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Shhhh…. Rewilding is praxis

Biodiversity can be achieved through executive dysfunction!

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a message for workaholics + people who call sunfish “useless” animals

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So I'm not putting this as a reply to your comment, because I'm not one HUNDRED percent sure how it's shaking out yet, but I figure you would be quite pleased and should know. It turns out that Remus has developed a degree of insight and self-preservation in his decades of experience on the roller-coaster of his brain, and also that Lily has some skill at intervening in destructive spirals, once she's been clued in to their precise nature well enough that it doesn't get all muddled up in her OWN spiral and, long story a bit shorter...

Remus's trajectory is smoothing out quite rapidly from the previously anticipated crash into rock bottom. He appears to actually be recalibrating himself towards a plan that... verges on the healthy? VERY EXCITING DEVELOPMENT. He is looking at the torture machine and questioning whether feeding himself to it actually benefits anyone!! He has learned from previous experiences! Everybody claps!

Oh that is good news! (Although I won’t hold you to it… sometimes one winds up one’s characters, sets them down and they end up vibrating off the table in unexpected directions! Been there in my writing days…)

I do, indeed, clap!

I was dreading Remus disappearing on Lily (and how that would hurt her) and dreading his lack of obvious non-ditch destinations but… I actually would like to see him leave for a bit (no pressure AT ALL of course! Just clarifying!)

I think getting out of the situation for a while might help him a bit. (The super super petty part of me hopes that Harry misses him, and the garden browns, and that there are no clean sheets or plates. Your house James?? Then YOU clean the windows. But I really need to let go of that petty part! it’s not actually fair and I know it!)

I’m loving the insights I’m getting from other readers highly variable reactions to all this too.

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Ace allos! ✨

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what are your favorite lichens in each color of the rainbow? Are there any purple lichens?

I am happy you asked:

Red: Lasallia rubignosa

Orange: Teloschistes capensis

Yellow: Candelariella rosulans

Green: Sticta canariensis

Blue: Lobarina scorbiculata

Purple: Peltigera hymenina

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everyone on replies is terrified of this fact but i just think it's so sweet and heartwarming. she's holding our hand and leading us somewhere secret and we're both giggling like kids. i love her

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I meant to make this meme ages ago when pride month was still on but yeah gé (pronounced gay) is the Irish for a goose.

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I did sleep fairly well, thanks!

For what it's worth, I think the agency element is a legitimate reason to find Lily's responses most difficult to forgive. I do think there's also an element—not necessarily for you, but for readers in GENERAL—of reactivity against the interaction between her crisis and her gender. She's holding this lever of death, wanting only to cover her eyes and look away... wanting to DO SOMETHING and SAVE EVERYONE but unable to think of anything to do that won't make it worse... and her backup plan is to sort of stand there and go "Somebody help! Save me! Save me! What do I do?"

One of the unfortunate side effects of a shortage of well-written female characters is the pressure for every fictional woman with any definition at all to singlehandedly make up for all the rest of them. I think Lily is a difficult pill to swallow because she's such a Bad Role Model in so many ways—and so full of contradictions! Feminist with a mind full of internalized misogyny; learned helplessness vs desire to be in control of everything and everyone; full of self-doubt but prone to asserting her opinion as fact; highly sexual but heavily traumatized with significant buried shame; loyal and forgiving and prone to snapping like a reactive dog. She has many, many flaws, and unlike James and Remus, there isn't a beloved archetype that I can think of that she fits very well. James is the cocky hero, Remus is the werewolf with a tortured soul, Lily is... hm. She's kind of a bitch, right?? And very whiny. Does she really have to be that pathetic? Maybe she should just get over herself already and save everybody!!!!

I certainly do not think that you judge Lily more harshly only because she's a woman. It's true about the agency, and also characters are allowed to just rub people the wrong way! But the scaffolding to help readers empathize with Lily simply isn't there. The established tropes are hidden shortcuts—Remus might be upsetting people with his unruly trauma responses, but at least he's behaving according to type! And people who already love the tormented monster boyfriend can easily forgive him for all of it. Lily... if you relate to her, it's a mirror you don't love looking into. If you don't relate to her, you're left with a deeply flawed character and no pre-built schema for empathizing with a Character Like That.

(It's rough enough that I myself have, in at least one irrational spiral, become convinced that she's poorly written and has no personality and now everybody can look at her and know that deep down I'm a misogynist who can't write women. And if I as the author sometimes find it difficult to manage the conflict between Lily and the strong female character in my head, I think it's unreasonable to expect readers not to struggle.)

