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greaseonmymouth · 4 years ago

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Hi! I'm rereading your incredible Little Deaths fic and drinking green tea, in the middle of some very dramatic gloomy weather. Super conducive to soft whispery feelings!

I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the post-war justice system/environment of the fic? I'm from a recently post-war country, and have always thought a lot about who should and shouldn't stand trial after conflict (especially in wars where the general population is heavily affected by fighting from either side). I'd just like to hear your thoughts on well...anything, really! How you came up with this aspect of the story, what your thoughts are on the HP fandom's usual representation of post war justice system, anything!

If you've talked about it somewhere else feel free to just point me there or ignore - I tried to look through the comments but there's so many of them, as there should be, of course ❤️ Thank you again for your writing and these whispery sweet boys!

Hi! I don't know how long this has been sitting in my asks so I'm sorry if you've been waiting awhile.

To start with: thank you for this lovely ask! I’m so incredibly pleased and humbled that this fic has become a comfort read for so many, and is still being read and re-read. ❤️

The rest of this post is under a cut because it got REALLY long. It’s also on my DW in a public post here in case it’s easier to read than on tumblr.

Ok, so the post-war justice system. I have thought about the war aftermath in HP for many years and have never really been able to formulate a coherent idea of what I thought was wrong with how it was done (or not done) in canon, and then fanon has a set of common tropes for dealing with it that don’t gel with me much either (though I’ve no doubt used those tropes myself in fic as a shorthand to get past the war unpleasantness so I could get to the more fun stuff). I think the first time I tried to bring it up was in Don’t Blame Me, which I wrote in 2015:

"I do not see what the problem is," Fleur said. "The war is over! I have been reading a lot of war literature, you know, and I think you're doing the right thing, Harry."

Harry frowned. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"It's healthy for the society," Fleur said. "Muggle studies of societies that have been through civil wars as well as non-civil wars show that people who do not talk about the war and who keep sides after the war, have a much bigger risk of going through another war, or have a lingering war trauma in their collective consciousness," she explained. "One study showed that it takes until the great grandchildren of people who fought in a war for this trauma to fade."

Harry and Ginny stared at her.

"Oh, don't look at me like that," she said, impatiently. "I believe the second war happened in part because the fallout of the first one wasn't dealt with properly! And in order to prevent the same thing from happening again, we must take conscious action." She was gesticulating as she spoke. "That includes making sure nobody is ostracised or left behind"

"You mean, can't let the losers get trodden on," Harry said.

"No," Fleur answered. "That's not what I think. In a civil war there are no winners, Harry, only losers. We may have won the war, but we lost it too." She gave him a significant look. "The only difference, in the end, is that the victors aren't put on trial and only the losers are punished for their crimes of war."

Harry felt his cheeks grow hot. "You think I should have been tried in court."

"I think we all should have," Fleur argued. "We all did terrible things. You can't tell me you didn't."

"I suppose I did," Harry said, his guts twisting. "I'd rather not talk about it."

"Yes, let's not talk about the war," Ginny interjected.

That’s all I said about it - this is one of the fics I wrote where the war aftermath was reduced to a single line ("Didn't we settle our differences after...your trial?" Harry asked carefully. "Because I thought we had.") so I wouldn’t have to deal with it, but my brain wouldn’t leave it alone.

And then I wrote Little Deaths (2018) and I didn’t plan to bring this up again, but since I was already dealing with some serious issues and Harry and Draco do discuss an epilogue in a fantasy book (vaguely based on Hunger Games, but absolutely also intended as a meta discussion of the HP epilogue) and it just felt wrong to not say anything at all about how the war turned out in this fic. Little Death’s is about healing in so many ways, so I was also wondering how does a nation heal from the trauma of a civil war?

For those reading along, here are the relevant passages from Little Deaths:

Harry was struggling to remember the last time he’d had a civil conversation with Malfoy…that was to say, before he started coming to the Archive. Was it at the trials? Harry recalled sharing a few words with an exhausted Draco Malfoy in the halls at the ministry—Harry had been utterly wrung out at the time as well, testifying for and against so many people, standing trial himself, testifying, testifying, watching friends and enemies and everyone in between go from court room to holding cells to court rooms to freedom, or to jail.

No, there had been instances other than that, later. A few words at a party or other, those Pansy had put on after the trials (and after she got out of prison), the ones that started out as blind drinking and dancing to forget, that turned into drinking to talk, that turned into canapés and Muggle movies and friends. Malfoy had been there, but now Harry didn’t know if he’d spoken to him at length, if at all, or if all their interactions had been filtered through alcohol and semi-annoyed tolerance. Pansy had stopped throwing those get-togethers a long time ago.

