The Aurors Prompt-Fest!!

[starlady]

First: The Aurors Prompt-Fest is open for signups and prompts!!

Are you fan of cop dramas on TV? Is Mad-Eye Moody one of your favorite Harry Potter characters? Ever wish the series had chucked Quidditch in favor of more Defense Against the Dark Arts?

Then you would like The Aurors, the TV show that, alas, never existed. Except here, in fanfic form! This is a prompt meme inspired by that fan "trailer," for readers and writers who would love to see a grittier, more adult Harry Potter, focused on the men and women (and possibly some non-humans, too) who defend both the wizarding and Muggle worlds against evil magic.

Signups are open now; close on December 8th at 8 p.m. EST; stories are due by the same time on January 8th, and will be opened for reading on the 9th. They'll be anonymous to begin with; author reveal will follow a week later.

swan_tower and I are your hosts. Please leave prompts if you have them, sign up if you see any that tickle your fancy, and spread the word!

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

<looks around for the problem>

<fails to see it>

:-)

[recessional]

>.> I still owe someone 8K of a novel, have a Yuletide assignment, have an Ante-Up assignment, will have a LNYE assignment from white_lotus, kind of want to finish polishing up the rest of my A:TLA fic to stick on AO3 and someday write more of my Calvin&Hobbes(&Suzie) post-apocalyptic fic. Also possibly write more of the HP-AU I already HAVE.

I do not have TIME to worldbuild that much!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Eh, you have until January 8th on this one. Plenty of time, right?

Sorry, just playing, uh, devil's enabler. :-) I'm also somebody who wants to run a Harry Potter RPG someday that would be set in the U.S. (at a school that is to Hogwarts as Harvard is to Oxford/Cambridge, i.e. a semi-knockoff with lots of American differences), so I'm sympathetic to the worldbuilding issue.

[recessional]

That's kind of what would draw me to it - to further the university metaphor, the Canadian system superficially looks like the American one with some random British bits, but the more you look the more you realize huge underlying differences in attitude and emotional attachment. (the school as someplace you went to learn stuff, vs the school as a major identity marker and nexus for emotional attachment, for example . . .)

Where I get super-hesitant is the part where to do it without dealing with First Nations would be very erasing, but I'm not . . . entirely sure there EXISTS a way to respectfully and non-hugely-problematically integrate HPian worldbuilding with a FN-worldview/viewpoint. And I'm definitely not sure I, as a mostly-white definitely-outsider chick, could be the one to do it. /random

[starlady]

Where I get super-hesitant is the part where to do it without dealing with First Nations would be very erasing, but I'm not . . . entirely sure there EXISTS a way to respectfully and non-hugely-problematically integrate HPian worldbuilding with a FN-worldview/viewpoint.

This is actually what first occurred to me the moment you brought up Canadian schools (I now live with a Chinese-Canadian roommate who is very knowledgeable around FN issues in Canada, at least to my U.S.-ian eyes). I think, based on what little I know, the pitfalls and the payoff of trying to do it are both potentially huge.

[recessional]

Yeeeeah. And I'm really not sure that I'm the person who's in the right position to do it (basically, I know enough to know that it's a MINEFIELD, but not enough not to blow myself or someone else up, metaphorically speaking), and if I'm going to do stuff based in my own country at all for the fest the end answer may just be "I leave that peripheral and just try not to lock in anything too faily" and commit the sin of omission rather than of fucking up.

I'd have the same problem if the scope of my writing would include, say, Afro-Diasporan religions or other ones that have a view of REALITY and how it works that is different from that normal to post-Enlightenment Europe. Just, you know. This is the issue that's in my hometown, so to speak, so it's right there and personal.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Starlady knows (because I've been picking her brain about it <g>) that I'm dealing with that "different view of reality" thing in a Japanese context, for an urban fantasy proposal. WASP U.S./British assumptions (because 99% of the urban fantasy I've seen is set in one of those two countries -- mostly the U.S.) for what people think of as "real" and what they think of as "magic" are not universal by a long shot, and that changes the whole genre landscape.

