Fanfiction Fridays: those immortal dead by notbecauseofvictories

there is a story among the Naboo, about a girl who went down to the shore and saw a man drowning, there in the deep water. She was a great swimmer (children of Naboo are) and so she shed her clothing and came out to him with strong, sure strokes. Yet he was desperate and flailing and would not heed her, and in his panic he dragged her down with him, into the dark water.

Her lungs were not so deep as his. She drowned.

this is a lesson, the mothers of Naboo tell their children. sometimes, to be strong and good-hearted is not enough to save yourself.

No one on Naboo seems to remember the name of the girl who went down to the shore. Girls in tales don’t need names.

(this story is different among the gungans. They say: there was a girl, and as she sank down into the darkness and the mud, she opened her eyes and breathed in, and she became a gungan, for nothing is made and nothing is destroyed, and all water that was once snow comes around again in rain.

Death is a rare thing, the gungans say. The rest is just a change of states.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the next Star Wars movie lately, and about the astronomical (ha) hopes I have pinned on it to be even better than the last. I went looking for fics to preemptively fill the hole in my heart, but in the end I discovered one that, while excellent, doesn’t really speculate about the future of the sequel trilogy at all. (The AO3 gods are just like that sometimes.) While those immortal dead doesn’t offer any great ideas about what might happen next, it does offer a bittersweet perspective into what has already happened: namely, the passing of Padmé Amidala and its effect on the people in whose lives she would have otherwise been.

Fanfiction Fridays: Dumbledore’s Army

as a metamorphmagus, i should be able to transform into any shape i want to be. but who is there to teach me? we are rare. the only metamorphmagus i know is long gone.

but at thirteen years old, puberty is beginning. and it’s not right. there are lumps on my chest that hurt when i press on them, shrink ever so slightly, but this is the default shape and i hate it.

i hate that i can’t control the only talent i seem to have.

“it’ll just take practice.”

that was what everyone said. and at first, it was funny, when my hair flashed different colours over an argument at dinner, and i woke up with a nose that protruded out of my face like a beak.

but now, in the privacy of my own room, it’s infuriating. i can’t look the way i want, and i can’t explain that to anyone else, because all they see is a girl.

“i’m not. i’m not.” i flop back down on the bed, face buried in the pillow. outside, various potter/weasley children play a game of tag up and down the street. they’re having fun, enjoying the summer sun while it’s out, and i’m up here, sulking. in how many more ways can i be different from the others?

as much as they tell me, harry and ginny aren’t really my parents. i’m not a potter, or a weasley. and now — how can this even be normal?

transgender. i already know what it means — at this point, i’m something of an expert. it means inwardly cringing every time someone says ‘she’. it means hiding the way i look, even to myself.

the adults know something’s up. this has been going on — badly — for weeks, ever since i got home from school. those changes had crept up on me during exams and now there’s nothing to distract me from the disaster happening right in front of me.

so now i hide. in my room, away from their casual inquiries.

A week-ish ago, I found myself reading a fascinating article about the many ways in which Harry Potter has failed its queer fans. While the writer did predictably come down on the ultra-heteronormalizing Lupin/Tonks marriage, I was surprised to read that people had read not just Remus as queer, but Tonks as well. While it seems obvious in retrospect, I apparently missed that ship when it was sailing.

I set out to rectify this and acquire some fantastic queer Tonks headcanons, but the AO3’s tagging system, which I find notoriously hard to use effectively in the Harry Potter fandom in particular, thwarted me. I can’t be too mad, though, because my search turned up the fantastic fic Dumbledore’s Army.