The Harry Potter Fanfiction Thread

Yeah, it's more a trait of men in general.

That's not really a gender-specific trait, dude. Romanticizing a lover who does horrible things to you is not notably more reasonable than romanticizing a sport that does horrible things to you, even if the Scottish game was only put on a pedestal by the lads.

edited 19th Oct '14 12:15:53 AM by rikalous

When I said that, I was thinking more about the distinctly male tradition of doing really stupid stuff pretty much just for the sake of Testosterone Poisoning.

You know. The kind of idiocy that gets prefaced with a "Hey. Watch this! <eyebrow waggle>"

edited 19th Oct '14 12:21:05 AM by EvaUnit01

Really, the true beneficiaries of those sorts of stunts are the audience, so it all evens out.

Point taken.

Besides, we love stupid. Especially if the people being stupid pay for it.

That's why we have the Darwin Awards.

I'm guessing most Wizard sports in Britain started with "Hold my mead and watch this!"

You speak as if most mundane sports didn't start that way, either.

Idea for a story: we are told that all of the time-turners were destroyed in the Battle in the Ministry. But we also know that Voldie had at least one inside man in the Department of Mysteries.

What if not all the time-turners were knocked out of action?

Can you say "Empty Quiver"?

You speak as if most things that are awesome weren't started by someone asking someone else to hold their alcoholic beverage while they went to do something insane(ly awesome).

I wonder if Contraceptive potions are a thing...

And if they are, would it be ethical to have the elves dose everyone by adding it to the food everyone eat?

Hm...

I just thought that if I do ever write Harry as raised by Ala Alba (+ Evangeline), then he'd need a villain song. After all, the reason he wants to be a villain is exactly because villains get all the cool things, and his example of villainy (Evangeline) isn't evil enough to show him why it's wrong to be a villain. They get the best lairs, the best clothes, and more importantly, the best songs. And yes, getting a Villain Song includes pestering Negi, Evangeline and later on McGonagall, Flitwick, Dumbledore and Hermione, for spells to be able to pull off a Disney Villain Song properly. I'm thinking Voltaire's When You're Evil for the song itself, or at least something inspired along those lines.

Cue Hogwarts mounting a musical production to impress the other schools' students during the Triwizard Tournament, using the special effects spells that were dug up for Harry's villain song...

I can totally see Dumbledore being into it and encouraging everyone to participate, and making it a regular, every year thing for the Seventh Years to pull off, in the name of house unity.

edited 21st Oct '14 10:14:54 AM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

More ideas inspired by history.

We know that wands, though subsentient, reflect their owners. The wand belonging to a killer isn't exactly happy fun to wield for the whole family.

Imagine what a wand for an executioner must be like.

Day in, day out: the prisoner is dragged in and shoved against the wall; a moment to aim at the back of the head. The blast and the flash, and the prisoner slumps, leaving a trail of red. Then the corpse is dragged out and the next prisoner is brought in, repeated hundreds and hundreds of times.

Stalin's NKVD executioners used Tokarevs, Nagants, German Walthers, whatever gun was handy. In whatever the wizarding analogue to the Great Purge was, they used wands. After a while they would have learned not to use killing spells, which are tiring for the caster and require a degree of focused expertise. Instead, something as simple as the severing charm—which any schoolboy could master—would be sufficient. Aimed at the back of the head, death would be instant.

As a bonus, it would be usable by the inebriated. The NKVD executioners would numb themselves with vodka after their grisly work, which was fine: any drunk could pull the trigger on a pistol; assistants could help them reload, and hand them new pistols when the old ones jammed from heat, built up with repeated firings. With magic, that isn't an option; while a killing spell may not function for any poorly-trained wizard, something as simple as a cutting spell has fewer things to go wrong: it could be repeated, and repeated, and repeated, until dawn broke and the executioners stumbled away to the guardhouse and the vodka.

