The Harry Potter Fanfiction Thread

Seeing how there is more Harry Potter fanfiction than just about anything, and how there are threads for specific Harry Potter fanfics, it seems kinda odd that we don't have one for Harry Potter fanfics in general.

If there is one and it's just hiding at the bottom of the pile, feel free to hit me in the face with a walrus cock or something.

Anyway! Discuss your own Harry Potter fanfiction here! Discuss other people's Harry Potter fanfiction here! Good, bad, ugly or maybe even just plain absurd!

Caaan anybody find me... Somebody to ♠

Okay, I don't know if this is against the rules or not, but I was wondering about the story Harry Potter and the Girl Who Lived (if it's explicit - I don't actually know yet - please let me know and I'll remove the link.). Apparently it had a page here at one point, but was cut and then locked. The rating for it on ff.net is T, so it can't be too sexually graphic, I don't think. There are over 800 reviews, so there has to be something notable about it.

Does anyone know what the deal is with that story? I'm a little afraid to read further without knowing what I'm getting into.

edit: I'm on chapter 2, and so far it's just reading like a standard Peggy Sue Mary Sue fanfic with Harry Potter going back in time into an alternate universe to meet his gender-flipped counterpart. It's not horribly written, but it's not very good either. Like there will be random mentions of how Harry Potter is telepath, a phoenix animagus, has magic nutrition potions, and now his codename is Feathers. What?

Okay, a lot of the stuff in this chapter is pretty stupid*

, but on par with a lot of other bad fanfiction. I am still not seeing what is so notable.

edit2: OH! Is this self-shipping? Fuck. I missed the tags on the story. I guess that might make it notable, but it's still not that bad. I've read pony fanfics with a similar thing going on, and they're actually pretty well-regarded in the fandom. Everyone seemed to think it was cute rather than creepy.

edited 26th Jun '12 5:03:22 PM by Sessalisk

Caaan anybody find me... Somebody to ♠

The only fanfic I can recommend on an open forum (as most of the others have been nsfw) is Oh God, Not Again. Which is fricking hilarious, well-written, and has a happy Harry.

And has one of the best Brick Jokes in history. Harry:"Cemetary" Cedric: "Run Like Hell."

edited 29th Jun '12 10:41:34 PM by TamH70

^ And here I thought you'd recommend Methods Of Rationality

"Oh God Not Again" started out really great, but after it became clear that the author didn't really care much about the premise beyond using it as an excuse for a "Harry acts insane and Genre Savvy" story it got a little less appealing to me. I still enjoyed it, though.

I'd say my taste in Harry Potter fics varies. My general hobby in fanfic is to browse fanfiction.net forever looking for the 10%, and as a result I've seen some of the best, some of the worst, and some of the less than good ones that think they're the best... the Harry Potter section in particular is a good place to study characteristics you might generally find in fanfiction, since there are so many of them.

Recently I've been reading a lot of "Reading The Books" fics, a decent chunk of which are pretty flat but a few of which use the premise very well - the idea that a bunch of characters could have their future revealed to them is a pretty good one if the writer deals with it well enough. Lots of people just have it be single one liners after whole pages of text from the books, but others do deal with the characters pretty well. I could probably recommend a few good ones, though fanfiction.net is pretty much systematically wiping these from existence anyway.

Other than that, I'd say my favorite types of books are the mix of slice of life and adventure stories that deal with the in between from the end of DH to the epilogue... sadly most people just write hook-up fics in that time, but there are some that really effectively continue the lives of the characters.

I also like the idea of "Albus Potter And The ______" series, though a lot of those are hook-up fics as well. Not that that's surprising. There's two fairly decent series of those I've been semi-following though...

edited 3rd Jul '12 4:27:10 AM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Well, it bores people if I keep banging on about Methods. Which I am happy to do, it is just I loved "Oh God, Not Again." Probably for all the reasons why you don't, 8-)

Thirty Hs is still the gold standard by which Harry Potter crack fics aspire to.

Neither goony beard-men nor rainbow-haired she-twinks will stand in the way of my dreams!

