Statement the first: trans women are women. ANTI JKR. HP FF writer/reader, she/her, 30+, not all posts Safe For Minors. Stuff I write and bookmarks to stuff I 💜 can be found at AO3: archiveofourown.org/users/turanga4.
All the Cool Kids (okay, MANY of the Cool Kids) seem to be doing this, so… You can find all the stuff I want you to find on Ao3, but here’s the stuff I’d most like you to find.
Disclaimers: I only write HP, I don’t usually do ship stuff, I have only written one thing that was more than a one-shot and I suck at middle grounds, cuz that one’s…twenty chapters.
Pensieve: Harry and McGonagall, very soon after the war.
Princesses: A sister bonding moment, before the Yule Ball.
Visit: My first experiment with second person POV: McGonagall in the Hospital Wing with post-graveyard Harry.
Jumper: Hermione and Molly Weasley bond over their losses.
Unfinished: Harry receives comfort from an unlikely source one night soon after the Battle of Hogwarts.
Socks: A careful conversation about Harry's future, post-Voldemort.
Images: Turanga take on the first Hinny conversation after the Forest.
Stay Close: LIly POV of The Forest Again, with minor change in dialogue.
Animals: Remus and Firenze, odd friends over the years.
After the War: My first significant stab at fan fic (pardon the head-hopping): a series of interconnected moments set immediately after the second fall of Voldemort.
Accidental Magic: A fic reflection on how Harry may have moved, over time, through and past his abusive childhood.
Mysteries: Ginny POV of the Battle at the Department of Mysteries; free additional angst with purchase.
New Ice on a Lake: Harry goes to therapy for the first time.
Feast of Chaos: A platonic Rare Pair Semi-Crack Fic: Peeves the Poltergeist, Minerva McGonagall, an Unhealthy Number of Kittens and an unfortunate Umbridge.
Aftereffects: Thought experiment: who would Harry have confided in were he to suffer lingering repercussions from the whole torture thing, and how would Snape have reacted if he were the one chosen?
Orchideous: Harry attempts to comfort Ginny in the wake of her brother’s death.
Turned Thrice in Hand: Missing moment: Dumbledore’s thoughts and memories as he places the Resurrection Stone inside the Golden Snitch.
Tripping Over: Crucial tags: Angst and Feels, POV Harry Potter, Book 4: Goblet of Fire, Lucius Malfoy Being an Asshole.
Choice: Harry and Hermione connect with one another after Ron leaves during the Camping Trip From Hell.
🤍: Which character is not as morally bad as everyone else seems to think?
🖤: Which character is not as morally good as everyone else seems to think?
So, I’m gonna answer these together because I think I have the same character for both. Yeah, this is about Dumbledore. I think he’s morally grey! The worst part about him is that he really is trying to save the world and he really does care about people—but loving people has led him to his biggest mistakes, and he avoids caring about people when he can.
Dumbledore is incredibly interesting and not half as clever as people believe. He is the most arrogant character in the series (other than Voldemort), and he’s terrified of love. I’ve written about this before, but the cruelest thing about Dumbledore is his neglect and forced apathy. People portray him as actively trying to ruin their favorite characters’ lives—I think it’s the opposite. He passively ruins peoples’ lives. The thing about Dumbledore is that he is trying to save everyone, so he can’t save everyone, you know? He cannot afford to care about the individual (even though…like…he should).
That’s why Harry Potter is the most dangerous person in Dumbledore’s story. He loves Harry more than he loves any other character. Harry is everything that Dumbledore is not—Harry loves openly, he wears his heart on his sleeve, and he believes that everyone is worth saving. Dumbledore loves Harry so much and hates himself for it. Damn! It’s so delicious! I love it!
💕: What is an unpopular ship that you like?
Lmao I like a good fucked-up Sirius/Peter. Idk why. It’s just so messed up. It’s so toxic. It compels me.
Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love! ❤️
Thanks so much for this! Way delayed response, but that means it may be a great time to start the self-love cycle AGAIN.
I love all 89 of my weird little children, but it was a delightful experience to think a bit and choose 5.
Visit: McGonagall and Harry, after the Third Task. I like the condensed and constrained emotion in this piece, and it's an example of what's been really cool for me in fan fic--exploring other points of view, including outsider and second person, and taking an unflinching adult look at the difficult bits of a book made for kids.
Accidental Magic : writing this one was just a delight, start to finish, and I'm really proud of one of the lines (the one the title comes from), which I think does a neat job of encapsulating Harry's growth arc in just one pithy sentence.
Unfinished: it was a lot of fun to 'flesh out' a ghost character who gets very little attention in canon, I always live for angst that has recovery, and what an amazing gift it has been for me to be in a position to make this gift for @evesaintyves.
Beginnings: lil bit of trans Teddy Lupin joy, because now more than ever, really, fuck jr rowling. I enjoyed crafting this piece and was pleased and humbled by its positive response.
