Featured Story of May: The Fool, the Emperor, and the Hanged Man by ianthe_waiting

[everythursday]

“Ten years after the fall of the Dark Lord, Hermione Granger leads a life of self-imposed obscurity, that is, until the day Headmistress Minerva McGonagall is murdered and a certain 'hero' is responsible,” is how ianthe_waiting’s “The Fool, the Emperor, and the Hanged Man” can be summed up in one line, yet readers will find that this fic is much,

Comments

[apkblack1]

The most obvious thing to me, that jumped out at me after reading the epilogue, was there was no way Harry was just going to be so ... so ... normal. No way. No one lives a childhood like that, an adolescence, living with death and facing death and losing every father figure who appears in his life, and then discovering that the central father figure manipulated him so massively throughout ... and is just this normal okay guy and "all is well." Wrong.

And it didn't feel right to me that he'd just be, you know, a little bit o'therapy away from normal, either.

When reading the epilogue it also struck me that Hermione would be in a similar-yet-not space. She's at home as a witch but has no family there. She's still a maligned minority, and went through so much of what Harry did, and the pressure to save their asses was on her so much of the time ... the mind reels imagining the repercussions, you know?

So the catharsis of reading FEH was incredible. It just felt right, from the very beginning, with Hermione's self-imposed isolation from all but the Hogwarts professors, and on and on.

So the question for me is the choice to use the first person throughout. I find that often it's very distracting for me to read, because it's usually so amateurishly done that it gets in the way of the story. In FEH it felt so real, I was so blown away by how true it felt to what I'd imagine Hermione's voice would be, you know?

So how do you get in that space? You don't just describe the action, you're in her head, and so much of it (particularly as it concerned her reactions to Harry) was just so out of the realm of any of our boring realities ... I imagine I'd have to lock myself in a room for a month and, oh, I don't know, meditate on insanity and death or something like that, to get there.

Can you describe the process?

[ianthe_waiting]

Getting to make Hermione speak... I very much enjoy writing first-person narratives, and FEH was really the first time I managed to pull it off in a somewhat convincing manner. At the time that I was writing FEH, I really used it as an escape from the pressures of thesis writing. So, I think a lot of the process I used was influenced by wanting to be able to speak for and think like someone else. That being said, I really did not want to fall into the cliche of fashioning a post-DH Hermione after myself...what would the fun be in that? I simply began listing Hermione's predominate qualities as illustrated in the books, from that point, I began thinking of all the 'what-ifs.' In this case, the 'what-if' is Harry's insanity. ^_^

I think one of the best things about middle school literature, growing up, was the character analysis, where you had to list character qualities, formative events in the story, motivating goals, likes, dislikes...basically a dissection based on what the author gives you. However, the analysis always continued in the sense that you had to imagine what the character would do in a given situation... You had to 'put on' the character, become that character, constrained by what you know factually by the character.

I'm getting long winded and repetitive, but I hope that made sense? Locking myself in a room for a month or so to work on a graduate thesis got old, so I remained in the room and fantasized a fanfiction. ^_^

Thanks so much for such a fantastic question!

[apkblack1]

I'm wondering if there aren't more questions just because of the fact that so little of the story is on this site so far. I've seen it referred to by others as a "classic of the ship," so I'm obviously not alone in my adoration of the tale, but maybe not enough folks seeing it here have read enough of it to go on.

But anyway. Back to the questions. The other thing I found satisfying in the tale is how you weren't afraid to kill off so many people (I know, that sounds positively sick LOL). Like there are folks who have almost a grudge against JKR for remorselessly killing off so many beloved people throughout the series, which makes no sense to me, because she was writing about war, and nothing is as arbitrary and remorseless in killing off so many people as war, right? Anyway, you didn't shy away from that at all right from the beginning.

Was there anything that you were going to do that you pulled back from, that you thought was maybe going too far?

[ianthe_waiting]

To be honest, I was surprised JKR did not kill off more of her characters in Book 7. Granted, I was not exactly happy that she killed off a few characters, but it is her book and not mine. ^_^ I have a certain interest in killing off characters, more so in other fics than FEH, which are non-D/Hr.

I think one big thing I 'pulled back from' was the level of Harry's violence toward Hermione. I was toeing the line of writing rape with the attack scene, and in some cases I think it was a 'rape' scene... I had written quite a bit more in terms of violence, but found it to be a little too graphic and too dark, even for a fic where darkness abounds.

As for a something I think I should have pulled back from and did not...some of the scenes between Draco and Hermione and the blatant cliches. I think if I could go back and edit (which I have considered), I would have eliminated the scene where Hermione storms off in the rain and twists her ankle...kinda silly, in my opinion, and cliched.

I have had reviewers ask me: what is it I have against Hermione to make her suffer so? My answer: she can take it. ^_^

Thanks so much for the question!