The Bromley Saga - Part One of Two
Tuesday, 11 October 2005 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
siguneOriginal Female Characters are probably the most reviled beings to dwell in the fanfictional Potterverse. Many readers hit the back button when they see one listed among a story’s cast. Is this prejudice justified? I don’t think so. Let’s be honest: a bad writer probably won’t get a character right, no matter if it’s canon or not, and decent writers are likely to create good original characters, even female ones. OFC does not automatically signify Mary Sue, and even an OFC with a few Sue characteristics does not a bad story make. Better still: give someone like Grainne a random real Sue and she will craft something brilliant with the little monster!
Still, nobody said it was easy, and I for one couldn’t pull it off.
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_grainne_ and lunafish were foolish enough to express interest in my OFC Brynhild and how she evolved from her forebear Bromelia “Sue” Bromley, whose acquaintance you could make in Uncommon Flower, the delicious tale Grainne span for me on the occasion of the S.N.A.P.E. contest. (If you missed it, you can find it here.) Because I somehow like all my creations – even Bromelia – for no better reason than that they are the fruits of my imagination, I wasted no time and delved into my vast archives (*ahem*) to retrieve old Bromley material. I display it here for your pleasure and delectation – I hope :-). You are kindly invited to have a good laugh at my Sue antics…
Contains many sketches, demented plot bunnies and a fragment of a story…
1. The Birth of Venus – er, no – Bromelia
The very first Bromelia appeared on one of my earliest pages of Snape sketches. Suddenly she was there: a girl with dark, curly hair and rather sad eyes, squashed between two studies of hands. All I knew about her at that point was her name, Bromelia Bromley, and the fact that she was a classmate of Snape’s at Hogwarts. Why she popped onto the page I really don’t know. I remember thinking that Snape must have had a friend. Even the nastiest, most horrible people I have ever met have friends, and as far as I could see there weren’t any very obvious candidates in canon.
(It didn’t occur to me that I was somehow ruling out Rosier, Wilkes and Avery, and repressing the thought of Snape befriending Lucius Malfoy, whom I happen to find one of JKR’s least interesting characters on account of his high cardboard rate. I find it very convenient to make the difference in their ages account for their lack of camaraderie in my version of events :-D.)
Why the name of Bromelia? The name is much in the line of Petunia – a flower-name that is absolutely no gift to a young girl. (Honestly, what were Mr and Mrs Evans thinking, naming one girl Lily and the other Petunia?! Poor Petunia wasn’t exactly off on a good start. How unfair. No wonder she resents her sister.) In any case, my Bromelia was a nice girl labouring under the weight of a horrid name referring to a horrid plant – I loathe bromelias. Then I looked for a matching, potterversish family name and came up with Bromley, which I later discovered to be a perfectly ordinary English family name. I had no idea at the time; I just liked the sound of it.
I’m not sure how or why I made the transition from the ordinary-looking Ur-Bromelia to the cuter version below. I guess it had something to do with my imagining her all grown-up and once again in the vicinity of Snape.
This Bromelia (described as looking very sweet and having the face of a China doll) had acquired the powers Grainne describes in Uncommon Flower. I have a handwritten fragment of a scenario for a comic that would feature her in her schooldays. The first scene is of Mr and Mrs Bromley complaining to Dumbledore because their daughter hasn’t received a Hogwarts letter. Dumbledore explains that this is because the girl is a Squib and can’t do magic. But she can! She may be rubbish with a wand, but she’s a genius in wandless magic, a natural Legilimens, and she specialises in unspoken Imperius Curses! So Dumbledore allows her in, she’s sorted into Slytherin in Snape’s year, and guess what: Snape thinks she’s a wimp until he finds out about the Imperius thing, and then Bromelia proceeds to teach him Legilimency and Occlumency in return for his friendship.
