Sandbox / Golden Seals

I know that Repair, Don't Respond is a guideline here, but if you want to make massive changes on the description and examples, it is advisory to ask first over the Ask The Tropers or the Trope Description Improvement Drive so that there would be less headaches for the cleaners regarding unilateral changes. Thank you.

alnair

Thank you, kind sir! Wasn't aware of (or clear on) that thread; maybe it'll be easier to get people's attention that way. You'll notice that none of the changes on this page have actually been implemented (haha); sometimes it feels like the only way to improve things is unilaterally, but I get that This Is a Wiki and am always looking for ways to help the community improve the wiki together! ~GoldenSeals

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This is my sandbox. Here I shall preview large-scale changes to certain pages that catch my attention.

Chalk Outline

The Chalk Outline is a commonly seen trope in which the police draw an outline on the ground around a murder victim, usually chalk (but occasionally tape). The idea is that this would allow the police to visualize the crime scene even after the body has been moved.

There's a bit of Fridge Logic to it, though; why is this necessary when you could just take a picture of a crime scene? Indeed, in Real Life the origin of this trope didn't relate to policing so much as journalism; the press could take photographs of the crime scene and give the readers a sense of where everything was lying without actually having to show real bodies (and real Gorn). And all of this was from around the 1930s, before everyone understood the importance of forensic evidence and learned not to touch the crime scene for any reason. That's not to say that the police never do this today; they might well need to observe the crime scene after the body has been removed for whatever reason. But they generally don't use chalk, being as it is a very granular substance that can easily be blown, washed, or scuffed away and also contaminate the crime scene. Instead they like to use numbered flags or placards that allow investigators to keep track of who's who. The most likely use of chalk might be on a victim who's not actually dead (especially in traffic accidents), so as to preserve the makeup of the crime scene while rushing to get medical care to the victim.

So naturally, given its relative rarity in real life, the Chalk Outline is a very televisually oriented thing, something that just shouts "crime scene" at the audience in a single shot. More often than not, it's subverted or parodied — an outline might be in a particularly bizarre location or of a particularly bizarre shape (or multiple shapes, all belonging to the same unfortunate victim). But it's also useful for its original purpose: showing a crime scene without showing bodies, which for whatever reason the work might not want the audience to see.

Not to be confused with Shapes of Disappearance, where an outline would be use to indicate that someone or something who's supposed to be there has disappeared (and not necessarily because of a crime).

[Note: I'm not convinced it's an Undead Horse Trope. It's not listed on the latter page, and for it to be an Undead Horse Trope a parody would have to be so prevalent as to be a cliché, but I don't think it's there yet. Therefore, I removed that particular reference from the description.]

The Disease That Shall Not Be Named

Just thought the description for The Disease That Shall Not Be Named could be trimmed down and wanted input on what's apparently a major change.

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"Think about it, Tone. Sudden weight loss..."
"AIDS?"
"Nobody's got AIDS! I don't want to hear that word in here again!"

-Tony Soprano and friends discuss colleague who was recently outed.

LEPROSY. TUBERCULOSIS. SYPHILIS. CORONAVIRUS. CANCER. AIDS. DIARRHEA.

There are some illnesses that we don't like talking about. Today, we are much more open about it, but not too long ago, you never mentioned them by name. Not in conversation, not in media — not even in the doctor's office, leading to situations where a medical doctor might not actually tell the patient what's wrong with them.

There are two basic strains to this avoidance: embarrassment and incurability. In the first case, people avoided talking about illnesses that involved nasty things like bodily functions, or which were transmitted sexually. AIDS, for instance, was long a taboo subject because it was primarily (but not exclusively) transmitted by sex, and in The '80s it spread primarily in the gay community and led people to think it had something to do with homosexuality. But another good example is diarrhea, which is very common and easily treatable but pretty damn disgusting.

The second case regards incurability — it can be difficult to discuss a disease that's effectively a death sentence. Sometimes it's a matter of not calling attention to the cruelty of one's fate. Sometimes it involves painful, invasive, or embarrassing treatments that do little other than buy the patient time. Sometimes it's superstition and a desire to avoid Tempting Fate. In the days before the causes of diseases were known, communicable diseases which we know how to avoid today spread very easily, so people who heard rumors about some guy coming down with cholera were likely to get it in due time — they just didn't know they would get it from drinking from the same well, and not from just saying its name, and so came centuries of the Association Fallacy.

The king of this trope, though, is cancer, because it actually fits into both categories. For centuries, it was known but impossible to treat; even today, half of all cancers remain incurable, and the rest can only be treated with invasive and unpleasant procedures like surgery and chemotherapy. In the old days, a cancer diagnosis was effectively a death sentence; that's why doctors were so reluctant to name it. But there was also a strain of embarrassment, because in the old days, it was so hard to diagnose that only the easy ones were known — and those were breast, cervical, and vaginal cancers, all of which involved women's intimate parts that no one liked to talk about. Oddly, the advances in cancer treatment have made the subject more taboo over the years; it started as a thing that could affect anyone and was just a part of life, but then it was later connected to certain habits like smoking, at which point it was still a "death sentence" but mentioning it could be an indictment of the sufferer. The word became so unpalatable that even using the word "cancer" in other contexts is avoided, like how some horoscopes will refer to the astrological sign as "Moon Child".

In some languages, like Dutch, profanity largely consists of the names of diseases. If a Dutchman tells you to "kanker op," he's not hoping you really get cancer; he just really doesn't want to see you.

In fiction, this trope (when not used In-Universe) attempts to make things more palatable for the audience by not subjecting them to the gory details of what a character is suffering. It can also avoid Artistic License – Medicine — the audience can't call an author out on getting the details of a disease wrong if they never name the disease to begin with.

Compare Disease by Any Other Name (the audience knows the disease but not the characters); The Topic of Cancer and Tragic AIDS Story (exploring the tension and awkwardness of bringing up those specific diseases); Secretly Dying; Never Say "Die"; Victorian Novel Disease; Delicate and Sickly; Littlest Cancer Patient; Good Victims, Bad Victims; and The Scottish Trope (the means by which characters avoid saying a specific name). Contrast Incurable Cough of Death and Soap Opera Disease, where the illness's symptoms are ill-defined and vague just to ensure that they're convenient to the plot.

Fandom Specific Plot

This is for Fandom-Specific Plot/Harry Potter. I've often felt drawn to fixing pages like this when I stumble upon them because they're rarely written in wikivoice and seem to be a hundred fanfic writers coming together talking about things without any regard for the presentation of it. Harry Potter is kinda ideal as I've read the books (well, a long time ago now) so I have the bird's-eye view, but I'm not so familiar with the fanfics and can present things a bit more "objectively". (As an aside — the only Harry Potter fanfic I've ever read was My Immortal, in part, insofar as it's possible to read it.)

The things I've chosen to fix are:

• Flow, most of all. Some examples are rewritten to flow better. Several are rearranged to group them together or eliminate redundancies. The whole thing should read like it was written by one person.
• Spelling and grammar, in some places, in particular use of apostrophes. In some places I replaced curly apostrophes with straight ones, in keeping with wiki policy (I know I read this somewhere) that straight ones are preferred for formatting reasons. Also tried to keep use of single and double apostrophes for quotes consistent.
• Gave everything titles. Maybe controversial, but some entries have them and others don't. Giving it a snappy title kinda works well to get the point across. I've seen this used on other pages, figure it would work here.
• In some cases created a "superplot" where there are common threads that people are missing, most notably "Light and Dark".
• A few cases of natter/poor indentation.

Here's my proposed revision:

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Harry Potter fandom has such an enormous fanfiction community, with so many common plotlines, that it's difficult to keep count.

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Overpowered Harry:

Often tagged "Independent Harry", "Powerful Harry", or "Pureblood Culture/Society/Politics" (no one is sure what to call it). The idea is that Dumbledore is a Manipulative Bastard setting Harry up as a sacrifice in order to defeat Voldemort — and, in more extreme cases, is planning to take all the credit afterward. To ensure this, Dumbledore suppresses Harry's power and wealth. However, Harry finds out, emancipates himself, and unlocks his real power and influence — which he'll need to thwart both Dumbledore and Riddle.

In better-done takes, Harry must work out whom he can trust and what he needs to know before Dumbledore or Voldemort can enact their plans. In more poorly written iterations, Harry effortlessly defangs and counters all opposition, leaving them blinking in stupefaction in his wake.