New Ice on a Lake : my Harry Does Therapy fic that actually quite helped me establish trust with my real therapist because you might as well know that I'm a bit odd and have some trauma, and no better way to say that than "hey look at my fanfic."
Thanks thanks for indulging me with this message/ask! I admit, I've kind of lost the writing spark of late, and it's nice to be reminded that I have done things that I'm proud of.
1. Prof. McGonagall sends the kids to the forbidden forest in the middle of the night because they were walking around in the middle of the night
2. Prof. McGonagall can cancel quidditch whenever the fuck she wants to
3. Prof. McGonagall gives a 13 year old a time machine but only for school
4. Prof. McGonagall thinks potter is a boy, not a piece of meat
5. Prof. McGonagall tells Peeves to unscrew it the other way
6. Prof. McGonagall can’t believe Dumbledore passed the burden of saving the world onto a kid who can’t even conjure birds out of thin air, I mean that’s so basic
7. Prof McGonagall fights the battle of hogwarts in her pajamas
D'awww thanks thanks for the ask! I'm hoping that talking a bit about my blorbos can perhaps lead me at some point to continue writing about blorbos.
Fanfic writer ask game here.
Gotta reach way back, actually for 🐣, as when I was very young, I enjoyed a tv show called Joan of Arcadia. Premise is that Joan is an ordinary 16 year old kid, to whom God chooses to appear, in the guises of different ordinary looking humans. Hilarity ensues, except also some pretty deep shit, as Joan is the daughter of a police chief who experiences the darkest human things on the daily, her brother was recently rendered a paraplegic, and eventually her mother discloses she was raped. There's a lot of interesting push-pull between Joan and the God figure(s) in terms of "I need you, Joan, to do this small thing in this way"/ "Um, you're the Supreme Being, why can't you fix my brother?" I wasn't satisfied with them not having a scene where Joan confronts God about her mother's experience, so...I wrote one.
First HP fanfic was similarly an offscreen conversation; I took a stab at actually writing the conversation glossed over at the end of Goblet of Fire, where narrator Harry is like, "so, Harry told Dumbledore all of the things that happened in the graveyard," because I didn't feel like the source material really explored the different dynamics that would have been in play.
Both items are thankfully buried forever somewhere in ff.net, and let us never outside this ask speak of them again.
❤️ a fic I've written with a special place in my heart. Hmm....honestly I love all of my tiny weird children, and it's hard to choose between 88 one shots. But, I really enjoyed writing Accidental Magic--it came pretty naturally to me, and specifically, it came most naturally to me when I did a thing I've learned to embrace doing, which is to say "f@ck the initial prompt or more popular way of doing this story, I think I want to go a different direction." (The prompt word was "pivot" and I initially tried and failed to write a love story.). I was so delighted by the positive responses people had to it, it was the first fan fic piece I felt good enough about to share and promote outside the confines of the writing comp that was my entry point into HP fan fic, and reading it again, I *still* like it, which is nice.
I feel like most of my moots are fanfiction authors so here's a little game to celebrate your work - you can choose to answer all questions right away or to let people ask them in your ask box! Have fun!
🐣- Your first fanfiction
🐔- Your latest fanfiction
❤️- The fanfiction that holds a special place in your heart
🌟- Your most popular fanfiction
😨- The fanfiction that made you leave your comfort zone
📏- Your longest fanfiction
🤏- Your shortest fanfiction
🥴- Your weirdest fanfiction
🌶️- Your spiciest fanfiction
🏆- The fanfiction you are the most proud of
🥺- The most underrated of your fanfictions
📝- The fanfiction you wish to rewrite
🥳- The fanfiction you had the most fun writing
🪨- The hardest fanfiction to write
🪶- The fanfiction that just basically wrote itself from how easy it was
🙀- The fanfiction that would give your mom (or any parent figure) a heart attack if they read it
🫣- The fanfiction you were most hesitant to post
💥- Bonus! Tell us all about one fanfiction of your choice!
ok I am now a little curious as to whether I'm just insane or not so humor me for a moment
are you a woman and afraid of going out alone at night?
white cis woman, I am afraid
white cis woman, I am NOT afraid
cis woman of color, I am afraid
cis woman of color, I am NOT afraid
white trans woman, I am afraid
white trans woman, I am NOT afraid
trans woman of color, I am afraid
trans woman of color, I am NOT afraid
nuance (explain?)
Voting ended onOct 10, 2024
I would do one for men but too many options and I think it would misdirect from the conversation I'm trying to have here I only care abt things that pertain to me ty
Remus Lupin/Nymphadora Tonks, rated M, eleven 200-word drabbles. Warning for mentions of abortion.
