I can’t remember much of my childhood, but if I squeeze my eyes shut and press my fingers to my forehead, I can summon scenes forth from the back of my mind like I’m accessing a vault, a backroom where reels of film are on a loop and pages of books keep flicking between key scenes. Where some might find comfort in familial memories, I’m sitting cross-legged in the records room, remembering more of my teenage self on page 758 of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix than the feelings I associate with a family holiday in 2007.
Harry Potter’s breakdown in Dumbledore’s office:
“I DON’T CARE!” Harry yelled at them, snatching up a lunascope and throwing it into the fireplace. “I’VE HAD ENOUGH, I’VE SEEN ENOUGH, I WANT OUT, I WANT IT TO END, I DON’T CARE ANYMORE!”
Snape’s confession to Dumbledore in book seven:
“I wish…I wish I were dead…”
Final Fantasy’s Cloud’s childlike despair at the end of disc one:
“Aerith is gone. Aerith will no longer talk, no longer laugh, cry…… or get angry…… What about us…… what are WE supposed to do? What about my pain? My fingers are tingling. My mouth is dry. My eyes are burning!”
Dumbledore cuts through Harry’s denial and recognises his pain. With Snape, he recognises his own guilt and pain, understanding how it feels to truly want to die.
Barret places a hand on Cloud’s shoulder in silent comfort, unwilling to let him fight alone as the cold facade crumbles.
Severus Snape, Cloud Strife, a fleeting fascination with Cobb from Nolan’s Inception. Different stories, different mediums, yet each took up permanent residence in my teenage imagination. All visible in their desperation, all bending the story’s narrative to their suffering, deeply unhappy and wounded sad men, carrying pain alone.
Until someone noticed.
Sitting on the floor of my bedroom, controller in hand, my thumb hovering by the X button or turning the dog-eared pages of a favourite chapter, I recognised something of myself in their suffering. Something I hadn’t been able to say out loud.
They pulled out a chair, sat down beside me, and stayed.
Fictional characters couldn’t see me, but they sure as hell would never reject me.
My experience, being a teenager in the mid noughties crying to FMVs of Vampire Knight, wasn’t the same as that of a sword-wielding mercenary with a fragmented past or a middle-aged wizard with heaps of unresolved trauma. Yet I recognised something familiar in them. I never quite knew which version of the day I would be coming home to. I struggled to feel secure and spent much of my adolescence wanting and waiting for someone to notice.
“Author note: There’s a lot of angst in this chapter. And maybe in the next one, and the one after that.”
In the summer of 2008, I borrowed the world of Harry Potter and completed the first chapter of a story that I would go on to post online. Between studying the symbolism of Jack’s red hair in Lord of the Flies and failing GCSE physics, I laboured over an old laptop in my box bedroom to write my first fanfiction. I saved chapter after chapter on a flimsy pen-drive that every Year 10 was expected to use for coursework and carried it to and from the ICT suite at school to publish the story.
The story issued a warning to readers, in my fifteen-year-old “if you don’t like it, then tough” attitude: “CONTAINS ABUSE AND SELF-HARM. HIT THE BACK BUTTON IF YOU DON’T LIKE.”
What was the story? Simply put, Severitus. A sub genre of Harry Potter fanfiction where writers explored the platonic relationship between Harry Potter and his potions professor. Stories that imagined Severus Snape as a paternal figure to Harry Potter, whether biological or found family.
What I saw, and how I continued to write it, was Snape recognising Harry Potter’s hidden suffering and taking responsibility for it. An attachment to a character who could have noticed and imagining how that might have helped.
A child suffering. An adult taking notice. More importantly for me, it was the adult and the caregivers using their own trauma and lived experiences with pain to support another.
The pattern of latching onto sad male characters followed me across books, films and video games. Different stories, different pain, but the same tortured men. Their pain was legible. It was written across the pages and projected onto the screen. It was implied in silence between the lines and with the smallest intonations in dialogue.
Their pain felt legible in a way my own never did.
Years later, during my undergraduate degree, I learned that the sad man was an archetype in his own right: the Byronic hero. Brooding, isolated and haunted by the past, he appears throughout literature wearing different faces. The outlaw. The rebel. The outcast. What surprised me was not that the archetype existed, but that I had spent years searching for it without knowing its name.
Fictional characters felt safe.
The adults in my life had their limitations, and understandably so. I was twelve years old when one teacher asked me to stop hurting myself, but he never checked whether I had. Perhaps he’d assumed the problem had been resolved, that I’d grown out of the habit. Perhaps he thought someone else would notice if things got worse.
And they did.
Another teacher noticed.
Three years too late.
It was the second question I needed. The second conversation. The decision to keep checking.
Adulthood has complicated my understanding of those years. I know now that the adults around me were working with incomplete information with the pressures of existing in their own narratives: full classes, unmanageable schedules, relentless workloads, their own invisible struggles.
Some of what I was experiencing would eventually be understood through a bipolar diagnosis. Neither of those facts erases the loneliness of being fifteen. They simply make the story less straightforward than I once believed.
The version of Snape I wrote, the dark Byronic hero type, did notice things and more importantly, he didn’t stop looking when he believed things had settled. I rewrote the same fantasy: a hurting child is finally recognised by an adult who understands suffering because he has survived it himself.
I didn’t want the hero to rescue me. I wanted him to recognise me.
If anyone could see how much I struggled, it would be him.
I trusted sad men to see the sadness.
I wanted Snape to recognise his own childhood in the way mine had hurt me. Cloud’s confusion felt familiar; his story was one of someone trying desperately to understand himself. Cobb’s own loneliness granted him a special fluency in pain, willing to carry it openly. So, I kept writing stories in which someone was finally noticed again and again.
I suspect I craved that acknowledgement as a teenager, and now, sitting comfortably in my early thirties, I know that I did. At fifteen, I didn’t have the language to explain why these stories mattered so much to me. All I knew was that I kept returning to them. Years later, I would find myself writing the same lonely, wounded characters I had once searched for in other people’s stories.
I look at my own characters the way I once imagined Snape looking at Harry: searching for the hurt they’ve tried to conceal. I send them on journeys that allow them to heal through helping others like Cloud’s loyalty to AVALANCHE helps him rebuild his identity.
The stuff I posted during that summer is still living in the archives. The content warnings I included with every chapter for two years, are now a list of themes I explore in my own novel: Mental illness. Self-harm. Loneliness. The subjects have remained surprisingly consistent.
The difference is that, at fifteen, I hid them inside Harry Potter fanfiction.
Now I call it literary fiction.
Amanda Birchall 