I'm interested in the "Reading the Book" thing you're talking about. Is that where characters from the books actually read the Harry Potter books themselves? Do you have links to the good ones you've been referring to before they're taken down? Cuz that's a pretty interesting concept!

edited 3rd Jul '12 8:38:34 AM by Sessalisk

Caaan anybody find me... Somebody to ♠

It sounds interesting, I know, but after you read a few meh ones they all start to blend together; the people reading tend to be the Marauders, wondering at first how James managed to acquire a cousin, then wondering how he got Lily to actually permit him to be in her presence long enough to have sex without hexing him (they dial up her rage in these fics a lot of the time, make her a batshit tsundere instead of a girl who doesn't want to go out with a douchetard), then hissing and booing at Snape, and then Sirius makes some Muggle-world-savvy references he really shouldn't know anything about with the excuse that he learns about Muggle stuff whenever he can to piss off his parents. Oh, and sometimes they turn on Peter when it's revealed what he did.

A True Lady's Quest - A Jojo is You!

^^^^ I dunno, I doubt the reasons I eventually disliked "Oh God, Not Again" are the same reasons you liked it. After all, "Thinking In Little Yellow Boxes" is one of my favorite Potter fanfics.

Most of the best ones really do work with the concept, though: have the characters truly react to things, have an actual plot and progression beyond just having the books plastered there. As with all fanfiction genres, the diamond in the rough is worth it.

And you can always tell when you're about to read an interesting one, because it has characters that aren't often used. A while ago I went on a big search for Reading The Books stories wherein the writer wasn't afraid to use Pettigrew. There's only, like, one.

My favorites of the genre are the ones that aren't the Marauders anyway, but for the characters in the present reading about their immediate futures.

Of the ones that aren't lost to the ether, I'd suggest Point Given's "For A Better Future," which is probably the best one I can think of off the top of my head. Also, it has the fun turn of bringing Hermione's family into the act halfway through the OOTP set.

Another I'd suggest is "Dumbledore's Army Reads Order Of The Phoenix," which got better as the author kept writing it, though he had no plans for continuing through the series. There's also Choice HP's "Changing The Future: Reading The Deathly Hallows" which has a follow up story.

The best I can recall reading involved early-fourth year Harry and a lot of people reading starting from the middle of fourth-year continuously into fifth year - it was one of the stories that got me into the genre - but that one was deleted years ago.

edited 3rd Jul '12 5:33:26 PM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

"Deprived" (a Wrong-Boy-Who-Lived story) is a Guilty Pleasure of mine... maybe because it features The Story Of Ricky head claps, Harry being an impossibly awesome badass, Luna being, well, Luna, and many other bizarre and odd things.

Neither goony beard-men nor rainbow-haired she-twinks will stand in the way of my dreams!

Fiddling around with an Elsewhere Fic set at Hogwarts during the events of Deathly Hallows.

Obviously, this has been done already and I am concerned about not ripping things off. That's especially important to me since I started this by me deciding "I could better than this, so why don't I?"

edited 7th Jul '12 1:10:07 PM by TheBatPencil

And let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a' that)

Actually, the story you first recommended is NOT explicit. However, there is a fanfiction story with the same exact name that is. That's why. I read the one you posted and it was wonderfully thought out.

And funny in a very dry way. But I love dry humour! I live for it!!!

Hmm... so I'm working on a fanfic at the moment that takes place in the Potterverse, although it's kind of a weird one; it's a crossover fic starring Harry Dresden... who gets knocked on the head (again) shortly after the events of Turn Coat. And then wakes up in the body of an eleven-year-old Harry Potter, on the Hogwarts Express for the first time.

The thing that made me want to write this (aside from how much fun it is to write in First-Person Smartass) was the fact that (canonically) Harry Dresden has read the books (and seen the movies). Add that on top of his normal Spanner in the Works tendencies and violent dislike of dark magic, and I give the original plot about a week before it goes so far off the rails that you would be forgiven for thinking that the rails were never there to begin with.

