primeideal

(A lot of this might show up in comments to replies, I thought I'd put the whole long ramble here in case people specifically cared about the thought process behind the fic.)

It's Reveals Time at HP Friendship, which means I get to take credit for "Before Peace"! (Also on Ao3 and FFN.) This is a fic centered on the Ravenclaws in Dumbledore's Army during the year of book seven. As a self-declared (and other tests-declared) Ravenclaw, and a big fan of anything that explores the Hogwarts resistance, this was the perfect prompt for me.

But it wasn't really. To be specific, the prompt in full specified "He talks about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising like its more magical than Hogwarts, and she listens because she wants to believe they'll make it out of this alive," with extra "Likes" as "History and culture, especially Jewish and Indian history and culture. In-character Luna. A look into house dynamics. Padma's always homosexual in my head, if that plays into it at all." This was on the early side in terms of the prompts left for the fest, so I was very excited by the potential fic that other people might write for it--like I said, I adore these characters and the setting. But...it just seemed too intimidating for me; identity politics and related issue-fic aren't really things I enjoy writing, overall.

Well, you know how it goes; the "one week left to claim" notice came around, nobody had called dibs, and I took it up. In fact, early when I first saw the prompt I think I had toyed with the conceit of "oh, if I tried this anyway, I might use a surprise narrator who's not revealed until the end." But by the time I actually claimed it, I'd embraced another formal constraint: the ghazal.

As I used it (here and in some other fan-poetry I still need to upload), it's a poem consisting of a series of couplets; the second line of each ends with a repeated word or phrase, and a bunch of other things that rhyme with it. Once I figured out how I wanted to end it, I started working backwards to come up with thematically-related rhymes, and those drove the plot forward--it was a good way for me to focus on a lot of different characters without running long and writing something I didn't have time for. Just as importantly, it provided me a way to integrate some level of Indian culture into the narrative without having to be too heavy-handed or awkward. (Side note: another ghazal tradition is to reference the poet pseudonymically in the last couplet; this would be ICly Padma, hence the "lotus" namedropping.) The quote in the summary comes from Agha Shahid Ali, a poet and editor whose anthology of ghazals (and praise of their formal constraints) helped me really embrace the form. (Several years ago I'd had to read and write a different version of English poetry, based on the ghazal form but without any of the rhyming and repetition. Unsurprisingly, it didn't "take" then...but that's another story.)

Wow, this is getting long, sorry. If you're still here, a couple more thoughts on specific characters as they came across. Luna is, of course, one of my favorites, but I wasn't sure how to really portray her if there was a fear of being OOC. I decided to sort of call back to the first scene where we meet her, in which Ron comes up with a one-liner involving a baboon's backside, everyone chuckles, but Luna just completely laughs and laughs--in her Ravenclaw way, she appreciates good wordplay, perhaps to a fault. So I decided to stress some canon but maybe less-seen sides of her.

Michael Corner! I'd recently written a fic (which I don't think "worked" as well as this one, let this be a lesson to me) in which, under the influence of some unsavory elements, he becomes a tool of an AU dark side, and I wanted to make up for that by showing his canonically brave side. I think his portrayal in the books definitely goes to show, you don't need to be at all a nice guy to be a hero.

For my headcanon for Harry's classmates in general, I'm indebted to "Secrets of the Class List," an in-depth analysis of different characters' likely demographic backgrounds based on their names and what we've seen of Rowling's writing style (trying to create a representative cross-section of Britain as a whole). It allows me to not actually delve too deeply into the identity politics, as above, but to have a starting point when I want to portray the spiritually diverse and intellectually curious Ravenclaws. I see some of myself in this Terry--by turns wearing many hats, both faithful and geeky. :)

Oh, and continuity nods--like I said, I really like writing about this year. The new fifth-year prefect who appears anonymously is none other then Orrel Trask, one of the main characters in my fic for last year's friendship fest. (Shameless plug if you're interested: original link, Ao3 and FFN. The Quidditch game mentioned (in both fics) is described more extensively in another of my super long fics (same timeframe, different protagonist). I'll also put in another shameless plug for the much shorter "The Golden Generation" (Ao3, FFN ), which is another bunch of short glimpses at different DA characters during book seven.

Anyway, thanks so much for an engaging prompt, and many thanks again to everyone who read--I'm so glad this worked for you! :)