In the last year, I’ve been feeling progressively more weary and despondent when it comes to fandom. At first, I thought it was just a phase brought on by unnecessary drama and a succession of broken friendships, and that if I just took a step back, if I distanced myself from fandom spaces that had become toxic to me, I would find joy again. And I did distance myself. I cut ties, I quit logging in, I deleted accounts, until hardly anything remained. And it worked, because my mental health is better than it ever was. But the joy I used to find in fandom hasn’t come back.
Distance has made me admit things I think I was refusing to acknowledge before. The amount of time, effort, and dedication I’ve been putting into my fanworks for years feels like a waste now. It probably makes me sound ungrateful, because some of you have been so incredibly supportive, and you absolutely are the reason I’ve kept going for so long, but I can’t help but feel I need to move on to other, and hopefully better, things.
For a few months now, I’ve been preparing to move on to posting original works. I feel constrained within the limits of the fandom, of the characters, of someone else’s imagined world. Yes, I’ve been writing a lot of AUs, but it’s still not enough. I need more liberties. The stories I’ve written feel small in comparison to what they could be.
I wanted to wait before making the announcement, because it could be well over a year before I’m ready to post anything, but lately I’ve felt like giving an early heads up would be a good idea, mostly because some of my fics will be adapted and transformed and eventually deleted. I don’t know what will go and what will remain yet, so I guess this gives you the opportunity to save what you like before it goes. I’ll try to keep some copies in case anyone would want them, because I know not everyone will read this, and I’ll try to give a warning before any of the big fics go, but like I said, it could be well over a year before that happens. I just felt that if you follow me here, and if you have supported me all this time, you deserve to know what’s to come.
I don’t know if I’ll still post on ao3, or on the same account, or under the same pseud. It might be on Patreon instead, or who knows, it might be actual physical books! Nothing is certain so far, it’s all things I’ll have to figure out, but I’ll keep you updated on what I decide.
Thank you so much for sticking with me for however long you have. I’m so grateful for you all. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.
Back in january I posted about dealing with a severe mystery allergy - Today I found out it is infact not an allergy, but some other issue/disease that is messing with me very heavily! Now it’s onto trying to pin down what it is.
I am super sorry for being so inactive and really only posting the occasional sims or SSO screenshots and nothing else - This is because my dominant hand is in severe pain for most of the day, sore and incredibly stiff.
Thanks to all of you that still enjoy my rare posts and interact with me, it means the world to me ♥
Here’s the amazing art the fantastic and thoroughly talented @luendland did for my fic Certain Dark Things, in all its splendour, proudly on display. I am so enamoured!!! 😍
Hi all! I have been very inactive for a good few weeks now, aside from the occasional reblog.
Even tho I don’t really have a very big active following, I thought giving a little update as to where I went would be good - Simply because some of you have been very kind to me and I wouldn’t want to just drop off the face of the earth ♥
At the end of last year I got very busy with private things going on inside my family - And as of right now I am dealing with a severe allergic reaction to a mystery allergy that still has to be figured out!
Alongside those, I am dealing with a lot of back and forth of other treatments and trying to wrestle various mental struggles back into their boxes!
Oh, and I chopped off all my hair again! Hopefully I will get to dye it soon :)
I hope you all had a smooth start into 2023, stay safe out there!!
On Muggle AUs: or why I love writing them so much, and why I think more people should give them a chance
It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s read my works that I love Muggle AUs. I love writing them, reading them, and talking about them. I’ve written three so far and have every intention of writing more in the future.
It's come to my attention very early in my writing ventures that a lot of readers and writers don’t see the appeal of Muggle AUs at all and even actively avoid them. And I get it. We all have our likes and dislikes, and that’s perfectly okay. But I must admit, in all honesty, that I can’t help being a bit hurt every time someone tells me they won’t give one of my fics a chance, or won’t read a fic I recommended, simply because they “just don’t read Muggle AUs”. And for a while I’ve wanted to try and express my opinions on this “trope”, if one can call it that, and explain why I think Muggle AUs are just as valid and important as the more canon-compliant stories, and just as deserving of being read, loved, discussed, and shared.
