The Harry Potter Fanfiction Thread

Hpmor kinda does that too. Harry isn't evil so much as ruthless and ambitious, due to SPOILERS. He's mischievous and manipulative, and arrogant to the extreme. But he's also very idealistic and hopeful. Being raised in a loving family made all the difference, and the power Voldie knows not is the fact of having people you love, whom you want to protect.

He does ruin Draco's life in every conceivable way while offering the hand of friendship.

I love that. That's awesome. I never knew about firestorms. Seems like a magnificent tragic tale.

edited 4th May '15 2:28:09 AM by TheHandle

Yeah, that alt history outline was interesting...

If you could factor in Hitler's fascination with the occult...

Ghostapo

NAZI MAGICAL EXPERTISE IS THE BEEEEEEEESSSSSTTT IIIIIINNN THE WOOOOOOORRRLLLDD!!!

edited 4th May '15 3:54:15 PM by EvaUnit01

Nonsense. That's why the US put a pentagram on all it's military vehicles.

That'd almost certainly be mentioned. I wouldn't at all be surprised if Hitler and Grindelwald were buddies, although it does mean I would have to figure out how far back they knew each other and how they influenced each others' rise.

The Schaefer expedition would almost certainly be a datapoint, too.

If I were to go ahead in earnest with this project, I'd go with Tim Powers' rules for writing the secret history subgenre: known, recorded facts cannot be changed. In an interview about Declare (which, by the way, is amazing, and everyone needs to read it), he stated:

Known facts may be reinterpreted, but I better damn well have an explanation if something in my story doesn't mesh with witness memoirs. The saving grace here is the sheer amount of historical information that is still unknown, and hence fair game. For instance, the disappearance of Martin Bormann. In reality, he was probably shot by the Red Army while escaping from the Fuehrerbunker, but nobody knows for sure—meaning that I have a lot of latitude to determine what happens to him.

In a world in which obliviation and confundus charms are a thing... Yeah, you can get away with a lot of artistic freedom regarding known facts, because magic makes it so that even witnesses are suspect.

That actually offers a little less leeway than might be imagined because of the sheer amount of written documentation that has survived, and the general need to fit the facts into the wider historical framework. (Among historians, individual firsthand memoirs are already treated as potentially suspect unless otherwise backed up; the effects of hindsight or deliberate distortion are well known—see all the German generals' memoirs claiming "we destroyed an entire Soviet division, and then had to withdraw for totally unrelated reasons", and then contrast with more-recently-opened Soviet operational archives where the division that was supposed to have been destroyed...seems not to have noticed its own demise.)

Or, you know, Death Traps portrayal of the Sherman vs. the reality painted by Zaloga and others.

Hey, you're the one who's actually having people be competent. If actively competent, the wizards' ability to casually fuck with people's minds, which I remind you muggles have zero defense against, is a game breaker of such insanely epic proportions that it's hard to describe, and the best analogue I can offer is that it's no different than the MIB going around WWII fighting aliens right out in the open, that having an immense effect on things, and then them using the Neuralizer to make people think something else happened.

Really, the only ones who would have the 'true' accounts of what happened are the very high command, and those would likely be kept secret from everybody, if there's even any records or accounts left.

Personally, I'm thinking I might take the alternate history approach when it comes to my personal urban fantasy idea.

Maybe something like "the Prime Minister got thrown off of Big Ben by a very pissed off Loki", or something like that.

A Broken Masquerade ought to stay broken, dammit.

Honestly, I kind of feel like the "those very well-known historical events? All fabricated by wizards/aliens/gods/poodles" approach to be rather condescending. I'm fine if there was something going on behind the scenes, but I feel there's a limit to where you can go with "everything you know is a lie".

edited 4th May '15 10:51:09 PM by KarkatTheDalek

You'd mainly see those effects at the individual-memoirist level, and those already have a lot of scope for omissions and outright lies—enough so that it'd be quite easy imagining a man like R. V. Jones, who is already neck-deep in the secret world of intelligence and scientific warfare, omitting some classified details from his memoirs (Most Secret War, and it's a classic). It is much harder to fake reports at the high command, bureaucratic, and institutional levels, and many of those are open to the public already and heavily scrutinized by scholars.

So, for instance, a quick desert raid by a few squads of SAS men can be lost in the shuffle. A company-sized tank encounter can't realistically be covered up, memory charms or not. Besides, classical operational security—"need to know" and all that—is easier than mucking about with memory charms. Much more subtle, much more realistic, and much less offensively clumsy than trying to override the historical record directly with claims that everyone on an interservice committee was memory-wiped.

... You... don't seem to understand what I'm saying. I'm not saying Wizards can cover up military activity of that sort or anything like that. I'm saying Wizards can cover up their own activities and effects to such an extent that the public at large would think things happened the way they did in real life, but in reality, there were wizards making reality bend over and play dead running around doing stuff and fighting other wizards and doing more stuff.