Yes, you may laugh now. I said she was a Sue. But seriously, at the time I created her I had no idea how clichéd she was, and I had never heard of that Mary Sue person. The result was that I continued merrily in the wrong direction with the adult version of Bromelia – the one in the air hostess suit, you may remember:
The tale attached to her is the following:
This Bromelia rents an apartment in a place called Proserpine Gardens in London. Her rooms are in a beautiful, spacious old house but come remarkably cheap because the landlord is desperate on account of his other tenant – a Mr Snape – a man so unpleasant that nobody manages to share a house with him for longer than a few months. Bromelia, who is very perky, determined and courageous, isn’t daunted. Eventually she and Snape become friends. (Just friends, no shipping. Honest.)
I have no idea, now, why I should have thought that way, but somehow I got it into my head that it would be nice to find Snape a friend who was almost his polar opposite – cheerful, sociable, pretty, sweet, that sort of thing. I made Bromelia an air hostess because that was about the most un-Snapish thing I could think of. I imagined she had been cast out of the Wizarding World (the reason wasn’t quite clear to me) and had embraced a Muggle life. The problem was that I quickly discovered that Snape and my air hostess had precious little to talk about and generated no stories worth speaking of.
I changed Bromelia’s occupation and made her a detective chief inspector. I mean, she was supposed to be a Slytherin, so even cast out of the Wizarding World she would be ambitious, make use of her wandless magic talents and cheat the poor Muggles who worked with her. I have a handwritten prose fragment in which she is described as petite, attractive, with frizzy blond hair and a small pouting mouth, and wearing short skirts and fluffy jumpers. She is not yet forty but already a chief inspector on account of her impressive record – of course she uses Legilimency when interviewing suspects and attains unheard-of results. She has a male sergeant called Humperdinck who is older than she is, and she likes to confuse interviewees as to who is the sergeant and who is the chief inspector. It seemed fun to give the (ex?)criminal Snape a policewoman for a friend.
It was around this time that I chanced upon Rugi & Gwena’s Tough Guide to Harry Potter and read that a typical partner for Snape in fanfic of questionable quality is often a) perky; b) petite; c) a law enforcer. Then I discovered that the worst sin, the greatest monster in fanfic is called Mary Sue, a girl/woman who has talents that surpass the canon character’s that she is paired up with, who is often sweet and lovely-looking, and she’s often a natural Legilimens, Occlumens and wandless magician. Or she’s a Squib or Muggle, and Snape falls for her charm nevertheless. Aww me – Bromelia somehow managed to combine all those. And there I was, thinking I had been original :-)… Embarrassed to the extreme, I abandoned Bromelia Sue and turned resolutely to genfic.
It is very strange. I write a lot of original characters, or pseudo-original ones of which canon offers us the name without the personality, and I created those characters with confidence. Never for a moment have I worried that Stephen Snape might be a Gary Stu, or Septimia DeQuincey a Mary Sue. I never doubted that they were not. But Bromelia – goodness, did I struggle with her; there was no end to my anxiety about her. Simply giving up would have been admitting defeat, so I persisted with her; but it took me a lot of time to fashion her into someone acceptable. I don’t know what caused all those difficulties. Maybe it is Snape who is the problem: it is so difficult to imagine him really getting along with someone and forming a friendly attachment. Creating a believable friend for him proved one hell of a challenge, and in the end it is still up to the reader to see if they buy the attachment.
2. The New Bromelia: Brynhild
It was obvious that in order for my OFC to become acceptable, she needed a complete makeover – and not, for once, one in the badfic way. The first thing I did was to dispense with the prettiness and sweet disposition. I attacked her china doll exterior; as usual, I needed to sort out the visuals before I could think of the rest.
I tried out several looks which had one thing in common: they made the girl sharpish and physically more along the lines of Snape:
You can tell this is an old drawing because she is wearing a Hogwarts uniform based on the films rather than the robes I eventually adopted. Here is a close-up of her first new face:
I kept the frizzy hair but made the face angular and gave it a surly expression worthy of Severus and Eileen. The nose, also, is different.