Common features include:

• Harry's real name isn't "Harry". Weirdly, it is also never "Henry" or "Harold", the two names usually shortened to "Harry" (e.g. Prince Harry, who would be "Henry IX" if he ever became King). Instead, it's usually something powerful and magical-sounding, like "Hadrian". Worringly, it implies that many writers agree with Aunt Petunia's assessment that "Harry" is a "nasty, common name" unfit for their special superpowered wizard god.
• Harry is a "Lord" of some sort but never knew about it. This in spite of Canon mentioning several times that there is no wizarding nobility. He could be "Lord Potter", "Lord Black", "Lord Slytherin", or "Lord Peverell", or anything else sounding sufficiently "magical". One subgenre has him as "Lord Azkaban", which gives him control of the main wizarding prison (and often comes with the reveal that the Ministry of Magic owes him centuries' worth of back taxes for using his prison).
• Harry is entitled to a seat on the Wizengamot, if not multiple seats. As the Wizengamot is essentially the highest wizarding court, one would think a seat is earned on merit, but in these fics, the seats are hereditary — they come with Harry's "lordship", no questions asked. Harry can leverage those seats to make the Ministry of Magic do his bidding. Furthermore, some technicality will allow Harry to be treated as a legal adult while he's still in school — the most common one is his participation in the Triwizard Tournament, which is technically not open to underage wizards (but had been in the past — it's just the relaunched tournament that isn't). Meanwhile, Harry can engage in political power games with powerful families like the Malfoys, who will also own multiple seats in the Wizengamot and be portrayed as corrupt and evil for doing exactly what Harry is doing. All of this ignores that the Wizengamot is technically subordinate to the Ministry of Magic, almost as if the writers are mostly Americans who expect the court system to be equal with the rest of the government.
• Harry is also entitled to a shitload of money. While Harry already canonically has a vault at Gringotts containing the money he inherited from his deceased parents (that's why Deceased Parents Are the Best), the fic will establish that there are more vaults with more money and treasure to which Harry's access has been blocked. Many fics justify this by noting that Harry's vault is just money (implying it's just a trust fund), while other families explicitly have treasure in their vaults.
• Harry gets a "magical inheritance" that instantly grants him a Superpower Lottery of magical talents and abilities, with no effort involved. Expect him to be a metamorphmagus, an animagus (almost always a dragon or phoenix), gain special versions of his existing spells (like a golden Patronus), or have several other skills and "lost" forms of magic that no one else has. This "inheritance" usually requires a particularly powerful magical background; this often forces writers to Retcon Harry's mother Lily as not being a Muggleborn and actually coming from a powerful magical family. It also allows a sort of kinship with Neville, who canonically is descended from a powerful magical family and might know the secrets of magical inheritance.
• Harry gets to totally disavow the Dursleys. Dumbledore's insistence that Harry live with them is revealed to be part of his plot to suppress Harry's power. Expect the Dursleys to be far more abusive than they were in canon. If Lily is revealed to really be from a magical family, she might not be related to Petunia at all.
• Harry gets a Power Makeover. Since he no longer has to wear Dudley's hand-me-downs and is obscenely wealthy, he can dress for style, often by shopping at Hot Topic or the local equivalent. He also uses potion-steroids to fix his appearance, like fixing his eyesight, bulking up and getting a growth spurt (counteracting the Dursleys' starvation regimen), and obscuring or even removing his trademark scar. He also often grows his hair long. This serves to make him unrecognizable to Dumbledore and his (once) closest friends.
• Ron — and often Hermione, but always Ron — is revealed to have only befriended Harry on Dumbledore's order. The idea of an eleven-year-old child pulling off this kind of long-term deception is laughable. And if Hermione is included, it reaches the far side of the Gambit Roulette, given how her actual friendship with Harry began. Ron's mother Molly is usually involved in the deception^note Indeed, many writers point to a single "inconsistency" from Philosopher's Stone to prove her duplicitous nature — that she asks Ginny which platform the Hogwarts Express leaves from, when it hasn't changed in decades and Molly's been sending her older children to Hogwarts for years. Evidently, these writers have never heard of the "question game", in which parents will ask their young children questions to which they already know the answer (but pretend they don't) to test the child's knowledge, possibly for her own selfish reasons like ensuring Harry marries Ginny, or getting paid by Dumbledore, usually with money embezzled from Harry's vast fortune (which would only increase the odds of Harry finding out the truth). Many fics have Harry only learning this in the future and fixing it with Time Travel, turning him into a Peggy Sue. If they don't, Ron and Hermione stop being Harry's friends as soon as he finds out about the deception, and he has to go find new allies.
• Not everything Harry inherits is a good thing. He's also subject to a "marriage contract" of some kind, signed in his infancy or even before he was born, requiring him to marry a girl (or girls) he barely knows. Either the girl herself or her family is the villain of the story, and if the girl isn't the villain, then she's his True Love. Said girl could be a canon character like Hermione or Luna (but never Ginny), or an O.C. Stand-in who was barely mentioned, often a Slytherin like Daphne Greengrass. (Or all of them at once.)
• Harry gets the goblins of Gringotts on his side. This is usually accomplished through simple courtesies, like remembering Griphook's name, which mark him as radically different from the rest of the racist bastards that make up the rest of the wizarding world. This allows the goblins to throw all of their military and economic power behind Harry.
• Harry gets a super-trunk that's Bigger on the Inside. It has its own apartment, kitchen, library, potions lab, training room, and Quidditch field. While it is canonically a viable concept (see Hermione's Bag of Holding and Newt Scamander's briefcase in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), none of this is strictly necessary, especially if Harry inherits vast mansions and other properties.
• Harry gets hardcore in his magic and goes fully "Dark". He turns simple spells that they learn in class like Wingardium Leviosa into deadly techniques. He successfully argues that no spell is truly "dark", even the Unforgivable Curses that require the caster to enjoy killing, controlling, or torturing their victim. He might also get a new super-wand or staff, usually made with basilisk parts.
• Harry picks up a "snake" theme, perhaps in keeping with his suppressed Slytherin side. Expect him to get a super-special snake familiar to act as his spy, mentor, and confidant in equal measure.
• Harry gets trained in special unknown magic by elves, demons, vampires, goblins, Time Lords, or what have you. This gives him powers far more advanced than any of his peers, allowing him to stun his classmates when he comes back to Hogwarts for the next term and easily solve every problem the canon throws at him. Exactly why these people choose to train Harry can vary from "no explanation given" to "he's Lord of the Vampires." Staples include limitless shapeshifting, wandless and wordless magic, "almost Unforgivable" curses, fluency in a secret language, and floating runes.
• Harry is framed for some horrendous crime and imprisoned in Azkaban. All of his friends will turn on him in the process, including Sirius. They usually take the opportunity to be particularly cruel to Harry, with the standard acts being killing Hedwig and destroying his photo album while laughing about it. Eventually, Harry is either cleared or escapes — but not before the experience grants him an immense powerup, which he mostly uses to enact his revenge on those who betrayed him, as well as to defeat Voldemort (if the two aren't one and the same). In other words, it's The Count of Monte Cristo WITH HARRY POTTER!.

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Abusive Dursleys:

In these fanfics, Harry's abusive childhood is usually treated more seriously than in the books. It's also dramatically escalated, graduating to brutal violence and Gratuitous Rape. Interestingly, the abuse is often not retconned to have been happening all along; instead, it starts when Harry is a grown teenager, showing him arriving back at Privet Drive for the summer and the Dursleys immediately turning into monsters for whatever reason. Sometimes there's an explicit catalyst, such as Moody threatening the Dursleys at the end of the fifth book. Such fics often start In Medias Res, with a beaten Harry reflecting on how different the Dursleys have been this summer.

That's not to say that there are no stories in which the abuse has always happened. Those stories have it starting when Harry is an infant, leading to a character who's sustained multiple serious injuries by eleven years old and being dangerously underweight from the starvation diet imposed on him. Weirdly, it doesn't extent to his height, when one would expect a long-malnourished child to be shorter than his peers.

Common features include:

• Vernon is entirely responsible for the abuse. Petunia and Dudley will be mentioned so little, you'd think Vernon and Harry were the only people living in the house. If Petunia and Dudley do participate in the abuse, they'll essentially be Vernon's minions. While Petunia might be abused herself and undergo a High-Heel–Face Turn, you won't see that with Dudley.
• Harry is given a Long List of impossible chores, and is beaten and raped for failing to complete them.
• Harry lives in the cupboard under the stairs. If they had let him move out like they did in canon, in the fic they force him back down there again.
• Vernon brutally kills Hedwig, ensuring that Harry can't contact the wizarding world for help. Either this is Vernon's motivation for doing so, or he's just trying something new to torture Harry.
• Harry never saves himself from the abuse, regardless of how old he is, how powerful he is, and how often he's faced Voldemort. He never stands up for himself — either he dies, or someone else saves him. Indeed, a Harry who can save himself obviates the point of the story; that kind of fic usually goes in the other direction, with an overpowered Harry smacking the Dursleys into submission the second they lay a finger on him.
• Harry develops Dissociative Identity Disorder from the abuse.
• Harry becomes an obscurial from the abuse, a development introduced by the Fantastic Beasts films. Either he turns into a walking Angst Nuke, or he learns to harness the obscurus and boost his power.
• Dumbledore knows what's up but does nothing to stop it, either because he's oblivious or because he's trying to suppress Harry's power.
• Whoever saves Harry will be an unexpected ally, often Snape. This allows the abuse to set up a Hurt/Comfort Fic.
• An occasional inversion sees Petunia as the abuser and Vernon as the more reasonable one. It has the potential to be more interesting, exploring Petunia's extreme resentment of being The Unfavorite next to her sister Lily, and giving Vernon a little character development. More often, though, writers use it as an excuse to power Harry up the Muggle way by having Vernon sneak him out of the house and teach him martial arts or give him a firearm as a means to defend himself.^note Again, most of these writers are Americans and neglect to address the strict firearms laws in Britain that would prevent this kind of thing from happening.

