#every HP character has fascinating details and many have good points but I am HARD. PRESSED. to see Aberforth's

[firendgold]

Aberforth Dumbledore is not only biased and mistaken, he is also a coward. May Albus strike me down for bashing his little brother, but by now he should be used to it.

Like Horace Slughorn, Aberforth had to practically be shamed by Harry into doing the right thing. Just because he eventually revealed he'd been concealing a hiding place for the persecuted students at Hogwarts doesn't mean he was doing much more than that. Harry looked at the mirror shard that Aberforth had part of at least twice before Aberforth sent Dobby to save him. Aberforth could have provided Harry with advice, reassurance, even warnings against his brother if he so chose, as early as chapter 2 of Deathly Hallows when Harry saw his eye in the mirror and thought it was Albus--but he did not.

Just because Aberforth has a much better sense of duty to his family doesn't make him a better man than Albus in the long run. Perhaps he was at age 14, but he spent most of the long years after Ariana's death being grumpy and being passive.

Aberforth only jumped in to tell Harry to run away at the eleventh hour, when Harry was confident he was close to destroying all of Voldemort's Horcruxes--when giving up would have been the most foolish.

Aberforth did not tell Harry to abandon the wizarding world and save himself because he cared about Harry as a person. He did it so he could deliver a last dig at his departed brother. The bitterness over Albus' mistakes was still festering over a century later, and Aberforth was willing to risk selling Wizarding Britain entirely to Voldemort if it meant he could poison Albus' image in just one more person's mind--even though the person he was speaking to was already extremely disillusioned about Albus by this point.

How on earth does one bitter trauma dump show that Aberforth, who should know damn well that Voldemort would follow Harry no matter where he ran, cares more than Harry about Albus, who dedicated his life to protecting Harry even after learning he was destined to die?

It doesn't. After all that ranting, Aberforth still ended up being schooled by a seventeen year-old boy about doing what's right in the face of what's easy.

not to be controversial on main but aberforth displayed more genuine concern for harry's wellbeing during a 15 minute interaction than dumbledore did in 15 years and that's the tea

[pebblysand]

[the thoughts on canon-compliance you did not ask for.]

last night between 2 and 3 in the morning (look, i couldn’t sleep, got up to write, then got caught up, okay? don’t judge me for my terrible sleeping patterns please) i had a super interesting discussion with a few people on the hinny discord channel about the definition of canon-compliant-ness. i think this is fascinating because to be honest, before getting into the hp fandom, i didn’t even think this was something one could disagree about. to me there was what was canon, and what wasn’t. a very black-and-white sort of system. i’m finding that it’s not.

through the discussions that i’ve had both on my fics and other people’s fics, it seems that i can narrow down - in the hp fandom - three elements of canon.

i. the events of the books/films

now, as a general disclaimer, you can obviously argue about whether the films are ‘canon.’ you can also argue whether cursed child is canon. there’s a lot of elements which differ between those and lots of opinions about how to look at them. personally, i tend to ignore cursed child. as to the books v. films, i pick and choose what suits my story more. generally, that’ll be the books. but for instance, i’m writing a harry&hermione friendship one shot right now, and there are a lot of movie-isms in that story because that is an aspect that was more explored in the films. however, for the purposes of this post, i’m mainly considering the source material to be the seven books. nothing more or less.

having said that, to me personally, that’s what ‘canon’ is: the events of the story and the characters that gravitate around those events, as described in the source material. things like: tom riddle killing lily and james, or harry, ron and hermione rescuing the philosopher’s stone. anything departing from that is, de facto, an ‘au.’ the whole world of what-if scenarios: what if Harry was sorted into slytherin, what if dudley was a wizard, all of those, to me, are aus.

generally, both as a reader and a writer, those are not scenarios i’m particularly drawn to. my default answer to those what-if scenarios is: ‘well, if harry is sorted into slytherin, there’s no story.’ or at the very least, there’s no story as i know it, and if there’s no story as i know it, then i’d rather read/write original fiction. it’s obviously a very personal preference and there are exceptions to this preference. i loved the changeling [1] for instance, and love the self-aware style of dirgewithoutmusic’s aus [2]. but as a general rule, that is not my preferred genre.

