Despite the fact that Rowling writes in a magical universe, the humanoid magical creatures you’d expect to encounter everywhere get little screen time apart from the werewolves… and even those only as individual, sick, ostracized members of society. We know that Vampires, Veela, Merepeople and hags exist but we get little to no information about their place in the magical world. It seems that vampires and similar creatures are not educated at Hogwarts so where do they come from? Why do they play such a small role in the politics of this society that tries so hard to remain hidden?

Magical Creatures get a lot of abuse from fangirls in fanon. And even Indy writers mess them up badly most of the time. How would you like to see them portrayed and is a non-cliché portrayal even possible? (*cough*A Second Chance at Life*cough*)

How about the other species fanon introduces? Elves, Faeries, Succubi and Werecats etc?

When trying to integrate any of these species into you stories… what are dos and what are don’ts. Vampire lords and werewolf packs seem so terribly overused.

Any examples where you’d say they are more or less well done?

 

Get that Comic Relief book, Dangerous Beasts and Where to Find Them. If it's not in there, you better have a really fucking good reason as to why the Wizarding world has never so much as heard about the critter in question.

If you manage to do that, nail down a reason why the regular world has never heard of them. This is the age of cell-phone cameras with internet access, the Masquerade shit won't play here.

Now, if they've managed to keep hidden from wizards and normies since year dot, why the fuck are they appearing in your story now?

Heavily regulated and downtrodden by the various ministries.

Because they're a downtrodden minority. The only reason wizards keep 'em hidden is to keep from revealing magic as a whole.

 

The fanon idea that the British Ministry is one of the few that actively persecutes all other magical races seems a little off to me, personally.

 

I fail to see the reason you couldn't just suggest that the creature is in the book for the purpose of the story.

 

Actually staying true to canon seems pretty damn original to me. Doesn't mean no new critters, it just means you have to cudgel your grey matter into coming up with an explanation of how they stayed off the respective radars of the muggle and magical societies. Sure, you can blow it off entirely with a cry of 'creative licence', but that's a slippery slope. A slope that ends with Decepticon!Voldemort.

Let's whip something up.

Elves living not in this world but a parallel one is pretty much European folklore canon. Spin it like Dresden Files, or like the parasite dimension of the Discworld elves, or put a sci-fi twist on it and stick them on another planet. Have them grow their hair long and wear hats a lot and lay low in the hippie section of town. Tuck them away in the American national parks or the Amazon rainforests. Take a page from the Stargate Ancients or the rumours of the Elder Scrolls Dwemer and say they magick'd themselves onto a higher plane of existence.

HP canon already has fairies - basically butterflies with arms and legs. Since you've already mentioned the elves, I'll assume you're going for the little dancing winged girls - Tinkerbell and the Cottingley Fairies and all that jazz. Easy to add them in - a wizard starts paying attention, they just have to act dumb and the wizard assumes it's just another butterfairy. Hell, the entirety of HP canon fairies could be intelligent fairies playing dumb. Add in a bit of magic and they'd be elusive little buggers to boot, which'd keep the muggles ignorant.

If you just want the come-to-you-in-your-dreams-and-get-nasty variety, have them exist entirely in the realm of dreams. Bam. Of course, you can just as easily add in an entire daemonic subcommunity while you're adding in the fanservice. Separate dimension like the elves, or literally place 'em under the ground. Swimming through the molten rock under the tectonic plates. How they'd pop up for a rendezvous every night would be tricky, but hey, magic. And just because you're adding in Hell doesn't mean you have to go the whole hog with Judeo-Christian themes - just say that the existing Hell was worked into the mythology of the emerging religions back millenia ago. Or you could just play the ineffable card and say Heaven might be there, but they're either staying quiet or they're not making any noise the characters of your story can hear.

My original thought was to just call you a furry and be done with it, but that's lazy. Besides, werewolves are already canon (and mainstream European folklore to boot) - and cats are more awesome than dogs anyway. That's just my opinion, let's not devolve this into a my dog could kick your cat's arse argument.