She must have fallen asleep. She thinks it’s a fly crawling up her neck, for a minute, and nearly swats it before she realises it’s his mouth. Her heart gives a squeeze that is aching at the same time that it is sweet—how little it takes from him, these days, to wring a few drops of nervous hope from that tired old thing. But she turns to him, anyway, and they don’t speak but he kisses her a little, and fuck, there goes her gormless heart again.
Read it on Ao3.
I wanted to say a few things about what went into this fic below - and I will be talking about abusive relationships and abortion from a secular, pro-abortion-on-demand perspective, so if that's likely to trouble you I recommend giving it, and the fic, a miss.
This story is set around chapter 7 of Deathly Hallows, "The Will of Albus Dumbledore," when Lupin and Tonks leave Harry's birthday party to avoid being seen by Rufus Scrimgeour. This period of canon gives us several glimpses into how Lupin & Tonks's relationship is going and it strikes me as a really scary and unsafe time for Tonks. Lupin's unhappiness is so evident even Harry notices it, while she's described as "radiant," - meaning pregnant, but also that they're clearly not on the same page. Around this time we see Tonks facing some of the disturbing realities of being married to Lupin: Bellatrix's pursuit of her in the battle of seven Potters, having to flee from her boss so he doesn't see them together. Tonks's mentor is dead (and we see when that happens that Lupin's not all that interested in supporting her as she's reeling from it), Tonks's family is pretty unhappy with her (according to Lupin), things are unraveling.
(I'd like to point you to two takes I really love on how off-kilter their interactions are right before this, around the time Mad-Eye dies: Fallen Warrior by @bikelock28 and Mandible by @saintsenara - both of these authors have had a huge influence on my writing and my thinking about hp canon.)
I've always been kind of obsessed with this particular moment between Lupin and Tonks - when we see Lupin seize Tonks by the wrist and haul her out of the burrow. It's an alarming interaction, to me, that suggests the possibility of a very frightening dynamic setting up between them. Tonks is an adult, she's aware of the consequences of being seen together. I'm not even convinced she had to leave in the first place instead of changing her appearance or just making herself scarce upstairs for a while. There's no argument that leads Lupin to grabbing her out of desperation - he just says bye to Harry and hauls her away. Not by the hand, like he's trying to keep her from tripping or something. By the wrist, so she can't let go, which seems even more likely to unbalance her. It's a dismissal of her autonomy at the very least, he's treating her a bit like a child, and it's probably quite embarrassing for Tonks. The way she makes excuses for it the next day, in the context of everything else we're seeing about this relationship, only makes it all seem unhealthier. If I witnessed this interaction between a friend and her new husband, I'd be checking on her.
And in the midst of this rapidly-disintegrating relationship with this escalatingly-discontent and reactive husband - Tonks is finding out that she's pregnant, something that will complicate things even further and tie her to a man who does not really seem to want to be with her.
This fic came to be as I was thinking about the way Lupin talks about Tonks in "The Bribe," when he reveals that she's pregnant and they've split up, in a way that respresents this development as something abhorrent and humiliating but also downplays his culpability for it: ...then Lupin said, with an air of forcing himself to admit something unpleasant, "Tonks is going to have a baby." And how devastating that attitude might be for a Tonks who is happily pregnant.
But we don't really know how happy she is to be pregnant. We never hear about it from her. We see her as radiant in an early appearance, sure, and the baby ends up getting born, but that's all we really have to go on. And I have to wonder what options Tonks might have had if she didn't want to be pregnant or wasn't sure. She'd have had access to a legal abortion through the muggle health system up to 24 weeks, but there's evidence in canon that wizards are fearful of and disgusted by muggle medical practices (e.g. Arthur's stitches in OoTP). And wizarding society seems pretty regressive in some respects: people get married and have children young, there's no mention of divorce or blended families or out-of-wedlock babies - and yes, that's also because these are childrens' books (and books that privilege a certain kind of familial love above all else) but this is the text and the universe we have to work with. Notably, the immortal human soul demonstrably exists in this world and I think it's pretty safe to assume that most people believe in it - it seems to be pretty common knowledge that a dementor can remove the soul from the body and that ability is encoded into the wizarding penal system. What does that mean for abortion access in that world? Do wizards believe that an embryo or a fetus is an ensouled person and that it would be murder, or something like that, to terminate it? Even if a magical abortion is legal, what are cultural attitudes toward it like under this belief system? How difficult or inconvenient is it? I'll leave the particulars of how the wizarding legal and medical systems function to someone smarter than me, but... I work in health care, and I've seen the ways that even vague or minor barriers to access - stigma, embarrassment, misinformation, wait times or travel requirements, the levels of executive function and emotional regulation required to keep multiple appointments and talk to a bunch of providers about a sensitive issue - mean that some people who need care won't get it. We don't really know if Tonks unreservedly chose to keep her pregnancy, or if she just didn't have meaningful access to another option, or if access was just hard or unpleasant enough that she didn't make a decision until it was too late.
