have a nice little encounter with Florean Fortescue, and he seems like a friendly sort of guy. Someone who would likely have made at least a token effort to be involved in the childhood of a basically-orphaned little kid whom everyone thought was a Squib, if he had been part of Neville’s family. And while there is nothing in the books that says he and Neville weren’t family or friendly, the fact that Florean hangs out with Harry for a summer and doesn’t mention anything about Neville – a boy who is in not just the same year as Harry, but the same house – well, it just reads as off. Or that is it would read as off, if Neville was a relative of Florean, because that seems like the kind of thing that would have come up in conversation even if he and Neville weren’t personally close. But when Harry is summarizing his weeks in Diagon Alley, he doesn’t say “Florean Fortescue, Neville’s uncle who ran the ice cream parlor…” or anything like that, which leaves anyone trying to make that canon connection the responsibility of answering the question, why not? Why would Florean not introduce himself via Neville when he met Harry? Why would Harry not reference Florean’s connection to his housemate? I’m not saying you can’t make it work, that it’s impossible to come up with a way to make Alice a Fortescue without making later events in the books go wonky – but you definitely need to make that effort to craft that backstory.

Honestly having Alice be directly related to anyone we meet in the books who interacts with Harry in any sort of extended and friendly fashion doesn’t really work for me, because it feels awkward for them to never mention something about “oh you got to school with my nephew, Neville, he talks about you all the time!” or so on, you know? And again, it’s not impossible to do it and do it well, but it is something you have to tackle because when you’re writing a prequel (which is what Marauders Era stuff is if you think about it): you have to be very conscious of the canon that is going to come later and how what you’re writing now that’s new works alongside what was written previously about what is going to happen next. I think we’re all familiar with badly done prequel stories that don’t quite mesh with their later-slash-earlier installments, so I expect you get what I mean when I say that that kind of attention to detail matters!

(Also tbh most of the time when I see Alice linked to a family like that, one of the “nice ones” we meet, her background tends to read as pretty “Mary Sue-ish” anyway. You know what I mean: the sort of OC-insert character who ~conveniently~ has really close family ties to other characters we know and she’s suuuuuper important in their lives and oh-so-special and…basically it just makes you think of bad fanfics, right? The kind you write when you’re twelve and want to burn later? Maybe that’s just me idk, but any time I see the name “Alice Fortescue” I cringe because I think I know what’s coming, and sadly I’m usually right.)

Anyway, basically the thing that I think is important to keep in mind when crafting a backstory for Alice is what we learn about Neville’s upbringing: he was raised by his paternal grandmother. He had a family of busybody relatives who sent him lots of advice on what classes to take and who all thought he was a Squib when he was little and did awful things to try and get his magic to show itself (the doing of which seemed very casual, almost like he was an afterthought, as evinced by him being dropped out the window once when someone wanted desert). No one thought he was important or talented. His grandmother takes him to visit his parents in St. Mungo’s on holidays. She acts very familiar to her daughter-in-law (although admittedly she’s spent about fourteen years visiting her in the closed ward by then, so there’s no telling what their relationship was like back when Alice had her full faculties) and worn-out by it all, although still fiercely proud of her son’s talents (and later her grandson’s, at least once he finally “lives up to” what she wanted from him after the fighting against Voldemort starts).

From here on out this is admittedly all extrapolation, but going off of what we know: it has always seemed to me as though there are a lot of Longbottoms of Augusta’s generation or around that age but not a lot of younger ones, and Alice’s family doesn’t seem to be involved in things with Neville much at all. We know she’s a pure-blood, because Neville is, so it’s not a situation like with Lily – but we also know that the family line means a lot to most pure-blood families. So from that we can draw the assumption that for whatever reason, Alice’s son doesn’t matter much to her side of the family, even though one would think he ought to. Is that because she comes from a huge family, so the Squib-ish son of the girl who went mad and got locked up in St. Mungo’s isn’t someone they need to spend much thought on? Is that because she comes from a family that has almost died-out and there just aren’t many of them left to care about him? Is it because they don’t consider him part of “their” family as much as they do “a Longbottom” because the maternal line doesn’t matter to them as much? Is it because Alice herself had a falling-out with her family so they severed ties before Neville was born?Is it because her family and the Longbottoms just don’t get along (either for reasons that existed at the time Alice and Frank got married, which she did despite her family’s wishes, or for reasons that cropped-up later – perhaps over the side that Alice and Frank chose in the war, or perhaps they blame him for what happened to her, etc etc?) so they don’t want to have anything to do with the Longbottoms...who might not welcome them anyway even if they did?

