in transit / fic commentary

[dayflies]

ok so my roommates and i have been rewatching the harry potter movies over the course of a few months now, and this almost 5k character study of post-war ron weasley and grief was the result of that

i wrote in transit (which you can read here) in two days, but i feel like it was a much longer time in the making lol. tbh it’s very strange that this is my first hpfic ever, considering how formative hp was for me. (i am only just now realizing that is literally a LIE because i wrote a james/lily fic when i was like 16, which i later converted to a yeonbin fic and ended up posting on my old rpf ao3 account. anyway)

this is going to be kind of unstructured because it's been literal years since i wrote a proper fic commentary, but we move. 

when i sat down to write this, i knew i wanted it to be about ron. the writing process for this was mostly very chronological. i started with fred’s funeral because it just stood out to me as a significant moment in ron’s life, and from there, i figured framing this short, yet significant window of ron’s life immediately after the war, where he is dealing with immense grief, on top of navigating his relationships with hermione, harry and his family, and figuring out his own place in a world that no longer needs saving, seemed the most interesting to me. most of these considerations came and fell into place pretty naturally later on in the writing process though  - at first i just wanted to write about grief.

 

i think one of the first things i looked up was which materials fred’s wand was made of - because i imagine wizards and witches are usually buried with their wands - and turns out we don’t know at all lol. so i just read through all the different wand woods and chose sycamore: “The sycamore makes a questing wand, eager for new experience and losing brilliance if engaged in mundane activities. It is a quirk of these handsome wands that they may combust if allowed to become ‘bored'.”

 

ron’s is canonically made of willow, which is why i chose to have fred be buried under a willow tree. btw, according to the wiki: "willow is an uncommon wand wood with healing power, and Garrick Ollivander noted that the ideal owner for a willow wand often has some (usually unwarranted) insecurity, however well they may try and hide it. While many confident customers insist on trying a willow wand (attracted by their handsome appearance and well-founded reputation for enabling advanced, non-verbal magic) [Ollivander’s] willow wands have consistently selected those of greatest potential, rather than those who feel they have little to learn. It has always been a proverb in [Ollivander’s] family that he who has furthest to travel will go fastest with willow".

i think this is pretty interesting in the context of ron's character. obviously he does not have much confidence in himself either, so in that way the willow wood fits him, perhaps in a way he wished it didn't - i chose to include this in the fic as knowledge he would have, even though i'm unsure of whether he would actually know this in canon. i think the other bits about willow wands being healing-inclined and good for those who have to travel far, are equally accurate for him, but with him being at the place he is at currently, would focus more on the negative implications.

(this never made it in anywhere in the fic, but i'm also hc’ing george’s wand as being made from fir because: “Gerbold Octavius Ollivander, always called wands of this wood 'the survivor's wand,' because he had sold it to three wizards who subsequently passed through mortal peril unscathed.”)

 

i was thinking a lot about liminal spaces while writing. ron is suspended in this weird liminal space following the war; as is everybody else in different ways. for ron, i essentially decided it could be fun to reflect his state of limbo physically in a lack of connection with magic – something that should come naturally to him, but which he’s also often felt lackluster at. out of the trio, ron has always been the weakest at magic despite being from a fullblood family, and he also perceives himself as being much worse in comparison to his friends and his siblings.

by the end of the war he’s also still in possession of peter pettigrew’s wand, which was always really interesting to me because, in a sense poetic justice that ron “gets” peter’s wand given their history, but it is also a wand that has done some really dark shit. i just do not think ron and that wand would fuck with e/o.

 

i thought it could be nice to have ron’s restlessness and his subconscious need to process his grief manifest in a desire to fix up the garden, because gardens are such a nice, universal symbol for slow growth over time and hard work bearing fruit, etc. i also think the mundanity and repetition of gardening was perfect for creating the tone i was going for. i really wanted him to do labor without magic, to contrast with the way he and everyone in his family has always done things, as opposed to both harry and hermione, who grew up doing things “the muggle way”. also, i just think the fruit of that labor would be a lot more satisfactory lol.

 

i also chose to break romione and hinny up because firstly i do not care for longterm hinny, secondly, i think it’s unrealistic that these teenagers fight in a war and lose family and are totally fine and in love afterwards, and thirdly, i honestly think ron and harry should hold hands. not now, obviously but.

