Echo_1989

maybe this has been done before but anyway good little girl from adventure time but it's draco as marshal lee, hermione as fiona and ron as cake cos he loves his pudding just as much

Reading the flashbacks:

Going back to read the ‘present’ and realizing (and admiring) how everything is super intricate and connected:

Realizing how many details you overlooked the first time around:

Going a bit crazy rereading everything trying to find meaning even in the smallest of things because @senlinyuwrites is a genius and you can never be sure

Illustrations for Manacled by @senlinyuwrites (Part 2)

draco malfoy's harness (healer hermione x auror draco)

If it’s the Tiktok I saw, the creator only read six chapters of Manacled and then was reacting to the trigger warnings on the fic. If anyone who has read the entire story wants to bring examples of where they believe I’ve romanticized rape, I am more than happy to have a conversation about that with them.

But I’m not going to spend my limited free time endeavoring to change the minds of people who themselves admit to either having skim-read or only partially-read Manacled, and then proceeded to go to a public platform and make sweeping judgements about me and my intentions as an author, and why they think people have read and enjoyed the story.

Personally I have never regarded Manacled as a romance. It is romantic in certain gothic romance regards, but in my opinion, fundamentally, Manacled is a dystopian horror story and a tragedy, insofar as literary categorization goes. Admittedly the characters don’t die, but the structure of the story is not actually very romance shaped. Tragedy and romance have many similarities, but the form of their climax is distinct, which is part of why many people are dissatisfied with the epilogues, because they don’t do the things that readers expect to feel at the conclusion of an epic romance. They’re not supposed to, because it wasn’t.

Horror and romance are also closely related, they have many of the same beats, but they’re inversions of each other. One of my favourite tumblr posts puts it thusly:

something about horror as a genre is very inherently similar to romance, but it’s differently romantic. it’s like if romance could be compared to a rabbit, then horror is a hare. a hare is the same shape-ish as a rabbit, but it’s different; it’s upturned and eerie and comes at you from a sideways angle.

i think this connection between the two genres is the presence of love. love as a concept. romance is the genre that beautifies love, and horror is the genre that explores love in ways that aren’t beautiful. horror is the monstrosity of love gone sour, or the absence of love, or the emotions that the intensity of love and pain birth. slasher horror is monstrous obsession, while existential horror always has a narrative that makes you rethink what love means, what being human means. just like romance.

That’s very much the way I see Manacled. It was intended as the Black Mirror version of JKR’s power of love premise in the HP series. The question I wanted to ask in writing it was what kind of love is truly enough to win a war? Manacled is the horror version of Harry Potter, where love is monstrosity.

So, you just accidentally unlocked overanalyisis with Sen. I apologize. Here are many words:

There was actually a reason for that.  I agree that Draco wanted to distance himself from being a father like Lucius as much as possible, however, I imagine he grew up in a highly constrictive social circle and didn’t witness many families or parenting that would have been less formal. So I don’t think he would have thought to be called something different.

  You’ll noticed that Hermione refers to herself as Mum rather than “mother” but she calls Draco “Father” to Aurore, and in my mind, she did that from the beginning because she had assumed that it would be the name Draco would be expecting/more comfortable with. And so, that’s what Hermione uses, that’s what Draco goes by and that’s what Aurore calls Draco when she’s little.

HOWEVER, you will notice that in the final epilogue Aurore refers to Draco as “Father” during her conversation with Ginny that’s out in public, but in private, when it’s just her and James, she calls Draco “Dad.” In my mind, when she went to school she switched in imitation of her classmates and kind of cautiously tried it out when she saw Draco again, and was like, “Is this ok? This is what my school chums do.” And Draco had a small emotional breakdown on the inside and was like, “of course you can call me dad. That’s fine. I didn’t know you wanted to.”

So, in conversations with professors or when the context was less casual/intimate, she’d switch back to referring to him as father. But when she was actually with Draco, or talking about him with a friend, she’d refer to him as Dad.

So, this is the cologne that my beta had in mind when we were discussing what Draco should smell like in Manacled. Private Label by Jovoy. https://www.fragrantica.com/perfume/Jovoy-Paris/Private-Label-13460.html

However, the selection for notes that Hermione noticed were ultimately selected based on their literary function, and Private Label doesn’t actually have cedar or oak moss in it. 

So there were a couple different reasons. For one, her character just felt virginal, not in a innocent, girlish, blushing way, but in respect to sexual experience simply not being something she regarded as important for herself yet.

I considered her as very focused on the war, to the point that she just let everything else fall to the wayside. Hermione’s such an intense individual, whenever she does anything in canon to help Harry or Hagrid or the house-elves, she lets it consume her. There’s a ruthlessness in her choices that enables her to give up even some of the most important things to herself once she’s decided they're worth it. That line she has to Harry about “when I was in, I was in. Maybe you just never realized how far  I was willing to go,” really is to me one of the most defining Hermione lines in Manacled. When she’s in, she will go as far as necessary, no matter what the consequences are.

Too many Weasleys. And Weaslette seemed too juvenile for a war fic with the tone that Manacled had. So she was Ginny. Also. It probably annoyed Ginny to have Draco calling her by her first name.