Mcgonagall/Eileen prince for ships?
thank you very much for the ask, anon!
and i've decided, on the basis of it, to become a full-on mcprince stan.
i have - as i'm currently trying to make happen in a work-in-progress character study of her - got a pretty inflexible headcanon set-up for eileen's life. i don't like her as coming from a rich and influential pureblood family who disown her when she runs off with tobias, but i do like her as someone who grows up working-class alongside the muggle world, who falls in love with tobias as his childhood friend and believes that their bond will be so strong that magic won't matter, before discovering - as she gets older and the shine of first love wears off - that the gulf between them is just too great for them to endure as a couple.
and this aligns really well with the backstory we're given for mcgonagall on pottermore [which is, really, one of the only bits of jkr's post-series writing i actually like], which reveals that she was once engaged to a muggle childhood friend of her own, before she broke off the relationship when she realised that a life in both worlds would be impossible to sustain.
i like the idea of these two having a shared understanding of the liminality of their position as witches from non-elite families who fell in love in a muggle world which they were raised side-by-side with but which they could never truly belong to. i also like the potential of their shared shame over their failure to prevent severus snape's radicalisation, their shared grief for him, their shared anger at dumbledore and voldemort, and their shared need to keep going and rebuild themselves post-war.
bittersweet love stories are my personal poison, and this is no different. i ship it.