Few ways you could spin this'n. Say the various werecritters don't get along (since you're adding cats, might as well leave room for others) and werewolves pretty much dominate mainland Britain. Give Ireland or somewhere in mainland Europe to the werecats and it can all be handwaved away as 'since they don't have to deal with them, the British Ministry doesn't give two hoots about them'.

That, or: what happens if a werewolf bites a cat? Catwolf? Catman? Catmanwolf? What happens if that cat bites a human? Catman? Wolfman? Catwolfman? Manman?


So nyer to you, Demon_Vigilante. See how creative you can get when you have to weave inside the rules? Without having to think, I'd just say, bam, thunderbird. Bam, Harry's a werecat animagus. Bam, Harry just ate an Energon cube. Bam, Harry's the new guitarist for MCR.

 

I support the canon interpretation of vampires - meek, controlled creatures that don't hold acandle to wizards. I hate the recent trend in books for vampires to be some sort of extremely powerful, leather-wearing, sensual ubermen, and the way J.K.R. showed her vampire is a breath of fresh air. I constantly want to point out to the vampire-wankers, especially in crossovers involving vampires less than Alucard-level, that HP wizards should have no trouble Freezing vampires, conjuring a stake in their hearts, cutting off their heads, etc.

Vampire Lords = Big Red 'X' Button.

 

Just read ASCAL if you want a good idea of how to do it right.

 

Ascension of the Scorpion Sorcerer? A "bit" cliche I might say, but good for killing a few hours (and a few braincells)

 

Our knowledge about the WW is limited to Harry's knowledge. Meaning that a writer can introduce pretty much anything and chances are, Harry just hasn't stumbled across them. And not all magical creatures are in that book. It is one of many school books and not a complete glossary.

On the idea that all of them are "downtrodden" by the Ministry... I doubt that people like Fudge could control the magical creatures as a whole to that extent, after all their numbers should outweigh those of the wizards and witches as a single "species".

I loved the hippie elves.

Canon does not give us a lot to work with for many species. I totally agree that the vampire cult that has been developing is ridiculous but what exactly distinguishes vamps from wizards? What powers do they have; do they use the same magic as wizards? Do goblins? And can any serious writer use something like "shadow magic" or "stonemancy" or whatever they are called, without sliding into the realm of the ridiculous?

I've been trying to come up with original protrayals inside the canon-given bounds and have been butting into the fact that pretty much everything has been done to some extent or another before.

I haven't seen Succubi yet... although I'm sure I just missed them... so I will rely heavily on them and my own, less glamorous and "dangerously feral" version of Vampires. But whenever trying to write a scene with Goblins I just can not come up with something I don't feel like I'm remembering from some other fiction.

As Tragedian said, HP fanfiction is pretty close to dead.

 

In terms of canon, Vampires at least are apparently not all that rare nor shunned from society. Hagrid's met them in bars, Blood Pops - marketed towards vampires, after all - are sold in candy stores, and obviously Slughorn felt comfortable enough to bring one into a school full of children. This sort of suggests that some, at least, aren't considered terribly dangerous. Of course, my own theory is that some are wizards who are turned and some are muggles and the weak ones are former muggles. Folklore suggests that they are somewhat stronger than humans and have some advanced senses as well as the ability to transform into one or more animal shapes, but we don't know how many of these "powers" are simply the former wizards' magical abilities, such as an animagus form of a particularly legendary vampire.

Hags, too, seem to not be totally shunned, as Ron saw them in the Hog's Head, if memory serves. Though with the reputation of that particular bar, along with their taste for children and liver, I'm not entirely certain that they are welcomed.

In case anyone was wondering, I do plan on incorporating both of these elements into my new story Alchemist's Apprentice, so I'll be keenly eyeing these forums for good ideas.

Since when has HP fanfiction died?

Kevin

 

I can't find my copy of the damn thing, but in the foreword it says something along the lines of "this is the sixty-somethingth edition of this book, because it's a list of every magical critter and a new one being found means a new edition of the book".

