To Be Forgotten - final installment of Manacled letters

This blog will contain Manacled spoilers.

The last line in the story hauntingly reads, “She survived the war but died during imprisonment while a surrogate in the Repopulation Program. She was a non-active member of the Order of the Phoenix and did not fight.” This was noted under a picture of Hermione in a history book written years after the Second Wizarding War finally ended. The war was won thanks to the actions taken by Hermione and Draco and yet as history would remember it, she was just a simple healer who died while imprisoned, nothing more.

As it is Women’s history month and this is a women-focused newsletter, you will get used to seeing and learning about women whom history tries to forget. The author of Manacled, SenLinYu, told Today in an exclusive interview earlier this year that this was a very personal and intentional aspect of the story because she identifies with this quiet, subtle, self-sacrificing form of heroism. This is how women have been represented throughout history in works of fiction, but upon closer inspection, this is how it is in the real world as well. Sen stated in the interview that, “… I was trying to reconcile the ways that women are turned invisible, because they don’t perform the right kinds of heroism.”

I feel like this is the part of the story that so deeply resonates with readers, the feeling you’re doing your best and sacrificing all you have but that you’re slipping away, fading into the black, nothing but a footnote in someone else’s story. We don’t want to be forgotten. I think that’s partially why we create. Why we create art. Why we create reputations. Why we create families. We want people to remember that we gave ourselves to something, that we had a purpose and made a difference. But even though we desire that, so many women have decided that they would give everything, even their lives, to a cause and that it was ok if no one ever knew it, just like Hermione.

I think this has reminded me that it's okay to want people to remember but that it’s also ok if they don’t. Because that was the part that made me so sick, thinking about everything, so many terrible things, that Hermione went through and did to win the war and to just live her life and be happy. Just for no one to ever know. That’s the part that makes me sick about history in real life, the history we were taught in schools leaving out so many important stories. The key difference I think is that Hermione chose in that aftermath that being forgotten was what was ultimately best for her. She got to look at it and say, let them think what they want, what I need and want is to just live the rest of my life in peace and in love with those who matter most to me. I’m not sure that a lot of the people that we have forgotten in real life made that decision, I think our disregard for their sacrifices was never a mutual decision.