Since I have some (very reasonable) concerns about ace discourse possibly making a return thanks to recent events, I'd like to remind everyone (and myself) that majority of the time the pointless infighting and drama you see among queers really only happens online. If you go to a pride parade as an ace and/or aro nobody is gonna give two shits besides like, terfs and high schoolers who very clearly grew up online. And if one of those two parties DO approach you and give you shit for it i guarantee all the other queers there will defend you. Nobody normal actually cares this much about shit in real life and most of the community understands that; the vocal portion that do care that much don't have much power over the community outside of their echo chambers online, because they know if they just go out in the middle of a queer event and start attacking people they're gonna be the ones getting their teeth knocked out. So like. Don't let anything you read on this website make you think otherwise.

Anyways, aros and aces are queer (yes even the cishet ones), people with confusing/contradictory identities come over here and kiss me on my mouth, etc.

My ranty Author Notes to address questions on my Three Sisters fic

So, I feel like I should put up some notes on a number of recurring questions I get in the comments, for those who don’t really read my responses (because I do provide some detailed explanations for why certain things are happening in my fic, but I get it if sloughing through comments for insight isn’t your thing; it isn’t mine either, hence the A/N.)

Why is Lily so stupid / obtuse / blind about Snape? Let’s level-set a couple of things: A) Lily is about as Gryffindor as they come, and some of the more common character flaws of people who belong to that house is that they rather tend to think a lot less of situations before diving in. That’s the case for Lily in this fic. Snape was her first magical friend that she’d ever met. She cherishes that friendship because she knows it’s returned even though she might not agree with a lot of Snape’s beliefs, not to mention Snape was the first person who told her that all the strange things that have been happening to her was the result of her being magical. For a child feeling the otherness of her abilities so keenly around her perfectly normal, muggle working class family, that is a huge thing. For the first time, Lily thought she’d met someone who understood her and the things she could do, and for that to have happened to her as a child, the person who validates that part of her being is going to play a very central role in her life until she reaches a breaking point. In the books, that breaking point was when Snape’s bigotry included her. For the longest time, he’d always excluded her from his hateful rhetoric, and there’s passages in the books that support that. B) Lily is a kid. She’s 11, and she probably met Snape at a much younger age (I’m guessing around 8 or 9) Kids who value their friends can sometimes be stupidly loyal to them even when their friends are behaving badly. Why do you think peer pressure is such a huge thing among young people? It’s partly because they value the person who is their friend to the point of being foolhardy over said friend’s bad actions. C) A lot of Snape’s bigotry goes over Lily’s head, because she’s never been taught to find differences between magical and non-magical people. Her parents obviously love her and Petunia the same and for her, that means they’re no different. She doesn’t understand the superiority Snape feels over Petunia, and because she doesn’t understand it, and also because she’s just a stupid kid who doesn’t really know better or even understands the slurs that come out of Snape’s mouth, she doesn’t think too much of it. Notice that Lily actually does call him out when he’s being mean to Petunia in ways that she can understand, when Snape tells Petunia that he had no place being in Platform 9 3/4 for example. But then Snape follows it up with reasoning that seems to be perfectly sound - Platform 9 3/4 is a magical location; it might not be the best place for Petunia to be. As for the spoon encounter, Lily had some basic understanding of accidental magic, thanks to Holly, and mostly chocked up that unfortunate event to Snape’s accidental magic rearing up from Petunia’s mean-spirited taunting. Petunia isn’t innocent in that scene, if you go back to it and think critically on it, look at it in the eyes of a normal rational adult. She’s just presented as being sympathetic because the narration is from Holly’s POV, and Holly likes this Petunia and hates Snape absolutely. Lastly, pretty much everything I have on Snape during the Summer with the Evanses part of this story have a basis in canon. He was hateful to Petunia, but Lily constantly made excuses for him, thinking that he’s just mean in general because of his difficult family life. The same goes when they get to Hogwarts. Snape spouts the same bigoted things the Slytherin Purebloods say, and Lily makes excuses for him. That’s canon. Lily made excuses for Snape’s behavior to her sister and her friends (especially Mary, who was canonically muggleborn) until she found she couldn’t anymore because his hatefulness suddenly spilled over to include her. Does that make Lily stupid? Probably, yes. Does it make her human? Fucking hell yes, and anyone who thinks that they won’t behave that way have clearly never figured out conflicted love-hate relationships with toxic people, so good for you, but these things happen to others, and it shouldn’t be surprising. There’s a basis for this in reality, and there’s a basis for Lily’s blind loyalty to Snape in canon.  And barring all of that if you don’t agree, it’s my fic, and I choose to write her this way. If that makes her a stupid character and you think I’m assassinating Lily’s characterization from canon, your interpretation is valid, but so is my right to write what I want as long as I’m not making a cent off of this. Thanks.

