Cover Letter: Meta Archive
Jun. 28th, 2021 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoFor Cover Letter (Tom & Andromeda)
Originally posted chapter-by-chapter on tumblr.
When I set out to write Tom Riddle as a professor, I made a number of distinct choices for myself. For one, it was important to me that he had never been Lord Voldemort, so I used the occasion of his late-1960s job interview to create the opportunity. This is an exciting choice because it provides him the chance to interact with many of the important figures from the first war… when they are children, instead of as his followers or enemies. And that is the ultimate goal of this series, to throw Tom together with young Severus and Lily and Evan Rosier, but before I get there, I realized that I wanted Professor Riddle to have some experience with teaching. A novice instructor is going to be woefully unprepared for a student like Severus.
And who should be hanging around Hogwarts in the late 1960s but the Black sisters? I considered and discarded Bellatrix; her common romantic association with Voldemort was too much baggage for the role. Narcissa is simply too untroubled during her school years to be an interesting student for Tom’s mentorship. Andromeda, though…
Andromeda met and married Ted Tonks when she was very young, in what is most often assumed to be a secretive schoolyard romance. Of course, if that had been discovered by the wrong person, it would have been devastating. So poor Tom discovers it instead, immediately recognizes the complex prejudices and politics at play, and makes one decision—the choice to keep their secret—that will tie him to Andromeda for the rest of her time as a student.
I wanted Andromeda to be a nasty piece of work. For all of her willingness to marry a Muggleborn, she is a Black, and her sisters are both examples of fierce women. This relationship is unwanted on both sides; Tom is a vulnerable first-year instructor and has no interest in being an emotional support for students, and Andromeda is resentful that she might have to trust anyone with sensitive information. They do not mix well, and her entitlement, her Black superiority, demands that she remind this professor of a pointless elective who has a muggle surname of her discontent at regular intervals.
But this is still the early stages, of course. Mixed-status romances are fun when it’s illicit snogs in broom cupboards, and significantly less fun when one transitions them to the outside world.
I can’t get through anything without bringing the focus back to blood and culture, can I?
Now that the companion piece in this universe featuring Tom’s relationship with his husband has been published, I can talk briefly about the parallels between Andromeda/Ted and Thoros/Tom, even if Tom would prefer not to have that conversation.
Both are mixed blood-status marriages. Both face familial difficulties for choosing that path. Is Tom‘s worry partially rooted in the experiences he faced in his personal life? Yes, most definitely. But the differences: gender, age, external factors, are all firmly against Andromeda and Ted. And poor Tom would just rather not know, rather not have to think about a student’s personal life at all.
It’s one of the most difficult parts of teaching! Students are whole-ass people, and an instructor has only limited qualifications to help address the parts of their personhood not related to their academics. Tom’s not even Andromeda’s instructor! She’s come to him because she connected with him. These are some of the most heartbreaking students to handle. They feel safe with you, and that safety is precious, but you might not have much power to do anything for them. Sometimes the best you can do is listen, be sympathetic, and direct them to an appropriate external resource on occasion. And none of that is, exactly, the job! It is and it isn’t, and in his first year, given everything that he is, Tom is absolutely going to be feeling overwhelmed by what Andromeda is (unconsciously) asking of him. No wonder he reaches out to a colleague for a sanity check and a sympathetic ear.
Next up: Andromeda is a seventh year, and Ted’s out of Hogwarts. It’s just her and Tom left.
Without Ted around to distract Andromeda and keep her in the happy haze of young love, she needs to find some other way to fill her time.
The fall semester of senior year is always a time of thinking about what comes next. In high school it’s likely college applications; in college, it’s applying to jobs or grad school. Andromeda shouldn’t need that, given her station and probable destiny in life to be married off to a rich pureblood man and be his socialite wife. She’s not preparing for a career after school, but that doesn’t mean she’s not considering her options. She’s separated from Ted—perhaps they’re able to write to each other occasionally, but they’re not escaping to broom cupboards anymore. Do they still love each other? Do they still want to be together? She has to decide what this relationship is worth, to her.
