My Approach

When I write fan fiction, I want to walk a line. I want to expose the problems Mrs. Rowling has created, and explore some of the implications. On the other hand, I do try to be somewhat reasonable with my treatment of the characters. While there are enjoyable aspects of For Want of an Outfit, it has an acceptance of kinkiness that, I think, distorts the characters too much. I do not want my story to focus on the smut, because I am not writing the unrealistic relationships in to titillate, but to push the bounds of the defined universe. To expose how the magic causes problems, and to force the very flawed characters to deal with them.

I do cause things to happen that are only remotely possible because Mrs. Rowling has introduced, bluntly, magic, without fully defining or confining it. I am certainly not going to twist an established character’s personality just to introduce a political statement into a story. Any “alternative universe” story allows for changing the characters to fit the new universe, but I believe they should still be recognisably themselves. There can, however, be a butterfly effect thing, where a character’s personality grows a different way because of things that go differently from the books.

In book five, Dumbledore says “You know, I sometimes think we Sort too soon…”¹ because of how much children’s personalities grow and evolve between the begining of their first year at age 11 and the people they turn out to be leaving the school at 17 and 18. Sorting is at all possible because, at 11, children do have a base personality that has been formed to a degree. Dumbledore’s quote resonates with readers because these teen years are critical formative years in which we grow, and change, in remarkable ways. If a fan fiction author creates a compelling deviation in the course of a character’s life, it then becomes not just reasonable, but expected that the character would begin to evince behavioral differences from the canonical character. Protect them from something that forced them to grow and they will be more imature. Provide a new stress not present in the original, and they will grow, or break, or even both break then heal (and thus grow) in ways the original character did not.

There is some value to the “stations of canon” approach where, unlike the butterfly effect, no matter how much you change things certain things stay the same. Each should, however, be used carefully, with judgement, neither changing things just to do so, nor preserving things that end up feeling unnatural and contrived in light of the changes you have intentionally made. If this is true of events, it is just as true for the characters themselves.