The moment you start whining about how canon's too constrictive and you think it's okay to just add a whole fucking colony of High Summer Magic Elf Princes in the middle of Diagon Alley, that's the moment people stop reading your fic. Work within the constraints of the fandom or GTFO of fanfiction and start writing original shit.

 

Luna just owled me. She says that you're wrong (or Scamander is, anyway).

Meh. I'll take something that's well written but dips outside of the constraints of the fandom over something that sticks to it but is poorly written or boring, any day of the week.

I'll buy that. I'd say that probably falls under the category of 'well written'.

 

Warlocke makes a good point - Rowling mentions in an interview that Luna successfully discovers a bunch of new creatures on safaris when she's older merely because she thinks to look for them when no one else would.

However, I agree that the presence of "elves" as D&D portrays them makes for a pretty insta-fail story. Now them being annoying little forest sprites might not be so bad, if you explained why Scamander doesn't know of them.

Dwarves are canon, if you remember from CoS, but we have no info on them. Same with way too many other creatures. If Scamander's book is actually supposed to be a textbook, I feel sorry for any kid that is actually expected to know shit about the creatures described therein.

So make reasonable deductions, or go all out like Miranda Flairgold and no longer write HP.

 

The main problem that I see involved with introducing new magical species etc. is that they tend to change the world too much. Adding in other dimensions or planes of existence a la Dresden really wouldn't work well with the HP world as it shifts it away from a wizard-centric world and instead makes the Ministry but one governing body among many, one for each species, which tends to lead to a mess.

Sometimes this mess can turn out readable, like ASCAL, but more often than not it doesn't.

It seems to me that it's more like an encyclopedia or an overview of the magical creatures. Presumably other books go into more detail about individual creatures' habits, feeding, mating, magical powers, biology, variations etc.

 

I tend to dislike reading about any individual 'courts' or something of the likes for each species. Of course they would have existed once upon a time, but I refuse to believe that the magical creatures would have remained as archaic. I much prefer the modern kind that creep around in the muggle world and use whatever powers they have on the unsuspecting muggles and not the distrustful wizards. And I can't think of any reasons for them to still be organised into kingdoms or packs or some such shit. Organizations make sense because they have to fight for their rights but generally I'd think they'd prefer to disappear in the crowd.

In the muggle world they won't be doctors or something along those lines, because they did not enjoy a formal education, but werewolves as workers and Succubi or Vamps as whores makes sense on some level. They can use what they have or, in the Vampires' case, get close enough to the kind of shady prey they need where no one is going to ask questions, and make money (which they can't in the wizarding world because they aren't allowed to work).

Magical creatures exist for specific reasons. Other than humans, they have an obvious purpose or at least an exacter definition. Succubi are there to tempt men. Veela use their beauty to control men and enable them a comfortable life while their bird persona helps them defend against unwanted attention and jealous females (Veela are a lot like parasites rally). Goblins are characterized by greed and bloodlust which means that while they once bashed in heads to get their hands on gold, they are now business men. Werewolves are humans whose animal nature takes over on a few days each month.

Magical creatures represent a small part of our human nature and are often quite symbolic.

 

Hmm...existing in the Muggle world is one way, but from canon it seems to me that they exist on the fringes of wizarding society.

 

What do they do on the fringes? What do they live from, where do they live? How come Harry sees next to nothing from them?

 

Fringes as in, they shop at Knockturn alley rather than Diagon, they go to the pub at the Hog's Head rather than the Three Broomsticks, and so on. There's an inferior version of pretty much everything, it seems, where the "dregs of society" hang out.

 

Where do they go to school? What do they work as? Magical creatures in canon are pretty underdeveloped.

And the fringes of magical and mudane society overlap. Even the Blacks live in a run-down muggle neighbourhood. I do not think that the seperation can be as severe as Rowling sometimes portrays it (Arthur Weasely... 'nough said). With muggleborns and halfbloods making up the greater part of the magical community, I'd say that walls would be crumbling pretty fast.

 

Who knows? Maybe they go to Muggle school, maybe they don't go to school at all, maybe they don't get turned/bitten until later life so go to Hogwarts/Muggle school as normal.

As for jobs, whatever they can get I should imagine.