I wanna make a family tree of Alex's family in TES but idk how and where to start. Maybe on Google Docs? Spreadsheet? Idk.

📓?? 👀

Okay, okay, okay, so -

Put “📓” or some other version of a book emoji into my inbox and I’ll explain the plot of a fanfiction that I haven’t written but daydream about.

The Ancient Olympics AU (which I talked about with @crispyliza )

This AU came into being after I relistened to the "The Ancient Olympics" episode of the history/comedy podcast "You're Dead To Me". It had the interesting information that a lot of Olympic winners actually came from Sicily & South Italy! So naturally I began to wonder what might have happened if my Sicilians ended up in Olympia ...

Dramatis Personae:

- Michele Vento (APH Sicily, my OC) as Trainer of the Bontade Twins - Marco & Lorenzo Bontade (Human OCs of mine) as Athletes from Syracuse - Herakles Karpuzi (APH Greece) as Athlete from Athens - Timothea Simonides (Human OC) as Herakles' Trainer - Omar Simonides (Human OC) as ... Good question? Co-Trainer to Thea ig

The Happenings™:

- Lorenzo and Marco want to compete in the upcoming Olympics as runners. Michele,probably a distant relative to them who lives close, becomes their trainer.

- The Sicilians roll up to Olympia, most likely a few days early because travelling is an adventure in these days and it doesn't hurt to have a few extra days to get accustomed to the terrain.

- Michele also definitely loses the Bontade twins 10 minutes after arriving at the sanctuary bc he wasn't looking for 0.5 seconds. So now he lost his boys at a place that currently contains approximately half of Magna Graecia.

- The reason he wasn't paying attention? Some athletes were preparing themselves nearby, bucknaked of course. Amongst them Herakles. Michele has always been a sucker for strong arms and legs, so that plus Herakles' beautiful face has him swooning from the get go.

- After he recollects his twins, they spend the next few days training, as do the other athletes, which is when Herakles notices Michele's looks.

- Christina (crispyliza) had the galaxy brain idea that Herakles intentionally flirts with Michele to sabotage the Bontades success at the games. It's an idea that he comes up with together with the Simonides - to be completely fair, it was probably Timothea's. Omar: "My, looks like you've got a fanboy." Herakles: "And what a pretty one at that." Timothea: "He seems to be a bit shy about it, though. Or maybe he's actually after those twin brothers?" (They figure out he's the Bontades trainer) Timothea: "Oh, he's a trainer! Pretty sucky at his job though if he's oogling the competition so much." Omar: "All the better for us, though." Timothea: -oil lamp ignites over her head bc light bulbs aren't invented yet-

- While we're at the Simonides: This was before it was mandatory for everyone to be naked, so Timothea managed to sneak into the games by posing as a man. Omar helps her with it, since he's trans and thusly got experience. Christina also had the hilarious idea of them having fake beards, which is just, YES. Timothea definitely cut her hair and they made whatever beard is in fashion in Athens at the time out of them. Their mother Natasa used to be a famed winner of the Heraea, the woman's games also held in Olympia.

- So let the games GreSic flirting begin

- The Problem: Michele doesn't want his boys to think he's betraying them for a rival athlete. He also really wants Herakles to rail him. The Solution: Find ways to be sneaky and secretive about it so the twins don't have to find out. Here is one of the possible scenarios I had for this: "When I first thought about this, I also had this scene in my head. Idk how accurate it works, bc it involves a tent and in the ydtm episode they didn't mention how people were housed during the games. (Like, I am sure there were guest houses, the temples probably offered some places to sleep, both of that but in upscale fancy for all the rich and important people attending yadda yadda.) Do you know that trope(?) when someone has sex but is trying to hide it? That. Just Michele sticking his head out of the tent, clutching at the fabric to keep everything else closed. Tells his twins, who looked for him, he is kind of busy rn. Tries is best to hide the fact of what is actually happening and to make them leave. It works. Kind of. Because as soon as they are gone, Michele sighs with a :| look and tells Hera to stop. "But why?" "Because you would have to nail every corner of this tent down and then they'd still find a way to spy!" Which is exactly what the twins ARE doing. They are trying their best to get an unnoticed peak from one place of the tent. But because it has to be subtle, all they get to see is feet and they either don't hear them or don't recognize Herakles' voice. I don't think he is the person to go out of his way to pick on people or pick fights in general, so they probably haven't had much interaction. So Michele smoothes out his chiton annoyed and leaves the tent, to then just stomp around enough for the twins to notice him and pretend they weren't doing what he knew they were doing."

