Hello, this is a side blog for Manacled questions. Because I get a lot of the same questions or very similar ones, I am trying to create a way for people to find the answers Iâve typed up in the past.
Most frequently asked questions:
1) Who was feeding Hermione when she was imprisoned in Hogwarts?
2) Will you ever write Manacled from Dracoâs POV?
3) Did Aurore ever reveal the truth about her parents?
4) Were Hermione and Draco happy?
5) Did Draco and Hermione ever get married?
I havenât reblogged all the longer posts over from my main blog, but I will keep working on it. Iâm still working out what would make the tag system the most functional. Currently, the main tags are:
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I had an AMA today over on the HPFC Discord Server. Mostly questions about Manacled but also a few discussions of others fics if anyone is interested in reading a transcript.
I'm excited to announce that I have signed a book deal with Del Rey at Penguin Random House in the US and Michael Joseph in the UK for my debut novel, Alchemised, a standalone dark fantasy set in a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy, in which a healer with amnesia is taken as a prisoner of war and must fight to protect her lost memories and the secrets hidden among them. It will grapple with themes of trauma and survival, legacy, and the way that love can drive one to extreme darkness, and it is, as you may be able to tell, a reimagined version of Manacled.
I know Iâve been rather quiet about my publishing journey, and a lot of that has been because I didnât want to spark any concerns or worry that I might be abruptly taking away a story that is such a deep part of myself and that I know has meant so much to so many people. This process has unfolded very slowly and quietly because I have tried to be mindful as I could be in every step of the way.Â
As most of you know, I have been a reader in fandom long before I ever began to write. Fanfiction is incredibly special to me, and I have tried to do my best not to undermine its legal protection or allow my works to do so either. During the last several years, there has been a growing issue with illegal sales of Manacled, putting both me and the incredible community that shares fanfiction freely in legal jeopardy.Â
After consulting with the OTW as well as other lawyers, it has grown clear that as a transformative writer I have limited options in protecting my stories from this kind of exploitation, but I wasnât sure what to do; I didnât want to just take the story down, in part because I worried that might only exacerbate the issue, but I didnât know what other options I had. Then I suddenly had this idea of alchemy, which was peculiarly appropriate; an academic world filled with unique transmutational abilities, and a necromantic war against people who had discovered the secrets of immortality, and I could see a path to reimagining the story while still holding on to as much of the original spirit of Manacled as possible.Â
I began redrafting the concept privately around Christmas 2022, and then as if the universe had aligned, just as I was finishing, Caitlin Mahony and Rivka Bergman of WME reached out to me and were delightfully enthusiastic about concepts and ideas for my new alchemical world and the ways I had reimagined the story.Â
I'm thrilled to be working with Emily Archbold, my visionary editor at Del Rey, along with Rebecca Hilsdon at Michael Joseph in the UK, to polish this novel for publication in Fall 2025. I feel uniquely privileged that both my publishing teams are familiar with Manacled and understand how special it is to so many people, and how important it is that this reimagining captures the same spirit while also having its own wings.Â
Manacled is not going anywhere at present. It will remain online throughout 2024, at which point it will, if youâll pardon the pun, alchemise for 2025 and be removed from AO3.Â
I'm so thankful to all of you who've enjoyed my works, and I hope that I can continue to rely on your support as I take my next steps as an author.
Yes, I will be privating it at the new year for at least the immediate future.
It's possible that someday it might come back, but part of the reason I even started this process was because I wanted to pull Manacled back from the mainstream where it's ended up wandering in ways both good and ill.. It'll still be distributed in fandom groups, and privately via collections, etc but it'll be buried a bit deeper within the fandom community, where fandom etiquette is better understood rather than remaining so heavily circulated and front and centre.
Concerning âAlchemisedâ how much of Manacled will be used? Like aspects such as Handmaids Tale and Harry Potter? Since HP and HT are pretty well established books, how do you think youâll tackle creating new worlds,characters etc.??