now, aside from the what-if scenarios, there’s also the question of filling in the gaps of the story itself. like, i find it interesting that we only make tsunamis [3] is labelled as ‘canon-compliant’ because i get the feeling that a lot of people would disagree that a fic in which hermione is harry’s first kiss is canon compliant. but, by exploiting the silence sometimes left by the author and turning it to your advantage, are you writing an au? is a negative space canon? is silence canon?

again, as a matter of personal opinion, i would not push my definition of canon-compliance as including blank spaces. to me, as long as it does not contradict the letter of the text, adding in events to the books to suit your story (i’ll address character in point ii) does not make your fic an au. to give another example that was brought up to me regarding my own work, i don’t believe that the events described in chapter nine of castles [4] are au because they exist in a blank space of the books. the fact that harry didn’t notice the 1:1s between ginny and amycus doesn’t mean they didn’t happen, it just means that they’re not in the positive space described by the books.

ii. the characters/characterisation

(as a quick vocab note, please note that below, i’m using the terms ‘ooc’ to mean that the characterisation of a character in a fic is not canon-compliant. they’re synonyms to me.)

now, while the above was pretty straight forward, i believe that this is where i perhaps differ from the masses in my interpretation of what “canon-compliance” means. more i discuss with people, the more i realise that i don’t really think there’s a real ‘canon’ characterisation. or at least not in the big things. like, yeah, it’s canon that harry likes treacle tart, because that’s a fact. but anything that is down to psychology or perspective of the character is, to me, generally up for grabs.

as a human, i believe that there’s things that people do, events that they go through, that condition them to act a certain way. while there is a core to every human being, i personally believe that in life, anyone would basically be capable of doing anything, given the right circumstances. i’ve recently - rightfully - been told my writing is all about the power of choice in our life, the reasons why we make those choices and the people those choices lead us to be. for example, do i think i might murder someone tomorrow? probably not. do i think i might be capable of murdering someone in wartime? perhaps? i don’t know, that’s not the world i live in and my life choices have not lead me to find out the answer to that. however, my point is: to me, good ‘characterisation’ is down to the circumstances and choices outlined in any work of fiction. hence, good characterisation is essentially, to me, equal to good writing.

i often say that good writing could make me believe anything and i mean it. i don’t tend to gravitate towards these fics because these ships are not my personal taste but i genuinely believe that good writing could make me believe in drarry or rarry if it tried. it’s funny because over the course of the discussion yesterday on discord, this was brought up ‘well, no one tags drarry as canon compliant,’ and i’m kind of like, i don’t know whether or not they do because i don’t read it but if they did and none of it contradicted the events as detailed in the books, perhaps it could be? like, that would take really good writing (imo), but good writing has - on occasion - made me believe in dramione a couple of times, so why not? in ‘til the sirens come calling [5], good writing made me 100% believe that harry and hermione would have an affair together. in we only make tsunamis [3], it makes me believe that they had this quiet little relationship building throughout hogwarts that we never knew about.

now, though, i suppose the question isn’t: do i believe it? the question is: is it canon? and, i think that’s where i differ from most people because to me, it is. to take ‘til the sirens come calling [5] as an example, i believe the fic is an au because hermione marries victor krum in the end. that’s going against the hard fact presented by the epilogue, and thus makes it an au. but i don’t believe the concept of a harmony affair is inherently au, because nothing is inherently au, character-wise. it’s about how you write it. how those people get to that place. that’s what makes canon-compliantness, in my opinion.

for example, for that fic, truth be told, we don’t know what those nineteen years include per canon, so they could very much include an h/hr affair. and whilst i don’t believe that the characters as they are in the books would have an affair together, i believe that the characters as they are presented in the fic, with the events and hardships that they go through, definitely would. good writing, to me, is - in part - recognising that characters are moving on a spectrum and that whilst their decisions/actions might not make sense in book-verse, they make sense in fic-verse. good writing is convincingly moving your characters from book-verse to fic-verse, and it not feeling ‘off.’

if it does feel off, that is bad writing to me, and that is also ooc-ness/non-canon compliant. it means that for whatever reason, the writer has not successfully transitioned and explained said transition through the events outlined in the story. with the right prose, you could make me believe draco decided to take on a career as a ballerina dancer after the war, and it would still be ‘canon-compliant’ to me. on the other hand, i have read fics (i won’t name them because that would be shit and also i don’t keep track of my ‘bad’ reads) where harry, ginny, hermione, or ron all act according to book canon and yet, their motivations felt off to me and completely ooc because the writing didn’t successfully lure me in. specifically, there was a lack of character evolution that i found uninteresting. i read mostly post-war stuff because i want to see my characters grow up [6].