- One day however, Marco & Lorenzo are missing their trainer and can't find him. They run into Thea & Omar, who are missing their athlete. Hm. Weird. Wonder what's that all about :)

- They end up catching Michele and Herakles in the act, just out there somewhere underneath a tree, which, naturally, makes the Bontades VERY upset. Lorenzo: "What do you think you are doing?!" Omar, in his head: 'Herakles, obviously.' Marco: "He's the COMPETITION, Michele!" Both: "You've left us all alone for THAT?!" Since the Simonides were in on the whole thing, they're not surprised just disappointed that Herakles vanished without a heads up. "Well, that ain't sprinting practice."

- The most hilarious thing is that could not even tell you who wins the race. I didn't even think about that part until yesterday. I'm kind of particular to the thought that it's somewhat of a photo finish with the three of them, but the twins come out on top. Since there can only be one winner, they flippantly let one of them be chosen by the equivalent of a coin toss. So technically, either Marco or Lorenzo has won, but they keep both parading around with the wreath and insist that the inscription to them mentions them both as winners. Now, if they got their way is another story, I didn't read any academic articles on this at. all.

- Second place is as good as last in the Ancient Greek world, but Herakles takes the loss in stride. Timothea is probably the one who's most upset. Marco: "Hah, so all your flexing - " Lorenzo: "and all your fucking for nothing in the end!" Michele: "Hey, I'd like to think I'm a reward in and of myself, not an obstacle."

Sequel Bait:

- Back home in Siracusa, Michele gets asked if he doesn't want to train his cousins, too. The ones from Neapolis. The ones Michele can't stand. However, his mother talks him into it and he agrees. Extra funny because Lovino & Feliciano were also talked into it by THEIR parents. So Michele spends the next four years butting heads with Lovino, knowing fully well their mother will rip his head off if they don't do well. Lovino is of course hiding his giant insecurities about disappointing his loving father & mother behind snark. Michele will arrive at Olympia with four athletes in two this time and looks like he aged 40, not 4 years from all the stress.

- Herakles is no competition this time, though! He wants to try his hand at wrestling this year. However, very quickly after his arrival, he butts heads with a fellow wrestler from one of the Greek colonies in Asia minor. Only thing's more annoying than his big mouth, which he shares with his wrestling buddy, are probably the flirtations coming out of it & Herakles can't wait to show him his place. (Yes, I do know that the Turkish people came into the area that is modern day Turkey far, far later, he should be of another ethnicity [and he gotta be Greek to participate, anyways] but. Is any of you really going to deny me Herakles and Sadık wrestling, bucknaked, covered in oil? I'd hope the fuck not.)

everybody always makes alice longbottom in the same families: fortescue, selwyn, prewett. which do you think is best? or do you have better suggestion? thnx

Honestly I really don’t like Alice as a Prewett. It doesn’t make sense to me. I mean we know that Molly is really big on family, basically adopting Harry after five minutes conversation, so if Neville was a nephew or something like that don’t you think she’d have been part of his childhood? Even just a small part? Don’t you think the Weasley children would consider him family, even distant family, if he was a direct Prewett descendant? Making Alice a Prewett makes me uncomfortable, because if you project that lineage out to what we get in the books later it just doesn’t work. imo: bad idea, one of the worst.

Between Fortescue and Selwyn, I prefer Selwyn. We don’t get to really meet any Selwyns in the books – just one Death Eater who shows up briefly – but we have a nice little encounter with Florean Fortescue, and he seems like a friendly sort of guy. Someone who would likely have made at least a token effort to be involved in the childhood of a basically-orphaned little kid whom everyone thought was a Squib, if he had been part of Neville’s family. And while there is nothing in the books that says he and Neville weren’t family or friendly, the fact that Florean hangs out with Harry for a summer and doesn’t mention anything about Neville – a boy who is in not just the same year as Harry, but the same house – well, it just reads as off. Or that is it would read as off, if Neville was a relative of Florean, because that seems like the kind of thing that would have come up in conversation even if he and Neville weren’t personally close. But when Harry is summarizing his weeks in Diagon Alley, he doesn’t say “Florean Fortescue, Neville’s uncle who ran the ice cream parlor…” or anything like that, which leaves anyone trying to make that canon connection the responsibility of answering the question, why not? Why would Florean not introduce himself via Neville when he met Harry? Why would Harry not reference Florean’s connection to his housemate? I’m not saying you can’t make it work, that it’s impossible to come up with a way to make Alice a Fortescue without making later events in the books go wonky – but you definitely need to make that effort to craft that backstory.

