#i'm sorry but you are reading/writing fanfic about dead wizards who are not real it will never be as serious as you make it out to be

[5lazarus]

I'm really sorry about your father ruining your tomato sauce :/ but also I've been meaning to read your stories forever (but work happened) and now I FINALLY got to read at least all the millrat au snippets and I'm crying it's too good. ugh you write them so beautiful as young parents who don't know what they're doing (but they try). Your writing style is really great. It's succint and alive. (1/4)

The characters are so wonderfully complex yet it’s put down so wonderfully simply. It can be hard to get the right emotion across in dialogues, but the way you write characters, there is so much more than “the right emotion” that comes across. it’s clear that they’re complex, that there are things unsaid and things that shouldn’t have been said, that they run through thoughts and emotions as quickly and constantly as people do, without losing focus and without becoming chaotic (2/4)I really like how you handle your characters and their circumstances. There’s no making things prettier than they are, no drama or tragedy added for the sake of adding it. It’s very real and very down to earth. They’ve got flaws and sharp edges and strengths and what not. You can put so much in the little things. There’s some comedical stuff happening and then some godawful shit and it’s all just, you know, real. That’s how life goes. Still, your stories feel balanced. (¾)-

and the fourth ask disappeared? This is the convention for answering multi-asks like this, right?

Thank you very much! I’m particularly proud of the Millrat AU, and what I’ve done with Lily’s character. It’s so easy to go into Mary Sue territory with her (and thus flanderize Severus) and so giving her issues she grapples as much as Severus faces his own–drinking too much, resenting that the Wizarding World took her childhood, struggling to remain optimistic while being a good mother and raising a kid as a 20 year old in the middle of a terrorist war. There’s a quote one of my favorite writers said, Raymond Queneau: “Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.“ That’s kinda what I was trying to get at here, and I feel like most of us in fandom feel–we don’t care about the action/adventure, we want to watch these characters breathe. So we get Lily and Severus fighting over her drinking and his triggers, you see Severus realizing he can’t expect his child to understand how important getting wanded is to him, and Mary annoyed at how their all-consuming passion is actually just obnoxious, they’re a bunch of obsessed kids–except Lily’s fighting a war and Severus is barely making ends meet.I’m really glad somebody picked up on how Severus and Lily (and Harry, in the Stepfather AU) and Mary are all constantly self-censoring! I was hoping that technique would work. If/when I actually sit down and write it out, that’ll become a major issue. I want to, just so that there’s a fic that has Lily actively resisting junior Death Eaters by herself, without James Potter or Severus Snape to the rescue. There’ll probably be more drabbles on her and Mulciber. I want to explore how the battlefield began in the halls of Hogwarts–I really do think Severus and Mulciber and Avery, in 7th year specifically, and the Marauders were skirmishing before the battlefield. It may not have been specifically about blood purity in Severus vs. the Mauraders, but it became about it once he chose Mulciber over her.

Lily’s a fascinating character–she’s kind, she’s compassionate, but she’s naive and self-righteous and pretty fucking horrible to Severus over the Werewolf Incident. How do we reconcile it? There’s a difference between having a flawed character and a contradictory character. Hence, the Millrat AU: desperation and passion and a lot of naivety, working out because I want them to be happy for once, goddammit. They deserve to be happy. And Lily deserve to be something besides a dead mother. It’s bad writing otherwise, and yall might’ve noticed I’m pretty arrogant proud of my writing. I use fanfic to hone my craft, and so we’re going to get 19th century social realism pastiches until I feel ready to write it independently of another person’s universe. If JK Rowling and Emile Zola and Jane Austen with a dash of Roberto Bolaño could combine into one person, I’d never write anything ever again, I’d just read and reread and reread everything that they’re doing…but I think they call those people Zadie Smith and Hilary Mantel (and I guess David Mitchell before he started writing fanfic of his own work), who are probably the best living writers in English.As for the tomato sauce--it’s pretty funny. Just seriously not what I was expecting to see at 2 in the morning, and then wake up to my father still scrubbing out the pot. (There is still sludge on the bottom, but I think it’s almost in cooking condition)

#asks #severely-severus