Hi Annerb! Thanks For The Lucky Series, And All Your Other Slytherin!Ginny Work, Which Has Been A Delight

Hi Annerb! Thanks for the Lucky series, and all your other Slytherin!Ginny work, which has been a delight and also helped me understand some things about myself. You mentioned using D/D alignment charts for Hogwarts houses. Could you please expand a bit on that, if that's alright?

Okay, so the D&D alignment charts have two main axes: lawful/neutral/chaotic and good/neutral/evil. (And full disclosure up front that I am not an expert at this at all. I just used it as guidelines and a starting point to help me think about the houses and formulate my general approach for writing The Changeling.)

Let’s look at the first. We can break it down very simplistically to these two ideas:

Lawful – creatures of habit Chaotic – unpredictable

Hufflepuffs and Slytherin are both creatures of habit, more tied to convention, tradition, and law. Gryffindors and Ravenclaw are not bound by tradition, and can be unpredictable, they are more likely to follow their whims.

Now, the second set is where things got a bit more sticky: good versus evil. Which I will admit, I refused to put any house in evil. That was kind of the whole point of The Changeling. I guess for me, individual action will be what puts someone in the evil category. But I still looked at Good versus Neutral.

Good – altruism, respect for all life, personal sacrifice for greater good Neutral – “have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships.” (from this wiki)

To me, Hufflepuffs and Gryffindor both fall into ‘good.’ They put altruism above all things and support of ‘the good’ as a broad concept. Ravenclaw and Slytherin, while not being evil or against ‘good,’ do not necessarily see the same ‘greater good’ that the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff might. Their commitment is shaped by something else, in this case, personal relationships or webs of exchange. (Though I might argue that Ravenclaw are shaped by pursuit of knowledge/understanding above all else.) They are both more driven by ambition than altruism.

So we end up with:

Hufflepuff – lawful good (though you might be able to argue neutral good, altruism above law)

Gryffindor – chaotic good

Ravenclaw – chaotic neutral

Slytherin – lawful neutral

What I love with this, ultimately, is that some of the houses share an element in common, they are just shaped slightly different by their other alignment. Such as, Hufflepuff and Gryffindors both focus on the greater good, but Hufflepuffs do it through the lens of law and tradition and stability, while Gryffindors approach it through chaotic disregard for any tradition or law that gets in their way. Similarly, Hufflepuff and Slytherin are both bound by tradition and law, but Hufflepuff focuses on the greater good, while Slytherin focuses on the relationships that bind people together (whether blood or other connection).

But then you have the houses aligned to opposite corners from each other. Like with Slytherin and Gryffindor, and you can almost see how they speak a different language entirely. To the Slytherin, the Gryffindor are chaotic and have no respect for tradition and convention and are completely out of control, and to the Gryffindor, Slytherin are staid and boring and have giant sticks up their arses. To a Gryffindor, they only see Slytherin not supporting their vision of the greater good, and miss the web of relationships that ground their morality, which might lend itself towards a view of them as ‘evil’. And for a Slytherin, this Gryffindor ‘friend to all’ might seem like a lack of conviction, a caprice that shows no true deep forging of any kind of true relationship ties. They seem like giant faking hypocrites.

You also have Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw similarly oriented. To a Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff seems to lack imagination, interests, or deep commitments. To Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw are unpredictable and cold, and frankly frightening.

Ultimately when writing these houses, it’s realizing that none of them are wrong, they just view the world through different lenses. But also understanding how much perception plays into the ways these houses interact. How much they are all primed to misunderstand each other. But also how much they are set up to help each other. This really is where my understanding of what a unified DA could be in the final year of the war. And helped guide me for all the interactions between the houses.

(As a side note for the Armistice Series, I think a great example of perceptions being shaped by alignments is from in my head we do everything right, specifically how Harry perceived Ginny’s actions during her inquiry. He saw them as self-sacrifice for the greater good (his own alignment), whereas having been in Ginny’s head during the events, we know she wasn’t thinking about the greater good or noble self-sacrifice. She wasn’t thinking about what was right and good, she was thinking about the DA/her friends (her in-group), and what she was not willing to let them be subjected to. How she would use law and convention to protect herself and them as well. She never once was like “Oh, I’ll just let myself get chucked in jail to prove a point.” But that is exactly what Harry sees (and what he would probably do). It’s a fun little look into the different ways they approach things, and how it can lead to misunderstandings sometimes, but also most importantly that their outcomes are aligned, even if their approaches are not.)

Remus Lupin: Sirius you did what.

Inspired by this post and others by lotstradamus

Why did Ginny kiss Harry back in her sixth year in The Changeling? Did she finally realize she liked him ? Or she did it because it felt good?

