Spoilers for Lionheart Ch 80: I read Ch 80 on my way to work today, and I couldn't focus on anything all day. Before this, I couldn't fathom the idea of being so committed and invested in a fanfic that you love a character so much that their death just hits you so personally. I adore Narcissa for all her flaws and strengths, for who she is (a mirror of the worst and the best people I know), and for all that she has gone through in your universe (to think that she was under so much distress all this while and it was compounded by the horcrux-resurrection stone situation).
I know many people are upset at Harry for being the cause of Narcissa's death, Sirius' near death, etc. but... poor kid, man. I wonder if he was also getting visions like in canon that were driving him to pull the stunts he did in the last 2 chapters.
I am fascinated by your Bellatrix. First impression already reveals that she has so much more depth than canon and most of fanon, and of course it's all elaborated by the picture of House Black that's been slowly unfolding over this book (thank you for that by the way, when you said you'd be deepp diving into the Black family drama, you were not exaggerating).
I'm not yet ready to think about what this means for Draco, but my heart just weeps for him. I am glad to see Narcissa's parting words to Hermione though. Damn. What a way to bless.
All in all, what a chapter. What a sombre conclusion to Book 5 (pending the last couple of chapters, I think). What an excruciating reminder to our heroes that they're children fighting in the grown ups' war. Well done.
What a fantastic ask, god damn. I'm going to pull out of it one thread that I'd wanted to talk about, which was Harry.
A lot of people judge Harry harshly for his role in Chapter 79/80, and I think is merited to a point, but I do hope, as you suggest, that there's a sense of where he's coming from and at least an interest in where his character moves forward from here. One of the things I think Order of the Phoenix got right is the response of a traumatized child to a year of meaningless punishment ineffective bureaucracy + targeted psychological warfare by the principal leader of the enemy movement, both of which are targeting you by threatening a person who (1) you know personally to be unstable and (2) have an intense and unhealthy attachment to because of his relationship to your past. He blows up! He blows up and he fucks up real bad, and I think that's good, because in essence it's a lot of years of problems coming home to roost.
I also wanted to play up a contrast between Harry's victory against Umbridge — a cruel but ultimately arrogant and overextended bureaucrat— versus an actually dangerous and competent villain. Harry was just rewarded for breaking the rules and disobeying authority with the arrival of the Order and the deposing of Umbridge; I think he would realistically map that to the next challenge and conclude that it was a risk worth taking, especially since, in his view, he had taken all the precautions he possibly could to avoid someone else getting hurt. And Draco and Hermione both read him correctly and then misread him, in their own ways, based on their private biases and insecurities and griefs.
Finally, making Harry make a very large, very permanent miscalculation of risk, in a way that jeopardizes his personal relationships and imposes grave consequences for one of his closest friends, was important to his growth as someone who has generally been rewarded for risk-taking behavior. Harry has always had an asymmetrical understanding of just how powerful and important he is to the war, partly informed by Dumbledore's successful campaign to let him live a semi-normal life; but Book 5 is when that delusion stops being tenable, and he starts to see the kind of influence he has for good or ill.
