We have all seen the post-DH fics. Fics where Harry & Co, fresh with victory, enter the Ministry intending to reform it. Fics where they find that entrenched power structures cannot be removed overnight. Fics where they discover that the common people can't be fussed about their reforms and really just wanted Voldemort gone so they could return to the status quo. Fics where they come to the realisation that actual government is a lot more complex and difficult than what you imagine as a young revolutionary, that rule is a different game to winning a war.

I am curious as to whether this story can be told in original fiction.

Obviously, if you do the groundwork of depicting a conflict and showing your characters winning, it is relatively straight forward to just keep writing sequels which deal with the fallout.

Spoiler: Red Rising spoilers

This is what Pierce Brown did with Iron Gold onwards, which depict the collapse of the revolutionary state into factionalism and populism.

What I am more curious about is whether you think it would be viable to tell a story which starts with the aftermath, without ever depicting the preceding conflict and victory. You would come to the characters cold, and be introduced to them in their moment of triumph and follow their disillusionment.

Do you think this could work? Or do you think the author would be facing an impossible mountain to climb in terms of the sheer quantity of characterisation and background information that needs to be filled in about the preceding conflict and what the characters went through?

 

It is more work. You would have to have a grasp on what the rebellion looked like, and the relations between the victors as they developed during said rebellion. And after that, you would still need to do the same work for the actual novel. On the other hand, you would not be shackled to anything committed on paper. If your notes say characters A and B always trusted each other, but your novel is beter if they spend a few months suspicious the other was a spy, you can change that. So I would put the amount of work needed as more than one novel, but less than two.

One tool you would lack is a 'fish out of water' type character. All your protagonists (the ones that just won the rebellion) and likely antagonists (probably from the elites whose position is no much more shaky, and who want to go back to the old status quo) would have extensive knowledge of how the world used to function. And of each other: The protagonists fought together, and the elites likely followed to news or something? (Though, if the rebellion was super quick, you might have a villain protagonist who is trying to restore the system, even as they don't know these people who overthrew it? That would be a different story, however.)

Given that, and the bigger information load, you probably want to get the ball rolling quickly, and just trust the readers pick up on relationships and setting details as you go, as in, say, Malazan. (That does put a bit some pressure on the actual writing, of course. I prefer putting in vast amounts of small bits in that try to add up to the larger picture, but it does make me write more slowly and adds more rewrites.)

One other thing that would be a concern is the plot. Overthrowing the Empire/Emperor/becoming the centre of power has a natural end point that can easily serve as the end of a story. Trying to reform the system does not. There will never be a true end to the problems faced by any central government. (Unless you adopt a highly ideological paradigm. 'And then the Communist Utopia was achieved.' is an ending, but one that comes with problems of verisimilitude.) So you might need to put some early thought in how your story ends, and have some vague idea what happens in between.

The obvious end point might be when your characters are thrown from power. (If you want to avoid writing an 'overthrowing the Empire' story anyway, or writing something highly cyclical, they would have to be thrown out decisively.) That would be some measure of a downer ending, however, if you can show that some reforms stick, or the old elite must show more respect to the rest of society, it need not be completely so.

 

Reading a character slowly become disillusioned would be new and interesting, but without any attachment to who they were before, it becomes literary torture porn.
I would think a perspective that would be interesting would be seeing such disillusion from the perspective of the Everyman in government, either supporting or opposing the change, but who is trying to manage their own lives while these firebrands run up against inertia.
The percy weasely in early-mid book 7 view.

 

I have written some notes and a couple of test chapters about an idea like this. Well, something like it. The premise is that it starts out with a protagonist who is trying to free their friends from prison. Recently before the start of the novel, there was a big conflict in the world of the story, a government was overthrown and the now victorious rebels are making big sweeping changes, rounding up political enemies, putting people on trial and executing them, it's all rather dystopian and totalitarian.

But through the story it is revealed bit by bit that the protagonist had been a member of an oppressive, fascist power structure that committed atrocities and the new regime they are trying to undermine are the revolutionaries doing the equivalent of Nuremberg trials against the in-world equivalent of Nazis, basically. The friends the protagonist is trying to set free are participants in a genocide and the reader realizes that the protagonist's hateful comments throughout the story, which might have been construed as righteous anger at the new oppressors, are really just their bigotry spilling out from time to time.

I envisioned the ending as some big setpiece where the protagonist (at this point there should still be a bit of doubt for the reader) sets up a heist to free their friends just before their trial begins, maybe they plan a prison break on route to the courthouse or something like that, and it's successful.

The epilogue is from the POV of the antagonist, one of the revolution's emergent leaders, who throughout the story is portrayed as a Reinhard Heydrich type (in the eyes of the protagonist) but turns out to be just a war-weary revolutionary trying to keep the young government from falling apart and to bring the overthrown fascists to justice, of course not without facing the issues of righteous revolutionaries having fascist tendencies themselves now that they'd won and get to oppress their former oppressors.

So, that's an idea that's cooking in a word doc somewhere. Maybe I'll work on it some more now that Taure's made me think about it.