I had a lot of fun with this last cover for Book III (also I couldnât find a ref online that was right for her hands, so those are actually mine, minor hand reveal)
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The older i get the more i understand why some people become obsessed with privacy, not because theyâre hiding something, but because being constantly perceived starts to feel spiritually exhausting.
Did you know that soda machines at restaurants and movie theaters spy on you? That most common new cars now record your sexual preferences and send it to the manufacturer (and also data about anyone who also gets in your car, walks by your car, and maybe happens to be within visual range of your car)? That grocery stores are trying to force customers to download an app to scan barcodes on shelves instead of putting up prices, so the app can scan the phone, decide how much that customer should be squeezed for, and adjust the price? That more and more innocent people are being sent to jail for crimes committed hundreds of miles away because an AI facial recognition algorithm spit their faces out and the cops didn't bother to do the most basic of checks?
I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.
Thanks for responding to my question about why you chose Theomione as the main pairing! I was really under the impression that Draco was gone for good when i asked that đ¤Łđ¤Łđ¤Ł
Tbh after getting over the initial heartbreak i kind of liked him being dead (sorry dracođ) to the point that i was actively ignoring any hints and foreshadowing that he was coming backđ but thatâs only a testament to how much you sold me on Theomione!
Draco coming back and feeling BETRAYED by seeing Theo and Hermione together was so funny to me. He is such a little shit! The audacity and entitlement!! So you can have two lovers without communicating with either of them but they canât have each other? BYE!!! đ
I gave this a couple weeks since there was no way to post either the ask or the answer without spoilers (oh well!) but you definitely were not the only one who thought Draco was permanently out of the picture. Writing something with big plot twists well in advance of anyone ever seeing them can be such a funny process. We were certain so many times that things we were writing were telegraphing our intent and that no one was going to believe he was dead. And even with four people beta-reading this in advance, it's just like that sometimes, you really have no idea exactly how things will play.
And as far as liking him being dead, you for sure weren't the only person who felt that way either, and we genuinely love that. Neil and I talked several times about how we felt like Book II was a success in our eyes because we do truly think we could have kept him dead and the story still would have been beautiful and complete. I suspect it would have been much shorter, and the way it wrapped up likely would have been more focused on finding happiness after grief (also would have had to find a little time to take a dark lord down) but we could have done it. Ultimately though, we had another goal for the back half of the fic in mind, and we very much look forward to selling you on Draco coming back as hard as we sold you on the Theomione.
PS, Draco, the empath who couldn't find someone else's shoes with a map and a flashlight, will never not be hysterical to me, but WE WILL GET HIM THERE
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Lego's Q3 2025 earnings announcement, October 2025
So Lego just posted another monster quarter and everyone's doing the usual "timeless appeal of analog play in the digital age" garbage and like, no, the actual story is that Lego is a privately-held Danish family company that spent the 2000s nearly going bankrupt and came out of it having figured something out that almost nobody in consumer products has figured out, which is that your core IP is the manufacturing tolerance.
Here's what I mean. A Lego brick made in 1958 still clicks perfectly onto a Lego brick made last week. That is not a marketing claim, it's a manufacturing fact, and it's enforced by tolerances measured in like two thousandths of a millimeter â the stud diameter variance on a standard 2x4 brick is famously smaller than most medical device manufacturers hit on parts going inside human bodies. Which sounds like trivia until you realize it's the entire business model: every brick ever made is compatible with every brick that will ever be made, which means the installed base isn't a depreciating asset, it's an appreciating one, because every new set expands what you can do with the bricks already in your kid's bin (and your bin, and your dad's bin in the attic).
Now compare this to basically every other toy category. Hot Wheels from 1972 don't interface with Hot Wheels from 2024 in any meaningful way â they're both little cars, sure, but the track systems have changed, the scales have drifted, the accessories are incompatible. Barbie has gone through probably a dozen body molds. American Girl dolls from the 90s have different proportions than the current ones. The entire video game industry is structured around planned incompatibility â your Switch games don't work on Switch 2, your Xbox 360 discs mostly don't work on Series X. Incompatibility is the business model, it's how you get people to rebuy.