There's a tendency in some Remadora fic— including one of mine, in a way I didn't think much about until later—to frame the hypothetical of Teddy being aborted as a regrettable tragedy, thankfully averted by the power of true love, and not as a reasonable response to the difficult circumstances and something everyone might have moved on from and been fine - and I think that's understandable. Teddy's important to trajectory of Tonks and Lupin's lives. It's okay to love these characters and want everyone to be as happy and whole as their situations allow. And I think that we have some (at least mildly gendered) expectations that of course our faithful Tonks wants to stay married, wants a child with the person she loves. But I wanted to depict this slice of their relationship with sympathy for a Tonks who is seriously considering ending her pregnancy - who has at least as much reason as Lupin to just want shut of the whole thing. I would have, in her position. I have seen friends locked into horrible situations with abusive partners by pregnancy. I think you could argue that not having Teddy and getting out of that relationship might have meant a different outcome for Tonks in the battle of Hogwarts. And I think that it's entirely possible for Tonks to have wanted an abortion that she didn't end up getting - for whatever legal, cultural, or psychological reasons - and for Teddy to still have been a welcome and loved child when he was born.
Anyway, let me know what you think.
[image: from francis bacon, three studies of figures on beds, 1972]
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
The girl in the forest looks almost nothing like her father. The hair, the eyes, the posture—all are different. The biggest change is one that perhaps only you notice, the way that she carries no weight beyond herself.
the ever terrifying and exhausting cycle of “i don’t want to share my writing bc it feels disheartening when not many people are interested in it” and “i have to post the writing for people to become interested in it”
okay, the first of my post-castles projects is done! i present you with my very own rec-list spreadsheet! this will now be linked in my pinned post and in my AO3 bookmarks, and will be updated as i read on. hope you enjoy these gorgeous, gorgeous works!
Maxing out the character limit on a comment on my favourite fic
Commenting on my most read fics saying how often I re-read them
Commenting on the most recent fics from my favourite authors
Finding a fic in my favourite tag and leaving a thoughtful comment
Making a set of custom memes about the fic that I recommend most often
Live-blogging comments reading a fic I've been saving for a special occasion
I don't know yet but emoji are gonna be involved
Something else (tell us in the notes)!
Voting ended onSep 10, 2024
Comment Day is a celebration of leaving comments on beloved fic! We want both to tell the author what their work means to us, and to appreciate reflecting on works we enjoy! Commenting is a unique feature of fic reading, and we want to have fun with it.
I just want to say, as someone who writes more sporadically than Harper Lee, there is nothing that brings me more joy than an email saying that I've gotten a kudos or even a comment(!!) on a fic, because once something has been out for a few months I assume it's been lost to the black hole that is the internet and that no one will ever see it again. Knowing that people are actually searching for and reading older fics gives me hope for humanity and makes me feel like it was all worth it.
do you happen to have any fic recommendations that are well-characterized? (i.e. follow their canon personalities quite faithfully?) :)
Ok I don’t read as much fics as I would like to so I fear that the ones I’m about to recommend are ones I already have before haha.
I have to recommend literally anything by @evesaintyves ! I love the way she writes Lupin so much! He feels so real and gritty while still keeping true to his character. She also writes my favorite version of Tonks!
Couple of my favorites are
“The Rougarou” (Remus/Sirius) Such a good exploration of Remus and his sexuality omg.
And
“It’s just what you do to get by” (Remus/Tonks) Genuinely the best fic I’ve ever read. I love this so so much AHH
Some other Lupin fics I’d recommend:
“Introspective to say the least” and “home for Christmas” by Thecat_iswritting. I feel like @thecat-isblogging-blog gets Lupin’s voice so right it’s crazy
“Toys in the attic” by @ashesandhackles and @thecat-isblogging-blog I feel like I’ve talked about this a thousand times now so I’ll just say if you’re a Sirius and Lupin fan read this
“The grace unasked for” by Leftsidedown. Feels like it could have been in the book because it feels so true to Tonks and Lupin’s characters and voices.
“Of the fallen” by DopeyTheDwarf has a great Hermione and Lupin, and it’s also super sweet!
I’m mostly a Remus fic reader because that’s my girl but I’ll occasionally dabble elsewhere:
I’ve really been enjoying @whinlatter’s Ginny in “beasts”! though this is another one I haven’t finished yet because I’m taking a very long time to read cause I’m enjoying it so much lol
“I hope this comes back to haunt you” by humanveil is a really good Snape fic that @seriousbrat recently recommended!
I talked about this recently but “the last enemy” by CH_Darling and “The darkest days” by betweenfactandbreakfast are two really good marauder era fics that again I’m taking my sweet time to read.
That’s all I have right now, if anyone has any other recommendations pls share!!