The High Command wouldn't have any sort of reports about this because there would be no realistic way to have any records about any of this unless the wizards flat out told the High Command of their actions. In your story, they do. And in your story, it seems that the high command is already in the know, at which point they would know not to leave a goddamned paper trail that can be tracked, and they'd have to be hilariously stupid to not heavily doctor and alter everything that passes through them to make damn sure any and all things that could lead people to assume wizards were involved are properly removed from the public record. So, yeah. The public record would wind up being the exact same one we have, because the Wizard World likes remaining secret to the muggles, and would put "Erase every mention of us and any possible lead to us" as part of their stipulations for cooperation.

You seem to underestimate the military's ability to cover up their own actions. Trust me, they're very good at it. If the military doesn't want you knowing there was a company-sized tank encounter in the frontlines, then you're not gonna learn that there was a company-sized tank encounter in the frontliness. The only ones that could tell you would be the other side in the confrontation, and I doubt you're gonna learn from them until way after it's done being relevant.

And holy shit, the military with access to Wizards and their bullshit mental powers? Yeah... no, you're not gonna learn about anything that they don't want you to learn about.

edited 4th May '15 11:10:03 PM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

You're vastly underestimating the problems of the coverup, problems that exist in dimensions mindwhammying people can't solve; problems of space, of time, of manpower, of the fact information literally spreads like a virus (an airborne virus, no less, thanks to the fact people talk), of not having the eyes where you needed them at the right moment, of falsifying the logistics and the personnel records that are possibly spaced hundreds or thousands of miles apart across continents.

edited 5th May '15 12:08:55 AM by Night

Potterverse magic does have its limits. You can't just erase everything with a snap of your fingers.

I wonder how long such a deception would last in this day and age. All it would take was one major fuck-up.

edited 5th May '15 12:43:08 AM by KarkatTheDalek

Yeah, I've got a question for you, IANCE: how much study have you done of military history? Political science? Intelligence apparatuses and their histories? States in general? Operational security and all the history of state secrets?

Because if you've looked into them with any degree of seriousness you'll realize that states and militaries are absolutely horrible at keeping secrets.

A big issue is that "the government" or "the military" are not monolithic entities. Anyone familiar with the history of procurement comedies can tell you that. They are agglomerates of related entities that are doing quite well if they can get the inherent principal-agent problems under any kind of control.

edited 5th May '15 9:40:01 AM by SabresEdge

I love how you want to have a story in which the military, and yes I understand it's not a single monolithic entity, is working with the wizards but refuse to actually have them work with the wizards other than in the places where it is convenient to you. When you give the military the ability to cooperate with wizards, you're giving them access to the wizards' repertoire of spells.

The whole 'ifreet' thing is absolutely pointless because just casting Fiendfyre has the exact same effect, being a magical flame that's hard to put out and spreads incredibly rapidly. Then there's also giving people invisibility cloaks that they can use to bypass defenses and sneak into guarded places with ease. And there's also disillusionment, which also makes people and things invisible.

But I digress.

My point is simple. You're severely underestimating the wizards' power, and you're assuming that because we learn of military secrets after they're no longer relevant, that they're pretty bad at keeping them. Of course you can't cover up everything all the time. That's an idiotic concept. Having everything kept under wraps is simply not possible.

But guess what? One of the most incompetent militaries of all time, the Argentine Armed Forces, managed to keep the entire country in the dark about how much the English were kicking their asses, while at the same time stealing massive amounts of money from the public, for the entire duration of the Falklands War. This happened in the eighties. Forty years of technology after the events you describe.

Excuse me for believing that a high command that is not composed mostly of idiots would be good enough to keep what they don't want you to know under wraps. Yes, the scale is massively different, but then again, they didn't have people capable of magic to do the cleanup.

...

And if they did, we wouldn't know, is my point. Wizards have been covering up their existence for centuries. It's the only thing they're competent at in canon.

The way I read Sabre's idea, the military and the wizards werent fully cooperating with each other. I had imagined it like cannon- people high up in the government know about the Wizards, but grunts down in the trenches have to be kept in the dark. In that case, releasing an Ifreet might serve a purpose after all.

On the subject of trying to keep secrets over a long time, the Stasi would like to say hi—as would the Gauck archives. Most of the atrocities committed by the totalitarian states, too, no matter how much they tried to keep it secret. Over any kind of scale, that kind of thing tends to leave a paper trail. Wizards only managed to keep their existence a secret by disassociating from the outside world entirely. And if you've seen the kinds of petty bickering and feuds that erupt in even the best-run military high commands and the way it tends to get out (if not noticed for a few decades), you'd realize that military organizations are no better at keeping secrets in the long term than any other kind of organization, no matter how discreditable it is and how much they'd want to keep a secret. Rumors leak.