One of the most common reasons I’ve encountered to justify why someone would avoid Muggle AUs is their most obvious characteristic: the lack of magic. And that’s perfectly reasonable. Magic, after all, is what makes the Harry Potter series so… well, magical. It’s the force that holds its universe together. It’s what made us dream, made us hope to receive that wonderful letter ourselves when we turned eleven. What is Harry Potter without magic? Nothing special, right? Just another story. Magic is what pushes the story forward, it’s its essence.
And it’s no different when it comes to fanfiction. As fanfic writers, we use magic to propel the plot, we weave it into our narration, we use the wizarding world as a beloved setting with all its wondrous and weird places and people. Things can be fixed with a wave of a wand. People can turn into animals at will, can be invisible, can be transported in the blink of an eye. Every object can be cursed, enchanted, summoned or vanished. We use magic as a plot device.
To me, the lack of magic is what makes Muggle AUs so attractive and so full of possibilities. Because if you can’t use magic, you have to tell your story a different way, through different means. Without magic, you have to find another force to propel your story while still trying to keep one foot in the HP universe. And that force is my absolute favourite part of the series: the characters.
Muggle AUs are, most of all, character driven. They are stripped of their main essence, magic, and left with the bare minimum. But not so bare, to me! For me, more than the magic, it’s the characters that gripped me and dragged me into the HP fandom. I fell for Harry, his kindness, his sass, his losses, his bravery in the face of adversity. I fell for Snape, his snark, his intelligence, his outstanding courage, his sacrifice. The lack of magic strips the story, but it also strips the characters to their key characteristics, their core values. If there is no dark wizard chasing Harry, then what would be his challenges, what hardships would he be faced with? If there is no Hogwarts to escape to, then how would he find his place in the world? If there are no Death Eaters for Snape to join, then where would the temptation come from, where would he go to try and find the power and acceptance he seeks?
I love the challenge that Muggle AUs offer. I love transporting the characters into new lives while keeping the essence of their beings, what makes them tick, what touches them. I love setting up parallels to their canon lives in these new lives. Muggle AUs are, to me, at once the most challenging and the most rewarding form of AU. A true alternate universe where everything is different and yet the same, if you take the care, as an author, to weave your story properly and the time, as a reader, to look and find the similarities.
Muggle AUs force you to consider all the possibilities, to find a place to fit each character in a different setting in a way that suits them, their purpose, their drive.
Another reason why people tend to avoid Muggle AUs is OOC-ness. The characters seem different, their personalities not quite exactly like in canon. And don’t get me wrong, OOC-ness bugs me as much as the next reader. When I read canon-compliant fics, that is. But in Muggle AUs, a certain level of it is to be expected. How can one possibly expect a Harry who had to suffer the Dursleys until he turned eighteen because there was no magic to spirit him away, who now lives in a crabby flat, who works in a coffeeshop and struggles to pay rent to be exactly the same as in canon? How can we expect a Snape who had to work his way out of poverty and use his skill and intelligence to get into a decent school and now teaches chemistry at a graduate level to be exactly the same either? There are bound to be differences in character. But that’s what makes it so fun and challenging, fusing those differences with the essence of the character that we know so well. To me, it doesn’t matter much if the characters are a bit different, because it’s an entirely different context. What matters is how they are different, and more importantly, why.
Muggle AUs are character studies. They force you to ask yourself who the characters really are, and how they would be different if such or such a thing happened or didn’t happen to them. Muggle AUs force you to think, deeply, not only about the characters you’re using and their very nature, but also about human nature in general.
Muggle AUs are a feat of narration, an amalgam of the known and the unknown. There is a surprise at every turn. Muggle AUs are the unexpected. To me, they transport into the real world, the one we are unfortunately stuck in, a little touch of the magic that we love so much from the HP universe.
