#oyiet answers

[saintsenara]

If you’re still doing the ship game, what are your thoughts on Voldemort/Tonks? (Inspired mostly by the comparisons between Tonks and Bellatrix in the most recent chapter of One Year in Every Ten.)

anon, thank you so much for this ask - which has, to be quite honest, upended my world.

because i'd literally never thought about this ship before, but now i realise that i'm not only in line for a passport to vonks nation, i appear to be an accidental vonks sleeper cell...

i always write both bellatrix and andromeda as having personality types which map on very closely to the tonks we meet in order of the phoenix - funny, clumsy, cheeky, charismatic, bright, a bit naive, and possessed of an outrageous fashion sense.

there isn't a shipping reason behind this. it started way back when i was planning nor all that glisters gold and thinking about andromeda, and i realised i've never vibed with a fanon tendency to make her this incredibly haughty ice queen, and to suggest that all of tonks' vibrant or insincere personality traits are inherited from ted.

obviously - yes - andromeda doesn't come across as massively welcoming in her only canon appearance, but i think she can be forgiven this on the grounds that harry and hagrid have just destroyed half her garden, revealed that her daughter might have been murdered in a surprise death eater ambush, and shouted at her when harry mistakes her for bellatrix.

but nor, actually, does ted. and so i think it makes much more sense to imagine that they're both a bit curt because of the enormously dangerous situation they find themselves in, and that - outside of that context - andromeda is just as likely to be a great laugh as he is.

i should also say that i am really not a fan of the sort of "omg aristocrats are so brooding and mysterious" way of writing many of the pureblood characters in the series. and one of the things about this which i don't like is the way it reduces characters to gendered stereotypes, while rarely seeming to think critically about the actual gendered conventions which govern their lives we get a hint of in canon.

pureblood women are often reduced to descriptors such as "haughty", "mannered", "prim", "icy", and so on - and, yes, all of these are traits which are implied canonically about bellatrix and andromeda [and narcissa, sirius, and regulus as well...], but they are not traits which have to exist separately from ones we would associate with tonks.

because bellatrix is - canonically - both haughty and theatrical; both cruel and loyal; both in thrall to voldemort and willing to answer him back [it's always overlooked, i think, that, in half-blood prince she reveals that she's told the dark lord to his face that he's wrong to trust snape - that takes a pretty strong nerve!].

she's clever but not particularly cunning [she's a blunt instrument - subtlety is not her strong point]; incredibly charismatic [harry always notices her whenever she's in a room] but also quite artless interpersonally; entirely committed to her prejudiced beliefs and also clearly a little bit naive... her anger when harry says that voldemort's a half-blood in order of the phoenix is really striking when compared to the fact that lucius malfoy doesn't bat an eyelid - i have always thought that more of the death eaters are aware of voldemort's birth name and background than dumbledore believes, which malfoy basically confirms, and so i really like the insight this gives us into what bellatrix is unwilling to move beyond when it comes to the version of voldemort she has in her head.

and she's also someone who is clearly very affection-starved - and who can be written on the basis of her canon personality to be something of a hopeless romantic, and for the vision of romance she has to be quite idealistic and a bit girly. and this doesn't prevent her being a sadistic bigot who knows exactly what she's doing in the slightest - it just adds another layer to her character which i think is really interesting to explore.

i really like the complicated dissonance of her being proud to be the loyal lieutenant of a terrorist kingpin she believes is capable of magic beyond her wildest dreams and who rewards her for her service by not murdering her, and also her wishing to be wooed and sent roses and taken out dancing by a man who has never had the slightest intention of doing any such thing.

tonks also has that idealistic romantic streak - after all, she takes one look at the giant red flag lupin's waving and says "you son-of-a-bitch, i'm in" - and she also has the brains, charisma, bluntness, theatricality, loyalty, and ruthlessness of her aunt.

as an aside - i also really like these tonks-bellatrix comparisons because they undermine one of the series' lazier narrative conventions when it comes to writing women: that straightforwardly bad women can never have anything substantial in common with straightforwardly good ones. petunia has to be nothing like lily, for example, because lily is the series' central pinnacle of womanhood and petunia is a bitch.

the idea that tonks gets all the fun parts of her personality from her father is an offshoot of this. but i really like the fact that realising she is very like bellatrix would force harry et al. to actually reckon with the reality of what bellatrix did and to think critically, in contrast to the ministry's view that everything's fine with voldemort dead, about the conditions which enabled her radicalisation.

