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]

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."