The last option makes me like the Selwyn idea because we know the Selwyns are pure-bloods at least in part (from the fact that Umbridge claims their lineage when sporting Slytherin’s locket) and we know that at least one of them was a Death Eater. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean the whole family was a bunch of blood-supremacists of course, but it does give us more potential to play with than we get from the Fortescues or the Ollivanders (or the Prewetts), I believe. Giving Alice a family that is: a) majority pro-voldemort or b) mixed between pro-voldemort/pro-dumbledore or even c) majority pro-dumbledore but with a few outcast death eaters provides a much more interesting and idea-fertile background, I think, for both her and her son.

To that end I’m thinking that if you really want to tie Alice in with a family that has members we know well – maybe one that provides you with relatives who will also be played in your game without adding a bunch of OCs – you can always go with the Lestranges. That’s an idea that occurred to me recently that I really, really like. Make her a cousin or second-cousin or so forth to Rodolphus and Rabastan. Not a sister; if she was that closely related to them the dialogue we get between Bellatrix and Neville later gets awkward because there’s no way she wouldn’t introduce herself as his “auntie” to drive the spikes in deeper, not if they had that kind of connection – but some sort of relation, anyway. Then you get to add another layer of intensity to a bunch of canon things without having to actually twist canon at all:

Why did Voldemort pick the Potters and their half-blood son to go after first, before the pure-blood boy? Maybe it wasn’t just because he and Harry shared the same blood-status; maybe it was because the pure-blood was related to his most loyal servant so he figured he’d start with the stranger (either because he thought Harry would be easier to deal with, or because he trusted Bella and her boys to be quick to deal with the Longbottoms if they got troublesome in the meantime).

Why did the Lestranges go after the Longbottoms when they wanted information about Voldemort’s whereabouts? Maybe it wasn’t just because they were Aurors who knew Ministry secrets and were part of the Order; maybe it was because they were family. We know that Bellatrix is enthusiastic about the prospect of pruning traitors out of her family tree after all, an idea that she would probably extend to her relatives-by-marriage even if the Lestrange brothers didn’t share that fatal familial enthusiasm for themselves…although they probably do.

Why did the Lestranges torture the Longbottoms so much that they lost their minds permanently, when surely that meant going far beyond the point of their actually being able to get any answers from them? Maybe it wasn’t just because they got carried away and liked the fun of it so they kept going even when it wasn’t useful any more; maybe it was exacerbated by the fact that Alice and Frank were family and they needed to be punished for choosing the wrong side. Maybe it was personal.

If Alice was a Lestrange before her marriage, then tension between the Longbottoms and the Lestranges gets ratcheted-up about a thousand points in all areas, both regarding the things that happen in the books and their relationships before. It puts her in a position similar to Sirius and Andromeda, where the battle lines are drawn between the branches on her own family tree and she has to decide how far she is willing to go for what she believes in, even when she knows the person looking back at her out of that silver mask.

The First Wizarding War divided people against their own family and friends and too often we get mired in extreme black-and-white ideas of good and evil sides, forgetting that there are a lot more shades of gray (just ask Sirius). Since we know so little about Alice, she’s a perfect opportunity to explore that nuance and making her related to a few Death Eaters (of any family) is a great way to play around with that. Honestly I have like a hundred different ideas of things that could be done with such an Alice so if you want to build one and you’re drawing a blank please hit me up I will gladly gush to you!

tl;dr Alice Selwyn = yes, that’s interesting. Alice Fortescue = a whole lot of meh and a little awkward. Alice Prewett = please no that causes more problems than it does anything else. Also consider as an option: Alice Lestrange.

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