Context:

For some time, I’ve been dissatisfied with two key underdeveloped aspects of the Harry Potter universe, and fanfiction has failed to offer the development I’d really enjoy reading. I’ve toyed around with the idea of writing it myself at times and despite having developed various aspects of it fairly well in my head, I’ve never made any attempt (beyond discussing ideas with others) to make good. Part of the purpose of this post is to flesh out the idea and construct a general outline so that I can expose it to criticism and hopefully develop it into a solid and well written story that avoids many of the pitfalls present in fanfiction and the novels themselves.

Additionally, while I’ve written plenty of non-fiction papers and such, I’ve never written a single fic. And I really want this story to be a good one. What I’d prefer, then, is if someone were interested in partnering with me on this so that I don’t have to invest an immense amount of time in writing it myself just for the satisfaction of the story finally being done properly. If you or anyone you know would be interested in writing this with me, please let me know. My preference would be to be heavily involved in developing the plot, but not so much in actually doing the quality writing so an ideal pairing would be someone who loves to write but is looking for ideas. I've got a pretty good handle on the real world aspect of many of the things I want to bring to the story (i.e. military practices and weaponry) so I can provide SME input on that as well.

Poorly Developed Ideas

Poorly Developed Idea 1: a more significant application of magic to and integration of things invented after about 1500 or so, especially for the purpose of fighting.

The real world reason for this is of course that Rowling found the idea of a separate wizarding world enchanting and didn’t give much thought to how the competitive space of ideas would force innovation, so we get the traditional wizarding world untouched from the fantasy setting barring the occasional steam train and flying car. The in-universe reason is conspicuously lacking except for a clear implication that magic means muggle stuff is inferior to wizard stuff and wizards are not threatened by muggle stuff (“the great James and Lily Potter died in a car crash?! HA!”).

While there are a few fanfics that deal with this issue well by coming up with a plausible reason for the lack of magic applied to muggle tech, the ones that have our heroes buck this trend use a lazy excuse on the level of “lol, wizards are so dumb they never thought about using/enchanting a gun!”, and then, inevitably, these same stories seem to fall into the same trap by failing to fully exploit the potential of magic applied to muggle tech. It is this second category of fanfiction that I wish to improve on: I want to write a story that much more fully exploits the potential of magic applied to technology. The idea is for this to be a sort of revolution in military affairs where our heroes bring tech to the fight, countermeasures are developed, counter-countermeasures and new innovations are developed, etc. and until countermeasures are developed, innovations continue to be exploited (I’m tired of reading good ideas being used only once despite never being credibly countered). There are so many opportunities for this, and the fact that existing literature is pretty much limited to “guys with guns shoot wizards and sometimes use bombs too” drives me nuts. I want to see muggles and squibs crewing high caliber machine guns and mortars that are unleashed on buildings while wizards break down the wards so that when the protections fail, the house starts crumbling under the barrage; I want to see 120mm sabot rounds (rounds and the tubes stolen and repaired from munition dumps and tank graveyards, of course) being fired at giants, rune inscribed wizard breaking bullets, flying machines launching munitions from the air (no, not brooms), and more.

I’m not trying to write a stompfest here; it’s totally feasible to restore balance to the story by giving Voldemort actual or de facto control over the wizarding government like we see in book 7. Combine that with giants, werewolves, and adult wizards, and magic which is very effective at thwarting physics based weaponry and it's hardly me "giving Harry a light saber" without also "giving Voldemort the death star".

Challenges to writing this:

• A satisfying reason for why wizards have not already adopted such techniques (i.e. if magical guns are great, why doesn’t Moody carry one?).
  • One of the best idea so far: magic messes with precision machinery in inconsistent ways; the more something is a product of precision crafting, the more likely it is to malfunction in the presence of magic (higher levels of magic exacerbate this issue).
    • Potential resolution: Heroes discover a closely guarded art /invent a method to modify such things to be compatible with magic.
      
