#beasts fic

[ habitat, n.: the natural environment in which an animal or plant usually lives ]

writing notes and headcanons: 

on writing: this chapter was the toughest yet to write honestly - still feel i'm learning the ropes about pacing, foreshadowing and suggesting, and how to balance flashbacks with driving plot forward in the present. i've made my peace with how it turned out and was excited to put it out after a lot of revision, but damn did you know writing was hard who else knew this and didn't tell me hmmm! also i'm a fair weather writer and a chipper lil bean why am i writing all this sad shit. questions without answers

on quidditch: ah man i honestly love writing about quidditch (the metaphor potential!) re the muggleborns in quidditch issue - i know in PS/SS there’s talk of the first-years having multiple flying lessons, but it always seemed wild to me how obviously at a disadvantage muggleborn students would be at with confidence and practice on a broom (like, no shade to the weasley boys, who are clearly a talented bunch, but they do get to spend the first eleven years of their lives and every summer after that playing and practicing in their orchard - like, justice for dean thomas making it to be a reserve, honestly!) ginny is her father’s daughter, so reckon this is bit of a social justice issue for her, but in a sort of i-want-the-best-and-i’ll-find-it way (i also think she knows from playing on a team with ron that underconfidence doesn’t mean a lack of talent). much more to come on rina!

on souls: one of the things i had the most fun with in this chapter was the soul chat scene - a tricky topic for a teacher to broach, even under normal circumstances, but especially for this bunch of war-hardened teens, some of whom (ginny and hermione, but also all the azkaban survivors) have far too much first-hand experience with soul magic of the darkest kind. i’ve learnt so much from some truly fantastic metas and analyses of souls in hp (some shared below) and have always wanted to think and write about the soul-as-both-personality-and-conscience tension that runs throughout canon - in harry’s narration, other than in passing in conversation with dumbledore over horcruxes, we don’t get a ton of exploration of what a soul actually is. i intended to do it as a meta but honestly i’m having so much fun trying to weave these ideas and speculation into this fic, as well as use questions of souls and what makes you, you, as ginny herself goes through this unwanted process of self-examination and reflection as she’s knocked off course with her own sense of self 

on molly and ginny’s letters and their relationship: a lot of what i want to use Beasts to explore are the relationships between different female characters, including mothers and daughters. a criticism often made of molly from her critics is often that she doesn’t really write to harry or any of her children when they’re at school. to that i say: here are all my headcanons defending molly weasley til the death!  in canon, i think ron’s lingering jealousy of molly’s attachment to ginny and fears that she favours ginny (‘least loved always, by the mother who craved a daughter…’), and ginny’s constant conflict with molly over her coddling risks means we don’t always get to see a positive read on ginny and molly’s relationship. we also know, though, that ginny and molly both enter and end the series beside one another, and we saw molly become a killer to defend ginny from bellatrix. this is such an important relationship and i'm so excited to write about it in this piece. i just love the idea that ginny and molly are extremely close over the years, actually, despite their conflict, and that they were in regular contact throughout the school year in ways the boys just would never have been, making each other feel less lonely in their more solitary years. 

on ginny and hermione: relevant to the above and honestly a bit of a soapbox issue/manifesto for this whole fic - it's really important to me to try to find a way to write friendship and conflict between two characters (especially female characters, and particularly female characters who have historically been at the centre of fandom shipping wars), while doing justice to both characters’ perspectives and not bashing either of them. i love both hermione and ginny as characters. i’m very interested in their friendship and both characters’ flaws and failings, and so getting to write this post-war year with both of them back at hogwarts, spending the most time together they ever have but also such different wartime experiences and perspectives is just *chef’s kiss*. we know their friendship is strong - hermione and ginny do appear in canon as people who have fun together and serve as each other’s confidants on key issues. but they’re also two strong-willed characters who canonically do fall out and must, by virtue of their characterisations, have certain faultlines running through their friendship. obvs they famously have that fantastic clash over harry and the sectumsempra curse in HBP that i’ve always been kind of obsessed with (ginny coming out swinging for harry, very strongly, rightly calling hermione out for being manipulative, but also immediately going mean in her response - the “oh, don't start acting as though you understand quidditch you'll only embarrass yourself” is, like, as iconic as it is devastating, lol) that scene remains a big jumping off point for thinking more broadly about their dynamic and relationship in this period of their lives. hermione can be tone-deaf and patronising sometimes, ginny can be angry, spiteful and childish - i want to write about that, and let both women be flawed and interesting and still worthy of respect and affection. (also i re-watched fleabag for this fic, because we're thinking about sisterhood here babyyy)