In his heart, I can’t make Tom hope that their love will win out. We’ve seen the origins of his own marriage. We know that his husband gave up the comfort and status of pureblood society for it. Thoros might have made that choice to protect Tom, he might do it over again, but they were 30 at the time. It’s much easier to sign away your wealth, give up your family, after a decade spent establishing yourself as an adult. They had support networks of their own; they had independent incomes and qualifications. (Thoros is forever and always a master of runes. I will sneak a phd-equivalent into every Tom pairing.) Andromeda is a teenager and not yet out of school. So, although it’s terrible for Tom to secretly hope for his student’s heartbreak—he knows what she would be losing, and he worries about that.
By the by, I collected only a subset of the named items from my campus’s own storeroom of abandoned furniture, but I did end up with a lovely hat rack.
And a shoutout to the quidditch game, my favorite scene in the chapter for how Thoros, Carol, and Andromeda all manage to make fun of Tom.
If Tom’s a professor, he’s going to have two types of professional relationships: those with his colleagues, which last until one of you dies or escapes and cannot rightly be called wholly ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and those with his students, which end definitively on a cyclical period. Andromeda is a student, and so from the beginning of their acquaintance, the end was coming.
Students say they’ll write to you, and you say you’ll keep in touch, and it... largely doesn’t happen. Maybe for the first couple of years after they graduate, if they stay local. Maybe they’ll reach out again some time later when they’re going through a career change and think of you. (I did! Shoutout to my rabbi, my undergraduate advisor, who counseled me as I cried through the academic job search.) But most students simply graduate and you become their past tense. They could think of you fondly, but their years in your care are over.
Andromeda is serving the role of “the first student who makes Tom care.” As spring term ticks on, he realizes that their time together is ending, and he scrambles to do everything he can for her before she leaves the safety of Hogwarts. He is forced to acknowledge that she’s her own person, and she will make her own choices, and he just wants to give her a softer landing. I think this terrifies him. It should! Because it was never going to just be Andromeda. He’s here for the long haul, and there will be more Andromedas, and students so unlike her that a comparison is fruitless but who seek him out all the same, and he’s going to have to watch all of them make mistakes and he can only hope that he can help them the tiniest bit while they are his students.
Beyond Tom’s existential grief, I hope I conveyed some of Andromeda’s excitement at her current life stage! Being so close to graduation, and a whole new phase of life, is incredible. You only get that feeling so many times! She has anxieties, of course, but she really is living the high of being the second-semester senior. I wanted her to get to be a little romantic, a little cocky, a little silly, because she is young.
Of course, Tom thinks he’ll never see her again, but we have one chapter left in this story. Their world is too small for it not to happen.
I’ve said previously that Andromeda appealed to me for this story because her time at Hogwarts must have been so complicated in light of what her young adult life looked like. That remains true, but it also meant that this story would be incomplete without giving Tom a chance to interact with that young adult Andromeda who had experienced those difficulties, though they came after her time as a student. A chance meeting provided my opportunity to bring them back together.
In the interest of providing familiar landmarks, I’ve preserved Andromeda’s canon. She marries Ted young, has Dora young, and is cast out of her family. Fandom, when it interacts with Andromeda, tends to do so through her relationships to her sisters, husband, daughter, or grandson—that makes sense, they are the relationships that define her—but in changing the timeframe of focus to one in which Andromeda is largely isolated from those parties, and in investigating a relationship with a person (Tom) who is not connected to those parties, I had an opportunity to cast a different light on her life.
Andromeda as Ted’s wife, Dora’s mother, and Teddy’s grandmother is a maternal figure, a romantic who recognized true right and wrong despite her birth family’s evils and forged a better path.