      
    • Potential resolution: ambient magic is monitored and the levels dictate which technology is usable.
      
      
    • Potential Resolution: the ability to merge magic and technology is a very recent development, and Harry's celebrity status/piles of gold help him get early access.
      
      
    • Potential Resolution: it's long been available, but it's extremely inefficient. You have to pour an enormous amount of magic into the enchantment to stabilize it or something like that, and very few people are powerful enough to do it. In fact, the list is basically Dumbledore, Flamel, Voldemort, and Harry. Whatever else his flaws are, canon strongly implies that harry is an *extraordinarily* powerful wizard- at 13 years old he chased off hundreds of dementors, when most wizards would struggle with one.
      
      
    • Potential Resolution: the trick lies not in enchantment and runes, but in alchemy and potions. Not really a solution to anything in its own right but can be tied to either or both of the above.
  • Another idea: it’s illegal and culturally taboo. The law prevents most of the good guys, and the cultural taboo is traditionalist. It could be illegal either because wizards still remember WWII, because muggle Britain has more influence than we realize, or because of the ICW. It’s arguably plausible that wizards might give up this advantage despite their conflict if we recall that wizarding Britain being in a state of civil war is more of a fanon thing; canon depicts it much more like a terrorist insurgency alongside a sympathetic ruling class which ends in a political coup. The only real “battle” (or even fight of more than a few wizards on each side) in the books is the battle of Hogwarts.
    
    
  • Another idea: muggle tech is considered impotent against magic because:
    • Various things like ballistic protection talismans are commonplace among wizards.
      
      
    • The magic of a wizard means their bodies can withstand more punishment (this fits well with the canon casual acceptance of kids playing quidditch) so bullets just don’t do that much damage as compared to spells.

In this case, it is the concept of combined arms, where muggle weaponry is merely one part of the combined effects (which include other techniques such as those designed to disrupt the ballistic protection) approach that our heroes employ which is new to the wizarding world. Maybe Moody does carry a gun, we’ve just never seen him use it because it's almost always better for a wizard to use his wand in the kinds of fights we've seen in canon.​

• A plausible escalation of countermeasures to maintain tension and conflict in the story.
  • Some of this can simply be addressed by the fact that magic does provide a very effective defense against muggle weaponry (magical protection not working well against guns is one of my pet peeves). This fits well with the second idea for why muggle tech is not used by British wizards

Poorly Developed Idea 2: Harry gets over his victim status, realizes the British wizarding world is not worth saving (and even if it was, he doesn’t owe them anything), decides they can all rot together, and leaves for anther wizarding country. Although this has kind of been done, I’ve never seen it done well except as a oneshot (and I say “kind of” because even when it’s done poorly he comes back for reasons that aren’t really his own). Unfortunately, when this has been done, it’s almost always as part of a Harry Goes to Azkaban fic which kind of ruins it from the start (“Azkaban hardens Harry” would be a fine trope if it weren’t for the fact that Harry going to Azkaban is so implausible that authors are forced to concoct a ridiculous narrative to get him there). But what I really want to see is after the series of events that totally disillusion Harry, rather than staying and fighting for this awful world, he decides to just leave. And leave for real, not just run off and come back when he realizes people really need his help, leave and only come back to the fight for his own reasons rather than some misguided loyalty to a messed up wizarding world (I’d prefer he just stay gone, but there’s no story if he never returns).

This idea feels like low hanging fruit since it’s so easy to read the canon wizarding world as irredeemable. We don’t even have to come up with ridiculous conspiracies or Evil Dumbledore, we just have to look at how Harry is treated in book 5 to ask “if Harry had any sense of self worth, why would he stay in Britain?” So the idea here is to just subtly nudge a few canon events and let Harry just decide he’s had enough.

Biggest writing challenge: Coming up with circumstances that bring him back into the fight (maybe Voldemort kills his dog and steals his car?).