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Other Canon Era Plots:

• Harry Is Raised Differently: Harry is not abused exactly like the books portray. Whether this is because he was raised by someone else, or just because the Dursleys didn't abuse him the same way, this leads to Harry having a totally different personality when he gets to Hogwarts. Given Harry's canon status as a Naïve Newcomer, it turns him into effectively an O.C. Stand-in; fics like this either go the easy route and turn Harry into an overpowered phenom, or they explore what a different character might do in Harry's situation. It's not always a happy ending; consider a Harry who ends up as fat and nasty as Dudley and how ready he'd be to face Voldemort. However, the vast majority of fanfics conclude that pretty much anyone and everyone other than maybe Umbridge would have done a better job raising Harry than the Dursleys, leading to fanfics showing a much better-adjusted Harry arriving at Hogwarts having been raised by, inter alia, Sirius and Remus; Snape; the Longbottoms; his not-so-dead parents; the Malfoys; the Lestranges; Voldemort himself; Kreacher; Barty Crouch, Jr; snakes; Dementors; The Legions of Hell; or himself. All of this ignores the fact that Harry has important and powerful blood protection from being raised by the Dursleys which prevents Voldemort from just killing him over the summer.
• Late to Hogwarts: A young wizard or witch doesn't start Hogwarts at eleven years old, whether because they didn't get an invitation or were otherwise unable to go. A popular subgenre is the Transfer Student Fic, in which the student comes from a different wizarding school. It's very popular as a Wish-Fulfillment fic, with the other school being wherever the author's from, allowing the author to (a) invent a new, totally awesome wizarding school; (b) give the character unique, totally awesome, never seen in Britain magic; (c) not worry about the canon Hogwarts selection process; and (d) employ an Obvious Crossover Method. Giving the transfer student an inherited katana is a red flag. Hogwarts Legacy also uses the transfer student plot, but its developers are explicit that it's not canon.
• The Field Trip: Hogwarts students travel to another country to visit a wizarding school there. And it's usually in America, for the same reason that the exchange student usually comes from there. Sometimes it's a genuine wizarding school, in other cases it may as well by a Muggle high school. The former is mostly deprecated thanks to later canon establishing that there's only one wizarding school in North America, Ilvermorny, attended by a handful of the Fantastic Beasts characters.
• Snape Employs Magical Healing: A character, often Snape (because of course), uses hitherto unseen expertise to cure a character of a magical ailment that was previously thought to be permanent. Common examples include curing Lupin of his lycanthropy and Neville's parents of their torture-induced madness. Now that these characters are indebted to Snape, the author can expound how awesome he is.
• Harry's Long-Lost Relative: Harry finds (or is found by) a distant relative, either by blood or geography, who rescues Harry from the Dursleys and possibly even adopts him. It's powerful Crossover fodder, too.
• Voldemort Wins: A Dark Fic set in the bleak Dystopia of a victorious Voldemort. While an interesting concept, all too often it's just window dressing for a kinky Lemon in which Hermione is forced to be Draco's Sex Slave or something. (Even then, after Deathly Hallows most such fics take place during the interregnum when Voldemort did take over Britain.)
• Voldemort Wins, but Harry Goes Peggy Sue: Voldemort succeeds in conquering wizarding Britain (or at least scores a Pyrrhic Victory that leaves it a depopulated wasteland). But Harry goes back in time to his school days, so that he can Set Right What Once Went Wrong. (Sometimes it's a different character, but usually it's Harry.) A particular variant is the "Reptilia28 Challenge", in which Death himself sends Harry back in time.^note Reptilia28 himself became dissatisfied with the challenge as the plots "seem[ed] to blur together into one giant mass."
• Voldemort Uses Time Travel to Try Again: Harry succeeds, but now the bad guys use Time Travel to Make Wrong What Once Went Right. Either Harry (or whoever) has to follow them back in time in a Terminator Twosome, or school-age Harry and friends face a new threat. Both A Very Potter Sequel and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child use variants of this, and its status as a Fandom-Specific Plot is part of what made the latter feel so "fanfic-like". There's also a subgenre in which Voldemort turns out to be right and the Muggles are the real monsters, so Voldemort or his emissary becomes the good guy.
• Head Boy and Girl's Private Quarters: The Head Boy and Girl do not stay in the normal dormitories with everybody else, but instead have their own suite of rooms that they have to share. And there's only one bathroom. This forces them to interact a lot and generates massive amounts of Unresolved Sexual Tension. These fics tend to ignore that positions like Head Boy and Head Girl are based on academic merit and have totally random people like Draco Malfoy get handed the position. The whole point of all this, as you'd expect, is Shipping, and anyone and everyone can be shipped like this as long as they're the same age: Ron/Hermione, Harry/Hermione, Hermione/Draco, Lily/James, Rose/Scorpius, anyone with the Original Character. This apparently originated from Percy/Penelope, who were a couple in canon and happened to be Head Boy and Head Girl (but with no mention of them having a special dormitory, and even showing Percy living with the other Gryffindors).
• Education in Domestic Harmony: A hitherto unmentioned required course at Hogwarts pairs up the characters to learn how to be adults. This apparently requires them to live in the Room of Requirement and pretend to be a married couple, including Egg Sitting a magically-created baby. The idea is that the characters will fall in love. There is no explanation as to the morality of putting two Hormone Addled Teenagers in a room and forcing them to raise a child whom you plan to delete in a couple of months.
• The Yule Ball Happens Every Year Now: Canonically, the Yule Ball only happens in years in which the Triwizard Tournament is held. No such restraint in fanfic; there, it happens every year. This allows the raft of High-School Dance tropes to be used with little restriction. Indeed, it was so attractive to writers that many were under the impression that the Yule Ball really did happen every year and the only reason we didn't see it until Goblet of Fire is that the characters weren't old enough for it; it wasn't until Order of the Phoenix came out that fanfic writers figured it out. In the meantime, every fanfic assumed otherwise, even The Draco Trilogy. A few persisted afterwards, some with a Handwave as to why it happens every year now.
• The Maid of Malfoy Manor: A female character — usually Hermione, Ginny, or an Original Character — is hired as a maid in Malfoy Manor. Draco lives there. Do you see where this is going?
• The Severitus Fic: Harry's real father is not James Potter, but Severus Snape. The style of fic is named after the "Severitus Challenge", issued in 2001 by fanfic writer Severitus. The challenge mostly arose out of the fact that Harry looks almost exactly like James; it originally called for writers to find a way for Harry's appearance to change to look more like Snape over the course of the fic. It was a silly challenge, but it was extremely popular, and the name stuck around even after people started to drop some of the requirements (some of which were unrelated to the Harry/Snape relationship, like Lupin coming back to Hogwarts). Among the explanations for why Lily would ever have a child with Snape: (a) Lily really loved Snape, despite him being a Muggle-hating Death Eater whose ideology drove them apart in canon; (b) Lily had an affair with Snape, probably because James never grew up like canon says he did; (c) James couldn't have children, and Lily asked her friend to do them a favor; (d) James, Lily, and Severus were in a secret threesome and Harry was their secret potion-baby; or (e) any number of inane ideas that completely ignore canon.
• Light and Dark: The Harry Potter universe is recast in a strict dichotomy between "light" and "dark", almost in a Star Wars-esque way. This in spite of the canon series never having treated magic like that, or even many of the canon characters (e.g. Voldemort's "there is no good or evil, only power and those too weak to seek it"). Stories tend to lean on the Light/Darkness Juxtaposition to allow characters to more easily switch sides, or to explain why a character is so much more powerful than the used to be. In particular, it allows Harry to turn "Dark" and unlock incredible power, and for characters like Ron to suddenly turn on Harry because they hate the "Dark" so much.
• The Second Prophecy: The prophecy about Harry and Voldemort isn't the only one about Harry. There's another one that the characters have missed. It usually ends with Harry turning to the Dark Arts, or picking up God Mode, or both. Expect obscure and symbolic animal imagery and vague terms about "light" and "dark", which are not common features of canon prophecies. One common subgenre is for the second prophecy to undo the first and make Harry The Unchosen One, usually in favour of a female character who can redeem the enemy with The Power of Love (read: hook up with Draco and induce a Sex–Face Turn).
• The Gender Bender Fic: One of the male characters is turned into a girl, either temporarily or permanently. And they can't change back at will, even using the same spell. It's often done for Jumping the Gender Barrier, allowing the writer to pair two originally male characters without it being a Slash Fic. In other cases, the writer has no idea beyond "let's make this character into a girl!", and after the literary equivalent of a Shopping Montage, the story becomes a Dead Fic.