I also love a good system to analyse, and yes, I agree that that's an autism feature. I would say that other writers are MISSING OUT on your comments, which I truly always look forward to.

Humorous note about the Remus thing: you actually AGREE with him about the undernegotiated kink. HE'S quite sure that was some kind of sexual assault. Lily strongly disagrees with him. (And I'm pretty sure the question of "who is right" is going to be ultimately discarded by the narrative in favour of "what do we do now, though?")

One tragic thing about Remus's situation is that it's both predictable and manageable, if only they had the resources to properly contextualize it. He's having an attachment crisis that's entirely typical of people with severe attachment wounds who are transitioning from monogamy to polyamory. It's NORMAL that he's reacting like this is a threat to his survival and is being hit with overpowering feelings of jealousy and rage. It's normal and it doesn't make him a monster and it doesn't mean that he's incapable of adapting to polyamory. But he doesn't know any of that—none of them do, because they're stranded in a time and place where nobody knows much of anything about polyamory. (Unlike here and now, where... almost nobody knows much of anything about it.)

Remus COULD theoretically have said out loud to Lily in the planning phase, "Look, I have strong and painful feelings about the prospect of sharing you with James. Remember how badly I coped with the pregnancy? Yeah, this feels worse. But it's definitely what I choose and I'm fully committed to it—there's no better option for me. I just feel a lot of distress about it, which I'm hoping will get better once it's a tangible reality." And if he'd told her that, they could have made a mitigation plan. Like maybe she could have taken James directly from the resurrection to a hotel or something and stayed there for the first week—she could have explained things to him in privacy and they could have had time and space to figure out what their relationship was now and Remus would have the security of a defined timeline and wouldn't have to WATCH his wife falling back in love with her long-lost husband. That would have been much better for everyone.

Unfortunately, he didn't say anything of the sort, because he couldn't, because he found his own feelings too threatening to voice. So he fell back on the good old 'conceal don't feel' standby taught to him by his abusive father, and now here we are! (And he was nevertheless doing an okay job of holding himself stable until James made a deliberate and expert attempt to trigger him! Nobody is free from responsibility for this mess and I absolve them all of it.)

Oh yes absolutely! Remus could have said those things (and Lily I guess could have easily predicted those things and tried to make them safe to talk about I guess?) but I’m not going to blame either of them for that because they aren’t psychologists! And even if they were they aren’t their own psychologists. Pre bringing people back from the dead counselling should be mandatory! I swear I have adopted pets with more counselling and vetting of the home situation than this come pick up your dead husband at 2100, bring your infant business!

I can SO relate to Remus’s ‘I can totally white knuckle through this, oh wait I can’t, now I’ve fully dissociated at the dentist’ instincts (to pick a completely random example that definitely didn’t happen to me recently). People with cPTSD white knuckle through things all the time. “I will survive going to the pharmacy today because I have to” isn’t all that different to “I will survive sharing my lifepartner with my reanimated best friend, who is everything wonderful that I am not, because I have to.” It’s just life.

I relate a little less to the jealousy/posessiveness/anger manifestation of it. ( I tend to go a little more learned helplessness with it), but it’s definitely understandable!

And oh no! Lily isn’t badly written at all! She’s just complicated. Strong female character is a blast when you are watching an Aliens or Terminator movie but she doesn’t belong here. Teenage Lily is easy to relate to. She’s exactly like a teenager. Adult Lily is… yes, more work. She’s equally passive but less vulnerable. But she WOULD be. Even in Lily’s own points of view, her churning anxieties are on the surface, because they would be. There’s history to “I’m simultaneously not doing beauty hard enough AND I spend too much money on beauty.” There’s society and structural oppression and deep deep trauma. She should be crying in a corner but she can’t because she’s got the lever of Damocles to hold and blackberry to wipe off her kids face.

There aren’t archetypes for woman deeply wounded by the patriarchy but isn’t being kickass power fantasy about it. But there should be. (The closest I can think of is Jane Eyre and she annoys the hell out of me!)

I am glad that Lily annoys me. It’s work I have to do.

James is… James. Yeah he’s been mean as hell at times. But he’s twenty one, matured in a war that orphaned him and was then murdered only to be dropped onto the funhouse hell mirror of his life and home about two hours later. He’s still in the peracute psychological trauma phase and basically is doing well if he’s not setting things on fire.

