Why Manacled hurts so much
So I've just finished Manacled by @senlinyu this fanfic felt like my soul crumbling. It hurt something to deep in me. I knew it was going in and now I somehow I want to have never read it but also I want to experience it all over again.
I've sat and thought about why this fic hurt so much, yes it's a dark and heavy fic, yes its beautifully written but it's something more.
Harry Potter and its fanfics were my escape, wanting to live in another universe, away from my problems, even at a boarding school away from my families and home. I believed that magic would be the greatest gift, it would change my life for the better, I would be given so many posibilites. I dreamed of feeling connected by magic. To fly. To float feathers. To make potions. To have an undeniable physical manifestation of belonging and uniqueness. Manacled took my dreams of hope and escapist dreams and destroyed them.
It showed me that magic can be evil
And not big bad wolf evil or the stupid "I want infinte power" evil but diabolitcal evil. The type of evil you think is not possible of a human to inflict upon another. Evil that creates curses that eat away at peoples flesh, that cut people a part layer by layer, that waste people away into nothing and do it all so, so slowly to create so much pain. But this same magic which inflicted that, the same magic we beg to have, couldn't reverse those curses or even stop the pain.
Manacled showed me that waking up at Hogwarts won't save us from evil. It placed real human reactions into my fantasy world. What would really have happened in a war, without an unrelistic superpowered Fate blessed Saviour to fix it all.
It showed me cruelty
It made my fantasy world, the one I cried myself to sleep thinking about, it made it a real flawed world. It snatched my rose tinted glasses destroyed them in the most cruel way. It showed me the harsh truth that I dreamed away when I begged for hope. It took the most preacious pure parts of this world and thrusted lifes cruelty deep inside them; Fleurs baby sister, Harry's optimisum and stuanch morals, Hermione's role in the war. All of them cruel replaced by what would have happened in a real war, children become sullied, optimisum and morals gain you nothing and some peoples sacrifices will never be acknowledged
Its forever tainted my view of Harry Potter, it's showed me the twisted reality of this world.
It destroyed my childhood and my last piece of unadultered inner-child's imagination.
I don't think I'll ever feel this amount of hatred and awe for a piece of media ever again. Manacled will mean so many more things to everyone. This is just what it made me realise, it's definitely not a new take but one I needed to process by voicing to anyone. Even this empty void
