Sandbox / The Ariana Black Series

The Ariana Black Series was a series of seven fanfics, written by "Ariana Black." (The main series itself had seven stories, but the author also wrote several side-stories about Ariana's mother, and one about Ariana's rival, Maria. Technically they don't count as part of the actual series.)

Over the course of seven fics, Ariana comes to Hogwarts, befriends all the characters that the author likes, discovers she is an "Empath," which gives her special powers, and Voldemort decides she's more important than Harry and focuses on alternatively killing her or stealing her powers.

All the stories have been taken down because the author was tired of people telling her Ariana was a Mary Sue, but there is an on-going spork of all the fics starting here, the sporkers being fortunate enough to still have copies of the original fanfic.

For the Touken Ranbu equivalent, see The Final Sword.

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Tropes:

• Affectionate Nickname:
  • Ariana, Ginny and Hermione decide to give each other nicknames — Ariana becomes "Pathological", Ginny becomes "Ginger snap" and Hermione becomes "Squeaks" (because, according to Ariana, "Minnie" is a nickname from Hermione and it makes her think of Minnie Mouse. In actuality, Minnie is a nickname for "Wilhemina".)
  • Sirius claims he used to call Tabitha "Tabby Cat" and she'd call him "Dog Star".
• Age-Gap Romance: Ariana and Neville fall in love when she's eleven and he's fifteen. They continue to date throughout the entire fic.
• All Men Are Perverts: All the teenaged ones are, anyway, with Harry, Ron and Neville frequently making lecherous comments about their female friends and generally have sex on the brain. Draco tries to rape Ariana several times over the series.
• Alpha Bitch: Maria fits all the hallmarks of this, complete with being from a rich family, picking on the main heroine, and having her own Girl Posse.
• Artistic License – Biology: During the sixth year, when the group are escaping Azkaban and Ariana manages to get tangled up in seaweed, the water being repeatedly mentioned as ice-cold means that there shouldn't be anything long and clingy growing in the sea for her to get caught in.
• Artistic License – Ornithology: Sprite, Ariana's pet owl, is supposedly so smart that she understands everything Ariana says, can do tricks and even holds grudges against anybody who is mean to Ariana. Owls are actually some of the least-intelligent species of birds because they have relatively smalls brains compared to the size of their heads. To be fair, the owls in the Harry Potter universe tend to be a bit smarter than average (which can be explained with magic).
• Attempted Rape: Draco tries to rape Ariana on several occasions. In the fourth year, when he gets Ariana alone, he starts feeling her up, but only touches her sides and back, and starts chasing her around a wooden table.
• Author Appeal:
  • The author seems to like writing about Ariana gratuitously receiving expensive jewelry for no apparent reason.
  • She also likes writing Ariana and the others having pillow fights, snowball fights, food fights and mud fights.
• Blessed with Suck: While Ariana's Empath powers are genuinely useful, she rarely gets enough use out of them to justify the horrible side-effects:
  • Being near mood-altering spells or potions send her into potentially lethal fits.
  • She can't help but feel the emotions around her. If the emotions are strong enough, they start to override her own, leading to a point where she effectively roofies herself when her friend confesses his love for her.
  • Voldemort wants to kidnap her to use her blood for an immortality potion, or so he can erase her will and use her as a political puppet, or various other reasons.
• Body Horror: At one point, Neville's nose evidently ends up smeared across his face.
• Bonding over Missing Parents: How Neville and Ariana first hook up.
• Bus Crash: After Sirius adopts Ariana, Mita is pretty much completely dropped from the story, until she's brought up again in the fourth year by sending Ariana a letter. Then it's revealed later that Voldemort murdered her.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Ariana gets drunk on Butterbeer.
• Changeling Fantasy: An unusual case. After her mother's death, Ariana was raised by a witch named Mita. Ariana immediately dumps her to live with Sirius once he's pardoned, and even comments that it wasn't until she started living with Sirius and Harry that she had a real family.
• Compressed Vice: In the sixth year, as everyone is leaving for the Hogwarts Express, Maria and her lackeys shove Ariana in a cupboard and lock her inside so she'll miss the train. Ariana proceeds to have a massive Freak Out and when Snape finds her in hysterics she explains to him that she's scared of dark, enclosed spaces because of mean pranks from her old school. Snape flies Ariana home to Sirius on a broom. This has never been mentioned before and gets dropped again after this.
• Curtains Match the Window: Ariana and Patty. The former has black hair and eyes, while the latter has brown hair and eyes..
• Disney Death: Ariana drowns and dies as a result for at least five to seven minutes. No spells attempted work in reviving her, but CPR does. Realistically, if no spell could have revived her, then CPR wouldn't have a chance either.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Hermione especially, but also Ginny, seem to be in the habit of hitting their Love Interests in the back of the head whenever they annoy them. Played for Laughs.