Lego said no. Lego said the brick from 1958 will fit the brick from 2058. And this is insane, if you think about it, because it means they have voluntarily foreclosed on the single most powerful lever in consumer products, which is forcing obsolescence. Every company that sells a durable good spends enormous amounts of R&D figuring out how to make this year's product not work with last year's product without pissing the customer off too much. Apple is a master at this, Microsoft is slightly worse at it, car companies have built entire industries on it (proprietary charging connectors, OBD-II access, right-to-repair fights). Lego just... doesn't do it.
What they get in return â and this is the thing the "timeless analog charm" people miss â is that the brick becomes infrastructure. A Lego brick is not really a toy. It's a piece of durable manufacturing infrastructure that gets distributed into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and every new set is basically an expansion pack for an operating system that already has universal install. Which means the network effects are doing most of the work. When a grandparent buys a Lego set for a kid, they're not buying "a toy" in the sense that a Mattel product is a toy â they're depositing compatible substrate into an accumulating household stockpile, and every deposit raises the marginal utility of the next deposit.
This is also why the IP licensing deals (Star Wars, Harry Potter, the recent Nintendo stuff) work for them in a way they work for basically nobody else. When Hasbro does a Star Wars license, they're making Star Wars figures that sit on a shelf. When Lego does a Star Wars license, they're making bricks in Star Wars configurations, which means even if the kid loses interest in Star Wars in six months, the bricks get absorbed into the general pool and keep producing value. The license is temporary, the substrate is permanent, and the substrate was already the valuable part.
The near-death experience in the early 2000s is the instructive piece here, because Lego almost lost this. They went on a diversification binge â theme parks, video games, clothing, Galidor (look it up, it's hilarious) â and they started loosening the tolerances on the actual bricks because the bricks were seen as a commodity and the "brand" was seen as the valuable part. Which is exactly backwards. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp comes in in 2004, basically says the bricks are the company, tightens tolerances back up, narrows the product line, and the company starts printing money again. The takeaway the business press drew was "focus on your core competency" which is such a domesticated reading of what actually happened â the actual lesson is "the boring manufacturing discipline IS the moat, and when you think the brand is the moat, you are about to destroy the company."
Which is interesting because right now there's a huge knockoff market â Mega Bloks, Chinese brands like Lepin (which got sued into oblivion), various others â and they make bricks that are almost compatible with Lego. Almost. And it turns out almost-compatible is actually worse than incompatible, because when a kid tries to fit a knockoff into a real Lego build and the stud is 0.03mm off, the whole structure gets wobbly, and the kid learns not to mix them. The tolerance is a credential. You can counterfeit the shape but you can't counterfeit sub-thousandth precision at scale without becoming, essentially, Lego.
Anyway, the Q3 number is like 13% up year-over-year in a consumer products environment where basically nothing is growing, and the analyst takes are all about "emotional connection" and "intergenerational brand equity" which â sure, fine, those are downstream effects. The upstream cause is that a Danish family spent fifty years obsessing over whether their plastic rectangles were within two thousandths of a millimeter of spec, and it turned out that was the whole game.
Whenever I donât want to get out of bed but I really *need* to, I take a deep breath and tell myself âGet the fuck out of bed bitch goâ and I am UP. I hope this man knows the service heâs provided and is proud.
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I am LOVING bloodtoll and although iâve never read theomione without draco, iâm obsessed. Genuinely i look forward to every update all week. Maybe you canât answer this yet, but i was wondering about the reason behind choosing theo to be the main love interest (or at least the one who lives lol) instead of draco? Donât get me wrong i am OBSESSED, but theo is basically a fanon character, while dramione is the more established ship, itâs an interesting choice and iâm curious about the reason behind it! Xx
Hey! Thank you, this was a really cool ask, and I'm probably about to make you regret it with the absurd length of my answer.
I got this several weeks ago but couldnât answer it until now because while most of this, including the question, contains spoilers for beyond Chapter 17, which canât really be helped (sorry to anyone who hasnât read that far!), there is one aspect of this that gets into ENORMOUS SPOILER territory for Chapter 31 and beyond, so I'm going to put that below the âkeep readingâ.
