#some with arrows

One of my main issues with Much Ado, is that Bea and Ben's story is kind of wrapped half way through and then it jumps into Hero and Claude's story. So for SWA, I combined the two and the phone being fake lost and the subsequent spiral pulls very heavily from the Hero and Claude story (for those unfamiliar, long story short, Claude and Hero are supposed to get married and then Don Pedro lies to Claude about Hero's virginity). Obviously, that's not the vibe for the modern retelling.

What I'm about to tell you now is truly the secret to everything I write. I go into everything I write asking myself 'how can I fuck this up? A nicer way of putting that is how can I prevent my heroes from getting what they want, but I prefer my version tbh. So I just sat down and knew that at this point of the story I needed to break Lily and James up before they went on their date and I knew I needed it to be something Peter could be involved in. At one point, it was just going to be a deuxmoi post, but there were too many holes with that one (it does remain a bit with the various deuxmoi posts that track the two of them being out and messy). I also knew I had to close a lot of holes - Lily and Sirius and Remus were all becoming friendly, so I needed to cut communication of there too. And thus I came to the idea of the "stolen phone." I have a few friends that have been celebrity personal assistants and their entire lives are on their phones, and it's a HUGE thing if the phone goes missing or is stolen, so that felt big enough and also something Peter could pull off.

And then from there the story progressed. Lily would be slighted from James not showing up, but James also needed to end up mad at her, which is how she ended up on Raya. But, it couldn't just be celebrity gossip, James needed to hear it from someone he trusts. If it was Peter it'd be too much of a give away, so enter Regulus Black via Sirius.

Petunia to me is such a fascinating character when we write fanfiction, especially when we write Muggle AUs. Because Petunia and Lily used to be close, but it was Lily going to Hogwarts that really drove the wedge between them. What happens when Lily doesn't go to Hogwarts and what happens to their relationship were two questions that stuck out to me as I started SWA.

Because we spend so much time with Petunia in canon where she's incredibly nasty and awful, that's usually carried through to AUs and Muggle AUs. For this one, I wanted to challenge myself to write a relationship I'd hadn't seen too often in fanfic between Lily and Petunia.

The line in HP3 (I think it's HP3), where Petunia is obsessed with some celebrity gossip lived in my head while I was writing SWA. Petunia is clearly someone who loves gossip and loves the idea of celebrity, which makes her an intriguing character to put in the world of SWA - especially with deuxmoi.

I don't think I ever considered Petunia as a culprit for deuxmoi - in fact, looking back a year, I think it was always going to be Peter. But, I did want to use her to throw everyone off the scent. And I sometimes succeeded (mostly not, I feel like you all were with me with the Peter reveal for the most part).

We only got to see a glimpse of Petunia and Lily in SWA, but what we did see I'm really happy with what came out. They clearly don't hate each other and they clearly talk often. Petunia does things that piss Lily off (because sisters often do) and vice versa for Lily. I think there is an element of Petunia being jealous of Lily's fame. But I also think when you're fame adjacent, like Petunia, you'd use that to your advantage - thus not completely cutting Lily out of her life like in canon.