Andromeda as the sister of Bellatrix and Narcissa is a tragic figure, the woman who split the family and whose ideology ultimately outweighed her love for her sisters.
I wanted neither of these. I wanted a sympathetic but fully external perspective on Andromeda that would not be interested in revisionist romanticism or casting the whole business in the light of a Shakespearean tragedy, a moral lesson wherein we might admire the tragic hero. Tom sees Andromeda as a woman presently and actively making choices, and he despairs for her because he cares for her. It is not a charitable read of her relationship. Even with his own life choices, his pureblood husband, he is not going to be moved to excuse her hardship through true love and romance. She made a difficult choice that prioritized a man over her own well-being, in many ways, and so he balances his feelings of wanting her to know she has his support and respect while also being shaken that she would take on these burdens so young. Thoros was thirty when he said he would become “weepy” about being disowned by his family. Andromeda took that on at eighteen.
And I don’t think—absent the ‘90s wizarding war—that the Tonks’ story is ultimately a tragedy. I think that in time, the family finds their footing, Andromeda recovers some measure of the standing and security she had envisioned for her life, and Dora has a happy and healthy Hogwarts career that leads her into a respectable job. Ted is a loving husband, and Andromeda was not a fool for choosing that. But there are hard years for her along this path, and given what Tom is to her—an instructor, perhaps a mentor, for a brief period of time—he sees mostly the difficult parts. Perhaps they will laugh about it when Dora starts at Hogwarts and Andromeda approaches him as a parent. That isn’t within scope for this story, and I don’t want it to be the lesson taken from Cover Letter. No, I’ve chosen the less pleasant option: sometimes an instructor cares deeply about a student and does what they can to support that student through challenging circumstances, but the challenges are too great to be fixed through the intervention of one person and the student goes through the dreaded hardship that you both saw coming.
(For additional thoughts on Andromeda, read Flying Lessons.)
(I recognize that Nymphadora Tonks’ preferred name was Tonks, but from the perspective of her mother, she will always be Nymphadora or Dora. Forgive me for this license.)
Originally posted chapter-by-chapter on tumblr.
Chapter 1
When I set out to write Tom Riddle as a professor, I made a number of distinct choices for myself. For one, it was important to me that he had never been Lord Voldemort, so I used the occasion of his late-1960s job interview to create the opportunity. This is an exciting choice because it provides him the chance to interact with many of the important figures from the first war… when they are children, instead of as his followers or enemies. And that is the ultimate goal of this series, to throw Tom together with young Severus and Lily and Evan Rosier, but before I get there, I realized that I wanted Professor Riddle to have some experience with teaching. A novice instructor is going to be woefully unprepared for a student like Severus.
And who should be hanging around Hogwarts in the late 1960s but the Black sisters? I considered and discarded Bellatrix; her common romantic association with Voldemort was too much baggage for the role. Narcissa is simply too untroubled during her school years to be an interesting student for Tom’s mentorship. Andromeda, though…
Andromeda met and married Ted Tonks when she was very young, in what is most often assumed to be a secretive schoolyard romance. Of course, if that had been discovered by the wrong person, it would have been devastating. So poor Tom discovers it instead, immediately recognizes the complex prejudices and politics at play, and makes one decision—the choice to keep their secret—that will tie him to Andromeda for the rest of her time as a student.
I wanted Andromeda to be a nasty piece of work. For all of her willingness to marry a Muggleborn, she is a Black, and her sisters are both examples of fierce women. This relationship is unwanted on both sides; Tom is a vulnerable first-year instructor and has no interest in being an emotional support for students, and Andromeda is resentful that she might have to trust anyone with sensitive information. They do not mix well, and her entitlement, her Black superiority, demands that she remind this professor of a pointless elective who has a muggle surname of her discontent at regular intervals.
But this is still the early stages, of course. Mixed-status romances are fun when it’s illicit snogs in broom cupboards, and significantly less fun when one transitions them to the outside world.