[i've written something touching briefly on this - everlasting ink - in which harry and ginny end up adopting delphini and discover she's both her mother's daughter and the reincarnation of a woman they adored.]

but to return, dazed and bleeding, to the vonks agenda...

it's an incontrovertible truth that voldemort mainly likes bellatrix because of her fanatical devotion to him, which enables him to use her freely as a tool for his own gain.

but this is not - i think it's reasonable to argue - the only reason he likes her. after all, she's not the only death eater who goes to azkaban rather than betray him, but he's not going around calling rabastan his favourite...

and her slight bolshiness evidently does contribute to his fondness for her.

the canonical voldemort clearly thinks of himself [even if, let's be real, he's wrong] as someone who doesn't like sycophants. he has no interest in hearing nott sr. gab at him following his resurrection; he is perfectly happy to be told by augustus rookwood that the way he's being going about trying to retrieve the prophecy is wrong; one of the things which drives his humiliation of lucius malfoy in the dark lord ascending is that he's fully aware that the malfoys hate having him squatting in their house, but that lucius would never have the backbone to tell him this. his trust in snape is implied, particularly in deathly hallows, to be connected to what he perceives as a frankness in the way snape speaks to him - him telling snape that he "sounds like lucius" just before he kills him is a way of him letting snape know that he thinks he's being shifty [which - of course - he thinks is because snape knows he's the true master of the elder wand].

he is also theatrical, charismatic, interpersonally offputting [in a context where you weren't afraid of him, think how annoying his tendency to witter would be], clever, strangely loyal [i talk about this a lot, but the fact that he berates wormtail for betraying james and lily - even though this is exactly what he wanted - is really striking], transcendentally attention-starved, and so on. and he clearly respects the idea of constructing one's own identity in defiance of social convention - his favour permits bellatrix to behave in a way which is clearly unusual for a woman of her social class and snape to be ranked higher than richer purebloods who should look down on him, for example.

and he's also - in his own way - a little bit of an idealist too. the elaborate fantasy he's shown to have constructed for himself as a child - that his father was a wizard [who, i presume, he imagines will reveal himself after dumbledore's visit, now that it's safe to do so], that his mother wouldn't have died if she'd mattered, that his father doesn't emerge because he's also dead [he doesn't realise he's alive until he visits morfin!] - is something he uses to self-soothe, and he's hugely rattled by anything which undermines his belief in this dreamscape. just as bellatrix is by any hint that he's not an almighty pureblood god.

and, above and beyond this - even though this is a much more controversial thing to say - he's also capable of being a hopeless romantic himself when he wants to be... it's astonishing to me that we as a fandom don't make more of the fact that he thinks that his parents were in love, that tom riddle sr. was responsible for naming him [even though he's shown in chamber of secrets to know that merope chose his names], and that his father only abandoned his mother because she revealed her magic to him. there is absolutely no chance that he heard this from either morfin or tom sr. - he just makes it up! - and yet he clearly believes, even as an adult, that there was a world of happy families he was denied by his father's lack of chivalry. and i think this adds a really interesting dimension to his obvious loneliness which is tremendous fun to explore.

in a context where the fact that she's an order member is insignificant to him, then, i think it's entirely plausible that he wouldn't hate tonks - which is, for him, essentially a proposal of marriage - on the basis of her similarity to his erstwhile fave.

and tonks, for her part, clearly has a horrible weakness for cruel, emotionally-unavailable, self-loathing men who are cheerfully capable of murder.

i don't not back it...

as a postscript, my two favourite tonks-voldemort moments in canon: the fact that, in the middle of planning a coup, he's taken time out of his day to learn that she's married lupin [it's giving xoxo gossip girl!]; and the fact that her wasting away from unrequited love in half-blood prince is exactly what happens to merope.

#asks answered #asenora's opinions on ships #vonks #tom riddle #lord voldemort #nymphadora tonks #unhinged and deranged ships #obviously #and yet sign me up i'm hooked #oyiet answers

[saintsenara]

Ah, see, that irks me, but unfortunately, it does not surprise me. The idea that Hermione is the more emotionally mature one, more attuned one, Harry's REAL best friend of the two is a view with which that goddamned yankee screenwriter has plagued this fandom for decades now. Whenever I see this take in drarry/snarry/whathaveyouarry-- where Ron is the last person to come around to the absurdity, I'm reminded immediately of how, when Hermione was having the kittens about Harry floo-calling Sirius, it was Ron who put his foot down and said "Harry can decide for himself."

I think this fandom really overlooks, in favour of magnifying his jealousy, just how deeply Ron trusts Harry and thinks the world of him, how impressed he is by Harry as a person, how much he's willing to put his own life in Harry's hands. There's a reason that Ron and Harry are a Dog and Stag just like Sirius and James, which is to say that when Harry makes ostensibly shite decisions, Ron is most likely to hear him out. The locket had him acting completely unlike himself, and the pseudo-possession there is a different conversation.

