July Featured Story: Tender Vengeance by margotlefaye

[margotlefaye]

Once again, I’m humbled, thrilled and blown away by everyone’s response to my writing. Thank you to all of you who voted to make Tender Vengeance one of the featured stories for July

Comments

[apkblack1]

So I'm still reeling from reading it (and I read it last night, had thought the bright light of day would clarify enough to review and ask questions, but maybe not LOL) but can cut through to the first thing that strikes me about it all, without the emotions of it all getting in the way: Their ages.

Now, I know Ginny's age is, in a sense, a factor that deepens the horror of what's happened to her, so just from that starting point, they all have to be young.

But through the whole thing, Hermione and Draco have felt much older to me. That's not to say the writing is off; it's just the perception of their characters. It is worth noting that I'm middle-aged (and I know you are, too) so it is easier for me to feel characters that are at least, say, in their 20s (where my deluded brain insists I still am, despite being decades past LOL) ...

It's clear in the opening that their ages are central to the story, but after that, once Hermione is Draco's captive, it doesn't play a part ... and if anything, it felt to me like she was old enough to be almost maternal when meeting with Ginny.

Again, we all come at stories through our own lives and experiences and ages, which cannot help but color how we read them, right?

So how much did their ages enter your thoughts while working through the chapters? And did it make any difference in how you wrote, and how you've worked things out?

[margotlefaye]

There are several elements that went into my thinking about age in this story. To bottom-line it, my feeling is that a) Wizards canonically mature more quickly than the rest of us, hence the younger age of majority, 17 instead of 18 and b) the experiences that Draco has lived through since he turned 16 and that Hermione has been living through every year since she came to Hogwarts, finding herself on the front-lines of a war by virtue of her friendship with Harry, have forced each of them to mature far more quickly than they would if they'd been able to have a normal adolescence. So, in a way, the fact that he's 17 and she turns 18 in the fic? Those are just numbers.

I touch on this a very little bit in the current section, when Hermione is thinking how surreal the idea of returning to Hogwarts seems, and after her confrontation with Scrimgeour, when she has to get out of the hospital but doesn't know where to go, and she thinks she can't go to Hogwarts because she's not a schoolgirl anymore. And, there's going to be more exploration of that in the next chapter or two, as Hermione tries to figure out where she goes from here.

And, really, there's a whole lot behind my thinking, including discussions, 25 years ago, with my best friend in college who was doing a paper on childhood, which didn't exist in anything like we think of it until maybe the 19th century, and my own interest in History (one of my own college majors) and how, historically, people of 15 and 16 were, in many respects, adults with adult responsibilities, including marriage and bearing and raising children, fighting in wars, that sort of thing. The whole bit about Lucius finding a mistress for Draco, which scandalizes Hermione in an earlier chapter, that, too, is rooted in a different kind of mindset about age, something that harkens back a few centuries because I think the Wizarding world is very much in a medieval mindset, although that bit was maybe more Regency, but still.

Beyond this, there's the new information scientists are coming up with on the development of the human brain, things they are learning with the latest medical imaging technology, and how the judgment centers of the brain are the last to develop. Those centers aren't fully developed in teens, and don't finish developing until the early to mid twenties.

But, of course, those things are always subject to some degree of individual variation.

And, of course, if Wizards do mature earlier (possibly because of the judgment needed to work magic?), and if extreme circumstances can also force the judgment centers to mature earlier, then Draco and Hermione have both factors working to get them to mature earlier.

I think children caught up in a war are always forced to grow up too fast, and that is how I thought of their ages in this story. They aren't safe in Hogwarts having a normal adolescence. They've been thrown into the deep end of the ocean, and are far more mature and experienced than is the norm for their ages.

And, because that's where I was coming from in telling this story, their ages didn't matter to me as much as if I'd been trying to write a story that was taking place entirely in Hogwarts. So, it didn't make much difference to what was happening in the plot. The story unfolded the way I thought it would unfold if Draco and Hermione found themselves in those circumstances.

And...hope that answers your question. Thanks for asking.