[recessional]

Yeah, it's something I'm much less squidgy about touching in my own original stuff; it helps that, frankly, my view of reality is not based on those WASP US/Brit assumptions. My position isn't that of a FN reader immersed in FN culture, but in some ways it's closer to it*. (This DOES make a huge chunk of fantasy really aggravating and insulting to me, as it happens - if I bothered to rant about every time a story I read commits viewpoint!fail, my journal might be nothing but.)

With HP, I'm stuck with the assumptions of canon. And what's what I mean when I say I'm not sure I could respectfully integrate them (which in turn is different from saying I'm not sure if they COULD be respectfully integrated - I'm just such an outsider, it makes me nervous.)

(Also, that proposal sounds awesome.)

*that is, non-standard-WASP-Christian, non-monotheistic, non-easily-divided-into-"gods"-and-other-things etc etc viewpoint. Reading modern fantasy, especially modern urban fantasy, has not been a rewarding experience for me.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

. . . dammit, now you have me wondering if I can find a way to do a story about something Mesoamerican (which is the New World region I know the best, in terms of indigenous beliefs). But I actually don't know the modern, mainstream culture of Mexico or Guatemala very well at all. >_<

[recessional]

Bwahaha. Sorry. I do that. *offers tea in apology*

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That's one of my concerns with a U.S. setup, too. I don't have to worry about it as much for this fest because I'm writing about law enforcement, not education, but yeah -- as soon as I try to work out how my Hogwarts-analogue was founded, I run smack into those questions, and I haven't yet decided how to settle them.

[recessional]

Well, for me it shows up even in law-enforcement, because I have to decide what the relationship between FN groups and magical law enforcement IS. I have to decide what the relationship between magical FN groups and non-magical FN groups is, in a situation where the magical members of the community would have every reason to be trying to use their powers to help the community, and not have that much reason to care what the major government powers thought about it; I cannot imagine, for instance, a magical student from Attawapiskat giving much of a shit about whether or not handing out warming spells to his entire community, or figuring out how to help them build houses, gets the government on his case. And if it does, how does one justify that? Does the magical community simply duplicate the indifference and oppression of the Muggle community, and if so, and yet everyone goes to magical school without having to pay for it (as no tuition fees are ever mentioned for Hogwarts, or either of the other schools discussed) how do they get away with it, after educating and literally (via wands/etc) empowering the FN kids?

So are the Aurors just constantly arresting FN kids who went through this magical education system and are trying to use their knowledge to help their homes, because of the need for "secrecy"? And do I want to write in that world, if so? (answer: no; the stuff that goes on in the real world is bad enough, that's worse.)

Not to mention, what do I do about non-humans? And how magic works, and what is magic and isn't? That's actually what concerns me more, even, because it's so basic - HP is written VERY MUCH from a post-Enlightenment secularist pov, afterlife notwithstanding: figures that used to be part of a worldview (goblins, elves, etc) become bankers and house-servants, stuck into a world almost totally devoid (again, pasted-on afterlife notwithstanding) of any spiritual worldview context. And that's okay, because that's her culture, so she can do that.

Do I decide that the akhlut is just another kind of werewolf or analogous creature? If so, is it a "dark" magical creature like the Dementors, or just a hungry one like the giants? What about clairvoyance, "seeing" the future (or far away, or whatever) which is treated the way it is in the book, but is very different in a FN context? Do I have the RIGHT to decide if the various spirits of the Haida are "real" like the house-elves/etc (stripping them in some ways of their powerful nature) or "merely" beliefs? Which one of those is the right answer? Or is that "neither", because I do NOT have the insider's right to work it out at all?

That's, like, fundamental worldbuilding stuff. That's "what do my Aurors even deal with?" kind of worldbuilding stuff. It's what's magic, what's medicine power, what's spiritual stuff, what do those divisions mean and do they mean anything? and if my answer is "I don't deal with it, I just write about the stuff that doesn't post these questions to me", then I'm, well, erasing.