I don’t remember around what time I changed her name into Brynhild. The main reason was that I really didn’t like the name of Bromelia; but I did want a Br-name to go with Bromley (and with the six brothers she had acquired along the way and whose names all started with Br), and as you can imagine the choice was rather limited. My dictionary of names brought me “Brynhild”, referring to the historical and mythical (yes, she managed both) Germanic warrior queen Brunhilde. To explain the girl’s name I gave her a German mother, Gunhilda. The German connection through Brynhild and Gunhilda led me to fairytale witches as I knew them from the brothers Grimm’s collection. These ‘classical’ witches, ugly old women with warts and beaky noses, who eat children and build gingerbread houses, have been more or less recycled by JKR to become ‘hags’, beings that don’t carry wands, much in the same manner as vampires. I thought I would model Brynhild on one of those, and decided to give her a hag for a grandmother. As such, the name change influenced the development of the character. Here is the next adult version, in which she has been given a beaky nose:
Brynhild keeps popping up on sketch pages where she doesn’t belong, such as the following one from my Tunnel comic, in which she won’t appear at all:
I was toying with looks for her, and she has entered the ‘robed’ stage. At this point I have made her a little eccentric, wearing striped stockings and slippers. Her hair is growing wilder and her face more grotesquely hag-like. I knew where I was going, but I wasn’t quite satisfied with her at this point. Here is another sample, which made me realise that it was rather impossible to draw a child-hag – Brynhild-the-teen always looks older than she is supposed to be.
I still hadn’t done anything with Brynhild. There was no finished drawing, only sketches; and there was no story because I didn’t dare to write one. I really didn’t know how to make her palatable to the fanfic audience, and yet I really wanted to do something with her. She was still a policewoman and a witch stranded in the Muggle world. That is when I had one of my weirder ideas: I would write her into canon. I decided to merge her with someone else, and my eye fell on one of my favourite minor canon characters, to wit, Irma Pince.
The plot bunny (it had rabies, I guess) was the following: Irma Pince, a.k.a. Brynhild Bromley in disguise, is hired the same year in which Harry starts school. The philosopher’s stone gets stolen and everybody suspects Snape. In order to clear his name, Snape sets out to catch the thief, whom he discovers to be Pince or, well, Brynhild. When I told my beta Elfie of this scenario, she told me frankly that I had gone mad, and I guess that it is just as well that I never wrote this thing. I can, however, show you a fragment of the last chapter – the one bit that I *did* write. Here it is, for your interest – or for you to skip :-). Needless to say, neither of my betas ever set eyes on this…
“But why this charade? Why apply for the job? You could just have crept in and out of Hogwarts without anybody noticing, and you would never be found out. Instead you remained here, Stone and all, virtually waiting to be caught. How stupid is that?”
Bromley looked at him with a pained expression. “You don’t understand. I did not steal that stone because I wanted to possess it or even use it once. With the kind of protection Dumbledore put on it, that would not have worked anyway – I would not have been able to take it to begin with, I think. I stole the thing because… because I had to. I took it for the taking, not the having. It’s a… compulsive… kind of…” She looked away and wrung her hands. Snape said nothing.
“Besides – I have nowhere to go. I was forced to resign after the force found out about my… disposition; but even without that… I couldn’t bear it anymore, this banishment from the wizarding community. You don’t know what it is like, living with your powers pent-up, feeling them grow within you and not being allowed to use them. It drove me crazy. And it made me steal those things. I simply had to come back, but it meant I would have to find a way to circumvent the Magical Law Enforcement Squad.”
Snape snorted. “That couldn’t be too difficult.”
“Perhaps not. But I wanted something lasting. That is when I decided to change identities and apply for a safe job. In any case I can’t undo what I did, and the Hit Wizards are out there looking for me. Not to mention those Goblins I stole a bar or two of gold from. Two bars, I ask you! And I was going to return them anyway.”
“Stealing from Goblins?” Snape let out a short, derisive laughter. “I would have thought you were cleverer than that.”
“I am,” Bromley replied indignantly. “But I couldn’t resist. It’s a disorder, you know.” She pursed her lips. “Not that that made any difference to the Goblins.”
