Poor you, I was told that by my parents and somehow school (I don't remember how! Oh right, asking why my aunts had diet when they went into pregnancy.) Of this and I've never had to explain it to anyone, I can't imagine the trouble you went through. Thankfully, I'm not a sophomore with scientific classes ! Why is Ed ss-ing and zz-ing and vv-ing by the way?
It was definitely an awkward start to high school chemistry, but with a few more years distance I think I'm a little more sympathetic to the situation. There is a *lot* of misinformation about pregnancy out there.
Ed and Al have a stylized accent for a few reasons 1) a lot of my favorite FMA×HP fics when I started writing TSL used a stylized accent for [insert Amestrian character here] 2) JKR hadn't revealed herself to be a TERF-tastic POS in 2016, so I took her decisions a little more seriously. She used stylized accents for foreign characters, so in a bid to make the world of TSL *feel* like HP, I followed her lead. 3) It was an easy way to nod at the fact that an Amestris to Germany to Britain culture shift would be a HUGE adjustment without spending too much time on it.
Would I choose to give Ed and Al stylized accents if I was writing this fic today? Nah. I'd probably just nod at common English-as-a-second-language difficulties in the descriptions sometimes. But I've stuck with it for continuity. A lot of readers hate it, but a lot of readers love it, so I figure it all comes out in the wash!
I won't tell you I hate it, you've reasons, even if most people I read would let the other characters hear the accent and the reader would read common english. I also said to myself that Ed is a genius, I don't think it would be too complicated for him to master a language and accent if he really wanted to, but maybe not everyone thinks so. No, I don't particularily disagree with your choice other than those two points, it's just that reading this heavy accented dialogue give me just a bit of a headache on extended periods of time and reading, and the voices in my head starts to distort to sorts of nose-pinched cartoon character voices and now I'm trying to ignore the accent and it's difficult to hear Ed's voice again. It's just that. The rest is perfectly fine.
Same. Glad you didn't take it badly, but then again, you seem to have changed mindset since you wrote this. Does that mean you're not going to finish it?
Oh no! This fic is getting finished. It's got a boatload more chapters over on FFN, another ten that haven't been posted anywhere, AND I'm finishing it once and for all for this year's extended NaNoWriMo-adjacent project. The finish line isn't exactly within sight over here on AO3, but it's well within my sight. There honestly might just be another 10,000 or 15,000 words left to write.
It's just a long running fic, having started in 2016. And beyond that, I first got the idea for it and wrote the first two chapters in roughly *2014* without plans to post (I had other projects at the time, and I wasn't sure that I really had anything worthwhile to add to the already well-populated FMA×HP world). I've grown as a writer, and there are certain decisions I'd make differently if I was just starting this fic today.
But I like them all well enough to follow through! And sticking with those decisions have created narrative challenges that I've enjoyed wrestling with.
If all goes according to plan, I'll be done writing by the end of 2022. It should all be posted to both AO3 and FFN by early 2023.
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IlnaHers on Chapter 2 Tue 15 Nov 2022 09:02PM UTC
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