It wasn't a question of how, it was a question of when.
A Question of When
is an AU one-shot Harry Potter fanfic by vlad that blends A Day in the Limelight and Peggy Sue tropes... and proceeds to deconstruct the hell out of them.
Romilda Vane has convinced herself that, rather than any personal flaw, she simply chose the wrong moment to approach Harry Potter and convince him that they would be perfect together. So she will find that perfect moment. Over and over again. As many times as it takes.
A Question of When provides examples of:
- Bittersweet Ending: Romilda grows a bit as a person, successfully romances Harry, and is assured after peering into the future that they will always be together... but the original timeline she came from has been erased from existence, the sheer lifetimes she invested in achieving this single outcome (Wizarding World be damned), and the implication that she can potentially re-live her life over and over again means she might never cross over with Harry at the end of their lives.
- Character Development: Romilda starts the story as a ditzy, amoral, self-involved twit with Mental Time Travel abilities... and she remains that way for a good portion of the fic, purely fixated on her goal of meeting Harry at the "perfect moment". It isn't until she starts looking outside herself (befriending Hagrid and trying to save Sirius) that Harry finally begins to trust her, and as a Slytherin at that.
- Cosmic Retcon: After figuring out that the Battle of the Department of Mysteries is the moment that Harry's inner circle closed completely, Romilda decides to jump all the way back to her first year (which is Harry's Third) to ingratiate herself with him before the spectre of Sirius Black enters the picture. At her sorting, any hopes of staying in Gryffindor with Harry are dashed the moment The Sorting Hat is placed on her head. It immediately gives a great, bellowing laugh before sticking Romilda in Slytherin, marking the first drastic change to the timeline.
- A Day in the Limelight: Romilda Vane is a little-known character who has only mild significance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as something of a Stalker with a Crush. Here, she is the main character (with that particular trait intact).
- Deconstruction Fic: Takes the concept of a Peggy Sue and asks "What if we give time travel powers to someone who doesn't want to save the world?" and rolls with it.
- In Love with Your Carnage: In the timelines where she bears witness to Harry successfully casting the Cruciatus Curse.It doesn't matter that the spell is dark, has no purpose but to unleash unspeakable pain - she shivers to see Harry casting something so powerful.
- It's All About Me: Romilda's biggest flaw - she grows increasingly frustrated with how little she can initially change the timeline, never realizing it's because she doesn't actually know Harry that well. She eventually stumbles into making a drastic change, but she never realizes just how she managed it.
- May–December Romance: All but stated in the text - Romilda's first jump brings her to the first moment she entered Harry's compartment (and proceeded to indirectly insult his friends) and she is momentarily distracted by the fact that everyone looks so young! There is a certain irony in that, as Harry is a little more than a year older than she is (and two years ahead academically) in the present day. Eventually, she spends countless lifetimes trying to figure out the best way to approach and endear herself to Harry.
- Mundane Utility: Somehow, Romilda Vane gets her hands on a way to travel forwards and backward within her own lifetime and rather than use this ability to warn the Wizarding World about Voldemort's return... she uses it to try and seduce a boy she likes.
- Noodle Incident: We are never told precisely how Romilda can travel through time.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: As mentioned in the entry for Mundane Utility, Romilda chooses to use her abilities to try and seduce Harry Potter instead of using her knowledge of the future to try and help the greater Wizarding World, to say nothing of effectively grooming a teenage boy for a relationship. Romilda's odd combination of naïveté and Selective Obliviousness lend her quest a certain innocence, but there is always the implication that her actions are definitely Not Okay.
- Save Scumming: A rare non-videogame example. It seems to be how Romilda can mentally time travel, able to leap ahead in her own timeline to see if a change she made stuck.
- Selective Obliviousness: Romilda gets hilariously frustrated with her inability to seduce Harry, despite replaying events over and over with minor adjustments, never realizing that it's her attitude and failure to pick up the social cues of Harry and his friends that doom her attempts to failure. She eventually has to go back to a point where Harry still trusted outsiders in order to gain any ground with him... but her efforts also cause a Cosmic Retcon that erases her original timeline.
- Single-Target Sexuality: Harry Potter is the only boy Romilda notices and is possibly the only person she cares about aside from herself at first and she is willing to jump across timelines and universes in order to get together with him.
- Stalking Is Funny If Its Female After Male: Played With. If the genders were reversed, Romilda's obsession with Harry wouldn't be so funny. As it stands, Romilda is pretty amoral in how she jumps back and forth in the timeline without doing anything to help against Voldemort or his Death Eaters at least initially.
- Wife Husbandry: What Romilda is basically doing to Harry. Despite the perpetual physical age gap of about a year in Harry's favor, there is no telling just how many years Romilda has actually lived compared to him. In essence, she is The Ageless doing her level best to groom a sixteennote year old boy into falling in love with her. It takes countless lifetimes for her to get it right and even then she is the one who ends up changing enough to become someone Harry is willing to associate with.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Played With and Played for Laughs. Certain points stay constant no matter what timeline Romilda is inhabiting (Slughorn summoning Harry on the Hogwarts Express, Harry asking Cho to the Yule Ball, Ginny kissing Harry post-Quidditch victory), and Romilda is frustrated how some aspects of the timeline change with seemingly no interference from her, but the things she actually tries to change remain stubbornly obstinate. It's played unnervingly straight when she realizes just how much Harry cares about Sirius (as she wasn't in on Sirius' secret until the Cosmic Retcon) and she repeats the Battle of the Department of Mysteries over and over again trying to save him. She fails.