  • Interrupted Suicide: When eleven-year-old Ariana jumps off the roof of the school in front of Hermione and Ginny, two skilled witches who always carry their wands with them. Hermione managed to leviate her back up.
• The Empath: Ariana is an Empath, which means she knows exactly what other people are feeling.
• Expy: Maria, Kitty, and Patty are basically Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle as girls and with cattier personalities.
• Freudian Excuse: The seventh story gave Maria one — she hates Ariana because Ariana has an adopted family who loves her, while Maria's rich parents don't give her the time of day..
• Full-Name Ultimatum: When Ariana and Ginny dress down to their bikinis after drinking too much butterbeer, Harry and Ron yell at them using their full names (interestingly, the author assumed that "Ginny" was short for "Virginia", when it's actually short for "Ginevra" in canon). Ariana's middle name is apparently "Adora", which was the name her mother used to call herself when she was pretending to be a princess.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Tabitha, Ariana's mother, never got over the fact that Sirius was born with magic and she wasn't and they became estranged after Sirius went to Hogwarts.
• Heel–Face Turn: Kitty gradually starts to fall for Ariana's charm.
• Insistent Terminology: Ariana keeps trying to make Snape call her "Ariana", but Snape always refers to her as "Miss Black" until late in the sixth year, when he finally caves.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Maria and her friends try to kill Ariana at breakfast one morning, lock her in a closet on the last day of school and plan to leave her there all summer, et cetera. All they get away with is a slap on the wrist.
  • Draco attempts to rape Ariana twice early on. Dumbledore only threatens to expel him.
• Loophole Abuse: In one of the stories, Voldemort curses Ariana so she no longer has her Empath powers, saying that "the curse will be on you til the day you die." Guess what.
• Magnetic Hero: Everybody loves Ariana, including Filch, Ms. Norris, Neville's grandmother and Snape. Anyone who doesn't is automatically evil or a bitch.
• The Maiden Name Debate: Since she's Ariana Black, her mom apparently decided to keep her last name (or maybe change it back when her husband left her). Which is kind of odd, given how terrified both originally are about people realizing they're related to Sirius.
• Make-Out Kids: Ariana and Neville - they never do anything else as a couple besides kiss each other constantly and reaffirm how much they love each other. The other couples do this too, but nobody is as bad as those two.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Mita comes back into the story pretty much to succumb to this.
• Mind Rape: Another one of Ariana's "Empath powers" is to go through other people's memories, which she does with Snape in the fourth year without even asking him permission.
• Mood Whiplash: The story tends to swing between chapters of pointless "hee-hee, characters having fun!" antics to other chapters that are full of overdone sorrow. Any bad thing that happened seems to be forgotten immediately, with characters cracking jokes right after they escape from mortal peril.
• MST: The only format the fic exists in anymore.
• Muggle Born of Mages: Ariana's mother, Tabitha.
• Muggles Do It Better: See Disney Death above.
• My Sensors Indicate You Want to Tap That: After a somewhat-lewd comment from Harry, Ariana threatens to tell the others what emotion she was sensing from him.
• Never My Fault: Anything bad or stupid Ariana does is never her fault. According to her (and usually the other characters as well), it was someone else's fault for goading her, or because of her Empath powers. A great example occurs in the seventh story, when Ariana makes out with another boy behind Neville's back—twice, and both times she claims she didn't fight back because her Empath powers reacted to his love. She does say that it sounds more like she's making excuses, but then she never really tells herself it wasn't her powers either.
• Never Trust a Title: "Ariana and the Mystery of the Muggle Murders" has no mystery—the first time the murders are mentioned the narration (correctly) tells us Voldemort is doing them to send a message to Snape. For that matter, the murders really don't really have much to do with the plot; the characters never try to stop the murders, they just let them know that Voldemort is ticked off.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Ariana suddenly develops her "Empath" abilities in the third year after absolutely no warning. The Locutus Amulet is introduced in the fourth year after Mita is killed, which she gives Ariana in her will, even though you'd think she'd have given it to Ariana long before, as it belonged to Ariana's mother and could have come in very useful.
• Nobody Calls Me "Chicken"!: Maria dares Ariana, who's already dating Neville, to French kiss the next person to walk into their dormitory. It's Harry. She kisses him and there is much sorrow about how Maria "forced" her to cheat on Neville.
• Not Blood Siblings: Harry and Ariana said they were Like Brother and Sister even before Sirius adopted them, but that didn't stop Ariana from kissing him on a dare.