(Is that me letting him off to easily because he’s the cocky hero? Maybe? I don’t THINK so, I just don’t feel like he’s had enough time to get his feet under him. It doesn’t seem fair to judge him yet)

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Love your thoughts and also please don't think that I expected you to respond immediately! I was just FRUSTRATED about the brain bees and wished to complain about it to someone, thought you seemed like a likely person to actually find the rant interesting, and then once I was slightly less full of bees reconsidered the advisability of unsolicited rants. I'm glad it was (I think?) not disruptive to you.

I fully agree about the powerful aversion to looking for structural 'villains'—I think a significant part of it is because awareness of a structural villain simply feels BAD. You cannot have a cool boss fight with a structural villain. The hero cannot defeat them with fists or with snappy little comebacks, and you cannot have a satisfying closing shot where they are led away in chains. A structural villain must be painstakingly dismantled or ship of Theseused away into something that isn't killing people anymore... and that's not really something that a single person or even an all-star team can just DO.

The Harry Potter world in general has a significant amount of structural villainy just kind of hanging around, and my work shines a couple of little spotlights on it, but Fidelity in particular is not ABOUT defeating the villains. There are things you can do as a person to help the people around you survive the machine. There are things you can do to weaken the machine. You can distribute 'herbal remedies' to neighbors with cancer that you aren't legally allowed to cure. You can be a famous Quidditch player slash war hero and do a lot of shirtless photoshoots for magazines which you accompany with pithy statements about werewolf and house elf rights, thus radicalizing teenage girls in impressive numbers. You can live and survive and raise children who are safe and who are just a little bit more free from what infests your brain and you can hope that it counts.

It makes sense that people struggle with stories that are not about defeating a villain. And I'm definitely not under any illusion that my art is perfect. If I were I would find it much easier to sleep at night. 😆 But I'm glad I'm experimenting with these themes now and getting to test the waters of People Reacting To It in a context where writing is a theoretically low-stakes hobby and not my family's livelihood.

I love your thoughts about how the way people assign blame in this tragedy of good intentions can shed light on subconscious thought processes. If I AM in a blaming space with my own story, I definitely find it easiest to blame... Lily. But I don't feel like I have to do a lot of digging to figure out why, because... yeah, no, it's definitely because I relate the most to Lily. 😆

Going to sleep now but thank you for sharing your thoughts, I really enjoyed them. And I got a few hundred more words on the Remus scene, so that's something! (I'm not currently working on the next chapter—that's in a resting phase before revision. This is the chapter after that.)

Not disruptive at all! I was more than happy to read your thoughts, I was just sorry I wasn’t immediately available for beekeeping assistance.

It’s probably the ASD but I actually love structural analysis, systemic failure analysis, and understanding how cognitive shortcuts affect people. I have legitimately put thought into how I would go about integrating people unexpectedly brought back from the dead to try to avoid this kind of thing…

And honestly I get the bees… I rarely comment because I assume that most authors don’t want to hear my weird thoughts about their writing (which is odd because when I did write fanfic I was desperate for any sort of comment!)… I was so upset though about the people hating on Remus and Lily that I felt like I had to say something. I hoped it would be welcome because it seemed to me that you weren’t writing it with a villain in mind.

As I’ve mentioned before I disagree with Remus regarding the undernegotiated kink but apart from that I’m not sure what else he was meant to do apart from bootstrap an entirely new personality. Which can’t be done. I am a decade into therapy and even with excellent professional help and a decade it can’t be done. Certainly not without help in a few months!

And yeah… the Harry Potter world is full of injustices which its creator is just not that interested in as far as I can tell. I found it insidious because I kept expecting it to come to the forefront of the story as the books advanced (the discourse I remember from the time was very much that as Harry got older the engagement with the world would become age appropriately more complex). Obviously that’s not what happened. And now I’m stuck with yet another horrendously problematic hyperfixation! The joys of ASD! (So I only engage with sufficiently subversive fanfic…)

We need more stories where traumatised people live under systemic injustice and can’t fix it but can be loved and fulfilled and make the world a little better anyway. Because that’s what actually traumatised people have to do.

I THINK I’m inclined to blame Lily in my unfair moments because in a way she has the most agency (the switch for the trolley problem as you said). Technically James probably has the most financial power (I can’t imagine wizarding courts would award his fortune otherwise) but realistically, his not financially supporting Harry and thus to some extend Lily seems implausibly out of character. Lily has both the most agency to make choices about what she wants and also the most information about what she wants. She is doing the best she realistically can, I know, but I think that’s where my instincts against her come from.

At least I hope that’s what it is. I do not like the fact that I seem to be holding the woman in this situation to a higher standard than the men! I don’t THINK it’s that…

I hope you sleep/slept well!