I also think it's fascinating that for all that Ron nearly has a fit every time someone says "Voldemort" around him, he seems to have a very nuanced understanding of Harry and Voldemort's connection, unlike Hermione who accuses Harry of liking it, and Ginny, who only sees her possession at the hands of the diary as deeply traumatic. Ron understands that Harry understands Voldemort and the man he once was, and you can do a lot with that.

yes. just yes to all of this.

ron and harry [and james and sirius] are basically two pair-bonded cats - they run around sharing a braincell [and i do feel for hermione trying to manage ron's willingness to hear one of harry's dumb plans and say "you son-of-a-bitch, i'm in"] but they do also trust each other so profoundly that it feels like an actual crime for it to have been left out of the films.

and part of that trust is that - unlike hermione, who as i've said elsewhere, often gives the impression of being afraid of harry - ron isn't afraid to be honest with harry, even if that honesty is in the tough-love vein. he's actually entirely correct in deathly hallows that harry hasn't thought the horcrux hunt through, that this lack of planning is making them inefficient and putting them in more danger, and that harry's increasing belief that he's the only person the war is happening to is an enormous disrespect to the people who are putting their lives on the line to support him, including ginny.

because something i get in the critical comments of one year in every ten as well is the idea that ron would cut ties with harry if his relationship with ginny broke down. and, besides the fact that divorce is not always acrimonious, this annoys me because i think it fails to appreciate what ron would be particularly upset about: that, in pretending his marriage was fine, harry was being dishonest, and that his dishonesty would end up hurting ginny and hurting him.

i wanted ron to be the person who'd always suspected that harry wasn't being entirely open about his sexuality - and the person who'd actually done some thinking about what impact this might have on the state of the hinny marriage - and i wanted this to lead into ron's view that a strange but clearly raw and real relationship between harry and tom is better, whatever the other costs it has, than fantasy happiness with ginny simply because harry's too afraid to admit who he is and what he wants.

and absolutely - my "ron is a tomarry shipper" conspiracy theory is heavily rooted in the fact that ron is nowhere near as freaked out by their mind connection, nor by harry's interest in indulging it, as hermione is. it is also rooted in ron saying the quiet part out loud in deathly hallows:

You really understand him.

the best man speech writes itself!

#asks answered #ron defence league #weasley is our king #oyiet answers

[saintsenara]

HOWLING at the reaction pic... no, because madam, I am not usually a tomarry girlie, and I was recommended your (utterly excellent) murder mystery, "one year in every ten" with the promise of a wonderful Ron (a promise that was fulfilled) and I came out of it being completely tomarrypilled but also, I don't know if your readers have already pointed this out to you, but your Ron and your Tom also have nastily good chemistry... especially in that one part where they have a heart-to-heart about loving Harry. And then I looked at your blog because what else do you do when you're a fan. And well. All I have to say is you're right about Ron being kind of Mother and you're Right that it's compelling. Sorry for the absolute mess that is this ask. Happy St. Paddy's!

anon, tom is shaking at the suggestion that he has actually admitted to loving harry at any point in the entire proceedings.

look, we know that ron's canonically not immune to the charms of thin, dark-haired men [kron nation rise up!], and i will die on the hill that lord voldemort isn't immune to the charms of gingers with a cracking pair of baby blues either [after all, why would he be so obsessed with dumbledore if he wasn't?], so i will roll around with glee in the idea that the combined forces of ronmort are going to enjoy messing with harry for the rest of time - in the one year in every ten universe, at least - by flirting with each other across the kitchen table in grimmauld place.

but ron's still going to remain a committed wife guy. obviously. hermione's getting treated right even when they're centenarians.

[lord, i have seen what you have done for others...]

my more serious point is that i'm always very interested by the fact that i get a lot of furious comments from people who have apparently read through 200,000 words of explicit-rated tomarry and been shocked to discover that the tomarry is explicit, who really take issue with the idea that ron's extraordinary love for harry might motivate him to try and understand just what exactly his friend might see in the dark lord.

and yet nobody ever says the same about hermione.

there does seem to be a general idea i notice in tomarry fics that hermione would be far more amenable to harry hooking up with a man who was obsessed with killing him than ron [also a theme i notice in other harry-centric slash pairings like drarry and snarry].

but i'm afraid i do just sincerely believe that ron would love harry enough that he'd be the first of the granger-weasleys to make the effort, and that he would discover in doing so that - since harry and tom are narrative mirrors - he, as harry's best friend... is going to quite like tom as well.