Ginny kissed Thompson back because it felt nice and she figured ‘why not, he’s a nice guy’ and she was kind of curious to see what it would be like.

Ginny kissed Harry back despite their fights and misunderstandings and being in different houses and everything in her brain telling her it’s a terrible idea. Not because it felt good or she was curious, but because she wanted to do that for a very long time, because of how she feels around him, and because, in that moment, she realized she wasn’t going to be able to get away with pretending otherwise anymore. But maybe that’s okay. Harry, as always, somehow makes everything feel a little less scary. 

I'm so grateful to you for creating all these truly marvellous characters. Especially the parlour girls who own my heart. I adore Theodora and Antonia, the temper and fierceness beneath all that iron control. And I would read all seven books from their perspective and more. Thank you for giving us these stories.

Thank you so much!

What an interesting series of books those would be. They would be so far removed from Harry’s adventures and experiences as to be hardly recognizable, I think. It was fun enough to imagine what all the trio’s shenanigans would look like to Ginny who is only peripherally involved, but still is. Imagine what all of that looked like from older students who are wholly unconnected to the Weasleys and not privy to the actions of the Order. I’m sure someone has to have written that fic–the war through the eyes of a background character.

Of course with Theodora and Antonia, we would get a glimpse into two very different family dynamics–Theodora from an elite, upper class Pureblood family, trying to work within the constraints of tradition and yet achieve every single one of her ambitions without apology or compromise, and Antonia from her rather unique family of heterodox women who society is often too scared to look down on (hags, some might call them with a sneer, but only once).

I would quite like to read that myself. Someone else please magically remove this vague image I have of them from my head and flesh it out. Thanks, I appreciate it. 

Sometimes I think about your Ginny and Harry and that scene at Slughorn’s dinner and how Parlor Ginny saves Harry (and probably Neville) from doing saying and doing something he’d regret. But how different that is from how she usually saves him by being Cloister Ginny. Does it make any sense? Maybe not.

This one got me thinking. I think you definitely makes sense, though I may be interpreting your ask incorrectly. The way Ginny protects Harry (and others) in public is very much about weaponizing her carefully collected information and her persona, like at that Slughorn dinner. (Though I am honestly not sure that she did that just to keep him from doing something he’d regret as much as refusing to let him feel like no one at that table has his back. She stops EVERYONE at the table from coming after him or making him uncomfortable for the rest of the evening, mostly because it pissed her off and she’s always had way low impulse control when it comes to Harry.) 

Harry defends Ginny in public very similarly, only instead of those much more ‘Slytherin’ tactics, he physically puts himself between Ginny and any danger or attack, like during the DADA NEWT exam where he uses magic to protect her, throwing up an enormous protective shield in reaction to her getting hurt, and then physically putting himself between Robards and Ginny when he seems to be angrily advancing on her. He’s ready to take the hits for her if he has to (as Harry is very willing to do for almost anyone he considers an innocent or in his in-group).

Now who they are in spaces like the cloister is incredibly different because that isn’t public. In these private spaces, they ‘save’ each other in very different ways, and I think that is a fundamental part of who they are to each other. In private, they don’t have to fall back on those other thing–which for both of them is a rare thing, not to mention that those parts of themselves, while fundamental to their character, are also not things they necessarily are comfortable with. In spaces like the cloister, Harry doesn’t feel like he is only good for throwing spells and taking hits, and Ginny doesn’t feel like she is only good for manipulating people and making the hard decisions. They are each most helpful to the other in simply giving space and having enough trust built between them to allow them to be themselves. They ‘save’ each other just through being there, by having space to talk and wonder and be wrong, and through physical comfort. Just like Ginny allowing Harry to talk through his thoughts about his confliction over his father and Snape or what he did to Malfoy. Or Harry holding Ginny and letting her cry over George. These things are not about what they can do for the other person, but how they provide space for them to just be themselves. 

Maybe this is dumb, sorry, but I just wasn't sure. Ginny became member of the Parlor the second she was invited, right? And she could go back any time she wanted? So when Antonia 'asked her again' when she was going do a reading, it wasn't actually Ginny's second chance?

Yes. Though Antonia is the queen of second chances, this was more about Ginny thinking she deserved a second chance. Also a way to highlight that for Ginny, she is in foreign territory with rules and rituals and practices that she does not understand (and for a while doesn’t want to understand). All of which contributes to her feeling of not belonging. But it is not that the others don’t think she belongs, or even that she doesn’t, rather that Ginny’s perspective and understanding is the thing that needs to grow. Both of herself and of the space she inhabits.