Honestly having Alice be directly related to anyone we meet in the books who interacts with Harry in any sort of extended and friendly fashion doesn’t really work for me, because it feels awkward for them to never mention something about “oh you got to school with my nephew, Neville, he talks about you all the time!” or so on, you know? And again, it’s not impossible to do it and do it well, but it is something you have to tackle because when you’re writing a prequel (which is what Marauders Era stuff is if you think about it): you have to be very conscious of the canon that is going to come later and how what you’re writing now that’s new works alongside what was written previously about what is going to happen next. I think we’re all familiar with badly done prequel stories that don’t quite mesh with their later-slash-earlier installments, so I expect you get what I mean when I say that that kind of attention to detail matters!

(Also tbh most of the time when I see Alice linked to a family like that, one of the “nice ones” we meet, her background tends to read as pretty “Mary Sue-ish” anyway. You know what I mean: the sort of OC-insert character who ~conveniently~ has really close family ties to other characters we know and she’s suuuuuper important in their lives and oh-so-special and…basically it just makes you think of bad fanfics, right? The kind you write when you’re twelve and want to burn later? Maybe that’s just me idk, but any time I see the name “Alice Fortescue” I cringe because I think I know what’s coming, and sadly I’m usually right.)

Anyway, basically the thing that I think is important to keep in mind when crafting a backstory for Alice is what we learn about Neville’s upbringing: he was raised by his paternal grandmother. He had a family of busybody relatives who sent him lots of advice on what classes to take and who all thought he was a Squib when he was little and did awful things to try and get his magic to show itself (the doing of which seemed very casual, almost like he was an afterthought, as evinced by him being dropped out the window once when someone wanted desert). No one thought he was important or talented. His grandmother takes him to visit his parents in St. Mungo’s on holidays. She acts very familiar to her daughter-in-law (although admittedly she’s spent about fourteen years visiting her in the closed ward by then, so there’s no telling what their relationship was like back when Alice had her full faculties) and worn-out by it all, although still fiercely proud of her son’s talents (and later her grandson’s, at least once he finally “lives up to” what she wanted from him after the fighting against Voldemort starts).

From here on out this is admittedly all extrapolation, but going off of what we know: it has always seemed to me as though there are a lot of Longbottoms of Augusta’s generation or around that age but not a lot of younger ones, and Alice’s family doesn’t seem to be involved in things with Neville much at all. We know she’s a pure-blood, because Neville is, so it’s not a situation like with Lily – but we also know that the family line means a lot to most pure-blood families. So from that we can draw the assumption that for whatever reason, Alice’s son doesn’t matter much to her side of the family, even though one would think he ought to. Is that because she comes from a huge family, so the Squib-ish son of the girl who went mad and got locked up in St. Mungo’s isn’t someone they need to spend much thought on? Is that because she comes from a family that has almost died-out and there just aren’t many of them left to care about him? Is it because they don’t consider him part of “their” family as much as they do “a Longbottom” because the maternal line doesn’t matter to them as much? Is it because Alice herself had a falling-out with her family so they severed ties before Neville was born?Is it because her family and the Longbottoms just don’t get along (either for reasons that existed at the time Alice and Frank got married, which she did despite her family’s wishes, or for reasons that cropped-up later – perhaps over the side that Alice and Frank chose in the war, or perhaps they blame him for what happened to her, etc etc?) so they don’t want to have anything to do with the Longbottoms...who might not welcome them anyway even if they did?

The last option makes me like the Selwyn idea because we know the Selwyns are pure-bloods at least in part (from the fact that Umbridge claims their lineage when sporting Slytherin’s locket) and we know that at least one of them was a Death Eater. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean the whole family was a bunch of blood-supremacists of course, but it does give us more potential to play with than we get from the Fortescues or the Ollivanders (or the Prewetts), I believe. Giving Alice a family that is: a) majority pro-voldemort or b) mixed between pro-voldemort/pro-dumbledore or even c) majority pro-dumbledore but with a few outcast death eaters provides a much more interesting and idea-fertile background, I think, for both her and her son.