“Sorry if I don’t weep. You shouldn’t have let them catch you. You say you’re good, but it rather seems to me you have a peculiar talent for messing things up.”
“Yes, I did notice we have a few things in common,” she purred, smiling sweetly.
The Potions master narrowed his eyes. “That is, at best, a veiled insult.”
“Oh, is it?” Bromley got up, walked over to the fireplace, studied herself in the mirror for a moment and then turned around, a smirk on her face. “Then what are you doing here, Professor Snape? What are you running away from? Something big, I bet, that it should drive you back to a place you loathed so much when you were younger. How desperate you must have been, that you should have decided to become a teacher.”
“The teaching profession is a noble one,” Snape said with dignity.
“My point exactly.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Come on, Severus, don’t pretend to be offended. If anyone had told you ten years ago that you would be teaching Potions to teenagers, you’d have hexed them – am I right or not?”
“Hm.”
“So?”
“It… isn’t the career I dreamed of, but it sort of grew on me,” Snape said slowly. “And for your information, I never loathed Hogwarts. I just couldn’t stand most of its occupants, which is quite a different thing. In summer, with all the students gone, the place is like heaven.”
“I understand,” Bromley said. “Teaching is wonderful, pity about the students.”
Snape raised an eyebrow. “Look who’s talking: the librarian who hates to lend books. I thought that was the whole point of the library system, but I may be mistaken.”
They looked at each other, and then away. For minutes, neither of them spoke a word.
“Severus? You’re not going to squeal on me, are you?” Bromley asked finally.
“I never squeal,” Snape said. “But silence comes with a price.” He eyed her shrewdly, and she frowned.
“What kind of price?” she asked suspiciously.
“Don’t look so alarmed,” he said in a silken voice. “You might even find it pleasant to pay.”
It did nothing to reassure her.
In case you wonder, he was going to ask her to steal a particular Dark Arts book from Lucius Malfoy.
Looking back, I have no idea how all of this was ever supposed to work. I can’t write detective stories for starters, and how was the revelation supposed to be something if no one knew Brynhild? Small wonder I abandoned it – but the piece did help set the tone of Snape’s relationship with Brynhild.
Eventually, Brynhild did acquire a finished, final shape. I can’t help liking her. The idea is for her to be a woman who couldn’t be further removed from the classical standard of beauty but is nevertheless comfortable with her looks, who likes her little luxuries and takes great care of her person – say, a hag from Grimm transplanted to modern-day London and who reads women’s magazines; someone who manages to be both ugly and somehow attractive, if you like her type. She is tall, thin rather than slim, with a large beaky nose, impossible hair and no bosom to speak of. She’s a delight to draw, at least for me :-D.
This entry is already quite long, so the continuation, and Brynhild’s emergence into fiction, will be in the next entry. I’ve probably bored you to death already; I promise the next part will be more concise!
Oh – and here is a Sigune doll to prove that the one thing you can’t accuse me of is that I made either Bromelia or Brynhild a kind of improved likeness of myself. Not that this is an accurate portrait, but you get the idea ;-)…
Still, nobody said it was easy, and I for one couldn’t pull it off.
_grainne_ and lunafish were foolish enough to express interest in my OFC Brynhild and how she evolved from her forebear Bromelia “Sue” Bromley, whose acquaintance you could make in Uncommon Flower, the delicious tale Grainne span for me on the occasion of the S.N.A.P.E. contest. (If you missed it, you can find it here.) Because I somehow like all my creations – even Bromelia – for no better reason than that they are the fruits of my imagination, I wasted no time and delved into my vast archives (*ahem*) to retrieve old Bromley material. I display it here for your pleasure and delectation – I hope :-). You are kindly invited to have a good laugh at my Sue antics…Contains many sketches, demented plot bunnies and a fragment of a story…
(It didn’t occur to me that I was somehow ruling out Rosier, Wilkes and Avery, and repressing the thought of Snape befriending Lucius Malfoy, whom I happen to find one of JKR’s least interesting characters on account of his high cardboard rate. I find it very convenient to make the difference in their ages account for their lack of camaraderie in my version of events :-D.)
