I finished Potter and Evans today, and I really, really want to thank you for writing it. As much as I love TLAT, it's kinda frustrating that it stops so abruptly. You've managed to pick up the flow and write the characters really well, and I loved every moment of reading it
Anyways, good work. I hope you'll update soon, as I can't wait to read more.
Btw, Carlotta really needs to chill. Like please, just grow up. Not that hard to do is it??
Thank you thank you thank you😍😍😭This was such a sweet ask to receive right as I walked out of an exercise class that wrecked my body and soul haha (fun fact when the exercise man wasn’t mean enough I imagined quidditch captain!tlat!James potter bullying me. It kinda worked!)
But re Carlotta - okay at risk of starting another wave of Jarlotta hate.....…........ I think I did Carlotta dirty in the last chapter 🙊 I’ve been worrying about this for a while so imma use this ask to talk about it lol. Details below the cut if you’re interested!
I know my characterizations and plot and especially narration will never be exactly Jules, but I try really hard to never have a character do smth that I know is OOC. Sometimes I fuck up and get myself into a position where I need/want an OOC line too much (it’s usually James—”Warm now?”/”Almost” in the Christmas Eve one, joking abt quitting Quidditch in Saved Seats, the whole Country Boy sequence oops) but I’m particularly proud of Chapter 2 of PE because there's no single action or line that I know Jules wouldn’t write for that character. I genuinely think Carlotta is a thoughtless and petty enough character to have casually thrown out the line about Lily to Mulciber (and it’s Carlotta, not Colista, because she doesn’t understand the possible consequences of putting a Mudblood on his radar)
However.
I actually think the Carlotta/Colista friendship is something that could have been positive for both of them. These are two sad, lonely girls who do in fact both want to be good—or at least don’t want to be bad—who are both kinda caustic and pretty funny and not used to having female friends. Colista is presumably not as Beautiful as Carlotta, but she isn’t plain + insecure like Shelley, so there’s not going to be a perpetual shitty power dynamic. They’re not really bonding over hating Lily, because neither of them do hate Lily! Lily is a really really hard person to hate! They joke about hating her because ‘we both like the same boy’ is their most obvious common ground, but that’s a recipe for rivalry, so to get to friendship they jump on ‘the boy we both like likes that bitch’. Which, yeah, not perfect behavior, but honestly solid grounds for a healthy teenage girl friendship!
Teenage girls are bitchy! That’s okay! It’s kind of their thing!
But the point is, I used their friendship to cause Mulciber and Lily’s standoff (for plot and character development reasons that I hope will become clear and seem legitimate!). Because the consequences of what Carlotta said are so so awful, it makes her look like an awful person who has undergone no development. But what’s actually happening in that scene is that she’s defending a female friend to a guy—she’s showing loyalty to a girl in the face of a man. And yeah, that girl is Colista and that man is Mulciber, but Carlotta gets most of her self esteem from male attention, so this is kind of a growth moment for her.
Since I’m basically not gonna go past the first kiss, I’m not spending much time developing the Colista/Carlotta friendship, so the biggest moment I’ll probably end up writing for Carlotta is the time she got Lily REDACTED, and I genuinely feel bad about that because I think that she deserved better and that the C/C friendship could’ve been really good for both of them. Jules wrote Carlotta complex and flawed and redeemable, but I hate her for disrupting Jily so I didn’t bother to redeem her. Not super feminist of me.
Anyway it’s really late at night here so idk if that made much sense haha but the point is...Carlotta doesn’t really grow up in Potter and Evans, but I wish she did. I hope after you read Chapter 3 you imagine her platonically riding off into the sunset with Colista, ultimately becoming a perfectly fine person who eats men for breakfast lunch and dinner but no longer does it at other women’s expense (much).
Actually, it doesn’t have to be platonic. Carlotta kissed a girl once. That could be hot.