To that end I’m thinking that if you really want to tie Alice in with a family that has members we know well – maybe one that provides you with relatives who will also be played in your game without adding a bunch of OCs – you can always go with the Lestranges. That’s an idea that occurred to me recently that I really, really like. Make her a cousin or second-cousin or so forth to Rodolphus and Rabastan. Not a sister; if she was that closely related to them the dialogue we get between Bellatrix and Neville later gets awkward because there’s no way she wouldn’t introduce herself as his “auntie” to drive the spikes in deeper, not if they had that kind of connection – but some sort of relation, anyway. Then you get to add another layer of intensity to a bunch of canon things without having to actually twist canon at all:

Why did Voldemort pick the Potters and their half-blood son to go after first, before the pure-blood boy? Maybe it wasn’t just because he and Harry shared the same blood-status; maybe it was because the pure-blood was related to his most loyal servant so he figured he’d start with the stranger (either because he thought Harry would be easier to deal with, or because he trusted Bella and her boys to be quick to deal with the Longbottoms if they got troublesome in the meantime).

Why did the Lestranges go after the Longbottoms when they wanted information about Voldemort’s whereabouts? Maybe it wasn’t just because they were Aurors who knew Ministry secrets and were part of the Order; maybe it was because they were family. We know that Bellatrix is enthusiastic about the prospect of pruning traitors out of her family tree after all, an idea that she would probably extend to her relatives-by-marriage even if the Lestrange brothers didn’t share that fatal familial enthusiasm for themselves…although they probably do.

Why did the Lestranges torture the Longbottoms so much that they lost their minds permanently, when surely that meant going far beyond the point of their actually being able to get any answers from them? Maybe it wasn’t just because they got carried away and liked the fun of it so they kept going even when it wasn’t useful any more; maybe it was exacerbated by the fact that Alice and Frank were family and they needed to be punished for choosing the wrong side. Maybe it was personal.

If Alice was a Lestrange before her marriage, then tension between the Longbottoms and the Lestranges gets ratcheted-up about a thousand points in all areas, both regarding the things that happen in the books and their relationships before. It puts her in a position similar to Sirius and Andromeda, where the battle lines are drawn between the branches on her own family tree and she has to decide how far she is willing to go for what she believes in, even when she knows the person looking back at her out of that silver mask.

The First Wizarding War divided people against their own family and friends and too often we get mired in extreme black-and-white ideas of good and evil sides, forgetting that there are a lot more shades of gray (just ask Sirius). Since we know so little about Alice, she’s a perfect opportunity to explore that nuance and making her related to a few Death Eaters (of any family) is a great way to play around with that. Honestly I have like a hundred different ideas of things that could be done with such an Alice so if you want to build one and you’re drawing a blank please hit me up I will gladly gush to you!

tl;dr Alice Selwyn = yes, that’s interesting. Alice Fortescue = a whole lot of meh and a little awkward. Alice Prewett = please no that causes more problems than it does anything else. Also consider as an option: Alice Lestrange.

hsdf idk how to start this off but basically i’m gonna do some worldbuilding and also some editing to my main verse

i’m gonna separate it into two main offshoot-timelines, one taking place within the events of the prince & the raven, where she is adopted and raised by siegfried’s family, and another one where she’s.. not.

generally speaking, the difference between these two timelines is, in the first one (the main-main verse, i guess you could say), Schwanensee only consists of the sacred island in the center of the Swan King’s lake, and is really only a ‘kingdom’ in name because the inhabitants are all only the royal family (extended up to like 3rd cousins). 

(the ‘royal family’ was originally more of a sacred priest/sage bloodline, but evolved over the years into more of a leadership role, so they started calling them royal.)

in the other one, Schwanensee consists of the lake, the island and a good portion of the land around the lake- not a very big kingdom, but enough to be counted as a kingdom. 

In this verse, the actual royal family had retreated to the sacred island for several generations, leaving the nth-time-removed cousins who didn’t inherit the holy bloodline powers to run the actual kingdom. this decision was probably made to protect the empowered members of the royal family from got/tudors-style royal murder intrigue, or something like that.

However, that probably backfired because within like, one-and-a-half generations the regent side of the family started to abuse their powers- under the table, of course, but basically they became the actual kings/queens in all but name, and kept the distant concept of the actual royals on the sacred island over the heads of the citizens as sort of a threat, like ‘oh you think we’re not fit to manage this country? would you say that to the royal family’s face?’ or ‘oh the harvest has been poor this year and maybe there might not be enough food for all of you this year but just keep a stiff upper lip and think of the royal family, they’re praying for us or something’

this is also going into OC territory here but in Tutu’s time, the main-- magistrate, minister, regent, what-have-you-- is her several-times-removed cousin who is the perfect golden child on the surface; all glasses-pushing-up and theatrically clumsy and bookish and all smiles and etc., etc., but- of course- you can’t judge a book by its cover. 