Why the name of Bromelia? The name is much in the line of Petunia – a flower-name that is absolutely no gift to a young girl. (Honestly, what were Mr and Mrs Evans thinking, naming one girl Lily and the other Petunia?! Poor Petunia wasn’t exactly off on a good start. How unfair. No wonder she resents her sister.) In any case, my Bromelia was a nice girl labouring under the weight of a horrid name referring to a horrid plant – I loathe bromelias. Then I looked for a matching, potterversish family name and came up with Bromley, which I later discovered to be a perfectly ordinary English family name. I had no idea at the time; I just liked the sound of it.
I’m not sure how or why I made the transition from the ordinary-looking Ur-Bromelia to the cuter version below. I guess it had something to do with my imagining her all grown-up and once again in the vicinity of Snape.
This Bromelia (described as looking very sweet and having the face of a China doll) had acquired the powers Grainne describes in Uncommon Flower. I have a handwritten fragment of a scenario for a comic that would feature her in her schooldays. The first scene is of Mr and Mrs Bromley complaining to Dumbledore because their daughter hasn’t received a Hogwarts letter. Dumbledore explains that this is because the girl is a Squib and can’t do magic. But she can! She may be rubbish with a wand, but she’s a genius in wandless magic, a natural Legilimens, and she specialises in unspoken Imperius Curses! So Dumbledore allows her in, she’s sorted into Slytherin in Snape’s year, and guess what: Snape thinks she’s a wimp until he finds out about the Imperius thing, and then Bromelia proceeds to teach him Legilimency and Occlumency in return for his friendship.
Yes, you may laugh now. I said she was a Sue. But seriously, at the time I created her I had no idea how clichéd she was, and I had never heard of that Mary Sue person. The result was that I continued merrily in the wrong direction with the adult version of Bromelia – the one in the air hostess suit, you may remember:
The tale attached to her is the following:
This Bromelia rents an apartment in a place called Proserpine Gardens in London. Her rooms are in a beautiful, spacious old house but come remarkably cheap because the landlord is desperate on account of his other tenant – a Mr Snape – a man so unpleasant that nobody manages to share a house with him for longer than a few months. Bromelia, who is very perky, determined and courageous, isn’t daunted. Eventually she and Snape become friends. (Just friends, no shipping. Honest.)
I have no idea, now, why I should have thought that way, but somehow I got it into my head that it would be nice to find Snape a friend who was almost his polar opposite – cheerful, sociable, pretty, sweet, that sort of thing. I made Bromelia an air hostess because that was about the most un-Snapish thing I could think of. I imagined she had been cast out of the Wizarding World (the reason wasn’t quite clear to me) and had embraced a Muggle life. The problem was that I quickly discovered that Snape and my air hostess had precious little to talk about and generated no stories worth speaking of.
I changed Bromelia’s occupation and made her a detective chief inspector. I mean, she was supposed to be a Slytherin, so even cast out of the Wizarding World she would be ambitious, make use of her wandless magic talents and cheat the poor Muggles who worked with her. I have a handwritten prose fragment in which she is described as petite, attractive, with frizzy blond hair and a small pouting mouth, and wearing short skirts and fluffy jumpers. She is not yet forty but already a chief inspector on account of her impressive record – of course she uses Legilimency when interviewing suspects and attains unheard-of results. She has a male sergeant called Humperdinck who is older than she is, and she likes to confuse interviewees as to who is the sergeant and who is the chief inspector. It seemed fun to give the (ex?)criminal Snape a policewoman for a friend.
It was around this time that I chanced upon Rugi & Gwena’s Tough Guide to Harry Potter and read that a typical partner for Snape in fanfic of questionable quality is often a) perky; b) petite; c) a law enforcer. Then I discovered that the worst sin, the greatest monster in fanfic is called Mary Sue, a girl/woman who has talents that surpass the canon character’s that she is paired up with, who is often sweet and lovely-looking, and she’s often a natural Legilimens, Occlumens and wandless magician. Or she’s a Squib or Muggle, and Snape falls for her charm nevertheless. Aww me – Bromelia somehow managed to combine all those. And there I was, thinking I had been original :-)… Embarrassed to the extreme, I abandoned Bromelia Sue and turned resolutely to genfic.
