Gah, sorry it was confusing.  I've written and posted a prequel, "Spectacles", and I'm writing sequels that'll hopefully make some aspects of the world a little clearer.  The challenge I was given specified that James was Harry's dad, it was my own crazy idea to have Voldemort win.  I'm glad you liked my strange ideas.

Thank you!  This story was one of those stories that just demanded to be written right now damnit, and that worries me, because sometimes those stories work, and sometimes they’re absolute crap.  I did my best actually to keep everybody really in character, though I did give James the chance to grow up, and even as this takes place in a demented frightening dystopia, I wanted it to be centered really strongly on the relationships of the people in that house.

I’d actually been waiting to use that particular line about Snape since before DH came out (so before I started writing fanfic, even), and I hadn’t written the right story for it until now.  Of course his unrequited love for Lily screwed it all up for me in canon, but in this story, I can have my cake and eat it too.

Poor Lily, she feels like such a rat.

As for the Cruciatus, I wrote myself into a corner with that (because I wasn’t planning the sequel yet) and only last week figured out how to write myself out of it (and dump more angst on these poor tortured souls).  I have to pity the poor optometrist, because he’s so frightened, and in the middle of all this nastiness that he has no clue about, and then, snap, Snape obliviates him.  Forget me using him as an object, the other characters are!

The thing is, as a writer, I know as soon as Snape gets out that pensieve, he feels like a fool, which of course is buried under all his other messy emotions.  It was fun to play with it in my head before I wrote it down, just seeing which ways I could go with it.

It’s supposed to be a scary world ;)  I was going to write a perfectly normal answer to the challenge, with everything set in a world with only a minor change, and then it hit me in the grocery store, surrounded by people who did not appreciate the staring into space thing, that if Harry weren’t the child of both James and Lily, Voldemort would have no reason to go after him, and would go after Neville instead.  Furthermore, Neville’s mom wasn’t the object of affection for any of the Death Eaters, so he had no reason to offer her life the way he did Lily (“Stand aside you silly girl” and all that) so there would have been no mother’s sacrifice, and no early fall of Voldemort.  Then this wrote itself in three days, and I was weirded out as much as anyone else.

It's easy to paint James as either hateful or as a stick figure because we don't see him much in canon, and most of what we see shows him in a very bad light, but, well, I like to play with the characters that weren't used much in canon.  And i likewriting people who really really don't get along.

hehe!  Those two can't help but be bastards to each other, though I think James knows  better than to make anything but the most oblique reference to that.  It's a sad sad scene that.  I even feel aweful for Lily, put as she was, in a terrible position.