(no subject)

[bottle_of_smoke]

I'm doing my annual-ish re-read of Harry Potter (very slowly) and have just hit Chamber of Secrets. This book is not the best of the bunch but it always had so much fanfic potential for me, simply for Tom Riddle, who fascinated/fascinates me. It reminds me that, for all the good fic that the HP fandom produced (and continues to produce even at its slow winding down) there were so many wasted opportunities. There are plenty of Tom Riddle fics out there and many of them are very, very good. But there was so much that could be done with Tom Riddle fic that was never explored! Namely, the Second World War. I've probably bitched about this before but it's a source of never-ending exasperation for me: a person who loves her historical fic, a person who loves stories that have a real sense of place. I want to read about London in wartime. I want to hear what happened to the orphanage - where the kids were evacuated to, and did Tom Riddle go with them? I want to hear about Muggleborn children trying to buy school uniforms with the coupons in their ration books, I want to read about these same kids crawling under their beds at Hogwarts to sleep, fearing bombs, I want to hear about the ones that ran away to get back to their parents in blitzed British cities. Did Hogwarts eventually open its doors to these children in the summer months, so they wouldn't have to be evacuated to a stranger's home? Was one of those children Tom Riddle, and what did he do with those months? What about the children whose parents were killed? The ones who received owled telegrams telling them their father had died? I want to hear the arguments from Muggleborns that if wizards just got involved in the war it would be ended much more quickly, the ones that tried to bring this into fruition and how on earth did the Ministry stop them? I want to hear about how the war against Grindelwald tied in with the war against Hitler: did one really fuel the other, and how?

Before anyone rolls eyes at me, I did actually try writing this fic once but was waylaid, and eventually HBP nixed the whole thing entirely. I do sometimes wonder though.

Ach, work.