Certain Dark Things is a Harry Potter fanfiction being written by rentachi
(Archive of Our Own link Fanfiction.Net link).
Certain Dark Things contains examples of:
- all lowercase letters: The chapter titles are all lowercase.
- Dead Guy Junior: Elara’s owl Cygnus is named for her deceased Uncle Cygnus.
- Disabled in the Adaptation: Snape now has one nonfunctioning eye, and Dumbledore is now missing his right arm.
- Door Stopper: At over 800,000 words the story and is still ongoing as of January 2024.
- Emancipated Child: Elara’s Uncle Cygnus emancipates her when she’s eleven so she won’t have to go back to the orphanage after he dies.
- Fan-Created Offspring: Sirius Black and Marlene McKinnon, two characters from the source material, have Elara Black, an original character, as a child.
-
Fandom-Specific Plot: This fic uses two of them: Wrong Boy-Who-Lived, in which Harry is still the one who defeats Voldemort as a baby but someone other than Harry is acknowledged as the Boy-Who-Lived (in this fic, Neville gets the acknowledgment), and Harry being sorted into Slytherin instead of Gryffindor. - First Friend: Elara is this for Harriet.
- Gender Flip: The child born to James and Lily Potter is the female Harriet Dorea Potter, as opposed to the male Harry James Potter in the source material.
- Gratuitous French: The French Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel both sprinkle French in their sentences even when talking to characters who don’t speak French. Nicholas also uses French greetings and sign offs in his letters to Harriet.
- Handicapped Badass: Dumbledore is missing an arm, Snape has a nonfunctional eye, and both are still formidable wizards.
- Hidden Depths: Mr. Malfoy likes to cook, not that he wants anyone to know, and Mrs. Malfoy reads a certain Muggle’s romance novels.
- In-Series Nickname:
- Harriet shortens “Livius” to “Livi.”
- “Rick” is short for “Godric.”
- Some people use “Harry” as an affectionate nickname for Harriet.
- Lady Swears-a-Lot: Harriet Potter, frequently scolded by Professor McGonagall for her foul language.
- Official Couple: According to the tags on Archive of Our Own, eventually Draco and Hermione will end up together, as will Snape and Harriet, and Elara and Fleur.
- Original Character: Elara Black.
- Pet Monstrosity: Harriet has lots of snake pets. Three of them are small transfigured golems that nevertheless like to bite. One of them is a big magic snake, specifically a Horned Serpent, rated XXXXX by The Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, meaning that it’s a known wizard killer or impossible to train or domesticate.
- Plagiarism in Fiction: Harriet catches Lockhart plagiarizing from Muggle books to write his own.
- Punny Name: In addition to the canon places, there’s Empiric Alley (“empirically”).
- Teacher/Student Romance: In the tags. However, since Harriet is young, the love story will come out only after time.
- This Is Your Brain on Evil: Dark magic can be addictive for some. Elara is susceptible to it.
- Unusual Pets for Unusual People: Harriet, who “had a soft spot for creepy, odd things” and thinks of herself as weird, has a horned serpent, snake golems, and a crow for a pet.
- We Named the Monkey "Jack": Elara’s owl Cygnus is named for her deceased Uncle Cygnus.