Why is Sirius spouting the bigotry he vehemently disavowed in OoTP? And why did he call Holly a mudblood? I don’t know about you, but I think Sirius had to have been an extremely sheltered child, growing up in a magical house surrounded on all sides by a muggle neighborhood. I think he started questioning why he wasn’t allowed to play with other children whom he could probably see from his bedroom window, but he didn’t actually know how and why he needed to reason it out with his parents until he met people who taught him how to articulate the feelings he had over his parents’ bigotry against muggles and muggleborns. As for why he called Holly a mudblood, again, has a lot to do with the normalization of hate in the household he grew up in. Walburga and Orion Black taught their children to hate anything and anyone that didn’t subscribe to the same Pureblood rhetoric as they did. And since Sirius thought Holly lived with the Evanses, who were muggle, and not with the Potters who were Purebloods, he didn’t see a distinction for her blood status from Mary or Lily, who were actually muggleborn. Hell, I don’t even think Sirius understood blood status all that well at all as an 11-year-old. He was just repeating shit he heard his parents say because he didn’t know any better. I’m not going to tell you how to interpret your reading of my fic, but generally, I wouldn’t ascribe knowledge that I know of characters and events to the characters within the story, because they can’t be expected to know and understand what I know and understand, especially in a fic written in such a limited POV, and things like Holly’s blood status, would not be known to Sirius because Holly had never actually told James or him about her parents, other than that they were Potters. And while you can make a case for the fact that Holly told Sirius and Regulus in Chapter 7 that she’s not muggleborn, I still stand by the idea that the Black exclusionist ideas that Walburga and Orion taught their children would still have Sirius identifying her as one simply because of where he thinks she grew up in.

Why is Holly so stupidly letting so many details from her timeline out to her friends? I think we should all cut Holly some slack for spilling so many details about her life to Lily and Petunia. She’s an orphan who’ finally met the girl who would be her mother. She can’t shut up about her life because OMG my MUM! I finally got to meet her! On top of that, up until the point where Holly met Fleamont Potter, the last time Holly had been warned about meddling with time had been when she was in third year, and it was rushed and the warning hadn’t even been made to her; it had been McGonagall warning Hermione and Hermione repeating the same information to her. So the meddling about time? Holly didn’t exactly give a shit. Lastly, we have so many references in canon of Harry Potter being an exceptionally impulsive little blockhead to the point where he constantly gets himself into trouble. Running after the Philosopher’s Stone in PS, continuing on to fight the basilisk and look for Ginny while Ron tries to get help in CoS, haring off to the Ministry in OoTP, Sectumsempra in HBP, uttering Voldemort’s name and getting them caught by Snatchers in DH… the list is actually pretty damn long. So why should it not be a character flaw for Holly in this fic to be stupidly impulsive in the information she gives out to a person she thinks is her mother, one she’s loved and idolized and put on a pedestal all her life? Why shouldn’t she spout similarly incriminating information to a boy she knows would be her godfather, whom she trusted and loved up until he got killed? It’s a character flaw, yes, and I’m not here to write perfect characters, because perfect characters who only do the right and intelligent thing make for a dry, boring read. If you weren’t about annoying flaws like this, then you’re welcome to click off my fic and find some other story where Harry is the perfect godsent angel come to save us all. That’s not what this story is about.

Why aren’t you patching up any of these inconsistencies that multiple people have already pointed out? Some of them, because that is how I want to write the characters in my story. Some of them, because there will be points in the future where these things are addressed and resolved. And yet still some of them because I don’t want to. Yes, even the stupid ones that really don’t make sense and should probably be changed. I don’t want to go back and change them. That’s how I am as a fic writer, and last I checked, this is still my fanfic.

Want to have a say in how I’m planning the characterization and plotting out? I’m still looking for a beta who I’d like to be able to help me with things like plot inconsistencies, annoying characterization (ok, shut up about Lily already. I didn’t make her this stupid; JKR did when she wrote Lily insisting on her friendship with Snape all the way up to fifth year!), and just generally talk about how and where I intend for the story to go.

If you’d like to beta for me, hit me up on my main Tumblr, @mumuinc  or DM me on Discord; my profile is mumuinc#7662.