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Hmm I think the rant may have been excessively rantful. Please do not feel obligated to respond to it. I am just trying to write Remus and feeling so sad about his state and so FRUSTRATED with the conditioning that drives us as people to look at people in pain and ask "okay but which one is the bad guy?" I just want to write a story where people hurt a lot and are sad and hurt each other and then forgive each other and themselves and are happy. That's all! It's all I ever wanted. Anyway. I appreciate your deep empathy for the sad broken man. He needs it so much.

Oh, I’m sorry! I am happy to respond I was just distracted the last few hours.

Honestly I agree with you that I don’t feel like there is much point in looking for a bad guy in situations like this. Sometimes there IS no bad guy. It’s the just world fallacy to think that there is. Just because good people are hurt and in pain doesn’t mean that anyone is the bad guy.

As you’ve said before, people like reasons for their stories. An animus. An acting agent that caused this situation.

The bad guy in your story if there is one is structural. Some unspeakables ethics committee somewhere. Some reintegration psychology specialist. It should never have been done like this. It couldn’t help but fail.

Unfortunately humans are not trained to look for structural reasons for things (or perhaps trained NOT to look for structural reasons for things!) So there’s a strong instinct to blame one or more of the three main people involved for people having a bad time.

And people’s criteria in those situations can be fascinating

Eg.

-who behaved closest to the preexisting social expectations

- who is trying the hardest

- who took active actions instead of passive ones

- who could have done things differently

- who do I relate to the most

- what actions are owed and which are optional

It all gets philosophical quickly (one of the many reasons it’s so good!). I think a lot of readers would benefit from parsing out why they lay blame where they are.

When I’m being thoughtful, I agree that you have the diabolic balance pretty close and I blame nobody. But when I’m being unfair I am biased most towards Remus and most prone to blame… Lily. And I have actually been really trying to interrogate why that is and what it says about the way I think on an instinctual level.

And you are absolutely right. They are HERE. And nobody can get out of their own fears and insecurities quite enough to really ask the others what they need or recognise the real genuine olive branch moments. The coffee Remus made James. The waffles. Lily being ready to talk the morning after. James trying to clear the air.

They ALL tried. But they can’t hear each other right now and that’s a JOINT tragedy.

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I suspect that the angrier "Lily and Remus should both go die" comments also come from people without a lot of life experience—they can't comprehend how grief and trauma can complicate someone's emotions, so they just see two people who don't give a shit about James. Also, I deliberately tagged the Lily/Remus relationship before Lily/James in order to try to get ahead of the assumption that James is her MAIN partner, but then of course I have people thinking that Remus is the main partner, especially as she's been so insistently prioritizing him for most of the beginning.

I'm very glad you did comment! Having someone who's solidly On His Side goes a long way to reassure me that I haven't gravely misbalanced the story on accident.

I do personally relate the most to Lily, having generously endowed her with several of my own character flaws. (Compulsive chameleon instincts driving her to either agree with or lash out at everything people say, immobility under stress, emotional volatility, need to manage people, spirals into self-blame at the drop of a hat—most of what's wrong with her is locally sourced.) Giving a character your own problems is all fun and games until people are saying she needs to lose both her husbands and maybe just not exist!

And of course Remus's suite of problems are a composite of a couple of people very dear to me—that scene where Lily holds him in bed and tries to understand what's wrong while he's nearly unable to talk was drawn from life. (James is also full of traits I've harvested from my own loved ones, but nobody hates him. And nobody hates Rosie for her problematic behaviour of taking everything out of all the drawers and cabinets, so my kid is also getting off scot free. 😆)

I will say that Remus has a BIT more in terms of 'friend on his side' than it may presently appear. James's conversation with Ginger continued after the scene ended, and she gave him some advice. Sooner or later, she's going to see what he's made of her advice. She's not impressed.

I think you are right that life experience is a big part of it. James is quite a bit younger than the others (those seven years are big ones even for people not traumatised by war, poverty, disability, mental illness etc.) and it’s a credit to your ability as a writer that he FEELS younger. It’s expertly done.

I have always felt that people with decent self esteem struggle to understand the actions of people with very poor self esteem too. More controversially, I think people who tend to respond to conflict with a ‘they’re dead to me’ avoidant anger reaction often seem to struggle to understand different conflict styles? (Want to clarify that estrangement can be healthy under some circumstances but would be an overreaction to anything that’s occurred in your story so far for example).