as a last, additional note on characters, i also think that the characters in a story only exist within the prism of how we view them. this means that to me, locking my own understanding of a character's personality as 'canon' is particularly difficult because my understanding of a character is unique. i believe there are as many harry-s or ginny-s or hermione-s as there are readers. so i think saying someone's interpretation of a character isn't canon-compliant is odd because i don't actually believe there's any wrong or right answer. as i said, do i believe it likely that draco would become a professional ballerina? no. but if that works within your understanding of his character as described in the books, who am i to say that is or isn't canon compliant? i'll admit, the idea makes me sort of lol though.

iii. tone

lastly, i’ve come to find (in potter particularly) that canon-compliance might include tone. as in: hp is a story that is a) written in a certain style and b) written for children/young adults.

regarding style at a), this is honestly the main reason why it took me 15 years to write potter fic, despite the fact that i’ve been a fan for even longer than that. i genuinely thought you had to write like jkr. and i, well, don’t write like jkr. i love the books, but i don’t even particularly like her style. i like: camus, and sorj chalandon, and sally rooney, and dirgewithoutmusic and copper_dust [7]. i have zero ambition to write like jkr and don’t particularly want to read stuff that is written like her stuff either. it’s a style that imo works for her, but it doesn’t work for me as written by other people. i don’t particularly think you need to stick to her style to be canon-compliant.

which brings me onto my actual point: b) hp is a story written for children. young adults perhaps, for the later books. it sometimes explores dark themes but the writing style, the tone, etc. is lighthearted enough that it appeals to a younger audience. there’s snogging but there’s no sex, there’s violence but the torture is mostly off-screen, etc. issues like sexual assault, substance abuse, etc. aren’t explicitely brought up in the books, although they would one hundred percent fit in a book about a war that wasn’t necessarily aimed at children. the question is whether this setting and tone is part of what we call ‘canon-compliance.’

honestly, i don’t know. i didn’t think so until it was brought up to me that castles might be a dark!au and i was like: maybe? like, if you want it to be? i know what i like to read in fanfic: i love the exploration of serious themes that were not explored in the books, or explored differently due to the fact that they were written for children. one thing i will say and insist on is that i don’t think castles is all dark. i actually make a point of having lighthearted moments in each and every chapter, even just a notch, because i am attached to the fact that life as a concept is a mixture of good and bad, and you could laugh at the funeral of someone you loved, again in the right circumstances. but yeah, to me the post-war world is dark. so if tone is part of canon-compliance, then yeah in that way castles (as well as most of the stuff i read, to be honest), is a dark!au.

as a last side note, i’m not sure what that means for my other, lighter stuff though. like are the wolf’s just a puppy [8] or slipped [9] more canon-compliant than castles? i never thought about it in those terms but perhaps? it really opens up a world of questions in my mind and i don’t really have the answers to them.

conclusion:

so in sum, as a reader, what i mean as ‘canon compliant’ is basically a) the events as described in the source material and b) the characterisation of characters as they are at the start of the fic. if character evolution is sufficiently justified and well-written in the following thousands of words that the fic has, then said characterisation can still be canon-compliant, even if the characters act different than they would have in the source material itself. i’m a fan of good writing and good writing can make me buy into literally anything. it takes me places that i've never been before and convinces me that those places are the ones i should be in.

as a writer, i hope that regardless of 'compliance,' whatever i write at least makes ‘sense’ to people within the universe, even if they don’t consider it canon-compliant, per se. i feel like i can’t really be the judge of that. from the discussions we had last night, i feel like there are as many versions of what is and isn't canon-compliant as there are people.

.

.

