SenLinYu’s dark fantasy novel Alchemised debuted on the New York Times bestseller list in September, selling 300,000 copies in North America in its first week and 1 million in the U.S. by the beginning of October. Even before it was published, Legendary bought the film rights, reportedly for more than $3 million. That’s a staggering level of success for a debut novel. But SenLinYu had already built a large audience for their book on the Archive of Our Own, where it originated as Harry Potter fanfiction.
“When I wrote the story, I was in what was considered a pretty niche fandom,” SenLinYu tells Polygon in a Zoom interview. “Then it blew up and was going viral everywhere, and it was kind of ripped out of my hands, in that I didn’t really have a lot of control where it went, how it was getting presented, how it was getting promoted to people. Then people started to sell it, and I was very limited in my legal means of dealing with that.”
SenLinYu took their pen name from their handle on AO3, where they shared the highly popular fanfic Manacled. Over the course of more than 70 chapters, they imagined what might have happened in J.K. Rowling’s fantasy series if Voldemort and the Death Eaters defeated Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Manacled focused on Hermione Granger, who was captured and sent to live with Draco Malfoy so he could extract secrets hidden in her mind. A forbidden romance develops between the former classmates.
Alchemised keeps much of Manacled’s framing, but changes the conflict to be between a religious group of alchemists known as the Order of the Eternal Flame and necromancers dubbed the Undying, who have a huge advantage in the war because they can reanimate their fallen enemies and make them fight on their behalf.
The book begins after the war has already been lost. Helena Marino is one of the last survivors of the Order of the Eternal Flame, and is sent to live with her former Alchemy Institute classmate Kaine Ferron so he can extract secrets hidden in her mind. While Alchemised does involve a romance with messy power dynamics, SenLinYu doesn’t like having their book called “romantasy,” and rebuffs comparisons to Fifty Shades of Gray, another highly successful novel that started as fanfiction. They wish people would acknowledge that the reasons for writing fanfiction go well beyond erotica.
“People always want writers to be doing something solely out of passion. That’s literally what fanfiction writers are doing. They’re not looking for their marketability.” SenLinYu said. “Then [people] are like, You must just be self-inserting to imagine this sex that you want to have.”
Moving beyond the world of Harry Potter, SenLinYu looked to Castlevania for the vibes, while the heroes’ powers were inspired by Fullmetal Alchemist and Fate/Zero.
“I’m a huge watcher of anime, and I’ve always loved the combat scenes where weapons morph and change shape and things like that,” they said. “So I thought of that as a much more righteous and acceptable form of magical warfare. Alchemy has hundreds and hundreds of years of tradition, so I did a big deep dive into that.”
That research led SenLinYu to Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of alchemy that viewed women as weakening men by making them more emotional. SenLinYu built on that sexism, baking a similar set of biases into the historic roots of their magic system. While Harry Potter is fairly egalitarian in its gender politics, Alchemised is set in a highly patriarchal society where few women receive training in alchemy — their affinities are typically only considered when arranging marriages.
A big portion of Manacled was inspired by Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In Manacled, the Death Eaters enacted a breeding program to solve the problem of low fertility among pureblooded wizards. SenLinYu initially cut that concept out of Alchemised entirely, before reframing it as a eugenics project.
Members of the Undying rape captive women with the goal of birthing children with specific alchemical resonances, who can be hosts to the souls of necromancers when their own bodies decay. Helena is forced into the program because she has a rare affinity for animancy, the ability to manipulate the mind, and vivimancy, which allows her to manipulate living flesh.
Vivimancy is viewed as an abomination by the Order of the Eternal Flame, but the group’s leaders allow Helena to use her abilities to heal their troops. SenLinYu compares her to Hel, the Norse goddess who rules over the souls of those who don’t die gloriously in battle, as Helena tries her best to tend to the wounded in a hellish hospital.
Stripping the familiar Harry Potter characters out of the story created a fresh challenge for SenLinYu, who had to find a way to build emotional weight around original characters who are already dead at the start of the book. They found inspiration for how to develop Alchemised’s Harry equivalent, Luc Holdfast, in the anime Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, which kills off a key character in the first episode, but uses flashbacks to demonstrate how important he was.
Starting fresh allowed SenLinYu to introduce entirely new characters, like Luc’s bodyguard Lila, who was created as a foil to Helena.
“Helena goes into very feminine-coded care work, and Lila is your archetypal strong female character who does all the things that men can do and is just as good at them as the men. On a mythological allusion level, Lila [is] inspired by Athena,” SenLinYu said. “She gets to be a masculine warrior even though she’s female-coded, and yet there’s still that whole patriarchal element of virginity —– you have to be a virgin in order to do these things as a woman.”
Alchemised is a very dark book, dwelling on self-harm, torture, and rape, but SenLinYu said they didn’t want to shy away from the horrors of war.
“We as a society are so obsessed with war. It’s something that’s constantly going on in the news,” SenLinYu said. “It’s something that’s constantly used as an epic stage for films and literature that have this really particular narrative that tends to ignore a lot of that [moral] grayness, discomfort, trauma, and darkness does us such a disservice to not be more aware of those things. That was really what I wanted the story to be about, pushing back against the more common narratives.”