But to answer you, there are several facets to this and I kind of felt like talking about all of them.
1) The first, which I realise is not exactly the question you asked, is 'why a second MMC (any MMC), in addition to Draco, at all?' / âWhy two love stories?â / âWhy did someone have to die?â
When Neil and I first began batting around an idea for this fic in the summer of 2024, the arc of Book II was really the lynchpin of the story for us and that was what was conceived first. Book II probably has the most traditional âromanceâ plot beats, and I think the conceit of it is most central to what we started off wanting to explore, essentially the overwhelming angst and guilt (on both sides!) of falling in love with your dead loverâs lover.
2) I think taking that as a given, the next question would be âwhy Theo specifically?â as the Book II love interest, rather than any other MMC we might have chosen. He is, as you say, basically a fanon character â and we didnât even particularly stick to that fanon characterization.
Iâd say that for as much as Theo can often be a glorified OC, we do really like his possibilities, and we also have a very long-standing fascination with his structural position in fandom (which is such a unique thing and which I would genuinely love to read an academic paper on someday if someone ever wrote one). Despite such a broad fan consensus on who he is and how he âoughtâ to be written, he's in some ways (great ways!) a blank slate, and in other ways he's ideally placed with certain elements of his background to slot into a very specific role.
Sidenote about THE DYNAMIC: We had a story premise that required a pre-existing, secret relationship between two alphas, and look, if we are talking M/M I have a weakness, and I won't speak for Neil on this one, but I know she certainly enjoys it too. And that weakness is for posh boy childhood friends to lovers, especially if there's an element of âtragically forbidden due to societal circumstanceâ, and especially especially if you can cross that with âwe were soldiers togetherâ. (And this didn't come into play in Bloodtoll specifically, but I also adore a side of daddy issues, obligatory shout out to Chin Up). In HP fandom nothing accomplishes all that for me quite like Dreo.
So if our story predicates two pureblood men, who are already in love with each other, both falling in love with the same woman at different points, there was really an obvious choice there in terms of preference for who those two were going to be.
3) Which brings us to âWhy have the two love stories play out in that order?â Or said another way: âWhy not cast Theo as the enigmatic fast burn who dies saving them both and Draco as the angst-ridden wild card slow burn who picks up the pieces?â This is, I think, closest to the question you actually asked (sorry I am only now getting to that after hundreds of words).
First â plot dictates. We needed the love interest in Book I to be a highly secretive, unreliable legilimens and the love interest in Book II to be a bit of a loose cannon mess who, crucially, cannot protect his mind or read anyone elseâs. It isnât inconceivable we could have made that Theo and Draco respectively, but at least where Draco is concerned, itâs a lot less in keeping with his fanon reputation, and even a bit of canon. On the one hand I could generally give a shit about characters being OOC â I can be convinced of anything if itâs well written, and in a sense all fanfic is out of character by a certain degree or the events would play out exactly as they do in canon. But taking other factors into consideration, it did feel more fitting to play it the way we did.
Second â It didn't escape our attention that, as you've pointed out, there is a massive and well-established ship for Dramione, which is nothing like the case for Theomione. We had a specific plan for how we wanted to tag this fic (the hows and whys of which are probably the subject of a different very long ask), and that plan was to retain as much surprise about the course of the story as possible. What that meant in practical terms was that we were aware that a lot of people were going to start this story as a WIP, expecting something Dramione-only, only to be hit with *Not That*. We anticipated A LOT of people dropping it after Chapter 17 (and even some after Chapter 13) and we were cool with that â we were pretty clear up front that this story wouldn't be everyone. Surprisingly, this didnât actually happen, and as it stands at the end of Book II the number of people who are subscribed to the story is well above what it was before the events of Chapter 17. I suspect that if it had been tagged as only Theomione from the start we would have had a vastly different and much narrower subset of people reading it, but, to be clear, that in itself had zero effect on anything about what we chose to write.
Neil and I would write for literally only two people (and we do in a sense) if we believed that was the best version of the story we wanted to tellâbut something that did factor was our general overall impression of how fandom views Draco.
