I remember when more Aussies than just joe6991 wrote HP stuff.

Not sure if these devices have died out, but magical TARDIS!Trunks and pensieve memory training were pretty prolific.

I also remember there being a site with a light-purple/white? theme where I discovered some great HP/Stargate crossovers, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was or if it still lives.

 

Heh. While I do like the idea of shutting down a whole genre of the fandom, there have been plenty of decent and well-written time travel fics post-Wastelands!

 

Yes, exactly! Like HP and the Heartlands of Time

 

And the winner of best post by a squib is.

 

Harry going to a foreign school was huge. Generally Durmstrang because they wanted Harry to be dark and edgy, but pretty much every major city in the world had a HP fic set there where Harry was running away to from "Evil Dumbledore".

It was commonly paired with Wrong Boy Who Lived too and all that that entailed.
I even got in on the action and submitted a story here where Harry was the WBWL and fled to Rome to learn magic there.

People ripped it to shreds so completely that I even abandoned that account and avoided DLP like the plague for a few years. I remember someone said it was so bad it had to be a troll- nope, I was just 11 lol

 

Every time Harry goes to another school I inevitably think of Miranda Flairgold, the queen of over the top alternative education.

 

I'm a late comer to the HP fanfic world, but every time I see the Dark-but-not-Evil Harry tag, it makes me laughingly wish for Evil-but-not-Dark stories instead. Like if Harry were a huge snob that thought the Dark Arts were a cheap and easy way to kill and torture people.

 

Write this man.

 

The Diagon Alley super shopping trip was at one point almost mandatory, accompanied by the super trunk, and clothes and shoe shopping at a muggle store for some reason. Plebian teenagers want their sneakers instead of wizarding fashion.

The indy!Harry formula has really been refined into cliched perfection, but it was exciting over tean years ago.

Azkaban!Harry really was basically an entire sub-genre. Has really fallen off, though.

My clearest memories are definitely of a 'summer of change' project, with a shopping trip, time dilation super trunk training, getting physically fit, and all that stuff.

 

Stalking? Creating an entire false life story around yourself to get noticed by fanfic authors? Some people sure treated their children books fanfics really seriously.

 

Looks at Deadwoodpecker.

 

What did she do?

 

I'm curious as well as I must have missed this story.

(The description sounds a bit more like the Andrew Blake/thanfiction roadshow.)

 

She pretended to have this humongous family, invited everybody to add her on Facebook, and maintained an entire fake persona for years.

Turns out they were pictures of her friend, her husband, and their kids. That's what that thing Taure posted about her deleting all her stories was about a few months ago.

She never did delete them though.

 

This is what I found on a reddit thread :
she had a Facebook page that she shared with fans, where she out up pictures of her husband and children. At some point on the Facebook page or a discord channel or something, someone revealed that the photos had been stolen from neighbours and friends.

 

I mean, I vividly remember seeing so many Dursley abuse stories. I don't really know how prolific they are now because I'm so so picky when it comes to HP fic (my trash is anime trash), but dozens upon dozens of "whump!Harry" and usually paired with a Severitus or Harry/Draco slash or both. There was also a weird but very active subset of fics where Harry either tried or successfully committed suicide. Again, often paired with some kind of Severitus, Drarry, or evil Weasleys/Dumbledore.

 

I recall the time-travel stories where Harry and Hermione realized they liked each other after the final battle, kiss, and are taken up by the Goddess of Love, (or Death) and proceed to do everything all over again. It was always Ron, Ginny, Molly, and Dumbledore or four of them trying to break the pair up and always failed spectacularly because of the soul bond Harry and Hermione had. They would also always argue with the Goddess of Love about something and said God would always fold backwards during the arguments (I - faintly - remember there was one time when the Goddess almost broke Harry after one shouting match, by using her godly presence to remind him just who had the power there).
Haven't seen one of those in ages, and I think that's a good thing.

 

Man, personifications of Love, Death or Fate are basically big warning signs that the magic system is going to suck and that the author will use lazy plot twists. For some reason a lot of people think that a being like that would be like a powerful human who (for some reason) doesn't use his powers except to give Harry (and friends) superpowers and time travel.
There are some good examples of including Death like in the 'Black Prince' when the shadows call Harry master but the big difference between this kind of use and the bad kind is that these entities are decidedly not human.
The only recent examples (of the bad kind) that I've seen are 'Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches - Revenge is Best Served Raw' (guilty pleasure but not terrible) and 'New Gods Rising' (okay but not much has happened and the author is rewriting it I think).

@momo not sure if that was actually a compliment but thanks I guess

 

The personifications were part of a challenge, although I can't remember who started it.

Blood Brandy had another popular one, with the DC Vegas challenge. This involved Sirius taking Harry to Vegas, then them getting drunk and marrying supers. Often Harry gets a throuple, either with two of the titans, or a hero/villain pair. I don't know of any that finished, although I'm sure that's where Megamatt got started.

I think one of the things I don't see as much (for HP, at least) is iterative fanfics. Omakes, challenges, fanfic-of-fanfic... They all seem to be for 'younger' fandoms. In the sense of how long they've existed, not target demographic.

Look at Worm stuff - more omakes and F.o.F there, too.

 

God, challenges. I think Perfect Lionheart (and isn't he another blast from the past - remember Partially Kissed Hero, or his pseudonym Skysaber's My Gilded Life?) issued one, the Missing Hokage challenge, for Naruto. I think that oddly enough some not-all-that-awful fics come out of it, although I don't remember them taking the challenge's prompt too literally.