When Tutu was rescued from the wreckage of the sacred island, he was somewhere in the 12-14 age range, while Tutu was 5, and his father was actually the magistrate/regent/whatever-the-fuck. 

The aforementioned father was almost CARTOONISHLY corrupt- like, not subtle about it at ALL, there were crying children in the streets while he was eating 3 whole roasted pheasants at a time up in the castle and all that stuff. You know how it be. 

He made a big show about having rescued the princess, who is ALSO the daughter of this kingdom’s like LITERAL GOD, and how he was going to raise her and protect her as if she was his own, this was a miracle, etc. etc. but really his plan was to raise her and spoil her absolutely rotten to make her more of a figurehead to wave from balconies and for all intents and purposes be under his thumb/so vapid she has no thoughts of her own. 

It worked out pretty well for the first few years because she was a traumatized child, but she started having her own thoughts and opinions at about 7 years old, which also coincided with when the current magistrate started coming down with a case of Ye Olde Consumption or something like that- after a long, painful illness he- of course- died, and his son, Name TBD, became the next one. Almost immediately, he basically turned the kingdom from cartoonishly-poor-and-obviously-run-by-a-villain to actually-an-okay-place-to-live. 

Not because he actually wanted to help or anything, but the peasants had been getting restless and there was a high probability that they would have actually staged a revolution sooner rather than later. That obviously gave him points from the citizens, and it was a lot easier to continue doing his corrupt activities under the table when starving people weren’t pounding on the castle walls yelling. 

He was actively a lot nicer to Tutu- for one, actually talking to her like she was a person, and letting her do things she wanted, to a reasonable degree, because, like, she’s only a little kid and anyway it’d be a lot easier to control her/get her to do things YOU want from her if she likes you. 

He only started getting worried when most of the things SHE wanted to do were to actively help the citizens, and then of course the entire kingdom basically started falling in love with her in a ‘our princess is also our literal messiah and she’s so kind and beautiful i can’t wait for her to be queen’-type sense, and that only grew when she started using LITERAL HOLY MAGIC to heal sick children or cure blight on a field of crops. At first he was like ‘okay i can work with this’ but as she got older she also started getting more involved in the kingdom’s actual politics and managing, and undoing literal generations of corrupt money-funneling and keeping-the-masses-ignorant and so on and so forth, completely unaware the whole time that they were anything more than clerical errors in the contracts and paperwork. 

So at this point he’s like ‘...ah fuck, this kid is actually smart and altruistic and literally beloved by all, this could ruin EVERYTHING and what’s gonna happen to my side of the family when she gets married and/or becomes queen, which is eventually gonna happen because she’s beautiful and every half-bit noble from lords to full-on emperors are probably gonna want to marry THE CHILD OF AN ACTUAL GOD at the very least for bragging points if nothing else.

So for one he changes the age of her coronation from 18 to 21, but that’s not gonna solve the problem forever, so I’m not saying he started actively conspiring against her- extremely low-key, of course- but that’s basically exactly what I’m saying. 

For one, he only arranges meetings with, like, the most obnoxious possible suitors- the French-royal, powdered-wig types, or the dickhead playboy pinches-girls’-butts types, or the straight-up just like actual marauding Viking kings or something- the ones that she would NEVER even give the time of DAY to, and disguises his actual intent in having her reject all of them by ‘of course i would never FORCE my dear cousin to marry against her will, women- even princesses- are PEOPLE, you know’ like. wow. so progressive. 

Also, while it’s true that some of the perils she faces are naturally borne from being a) a princess in a fantasy setting and b) the only child of an evil deity’s sworn enemy, who has powers that actively destroy his powers and minions, approximately, like, a FOURTH of them were probably more like ‘somebody got slipped a bag of gold to try and get the princess’s horse to run off a cliff’ or ‘hey coachman why don’t we take a detour through these woods known to be the territory of violent bandits/dangerous magical beasts/etc., it’s probably fine if we go fast’

They’ve all failed up to this point because. Hey. Heroine plot armor, dawg. That shit be TOUGH. 

They also probably won’t- or wouldn’t- turn into literal assassination attempts until she starts getting closer to her 21st birthday, but they do probably slowly ramp up in intensity the older she gets. There’s also a high probability that Name TBD would actually ally himself with the Monster Raven, or at least some of his human cultists and/or his horrible children to either kill Tutu or get her out of the way somehow (coughcough COR cough. absolutely irredeemable creep REALLY wants to ‘have’ her. Gross on so many levels.)

.....yeah man that’s basically all i have *dabs*