These ideas work together because if you really want to write Harry as someone leading a military insurgency, he needs to be older than sixteen and he needs military training. So get him out of the country, get him some training, give him some contacts, and give him time and opportunity to learn how to integrate magic with muggle before we finally kill his dog and steal his car to get him back fighting Voldemort.


Story that I’ve come up with so far:


In fourth year, instead of welcoming Ron back with open arms after the dragon fight, he’s kind of shocked that Ron thinks he can treat Harry the way he did and then just expect to be welcomed back once he changes his mind… just like the rest of the wizarding world does to him. He still forgives him (mostly) but he doesn’t forget and he never sees Ron quite the same after that.

The summer before fifth year, Harry finds out that the real reason Hermione is at Grimmauld Place is because she had a huge fight with her parents after they find out about Voldemort being back and want to move to France. This gets Harry wondering whether maybe Hermione’s parents have a point. After he learns how he’s being treated by the press, Harry asks Sirius about continental contingency plans; could he transfer to Beauxbatons if he is expelled at his trial? After his trial, he’s not ready to leave just yet, but he’s also not sure what’s keeping him here, especially if Hermione were to leave. After sharing this with Hermione, he realizes that he’s pretty much the only reason Hermione is still in Britain and that if he were to leave, she would too.


Departure Option 1:

When Harry feels the blood quill cut into his skin it all comes to a head: he decides he’s not going to just do as he’s told anymore and refuses to cooperate. Harry grabs the quill and takes it to Mcgonagall. Optional: Umbridge pulls her wand on him, a brief fight ensues.

From here, either Harry finds Mcgonogall’s response to Umbridge’s attempted torture disappointing or else Mcgonogall’s efforts only stall Umbridge until she is able to push through another educational decree. In either case, Dumbledore continues the mysterious distance we see in book five, and Harry messages Sirius about the possibility of activating their contingency plans. Harry tells Hermione (but not Ron) that he’s ready to leave before they can expel him and she surprises him by agreeing and committing to coming with him.

Harry eventually becomes convinced he is about to be expelled (real or not) and decides to leave before they can snap his wand. He sneaks out in the night with Hermione and meets Sirius in Hogsmeade who takes them to Hermione’s parents. From here, they use muggle methods to leave the country, but not before making one last stop: an interview with Rita Skeeter about “Why I’m Leaving -Harry Potter”. By the time the article hits the Quibbler, Harry is already requesting asylum in Switzerland.

Hermione and her family might join him in Switzerland, but more likely they move to France and both Harry and Hermione transfer to Beauxbatons.

Without Harry in Britain, events proceed mostly as they would have with him there, including Umbridge running rampant over the school and torturing students. Most probably, Dumbledore exploits Voldemort’s obsession with the prophecy into forcing him to reveal himself at the cost of Voldemort discovering the contents of the prophecy. Optional: some or all of the nature of the prophecy gets leaked to the press, causing the wizarding world to realize that the prophesied savior has abandoned them.

Dumbledore and/or Scrimgeour visit Harry and attempt to get him to return to Britain. Harry asks what punishment Umbridge received and looks pointedly at them as they give their unsatisfying response.

When Dumbledore shares the prophecy with Harry, and explains that it is Voldemort’s belief in the prophecy which gives it its power, Harry points out that Dumbledore is trying to get Harry to give the prophecy the same belief and therefore the same power. Clearly his best move is to place no faith in it and give it no hold over him.


Departure Option 2 involves Harry sitting in Dumbledore’s office after the canon DoM debacle and asking if he could use Dumbledore’s pensieve privately for a while to try to come to terms with everything that happened in the death room. While doing so, he realizes that he is able to hear the words of the prophecy, and they differ slightly from what Dumbledore showed him: “and neither can die while the other lives”. He starts to wonder whether Dumbledore is misleading him and this plants the seeds of doubt in Dumbledore. Before leaving Hogwarts, Harry calls one last DA meeting where he tells the DA that things are going to get dangerous and that if they can convince their parents to leave Britain, they should. Later, after having had some time to stew on things, he confronts Dumbledore/Scrimgeour regarding Umbridge: what punishment did she receive for everything she had done (including using an unforgivable and sending dementors after his parents). After some weak words about political necessities, it is admitted that effectively nothing has been done to her. Harry finds this to be the last straw and decides to leave Britain with Hermione and request asylum in Switzerland.