 

anyway, it’s a gen fic before everything else, and i really wanted ron to connect with hermione and harry as best friends again, in this new world where their entire friendship no longer revolves around defeating the monster of the school year. i’m pretty satisfied with the interactions ron has with both of them, although i do wish i’d written hermione in some more before she left for australia, but alas. i also don’t want it to be any longer than it is, and i’ll take one important talk over three pointless ones.

before i started writing this, i actually went back to look at some of my old writing, just because sometimes you need the reassurance that you've gotten better lol. so this section will be dedicated to elements i'm proud of, or areas where i think i've improved.

 

one of the things i am the proudest of in this is how simple it all is. it was always meant to be short, and i did keep it under 5k, but i still think i manage to like. hit some emotional beats within that space of time, without ever having it swell emotionally or dramatically, like it does in good old sunflower fic.

 

i think i managed to maintain that same tone of mundanity and being stuck; almost a sense of mutedness (which i don’t think is a word). i was worried it’d just translate to dryness and sever any emotional connection to ron and his feelings, but unna said she felt as if there was this gray cloud of grief hovering over the entire piece so i think it worked out fine. and in the end - which i, from the beginning, had known needed to be open-ended in some way - things don’t feel resolved, or as if there has occurred an emotional release or catharsis, but there’s this feeling that the fog may be lifting a little, soon. 

 

i’ve always liked cramming in small details and bits of (often made-up) lore whenever i see fit, for some Texture. i think it’s a really nice way of letting the personalities of characters show through their actions, or the nature of a relationship between characters, etc etc, without necessarily saying much. and it’s also just fun.  i‘ve been doing it at least since i hear the ocean:

 

from i hear the ocean: “Yamada’s gaze sweeps over an open notebook, trying to decipher Aizawa's handwriting - slanted and lazy almost to the point where the letters are lying down - just as Kirishima downs the last drop from his Red Riot themed water bottle.”

 

from be still, my broken bones: “Edelgard goes to war. Three days later, Claude catches Sylvain in the greenhouse, where he’s been helping Dedue on-and-off with cultivating Anette’s patch of greens in secret.”

 

in i hear the ocean i was honestly just dropping lore left and right, like i really had no chill. there were a lot of those moments in this fic as well, but i think i’ve gotten a lot better at restricting myself to only adding in bits of lore when it’s necessary lol, and in this case, i think they’re some of my favorite bits in the fic: 

 

“Instead, he finds a rusty pair of garden scissors in the shed, his father had bought at a Muggle flea market years ago and never used.”

“Harry has only bothered changing out of his pyjama bottoms – he’s still wearing the faded Chudley Cannons t-shirt he’s slept in, which is too long on him because it really is an old shirt of Ron’s.”

“They get their groceries: salad and spinach from Mr. and Mrs. Thompson, who ask Ron to send his parents their regards, and ox from the butcher Ron can never remember the name of, which is fine because he keeps thinking Ron’s name is Percy - undoubtedly the worst Weasley he could be mistaken for. He gets Harry to buy bell peppers and potatoes from Mrs. Nelson because he suspects her of deliberately raising the prices for him and his siblings due to a prank Fred and George had once played on her.”

 

i think these bites of information are necessary to flesh out the universe, and just to make the characters seem a bit more real, and like they exist outside of the narrative - like harry borrowing ron's clothes, the weasleys being familiar with the local farmers but not enough for them to tell the difference between their children, etc etc.

i also don’t think the conversations came across as being too preachy, which i think i have a tendency to do whenever i’m writing about these more introspective topics (like the conversation between hyuka and taehyun in sunflower fic, and the metaphors after the conversation). i think the preachiest line of dialogue i have is in the romione convo:

 

Hermione does this thing with her face: a frown and a smile that sort of looks like she wants to cry, all at once. “Oh, Ronald,” she says, with a slight shake of her head. “That sounds… well, it sounds completely normal to me.”

Ron stares at her, a bit incredulously. Of all things, he hadn’t expected her to say that.

She opens her mouth, then closes it again, as if searching for the right words to say. “Grief looks very different for everyone,” she says, finally. “It’ll come back to you. Just give it time.”

 

which i think is the exact right amount of preachy, because it isn’t that preachy, and also it’s hermione so. and i think it’s just what ron would’ve needed to hear, and she would know that.

i'm also proud of the ending, which i've sort of already talked about, but there's something very satisfying to me about endings that linger without landing anywhere, but it was also important to me that there was some semblance of light at the end of the tunnel:

 

"He thinks, one day, this is what the grief will look like: an anthill with a tiny willow and a clear sky."

songs i listened to while writing:

- kintsugi by lana del rey

- bending hectic by the smile: this has nothing to do with anything, i just listened to it a lot

- in heaven by jbrekkie

- let down by radiohead