Would anyone have dared to break those wands when the terror was over? Might there, somewhere in the basements of the Lubyanka building, lie a battery of executioners' wands, as innocent-looking as loaded guns? Or would they be buried in the mass graves and the killing fields, resting like landmines amidst the bones of their victims, waiting for their day to be unearthed and used once again?

edited 25th Oct '14 10:02:51 PM by SabresEdge

edited 25th Oct '14 10:08:12 PM by rikalous

Whichever is the case, it would still be the wand belonging to a person with a lot of blood on their hands. The other thing is this: cursed items do exist, and I can think of no better way to ensure that an item is well and truly cursed than to have it be the instrument of mass murder.

Of course, if you think it's a cool idea then go wild. I just didn't remember it from the source material.

Nah. I tend to come up with ideas like that that might form the core of a story, but I'm focused elsewhere for now instead of making that story.

Also, this is the sort of thing that's inevitable when you study history: how would this affect the wizarding world? (In this case, the Great Terror in the Soviet Union—and the wizards that didn't GTFO of Russia during the Civil War would have even stronger incentives to do so then.) JKR is great at making stage props and settings but crap at building a three-dimensional, living world, which I had to do for a past project, and filling in the holes in that world is something of a long-running hobby for me.

edited 25th Oct '14 10:32:27 PM by SabresEdge

A few months back I started reading this story. It is notable for a bunch of things. For one it takes a very cliched and worm premise (a H/G soul bond story) and actually makes it entertaining to read. In particular it does several important things.

A developing romance that progresses really slowly (with focus on the unfair nature of essentially not being able to choose who you love).

A Dumbledore that is straight out of books 1-4, wacky and fun who participants in school snowball fights (and cheats).

Significant changes coming from the AU that don't exist solely to benefit the protagonists. Major spoiler Voldemort turns out to have been part of a broken soul bond which broke during the last Goblet of Fire tournament causing him to turn into the maniac we know and love. Also Mulciber becomes the new villain of Po A.

A Triwizard tournament with new tasks.

And most importantly neither Harry nor Ginny receive any kind of magic / intelligence boost, in fact their studies suffer abysmally due to the difficulty in having two steams of consciousness.

edited 27th Oct '14 8:43:04 PM by 32ndfreeze

There need to be more fics that feature Dumbledore being a wacky troll just as much as he is the stern, calculating chessmaster. It's one of the many things I enjoy about "The Professor's Point Of View:" you freely see him both when he's dealing with problems humorously (but effectively) and through trickery, and also when he's somber and straining to stop things from getting worse (from an outside perspective, that is). And he has one of my favorite lines I've ever seen in a fanfic (right up there with "help your fellow man, goddammit!" from this South Park fic):

"Now that sufficient chaos has been created, I'm going to bed."

edited 28th Oct '14 12:11:41 AM by KnownUnknown

After seeing for the umpteenth time a Manipulative! Dumbledore story I had a thought.

What about a story where Dumbledore is the manipulative mastermind fanon seems to think he is. But he directs the entirely of his energy towards Shipping Hogwarts students?

There'd probably be a lot more gay men coming out of Hogwarts if he did.

And the Harry/Draco fanbase was vindicated.

Hey, ya gotta deal with inter-House tensions somehow.

Love is, after all, a greater magic than any Hogwarts teaches.

And he promised to stop pulling that shit on the faculty years ago.

He promised to stop that shit with the faculty after the third time Binns wound up getting a harem.

I assume all attempts a playing matchmaker with the staff stopped dead once he hired Snape, who some theorize is some kind of love vampire who literally sucks the cheer and goodwill out of any room he enters.

Of course, he also tends to sabotage any matchmaking attempts towards the students too.

... So, a dementor then?

Not when he hired Snape. But after the plan to help him move on from Lily fell through Snape had a "quiet word" with Dumbledore in private and the matter never came up again.

I bequeath this idea to the community at large. Have fun.