Although this option has now been mostly superceded by option one for me, I still like it because it lets me play with a version of the prophecy that matches how the end of book 7 went pretty well, and I like the idea that this is the true wording of the prophecy. This is also the only way I get to have the full scope of Umbridge’s unpunished sins be directly responsible for Harry leaving Britain; I find this a very satisfying way to address what may be the most unappreciated miscarriage of justice in all of the books, especially when you consider that the vindicated Dumbledore was at the height of his political power, Harry’s testimony would have been listened to after the embarrassment of calling him a liar, and the disgraced state Umbridge was in at the end of book 5. The other aspects of Option 1 seem better though, so maybe I’ll just have to write a oneshot where this is the catalyst for Harry leaving for real and truly abandons Britain to their fate.


Switzerland offers the story the following benefits:

• An extremely plausible location for Harry take the neutral position from.
  • Tradition of neutrality.
    
    
  • Physical isolation.
    
    
  • Plausible magical protection from outsiders.
    
    
  • Tradition of being willing to put up extreme resistance against invaders (in ww2 they basically rigged the whole damned mountain to blow if anyone tried to drag them into it)
• The opportunity to learn the Swiss magic that allows precision instruments to work in the presence of magic.
  
  
• Military training as part of the legendary Swiss militia.
  
  
• An environment to meet and become familiar with various mercenary groups.
  
  
• A non-cliche location for Harry to flee to.
  
  
• If Harry comes back because Voldemort attacked him or his loved ones on Swiss territory, it’s very plausible that they would consent to him using their guarded technology to fight his insurgency.

After Harry completes his schooling he spends some obligatory time in the Swiss military (if it’s not obligatory for the muggles, it is for the wizards). Some time after that, something brings him back into the fight. At some point Harry learns of the Horcruxes; some of them have already been destroyed, others have been moved. Harry decides that’s not a reason to wait on killing Voldemort, and they do in fact manage it. After the first time though, Voldemort gets the return process pretty streamlined, so there’s not much point in killing him except to remove him from the current fight. It’s proposed that he be captured instead of killed, but V may have a way to abandon his body in such a circumstance.

When Harry returns to the fight, he brings with him a team of friends who owe him a favor, friends who enjoy the fight, and mercenaries he hires with his and Sirius’s vast gold. Some of these people (in fact quite a few of them) are muggles and/or squibs.

Additional Thoughts

How to bring him back:

Option 1: Steal his car and kill his dog. (If you don’t get the reference, shame on you, go watch John Wick, (just the first one and the first five minutes or so of the second one)).
In Harry’s case, the easy option here is Hermione. Hermione appreciates her time in France and at Beauxbatons, but can’t sit idly by while injustice is being done. Despite Harry’s best efforts to dissuade her (they even have a fight about it), she returns to Britain to join the resistance after she graduates. Some time later, Harry learns of her death at the hands of Voldemort when her parents visit him in Switzerland. As per the policy of Voldemort’s government, her parents are kidnapped to be publicly executed in Britain with a number of other families of resistance members. But the death eaters slipped up: although Voldemort has left standing orders not to attack Harry in Switzerland, it did not occur to the death eaters that this policy should extend to other violent actions in Switzerland as well, and so they conduct their kidnapping on Swiss soil as Hermione’s parents are returning from visiting Harry. Not only does this get Harry involved, but this violation of Swiss neutrality sways the government when Harry makes his bid for permission to use Swiss magic in his vengeance. As much as it’s kind of cliche to kill a guy’s loved ones in order to get a good vengeance story, it’s common because it works so well (tropes are, after all, tools). Also, while it might be cliche in movies and books, fanfiction authors usually introduce a new character to kill off if they’re even willing to kill off someone dear to Harry in the first place. Hermione hardly ever gets killed except in the backstory of a post-apocalyptic or time travel type fic.