It is very strange. I write a lot of original characters, or pseudo-original ones of which canon offers us the name without the personality, and I created those characters with confidence. Never for a moment have I worried that Stephen Snape might be a Gary Stu, or Septimia DeQuincey a Mary Sue. I never doubted that they were not. But Bromelia – goodness, did I struggle with her; there was no end to my anxiety about her. Simply giving up would have been admitting defeat, so I persisted with her; but it took me a lot of time to fashion her into someone acceptable. I don’t know what caused all those difficulties. Maybe it is Snape who is the problem: it is so difficult to imagine him really getting along with someone and forming a friendly attachment. Creating a believable friend for him proved one hell of a challenge, and in the end it is still up to the reader to see if they buy the attachment.
It was obvious that in order for my OFC to become acceptable, she needed a complete makeover – and not, for once, one in the badfic way. The first thing I did was to dispense with the prettiness and sweet disposition. I attacked her china doll exterior; as usual, I needed to sort out the visuals before I could think of the rest.
I tried out several looks which had one thing in common: they made the girl sharpish and physically more along the lines of Snape:
You can tell this is an old drawing because she is wearing a Hogwarts uniform based on the films rather than the robes I eventually adopted. Here is a close-up of her first new face:
I kept the frizzy hair but made the face angular and gave it a surly expression worthy of Severus and Eileen. The nose, also, is different.
I don’t remember around what time I changed her name into Brynhild. The main reason was that I really didn’t like the name of Bromelia; but I did want a Br-name to go with Bromley (and with the six brothers she had acquired along the way and whose names all started with Br), and as you can imagine the choice was rather limited. My dictionary of names brought me “Brynhild”, referring to the historical and mythical (yes, she managed both) Germanic warrior queen Brunhilde. To explain the girl’s name I gave her a German mother, Gunhilda. The German connection through Brynhild and Gunhilda led me to fairytale witches as I knew them from the brothers Grimm’s collection. These ‘classical’ witches, ugly old women with warts and beaky noses, who eat children and build gingerbread houses, have been more or less recycled by JKR to become ‘hags’, beings that don’t carry wands, much in the same manner as vampires. I thought I would model Brynhild on one of those, and decided to give her a hag for a grandmother. As such, the name change influenced the development of the character. Here is the next adult version, in which she has been given a beaky nose:
Brynhild keeps popping up on sketch pages where she doesn’t belong, such as the following one from my Tunnel comic, in which she won’t appear at all:
I was toying with looks for her, and she has entered the ‘robed’ stage. At this point I have made her a little eccentric, wearing striped stockings and slippers. Her hair is growing wilder and her face more grotesquely hag-like. I knew where I was going, but I wasn’t quite satisfied with her at this point. Here is another sample, which made me realise that it was rather impossible to draw a child-hag – Brynhild-the-teen always looks older than she is supposed to be.
I still hadn’t done anything with Brynhild. There was no finished drawing, only sketches; and there was no story because I didn’t dare to write one. I really didn’t know how to make her palatable to the fanfic audience, and yet I really wanted to do something with her. She was still a policewoman and a witch stranded in the Muggle world. That is when I had one of my weirder ideas: I would write her into canon. I decided to merge her with someone else, and my eye fell on one of my favourite minor canon characters, to wit, Irma Pince.
