Update
Sorry Boos, I really love y'all and am truly grateful for all your support, but I'm going to put this fic on a hiatus.
As of late, I've really been struggling to maintain my motivation to keep writing this fanfiction. In general, a lot of my decision comes down to my personal feelings about the progress of my fic, and how I had planned character arcs and characterization. I also felt really discouraged to write because I got a lot of backlash on the way I'd characterized Draco with some people saying I should take him out of the story as a love interest entirely. Truthfully, when I first planned this story, I knew including Draco was going to be a big challenge, but I wanted to include him anyway because I thought he was a great and possibly complex character with a lot of potential for growth. But I also knew that his character arc was going to take a lot of time to happen and with a lot of ups and downs and relapses of character.
But now, having Draco in the story stresses me out. Because spoiler alert: starting a 90 comment thread about how you hate a character in my story who I'm trying my best to redeem is kind of discouraging.
Initially, I had planned to fan out his arc into a series with three books up till their 6th year, but I realized that that was too ambitious a task for me to undertake. Halfway into the point of the story that we're in now was when I decided to scrap my original plan and stick to this story and this story alone. As a result, I kind of screwed up my characterization of Draco in this book, because now, we're halfway into that love interest branch of the storyline, and Draco is still hated by a bunch of readers and now Y/N just looks stupid :/ Now I don't even know how to fix it in the short amount of time before we hit some key moments I planned to happen. Because despite Draco being a character pulled from the Harry Potter series, it's now my job to interpret and characterize him in a way fitting of my fanfiction, but I feel like trash knowing that it's my fault no one likes the version of Draco that I've presented.
I'm not going to lie, I do feel like giving up, because what's the point of continuing to do something when it stresses you out? After all, I'm literally just a high schooler writing some obscure, niche fanfiction for fun, so there was really nothing to gain from it.
However, I did not spend this much time and effort for nothing, so what I'm going to do is take a hiatus to reevaluate how I'm writing this fic and its characters and improve. Hopefully, my motivation will come back by the time I do iron out Draco's character. I'm truly sorry that I wasn't able to write well enough to your standards in the first place. I promise to do better.
Though, I can't guarantee that I'll come back anytime soon. I might've signed up for a busy school year with the addition of the devil's sport Marching Band. So it might take a while for me to truly be able to take the time to rewrite what I had planned for the rest of the story. And if I find that I can't fix Dracos character, I'm sorry but I think I'm going to have to discontinue the story.
Again, I'm so sorry, especially to those who looked forward to reading a new update and got hit with this mess instead.