and, certainly that he's going to recognise that all of the things which ron is canonically shown to be really attuned to with harry - his grief, the weight of his orphanhood, the desire he has to belong to a family - also exist in spades in tom. one of ron's most underrated traits - especially within a fandom which likes to focus exclusively on his more negative characteristics - is that he is extraordinarily welcoming in that familial sense, that he clearly believes quite strongly in the idea that everything he and harry and hermione go through has given them a bond which is not only thicker than water but thicker than blood and will endure through anything. he is - and i'll die on this hill - the tomarry girly's secret weapon, and i love to see him get the respect he deserves in our little corner of the fandom.

and i also think that it's not only this version of tom [who is, of course, slightly saner than he is sometimes found...] who would like him - ron has lots of traits the canonical voldemort values, above all his loyalty, but also his pragmatism, his daring streak, and his intuition.

they make quite a formidable pairing. i can already tell harry regrets it.

[can i just also say that i continue to be delighted by the sheer number of people who tell me that one year in every ten is the first time they've read tomarry, or that they've tried it despite not being a fan of the pairing usually.]

[any and all engagement with fic is extraordinarily generous - obviously - but there's an extra layer of generosity in being willing to go in with an open mind to a pairing which might not immediately make sense to you which i really respect. i have encountered, as i'm sure many of us have, a great deal of the fandom's more narrow-minded denizens clutching their pearls at the idea that tomarry isn't automatically unpleasant or implausible, in a way which can often feel fairly demotivating as someone who thinks that it isn't in any meaningful sense a crack ship.]

[this is a very welcome reminder of the fact that far more people exist outside of this view than in it, and i shall never stop being grateful.]

#asks answered #i'm not sure i realised 2024 would be my ronmort era but here we are #oyiet answers

[saintsenara]

Hi! First of all, Happy Saint Patrick’s day! Second of all, I have been binge reading ‘One Year in Every Ten’ this past week and I have been absolutely captivated by it. In particular, I’m interested in your characterisation of Delphini, I liked the parallels between the portrait of Bellatrix as a young girl and the photo of Delphini on her birthday. I’m curious as to what your characterisation of Delphini would be if she was to appear as a more prominent character in a work of yours, things like her temperament, feelings towards her parents (particularly in One Year on Every Ten with a dead-but-not-actually Tom), interests etc. She’s a character I typically don’t have great interest in, since I’ve never been particularly interested in The Cursed Child, but you’ve piqued my interest!

I’d also be curious as to how you think interactions between Tom and Delphini would go down, and what you feel Tom’s feelings would be towards her? I think you’ve mentioned before that he wouldn’t be a particularly hands on father, but his behaviour at the end of Chapter 28 makes me wonder about that apparent lack of paternal nature.

anon, thank you so much! i am absolutely delighted that you’ve enjoyed one year in every ten, and i’m particularly thrilled that you’ve managed to do so while being a member of delphini nation. it will come as a shock to nobody that there are plenty of readers who are having to grit their teeth and suffer through the concept of a bellamort baby - and even more, i’m sure, who have dipped altogether at the first mention - and so it’s very refreshing to meet someone with taste…

the hill i will die on is that delphini’s existence makes sense not only in contexts such as this - which you will never find me claiming feature one-hundred-percent-canon-accurate representations of its stars - but within the canonical voldemort and bellatrix’s character arcs. the big theme of the series for voldemort is that his attempt to outrun his humanity is ultimately futile, and so him fucking around [literally] and finding out that even his body - cobbled together from snake blood and dark magic - is capable of getting his mistress pregnant fits that in a really interesting way. the canonical voldemort also has a really quite profound sense of honour - the most striking example of which is that he detests wormtail for having betrayed james and lily, even though that betrayal was literally what he wanted to happen - and i think this provides an explanation for why he wouldn’t just kill bellatrix [or give her an abortifacient against her will] when she refused to end the pregnancy.