(And a loooot of people would say "you're overthinking this", but after working in Gitxsan territory for a summer and seeing the way the people who lived there genuinely felt both about their stories and about misappropriation and misuse of their stories and beliefs that already happens in a lot of fantasy literature . . . well, I'm honestly more worried that the people who treated me so well would be upset with what I'd done, than someone looking at me and going "oh my god, it's just a fanfic, get over it.")

(I'm also honestly not saying everyone has to in-depth examine things - especially worldbuilding, which is my personal Thing - to this extent. This is just the problems I would have even figuring out where to start.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't mean it wasn't an issue. (Especially how to handle indigenous non-human magical creatures; that's a question for any setting other than the canonical one, and even in Britain you can have arguments with how Rowling chose to do it. Though I'll grant her that the story acknowledged there being problems with treating non-humans as second-class citizens.)

The difference for me is that the game I want to run would deal very directly with the founding of the school (which means I need to work it out), and the historical context of that founding is one where it's implausible to say that the immigrant witches and wizards were all lovely open-minded people who worked with the local tribes etc. So what, is native magic some recently-added elective the kids can take, as a sign of the changing times? I dunno. (And of the various macro culture-complexes that make up the native United States, the northeast, where this school would be placed, is one of the ones I know the least about. So hell if I even know what that magic would look like.)

But for a law enforcement story, I don't feel the pressure to work out the last three hundred years; I can just deal with the present. And I would already be pushing back at some of Rowling's worldbuilding decisions anyway, from a non-racial angle as well as a racial one, because some of it (like wizards being pig-ignorant of basic Muggle life) makes no bloody sense, or bothers me in other ways. So I feel like I could more easily tell a story about a particular community that says "to hell with this elitist oh noes, we must hide magic from the Muggles so they don't ask us to solve all their problems bullshit; I'm going to help my people." Or whatever. I feel more flexible about how I handle the topic, is what it comes down to.

[recessional]

Yeah, for me, I still feel a lot of hesitancy in deciding where the spiritual ends and the mundane begins, basically. Even if non-humans weren't second-class citizens in canon, they're still, in a very fundamental way, mundane. You go out in the forest, you find some centaurs. You see someone die, you get to see thestrals. That kind of thing.

Figuring out where Raven and Bear fit in there, or whether the akhlut is going to be a mundane creature like a werewolf or a more spirit-based creature . . . those distinctions are actually important to the people I worked with. And how these stories are dealt with by white authors was a major part of what the people I worked with viewed as damage white people did to their communities, so I'm really hesitant about working with it in context of a basic worldbuilding that announces that non-humans are THUS, they are either real and follow X kinds of rules or they're made up, when . . . in many cases, that entire view of REALITY isn't actually applicable.

And I'm mostly hesitant about it because it's identified by the people I knew as part of their oppressive context, how their stories were dealt with and handled by white people/white-dominated culture. Which, again - my issue, not one I'm projecting at anyone else.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there really is a total lack of numinous-ness (numinosity? whatever) in most of Rowling's world. Which I'm sort of okay with, because it's a tone thing and different kinds of tones are fine . . . but I can totally understand not wanting to see one's own beliefs turned into items from the D&D Monster Manual. (Especially when that's the only tone you ever see used for them in most fiction.)

But anyway, as for the prompt meme: you can sign up (i.e. submit prompts) without committing to write anything, you can claim a prompt without signing up and with no penalty if you don't end up writing the story, etc. That's why we ran it this way, instead of as a gift exchange; for the flexibility. You don't need to make a decision now. :-)

[recessional]

I left a whole bunch! :) And yeah, what I'll probably end up doing is just informing my brain that WE ARE NOT WORLDBUILDING THAT HARD, sketches are okay, let's just write about Peggy Sue and her hard day at the office, or the day Bob and Amal saved the city of Vancouver from the Death Eaters. Or possibly just writing something set in Rowling's version of Wizarding Britain anyway.

Whereas trying to worldbuild the whole school system would make my head EXPLODE with these questions.

Edit: Also, totally with you on the sort-of-okay-with - I mean, I enjoy the books and the world. I just look at it, and this totally common pitfall, where my position is viz all of it and go " . . . I am not sure I can make these two flavours mix well."