Chapter 2
I can’t get through anything without bringing the focus back to blood and culture, can I?
Now that the companion piece in this universe featuring Tom’s relationship with his husband has been published, I can talk briefly about the parallels between Andromeda/Ted and Thoros/Tom, even if Tom would prefer not to have that conversation.
Both are mixed blood-status marriages. Both face familial difficulties for choosing that path. Is Tom‘s worry partially rooted in the experiences he faced in his personal life? Yes, most definitely. But the differences: gender, age, external factors, are all firmly against Andromeda and Ted. And poor Tom would just rather not know, rather not have to think about a student’s personal life at all.
It’s one of the most difficult parts of teaching! Students are whole-ass people, and an instructor has only limited qualifications to help address the parts of their personhood not related to their academics. Tom’s not even Andromeda’s instructor! She’s come to him because she connected with him. These are some of the most heartbreaking students to handle. They feel safe with you, and that safety is precious, but you might not have much power to do anything for them. Sometimes the best you can do is listen, be sympathetic, and direct them to an appropriate external resource on occasion. And none of that is, exactly, the job! It is and it isn’t, and in his first year, given everything that he is, Tom is absolutely going to be feeling overwhelmed by what Andromeda is (unconsciously) asking of him. No wonder he reaches out to a colleague for a sanity check and a sympathetic ear.
Next up: Andromeda is a seventh year, and Ted’s out of Hogwarts. It’s just her and Tom left.
Chapter 3
Without Ted around to distract Andromeda and keep her in the happy haze of young love, she needs to find some other way to fill her time.
The fall semester of senior year is always a time of thinking about what comes next. In high school it’s likely college applications; in college, it’s applying to jobs or grad school. Andromeda shouldn’t need that, given her station and probable destiny in life to be married off to a rich pureblood man and be his socialite wife. She’s not preparing for a career after school, but that doesn’t mean she’s not considering her options. She’s separated from Ted—perhaps they’re able to write to each other occasionally, but they’re not escaping to broom cupboards anymore. Do they still love each other? Do they still want to be together? She has to decide what this relationship is worth, to her.
In his heart, I can’t make Tom hope that their love will win out. We’ve seen the origins of his own marriage. We know that his husband gave up the comfort and status of pureblood society for it. Thoros might have made that choice to protect Tom, he might do it over again, but they were 30 at the time. It’s much easier to sign away your wealth, give up your family, after a decade spent establishing yourself as an adult. They had support networks of their own; they had independent incomes and qualifications. (Thoros is forever and always a master of runes. I will sneak a phd-equivalent into every Tom pairing.) Andromeda is a teenager and not yet out of school. So, although it’s terrible for Tom to secretly hope for his student’s heartbreak—he knows what she would be losing, and he worries about that.
By the by, I collected only a subset of the named items from my campus’s own storeroom of abandoned furniture, but I did end up with a lovely hat rack.
And a shoutout to the quidditch game, my favorite scene in the chapter for how Thoros, Carol, and Andromeda all manage to make fun of Tom.
Chapter 4
If Tom’s a professor, he’s going to have two types of professional relationships: those with his colleagues, which last until one of you dies or escapes and cannot rightly be called wholly ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and those with his students, which end definitively on a cyclical period. Andromeda is a student, and so from the beginning of their acquaintance, the end was coming.
Students say they’ll write to you, and you say you’ll keep in touch, and it... largely doesn’t happen. Maybe for the first couple of years after they graduate, if they stay local. Maybe they’ll reach out again some time later when they’re going through a career change and think of you. (I did! Shoutout to my rabbi, my undergraduate advisor, who counseled me as I cried through the academic job search.) But most students simply graduate and you become their past tense. They could think of you fondly, but their years in your care are over.