Option 2: Something related to the horcrux in Harry’s head. Perhaps it changes in nature over time, or continues to provide visions over distance as the war continues. Eventually an expert is able to discern its nature after study and questioning Harry, but this would likely be years later and probably after Dumbledore’s death.


Open Questions:

• What brings Harry back to the fight? Does he actually come back to Britain, or has the fight spread to the continent, narratively allowing Harry to fight him without actually returning?
  
  
• How does Dumbledore approach the Horcrux situation with Harry gone? Is he more cautious, or does he still receive a mortal wound the summer after fifth year? If he still receives a mortal wound, how does he approach his impending death with Harry gone?
  
  
• Does “Why I Left” inspire a more fierce resistance than we saw in the books or otherwise change its nature? (“Your interview has left quite the mark Harry. There is now a Purge party in the Wizengamot.” “Did it? Then it seems I did more for the country by leaving than I ever did by living there.”
  
  
• How much does Harry learn about the Horcruxes from Dumbledore?
  
  
• How does Voldemort treat Harry’s departure? It’s very plausible that he just lets him be in Switzerland, for years. Perhaps five years later the resistance still uses Harry the Chosen one as a rallying cry, so Voldemort decides to publicly execute him and therefore makes a kidnap attempt? (this feels kind of cliche, tbh. I almost want Voldemort to just ignore him.)
  
  
• What is the state of the resistance? Are they still in Britain or have they fled?
  
  
• Is he still seen as the prophesied savior?
  
  
• When he learns about the horcrux in his head, does he find a way to remove it that doesn’t involve his death? (it feels kind of cliche to go, “oh, actually ____ magic can remove it safely, Dumbledore just doesn’t know about it/approve of ____ magic/wants you to be a sheep”)
  
  
• What flaws should Harry have so that I’m not writing a Gary Stu?

As you can see, while I've put some thought into the idea, there's still a ton to do, and I'd like to have the general plot of the story outlined before trying to write it (hopefully this prevents the awful fate of the abandoned fic). I eagerly await your flames.

 

I think you are asking in the wrong forum, Goose. The ideas you mentioned are not popular here. Or popular, but have plenty of bad rep. Well deserved bad rep.

Edgy Harry, Harry infusing muggle stuff, Harry abandoning wizarding world are ideas already very overdone in ff. I think these ideas have charm when you read them for the first time, but after that Harry just seems petulant and the tech enchanting badly executed.

And you might find that bit really hard to execute. Enchanting's barely explained in canon, so limitations and new rules would be a slog to explain at the start.

I used to love noodlehammer's stuff and blindness fanfic, but after the novelty wore off, it was just eww.

I think what the fandom really needs now is a fanfic with a completely new concept. If you are going to write something completely wild and new, I will be interested to help. I have been looking for some practise in writing.

Something that explores barely mentioned areas of magic or concepts. Like beyond the curtain by bobika, or like how amerison used to write. Just something completely new from the usual tropes of genre.

I am writing in mobile, so there might be some formatting errors here.

 

I broadly agree with this, however, I'd just like to add that I believe that the execution of an idea is usually more important than the idea itself. Admittedly, trying to hatchet guns into the Harry Potter magic system has been tried *many* times and I've not ever seen it work...

But it does seem like goose has put thought into the idea, and it's hard to see someone's vision until it's conjured into existence, so I don't want to be too harsh. If he's going for an entire reimagining/complete overhaul of the world, i.e. some version or variant of "modern steampunk Harry Potter" then I think it's possible, it would just have to be written very, very well to get people past the initial idea.

