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elapsesEvery time I go back to look at the post I made after I finished Deathly Hallows for the first time, I get re-obsessed with this comment ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tinhooves made:
Btw this is how I finished the aforementioned Deathly Hallows post, the bit that Stephanie was reacting to:
A lot of the time when I read any fic in any fandom, it prompts me to decide things. Sometimes I love some aspect of some fic so much that I decide to adopt it, for my personal version of how things "really" are. Sometimes it'll bring up something you don't see in canon -- like the way a mother/daughter relationship works, and it won't quite work for me but it will prompt me to decide how I see that mother/daughter relationship. Anyway of course in this case all that ended in me thinking about how I would sort them, which of course I requiredtinhooves' input, that is just how the world works. Because I wasn't sure I saw them in the same house: I liked Scorpius the Hufflepuff, but Rose seemed a lot more Ravenclaw (maybe Gryffindor, but not really anything else), and whenever I actually read the epilogue I dooo feel like Albus is a big fat Slytherin waiting to happen. But spreading them out across houses that way made it harder for them to be a ~trio~ (I don't know why this cliche appeals so deeply to me when the actual shipping of them really really does not). Sooooooooo we decided to make them all three quasi-losers within their own houses: I mean, really, what is better than a merry band of misfits.
It went sort of like this: Scorpius, mortified about his sorting, tries to pretend it doesn't exist. The Slytherin first year boys are kind of a mob, no one's really close yet but they're united, and Scorpius just tries to pretend that he belongs too. He sits with them in classes, tries to sit with them during mealtimes, mostly they just kind of lol at his life, not accepting but not particularly unaccepting either. This is how he and Albus become friends, and once you're friends with Albus it's sort of a straight shot to being friends with Rose: they got matched as babies and he just doesn't exactly know how to be without her, not yet. They have a cousin who's a Ravenclaw like Rose a year above them: Louis Weasley (Bill and Fleur's youngest), and when Rose decides she doesn't particularly like anyone in her year in Ravenclaw (she has strong opinions about people, Albus and Scorpius -- omg seriously though WHAT ARE THOSE NAMES, JO -- are a little more prone to neutrality), she just starts sitting with him and his friends at the Ravenclaw table. It's kind of like Al and the gang of Slytherins though: there are friends, and then there are friends. Just because you get along well enough with someone in class to sit with them doesn't always mean you want to spend all your free time with them, and that is sort of where the trioness comes in, I guess: Scorpius sort of insinuates himself into Albus and Rose's thing, and no one has ever done that before, so they kind of just scoot over and let him.
Hold onto your seatbelts, this gets waaaaay more complicated. We actually named all the students in their year, this is Stephanie's pretty spreadsheet:
I am still kind of proud of us for this, the names are so plausibly Rowlingesque to me. And we have the perfect number of familiar ones and unfamiliar ones! There are all kinds of miniature stories we came up with in coming up with that list, but I thought I'd mention my favorites:
- The Hufflepuff boys sort of work like this: eventually Scorpius gives up and accepts his Hufflepuff-ness, and he and Stanley get along fine. (He doesn't realize Stanley's muggle-born until a little bit later, and he has this lame internal moment of "IT'S OKAY, I ACCEPT YOU ANYWAY, STANLEY"). Millard Mullins is sort of generally unlikeable, though, that gross guy that's sort of difficult to be fond of. I mentally compare him to the guy in my middle school who used to spend play practice lying on top of rolled up gym mats and practicing making out with them. At least I think that's what he was doing?
- Stanley spends most of his time nursing his crush on Harriet Edgecombe (Marietta's daughter, father mysteriously unknown), who is oblivious. This began on the Hogwarts Express, where they sat in the same compartment. His friendship with Scorpius, and Scorpius' friendship with Rose, ARE V. ADVANTAGEOUS IN THIS WAY
- Lavender Brown is Despina Zabini's mother, hmm
- Persephone Cresswell kind of bullies Albus.
- Franny Spyre sort of goes on and on about being muggle-born, everything is "well you know I'm muggle-born and we..." with her.
