Edit by: caelestc

𝐇𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥🍃 ​​​

hermione watches draco showing pansy his wound

"does it hurt terribly Draco?"

The Auction | you should give Theo a taste of Granger, Draco

the scene when Draco lost Hermione to Theo.

I was deeply impressed (also shocked) while reading the Death Eaters' party in Edinburgh for the first time.

youth drama | flipped

"Perhaps you have the courage to take a Slytherin's hand at the ball in broad daylight, Miss Granger?"

📸 ​​💗

manacled | made a wallpaper with avendell's wonderful illustrations

made a meme

theyre (reluctant) friends

tbh i just wanted to draw 8th year draco brooding. but u know me, i cant help but add hermione next to him 🤪🖤

So i'm just curious about your state of mind during manacled because as much as i love it i'm sure writing something so dark and intense wasn't easy so i just wanna know how exactly u came up with the whole main idea of the story:))❤️

Plotting the story was mostly starting with a concept, Handmaid’s Tale AU, and then laying out what the most obvious reasoning was, what readers would assume, and then choosing something something else.

e.g:

A repopulation program because Voldemort cares about demographics... no, it’s a media feint to distract from the war and the fact he’s dying.

Hermione is Draco’s surrogate and they fall in love because they had to live together and he raped her... no, they had a relationship during the because he was a spy.

Draco demanded to have Hermione in exchange for spying because he’s been secretly in love with her for years... no, he didn’t give a damn about her initially, demanding her just played into the type of person the Order believed him to be.

Honestly plotting all that was pretty fun. But admittedly, there were some parts that were pretty mentally and emotionally draining to craft once I was actually writing the actual chapters.

soooooooo cute

1. What do Draco and Hermione do on their island after Aurore leaves? Sex on every surface in every room 😂? 2. Is Draco still super possessive of Hermione? Still say “mine” during intense moments?

Lmao. Definitely one of the things they do. 2) Yes. I tend to imagine him as more dragonish in retirement. The island is his lair and Hermione is his most prized treasure, and, when he’s not ensuring his lair is safe and secure, he just spends most of his time staring at Hermione and/or shagging her and being all, “Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.”

Hello Sen, I'm on my second pass of Manacled and this is eating at me...and I cannot exactly figure it out: in the flashbacks chapters, during the firewhiskey-fueled healing session, when Draco admits that he found Hermione 'lovely' when he first saw her after all these years....was he being genuine? I have a feeling your Draco never lied, so yes I guess? That said even on 2nd read I cannot be sure when he starts catching something real for her. When they make out later in that scene is Hermione still just a convenient warm body, or a got-to-get-her-out-of-my-system itch, or already a godamnit-i'm-doomed obsession? Your writing is so beautifully ambiguous that even knowing what I know that's to come, I still cannot fully trace the outline of their story...

I think it’s one of those “like falling asleep, slowly and then all at once” things. So, full disclosure, I’m actually a fairly aromantic person, and so for me my romance writing is generally a deconstruction of love, I take the components I see, the affection, admiration, respect, longing, desire, protectiveness, sympathy, possessiveness, and sense of identity that people find within each other, and then I put together each one into the closest I can get to what the poems and songs and novels feel like when I read about love. Obviously, in Manacled it’s a pretty intensely codependent form of love because of the ongoing trauma of their circumstances.

So, Draco reached the point of loving Hermione bit by bit. Especially because he was so resistant to it and he had the capacity to compartmentalize, the process of falling for her was deconstructed for him into small pieces that could sneak past his defenses. He sympathized with her first, and that turned into a gradual respect and eventual admiration, and at the same time he was injured and lonely, and she was there and so that loneliness turned into longing and that longing turned into desire, and that admiration and desire turned into protectiveness, etc. etc. 

So, yes he did find her more striking than he’d expected, but that wasn’t enough to actually change his feelings aside from the fact that he did actually find her attractive, which he hadn’t expected to. When they kiss drunk, yes she was convenient and he was horny, but he was also lonely and she was the first person that cared about his wellbeing and showed him kindness since his mother died, and that made it complicated. But still that desire wasn’t enough. However, he had obsessive tendencies and he had a lot of unresolved trauma around not being able to protect someone, and Hermione became someone that he could project all that onto, and that snowballed into a sense of protectiveness and possessiveness, etc. etc.

Hi! I absolutely loved Manacled and it is by far the best fanfic I have read in a long time. Recently though I saw a tik tok made by a creator who claimed that Manacled romanticized r@pe and shouldn’t be praised. I have been feeling very conflicted about this lately and am not sure how to feel. What are your thoughts about how the fandom romanticizes your story? Did you ever intend for Manacled to come off this way?

If it’s the Tiktok I saw, the creator only read six chapters of Manacled and then was reacting to the trigger warnings on the fic. If anyone who has read the entire story wants to bring examples of where they believe I’ve romanticized rape, I am more than happy to have a conversation about that with them.

But I’m not going to spend my limited free time endeavoring to change the minds of people who themselves admit to either having skim-read or only partially-read Manacled, and then proceeded to go to a public platform and make sweeping judgements about me and my intentions as an author, and why they think people have read and enjoyed the story.

Personally I have never regarded Manacled as a romance. It is romantic in certain gothic romance regards, but in my opinion, fundamentally, Manacled is a dystopian horror story and a tragedy, insofar as literary categorization goes. Admittedly the characters don’t die, but the structure of the story is not actually very romance shaped. Tragedy and romance have many similarities, but the form of their climax is distinct, which is part of why many people are dissatisfied with the epilogues, because they don’t do the things that readers expect to feel at the conclusion of an epic romance. They’re not supposed to, because it wasn’t.

Horror and romance are also closely related, they have many of the same beats, but they’re inversions of each other. One of my favourite tumblr posts puts it thusly:

something about horror as a genre is very inherently similar to romance, but it’s differently romantic. it’s like if romance could be compared to a rabbit, then horror is a hare. a hare is the same shape-ish as a rabbit, but it’s different; it’s upturned and eerie and comes at you from a sideways angle.

i think this connection between the two genres is the presence of love. love as a concept. romance is the genre that beautifies love, and horror is the genre that explores love in ways that aren’t beautiful. horror is the monstrosity of love gone sour, or the absence of love, or the emotions that the intensity of love and pain birth. slasher horror is monstrous obsession, while existential horror always has a narrative that makes you rethink what love means, what being human means. just like romance.

That’s very much the way I see Manacled. It was intended as the Black Mirror version of JKR’s power of love premise in the HP series. The question I wanted to ask in writing it was what kind of love is truly enough to win a war? Manacled is the horror version of Harry Potter, where love is monstrosity.

Much as I occasionally wish it, I cannot police interpretation. I don’t create characters as moral endorsements, and I expect that anyone old enough to read a M rated story to have the critical reasoning to understand that.

You wanna catch the light, but light is not made to be caught

Hermione never thought that one day Draco would blatantly walk up to her, stop in front of her, and say:

"Be my girlfriend, Granger."

marry me plz mione