Hello, I'm Eunike, and this is a worrying look into my damaged psyche my hobby.

Some random additional notes about my stories:

A Cats Mary Sue Parody (Cats):

This silly little story was one of the first stories I ever written, as the date and the quality implies. I can't say that it's worth the read (because it really isn't) but I like it how it reminds me of my dorky teenage self, which is why I don't have the heart to delete it.

Ananke (Harry Potter):

Equal parts melodrama and crude humour, I finally completed this Snape/Lily fanfic after a long, long on-off relationship with it. It follows the adventures of the 19-year-old Lily Evans who accidentally ends up in the year 1997 where she encounters her old friend Severus Snape. As the two attempt to figure out how Lily managed to travel through time and whether she can go back, they're forced to come in terms with the differences and problems that ended their friendship when they were younger. Starting out as a slow-burn romance, the second half of the story has stronger a focus on Lily growing up and having everything she thinks she knows about herself and the world questioned. Some reviewers have pointed out that the two parts of the stories feel different, and I agree with that; I kind of see this fic as two story arcs in one, both with themes and an emphasis of their own.

This story was written shortly after the release of the final HP book, back when the scars left by the Snape subplot were still fresh. I remember having consumed copious amounts of SS/LE stories back then, yet finding very few stories that didn't fall into certain annoying tropes I'd grown to dislike (such as Snape being the 40-year-old virgin who has not even smelled a woman since Lily died - or Lily being characterized either as this perfect Stepford wife with no agency, or as a vain, cold-hearted snob who must be PUNISHED). As I worked on this story, I also intentionally wrote in some themes and scenes that questioned certain elements in the books that never sat right with me. Thus, I kind of wrote this story as an attempt to subvert both canon and fanon.

Being the prominent character he is, Snape is rather easy to capture in fanfic, but when it comes to Lily's personality there's not much to go by in the books, aside from a few glimpses of her childhood, a letter, and some more or less biased comments made by people who knew her. Thats why every fanfic about Lily has to build her up from scraps. Mine borrows from Harry's personality, has spades of humour thrown in (I enjoy writing comedy, especially in contrast with dark themes), and possesses certain qualities I imagine Snape would have been absolutely smitten with. In the later chapters of this story, Lily's character has also become largely shaped by the things that have happened to her during it. Needless to say, she's very flawed, and much of this story focuses on her trying to overcome those flaws. She's the main character of the story, and her journey into adulthood and into everything it entails is the main plot.

Some reviewers have asked whether I had planned this story from the start, even though it took me ages to finish it. I did; I remember having written an outline of the plot and the chapters very early on, and I hardly deviated from it in the years that followed. Sure, I came up with some additional scenes here and there, and some chapters did not turn out quite as I had imagined them when I finally got to them, but the major plot points remained pretty much the same after I'd laid them down when I started writing the story. I remember having had more than idea for the ending, but I had already made my choice by the time I wrote the first few chapters.

The only big change I made in the middle of writing this was turning a supportive character into a villain (yes, you know the one). Originally, that character's role was just to be a critical voice that occasionally challenged both Lily and Severus when no one else would, but I eventually realized that it'd be much more interesting to have that character as the main antagonist of this story. For this, I imported some leftover ideas from another fic I never got around writing that pretty much focused on the idea of this character having sinister motives. So, there you have it - I don't harbour any particular hatred for this character, but I did feel like it was only fitting to have an antagonist like that for a fic that pretty much kicks canon around.

As for style and technique, I've written the whole story in free indirect discourse. That means that the narrative voice complies to the mentality of the point of view character of each chapter. That also means that the narrative voice can be limited, biased, or even downright distorted because the point of view character is uninformed, hung up on a misperception, or just too emotionally distaught to see things from more objective a perspective. In other words, descriptions of certain characters may not reflect an objective truth but rather the sentiments of the point of view character. Many reviewers have commented on the (harsh) opinions Lily has about some other characters in this fic, and all I can say is that one should bear in mind that anger, fear, misplaced trust, and lack of knowledge frequently keep her from understanding and empathizing with others; often, she gets them all wrong.