• Once per Episode:
  • Almost every year involves Voldemort kidnapping Ariana.
  • Similarly, once she's introduced, Maria makes an appearance during every single train ride.
• One of the Kids: Sirius gets hit particularly hard with this, often behaving like he's younger than his niece and Lupin is only marginally more mature.
• Our Demons Are Different: Foreign from Harry Potter canon, in this fic they're Living Shadows created by a Dark wizard. They possess people, but instead of controlling them they drain their energy and memories until the victim dies, then turn information over to their masters.
• Out of Focus: After the second story Harry and Ariana move in with Sirius, and their friends start spending their summers there/moving in themselves. This means that a lot of characters, like most of the Weasleys, pretty much disappear.
• Parental Abandonment: Ariana's father ran out on the family before she was born, and her mother died of an unnamed disease shortly after Ariana's birth.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: They are mentioned, but never do anything helpful. The one time they are supposed to appear on-screen, Ariana conveniently falls into Voldemort's trap and the rest of the time is spent with her, until she is rescued by the canon characters and the Aurors are never mentioned again.
• Protagonist-Centred Morality: Oh dear god.
  • Whatever Ariana does is good, right, and heroic. Anything and everything Maria does is bad and sign of her bitchiness...yes, even leaving class as she was told to, instead of standing around and worrying over Ariana.
  • Taken up to eleven in a Quidditch game where Maria tricks a bludger into hitting a chaser on the opposing team (who happens to be Ariana's friend). Instead of seeing this as a perfectly legal and rather clever move, Ariana claims this is the lowest thing Maria has ever done.
  • Ariana is allowed to do whatever she wants in the story and she is barely if ever punished - she attacks Maria and Draco several times with her "Empath powers," but when Maria and her friends hit Ariana with a Cheering Charm, they get four months detention, letters home, and banned from Hogsmeade for the rest of the year, just as an example.
  • Also, the "Mystery of the Muggle Murders" is no mystery - Voldemort is killing Muggles to get at Snape, which is Ariana's cue to act all concerned. Nobody seems to care innocent Muggles are dying.
  • When Maria and her Girl Posse show up on the Hogwarts Express, Harry and Neville often are inches away from attacking them if they don't leave Ariana alone, it's framed as heroic because they're protecting Ariana, instead of a bunch of near-adult boys threatening to beat up a bunch of pre-teen girls five years younger than them just for childishly insulting one of their friends.
• Racial Face Blindness: For a Potions lesson, Ariana partners with Michael Okuda, "a handsome looking Asian boy who reminded Ariana of Cho Chang." She never explains why he reminds her of Cho Chang, though, so presumably it's just because she's also attractive and Asian. (Incidentally, Cho is four years older than Ariana and Harry doesn't seem to pursue her romantically in this universe, so how does Ariana even know who she is?)
• Rape as Drama: Draco makes multiple attempts to rape Ariana, though she tends to get over it within a few pages.
• Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: We never go a single story without being reminded Ariana has 'raven black' hair.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Snape gave an epic one to Ariana's mother in their backstory, calling her out on acting like because she had a crush on him, therefore she was somehow Entitled to Have You and that he couldn't stand her or Sirius, who are thoughtless, immature brats.
• Remember the New Guy?: In Ariana's second year, we meet Maria and her cronies. Their antagonism towards Ariana is treated as though it was already established, despite not being present in the earlier fanfic.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: The cause of a "Slug Malfoy" in part 1, "Hell Malfoy" in part 2, and Dumbledore evidently not being Headmaster yet. And that's just the start.
• The Rival: Maria is set up as this to Ariana.
• Satellite Character:
  • Harry and his friends, of all people, are turned into this for Ariana. Whether she's around or not, all they ever do is fuss over her.
  • Maria, who has absolutely no purpose in the story except to be Ariana's own personal rival, except hilariously Maria tends to bring up totally valid criticisms of Ariana that the author is oblivious to.
• Satellite Love Interest: Poor Neville is hit with being a Satellite Character and Ariana's designated boyfriend.
• Shout-Out:
  • To Disney's The Little Mermaid (1989), as Ron and Hermione dance to "Part of Your World" at their wedding.
  • One of the members on the Quiddich team is named Susie Derkins.
  • There's a random Hufflepuff named Michael Okuda in Ariana's year.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Ariana and Neville.
• Soap Opera Disease: Ariana's mother dies in the backstory of a mysterious disease that isn't explained in any way.
• Spoiled Brat: Ariana, once she's been adopted by Sirius, who lets her do whatever she wants, including allowing her boyfriend to move in with them when Ariana is only fourteen and even thanking Snape for bringing her home safely because Ariana demands it. This exchange sums it up:

  Ariana: Harry, pass the salt.

  Harry: [holding it out of reach] And what do you say?

  Ariana: I say give it to me now or prepare to die a painful death.

• Super Drowning Skills: While swimming to escape one of Voldemort's strongholds, Ariana manages to get tangled up in completely mundane seaweed and drowns.
• Teacher/Student Romance: After graduating, Neville becomes the new Herbology professor. He and Ariana still date, which the author tries to justify because they were together before he became a teacher.
• Title Drop: Many chapter titles come from lines of dialogue in said chapter...and 99 percent of the time, the chapter title doesn't actually fit the chapter's content.
• Took a Level in Badass: Dementors are apparently capable of scaring away Patroni in this fanfic.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: Nobody in this story retains their canon intelligence, but Harry, Sirius, Hermione and Voldemort get hit with it the worst. Sirius acts like an eight-year-old for much of the series despite the fact he spent twelve years in Azkaban, Hermione doesn't even consider her career once she leaves Hogwarts until Ariana tells her she should write a new Potions textbook and Voldemort is laughably incompetent - his captives always escape from his "traps" after he pointlessly tortures them for a bit.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Ariana is a milder example of this trope than is usual, but she's making sexual innuendo and snogging her boyfriend repeatedly at age twelve and she also apparently wears lipstick as a first year. In the fourth year she also does a striptease with Ginny down to their bathing suits, then excuse it because they got drunk off butterbeer.
• Under the Mistletoe: During the holidays Professor Flitwick, for some reason, hangs mistletoe in the entrance to the Great Hall and won't let anyone enter until they "follow tradition." At one point this forces Ariana to kiss Ron. Another time it forces Ginny to kiss Ron.
• Unrequited Love Lasts Forever: Ariana's mother, Tabitha, had a thing for Snape when she was about nine and he was about ten. He reacts about the way any snotty kid might to a girl that he finds supremely annoying. Apparently she wasn't able to move on from this, because ten years later (after she had already married and divorced somebody else) she tells Remus that she's still in love with Snape. Note that he moved in with the Malfoys right after telling her off, so it's questionable if she's even seen him in the ensuing years.
• Useless Useful Spell: A rare non-video game example.
  • Ariana's ability to sense emotions doesn't seem to help any time it's particularly needed. She can sense her friends sneaking up on her (some of the time), but always misses when somebody with hostile intentions is preparing to ambush her. She can sense how much Neville loves her, but was completely oblivious to Reginald's feelings until he confessed.
  • In the fourth story we find out that for Ariana's protection, her former guardian Mita had an amulet that let her watch over her and know where she was. Ariana had been kidnapped by Voldemort and almost been raped by Malfoy twice each, and yet this had never come up before.
• What Measure Is a Non-Super?: In the fifth story the Death Eaters keep killing random Muggles in Snape's area to send him a message. Granted Snape is the person Ariana knows and cares about, but all the attention seems to be on worrying about him with very little concern for the poor, nameless people who are actually dying.
• Yes-Man: Marcus, Anaca and Edmund, some random first years Ariana befriends after Ginny leaves Hogwarts and they hang on her every word and never disagree with her.
• You Must Be Cold: In the fourth story, Harry offers Ariana his sweater after Malfoy's Attempted Rape tears her blouse. Which is sort of a Plot Hole; the author apparently forgot that earlier she had been wearing a robe over her clothes, so she could have easily just put that back on.
• You're Just Jealous: Any time Maria criticises Ariana, no matter how valid it may be, she is always accused of this trope. To quote Ariana herself:

  Ariana: "You bitch! You're just jealous that I'm better than you at everything!" Ariana screamed in rage.

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