It's very difficult to accept Harry and Ginny as the typical over-extended middle-class family, which makes it difficult to suspend disbelief for this story. It would work great with any other Weasley.

Author's Response: Thanks so much for your feedback! It's funny—in addition to this site, I've posted this fic on LiveJournal, on Phoenix Song, on Simply Undeniable and on The Quidditch Pitch—and the only place where anyone has expressed any difficulty with Harry and Ginny being richer than Croesus is at SIYE. I think I get your objection, but I do have to ask two questions:

1. How many typical middle-class families do you know of who have four houses, are supporting extended family members and have sent three kids through private (or, if you're in the UK, public) school ? (Well, a lot of families do—and it's a squeeze for most but all but the wealthiest.)
2. Where in canon does it say that Harry's rich? Wealthier than the Weasleys, yes—they've got (at the beginning of PS/SS) FIVE kids in private/public school and only one income! Harry's vault is full of gold at the beginning of PS/SS—but there's no sense, for instance, that it's as large as the Lestrange vault that we see in DH. And all of Harry's expenses will have come out of that vault—his tuition, room and board at Hogwarts, his clothes and school supplies. At no point in seven books does anyone say that Harry is more than comfortable—and, IIRC, at no point after the first book do we see the contents of his vault. He's never told his balance. Hey—he's a kid. Why should he care? Are you SURE that seven years of drawing on his trust fund haven't emptied it considerably? I could make the same argument with his inheritance from Sirius. Yeah, he got the house. Houses are expensive. Sirius had no income from the time of his incarceration until he died. Most likely what hadn't been plundered by Lucius and Narcissa in the way of valuable assets went to support the cause of the Order during the war. So there's no assurance that Grimmauld Place was anything but a cash drain.

And in these troubled times, I wanted to play with the idea of a Harry who actually had to make some difficult choices—those tend to be much more interesting to write and read about, don't you find? ;-)

I really enjoyed this story. Loved the way the Harry and Ginny interacted and I liked them having to try and come up with the cash for the wedding! It brings a touch of "real life" to the fic and I thought it was fab!

I've never seen a fic with James/Scorpious, but now I come to think of it - I like it!

Would love to read about the actual wedding if you were considering writing a little sequel *bats eyelashes

Nice job!

Love the way the rose garden commemorates important events/weddings in the Potter family. Nice reassessment of values, too.

Author's Response: Thanks! It's always good to reassess values, I think. ;-)

Er, James is ... gay? God, I find that hard to believe somehow. I always thought Scorpius would end up with Rose, given Ron's warning to her not to get too friendly with him and to beat him in every test in the DH epilogue. And as James clearly displays character traits reminiscent of his paternal grandfather and Harry's godfather, as well as his uncles Fred and George's sense of humour, I would've thought that meant he was straight. Anyway, it's your story and you can do what you like with J K R's characters, but as I said, it's hard for me to imagine James being gay. In short, it doesn't suit him somehow.

Author's Response:

Fascinating! Well, as you say, it's my fic. I'm a little astonished that you could ascentain James's sexuality based on the scant data we have about him: he seems to be twelve or thirteen years old and he's certainly male; he's apperently Harry and Ginny's son—they are called a family and "the Potters"—; he teases his younger brother to the point where they apparently fight enough that his father won't let them share a room; he finds it weird that Teddy would snog VIctoire; he loves Teddy; he's a bit frightened of his mother... and that's about it. I don't see anything about him not liking men in there. I also see nothing about his likeness to either his father or his grandfather—physically or behaviorilly. We don't know a thing about what he looks like, and we get very little sense of how he acts; we certainly don't get anywhere near the insight into him that we do into his brother, for instance.

I don't have any particular interest in his sexuality, but in order to write the fic in answer to the request that elysianfields gave me,I had to figure out what Lily and her siblings were up to. Lily I knew I wanted to pair with Lysander, largely because I love his name. Albus.... Fully two-thirds of the fics written about Albus Severus pair him with Scorpius Malfoy, which is clearly a sour-grapes ship for former Harry/Draco shippers. I didn't want to go that route, for many reasons (not least of which being that I found Drarry downright silly, and therefore refuse to write a knock-off). So I paired Al with an unidentified girl (what a concept! one of the Potters marrying a character whose parents DIDN'T appear in the books!) and then thought, "Hey, aside from the fifty bazillion Scorpius/Al stories, most of the other second-generation stories that I've seen pair young Mr. Malfoy with Rose Weasley, based on that one off-handed joke from her father. (By that same logic, I guess you think that she was sorted into Slytherin and disinherited. How awful for her!)

In any case, I've never seen a James/Scorpius fic—largely because there's no obvious fandom reason for one. So I wrote it. And that's all it was. Well, that and poking fun at Draco, since it's clear that Harry would have a far easier time accepting such a thing in his son that that balding bigot with the pointy face.

So yeah, James was gay. His sexuality is not in any way indicated by the text of DH that I have been able to ascertain, and JKR has never spoken to the issue. So I'm afraid I felt absolute freedom in assigning him that sexuality; we'll need to agree to disagree.

In any case, the paragraph about James was about a third of the way into a four-thousand word fic. Did you enjoy the rest of it?

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