I break free from this narrative technique once or twice throughout the whole story for the sake of a cheap joke, but pretty much everything else is filtered through the consciousness (including attitudes, impressions, and mental capacity) of whoever is acting as the point of view character. This narrative style very much the basis of most of the tension and the humour in this fic; the characters keep acting on assumptions that the readers of this story know perfectly well to be wrong. It also compliments the themes of the story; as she grows up, Lily has a lesson to learn about empathy and subjectivity, and about not taking her own perspective for granted.

Finally, this story was heavily inspired by the themes and the structure of the myth of Eros & Psyche. I'm not sure if it's obvious to anyone who reads this story, but I wrote Lily's character arc to mirror Psyche's, and there's also lots of symbolism in the fic that alludes to the myth. I worked in lots of other literary references in the story, too, including but not limited to: The Divine Comedy, Jane Eyre, End of the Affair, Atonement - all stories with similar themes of love and regret. There's also a lot of chess symbolism, water symbolism, chaos symbolism, and symbolism related to the usual things like places, animals, and nature. The meaning of the title, Ananke, and how it relates to the story is explained near the end of the fic. It's the name of an ancient Greek goddess of necessity, and it ties into this story's themes of compulsion and inevitability, and of love as a force of gravity within chaos.

I did some heavy rewriting on this fic when I brought it back after a very long hiatus in 2016. The plot remained the same, but I edited almost all of the chapters to get rid of some typos, repetition, needless padding, and others things I deemed unnecessary in hindsight. Some chapters were simply retouched, and some were rewritten almost entirely, depending on how much self-loathing said chapters evoked in me when I reread them. I felt like the story needed to be streamlined because it was already long enough as it was, and I also thought that the tone was off in certain chapters. So, if you read this story a while back and feel like something has changed since then, you're absolutely right. This is Ananke 2.0. Or more like Ananke 15.8, because I've revised the story in waves.

There's a Spanish version of this fic. Aquí está la traducción al español de Andy Black Riddle: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7622270/1/Ananke

Push, Pull (Harry Potter):

I wrote this miserable SS/LE fic as a knee-jerk reaction to "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". Get your welly boots on, because there's deep angst ahead!

In retrospect, I'm not particularly happy with this fic. It's too weepy, and while there's fortunately some humour to balance out the overly emotional content, I think that the narrative of this fic could have used some more irony, since the plot is kind of cruelly funny if you really think about it.

Some of the reviews I've gotten for this fic critisize Lily's lack of logic and self-righteous behaviour, and I agree with this. That was actually mostly intentional; she is contradicting herself throughout the story, and projects many of her own flaws on Snape because that's what people often do - they blame each other for their own mistakes because self-preservance, vanity, and stupidity keep them from seeing fault in themselves. I guess Lily comess off as an unrelatable character here because the story is told solely from Severus's point of view, and Lily's thoughts and feelings are never really exposed to the reader. She does explain her behaviour herself, but I think she's an unreliable source because she's obviously not really that good at self-reflection.

I don't think that this is a particularly romantic story, even though the focus is on a romance, because I was more interested in writing extreme angst by giving Snape snippets of what he desires the most and then immediately taking it away & making things even worse for him every time he thinks that his luck is about to turn. Perhaps it's the sadist in me, but I just can't help but think that Snape is at his funniest when he's horribly miserable.

The Stink of the Street (Les Miserablés):

This is a Canon-compliant one-shot about Éponine desperately offering herself to Marius before the rebellion begins. Wrote this back when I was really into Les Miserablés, haven't really looked at it since. Les Miz is another fandom I got in and out of rather quickly. I still like the book, but not enough to immerse myself in LM fanfiction anymore.

The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (Romeo and Juliet):

A short AU fic about the unhappy future of the Romeo and Juliet who never died. Crikes, I've actually written Shakespeare fanfiction! How nerdy can one person get?