Relationships between Characters

Overview

I think that nearly all writers fall into one of a very few categories when dealing with Harry and Hermione.

• There are the "Lets see what sort of twisted torture we can put him/her through" group out there. They come up with bizarre situations and pairings mostly just because they want to see the characters suffer.
• There are a ton of people who really wanted Harry to end up with Hermione. Some of these are simply lazy; Hermione is the only female with true character development in the series. Some of these identify with her, and so the pairing is essentially wish fulfilment.
• There are people who write Harry/Draco or similar stories. Some of these are reacting to Mrs. Rowling's unpopular opinions. Some of these are doing the wish fulfilment thing - they have these types of attraction, and so need Harry to have them also. Some of them are doing the "lets torture the characters" thing, and really belong in the first category. Jeconais is known for his fluffy stories in which Harry enters a relationship with a girl and in doing so finds the confidence to become Super Harry. In one of his stories, he includes the following that summarizes the improbability of this type of story:

  If he didn’t have Ginny, if by some quirk of nature, he didn’t like girls, if he lived in a world where water flowed uphill and he was actually gay, there was still no way at all that he could ever be anything other than polite to the ferret.¹

• A number of authors will pair Sirius with Remus. For most of these, I believe it is a way to make a statement of disagreement with Mrs. Rowling'S unpopular opinions without drastically changing central characters. The exception is where it becomes a focus of the story and we start to see lots of scenes about their relationship. Then I think it is a case of the author exploring his own situation but trying not to stomp all over Harry as a recognisable character.
• The writers that pair Harry with Fleur, or Nymphadora are essentially the same as the ones that write harem stories. I tend to avoid these. While a 3 year age gap is neglible in your late 20s, it is a wide chasm between teens. Harry may have needed to grow up fast in some ways, but he is not ever really going to be ready for a relationship with a much older woman while still a young student.
• Harem stories vary in sophistication from pure smut to something that can be surprisingly worth reading, but nearly every case there is that underlying immaturity. Even where both smut and immaturity are avoided, they are setting Harry up for a situation that is fundamentally unrealistic because they are not really dealing with real girls. Perhaps the author is doing that because these are fictional characters, and so this is a safe outlet for something the author knows full well is not real. Perhaps it is because the author is actually immature. Sometimes as a reader you can tell, other times only the author could truly say which.

This is not only fiction, but fan fiction. It is really really hard to resist the temptation to explore the holes in Mrs. Rowling's world building. As part of that, it is really really hard not to put the characters in totally unrealistic and impossible interpersonal situations, because these situations allow me to explore some of the interesting holes. Things like contracts, veela, life debts, and even to some extent the trace are hard to fully play with unless you deal with adult situations.

On a related note, there are a couple of common representations of Lily.

• She is a money/power hungry person who married James because he was a rich pure-blood. She either used love potions on James or took advantage of him.
  • In these stories, you will occasionally find that she cheated on James and that Snape is really Harry's father. Magic was used to disguise this.
• She was drugged by James, who unscrupulously used love potions. She would have left him as soon as she as uninfluenced.
• She was super intelligent and James was an utter moron.
  • If the first assumption is also true, she tolerates this because she needs the family name/wealth.
  • If it isn't, then she might not have realised it until she sees him squandering that wealth in blind obedience to Dumbledore.
  • He might recognise this and put her in charge.

More rarely, you see one or more of these subverted, for example she blindly follows Dumbledore while James is more suspicious. It is exceptionally rare to find a positive representation of both Lily and James. I find none of these biases acceptable in a story, and will strongly consider abandoning that story as soon as I come across them.

When I write fan fiction, I want to walk a line. I want to expose the problems she 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.