So... is it kosher to poke about for Alpha readers for "A Wizard Named Harry" here, or should I confine that to the Writer's Block subforum? >.>

Finally! I've been waiting for you to write this since you mentioned it in Fanfic Ideas You're Sure Only You Think Are Good. Can I get a link up in here?

A True Lady's Quest - A Jojo is You!

It's very much a Work-in-Progress, Furiko. As in, it's currently in a state that I'm not comfortable with putting up for public consumption >.O

That being said, if you want to/are willing to Alpha-read it, toss me a PM with your e-mail and I'll send the first few chapters your way.

Just a thought at the moment but how do people think it would play out if James' sacrifice had been enough to protect both Lily and Harry on that Halloween in 1981?

Essentially the curse rebounds off of Lily when she stands between Harry and Voldemort.

If Lily was also lauded as the one who beat Voldemort despite her own protests. The Prophet just couldn't resist the poetic irony of him being beaten by a muggle-born. Plus no one can believe that he simply disappeared. Except maybe Dumbledore.

edited 31st Jul '12 5:22:27 PM by PhoenixAct

"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill

I would read that so hard.

A True Lady's Quest - A Jojo is You!

I had an idea of writing a story about how the First Wizarding War played out. Basically, it would be centered around the Ministry of Magic during a time where it actively fought against Voldemort, set around 1972-80. There is no Chosen One, so there's no easy magical solution to defeating Voldemort. He is a force of destruction and his followers have corrupted every level of wizarding society. Every character is flawed, and has to wrangle with the fact that Voldemort is merely a symptom of the horrible society they built and sustained..

The central characters:

• A newly elected Minister, an idealist who not only wants to defeat Voldemort, but also reform British magical society. That proves easier said than done because, as a "new man" in wizarding politics and a Muggle-born, he has no connection to the pureblooded old wizarding families. And because of his unwillingness to engage in corruption, it's unlikely he'll ever join such an exclusive club. He got elected purely because he was everyone's second choice. Was formerly an Auror, and his fellow aurors hate him for being essentially the equivalent of Internal Affairs. He is married to a muggle-born witch with three children.
• Barty Crouch Sr., Head of Magical Law Enforcement. A man totally devoted to defeating Voldemort, at any cost. An extreme man, he uses measures many consider to be little different from the Death Eaters. It often takes the combined pressure of the Minister, Dumbledore, and high ranking members of the Wizengamot to prevent him from going through with his more insane schemes, demonstrating his influence and the precariousness of everyone else's position. Comes from very old wizarding blood, but has a very poor family life. His wife is constantly ill and he is distant to his son. Extremely popular because his actions get visible results (whether they are desirable is another story).
• Albus Dumbledore, leader of the Wizengamot, the wizarding court. Has his hands full with a young and brash Minister, the extremist Crouch, the hopelessly corrupt Auror office, the unjust and repressive hanging judges, and overseeing Hogwarts, while also leading the Order of the Phoenix, which has an undeservedly bad reputation with the Ministry.
• Lucius Malfoy: a young, wealthy elite and a member of Ministry's financial office. Having close ties to both the Ministry's treasury and Gringott's, the Auror Office (which he has paid off) is nevertheless investigating him for funneling gold to the Death Eaters. His father Abraxas was one of the other candidates for Minister, but when both Dumbledore and Edgar Bones drop out, a relative unknown is elected by the deadlocked Ministry as a compromise candidate.
• Rufus Scrimgeour and Frank Longbottom, the Old Cop, Young Cop, a pair of Aurors who see most of the action. Scrimgeour thinks Crouch is a hero and supports his draconian measures. Longbottom supports Dumbledore and thinks Crouch is too extreme. Frank also has to hide the fact that he is a member of the Order, since many honest Ministry officials think they are undermining official authority...and the corrupt ones want them dead.
• Voldemort. The Big Bad, of course. Rarely seen. Malfoy is The Heavy. Currently killing Auror after Auror. The bounty on his head numbers in the hundreds of thousands of galleons. The Minister of Magic has set up a special task force of the best aurors in the business to track him down. Scrimgeour, Frank Longbottom, and Mad Eye Moody are part of this force.

edited 15th Aug '12 7:25:00 PM by CrimsonZephyr

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

I take it the new Minister is killed by Voldemort just as he is on the cusp of winning the public's approval, and becomes a martyr after he dies?