• Ron the Death Eater: It's a scenario so common, it became the Trope Namer for the entire phenomenon. Ron is so jealous and resentful of Harry that he goes way Out of Character and spontaneously does a Face–Heel Turn. The most common reason for this is that the writer ships Harry/Hermione and seeks to make Ron Die for Our Ship. It doesn't always have to be Ron, though; sometimes Ginny's the culprit, dosing Harry with Love Potion to steal his money and fame.
• In Love with a Book: Ginny falls in love with the ghost of student-aged Tom Riddle, as expressed through his diary in Chamber of Secrets. While many shippers shy away from that particular pairing because it's pretty Squicky, others find it intriguing. But very few of them are able to come up with anything more than "Tom Riddle has sex with Ginny in the Chamber of Secrets before Harry shows up".
• The Talking Diary: All magical diaries are like Tom Riddle's and talk back to you when you write in them. Some such fics make the diary evil just like Tom Riddle's was, but others treat the diary more neutrally and portray it as a normal thing. (If it were a normal thing, no parent would be keen on their teenage girl opening their heart to some stranger in their diary, but whatever.)
• Ginny's Still Evil: Harry doesn't actually save Ginny when he destroys Riddle's diary — she's still got the evil in her. This can go two ways — either Ginny turns on Harry (and separates him from his actual Love Interest), or she's treated sympathetically because she's hot. When combined with the above plot, it essentially turns her into "Tom Riddle's queen", with Voldemort magically reverting to his Riddle-era good looks.
• The Summer of Love: Harry spends the summer with a female character, they fall in love very quickly, and they have sex. It usually happens after Order of the Phoenix, when Harry canonically leaves the Dursleys for good and hangs out at Sirius's old place. The three most popular candidates for said girl are Hermione (but of course), an Original Character (but of course), or Tonks (who helps Harry get over Sirius's death, never mind that she's seven years older than he is). In some cases, their love will be so strong that it will be the key to defeating Voldemort, and there may even be a second prophecy to that effect. Ron and Ginny will turn evil in opposition to the relationship, especially if the girl is Hermione.
• The Fountain of Youth: A character is de-aged to a baby or small child and must be cared for by other characters — or, in some cases, one character in particular. The victim is usually Snape, and the whole point of the fic is to make him cuddly.
• Matchmaker Dumbledore: Wise, old Dumbledore understands the power and righteousness of the author's One True Pairing. He becomes a Shipper on Deck, focusing all his efforts on getting those characters together rather than irrelevant concerns like killing Voldemort. After all, if Dumbledore says Draco and Ginny should be together, then obviously it must be true, right? It's never combined with a "manipulative Dumbledore" story because Dumbledore needs to be the good guy in this equation. It often, however, gets combined with the Head Boy and Girl's Private Quarters plot and may even "explain" (such as it does) why they have such an arrangement to begin with.
• I Married a Teenaged Veela: In the course of the Second Task of the Triwizard Tournament, Gabrielle Delacour bonds to Harry because he took the time to save her. This means that for all magical and legal purposes, she is now his wife. Fortunately, due to the vagaries of Veela biology, she is not actually the eight-year-old she appears to be, and shortly thereafter she undergoes a perfectly normal delayed and accelerated puberty that leaves her physically at her real age of 14 or so. Not exclusive to Harry/Gabrielle shipping stores; it's also surprisingly common in Harry/Unwanted Harem stories.
• Sirius Lives: Exactly What It Says on the Tin — Sirius Black survives his demise in Order of the Phoenix. There's a surprisingly common subgenre in which he and Harry team up to become Gentleman Thieves who steal from the Death Eaters and give to their victims. In the process, they go from wealthy to having more money than God. Also often combined with the Harem fics. One variant has him actually dead but successfully resurrected by Harry and company; this variant usually doubles as a Hurt/Comfort Fic, as the characters help Sirius get over his Resurrection Sickness. (And then they become Gentleman Thieves.)
• Professor Figg: Arabella Figg, the unassuming neighbour who was Harry's babysitter growing up, turns up as a Hogwarts professor. Most often, she teaches Defence Against the Dark Arts and is the most badass Cool Old Lady ever. It was a common fic during the so-called "three-year summer" between the releases of Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix; after the latter established that she was a Muggle Born of Mages, this plot died a quick death.
• The Level Beyond "Wizard": There exists a sect of uber-powerful magical people who are to wizards as wizards are to Muggles. They're called "Magids" in The Draco Trilogy, "Strega" in Pawn To Queen, and "Druids" in The Girl Who Lived, but it's all the same basic idea. Expect them to be right about everything, leading to Author Filibusters and Can't Argue with Elves scenarios. It was so common that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality made fun of the concept with the "double witch", a form of Wish-Fulfillment fantasy common in young witches and wizards who want "special magical powers" (which leads Hermione to conclude that witches and wizards seem not to appreciate their powers at all).
• Animagus in Plain Sight: A character (usually Harry, Draco, or Hermione) becomes an animagus or is otherwise transfigured into an animal, and they hide in plain sight as the pet of another character (usually Harry, Draco, or Hermione). A popular candidate animal is the snake, which allows others to understand them if they happen to be a Parselmouth.
• Harry Raised by Snakes: This is usually accomplished by having the Dursleys dump Harry in the woods as a toddler. He grows up knowing only Parseltongue and becomes a snake animagus (often by accident). It's usually a setup for a manipulative Dumbledore, a Dark Harry, and a Voldemort who can Pet the Snake.
• Slytherin Returns: Salazar Slytherin lives as Sealed Evil in a Can — and the can gets opened. And the statue of him in the Chamber of Secrets really is him — the result of an accident from a misplaced engorgio charm and accidentally looking into the eyes of his own basilisk.^note Canonically, direct eye contact should kill him; all the characters who evaded death by being petrified did so by catching the basilisk's gaze in a mirror. Not that most fanfic authors will remember this. Such fics are usually set after Voldemort's defeat, when a new Big Bad is needed; those fics usually just turn Salazar into Voldemort with a different name, right down to recruiting former Death Eaters as his followers. The Draco Trilogy is the Trope Codifier, if not the Trope Maker; infamous fic Hogwarts Exposed used it too.
• The Spawn of Voldemort: Voldemort has children! And they seek to finish the job even after their father is defeated at the end of the canon series. Again, it's used to allow for a villain in stories set after the series' end. Bizarrely, it's technically Ascended Fanon, given its use in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
• Everywhere Else Is Full: A common trope in both fan fiction and the original books — whoever gets top dibs on Hogwarts Express compartments, it's not the main characters. Inevitably, Everywhere Else Is Full, so they'll have to share a compartment with a plot-relevant character. In canon, it's used to introduce Ron in the first book, Lupin in the third book, and Luna in the fifth book. The line "everywhere else is full" is actually spoken by Hermione in the third movie and by Ron in both the film and book version of Philosopher's Stone. In the world of fan fiction, it's pretty much reached the level of Share Phrase, and it's a traditional way of introducing new characters.
• Voldemort Mentors Harry: Voldemort secretly mentors Harry into joining the Dark Side and putting the filthy Muggles in their place. He usually accomplishes this in horcrux form, most commonly the diary or Harry's scar. Interestingly, it kind of happens in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which Voldemort (or rather another villain taking over his body) becomes headmaster of Hogwarts and Harry grows up to be a psychopath.
• Voldemort Adopts Harry: Instead of trying to kill Harry on that fateful night, Voldemort kidnaps him and raises him as his own son, training him to become a Tyke Bomb. Related to the above plot, but this time with Voldemort getting in on the action as early as he possibly can.
• Harry Adopts Voldemort: The opposite of the above. Harry is sent back in time to the 1940s, rescues young Tom Riddle from the Orphanage of Fear, and gives him a loving home so that he won't become Voldemort.
• The Creature Fic: Harry (or Draco or Hermione) is suddenly revealed to be a Half-Human Hybrid and will come into his "creature inheritance" at age sixteen. While such hybrids do exist in canon (most notably half-giant Hagrid), there's nothing to suggest such traits do not manifest until one is a teenager. A particular variant is where Draco Malfoy is revealed to be a vampire, or an elf, or a male Veela — the point here is that he's one of The Fair Folk, naturally more beautiful and sexy than your ordinary human, which means it makes total sense to betrouser him in leather the way fanfic writers so often do.
• Fem!Blaise: Blaise Zabini is canonically a male. In fanfic, Blaise Zabini is more often a female. Since they are basically an O.C. Stand-in who was mentioned only very obliquely in the series as a Slytherin peer of Malfoy's, fanfic writers over time built up a character around them independently from the canon. In fanfic, she quickly became a fair-skinned Italian bombshell who's frequently shipped with Harry. It wasn't until later that canon revealed that not only is he a "he", he's also black. This one so shattered the popular fan conception of the character that it became a major example of Outdated by Canon, to the point that they're the page image for the trope.