Manacled's fundamental plot is what's being maintained, but all the IP of HP and Handmaid's Tale is omitted, which honestly the overt Handmaid's Tale references were always a red (lol) herring that I leaned into overmuch because I was worried about my ability to write a mystery story.
HP was more difficult because of the world building, but the thing about Manacled was that HP was fundamentally a bit of a vehicle to write a story about war that I was thematically interested in telling, and so while there were many very HP specific elements to the story, there were also some rather childish elements to canon that I had to try to work around (like the Order of the Phoenix's no kill policy based on the first war, etc) and those always felt a bit crazy to try to have the characters maintaining. So not that it was intended to ever be reworked when I was writing it, but there are aspects of the story that are inherently more conducive to explore in an original work than the ways they have to be altered with fit into a fanwork.
That is not to say that the process was in any way pleasant or something I will EVER do again. I would rather be shot. I have described the process to my family as taking two 5k piece jigsaw puzzles and having to use both to build a new puzzle that somehow makes sense. Do not recommend.
I also had to scrap and build from scratch a entirely new healing and medicine system and it was literally traumatic. *utters soft whimpering sounds*
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Sorry if this has been asked before, I did a quick browse and didnât see it.
Will alchemised be similar to manacled in the sense there are two reading orders? Iâm assuming probably not bc itâll be more of an original work than a fanfic, but I was curious enough to ask.
Thank you for the masterpiece that is manacled. I canât wait to read it a second time, this time chronologically and have my heart ripped out. đ
I talked a bit more about the premise of Alchemised in this interview a few months back.
Hii sen :) first of all, i want to say: you're amazing, your way to write stories is incredible. I can't wait to read Alchemised, so I was wondering, by any chance, is it going to be available in different languages?
Yes, at the moment there are translation deals for German, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Greek, Polish, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Czech, and Slovak.
My question is how did Hermione not hear the house elves giving her food? Did they do it soundlessly on purpose? Because from what I understood, Umbridge put Silencio on her and didnât silence the whole dungeon. If she did, Hermione wouldnât be able to hear the door opening at the beginning. Did I miss something?
If you read the books in Harry Potter, all the food that appears out of thin air in the Great Hall came from the kitchens and was magically transported by the House Elves without their being visible.
Hi what did Voldemort think happened to Draco and Lucius at Malfoy Manor? Lucius said that Voldemort was summoning him via the Dark Mark. Did Voldemort figure out that Hermione's manacles were freed and that Draco's Dark mark went blank? Did he assume that all three died at Malfoy Manor, or did he suspect that any survived?
In my mind, they noticed that Hermione's manacles had gone offline, which was why Lucius was summoned, when Lucius failed appear, Death Eaters were dispatched and found the Manor in flames, and s it was assumed that the reason was that everyone was being killed in the fire, which disconnected the manacles etc.
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It's like the third time i've read your masterpiece and as i did, i kind of had deja-vu moments. Not because i've read it already twice but because it reminded me of something else. And now i finally know! I heavily got reminded of Reylo. Like it has so many parallels and when i saw that you're also writing Reylo i couldn't help but wonder if Manacled is a bit based on it? Or is it pure conicidence?
It wasn't a conscious choice but I've heard that from a number of a reylo shippers. I think because of the type of role Draco has in the story, it definitely has bit more of a reylo dynamic than dramione fics necessarily have by default.
Did Astoria and Draco ever have sex or share a bed/kiss or be affectionate at all? I know they didnât consummate the marriage I think was written
They did consummate the marriage, but not until Astoria was supposed to be fertile, since their arranged marriage was the first stage in the repopulation efforts. Astoria had her own rooms in the manor, however Draco did not live there until Hermione was assigned as a surrogate, which is when he moved back in.
hi sen!! i know theo was driven mad by bellatrix but i was wondering if there was anyone who was taking care of him during the war and what happened to him after?? also iâm not sure if you have answered this but what happened to blaise? love your writing x
He was placed in Janus Thickey after that.
I never did anything concrete with Blaise in the final version of Manacled. Originally he said something anti-Voldemort to Draco when Hermione was imprisoned in the manor and Draco was forced to report and execute him before Voldemort saw the exchange in Hermione's memories, but I decided to omit that. So there's nothing official that happens to Blaise in manacled.
draco did everything for hermione in manacled. was there a line he wasnât willing to cross?