We (okay fine Stephanie did all the work in this case) also class-ranked them:
1. Harriet Edgecombe (another reason Rose hates her)
2. Rose Weasley
3. Atticus Octavius
4. Basil Woodridge
5. Cillian Donelly
6. Adelaide Sinistra
7. Persephone Cresswell
8. Colette Laclaire
9. Noah Lissinger
10. Evan Leicster
Although in retrospect: I don't know. At the time I decided that Albus and Scorpius were smart (Scorpius was very booksmart, Albus was very intuitive) but maybe not top 10 smart, but now I wonder if maybe the wouldn't have to be -- maybe down there at the bottom instead of Noah Lissinger and Evan Leicster, although I shouldn't just say that because I'm not looking at the house balance properly, THESE THINGS HAVE TO BE CONSIDERED, because so much of what I see of their dynamic is based on intelligence. They don't have dark wizards to defeat, you have to find adventures for them in other ways, and in this case "other ways" is Rose. Rose is sort of their leader, borderline batty and intellectually obsessive and disgustingly curious. She's not Hermione, her actual classes matter less to her than her intellectual obsessions -- she has a thing with time travel, and another with muggle science and how it relates to magic (this starts second year, she makes Albus and Scorpius both sign up for Muggle Studies), and another with how to quantify "real" divination, and also Animagi. She thrives on magical theory, and she just sort of drags Albus and Scorpius along with her, and they can't really be bothered to complain much. She sort of falls in and out of all of her little obsessions, you know how it goes. Way back then I wrote this short little thing to show Stephanie how I saw her, because I never can quite explain it:
I love this vision of them Stephanie helped me shape so much that sometimes it's disappointing to have them pop up while reading fic and be any other way than this way.
This post feels really weirdly Imymemine, I guess because I am recording my personal canon mostly so I have an easy way to look back on it; but I wanted to ask, too, if anyone else had any strong personal convictions about how things were for any character post-epilogue or just post-DH. Because talking about personal canon is the greatest.
tinhooves made:i think maybe later you'll appreciate the epilogue a bit better than you do now. it wasn't bad, it just wasn't necessarily what you wanted to see of that future.Sometimes I think Stephanie knows me better than I know myself.
does that make sense?
Btw this is how I finished the aforementioned Deathly Hallows post, the bit that Stephanie was reacting to:
A couple of months after DH I kind of felt like I would never really be ~into~ Harry Potter again: it felt like I would always love it, but also like I was emotionally over it (in retrospect LOL OKAY ALEXANDRA, LIKE YOU EVER GET TO BE OVER ANYTHING). Of course I was wrong, which I found out in December '08, when I somehow ended up rereading and refeeling everything. It was funny though, up 'till then I had always loved Harry Potter in basically the exact same way, but that time instead of the usual Ron/Hermione and James/Lily stuff, I ended up reading anything Andromeda-centric (in direct contrast to that statement I made about wanting the epilogue to have been Harry-and-Teddy having a what-Harry-and-Sirius-should-have-been thing, because man previous self: how could you do that to Andromeda, after everything? Not that I was thinking about her when I wrote that, because she didn't even occur to me), aaaaaaaaand all this lame fic in which Albus, Scorpius, and Rose were the trio: part 2!!! Mostly about them as 11-year-olds, because I have an inexplicable aversion to both Rose/Scorpius and Albus/Scorpius and the best way to avoid that completely was to read about them as kids (although even that did not always work). I think there were two of those that I actually got through more than a chapter of, nothing especially memorable, except that they got me on the track of wondering about sortings: I think in one of them the three were all Slytherins and in the other they were all 'Puffs.
Also, would someone please teach Harry and Ginny to name their children? I mean, yes, children born during the course of any course of fiction tend to have overwrought, tributary names, but James, Lily, and Albus Severus? Hitting us over the head with that much schmoop was a little (okay, a lot) unnecessary. But Ron was fantastic, and you know what, I really don't even care. You can have your silly fanfiction ending, Joanne. Thank you for these books and these characters.
(Although you know what actually drove me really, honestly crazy about the epilogue? WHAT THE HELL, HARRY. WHY IS POOR TEDDY SO PARENTLESS. AREN'T YOU SUPPOSED TO ADOPT HIM, GODFATHER BOY?! That would have been the schmoopy epilogue I would have written: 17-year-old Harry goes off to adopt Ted Tonks, to go live in 12 Grimmauld Place together. It would have been a nice, pretty tribute to all the Marauders, who, god damn it, are ALL dead.)