The plot bunny (it had rabies, I guess) was the following: Irma Pince, a.k.a. Brynhild Bromley in disguise, is hired the same year in which Harry starts school. The philosopher’s stone gets stolen and everybody suspects Snape. In order to clear his name, Snape sets out to catch the thief, whom he discovers to be Pince or, well, Brynhild. When I told my beta Elfie of this scenario, she told me frankly that I had gone mad, and I guess that it is just as well that I never wrote this thing. I can, however, show you a fragment of the last chapter – the one bit that I *did* write. Here it is, for your interest – or for you to skip :-). Needless to say, neither of my betas ever set eyes on this…
“But why this charade? Why apply for the job? You could just have crept in and out of Hogwarts without anybody noticing, and you would never be found out. Instead you remained here, Stone and all, virtually waiting to be caught. How stupid is that?”
Bromley looked at him with a pained expression. “You don’t understand. I did not steal that stone because I wanted to possess it or even use it once. With the kind of protection Dumbledore put on it, that would not have worked anyway – I would not have been able to take it to begin with, I think. I stole the thing because… because I had to. I took it for the taking, not the having. It’s a… compulsive… kind of…” She looked away and wrung her hands. Snape said nothing.
“Besides – I have nowhere to go. I was forced to resign after the force found out about my… disposition; but even without that… I couldn’t bear it anymore, this banishment from the wizarding community. You don’t know what it is like, living with your powers pent-up, feeling them grow within you and not being allowed to use them. It drove me crazy. And it made me steal those things. I simply had to come back, but it meant I would have to find a way to circumvent the Magical Law Enforcement Squad.”
Snape snorted. “That couldn’t be too difficult.”
“Perhaps not. But I wanted something lasting. That is when I decided to change identities and apply for a safe job. In any case I can’t undo what I did, and the Hit Wizards are out there looking for me. Not to mention those Goblins I stole a bar or two of gold from. Two bars, I ask you! And I was going to return them anyway.”
“Stealing from Goblins?” Snape let out a short, derisive laughter. “I would have thought you were cleverer than that.”
“I am,” Bromley replied indignantly. “But I couldn’t resist. It’s a disorder, you know.” She pursed her lips. “Not that that made any difference to the Goblins.”
“Sorry if I don’t weep. You shouldn’t have let them catch you. You say you’re good, but it rather seems to me you have a peculiar talent for messing things up.”
“Yes, I did notice we have a few things in common,” she purred, smiling sweetly.
The Potions master narrowed his eyes. “That is, at best, a veiled insult.”
“Oh, is it?” Bromley got up, walked over to the fireplace, studied herself in the mirror for a moment and then turned around, a smirk on her face. “Then what are you doing here, Professor Snape? What are you running away from? Something big, I bet, that it should drive you back to a place you loathed so much when you were younger. How desperate you must have been, that you should have decided to become a teacher.”
“The teaching profession is a noble one,” Snape said with dignity.
“My point exactly.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Come on, Severus, don’t pretend to be offended. If anyone had told you ten years ago that you would be teaching Potions to teenagers, you’d have hexed them – am I right or not?”
“Hm.”
“So?”
“It… isn’t the career I dreamed of, but it sort of grew on me,” Snape said slowly. “And for your information, I never loathed Hogwarts. I just couldn’t stand most of its occupants, which is quite a different thing. In summer, with all the students gone, the place is like heaven.”
“I understand,” Bromley said. “Teaching is wonderful, pity about the students.”
Snape raised an eyebrow. “Look who’s talking: the librarian who hates to lend books. I thought that was the whole point of the library system, but I may be mistaken.”
They looked at each other, and then away. For minutes, neither of them spoke a word.
“Severus? You’re not going to squeal on me, are you?” Bromley asked finally.
“I never squeal,” Snape said. “But silence comes with a price.” He eyed her shrewdly, and she frowned.
“What kind of price?” she asked suspiciously.
“Don’t look so alarmed,” he said in a silken voice. “You might even find it pleasant to pay.”
It did nothing to reassure her.
In case you wonder, he was going to ask her to steal a particular Dark Arts book from Lucius Malfoy.
Looking back, I have no idea how all of this was ever supposed to work. I can’t write detective stories for starters, and how was the revelation supposed to be something if no one knew Brynhild? Small wonder I abandoned it – but the piece did help set the tone of Snape’s relationship with Brynhild.