“All right. Uhm. Why did you drop out of the Auror programme?”

(...) “After I served out my prison sentence and community service I was offered a spot and since I had nothing else to do, I accepted it. And everyone else expected me to take it, you know? I was the Harry Potter, Vanquisher of Evil, The Boy Who Lived, all that bullshit—and everyone expected me to continue down that path. Be some kind of…Arbiter of Justice.”

Malfoy had raised an eyebrow. “You? Forgive me, but…not that I don’t appreciate your role in how everything turned out, but…”

“Right?” Harry agreed. “It was…I was tired. I was so tired. And after a year of training, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t want to be a person who fights, you know? I never…I never chose to fight in the first place, I just had to. And now it was all done and I was supposed to fight crime? Me?”

Malfoy huffed. “It’s not a spectacular story,” he said. “You know that I got a combined prison and community service sentence?” Harry nodded. “The community service part was in reconstruction. I and a bunch of others repaired and rebuilt what the Death Eaters destroyed—what we destroyed, everything from homes to bridges to Hogwarts to businesses. We broke it, so we fixed it.”

The rain continued pouring. It was cold, but dry, under Malfoy’s umbrella. Harry didn’t really know what he was doing, here, with Malfoy. He was falling in love with a person who had just reminded him, bluntly at that, that he’d been on the other side in the War, a person whose family was tied up with centuries’ worth of human and magical supremacy politics and blood politics, somebody who’d been directly responsible for a lot of harm.

But it was hypocritical, Harry thought, to hold himself in better regard. He’d gotten a combined prison and community service sentence too. He’d used Unforgivables. He’d caused injury and death to a lot of innocent bystanders when he’d broken into Gringotts with Ron and Hermione, and he had to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life. Hell, he’d probably broken more laws than Malfoy had, but Harry had gotten two months in prison, and Malfoy had gotten a year.

“When did I become someone who overthinks things?” Harry grumbled, sitting down.

“When you came back from prison,” she answered, without hesitation.

Harry didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t recall his time in prison being particularly awful; the incarceration rates after the War had been so high that there wasn’t enough space in Azkaban for everyone, even with the staggered sentences, so he’d been sent to a facility in Norway. And even so, the European Delegate had banished Dementors from Azkaban. Hermione had served in Azkaban and had said of her time there that it’d been a bit cold, but otherwise uneventful. Harry could’ve said the same thing. Prison had been mostly boring. There’d been a library there, and they’d had a few books in English, so Harry had read those, and…that was it. Two months of boredom in a Norwegian prison.

How had that possibly changed him? Was it all that time to just…think? His prison time had been bookended by his community service; he’d been assisting in the Janus Thickey ward for about six months before he went to prison, and he came right back to it afterwards.

He’d thought a lot about the war, then. About his choices. Both those that led to his sentence and those that hadn’t, all the different ways the war could’ve turned out if he’d only been faster, braver, more cautious, more bold…there’d been a counsellor there, but Harry hadn’t wanted to talk to her at the time. He’d made his peace—he’d taken both his punishment and his accolades, and gone to Pansy’s parties, and put it all behind him.

“I don’t think…none of us came out of the War unscathed,” Ginny continued, “and I think all of us were impacted by our sentences in some way or other…maybe it was a slow change, I don’t know. But when you came back from prison, that’s when I noticed you weren’t the same person anymore.”

“Merlin’s tears, Harry, I wasn’t ready! I wasn’t ready to have bloody children or, or, get married, or any of that shit!” Ginny snapped back. “I just wanted to live! Have fun! Not think about the fucking War or my dead brother or the fact everyone was in prison or doing community service—I just wanted to play Quidditch and have fun and not get serious, and you—you didn’t.”

“Look, that book? Is just a book. It’s not an indicator for your life, or mine, or anyone else’s. We get to make our own happy endings, all right? We deserve that.”

“Do we?” Draco said, after a while. “After everything we did, do we really?”

“Yes, damn it. I didn’t suffer for most of my life only to continue to suffer. I don’t care about what I deserve or don’t deserve, I care about what I want. Right now, that’s you, us.”

“That’s easy for you to say—”

“No, it isn’t! Merlin’s bloody hat, Draco, none of this is easy.” Harry rubbed his face. (...)

Draco hadn’t touched his food either. “I just don’t understand,” he said, “how, after everything we did, we deserve anything at all. The book—those characters all did some truly awful things to overturn the government, and they just…went and got married and that was it? How did they deserve that? How do we deserv—”

“I’ve already been to jail, and so have you.” Harry was done with this discussion. He put his plate aside and got up, pacing. “We’ve had our punishment. That’s enough. I’m not going to continue to punish myself just because. It’s done! It’s in the past! I just want to move on!” He glared at Draco. “I want a normal goddamn life, a fucking happy ending, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I want—I need to just be a normal fucking person!”