A lot of the time when I read any fic in any fandom, it prompts me to decide things. Sometimes I love some aspect of some fic so much that I decide to adopt it, for my personal version of how things "really" are. Sometimes it'll bring up something you don't see in canon -- like the way a mother/daughter relationship works, and it won't quite work for me but it will prompt me to decide how I see that mother/daughter relationship. Anyway of course in this case all that ended in me thinking about how I would sort them, which of course I required
tinhooves' input, that is just how the world works. Because I wasn't sure I saw them in the same house: I liked Scorpius the Hufflepuff, but Rose seemed a lot more Ravenclaw (maybe Gryffindor, but not really anything else), and whenever I actually read the epilogue I dooo feel like Albus is a big fat Slytherin waiting to happen. But spreading them out across houses that way made it harder for them to be a ~trio~ (I don't know why this cliche appeals so deeply to me when the actual shipping of them really really does not). Sooooooooo we decided to make them all three quasi-losers within their own houses: I mean, really, what is better than a merry band of misfits.It went sort of like this: Scorpius, mortified about his sorting, tries to pretend it doesn't exist. The Slytherin first year boys are kind of a mob, no one's really close yet but they're united, and Scorpius just tries to pretend that he belongs too. He sits with them in classes, tries to sit with them during mealtimes, mostly they just kind of lol at his life, not accepting but not particularly unaccepting either. This is how he and Albus become friends, and once you're friends with Albus it's sort of a straight shot to being friends with Rose: they got matched as babies and he just doesn't exactly know how to be without her, not yet. They have a cousin who's a Ravenclaw like Rose a year above them: Louis Weasley (Bill and Fleur's youngest), and when Rose decides she doesn't particularly like anyone in her year in Ravenclaw (she has strong opinions about people, Albus and Scorpius -- omg seriously though WHAT ARE THOSE NAMES, JO -- are a little more prone to neutrality), she just starts sitting with him and his friends at the Ravenclaw table. It's kind of like Al and the gang of Slytherins though: there are friends, and then there are friends. Just because you get along well enough with someone in class to sit with them doesn't always mean you want to spend all your free time with them, and that is sort of where the trioness comes in, I guess: Scorpius sort of insinuates himself into Albus and Rose's thing, and no one has ever done that before, so they kind of just scoot over and let him.
Hold onto your seatbelts, this gets waaaaay more complicated. We actually named all the students in their year, this is Stephanie's pretty spreadsheet:
I am still kind of proud of us for this, the names are so plausibly Rowlingesque to me. And we have the perfect number of familiar ones and unfamiliar ones! There are all kinds of miniature stories we came up with in coming up with that list, but I thought I'd mention my favorites:
- The Hufflepuff boys sort of work like this: eventually Scorpius gives up and accepts his Hufflepuff-ness, and he and Stanley get along fine. (He doesn't realize Stanley's muggle-born until a little bit later, and he has this lame internal moment of "IT'S OKAY, I ACCEPT YOU ANYWAY, STANLEY"). Millard Mullins is sort of generally unlikeable, though, that gross guy that's sort of difficult to be fond of. I mentally compare him to the guy in my middle school who used to spend play practice lying on top of rolled up gym mats and practicing making out with them. At least I think that's what he was doing?
- Stanley spends most of his time nursing his crush on Harriet Edgecombe (Marietta's daughter, father mysteriously unknown), who is oblivious. This began on the Hogwarts Express, where they sat in the same compartment. His friendship with Scorpius, and Scorpius' friendship with Rose, ARE V. ADVANTAGEOUS IN THIS WAY
- Lavender Brown is Despina Zabini's mother, hmm
- Persephone Cresswell kind of bullies Albus.
- Franny Spyre sort of goes on and on about being muggle-born, everything is "well you know I'm muggle-born and we..." with her.