Eventually, Brynhild did acquire a finished, final shape. I can’t help liking her. The idea is for her to be a woman who couldn’t be further removed from the classical standard of beauty but is nevertheless comfortable with her looks, who likes her little luxuries and takes great care of her person – say, a hag from Grimm transplanted to modern-day London and who reads women’s magazines; someone who manages to be both ugly and somehow attractive, if you like her type. She is tall, thin rather than slim, with a large beaky nose, impossible hair and no bosom to speak of. She’s a delight to draw, at least for me :-D.
This entry is already quite long, so the continuation, and Brynhild’s emergence into fiction, will be in the next entry. I’ve probably bored you to death already; I promise the next part will be more concise!
Oh – and here is a Sigune doll to prove that the one thing you can’t accuse me of is that I made either Bromelia or Brynhild a kind of improved likeness of myself. Not that this is an accurate portrait, but you get the idea ;-)…
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Date: Tuesday, 11 October 2005 03:40 pm (UTC)Brynhild sounds like a fascinating character indeed. :D
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Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 09:35 am (UTC)Usually I have my OCs ready in my mind and let them pop into my Snape-centered stories when necessary. That way they mature, and eventually they may get a story of their own, like (the late) Stephen Snape in Mirror Mirror. He had been referred to in Prodigal Son and Darkness and Light, and these tiny tidbits of characterisation through the eyes of others (Severus and Septimia respectively) helped determine his personality.
OCs are such fun, aren't they? :-) I think they are rewarding to write.
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Date: Tuesday, 11 October 2005 04:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 09:57 am (UTC)The trouble with Bromelia is that she didn't generate any stories that legitimised her existence. She was just there, for no obvious reason. I think I would have written her somehow if there had been a neat, finished story in my head, but she never went anywhere definite. The Sue-isms that made sense in connection to Snape are all still there in Brynhild, and I can fit them into my plots. When that is the case, I see no reason to change them.
The trouble with Bromelia the perky, sweet, petite Sue is that, in order to make an acceptable story, she needs an author who perceives the ironies and ridiculous bits about the character. Grainne saw them and exploited them - she did what I couldn't do because I was just too close to Bromelia and took her too seriously. I would never have had her defeat Voldemort or rescue Snape or something; but I wasn't going to poke quite enough fun at her either, and say what you will, she was just not cut out to be Snape's friend :-). (I know, I know, maybe I should just stop focussing on Snape, but I can't help it: *he* suggests the stories.)
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Date: Tuesday, 11 October 2005 04:44 pm (UTC)And your "Sigune doll" looks almost exactly as my best friend's would, except her hair would be blonde. I was like, "Woah -- that's Kerri! If she dyed her hair!"
It is also quite possible that I have had too much cold medicine.
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Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 09:59 am (UTC)Heh. But what, eh?
;-)
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Date: Tuesday, 11 October 2005 06:56 pm (UTC)Your art is fantastic! Brynhild has an interesting aura to her.
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Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 10:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, 11 October 2005 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 10:05 am (UTC)I keep *all* my sketches, even those I made on Florentine paper bags, scraps and what have you. I can't part with even the ugliest specimens. It's a disorder, I think...
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Date: Tuesday, 11 October 2005 08:03 pm (UTC)But she's beautiful in all her incarnations; I love your drawings! You capture emotion and personality so well.
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Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 10:53 am (UTC)Thanks!
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Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 05:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 11:01 am (UTC)Nowadays I tend to see Brynhild as Bromelia come of age; they still share a lot.
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Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 05:35 pm (UTC)So are we actually going to read this detective story? ;-)
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Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 05:54 pm (UTC)So you like my huge posts? Good! I don't post often, but when I do, I know no bounds :-D. I'm quite hopeless. I'm the kind of person they tell, "Yes, we like your article, but could you please cut it to half its present size?"
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Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 12 October 2005 11:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Friday, 14 October 2005 02:14 pm (UTC)You make me curious about how the story would have turned out if I'd told you all :-). If I didn't, it was because I was afraid of constricting your imagination too much - that would have been boring for you, I think.