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

No, being a Reasonable Authority Figure, he and Dumbledore get along really well (there has to be a reason why the Death Eaters and the Ministry fought each other for eleven years on roughly even terms in the first war, while the Ministry was completely curbstomped in the second). Between the two of them, they control the bureaucracy and the high court, and manage to keep Crouch, Sr. muzzled until he's needed. But he's a Muggle-born Minister, extremely popular amongst his own but reviled by the pure-bloods. Even goodhearted pure bloods, like Harry Potter's pure-blooded grandparents, think he's a demagogue (and, to some degree, he is — he is a jerk to pure-bloods for understandable, but self-destructive reasons, giving him a reputation as favoring his own). And every decision he makes regarding the war, while sound, destroys his popularity to near zero percent. Once it becomes clear that he can't hold off an election, he's unceremoniously defeated and sacked, and gets pilloried repeatedly by the Daily Prophet (Rita Skeeter makes her bones smearing him daily). He makes one last speech about how the dream of societal reform, of Muggle-born and non-wizard rights will never die. Millicent Bagnold takes over, doesn't trust Dumbledore, they can't keep Crouch's Knight Templar tendencies in check, and when the war ends, she gets credit for all the work her predecessor did in protecting the wizarding world. She's given the Order of Merlin, First Class, and the ex-Minister gets killed off by Lord Voldemort personally. His funeral is attended by a knot of fervent Muggle-born supporters and his now widowed wife and fatherless children. His reputation doesn't get repaired until well after his children have died and his sole remaining grandchild is a beggar living on Knockturn Alley. By then, it's too late. Central themes: Being Good Sucks, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

Basically, the story isn't really going to be about the war as much as it is going to be about a highly corrupt, but promising society wrangling with its dark side, rather than achieving its highest potential. No one will come out with a happy ending.

edited 15th Aug '12 7:50:20 PM by CrimsonZephyr

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

I heard that someone was reading The Girl Who Lived. ... :3

Caaan anybody find me... Somebody to ♠

Well, not reading the fic proper, but a sporking of it, courtesy of the HSM STFU. I don't know where to find the actual story, except for maybe the Yahoo TGWL group, and I'm not "joining" that thing, ever.

Real class, that. Go to the page and you're hit with a picture of a naked woman who I presume is supposed to be Rose.

Also, actually a completely different story from what you've got in the original post. No, this is something else - an alternate universe thing with a female protagonist instead of Harry. Author also felt that Harry "lacked common sense," and decided his Mary Sue protagonist wouldn't have the same problems. However, the author instead just made new problems, failed to solve old problems, and sucked out all of Harry's good points, creating probably the single most shining example of an awful Mary Sue character.

edited 20th Aug '12 1:17:24 PM by Pannic

Fanfiction I hate.

Hmm... It's different from the one I found? Could you give a link? or is it an explicit story and against the rules?

That explains a lot, actually. Apparently feo said that The Girl Who Lived was so awful that he couldn't finish reading it, and I just googled the title and picked the first story that came up. The one I read was just mediocre, rather than repugnant.

edit: Never mind. Saw your post on the FoE thread and it's an explicit story.

edited 20th Aug '12 1:36:50 PM by Sessalisk

Caaan anybody find me... Somebody to ♠

You can look up das sporking on Google and find the live journal thing. They mocked the whole thing. You're in for a treat. Marvel as the protagonist takes up any interesting abilities that other characters had. Be glued to your seat as she abuses those who are supposedly her friends. Be amazed as she struts around Hogwarts naked.

Fanfiction I hate.

Oh goodness. It's script format? Blech.

Caaan anybody find me... Somebody to ♠