For himself, no. I think if he saw it as a means to an end, heâd do almost anything. He was willing to be as monstrous as he needed to be.
However, there are limits to what heâd put Hermione through (which arguably were also much too high) but at least in her case, there was a threshold of harm where he would have just mercy killed her rather than put her through anything else.
Hi, Sen! I remender reading one of your answers to asks about Manacled that you imagined after Aurore was born, they'd have to deal with the trauma about their intimacy. I gathered you wont be writing about it, but could you tell a little of how you imagined the process went and how much they managed to heal? I hope I dont sound morbid, once H remebered it was different, but I wonder how a couple could heal and try to focus on their love after so much hurt. You keep making me reflec a lot.
I feel like it was a bit of a push and pull process for them. Theyâre both survivors and the thing about people who push things down in order to survive is that it can reach a point where they struggle to ever deal with it.
I think Draco was the one who needed it more because for him the trauma was linear, he always remembered their relationship, whereas for Hermione, because of the disconnect she had due to her memory loss period, she was more capable and inclined to just suppress the period of her imprisonment in the manor because that Hermione was a different person who operated under a different context.
You can see that difference in the way they both approached having sex after her memories come back. For Draco having sex with her again is like a form of redemption that he doesnât think he deserves. Whereas for Hermione, itâs a reversion and a reclamation of something she regards as having been lost/taken that sheâs determined to have back.
The thing about their resuming their sexual relationship so quickly (much too quickly) is that in a way it was necessary for them in order to have the degree of intimacy and trust needed for the escape, but on a strictly relationship level perspective, it would have been much better for them to have reconciled more gradually and intentionally. The fact that they did rapidly revert back to their wartime sexual emotional codependency made it harder for them to actually start dealing with what happened once they were safe on the island.
I think the biggest hurdle was probably talking about it at all. And then once that finally happened it was a very slow process of dealing with it in small enough pieces that it didnât trigger their survival/suppression impulses. Hermione I think would have been willing to just ignore it, she has a tendency to sweep things under the rug for herself once sheâs decided they were necessary (eg her almost complete lack of guilt over bombing Sussex, or her reaction to the revelation that Draco killed children as High Reeve), sheâd rather just move on than deal with the trauma. But for Draco, I think he needed to process it because he was afraid Hermione wasďżź only staying with him only because she wasnât actually acknowledging that heâd harmed her.
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âMalfoyâs lips remained pressed against Astoriaâs but as he kissed his wife he raised his eyes, looking over Astoriaâs head. His cool, grey eyes immediately locked onto Hermioneâs face.â
I have always wondered, what was Malfoy thinking in this moment?
Heâs known she was watching him the entire evening, but because of the constant scrutiny and attention he received, he couldnât look up at her. So, when he was kissing Astoria it was the first opportunity to look up at Hermione. And then, once he met her eyes, he couldnât look away. I donât think there was a reason behind it beyond that he couldnât help himself.
Hey Sen, I was wondering if you could tell me the end of the other surrogates such as Angelina, Cho, Parvati, Katie, Romilda, Hannah.
Did they end up finding closure, were they honoured?
Reading about how the other surrogates were treated hurt me so bad.
To be honest, I did not plot out what happened to the other surrogates in very much detail because the plot was so complicated, I didnât want to bring in a lot of extra threads that werenât going tie in in multiple places. In order to give myself some flexibility in the process of writing, I left certain threads loose in case I realized I needed them later, but ultimately because the story is so limited by the POV, there was a lot of information that never had a natural place to come up.
I think there was gradual healing for a lot of them. Ginnyâs efforts really helped to protect them and gave them opportunities to heal, but of course those types of atrocities arenât the kind of thing you ever just âget over.â But as you do see with Angelina in Diagon Alley, the surrogates did go on and live lives after that, lives that were obviously shaped by the war and the repopulation program, but their stories didnât end with the liberation.