• Vampire!Cedric: Cedric Diggory is a vampire — a plot derived entirely from his film incarnation being played by the same actor who played Twilight's Edward Cullen, sparkly vampiric boyfriend extraordinaire. It was just too much for some writers to resist. This connection also spread to a few other characters becoming vampires, like Malfoy or Snape. Or, in the case of My Immortal, damn near everyone (even though that particular fic predated Twilight).
• Harry the Necromancer: Harry has the power to raise the dead. It's often combined with the "Overpowered Harry" story suggesting he inherited the power, with The Reveal that the Potters were historically a "Dark" family and their ability to raise the dead goes back to the Peverell brothers and their bargain with Death. (Some even explain the surname "Potter" as an Unusual Euphemism that should more accurately be akin to "Undertaker" — the idea is that both play in the dirt.) Harry often pursues his necromancer heritage in order to bring back Sirius.
• Harry Merges with His Horcrux: This often allows him to unlock his "Dark" powers. In many cases, his personality does a complete 180, and there will often be physical changes as well.
• Finding Your Wand: There's a wand out there that allows every witch and wizard to make the most of their magic, and if you find it, you can unlock greater power than you ever dreamed. Harry's already got his (what with its special connection to Voldemort's), but other characters like Neville and Ron get hand-me-downs. In these stories, Harry helps Neville (and sometimes Ron, but always Neville) get a wand that actually works for him and helps him realise his potential as a powerful wizard. (In canon, Ron gets his own wand at the beginning of the third book, and Neville gets his at the beginning of the sixth.)
• Luna the Seer: Luna can see the future. That's why so much of what she says doesn't make much sense. If you can understand what the hell she's saying, you can find the answer to any question.
• Voldemort Gets a Makeover: Voldemort finds a way to restore the good looks of his youth after decades of being a bald, pale, red-eyed monstrosity. It's almost always done in fics that ship him with someone, either because he turns good or a good guy turns evil. Let's face it: no one wants to make out with a red-eyed snake-face. Sometimes it's explained that he looks like a snake on purpose, as a result of some animagus- or metamorphmagus-related magic, and that he did so to get his followers to deify him as a superhuman and be less distracted by his good looks (not that this apparently dissuaded Bellatrix).
• Lucius Malfoy Owns the Government: Any position of power is held or controlled by Lucius Malfoy, who has so much money he can do anything. This usually involves ignorance of canon, showing him as a member of the Hogwarts Board of Governors (which he was, but was kicked out after the events of Chamber of Secrets), the Wizengamot (which he was not, as established by Order of the Phoenix), or any number of positions during Half-Blood Prince, during which he was in Azkaban or a fugitive therefrom.
• Lucius Malfoy, Voldemort's Number Two: Lucius Malfoy is portrayed as Voldemort's right-hand man and even takes over the Death Eaters after Voldemort is gone. However, this kind of misapprehends his canonical position in the organisation; while he is probably the most prominent of the Death Eaters we see, Voldemort doesn't particularly trust him. After all, he screws up the operation in Chamber of Secrets, is called out on his loyalty in Goblet of Fire, and straight-up defects in Deathly Hallows.
• Hedwig the Phoenix: Hedwig is not actually a snowy owl, but a phoenix. Because an ordinary owl, even one as useful and loyal as Hedwig, just isn't cool enough for your story's protagonist. It's usually accomplished by her either having a magical disguise, or dying and coming back to life in her true form.
• The Cool Familiar: Witches and wizards have familiars with cool powers and abilities. But they have to be an owl, cat, or toad, as the Hogwarts rules stated back in Philosopher's Stone. While this is a common magical trope, it doesn't actually apply to Harry Potter; while the typical pets are traditionally thought of as familiars, they're just pets, nothing more. Meanwhile, the series also shows pets other than owls, cats, or toads, like Ron's rat and Lee Jordan's tarantula. Ironically, the closest thing the canon has to a magical familiar is Filch's cat Mrs Norris.
• The Mystical Veil. The veil through which Sirius falls is never adequately explained in canon, making it prime Fanfic Fuel. In some cases, it's a portal to another universe, providing fodder for a Crossover. (They especially love Star Wars, for whatever reason.) In other cases, it sends you back in time, usually to the time of Philosopher's Stone — that particular one was popularised by Oh God, Not Again!, even though it was a parody of that particular idea.
• Neville Lestrange: Neville is a Lestrange who was kidnapped from his real parents by Frank and Alice Longbottom during the first war. In retaliation, the Lestranges tortured Frank and Alice into insanity, but they never got Neville back for whatever reason. There is a "Harfang Longbottom" on the Black Family Tree, so it's possible that Neville is distantly related to the Lestranges, but only in the sense of every pureblood being related to each other.
• McGonagall Sides with Umbridge: A minor one, but it's surprisingly common — McGonagall finds out about Umbridge's Blood Quill (perhaps even from Harry himself) but tells Harry to keep quiet about it. Chalk this one up to misremembering Order of the Phoenix; McGonagall does tell Harry not to raise a fuss about Umbridge, but that was before the detentions started, and Harry never complained about the Blood Quill to anyone, in part because he wanted to tough it out and felt that complaining would be a sign of capitulation.
• The Potter Curse: A very specific curse that all Potter men will have dark, untameable hair and fall in love with a smart red-headed woman. The main reason this exists is for Harry/Ginny shippers to provide incontrovertible proof (well, in their eyes) that Ginny really is his True Love.
• Snape's Detention-Date: Snape sees no distinction between "detention" and "date". Most fics of this kind disregard the fact that this is a particularly coercive way to engineer a Teacher/Student Romance and would be grossly unethical. However, in the fic, rather than get fired as he should, Snape gets away with it because of The Power of Love.
• Lockhart's Detention-Date: Same thing, but with the inept Professor Lockhart from Chamber of Secrets. In this case, he's canonically kind of a heartthrob with a reputation for power and adventure, if undeserved. The fic will escalate it to the point where he can semi-openly have a relationship with his students (perhaps only with seventh-years, in which case it might even technically be legal). In a few cases, he is portrayed as a paedophile, which gives Harry and company an excuse to torture and kill him; interestingly, this almost never happens to Snape.
• Magical Eagleland: A particular variant of "life outside of wizarding Britain" showing wizarding America as a brilliant land of freedom. It has none of the blood prejudice of wizarding Britain, nor any of those pesky restrictions like laws forbidding teenagers from using magic outside of school. This one got Outdated by Canon thanks to the Fantastic Beasts films depicting wizarding America as even more restrictive about these things than Britain, albeit in the 1920s so things may have changed since then.
• Who Reads Books Anymore?: A Patchwork Fic where elements invented for the film adaptations are adapted as if they were part of the canon all along — often unknowingly, suggesting that if the author did read the books, the allure of the big screen is so strong that the film versions easily supplanted them as the primary source anyway. Expect to see the films' conception of the school's uniforms (which are not colour-coded by house in the books), characters' appearances (Neville's a blond in the books but his actor is not), or certain Character Tics (Hermione only calls Ron "Ronald" once in the books but does it more often in the films).
• Umbridge Gets Her Due: Ridiculously common, as the character is a tremendous Hate Sink; you'll see this even as a subplot of a fic about something else. Most such plots take their cues from Fred and George's dramatic exit in Order of the Phoenix, involving them leaving the school in a state of chaos; this will escalate to characters pulling pranks on her over the course of an entire year, often Gaslighting her and turning her into The Paranoiac. An alternative is to have a Rules Lawyer student who beats her at her own game, even if Umbridge changes the rules to her advantage — the holy grail is if said character can use their rule-fu to have her removed from her position and thrown in Azkaban.
• Hermione and Scabior: Set during Deathly Hallows when Scabior takes Hermione captive, in this fic he either whisks her away from Malfoy Manor or never takes her there to begin with. Then one of four things happens: (a) he rapes her but she kills him and escapes; (b) he rapes her and she falls for him; (c) he falls for her and makes a Heel–Face Turn; or (d) he falls for her and turns out not to have been that evil to begin with.
• House Elves in Bondage: The House Elves as a Slave Race are explained by being magically compelled to bond to a witch or wizard, on pain of losing their magic and dying. This usually explains away Hermione's awkward grandstanding as the only one in the entire series actually lobbying for house elves' freedom. They also often Retcon Dobby as having secretly bound himself to Harry while pretending to be free for Harry's benefit. In some such fics, house elves are portrayed as leeches who work in exchange for magic.
• Magical Cores: The fic introduces the concept of the "magical core", which determines a wizard's Power Level. This means that some witches and wizards are just Born Lucky and innately more powerful than everyone else. It's very, very often used in "Overpowered Harry" fics to justify his incredible power. It also badly contradicts the canon, in which no such thing exists and a witch or wizard's magic is determined almost entirely by their own knowledge and skill.