“So just because in the eyes of the law it’s done, it’s really done?”

“Yes!” Harry threw up his hands. “I don’t know! But there’s no other metric, is there? It’s why we have the sodding law in the first place, isn’t it?”

“Draco,” Harry continued, closing the distance between them. “I don’t know how to make you understand that you deserve good things—”

“Just because I went to prison it doesn’t mean the scales are even—”

“No, but you have been working tirelessly on becoming a better person than you were since then,” Harry pointed out. “Everything you’ve done since then has been about that. You’ve earned it. You get to have things, now.”

“I don’t—” Draco shook his head. “I’ll never be done with that. That’s not a process that ever really ends...I just happened to run out of properties to give away.”

“No, I know, but—okay, you know what. I died. I died so everyone could live, and part of me stayed dead—or so I thought anyway—and you know what, I don’t care if I haven’t deserved this, or if you haven’t deserved it, I want it, and I want you, and that’s just how it is. That’s how it’s going to be. Okay? I’m allowing myself to want something and to let myself have it and to fight for it. And what I want is you.”

So as you can see, this is a vanishly small part of Little Deaths - 1442 words out of 96144, or 1.5%. The point of Little Deaths was never to interrogate the justice system or the war or the aftermath, that’s something I think I’d need to write a separate fic to deal with and to be frank that’s never going to happen. I still don’t know entirely what my beliefs are - I’m still working it out.

A little bit of background:

I have a degree in Finnish and have lived in Finland for a while, in rural societies that still, a hundred years later, have plaques in the local church and/or community centres with the names of those who died in the civil war in 1918. The family I lived with didn’t want to talk about the civil war and which side their grandparents or great-grandparents had been on during the war, or who they lost, but they did explain a few things to me. The rest I got from textbooks and literature.

It seems to me that the wizarding wars are modelled on WW2 - there’s an overt link to the one where Grindelwald was terrorising Europe, and it’s placed in a vague, almost mythical past, due to the elder wand stuff and how old Dumbledore is. The two Voldemort wars however are clearly in terms of politics modelled on WW2. What canon doesn’t take into account is that the two Voldemort wars are civil wars. That’s not to diminish the very real WW2, but I’m old enough to remember the civil wars on Balkan (some of my earliest memories are going with my mum to red cross to put together boxes with food and blankets and the like to send to Yugoslavia), and while I’ve never even visited the area and absolutely cannot speak to what kind of horrors the people there experienced and what the aftermath was like, I have known several people from the area who don’t want to talk about it because the trauma is still very raw. My sister’s husband is from the area and what I’m given to understand is that the area still isn’t very stable. Last I heard there’s some unrest again because of politics that tie back to the civil war and people are scared.

So, these are civil wars. And what little I know about civil wars (I’m absolutely not an expert) seems to point towards these being profoundly traumatic to a nation because you’re not fighting an outside, invading force - you’re fighting your neighbours. Coworkers, family, friends. I won’t say it’s impossible to heal from a civil war, but it’s not easy, and the trauma can and often will last for generations. Take Finland for example - there are still families where it’s taboo to marry someone from a family who was on the other side of the civil war. There are still areas where neighbours don’t get along because their families were on the opposite side of the civil war, a hundred years ago. I won’t say that this is super prevalent because I don’t know enough about it to say, and no doubt for many people the civil war is a non-issue today. It just wasn’t always.

And the winners write the history books. The winners persecute the losers.

In HP, Voldemort and co killed and tortured a lot of people, and it’s implied that when the war was won (er, when Voldemort vanished bc of Baby Harry and his whole movement fell apart) all the ‘winning side’ did was persecute death eaters and imprison them. What we see in the books is that when the second war starts up again, the ‘good side’ does a lot of stuff that is straight up illegal and if had been done by the ��bad side’ would’ve been cause to punish them.

A common fanon trope for the war aftermath is that Harry testifies on Draco’s behalf (and often also his mother) to get them a lighter sentence, because Harry is a hero and has that power. He defeated Voldemort, after all! There are variations on this trope. Sometimes Draco goes to prison for a bit. Sometimes he gets off scot free. Sometimes he incurs financial losses. Sometimes he is discriminated against as an ex-death eater. The common theme is that Draco is always the one who gets punished and that Harry is the one with the power to make it stop, by associating with him. Harry himself is never punished. Nobody ever questions his methods - there’s very much a ‘the ends justify the means’ attitude to Harry in both canon and fanon. (A quick note here: I am not condemning writers who do this or fics that have this as a central theme. And tbh if fandom didn’t have this trope, many of us, myself included, would be missing a quick shorthand to get us past the war and to the fun stuff. It’s fanfic; if we want to write frivolous fanfic that doesn’t deal with serious war stuff, we should be allowed to do that without first having to grapple with bloody war politics to justify it.)