I like Lily a lot, she feels like a real person. I don’t like every choice she’s made, mostly from a strategic point of view rather than feeling like she’s done anything particularly unethical. I do think that lunch conversation was unethical but I also don’t think it was typical for her so she very much does not deserve to not exist! (Were I Remus I think this might be a ‘go stay with a friend and ask for couples counseling’ kind of event, but financial abuse is a trigger for me and would not be for everyone, so I’m not expecting that sort of reaction. And if I’m super honest about myself I’d probably finish the windows first…)

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I'm happy to chat here—it's just a bit clunky! (You've probably already checked your settings, and I don't even know what would cause that in settings. Maybe if your blog was somehow set to private? This website baffles me.)

Anyway, yeah, I'm finding that one of the interesting things about this story is how this intensely charged situation is triggering LOTS of people in so many different directions. Which I guess I should have anticipated more than I did, especially considering that one of my primary objectives as a writer is to craft emotionally powerful narratives. (I did completely fail to consider how the fanfic genre means that people are interacting not only with my story and my concept of these characters but with their own pre-existing concepts. That's not a problem I've ever had to navigate in my original work!)

It's also fascinating to see how different readers apportion blame amongst the trio. I feel such intense sympathy with all three of them all of the time that I forget not everyone feels the same! But of course it's inevitable that readers will be drawn to take sides while they're in conflict, particularly when their own personal traumas are triggered.

So yeah, if you want to talk more about what's up with Remus, or a little bit about where the story is going for him, I'm happy to do that. I'm not averse to sharing a few spoilers if it helps people feel less nail-biting anxiety between chapters! This section is where James gets a bit more aggressive and self-interested, which is naturally aggravating for everyone who wants Remus to just catch a fucking break for once. (I am one of these people, but I have the advantage of knowing roughly what's going to happen and being in debatable control of this runaway train. 😆)

Hi, yes!

I have checked all the settings etc. I can read and ‘heart’ things and do asks, but not comment on posts or send PMs. I will give the algorithms a few days to Turing test me before I give up entirely I think!

I can easily believe that this story is triggering and upsetting lots of people. Honestly it was people hating on Remus that prompted me to comment in the first place. I got the sense at the beginning that you were intending to write three flawed but good-hearted well-intentioned people with no one of them particularly blameworthy or blameless for the situation. I was surprised and upset that Remus was being read as the bad guy when… he hadn’t really done anything?

As you correctly point out it is fan fiction so I suppose some readers come with a preexisting investment in ‘Jily’ but your story is clearly tagged so… I don’t fully understand. Then again a lot of hetero allistic culture feels pretty impenetrable to me to I’m not the best judge 😂

Thank you for sharing your fan fiction in spite of the unpleasant comments. You are braver than I! I started a fic in this fandom but ended up deleting it due to unpleasant comments and demands I use a tag I wasn’t comfortable with.

I wouldn’t ask you to share spoilers, especially out in the ‘open’. I actually felt better reading some of the other comments that supported Remus on that chapter. (Made me feel less like an alien!) and it’s so lovely that you took the time to check I was okay as well.

I get the sense that you relate most closely to Lily? I know I was quite harsh about her choices in this chapter, feeling like she crossed a line, and set a bad example for Harry. I do fully admit I am biased, though! And also James’s point of view on that interaction is probably the most opaque one (I appreciate this choice as a story telling choice… don’t get me wrong… it’s just a watershed moment in Remus and Lily’s relationship from the perspective of neither leaves me with so many questions!)

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Tumblr treating you any better today?

It still won’t let me PM, I think you are right that I’m being held in some sort of bot pen and it won’t let me out!

I am comfortable chatting about your story visibly on my blog, (and I could periodically delete I think) but I didn’t want to exceed your comfort levels

I know you have been getting some mean comments on the fic and might not want to risk being “found” on tumblr…

So I’m happy to wait to get out of the bot pen if you would rather

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That's totally okay! Is it a new blog? If you just made it, maybe it's put restrictions on you in case you're a spam bot. I am going to go to sleep now because my kid's finally out, but I very much look forward to chatting more!

It’s an old blog but I needed to change the email. That may have upset things

Tumblr would not be the first being to mistake me for a bot…

Sleep well!

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I am bad enough at Tumblr that I'm now not sure whether you get notified of my replies on that other ask lol. Totally fine if you got them and hadn't responded yet—i just wanted to say here too that you did not upset me at all, and I appreciate the meltdown

Hi

Im so sorry

Im struggling to get tumblr to work for me right now!

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This is saravelda17. I think I've found the right blog? I am honestly Not Good at Tumblr 😆

Hi yes, you have! Hello!

Im sorry for having a little meltdown in your comment section today… and I know you’ve asked me to tread gently when commenting about Lily and I hope I didn’t cross a line