[and i do think he’d be under no illusion that delphini was his - not least because the most canon-plausible time for her to be born is at some point in spring 1997. bellatrix appears in half-blood prince once, in a scene set in early july 1996, and then doesn’t turn up in the text again until the opening scene of deathly hallows, which takes place in early july 1997. if we say she’s born in march or april, this would have her conceived in summer 1996 after all the evidence of canon suggests that rodolphus is back in azkaban. voldemort’s not wheedling his way out of that one!]

this does not - obviously - mean that i think he’d give a solitary fuck about the progression of bellatrix’s pregnancy or his daughter’s early life. as he tells us in one year in every ten, he has never actually seen delphini in person - rodolphus forcing that photograph on him in c.21 is the first time he’s ever laid eyes on her, and i think he was genuinely quite surprised to discover that she had turned into something he could think of as recognisably human rather than just a potato that screamed.

because i don’t think he’ll ever stop hating babies - the trauma of his childhood runs too deep, and a spoiler i’ll give away for free is that there’s no way on god’s green earth that harry is getting a riddle child of his own - but i think he won’t find it particularly difficult or traumatic to interact with a delphini who’s eleven and can, therefore, speak at a reasonable volume and sit still when required. i’ve written in a meta about the canon voldemort’s capacity for fatherhood that i think his relationship with delphini is best thought of as akin to the relationship a child might have with their parents’ family friend, and i think that applies to the tom of one year in every ten too.

[not least because this is exactly how i imagine his relationship with rodolphus and rabastan…]

which is to say that i think they will absolutely get along - i am committed to the idea that they are very similar personality wise, that delphini shares lots of his little quirks [marzipan and crosswords coming in clutch], and that the parts of her which remind him of bellatrix are something he refuses to let bother him because he’s never going to be able to properly acknowledge that he misses her - but that their relationship will always be cordial and superficial rather than resembling anything actually familial.

and i think that’s fine! it’s obviously a damning indictment of tom that he’s been beaten to a pulp in the paternal role-model stakes by… rodolphus lestrange, but it’s also better for everyone if he isn’t expected to assume sole responsibility for delphini’s welfare and if she isn’t expected to have to rely on him for any sort of emotional guidance. she can accept that he’s not dead any more [which i think she probably won’t find too hard - she’s inherited her father’s canonical predisposition towards mysticism], he can have his fortnightly trips to see her - not not something he’s keen on because he can lie on the terrace of roddy’s safehouse like a snake on a big, flat rock - and they can make fun of harry in parseltongue and that can be that.

and yet…

tom is of the opinion that he is very much lacking in paternal instinct and that he and delphini will never have a normal father-daughter relationship. he is also a hypocrite, a pathological liar, and a human being incapable - no matter how much he hates that he can’t - of going through the world as an automaton. the tom of one year in every ten has also obviously had some… experiences which have given him a slightly more stable sense of self than he had when harry blasted him in the head with his own killing curse [which means, i think, that he is able to not resent the fact that delphini wasn’t dragged up in an orphanage, as well as to find it faintly amusing, rather than rage-inducing, that she looks exactly like him]. and so he has found himself - while, of course, he would say that this doesn’t indicate anything at all - invested in the idea that his daughter is safe and happy, and vaguely aware that this is something it’s his responsibility to contribute to.

and maybe - although i think it might take quite a while - he might one day actually be able to interrogate that feeling…

stranger things have happened.

when it comes to delphini herself, something i really like that you can do with her as a character is show how both bellatrix and voldemort’s traits can be read much less negatively than they are in canon in someone who doesn’t doom herself in the narrative’s eyes by continually trying to murder its hero. i like her being just as single-minded and sly and brittle and prone to monologuing as her father and as haughty and loyal and hot-tempered as her mother - and i also like her being as clever and [and this is something i feel gets left out of a lot of fanon versions of bellamort] funny as both of her parents - and this being something which just makes her a fully-rounded and interesting character rather than an irredeemable villain.

but something i’m really wedded to in her characterisation is the idea that the person she’d remind harry of… is tonks.

it seems to be really common for andromeda to be written in fanfic as quite cold - and, sure, the only time we see her in canon she’s not exactly rolling out the red carpet for harry and hagrid - and for all of tonks’ personality to come via ted. i’ve never really vibed with that - and so i’ve always preferred to imagine andromeda [and bellatrix] as being, in their youths, very much like the tonks we see in canon: bolshy and rebellious and messy and cheeky and possessed of a very eclectic fashion sense. i think it’s a really important counter to the black-and-white divide between good people, who are nice, and bad people, who are horrible, in the series for harry [and ron and hermione and ginny etc.] to have to realise that someone who unleashed as much destruction on the world as bellatrix could have been so similar to a woman they all adored; and for tom to have to confront the fact that delphini’s only living cousin is draco - who we know he takes quite a dim view of - and it’s entirely his and bella’s own fault.

[and - some shameless self-promo - i’ve actually written a fic on this topic - everlasting ink.]

of course, the other interesting one year in every ten question is what's going to happen when tom meets harry's children. and the answer... is coming sooner than you think...

#asks answered #delphini riddle #i am a delphini stan account #so love that for me #oyiet answers