on parallels between harry and ginny as characters: writing this fic has just been me repeatedly finding 9000 more parallels between ginny and harry throughout the series i'd missed lol. this chapter i was thinking about how ginny is harry’s understudy in two quidditch finals (both of which she wins obvs), and again in the DA during DH (i know neville ends up as the only DA leader by the time of the battle of hogwarts, but i think we can tell from their canon characterisations and the deliberate parallel building between the golden and silver trios that ginny = harry, hermione = luna, and neville = ron. it’s also strongly implied in chapter 15 in DH through phineas nigellus’ testimony about the sword-stealing incident that it was ginny who was the DA ringleader and architect of that mission). now, here they are again, two captains, mirror images again. it’s just a throwaway line from angelina in this chapter (“you’re no harry” to ginny when she's trying out as seeker) but i’m having so much fun finding these parallels but trying to understand what that must have been like for ginny, to repeatedly be stepping into the shoes of the boy she loves and admires (soulmate shit, but also soul-searching shit, no?). even the way ginny is reacting to stuff in some of these scenes - hermione going to london and ginny doing her best not to sound openly jealous but failing - i was thinking about ron and the prefect badge all over again. ginny is not harry, crucially, and she has her own distinct characterisation and different responses, but they are enormously similar characters in ways i’m still learning about. (these guyyssssss honestly)

on seamus writing to ginny: have literally decided the seamus and ginny friendship arc from pebblysand’s the fault in faulty manufacturing is canon soooo that's what that is!

on the twins and ginny at muriel’s: firstly, i'm so sorry!!! secondly... i’ve had a version of that scene in my head for so so long and never knew how to use it. i briefly flirted with the idea of writing a fic about fred, george and ginny in hiding together with their parents at muriel’s and what those weeks were like for them, in what ended up being the last weeks of fred’s life. but honestly uh i cried writing that tiny vignette (and tbh welled up writing that last sentence jfc), so clearly i would not be able to get through writing that fic. their DH coins lighting up and the three of them being like woo we’re free from muriel’s we’re going to go fight let’s go? but it’s actually them going to fred’s death? i’m not ok!!!

on ginny’s card-making materials: canon compliant ginny weasley is an arts and crafts girlie. love u cute little loser girl! i see you with your sticky tape and gel pens! girls who make dumb crafts and inflict them on their friends representation!

reading list for chapter four: 

on ginny and flying: 

Little Sugar Men by DopeyTheDwarf @bluethepineapple

on ginny and hermione’s friendship:

I'll Be There by StarlingFlight

you were broken-hearted and the world was, too by celaenos

on souls:

The soul in the Harry Potter universe; a joint meta by @artemisia-black and @ashesandhackles

The Infinite Divide: A Study on Horcruxes and Souls in the Harry Potter Universe by @celestemagnoliathewriter

songs from the playlist particularly for this chapter:

for the widows in paradise, for the fatherless in ypsilanti - sufjan stevens | morrison's jig by orthodox celts | dot the dragon's eye by hanneke cassel | featherweight by fleet foxes | soon-to-be innocent fun by arthur russell | troubled waters by cat power | fallen fruit by lorde

and a sneak peek of chapter five because we need harry and gin to hang out again don't we? we've kept them apart enough 🌊🐚🎣

Of course, they get fish and chips by the sea, their new little ritual. Both of them hang off the counter, a little giddy, pointing at the notices stuck up on the wall ('Should we look for that man's cat, do you reckon? 'Gin, that cat's been missing since June, it's extremely dead'). Harry’s appalled by how much vinegar she makes the man at the shop put on her chips, grumbling as they leave the shop with the goods wrapped in warm newspaper paper. ‘I have to kiss you after you eat those, you know –’ ‘Have to?’ They perch up on the beach wall while she does battle with a ketchup sachet. He's cracking open a can of a suspicious-looking Muggle fizzy drink made by a man claiming to call himself Dr Pepper. ‘What do you mean, have to? Real hardship, is it? Great burden?' 'Yep.' He takes the ketchup sachet off her, tears it open, hands it back. 'It's tough work, but someone's got to do it.' 'How about I find myself someone else on this beach who's not such a baby and doesn't mind kissing a girl after she's had a bit of vinegar -' (She gets an unvinegared chip to the head for that one. He does let her share the fizzy drink, though it transpires he knows shamefully little about the identity of this Dr Pepper character.)