I heard you got diagnosed with senescence and will be expiring soon, how're ya holding up?
:P
I'm okay, and am actively trying to make the most of the time I have left before my programmed expiration date.
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As a longtime fan, I’ve noticed that your characterization of Tom has changed over time (Tom in Amulet and TMWWBK resemble each other greatly but not so much the Tom in October or to an even greater extent Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus)
Is that the result of the various AUs you guys have built? Or is it that your interpretation of Tom has changed as you’ve worked with him?
Both?
The thing about Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus especially, well, all fics then (Androids, October, etc.), is that they were intended to be extremely AU.
In Lily, right away we're told this is a parallel universe that has marked differences, and that Tom Riddle is not acting like the Tom Riddle that Uncle Death was more familiar with. He had a different number of Horcruxes than expected, he had a radically different childhood in keyways, he's recognizably Tom Riddle but supposed to be very different. This is also why Lily is, and you note it is, the radically different child over there (though even there, modern fic Tom Riddle and Wizard Lenin aren't all that dissimilar for all they look like it on the surface level).
October and Androids are similar, where I had "giant justification of why characters are different don't bother me, readers" and then we went on our merry way where Tom Riddle had enough of a different past or enough of a different something that he wasn't supposed to be canon.
They're vastly AU fics and intended to be vastly AU where I run around waving "this is not canon" flags.
But at the time, most of my thoughts on HP were, "I like the idea of X thing, canon was weird about it, I will make it even more of X thing and justify myself so readers don't bother me". I hadn't gotten into the heretical weeds yet.
More recent fics there's definitely been both a) years worth of thinking about this entirely too much in the backdrop b) a shift in priorities writing where I no longer give a fuck about being complained to by readers because I didn't match fanon or accepted canon.
This means that in The Man Who Would Be King and the like @therealvinelle and I think a little more in lines of "how would Tom as we understand him respond to X, Y, and Z" while also not having to either devote or drop things that "readers will question why things aren't explicitly how we expect them in canon and if Tom doesn't have at least one 'ew, love' speech then I will get annoying reviews".
So, it's a mix of everything you mentioned, thoughts changed, thought about this way too much, priorities changed in writing and what I want to focus on with characters, and the examples you give are either very very AU things in which crazy things happen that drastically change a character or else slightly more in line with canon if with strange things happening.
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: The Sleeper, The Lovers, and Rachael by Donato Giancola, 2009
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