---

[1] the changeling by annerb

[2] the boy with a scar series by dirgewithoutmusic

[3] we only make tsunamis by disOrdely

[4] castles by yours truly

[5] ‘til the sirens come calling by vexmybones

[6] as a side note and to take my own stuff as an another example, i totally agree that harry in castles isn’t harry in the books. i don’t think there’s much debate to be had in that assertion. i wrote him like this frankly because every other fic i’d read didn’t. they often had him sort of continue to be perfectly himself after the war, which i felt wasn’t speaking to me on a deeper level. imo, i think the war’s done a lot of scarring and the fic is about him growing into a new version of himself. so, to me, if i get a comment that says ‘i don’t think harry would act this way but i really love your writing’ it’s somewhat flattering but also confusing because i don’t really understand how one can enjoy the writing but not the characterisation. to me, they’re so intrinsically linked. what the comment tells me is: i think you did a very poor job at explaining character evolution and justifying character x’s [harry’s] choices but i still like your writing, somehow? i suppose that’s nice, but it doesn’t particularly compute in my brain. like, if the character feels off, it means the writing feels off and thus, why are you still reading? i appreciate all and every comment that i get but it doesn’t mean they always make sense in my own brain. if i’m honest, these comments often send me into an ocean of self-doubt about how shit my writing must be.

[7] copper_dust’s work and profile.

[8] the wolf’s just a puppy (and the door’s double locked), again by yours truly

[9] slipped (and said something sort of like your name), same.

[priorireverte]

Congratulations Lizzie!

Your application for Ginny Weasley has been accepted. She certainly has a lot to grapple with, both old and new. On top of the general ‘becoming an adult in the world’ things of one’s twenties! I do not envy her, though I do look forward to seeing her struggles and triumphs.

Please look to the checklist for the next steps and reach out if you have any questions!

OUT OF CHARACTER:

NAME & PRONOUNS: Lizzie, she/her

TIMEZONE: GMT

ACTIVITY LEVEL: The UK is currently in lockdown so I have a lot of free time. I am a part-time student but that is flexible so I know I have the time to dedicate to an rp. I do have health problems which sometimes take me out of commission but I normally can give advance warning for when this might happen and these episodes don’t last long.

ANYTHING ELSE: Suicide is a big trigger for me, as well as suffocation in any form. I’ve been in RPs since I was about 14 so I feel comfortable with the etiquette and what’s expected and I’m excited to find a new place to write and love.

 CHARACTER DETAILS:

NAME: Ginevra “Ginny” Weasley.

BIRTHDATE: 11 August 1981

DEATHDATE: N/A

GENDER, PRONOUNS, and SEXUALITY: Ginny identifies as a cis woman and is very comfortable in that identity and the associated she/her pronouns. Her sexuality is slightly more complicated; she identifies as bisexual, having come to the realisation through her teenage years. She’s never come out to anyone, but it’s not something she hides either. Her reasoning has always been that if people spend enough time with her then they’ll pick it up eventually. She’s always maintained that she would have realised her queerness earlier if it hadn’t been for her all encompassing crush on Harry which took up her first few years at Hogwarts. 

BLOOD STATUS: Pureblood

HOUSE ALUMNI: Gryffindor

OCCUPATION: Reserve Chaser for the Holyhead Harpies. Not exactly where she wants to be, but she knows she needs to pay her dues and work her way up through the roster to make a name for herself as a Quidditch player.

FACECLAIM: Luca Hollestelle I think is probably the best fit

CHARACTER BACKGROUND:

POSTBELLUM: 

Somewhat naively, which could be forgiven considering her age, Ginny had thought that once Voldemort was gone everything would be okay again. Of course, war is not so simple. Sometimes Ginny still feels like the war hasn’t ended because everything isn’t okay again. They lost Fred and the grief from that loss felt all-consuming for so long. They had struggled and fought and it still felt like they’d lost. People celebrated but Ginny just felt adrift. She hadn’t wanted to go back to Hogwarts, but she knew that it was important and so she returned. It felt like a living nightmare. No matter the work put into restoring the castle, Ginny saw bodies in every corner and when she came down for breakfast in the Great Hall she could still see the casualties laid out in rows. 

Quidditch became the best form of escape she had and she threw herself into it with a renewed passion, pushing herself as hard as she could. Quidditch has remained a form of therapy for her and it was a foregone conclusion that she followed it as a career after she finished Hogwarts. Years might have passed since the end of the war, but Ginny still relies on her job to get her out of bed each day and keep her a functioning member of society. 

She makes time each week to stop in on each of her family members, almost as if more time spent with them will fill the gap of never seeing Fred again. Of course she misses him still, and she thinks of her missing brother every day, but her life has found some sort of normality and wounds are beginning to heal. At least, they were until news of the Returned reached her. It feels like the unfairness of Fred’s death occurs again every time someone else comes back and it’s not him. Ginny can’t help but be angry; what cruel hand of fate would bring back Bellatrix Lestrange, who orchestrated so much misery, instead of reuniting a broken family?

