Alicornutopia

There is a plan to do a second Harry Potter 'verse in Effulgence. The second witch Bell (working nickname "Raven") will be British, facecast Sonequa Martin-Green, tentatively screennamed (but not yet accounted) as quetzalcohuatl, and attend Hogwarts. The canon of Harry Potter will again be taken as a given event of the past, but will be more directly relevant to a Brit local than they have been to Phoenix. Specifically, given the Bell birthdate attractor and the HP timeline, Raven will be an entering student at Hogwarts the very year after Harry's seventh. Her mum will have fled the country with her in tow to Australia a couple of years previously to get away from the nasty business, and Raven will have expected to attend the Oceanic Wizarding Lyceum (colloquially, "the Owly") and they will have only just returned to Britain post-Battle of Hogwarts in time for the new school year.

I've seen some quibbling about the Sorting of a Bell on Tumblr, so here is my advance gloss of how I expect that conversation to go:

Hat: Well, you look like a -

Raven: Just a moment please. Are you trying to put me in Slytherin? Don't do that.

Hat: Ah, but it suits you, your thirst to climb to the top -

Raven: Yes, yes, terribly thirsty, which is a large part of why Slytherin would be a terrible idea. It's a bit of a catch-22, admittedly: the House intended for the ambitious is currently trying to crawl its way out of a reputational pit deeper than than the Marianas Trench which will stymie the ambitions of anyone who touches it, and this isn't helping you populate it with willing volunteers who can help remedy the situation. But I've no loyalty to the place - Mum was a Ravenclaw and Dad's a Muggle, and even if she weren't, I'm simply not the type to care. Putting me in Slytherin will help something I do not care about at the expense of my own preferences, comfort, and plans, and if I were interested in letting you do that, then I would *not* suit.

Hat: ...

Raven: Ravenclaw, please. It is nearly as good a fit, especially for the next seven years. Slaking my thirst is expected to come later on. Plus it's a legacy. I will tolerate Hufflepuff if you prefer it, though I doubt you will.

Hat: ...but...

Raven: If you try to put me in Slytherin I will make Mum send me to the Owly after all, they sent me a letter too, I mean it.

Hat: RAVENCLAW.

Ah, the Slytherin dilemma. There's an excellent short fic (Insurgere) in which Tom Riddle gets himself sorted into Hufflepuff because of it, which ends up working out rather nicely for him.

Anyway, if a Bell really needed an alternate House, Ravenclaw does work out decently. It fits a hypothetical Bell born into utopia, at least.

^^at least that was smoother than what HJPEV did

Just checking: is this one likely to be more canonical HP, or more "elements of HPMOR" HP? I have no strong preference either way, but am currently in the middle of HPMOR (and as far as I know, it hasn't even ended yet, although that may be incorrect) and it would mildly influence my reading order prioritization if it was likely to be spoilery for HPMOR. I get the impression that if there's any HPMOR in it, though, it's a bit thin. Which is utterly fine.

On the other hand, since we're in the land of spoilery things anyhow, I wanted to say that I really enjoyed your take on (re?)discovery of Patronus v2. It did make more sense once I'd read Yudkowsky's - I felt like there was some detail missing, perhaps, though I now can't lay my finger on what exactly it was to be aside from the thought process which led to "dementors == death" being clearer to me in HPMOR - but it fit your characters well and I enjoyed that part of the story a lot.

Also, it is surprisingly difficult to remember how badly I'm supposed to view Slytherin. HPMoR does things to your brain...

As far as I can recall, and my recollection may not be perfect, our HPMOR references are limited to having nabbed the concept of the second Patronus.

On the other hand, we're going to steal some other worldbuilding from the AQ (Alexandra Quick) fic series - we've already taken some surface stuff, and deeper things are on the way.

Well, the greater patronus concept is itself based on the MoR interpretation of the nature of Dementors.

Mm... loosely, yes. But the nature of Dementors in Fantasia is not the same as the nature of Dementors in MOR.

Random thought: Renee was Ravenclaw? She seems more Hufflepuff-y to me, not because she doesn't value learning (teacher, after all) but because she shows less of a thirst for knowledge and valuation of intelligence than she does a drive for kindness and friendship. I may be mis-reading her, though; I've never gotten a good grasp on her personality. She also could be somewhat different in a world like this one.

I initially wavered on housing Renée, but ultimately decided that the combination of the teacher attractor, the fact that Bell raw intelligence does come more from that side of the family (Charlies aren't stupid, they just aren't really great g-loaded intellects; Renées are smart and only don't go farther with it because they prefer to have fun) and the example of Luna Lovegood (whose primary motivations are all about friendship, whose intellect is not conventionally severe and bookish but more about curiosity and openness to experience, etc.) added up to Ravenclaw. I wouldn't describe Renées as being hard workers, and while they care about the people they're close to, "loyalty" isn't a primary drive of theirs; they tend to (quietly, offscreen) cycle through friends as their mercurial interests lead them out of this social circle and into that one, and of course a majority of them divorce loving husbands because they can't stand to live in a dull town.

ETA: The Renée intelligence thing is inhibited by their draw in the lottery of fascinations. They're bright but incapable of specializing, and most of the things that interest them are impractical and fuzzy (spirituality) or have no solid state of the art (early childhood education) or interest them on a level that doesn't lend itself to accumulating academic facts (world cultures are interesting in a 'let's go be there for a month' way, not a 'let's read six books about it' way).

Thanks! Makes sense.

It occurs to me, especially after reading MOR, that a Bell might see Slytherin house's issues as a Problem to be Fixed, although this doesn't necessarily mean she'd want to be in it. Still, it just doesn't make any sense to have an ostensibly non-evil school where 1/4 of the students are *expected* to be bad apples, and you know which 1/4, and you keep them all together (and somewhat segregated from the rest), and they all get the same education, and the only special treatment they get from any of the teachers is *favoritism* from the himself-a-bad-apple teacher. WTF? You would have a bad time designing a better not-blatantly-illegal system for producing evil wizards if you tried; I'm not certain JKR did not, in fact, try.