Hence De Marquis's entirely correct interpretation. You'll notice a few things. First off, basic operational security dictates that the number of men who know the full details of what's going on could probably be counted on two hands in the mundane world, and not much more than that in the wizarding world. Most of the confederates don't need to know much more. The SAS men who are accompanying a pair of quiet, confident civilians who are supposedly working for SOE? They have no need to know about the magical world at all, merely that they are entrusted with getting them from point A to point B. The Mosquito pathfinder bombers entrusted with marking Hamburg or the Dresden Old Town? Maybe the pilot has an inkling that there's something special about the flares they're going to deploy; nobody else needs to know. The less the secret is spread in the first place, the less you'll need to rely on potentially dangerous ex post facto memory charms to keep it from spreading further.

Also, you seem to be thinking of the big organizations and bureaucracies when you say "high command": SHAEF, the entirety of the Air Ministry, and the like. I'm thinking tiny compartments within Bletchley Park and Baker Street. Men like R. V. Jones, Alan Turing, or Claude Dansey may be clued in (used as they are to working with secrets); few others would be. And on the wizarding side of things, this would inevitably be Dumbledore's own show, with his own agent networks and contacts in both worlds. The Ministry of Magic would be too leaky to entrust with any secrets, and it's an organization that inherently treats the muggle-liaison role as a joke by relying only on one person-to-person link—not good when you need the cooperation of someone who can order the Royal Air Force to set aside a few special planes for RAF 666 Squadron, or who can feed the writing on an old scroll through a specially-adapted bombe to try to decipher the summoning formula.

... It appears that what we have here is a simple failure to communicate.

Either that, or you are assuming that I meant my exaggeration literally. Which seems to be more common than it should be in TV Tropes.

Of course major military operations can't be entirely covered up. Not forever. Not once communications resume and people start talking about things.

But what you can do is alter and doctor the records to the point that you wind up getting the exact same records we have, even though the events were different. Anyone who could dispute it can be memory charmed, or confounded, or anything. To put it simply, wizards can cover up their activities, is what I've been saying from the start.

Eliminating records is simpler than you'd think. It's not done often. But it's simpler than it seems. There are a limited number of copies, and if they know the protocol to file them where they belong, then they know where to find each and every one of those copies.

edited 6th May '15 12:11:17 AM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

And you're still wrong.

There is a process to matters of logistics. Stuff is tracked, replacements ordered. It does not merely disappear. People made it, handled it, shipped it, loaded it. People saw them do so. Hundreds or thousands of them, many of whom may not have been observed by others or easily identified. For every aircraft that flew a mission the work of several hundred people in production, shipping, maintaining, fueling, arming, flying, is required for the plane and everything that goes on the plane. Hundreds of steps, many of them subject to documentation, made it possible for everything to be there. Thousands of people may have seen the process or the documentation of it, scattered across continents, and many of the "possibles" will be neither easily identified nor easily located.

In Napoleon's day, a cannon could merely disappear, but mechanized war is different. It demands an extremely high level of organization for the huge structures that fought the World Wars to function, and in a real sense the better organizers are the ones who won them.

And this doesn't even cover the possibility of witnesses and documentation existing where no British wizards could reach: on the other side.

You know what? This argument is utterly pointless. You clearly know logistics better than I do. And I'm not going to pretend I know more about logistics than you. This isn't me being sarcastic in any way. You're from the USA, your country is obsessed with its military, while I'm Argentine. I am contractually obligated to hate the fuckers who basically sent our economy down the toilet to line their own pockets. I agree with your point that there are many people that would be able to give you enough information to put the picture together. Of course, it'd require investigative work, but there are leads.

Of course, that just tells you that there was a plane and that it took off, and the time it took off at. What it did, where it did it and why it did it, however... But I digress.

You don't get my point. You seem intent in arguing about the logistics at large of something that is irrelevant to the main point I raised.

You can have a lot more freedom with wizard activity if you realize the potential that magic has. Both their mind magic as well as their capacity to clean up after themselves and leave no trace. Particularly in the HP Universe, in which Magic works in often extremely convenient ways, owing to JKR warping the rules so magic did whatever she needed it to do at any given time, giving Wizards incredible flexibility.

edited 6th May '15 1:11:23 AM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

Honestly, I dislike this sort of argument, as it often involves either Muggles or Wizards being shilled to hell and back, with the other side being made to look pathetic and silly - at least in my experience. A Curbstomp Battle is no fun at all.

...Why can't we all just get along in peace and harmony?

That takes effort, sensitivity, and self control.

Not to mention such a huge effort would ignore hr other side of opsec: the wizarding world.

This is a world that knows about and hence can account for memory shenanigans. It is also a world where secrets are terribly insecure and which is institutionally unsuited (if you look at the official institutions of government) to working with the outside world.

If anyone wanted to get anything done via cooperation with the outside, they would have to observe strict secrecy as well—and that means the armies of record keepers and Obliviators that'd be needed to keep the secret of large-scale cooperation simply cannot exist. In theory if the Ministry of Magic mobilized all its resources, like, say, Operation Declare or Her Majesty's Occult Service, it can pull off huge stunts. But given that the prime movers of events have been consistently non-Ministry, given that it couldn't stop a simple coup d'etat, it is logically not a party to whatever Dumbledore would have done in WWII.