We (okay fine Stephanie did all the work in this case) also class-ranked them:
1. Harriet Edgecombe (another reason Rose hates her)
2. Rose Weasley
3. Atticus Octavius
4. Basil Woodridge
5. Cillian Donelly
6. Adelaide Sinistra
7. Persephone Cresswell
8. Colette Laclaire
9. Noah Lissinger
10. Evan Leicster
Although in retrospect: I don't know. At the time I decided that Albus and Scorpius were smart (Scorpius was very booksmart, Albus was very intuitive) but maybe not top 10 smart, but now I wonder if maybe the wouldn't have to be -- maybe down there at the bottom instead of Noah Lissinger and Evan Leicster, although I shouldn't just say that because I'm not looking at the house balance properly, THESE THINGS HAVE TO BE CONSIDERED, because so much of what I see of their dynamic is based on intelligence. They don't have dark wizards to defeat, you have to find adventures for them in other ways, and in this case "other ways" is Rose. Rose is sort of their leader, borderline batty and intellectually obsessive and disgustingly curious. She's not Hermione, her actual classes matter less to her than her intellectual obsessions -- she has a thing with time travel, and another with muggle science and how it relates to magic (this starts second year, she makes Albus and Scorpius both sign up for Muggle Studies), and another with how to quantify "real" divination, and also Animagi. She thrives on magical theory, and she just sort of drags Albus and Scorpius along with her, and they can't really be bothered to complain much. She sort of falls in and out of all of her little obsessions, you know how it goes. Way back then I wrote this short little thing to show Stephanie how I saw her, because I never can quite explain it:
Rose was in the back corner of the library with a tall, black Ravenclaw boy their age whose name always escaped Albus, half-hidden behind a stack of books (which must've been why they missed her the first two times they checked here), completely oblivious to the fact that he and Scorpius have been tumbling up and down staircases for the better part of an hour looking for her everywhere so they could share.
"Rose, we found--" Albus began breathlessly, but Scorpius was quicker.
"That's not for Defense," he told Rose suspiciously.
"No," she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste and as she lowered the small book Albus could now see was labeled "Your Time Turner: An Owner's Manual". "I'll do that tomorrow-- right now I'm um-- looking up time turner malfunctions--"
"There's no way you can have a time-turner, you're eleven," Scorpius said in a voice half-disdainful and half-full of awe.
"Oh, no, of course I don't," said Rose quickly. "No, I was looking through the safety section because there's nothing else in the library that even comes close to discussing the theory behind time-turners... I guess they don't want us messing about..."
Albus shot the other boy at her table a furitive glance as he grabbed a chair across the table from Rose, suspicious that the boy was not nearly as oblivious to their conversation as he looked. Scorpius apparently had no such qualms, and had already taken the chair opposite Rose so he could have a go at her. "-- what a mess we'd be in if everyone decided they wanted to have a go and see what their parents were like as teenagers? Is that what you're trying to do?"
"Of course not!" said Rose, looking irritated. "Do you know nothing about time turners? You can't just go back and change things, or it would've already happened..."
Scorpius gave Albus a look, his eyes wide. Scorpius doesn't have the benefit of years-- Rose was an enchanter of ideas that made no sense, Al has known this since they were four and broke Uncle Charlie's wand and a couple of bones trying to "take the magic of flying out" of Lily's toy broom. Rose was older and more tempered now, but the wild look in her eyes as she jumped from theory to theory never changed. He was sure she would someday puzzle together some mystery of magic that would make her so much more important than the daughter of two war heroes, but for now she was still just an eleven-year-old in the back corner of the Hogwarts library.
"Rose," he started to say again, but her name had barely formed his lips before she was explaining.
"They call broken time rips, don't you think that's significant?"
"To what?" Albus asked, as Scorpius questioned, "Broken time?"
"If what it does is rip," Rose continued, not inclined to answer either question, "When you try to use a broken time turner-- don't you think?-- they ought to've thought of a way to control that kind of mistake-- well, maybe not, I s'pose you have to be really careful not to break a time turner-- if only they said what the rips do..."
"Rose," said Scorpius slowly, "What're you after?"
"I think there's got to be a way to open little rips, like... windows-- so you could see but not touch... it's have to be really advanced spellwork though... really advanced..."
Al rolled his eyes in exasperation, but Scorpius was learning toward Rose. "You're still partnering me for Wilcox's essay on theory of Transfiguration, right?"
"Stop," groaned Albus, "You two should feel free to mess about with the fabric of time when we've moved beyond basic levitation, but right now we have to go to Hagrid's and see if he can tell us anything about the re'em--"
I love this vision of them Stephanie helped me shape so much that sometimes it's disappointing to have them pop up while reading fic and be any other way than this way.
This post feels really weirdly Imymemine, I guess because I am recording my personal canon mostly so I have an easy way to look back on it; but I wanted to ask, too, if anyone else had any strong personal convictions about how things were for any character post-epilogue or just post-DH. Because talking about personal canon is the greatest.