I looked at what I know about civil wars, HP canon, HP fanon, and I couldn’t stop thinking: what if it had gone differently? What if it didn't play out that way? What if Harry's side of the war, even though they are the victors, did not, in fact, deal with the aftermath? What if an outside force (like, idk, the magical equivalent of the EU or the UN) took reins as an objective power, and put everyone on trial? I don’t have the power to change the world, and I certainly don’t have the answers - I don’t *really* know how international politics work either. But I can try to discuss.

SO. To get to the point:

Harry etc. went to prison because I find it profoundly unjust that they didn't. They might have been the 'heroes', but they used unforgivable curses. In the real world we have the concept of war crimes for a good reason, as well as we have established standards for humanitarian treatment under war by international law (commonly known as the Geneva Convention).

By making it clear in this fic that Harry and co faced justice for their actions I wanted to question the tendency in fandom to blindly accept the book series' implication that they never did, and especially the fanon that Harry testified for Draco at the trials after the war and that his word somehow got Draco a lesser sentence or off entirely. Harry is a teenager and when you look at the facts, you could argue that he’s a war criminal - so I wanted to question the assumption that Harry is a hero.

At the same time, we know that the British wizarding law body/government as presented in the books is deeply flawed, so whatever justice they, and others on the other side of the war, would've faced wouldn't have been just. So I thought about it and wondered how it'd have turned out if some kind of international impartial legal body untangled the mess? would such a body exist? why? when would it have been formed? I like to think that in a just world, an outside, unbiased (or relatively unbiased) body could've handled it. I don't have an answer, and I didn't go into further details about it in this fic because for the purposes of this fic I needed it to have already happened (or it would've been a very different fic...) but realistically I know that this sort of thing threatens the sovereignty of a nation (even one without a functioning government). It’s more like wishful thinking than a rational suggestion of how to deal with something as terrible as a civil war.

So I figured, ok. Harry and co were all tried in court and faced some kind of sentence afterwards, BUT there was still a sharp difference in how they were treated. Harry was sent to a cushy Norwegian prison for a couple of months while Draco got a year in Azkaban. institutional misogyny plays a role too, with Hermione's sentence. While her sentence was also short, it was carried out in Azkaban. I didn’t think it was realistic that an outside objective body would’ve been truly objective, I still think that there would’ve been differential treatment. (I went through the books when writing this and there's no evidence that Draco used unforgiveables aside from that time in myrtle's bathroom when he was about to crucio Harry. But Harry did! He used imperio and crucio successfully and multiple times. (His failed attempts to avada kedavra Bellatrix in book 5 should've probably been punished, but that wouldn't have served Dumbledore's agenda now would it. and Dumbledore was the only witness to those attempts iirc.))

I want to believe that this approach would've helped heal the rift caused by the civil war somewhat so that there wouldn't be yet another war twenty years later. I’d like to think that for many people, having had jail time and community service, they could get closure. they've served out their punishment so it's all over now. I also genuinely don't believe that the ministry would've been able to deal with the aftermath of the war, given how everyone was complicit, even though many of them had been acting out of fear.

What you might notice is that in the fic I was very ambivalent about it by actively avoiding presenting the war aftermath in a positive or negative light. I present it as something that happened. Where it gets thorny is how Harry, Draco, and Ginny think of it - and again, I don’t make it clear that one of them is right or wrong. Harry wants to believe that because he’s had his lawful punishment he can now move past it and be a normal person. Draco doesn’t believe his lawful punishment was enough and wants to keep making amends. Ginny (as well as Pansy and many others, by implication) was so traumatised by the whole thing that she refused to think about it at all and more or less became a nihilist for a few years. This ambivalence is deliberate in part because I don’t know within myself what I think is the right way, but also because I don’t want to pass judgment - this is a fanfic, but civil wars are real things and there are no doubt people out there in the real world struggling with that kind of trauma. I wouldn’t want to presume, from the comfort of my own non-experience with the subject, to know what’s the ‘correct’ opinion to have. What I do think, is that it’s very easy to talk about war as a black-and-white thing, with evil on one side and good on the other, that it’s always the ‘other’ who is in the wrong, and that heroes are infallible. I just don’t think with civil wars that it’s always that simple. Even in fictional universe Harry Potter where Voldemort is Actually Evil and Harry is the Good who defeats him, it’s not that simple.

So tl;dr I guess: How do you heal after a trauma like this? I don’t know.

#harry potter #little deaths and how to avoid them #my fic

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