PERSONALITY: 

Ginny is very good at hiding her sadness. Other emotions, not so much. Her mum has always told her that every anger and frustration is clear as day in her expression, even if Ginny manages to hold her tongue. Sadness, however, is easy to shut away to only be taken out in private. She knows she’s a strong person, she’s been through too much to not be, and that is the side of her she wants the world to see. She’d prefer to cover sadness with anger and quick wit, never letting anyone see into her heart unless she gives them permission. Of course, that means that she’s not the most emotionally intelligent and she struggles with the times when it’s important that she does share feelings that run deeper than sass and anger. Ginny is overly-combative and age hasn’t tempered that. She can still throw a mean bat-bogey hex but she can now follow it up with a mean right hook, and she’s more than likely to. She’s fiercely protective of her friends and family, and there’s a softness that she can express for certain people. At heart, she is a kind person, but she’s scared of letting too many people see that. 

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF FAMILY: 

The Weasley family is a family full of love. Of course there are flaws and arguments, just like any family, but there was no point in her childhood where Ginny ever doubted how much her family loved her and how much she loved them in return. They didn’t have a lot of money and there were many points during her childhood and particularly her teenagerdom where Ginny resented that, but she didn’t blame her parents. She was only thirteen when Voldemort returned, and that changed so many things so very quickly. Money and normal family squabbles just didn’t seem important any more, and the strongest value that Ginny picked up from her family was that it was important to fight for what she believed in. No matter what happened in the rest of the war, Ginny clung onto that ideal and it is the core of her personality.

HISTORY: 

Ginny has very few memories of a life not touched by Voldemort. Of course her early childhood was free of that fear, and she remembers playing Quidditch in the garden with her brothers and begging to go to Hogwarts with them every year. Those memories are not nearly as clear and sharp as her years at Hogwarts, and none are as clear as her second year. Her first year, despite being traumatic, is almost entirely lost to her having spent so much of it under the Diary’s spell. Her second year is unfailingly vivid, no matter how much she wishes it wasn’t. There were the nightmares, the creeping feeling like a cold hand on her spine that she would hear his voice in her head again. Then there were the looks of the other students. Ginny might not have been in control of herself when those terrible things happened, but she felt responsible and she felt the judgement in the stares of her peers. Ginny felt very lonely that whole year, but it was because of this feeling of ostracisation that she developed such a sense of confidence. 

She did her best to grow above the judgement of others and not to care what people thought or said and as a result her confidence blossomed. It was her confidence and her strong sense of justice which made her fast friends with those willing to give her a chance and by the end of her third year she felt as though the horrors of her experience with Voldemort could finally be put behind her and she would be able to have a normal teenagerhood. 

His return certainly put a halt to those ideas, but she still managed to be a normal teenage girl in between the difficulties of living in a world at war. Ginny’s skill as a witch and as a Quidditch player were only encouraged by the certainty of the times they were living in, and her ferocious commitment to justice went hand in hand with the desire to fight in the war rushing towards them all. She still hasn’t talked much with her family about what happened in the year that Snape and the Carrows took over Hogwarts, the only people she’s comfortable discussing it with being Neville and Luna because they were there for it. Part of her feels like she didn’t do enough to help Harry, and a large part of her feels guilty for having to leave Neville on his own after Easter. Regardless, everything that happened that year feels very much overshadowed by the terrible tragedy of the Battle itself, and her experiences really don’t seem that important.

OOC EXPLORATION:

WHAT ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO? One of my friends linked me to this rp and I was instantly fascinated. I feel like there have been so many HP rps that there are very few fresh ideas left and this plot just hooked me immediately. I love all the new dynamics that it opens up and honestly it just seems like an exciting place to write.

ANYTHING ELSE? So I have a pinterest board for Ginny here. Then I had ideas and feelings about the whole Harry/Ginny thing but I didn’t know where it best fit into the app so it’s here, sorry!

The Harry problem. When he left to do the good, right, and noble thing, Ginny expected that when he came back they would pick up where they left off, maybe he even expected the same thing. War changes people though, and she knew that the person he came back to was not the same person she had been when he had left. The Battle only further compounded that issue. He was her first love, and she knows that he will always mean a lot to her but it felt as though the world collapsed when the war ended and romance just wasn’t her priority. Of course she adores Harry, and his friendship means the world to her, but that spark she used to feel just never came back.