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Alternate Universes:

• Reading the Books: Characters read the books and comment on them. Most commonly they're given the MST treatment, especially by characters like the Marauders who would be good at that sort of thing. Other variations include Umbridge reading them out loud to the entire Great Hall, Snape reading them and realising he misunderstood Harry all along, or the entire Order reading them during Order of the Phoenix to find out what to do next.
• Reading the Fanfics: Characters read other fanfics, including classics like My Immortal (here) and Becoming Female (here).
• Mental Time Travel: Characters travel to another era and comment on it. This could be to their own pasts, to as far back as the Dumbledore-Grindelwald era of the 1940s, or even to see the Hogwarts founders in the 10th century. Unlike your usual Peggy Sue plot, this is just commentary; the characters can't change anything.
• The Future Founders: Characters travel back to the Founders' era but do interact with the timeline. This allows Harry to become either Godric Gryffindor or Salazar Slytherin, and his companions might become the other founders as well.
• Hermione Redeems the Marauders: Hermione goes back in time to the Marauders' era and falls in love with one of the characters from then, usually Remus, Sirius, or Snape. It had a brief but torrid run of popularity circa 2005-07, with such fics usually never exploring the implications of Hermione's presence in the era other than for sexytimes.
• Love Redeems Voldemort: A character (usually female, but not always) goes back in time and falls in love with Tom Riddle before he becomes Voldemort. Tom never becomes Voldemort and instead has lots of sex. It started as a way to ship him with Ginny without the problem of him being destined to turn evil, but since then Hermione became the redeemer of choice.
• Slytherin Returns, and He's Harry: Similar to Slytherin Returns fics, but this time rather than serve as the villain, he's reincarnated as Harry himself — will all the memory access, skill acquisition, and personality adjustments it implies. Slytherin is now Tall, Dark, and Snarky, and no longer a racist prick. Existence of the basilisk is justified or handwaved. Again, Harry's companions can similarly take the place of the other founders.
• A Veela Must Mate or Die: A Veela has a predermined mate (and it's always called a "mate"), and they're magically compelled to seek that person out and... well, mate. Even if they're already in a relationship with someone else. Originally done to pair Harry and Fleur despite Fleur already being married to Bill, it quickly became fodder for "Male Veela Draco" fics, allowing Draco to be paired up with damn near anyone, but often Hermione. In the relatively rare event that the chosen "mate" isn't too keen on such a relationship, the fic will introduce an ancient magical law to force their hand.
• Harry the Slytherin: Harry is sorted into Slytherin, probably because it would have been canon had Harry not requested otherwise. (He could be sorted into other houses, but that's much less common.) If he's in Slytherin, expect the "light and dark" dichotomy to be played for all it's worth; Harry's personality does a 180, Draco is now Harry's best friend, and Ron and the other Gryffindors are dumb jocks who hate Harry because he's "Dark". The more "interesting" alternative is for Slytherin!Harry to wrestle with Draco for control of the house, creating a new dimension to their existing rivalry.
• Hermione the Slytherin: Hermione is sorted into Slytherin, which doesn't make much sense (she admits in canon that her decision was between Gryffindor and Ravenclaw), but there you go. Here, she becomes best friends with Draco Malfoy and then becomes a little bit more.
• Hermione the Pureblood: Hermione finds out she's not really a Muggleborn and actually a Pureblooded witch. The Unfortunate Implications are immediately striking — in canon, Hermione is an extraordinary witch despite being Muggleborn, but some writers can't imagine that level of power without pure blood. Indeed, in many cases the discovery of her pureblood heritage includes a set of powers that make her even more accomplished than in canon. It's also a way to ship her with notorious pureblood supremacist Draco Malfoy, as her new family is now in the same aristocratic sphere and Draco suddenly wants to impress her. (The other variant is for her new family to be the Malfoys, in which case she's Malfoy's long-lost twin sister.) Finally, she often gets a totally new aristocratic style, allowing her new appearance and especially her clothing to be described in loving detail — this, along with her drastic yet inevitable personality change, makes one wonder why the author didn't just make an Original Character.
• Marriage Law Fics: Some magical law or other compels two characters to get hitched. It's a ridiculously common way of accomplishing the shipping that fanfic writers so adore, and there are accordingly many subgenres:
  • Magical Genetic Diversity: The marriage laws exist as a way of fighting Purebloods' inbreeding tendency. In addition to genetic diversity, it allows for a greater pool of future witches and wizards, especially given the possibility of a Pureblooded couple producing a Squib. The laws would therefore force Purebloods to marry Half-bloods and Muggleborns. Hermione being a Muggleborn, she's the most common victim, often to pair her with Draco (never mind that in canon she married the Pureblooded Ron)^note if a fic ever addresses this, the idea would be that Malfoy wants Hermione for himself and wants to fight Ron for her. Given how most fanfic writers see Draco, they usually paint Ron as abusive and marrying him as a mistake. Interestingly, it means Harry is no longer a marriageable partner for her. Also interestingly, this particular plot element came from a fanfic-writing challenge seeking to pair Hermione with Snape, who being Half-blooded himself wouldn't really qualify^note but this was before Half-Blood Prince revealed that he even was Half-blooded, and most writers assumed that as hardcore a Death Eater as he was, he had to have been a Pureblood.
  • Magically Arranged Marriage: The marriage laws allow for families to enter a Magically-Binding Contract betrothing their children to each other, regardless of what the children have to say on the matter. It's most commonly done to explain why Hermione marries Ron — his mother did it! And the only one who can save her from her Awful Wedded Life with Ron is Draco! Or Snape! Or whoever.
  • Ministry Monitoring: Not only does the wizarding government establish the pairings (rather than the parties themselves or their families), they will enforce them by law. One fic even included a statute that the marriage must be proven consummated within a certain window of time.
  • Time Travel Age Trouble: Hermione ordinarily wouldn't be required by law to marry someone until she's an adult, but unfortunately for her, her extensive use of the Time Turner in Prisoner of Azkaban means that she's aged a year and a half and technically reached the marriageable age before she graduates from Hogwarts. (Never mind that she only used it to take extra classes, which adds up to two weeks at most, and it would be cancelled out anyway by the time she spent petrified in Chamber of Secrets).
  • The Marriage Stone: A magical artifact declares that two characters are soul mates. From there, they must be married and live together in private quarters. Even if they hate each other — they won't by the end, you can be sure. It can be combined with Magical Cores, suggesting that the "cores" themselves dictate this compatibility, in this case allowing the uber-powerful Harry to be paired with whichever lady is powerful enough to match him (Ginny, Hermione, Luna, or all of the above).
• The Wrong Boy-Who-Lived: Voldemort marks one child as the Chosen One, but the wizarding world mistakenly identifies else. This usually happens because Harry has a sibling, often a twin (if only because it keeps the timeline straight). Either Harry is mistakenly identified and his sibling is the real Chosen One, or Harry's sibling is marked as the "Child Who Lived" and Harry himself has to prove his chops. In the latter case, a common subgenre sees Harry run away from home and enter a Voldemort Adopts Harry story.
• Neville, the Boy-Who-Lived: Neville Longbottom is the Boy-Who-Lived and not Harry Potter. This one comes partly from canon; Dumbledore acknowledges this as a possibility, given that both Harry and Neville could have fulfilled the prophecy. Voldemort just chose Harry instead of Neville, but Dumbledore briefly muses on what the world would be like if Voldemort had chosen Neville instead, which was easy Fanfic Fuel.
• Harry's Parents Live — and They're Not So Great: After all, if Harry's parents lived and they were awesome, there'd be no tension and no story. In this case, the Potters either fall into the "I hate darkness" trap and clash with a young Harry who's pulled in the Slytherin direction, or (for whatever reason) they still dump him with the Dursleys and pretend to be dead.
• Hermione Down Under: Fanfic Fuel derived from Hermione's canon decision to protect her Muggle parents from Voldemort by wiping their memories and convincing them to move to Australia. In these fics, Hermione goes down there (either alone or with her Love Interest) to retrieve them and complications arise. In some cases, she can't restore their memories but befriends them all over again. In others, she finds that in the meantime they've had another daughter named "Hermione".
• Hermione's First Period: Surprisingly common, but almost always a joke.

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Pre-Canon Era:

• Founders Fics: Set during the era of the Hogwarts founders, a whole sub-genre unto itself:
  • The Marauders Before the Marauders: The Founders are portrayed similarly to the Marauders, best friends until other events intervene and force them into a falling-out. While they do have their own personalities distinct from the Marauders^note Ravenclaw is typically a Brainy Brunette and sometimes a Rich Bitch; Hufflepuff is a blonde, motherly, closer-to-Earth farm girl, Gryffindor is The Cape (or an Idiot Hero if you take the other side), and Slytherin is Tall, Dark, and Snarky (or a Smug Snake if you take the other side). While these were mostly developed in fanfic, they do have some basis in canon, they tend to spend so much of their time just hanging out that it becomes kind of implausible for them to be scholars who might reasonably found a school. Much like the Marauders, it's one member of the group who's the catalyst for the falling-out. (While the books do say that Slytherin left the rest of the group, it's far from clear exactly how it went down in canon.)
  • Slytherin the Pragmatist: Slytherin was not a Pureblood supremacist, but lived at a time when Witch Hunts and Viking raids were a thing. He built the Chamber of Secrets and introduced the basilisk as a weapon of last resort. It was only his descendants who twisted its purpose to their own ends.
  • Forbidden Founder Love: Gryffindor and Slytherin were much closer than history remembers, but their relationship wasn't accepted by their peers. Slytherin eventually chose to leave to preserve Gryffindor's reputation, having accepted that being a Parselmouth he was already "Dark".
• Gellert "Godwin" Grindelwald: Grindelwald is identified with Adolf Hitler, given that they were contemporaries and had similarly odious racist and expansionist ideologies. While that parallel was indeed intentional, the degree is a matter of... well, fanfic. And fanfic being what it is, it likes to focus on Grindelwald's relationship with Dumbledore. In some "manipulative Dumbledore" stories, Dumbledore is the bad guy, Grindelwald was just trying to calm him down, and history — being Written by the Winners — attributed Dumbledore's atrocities to Grindelwald. (That one was largely Outdated by Canon thanks to the Fantastic Beasts films.) Another variant is for Grindelwald to have been The Woobie and Armoured Closet Gay, and his inability to accept his homosexuality is what turned him evil. (And Dumbledore "won" the Elder Wand from him with a Kiss of Distraction.)
• Lily, the Marauders' Match: The Marauders weren't the real prankster kings of Hogwarts — that honour goes to Lily Evans and her band of female friends. It lends itself very well to shipping, especially when Lily's group includes a bookish and soft-spoken girl (paired with Remus) and a beautiful and outgoing girl (paired with Sirius). Before Order of the Phoenix, Arabella Figg was often plugged into the latter role as an O.C. Stand-in; after this was contradicted by the canon, that honour went to Marlene McKinnon, a friend of Lily's mentioned once in canon as someone who died in the First War and whose death really rattled Lily.
• Peter Who?: A fic focusing on the Marauders that makes little mention, if any, of Peter Pettigrew, who eventually betrayed the group. The canon series paints him as such an unpleasant character that fanfic writers have trouble writing him without disrupting the Marauders' feel. (Notice how the above subgenre doesn't invent a girl to ship with Peter.)
• Late for Hogwarts, but Early for Canon: A subgenre of the Late for Hogwarts story, this time with a new student who joins in the Marauders' era. This new student immediately befriends all the positive characters, helps Lily and James get together, and hooks up herself with either Sirius or Remus (depending on whom the author has a crush on).

