This is a short story based very loosely in the Potterverse. It is centered on a new and as yet unknown protag, Azalais Emrys. Although there are a lot of familiar sounding characters in this story, it doesn't describe hardly anything that actually...
The above illustration by Max Bennett was one of the first results when I searched for a "blue haired witch" and is was much less sexualized than all of the ones I could see on the first page of search results. Since my protag isn't interested in sex nor interested in leveraging the power dynamics to manipulate people for sexual resons, I decided to go with mysterious person with a nice hat and an alert familiar. They were the closest representation I could find that nearly matched how I hoped that they would look.
This is a short story based very loosely in the Potterverse. It is centered on a new and as yet unknown protag, Azalais Emrys. Although there are a lot of familiar sounding characters in this story, it doesn't describe hardly anything that actually happens in the books and reframes everything from an utterly gay and inclusive standpoint. It is viewed through the eyes and the described experiences of a gray-romantic asexual non-binary person's point of view. This is an "own-voices" story.
The style of the story is faintly akin to The Pillow Book, but being made up entirely of diary entries rather than the full range of content seen in the original. In addition, there are a lot of crossing over of created universes throughout this story because I believe in the "infinite combinations infinite diversity" credo, and it's more fun that way. Most are referenced as real, a few are referenced as current day muggle pop culture. Oh, and if you want to see where I mention Rowling by name, and drag her, skip to the Epilogue real quick before going on to the story itself and continuing from there.
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The Inspiration
This short story was inspired by a blog post I wrote back in early 2005 that someone favorited on or about April 10, 2020. They reminded me that the story existed. My writing is much more developed than it was then and I have a lot of time on my hands right now for A Reason That Will Not Be Named (a name that you already are very familiar with anyway). But the original inspiration for this goes back much further than 2005.
The Pillow Book (the anglicized version of the name) was written by a woman named Sei Shonagon (anglicized version of her name) who was a court lady to Empress Consort Teishi; the book was accidentally made famous when Sei left a few pages unattended out on a cushion while writing and when someone found and then read those pages, they thought they were so awesome they brought them around to all their friends to read. Some of it was very political about the Emperor and their Court, but most of it was poetry, and lists, and diary entries. Sei's book was finished in the year 1,002 (based on the west's modern calendar) and she is an icon of Japanese literature and is still highly thought of by millions of readers to this day.
The Process & What Else I'm Writing
I had this story fully written and highly polished and was about to send it in to Strange Horizons come 4/14/20 when I read their article "Me and Science Fiction: Fan Fiction" written by Eleanor Arnason in Issue 27 (published in May 2013) and I discovered fan fiction is only allowed to be published under very specific circumstances. Nothing I read beyond that, that was written more recently, contradicted that. I had even gotten very positive feedback from a bevy of Potterverse fans who were acting as my beta readers. [These are all people who are part of my existing beta readers pool for my published and unpublished works of poetry - my first chapbook titled "30-50 FERAL PAGES" is with the editors now and we're working toward getting it on the shelves at some point. Look me up on Twitter @semiotic_pirate and check out my threaded set of tweets in my profile for more info about where I've been published (or look me up on WordPress under my real name, Kat Terban).]
I hope you enjoy this story a lot. Let me know. I'm going to write the book I talk about in the Afterward regardless, but I have always enjoyed people's responses to my writing and I am also fascinated by and awed at seeing people's wide open eyes, near wiggling ears, and uncontrolled facial expressions when I read to a live in-person or virtual audience.
The short story is approximately 6,400 words long.
Content Warnings: This book is rated as having adult content because I mentioned dick pics in passing.
Most of these other things listed here are concepts that are referenced in passing but are not gone into detail about or are in any way the focus of the themes of the story: positive and negative portrayals of drug culture, consent issues, fascism, child abuse as depicted in original material, allosexual culture, light BDSM, actions taken to mock and reduce power of abusive people, domestic abuse, name calling, and cheating.
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