About Neville Longbottom and the Diligits
By
Jessica Ljung
Ann-Kathrin Mai
We decided to tell a story from Neville Longbottom’s point of view. During most of our story, he is lying on the floor of the Gryffindor Common Room, petrified. He is thinking back on his first school year at Hogwarts, and about all the different things that have happened to him during this time. We also try to show a tiny glimpse into his family history as we interpret J.K Rowlings in later books as she develops Neville’s character. As Rowlings describes Neville as a brave and diverse character as the story unfolds throughout her books we have tried to show a bit of this. We try to incorporate this showing his stamina and courage as he decides in our story to honor his father by growing a plant that takes a lot of both to develop. Our idea with this fanfiction project is to show that he has his own adventures, and lives quite an exciting life, although it is not in the spotlight as Harry, Ron and Hermione are. We wanted to show that he has a lot more to him than clumsiness and stuttering and that he does not need to be the main character to have adventures.
Since this book series is about wizards and their daily life we tried to incorporate magic by using the Diligits Fortemus. We gave the plant magic powers as a lot of the world of Harry Potter has everyday object become unique and have attributes. Since Rowling, herself is a wizard of words and imagination we tried to show that we understand this by giving the plant powers beyond the muggle world. To try and honor the author’s clever use of the mix between Latin, Greek, French, English and double meaning, we gave the plant a name in the attempt of showing that we understand the cleverness.
During the time in our story where Neville is petrified and lying on the floor, he does a lot of thinking. As Rowling uses a lot of dialog in her stories we decided to give the plant a voice so that it and Neville can have a conversation during the time he is petrified, in the spirit of how we understand the book to be built up. Neville has a profound interest in Herbology, therefore it was quite natural to let his magic adventure be of a plant-based kind. Because he actually is petrified in most of our story and cannot talk we chose to have the whole of this conversation in his head. That is also why we let the seed draw blood and grow on memories, so that this hopefully ties in with the imprinting of Neville in the plant, as almost a part of him. We also try and use the plant-idea to show that Neville has a lot to struggle with and is not just a tragicomical character. He has a history with his parents that Rowlings let us see as Neville’s character unfolds in the later books and we wanted to incorporate that to show that there might be a reason as to why he tries to stop his friends from leaving and that there is always more than Rowling let us see in the first book. In the spirit of this, we do not end the story with Neville and his plant with a fixed pattern but rather try to end our story back in the book before the Philosophers stone situation has come to its end.
Being a group of only two, our fanfiction is quite short and our challenge was to try to incorporate what we think is how developing Neville’s character in the first book could have been like, if he had had some more room. Since neither of us has written stories before, we found this to be quite a challenge, and surprisingly fun. We found discussing and developing a character was an interesting way of seeing and understanding how much work goes into a book, and our respect for Rowling as an author has grown even more.
Literary Longbottoms 