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Post-Canon Era:

• Dudley's Child Gets a Hogwarts Letter: Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and easily contemplated by the setting's rules. Indeed, J. K. Rowling considered it herself, but decided against it.

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Crossovers:

• Canon Foreigner Adopts Harry: Here, the entity who saves Harry from the Dursleys is outside the canon entirely. This usually allows Harry to pick up special powers from the other universe. It almost always makes him a hypercompetent genius Chick Magnet who points out and eliminates everything the author doesn't like about the Harry Potter universe. The Ur-Example is Harry Potter And The Invincible Technomage, which plays it straight as an arrow; contrast Child of the Storm, which was explicitly written to subvert it.
• Canon Foreigner Reincarnates as Harry: This allows Harry to go through the series with all the memories and skills the other character picked up through the course of their work.
• Doctor Harry: A crossover with Doctor Who, in which two things will inevitably happen: the Doctor will be surprised by Hermione's Time Turner, and if the Doctor is in his tenth incarnation, he will be mistaken for Barty Crouch Jr.
• Hogwarts AU: A Transplanted Character Fic in which the characters from another fandom are dropped into Harry Potter's "fantasy boarding school" setting, and de-aged as necessary. Expect the main characters of the Harry Potter 'verse to be in the background, if they're around at all.
• Harry Potter and the Olympians: There is a truly enormous number of fanfics in which Percy Jackson or his friends come to teach or study at Hogwarts.
• Harry, The Grim Reaper: Harry has united the Deathly Hallows and assumed the mantle of Master of Death — including its responsibilities. He then becomes a Dimensional Traveler, addressing the soul-transporting needs of whichever other universe needs him. While he often discovers that he gets a serious power boost from the Hallows, possibly including Complete Immortality, and usually has whichever abilities he needs to survive his new universe, he also finds that he can never take a break or get rid of the Hallows.
• The Ultimate Showdown Against Voldemort: Dumbledore wanders into your favourite Fighting Series to recruit any superhuman he can to fight against Voldemort. Bonus points if the character is young enough (or looks young enough) to actually pass for a Hogwarts student. It most commonly takes place during Order of the Phoenix, which additionally allows for particularly Hot-Blooded Canon Foreigners to chafe under Umbridge's administration and use the opportunity to rip her a new one.

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News Parody

What I hoped to clean up:

• Unnecessary sentence fragments (description and examples flow better with complete sentences)
• Natter and improper indentation
• Word cruft (lots of "also" and the like)
• Writing in wikivoice, to prevent cases where "obviously some guy from this location wrote this particular example"
• Fleshing out some examples with insufficient descriptions
• Adding links where appropriate
• Removing excessive examples from the description, because that detail should be in the example section. Examples in the description like that give the false impression that they're "special" in some way.

Comments:

• We don't have a Useful Notes page on Boris Johnson? That surprises me. Given the number of redlinks to it on the page for Have I Got News for You, I'll guess that we used to have one but it was deleted. I made the redlink in case we decide to bring it back.
• Tried to arrange by country of origin, in part because it creates something of a continuity — you can easily see which shows influenced each other, and most news parodies focus on the local politics. It's not a strict order, though.
• Commented out a couple of entries which I didn't know what to do with.
• Put The Onion's followers into sub-bullets for The Onion itself.
• "Radio Free Cybertron" appears not to be an example. It doesn't appear to be a parody, just an In-Universe News Broadcast. I might be wrong, though — it's just that the example didn't say so.
• I can't fix "In the Style of" so that the link doesn't contain ellipses. Not even if I Pot Hole it. It looks ugly and breaks the flow of the sentence. I complained about this in a Wiki Talk thread, but it doesn't seem to be a high priority. I mean, I know it's trivial, but I just had to say it :)

Proposed revision:

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"The show you are about to watch is a news parody. Its stories are not fact checked. Its presenters are not journalists. And its opinions are not fully thought through."

— The Daily Show

News, but presented with a satiric and snide tone. It may be a show's entire premise or a single segment within a Sketch Comedy (like Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update").

A news parody may or may not report actual news stories. If it does not, it's a variant known as "faux news", like The Day Today — the stories are done In the Style of real news stories and spoof the array of News Tropes. If it does report actual news stories, it usually intersperses its reporting with jokes and commentary that you wouldn't get from a real News Broadcast. Over time, some viewers have come to prefer getting their news from News Parodies over "real" news outlets (which most News Parodies themselves don't recommend — they might be factual, but their breadth of coverage is too limited).

See also Shallow News Site Satire, which is a form of News Parody specific to "news" websites that don't really report actual news to begin with. Not to be confused with Kent Brockman News, a Show Within a Show parody of news shows, or the term "Faux News" as a pejorative nickname for Fox News Channel.

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Examples

Live-Action TV

United Kingdom

• That Was the Week That Was, a pioneering satirical show that lampooned current events in its sketches. Made in The '60s, its style of political satire was totally unknown and revolutionary, leading to many viewer complaints, even though it was fairly tame by our standards. The British original (1962-63) and the American remake (1964-65) were both fronted by David Frost.
• Not the Nine O'Clock News, a British show from The '80s and one of the earliest dedicated news parody shows, which aired at 9 PM on BBC2 directly opposite the real Nine O'Clock News on BBC1. It directly inspired a Transatlantic Equivalent in Not Necessarily the News, which itself became one of the earliest dedicated news parody shows in the U.S.
• The Day Today, a British "faux news" show by Chris Morris (adapted from the radio show On the Hour) that told absurd news stories in the same professional and deadpan style as real news reporting. Morris would later spin it into Brass Eye, which was a similar spoof of the Prime Time News format.
• Have I Got News for You is a news parody in Panel Show format, considered to be the Trope Maker of the British style of news parody. Real journalists and politicians are frequent contestants; the show was largely responsible for thrusting then little-known MP Boris Johnson into the national spotlight.
• Mock the Week, a Panel Show in a similar vein to Have I Got News for You. It's hosted by Dara Ó Briain and considered sort of Darker and Edgier.
• Top Gear includes a news segment about cars. It has evolved from the presenters sitting on furniture scavenged from cars and quickly running through relevant car news to the presenters poking fun at anything driving-related news — and each other.
• Broken News is a "faux news" show that's the Spiritual Successor to The Sunday Format, a radio series by the same writers. It cuts between snippets of different styles of News Broadcast — e.g. local BBC news broadcasts, national BBC News broadcasts (where the presenters keep interrupting each other), ITV News broadcasts (and their overuse of fancy graphics), and American news broadcasts (and their particularly oblivious hosts). The segments are intercut by a bored viewer flicking between channels.
• Drop the Dead Donkey was technically a Work Com, but it was set in a newsroom and eagerly spoofed current events, so it essentially functioned as a news parody. It had a very tight, South Park-esque production schedule that allowed it to be very topical as well.

United States

• The "Weekend Update" segments of Saturday Night Live are the Trope Maker, having been part of the show since the very first episode in 1975. It spoofs your average nightly News Broadcast, with one of the cast members recurring as a news anchor reading ridiculous stories, some of which are real and some of which are not. SNL also occasionally did sketches spoofing specific real news programs like The McLaughlin Group and anchors like Tom Brokaw.
• The Daily Show is a long-running news parody on Comedy Central. It hit its stride under its longtime host Jon Stewart in the 2000s, particularly lampooning America under George W. Bush. It's sufficiently informative to have won journalistic awards (even as Stewart insisted that he's a comedian, not a journalist); many, many Americans trusted The Daily Show more than actual news networks.^note Indeed, the appetite for this level of reporting was so strong that two Daily Show alums, John Oliver and Samantha Bee, went on to host their own shows (Last Week Tonight and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, respectively) that don't even really count as news parodies — just humorous but hard-hitting and in-depth reporting on real news. It's even been aired on genuine news networks outside the United States; the page quote preceded such airings to clarify that it was, in fact, a news parody. Since Stewart stepped down in 2015, it has been hosted by Trevor Noah.
• The Colbert Report was a Spin-Off of The Daily Show hosted by Stephen Colbert playing a parody of a blowhard conservative pundit. Derived from a Daily Show segment where Colbert openly spoofed The O Reilly Factor, it was highly popular in its day and essentially formed a pair with The Daily Show, with The Colbert Report airing immediately afterwards. The show ended in 2014 when Colbert left to host The Late Show, but Colbert will still occasionally break out his "conservative blowhard" persona on the latter show.
• The Nightly Show was a parody of a political panel show hosted by Daily Show alum Larry Wilmore. It aired in The Colbert Report's former slot after Colbert left to host The Late Show but was short-lived.
• The Jeselnik Offensive was a Black Comedy news parody on Comedy Central, hosted by infamously harsh comedian Anthony Jeselnik and mostly dedicated to mocking deaths and other tragic news stories.
• Crossballs was a short-lived Comedy Central parody of a political debate show, usually pitting actual experts against a revolving cast of comedians. The name was a portmanteau of the former CNN debate show Crossfire^note which was canceled two weeks after Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, went on the program and excorciated the hosts for their unprofessional and needlessly hostile approach to political debate and MSNBC's Hardball.

• Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld is a conservative news parody on the Fox News Channel — a channel that's long been a target of other news parodies. Fox News had tried to hit back for years, and its first offering, The Half-Hour News Hour, only lasted a few months before being unceremoniously canceled. Red Eye was much more successful and became one of Fox News's top-rated shows. It has a reputation for absurdism and being somewhere between a news parody, "faux news", and a fake pundit show — think The View if it had a decidedly Camp Gay bias. Gutfeld left the show in 2015 to host The Greg Gutfeld Show on the same channel, a straighter Talk Show but with frequent news parody segments.

Australia

• The Chaser's War On Everything is an Australian news parody by comedy troupe The Chaser. While not their only news parody, it's easily the best known. It's most famous for the hosts Bavarian Fire Drilling their way through a series of security checks to the entrance of George W. Bush's hotel at the 2007 APEC conference in Sydney. The Chaser's next most famous effort is its CNN parody CNNNN.
• One of the regular segments of Studio 3 is a news parody with kids as the anchors — but still pretending to be decrepit, old-fashioned news presenters.
• "ANNNN" (standing for "Australian National Nightly Network News") was a recurring sketch on Full Frontal. It started out as a series of short one-liners about the week's events, but it quickly evolved into a complete parody news report with a recurring cast of characters.

Canada

• This Hour Has 22 Minutes is a long-running news parody show on CBC that at times was as influential in Canada as The Daily Show was in the United States. Its name is a reference to This Hour Has Seven Days, a short-lived but hard-hitting Canadian news show from The '60s.
• The Rick Mercer Report is a Spin-Off of This Hour Has 22 Minutes hosted by Rick Mercer. It combines the news parody with the Travelogue Show, as Mercer would often visit places across Canada and interview people there. (And occasionally visit the U.S. and show how little Americans know about Canada.) In the process, Mercer got to interview a plethora of high-ranking Canadian political figures.
• Jimmy Mac Donalds Canada is a news parody set in The '60s and starring Richard Waugh.
• Infoman and La Fin du Monde est à Sept Heures (lit. "The End of the World is at Seven O'Clock") are French-language shows that are part news parody and part general silliness.

France

• Les Guignols de l'Info is a news parody using puppets — the guignol is a specific kind of puppet that was commonly used in French satire in the 19th century, although it also owes a lot to the British Spitting Image, which lampooned celebrities with puppets but wasn't strictly a news parody. It aired at 8 PM at the same time as the real news on other channels, and its host was based on a real news anchor who worked for years on another channel. Highly influential in the 1990s and 2000s, it was even credited with helping Jacques Chirac get elected President in 1995.
• Groland was a satirical show about a fake country known as "Groland" but which had very many obvious parallels to contemporary France. The earliest incarnations of the show especially took the form of fake news shows.

Others

• In Italy, Striscia la Notizia is a daily news parody which manages to make very serious points, having been influential in exposing local cases of corruption and fraud which don't usually appear on the "real" news programs.
• In Germany, Heute Show has been the premier news parody since 2009, mostly resembling The Daily Show. It's the Spiritual Successor to Die Wochenshow, which spoofed a greater variety of news formats like talk shows.
• In Israel, Eretz Nehederet runs almost entirely on this format. It alternates between mocking remarks about recent events in the style of "Weekend Update", interviews with actors playing public figures, and parody news reports.
• In Argentina, Caiga Quien Caiga (lit. "Whoever May Fall") was a popular news parody which targeted local politicians. It was popular enough to be exported to Spain and Brazil — in the latter country, it's called Custe o Que Custar (lit. "Whatever It Takes") to preserve the acronym.
• In Spain, El Intermedio evolved from the Spanish version of Caiga Quien Caiga. It started out as a general satirical show and evolved into a semi-serious "anti-establishment news show" that still has satirical elements to it.
• In Chile, 31 Minutos is part news parody, part Work Com, all puppets. It actually started as a genuine Edutainment Show to educate kids about current events, but quickly evolved into a satire with a surprisingly dark sense of humor. It became popular throughout Latin America, although not everyone understood the Chilean slang.

Music

• Lou Reed's "Sick Of You", which the book Between Thought And Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed described as a "fantasy newscast."
  "All the beaches were closed, the ocean was a red sea
  But there was no one there to part it in two
  There was no fresh salad, 'cause there's hypos in the cabbage
  Staten Island disappeared at noon
  And they say the Midwest is in great distress
  And NASA blew up the moon
  The ozone layer has no ozone anymore
  And you're gonna leave me for the guy next door?"

Radio

• The News Quiz is a Panel Show on BBC Radio 4 that's been running since 1977. While structurally a comedy show, the contestants are tasked to make fun of specific news stories from that week (for points that mean nothing). Contestants also get to read outlandish news clippings, many of which are submitted by the audience and come from obscure local papers. Although the contestants are usually comedians, sometimes they're politicians, too. It's a major influence on Have I Got News for You, which debuted on TV thirteen years later. It also spawned a Transatlantic Equivalent on NPR called Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, one of the very few examples of a radio Panel Show in the United States.
• The Now Show, like The News Quiz, airs on BBC Radio but is a much more straightforward news parody. Hosted by comedians Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt, the panelists will thoroughly mock a news story of their choice, often with a musical segment.
• Royal Canadian Air Farce started out as a radio satire on CBC Radio in 1973 and was sufficiently popular to hop to television twenty years later. It included news parody sketches and was very influential to subsequent Canadian news parodies.
• This Is That is a "faux news" radio show on CBC Radio and a parody of the real CBC radio news show As It Happens. It's a Stealth Parody that reports outrageously false news stories in total deadpan professionalism, leading to listeners taking it seriously and angrily phoning in to voice their opinions. Then the show would air recordings of its favourite outraged callers.

Web Original

• The Onion started out as a parodic newspaper but really hit its stride in website form. This allowed it to spoof every angle of the News Broadcast, including audio and video, allowing it to parody radio and TV news. Its slick presentation and graphics have meant that it's been mistaken for a real news outlet, even by actual news outlets. Its popularity in America has led to a ton of derivatives in other countries, including:
  • News Biscuit, essentially The Onion in Britain. Very similar stylistically, but not as popular.
  • The Beaverton, the Canadian version. It has a particular focus on Canadian culture and politics, and it's quick to pander to Canadian stereotypes.
  • Ministry Of Harmony, a self-proclaimed "Chinese Onion". While it's written in English, it's specifically a spoof of news in the notoriously stifling People's Republic of China.
  • Le Gorafi, the French version. Its name is derived from the French newspaper of record Le Figaro.
  • The Betoota Advocate, the Australian version. It's got a little help from TV series Media Watch, which showcases the shortcomings of Australian media and will quite eagerly tell the world when they've caught the media taking The Betoota Advocate seriously.
• The Babylon Bee is a "faux news" website from an American conservative and Evangelical Christian angle. Lefties don't know what to make of it; some think it can be Actually Pretty Funny, but others have taken it seriously in much the same way right-wingers believe The Onion. This might be why the Bee has a bizarre Sitcom Arch-Nemesis relationship with left-leaning website Snopes, which cannot resist "fact-checking" even its most ridiculous articles.
• The Borowitz Report is a popular online satirical news outlet. It was bought by The New Yorker in 2012 but still exists as a section of their website, with its satirical news stories written in much the same style as the real ones (which easily leads to confusion).
• Kayfabe News is essentially a parody of less reputable Professional Wrestling news sites. It's a Spiritual Successor to the "Headlines" section on WrestleCrap.
• El Chigüire Bipolar (lit. "The Bipolar Capybara") is a Venezuelan parody news blog. Given the nature of Venezuelan politics, there's a lot of parody fodder. It also hosted the satirical web animation Isla Presidencial.
• El Deforma is a Mexican satirical news website. It juxtaposes "faux news" with real news stories that are so outlandish they sound fake. It's so hard to tell the difference that they have to put a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer on the real stories.
• Actualidad Panamericana is a Colombian satirical news website. Although not written as strictly a Stealth Parody, it does have a serious-sounding name, leading to people sharing its contents as if they were serious, too.
• The Daily Freier is an Israeli English-language news parody website. It focuses particularly on satirizing the culture of Tel Aviv, especially recently immigrated English-speaking Jews. The name "Freier" can be translated as "sucker", originally coming from Yiddish but used in Modern Hebrew.
• Mock The Dummy is a YouTube parody of conservative politics... with dummies.
• The Hard Times is a self-proclaimed "very real punk news site" which is actually a parody news website focusing on music, particularly Punk Rock and other musical subcultures. It also has several Spinoffs, including Hard Drive for video game journalism and Hard Money for business and financial advice.

Western Animation

• The Wrong Coast presents fake celebrity news through eccentric Claymation characters.

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