Andromeda is serving the role of “the first student who makes Tom care.” As spring term ticks on, he realizes that their time together is ending, and he scrambles to do everything he can for her before she leaves the safety of Hogwarts. He is forced to acknowledge that she’s her own person, and she will make her own choices, and he just wants to give her a softer landing. I think this terrifies him. It should! Because it was never going to just be Andromeda. He’s here for the long haul, and there will be more Andromedas, and students so unlike her that a comparison is fruitless but who seek him out all the same, and he’s going to have to watch all of them make mistakes and he can only hope that he can help them the tiniest bit while they are his students.
Beyond Tom’s existential grief, I hope I conveyed some of Andromeda’s excitement at her current life stage! Being so close to graduation, and a whole new phase of life, is incredible. You only get that feeling so many times! She has anxieties, of course, but she really is living the high of being the second-semester senior. I wanted her to get to be a little romantic, a little cocky, a little silly, because she is young.
Of course, Tom thinks he’ll never see her again, but we have one chapter left in this story. Their world is too small for it not to happen.
Chapter 5
I’ve said previously that Andromeda appealed to me for this story because her time at Hogwarts must have been so complicated in light of what her young adult life looked like. That remains true, but it also meant that this story would be incomplete without giving Tom a chance to interact with that young adult Andromeda who had experienced those difficulties, though they came after her time as a student. A chance meeting provided my opportunity to bring them back together.
In the interest of providing familiar landmarks, I’ve preserved Andromeda’s canon. She marries Ted young, has Dora young, and is cast out of her family. Fandom, when it interacts with Andromeda, tends to do so through her relationships to her sisters, husband, daughter, or grandson—that makes sense, they are the relationships that define her—but in changing the timeframe of focus to one in which Andromeda is largely isolated from those parties, and in investigating a relationship with a person (Tom) who is not connected to those parties, I had an opportunity to cast a different light on her life.
Andromeda as Ted’s wife, Dora’s mother, and Teddy’s grandmother is a maternal figure, a romantic who recognized true right and wrong despite her birth family’s evils and forged a better path.
Andromeda as the sister of Bellatrix and Narcissa is a tragic figure, the woman who split the family and whose ideology ultimately outweighed her love for her sisters.
I wanted neither of these. I wanted a sympathetic but fully external perspective on Andromeda that would not be interested in revisionist romanticism or casting the whole business in the light of a Shakespearean tragedy, a moral lesson wherein we might admire the tragic hero. Tom sees Andromeda as a woman presently and actively making choices, and he despairs for her because he cares for her. It is not a charitable read of her relationship. Even with his own life choices, his pureblood husband, he is not going to be moved to excuse her hardship through true love and romance. She made a difficult choice that prioritized a man over her own well-being, in many ways, and so he balances his feelings of wanting her to know she has his support and respect while also being shaken that she would take on these burdens so young. Thoros was thirty when he said he would become “weepy” about being disowned by his family. Andromeda took that on at eighteen.
And I don’t think—absent the ‘90s wizarding war—that the Tonks’ story is ultimately a tragedy. I think that in time, the family finds their footing, Andromeda recovers some measure of the standing and security she had envisioned for her life, and Dora has a happy and healthy Hogwarts career that leads her into a respectable job. Ted is a loving husband, and Andromeda was not a fool for choosing that. But there are hard years for her along this path, and given what Tom is to her—an instructor, perhaps a mentor, for a brief period of time—he sees mostly the difficult parts. Perhaps they will laugh about it when Dora starts at Hogwarts and Andromeda approaches him as a parent. That isn’t within scope for this story, and I don’t want it to be the lesson taken from Cover Letter. No, I’ve chosen the less pleasant option: sometimes an instructor cares deeply about a student and does what they can to support that student through challenging circumstances, but the challenges are too great to be fixed through the intervention of one person and the student goes through the dreaded hardship that you both saw coming.
(For additional thoughts on Andromeda, read Flying Lessons.)
(I recognize that Nymphadora Tonks’ preferred name was Tonks, but from the perspective of her mother, she will always be Nymphadora or Dora. Forgive me for this license.)
