Really fascinating Snupin WIP

[valis2]

Right now I've been quite entranced with Dangerous People, a Snupin WIP by evecat (evegenia on IJ). It's post-DH, contains DH spoilers, and so far is pre-slash, though I have a feeling that it will not remain so for long. The author's warnings are: language, violence alluded to, character death alluded to, but I would add that the violence alluded to can get a bit gory. Just a bit.

There's no real summary, so I'll just say that Snape and Lupin are on the run from a Wizarding World gone mad, and end up in the Chicago, trying to blend in with the wizards and witches there. That sounds hokey, but it is entirely not. The political situation in both countries is explored, and Snape and Lupin do their best to keep up with their cover stories.

I didn't give this one much attention at first, because I was skimming, and it just didn't catch me, though I could tell that it was well-written. But I went back to it, and reread chapter one, and was delighted to find a truly adult, engrossing story. I am completely absorbed by the universe that Evecat casually conjures; so many things make sense, fit together, and are not only interesting but plausible. So many things resonate. These characters are interesting, and though she rewrites their backgrounds a tiny bit (and invents lots), it all fits together fairly well. And the language! I am loving the language.

The side characters are awesome. I mean awesome. I adore side characters who do not overload the reader with LOOK LOOK LOOK AT ME AND NOW I WILL UNLOAD MY STORY ON YOUR HEAD. Their banter and interaction with the main characters is exactly as it should be, logical sauce to the plot, background elements that really bring out Snape and Lupin's character. The side characters reveal things slowly, if at all. I am totally entranced by their behavior and dialogue, and they are really clever creations.

The plot is so unexpected, moving here and there, and I love not being able to guess, even though some of the issues faced are quite logical. People complicate things, and this is where the story shines--in all of its complications, in its lovely, stubbornly fixed pace, and its well-realized characters.

This is one of the reasons I love fandom, finding stories like this.

There are formatting issues, and it's unbeta'ed, so there are typos and small mistakes. Some characters we know and like in canon are a bit of a stretch here, doing things I'm really not certain they would, but in my head I've moved this story into an AU world, so it works. I'm also occasionally a bit confused by the POV shifts, but that could be a result of reading too fast, and the political side of things often throws me out of the story, but overall it's a wonderful piece of work. I'm enjoying it tremendously.

Excerpt:

The first light coming into the tent woke Lupin, but he kept his eyes closed. He felt soft and weak with relief, even knowing that the person sleeping across from him was Snape. He reminded himself that he didn’t fully understand what was going on and that he wasn’t really safe at all. But someone else was here, with food and clothes and a plan beyond making it to the next full moon.

Here is the link to Chapter one on LJ. Keep in mind that the author has now switched to IJ, and anything beyond chapter 7 is available there instead. Also, some of the chapters have links and some do not; some of her links lead only to her journal. I've compiled a set of links for the chapters--it's under the cut.

Chapter 1: Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

Chapter 2: What cannot be spoken must be passed over in silence
Chapter 3: Goodbye to all that
Chapter 4: Your name and your deeds were forgotten/before your bones were dry
Chapter 4.5: Interlude
Chapter 5: Something's misplaced, maybe for good
Chapter 6: I'd bury my dreams under the ground
Chapter 7: Interview Questions / Hard to be human again on LJ
Chapter 7: Interview Questions / Hard to be human again on IJ
Chapter 7.5: Unpracticed on IJ
Chapter 8: The dead sleep on but the living have risen on IJ

Comments

Why, thank you!

[evecat.livejournal.com]

Wow, you really capital-R recc'd my story! I blush. (And resolve to do better with the typos...)

I like the squids at the top of the page very much.

Your comments made me think--you're right, I don't really see the canon characters like Moody acting in canon as they do in my story. This is one reason I've kept them off-screen. I wrote them as I did because I wanted to show what I felt they would have looked like if Rowling had handled the violence and social insecurity that she writes about in a realistic manner.

This will sound more negative than I mean it to, because actually I do like the books quite a lot, and they're YA novels anyway: I wanted to show what a low-intensity civil conflict would actually do to the people participating in it, not just have them bounce back like they're made of rubber. I also wanted to show that mass fascist movements don't happen just because of an Evil Charismatic Leader and his Evil Followers. And that fascist movements usually have a coherent goal--the seizure of state power--that's kind of absent with Voldemort. He's this fantasy psychotic villain, and believing in fantasy psychotic villains gets you into more trouble...

So I wanted to write a story where my characters have to negotiate how war and violence corrupt things. It's not enough to say "oh, sometimes good guys do bad things"...you have to ask yourself "at what point do you cease to be a good guy if you do bad things?" and "how much individual responsibility do you have for not doing bad things, even in war"?

I also wanted to write characters who have to live with having done bad stuff. (And both Snape and Lupin have--some already revealed, some to be shown.) What with the current political situation, there are people coming back from the Middle East who've done terrible things (I've met a few...I've met someone who pretty much shot a guy he knew to be innocent.). How can you hold onto your beliefs about morality and about yourself and also accept that you've done something terrible? And what do you do then?