Draco is a bit of asshole in Book I, not only to Hermione, and to Theo, but also to the reader in some ways. He withholds a lot of information, he does some questionable things without explanation, etc. He's an unreliable narrator, and there is a certain level of the reader simply being on board with that that we knew we were going to need in order to make Book I effective. And we knew that there is a particular subset of fandom (certainly not everyone, but definitely a big chunk) that will forgive Draco of almost anything. This is in no way a value judgement btw, Neil and I both ship Tomione so hard we're 200K into another cowrite at the moment. It doesn't change the fact though that in a lot of fics out there Draco gets a pass from readers on some absolutely *wild* shit.
Conversely, Book II is intentionally structured around not only selling Hermione on Theo, and selling Theo on the concept of Theomione, but also selling the reader on Theo and Theomione. We wrote those 120K+ words with the express objective of getting whoever didn't immediately unsubscribe after Draco's death (and was tentatively willing to see how it all played out) to the point that by the end of it they are as desperate for those two characters to be together as the characters themselves. It is enormously cheering to get messages like yours, and others from readers, talking about how this is not a ship they've ever rooted for or considered, but which we've convinced them of. There is nothing more flattering to a writer than "you did such a good job that you sold me on something I didn't think I could be sold on."
So not only did certain character aspects necessitate the order of their respective love stories, but also, at least on a meta level, how theyâre regarded by fandom, and we were kind of counting on some of the things you mention in your question (fanon invention vs established ship) to support that.
And last:
4) To return to the question of why we chose to kill DracoâŚ
If youâve finished Book II (and you better have if youâre reading this because I donât want spoiling on my conscience):
We didnât. Happy Birthday Draco, you get to live. đĽł
The premise I mentioned back up at the top wasnât only âWhat happens when you fall in love with your dead loverâs lover?â
It was also âWhat happens when it turns out theyâre not dead?â
A lot, apparently, if the fact that we're only 50% through the story is anything to go by. Book III is going to be a lot of fun.
Hi! Iâve been reading Bloodtoll since the first chapter and Iâm obsessed. Iâve seen discord mentioned by commenters and from what i understand there is a server where readers discuss the story there? To be honest i donât really understand how discord works but when i downloaded it, it seems like servers are invite only so i just wanted to ask here if the server is for all readers and anyone can join bc iâd love to join if thatâs the case, i was embarrassed to ask for an invite on ao3 in case this is like a private server for people who are already friends/know each other or something đ maybe i missed it but i donât think u guys have ever included it in ur author notes so thatâs why iâm asking because i donât know how people know about it, iâm not really involved in the HP fandom and i donât know anyone i mostly just read alone so i just wanted to ask first lol totally fine if itâs a friends only thing
Hi there! First, it is so lovely to hear when people have been following along since the very beginning. It makes a massive difference to us as authors when people are willing to read our work as a WIP no matter what the fic is, but especially this one, because of the amount of trust youâve given us despite the minimal tagging. Anyone who reads this story once itâs complete will be wonderful and welcome, but they wonât be like you guys, who gave us the beautiful experience of your shock and delight at all the twists that wonât really be twists for the readers who come later. So thatâs huge to us.
Second, this was such a sweet ask! We did indeed fail to put the discord link anywhere in our author notes, but it was an oversight and probably because we were so busy rhapsodizing about banyas and French tarot that we forgot.
The discord channel people usually use to discuss the fic is on the Wizarding World WIPs server, and itâs not private, youâre absolutely welcome. It is mostly a lot of very lovely people chatting about a lot of very fun theories that Neil and I have to try very hard to be quiet about. Or asking us the occasional question about the writing of it that I end up responding to with way, way too many words (do not ask about our writing process unless you would like a novel in response, once I start I cannot be stopped, see the ask Iâm about to answer after this for reference). Also Neil has memes.
Anyway, the link for the server is here, it would be lovely to see you there: https://discord.gg/TRatg4Yr9S
Wizarding World WIPs is a place to flail and celebrate WIP fics in the HP Fandom | 1625 members
foreshadowing done well makes me go feral like thereâs NOTHING better than getting to the end a book or an important storyline moment and realising that the author laced information so intricately into their writing that werenât noticeable upon first read but when you read back sections theyâre light giant red flags like wow writing is amazing
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