Of course, I'm hoping to express all of this through chase sequences, Snape's accounts of his time with the Death Eaters, an assassination attempt...oh, and sex.

And I'm so flattered that you like the side characters! They're hard to write. Although I find that I'm getting more and more interested in them...Fatima, Janina, Ismail and the dog-man play a bigger role in the rest of the story, although all POV and so on are Snape's and Lupin's.

Speaking of POV, I hope I may ask you what is confusing about the switches? Are the voices not well enough distinguished? (That's something I worry about; I feel like I'm only starting to get a really good fix on writing Lupin.)

In an ideal world, I'd like to go back after I finish this thing and make all the details line up, rewrite a few awkward passages and tighten some things up a little. My plot didn't really come together until about part four...before that, I knew that they got out of the UK and went to Chicago but I had no idea about any of the rest of it. And that shows a bit, I think!

(I'm having trouble logging in--I hope I haven't just double-posted this...Apologies if so.)

Re: Why, thank you!

[valis2.livejournal.com]

Wow, you really capital-R recc'd my story! I blush.

I like to rec out-of-the-way fics--you know, fics that are awesome but aren't jumping up on the radar. (And I am a bit over-wordy, lol!)

I wanted to show what a low-intensity civil conflict would actually do to the people participating in it, not just have them bounce back like they're made of rubber. I also wanted to show that mass fascist movements don't happen just because of an Evil Charismatic Leader and his Evil Followers.

That is one of the things I like best about your fic--it isn't simple. Even though I have been a little waylaid by some of the political conversations, I am still impressed by the fact that they're in there--and that the characters are so complicated, so grey. I adore that, actually. Characters who do not blindly follow--characters who question, like flesh-and-blood people--those are characters who live and breathe. Yeah, you can write a hundred Bellatrix blindly enforcing the Dark Lord's will fics, and they're great, but that one Bellatrix who knows why she's there has to be a more stunningly real creation, at least in my eyes.

I also wanted to write characters who have to live with having done bad stuff. How can you hold onto your beliefs about morality and about yourself and also accept that you've done something terrible?

Yet again--another incredible item to explore in your fic. I have always wondered about wizards and witches--imagine that you carry in your hands every day a tool which can brew your coffee--or kill someone with a flick of your wrist. It's a lot of power. And this universe has proven again and again that bad things do happen, quite often--and people have done things they regret terribly. I really love that you're showing the consequences. It's terrific.

And I'm so flattered that you like the side characters!

I adore them. You've done such a great job with restraining them--they're not overloading everyone around them with backstory and quirky quirks. They're totally awesome, but they're still in the background. Love love love.

Re: Why, thank you!

[valis2.livejournal.com]

Heh...part two!

Speaking of POV, I hope I may ask you what is confusing about the switches? Are the voices not well enough distinguished?

Okay, here I'm going to get up on a soapbox. Please feel free to disregard what I say--you're such a great writer that I hate to nitpick, but the POV shifts were really, really distracting to me.

Here's an excerpt from your story:

[Lupin's] hands were cold and didn’t want to work. Being a werewolf, he’d often said to himself, hadn’t actually equipped him to survive in nature. Packaging, he thought as he tore open a wrapper. Advertisements and shops. The first bites of food were so good that he lost track entirely.

Snape watched him for a moment and then tore open a package of jerky and dropped it on the groundcloth in front of him. Wolfish, he thought, would be exactly the word. Disgusting. He could see flecks of food around the wolf’s mouth, could see his throat work as he gulped.

We are in Lupin's POV for the first paragraph. Completely within his viewpoint. And then, suddenly in the second paragraph (there has been no scene change), we are in Snape's POV.

There are three main third-person POVs that fanfic writers generally write in: third-person limited, third-person limited with rotating narrators, and third-person omniscient.

It seems like you are writing in third-person limited with rotating narrators, but if you are, then swapping narrators within the same scene is disorienting.

I've written a lot more about POVs, and fanfic writing in general (this is also hosted on Sycophant Hex, but it's the first version, so I'm going to leave links here for the second version, which is much improved):

A Guide to Writing Fanfic, Part One of Two: Character (http://valis2.livejournal.com/220596.html)
A Guide to Writing Fanfic, Part Two of Two: Mechanics (http://valis2.livejournal.com/220672.html)

I'm pretty sure the POV stuff is under Part Two. Seriously, your writing is terrific, and if I've made a mistake about which POV you're telling it from, then I apologize profusely. I mentioned it because it stood out to me. And I apologize for being so nitpicky, too; I hate to do it when there is such quality writing on the table. I love your writing, and I'm so very much hoping that you're going to grace us with more. Thank you so much for sharing your work with us!

Re: Why, thank you!

[valis2.livejournal.com]

Okay, I've reread some of it, just to try to get a handle on the POVs--I think the problem is that sometimes I don't know who "he" is and I have to reread some sentences to figure it out. That's a common hazard of writing slash, lol. ;)

Anyway, if you're writing with Third Person Omniscient in mind, then I'm just getting a little confused at points; if you're writing with Third Person Limited in mind, then the scenes need to be separate. Clearly I should take the foot out of my mouth, now. *laughs at self*