@goose000, I think you'll have more success in getting people on board or getting specific feedback if you begin writing your idea. An outline is a good place to start, but actually starting is also important. The clarion call of "I'll start tomorrow" is my personal biggest obstacle, is the only reason I mention it.

Anyway, my experience is that there are a lot more non-writers with ideas that they'd love to see put to paper, than there are prolific writers without any good ideas. The main difference though is that the writers started actually writing at some point. You should start if you think you'd like it.

 

If either of you have read a fic where abandoning the wizarding world to its fate has been done well, then please recommend it, because while I don't disagree that it's been done, I've yet to see it done well except humorously a la Make a Wish, etc.
As for the enchanted gun, not ever seeing it work is precisely why I'm frustrated: the world seems to be ripe for exploitation by disruptive existing tech on the muggle side, and yet nobody seems to write the elements that seem obvious to me to be part of what the solution has to be. I think there's something different to what I have in mind in that in my idea, only magic defeats magic. If Hermione is casting unbreakable charms in 4th year, then truly bullet-proof is easily doable and yet I'm not aware of any stories where mundane muggle weapons are completely defeated by magic and I'm certainly not aware of any where such weapons are combined with magic to achieve an integrated effect where the magic defeats the protection and the kinetics do the damage. Further, the scope and employment are almost always crap and corny.
IOW, Old Soldiers, Bungle in the Jungle, and Divided and Entwined as examples all use muggle weaponry, but they're not treated any differently from magical attacks. The first two mostly don't use any weapons bigger than rifles (sure a recoilless rifle is pulled out once or twice, but that's kind of it) and the third fails to fully exploit what is admittedly a really good idea (expanding C4) and yet at no point do the wizards on the other side develop any meaningful countermeasures. If either of you can point me to a fic where muggle weaponry by itself is effectively useless against magical protection, let alone the additional idea of pairing kinetic with magical attack to create a combined effect, then please point me to it.
It's been "done to death" because the wizarding world as written is ripe for the exploitation. But nobody ever does the hard work of identifying the countermeasures of the sort that military history has shown us would be developed and nobody ever finds the new point of equilibrium for what combat might look like. Everyone just wants to go on a gun rampage against the idiot wizards. That is not my idea.

Once again, the whole point is that I want a story to address either of these ideas well, so if you can recommend a fic where either one is done well, please do so, perhaps that will address what I'm looking for and I won't have to write it.

And thanks for the recommendation @Iztiak, creating this post is meant to be the first step in writing it myself, but I'd still love to find someone to write it with.

 

Re-reading this reply I want to respond a little more specifically to some things.
You're right that enchanting things is usually poorly executed. I have my own ideas about how to execute it better and some of them have to do with more plausibly addressing why we don't already see a high level of enchanted muggle tech. But maybe I need to rewrite my post a little, because that's really only part of my idea. I specifically want to explore a new dynamic of combat where muggle weapons are integrated into the combat. Enchanting the weapon is just a natural thing that would happen that almost always gets left out of "Guns Harry" except maybe unlimited ammo or self-cleaning. Nobody takes advantage of the space modifying capability and physics defeating spells to have absurdly high caliber weapons wielded by foot soldiers (as just one example).
But again, some of that feels campy because authors don't plausibly explain why these innovations don't already exist in the wizarding world. And casually bringing disruptive tech into a world like that is always going to feel campy.
My goal is to do the hard world-building work of explaining why actually the world as we see it is stable and then figure out how to plausibly disrupt it and find the new equilibrium as a series of countermeasures and counter-countermeasures.

 

I might have had misunderstood you then. When you stated Harry was disillusioned with wizards, I might have generalised you with othe people frequently using this trope.

But if you want something with wizards who are clearly stronger than muggles, I am going to list some names(not summaries or link sorry, writing from mobile). I have the same taste there:

• Wand and shield by Roarian: Solid dialogue and characterisation. Authors seems to worship the show, not tell rule. HP/MCU where Harry is strong enough to throw down with hulk.
• Toppling heroes and Kicking Gotham by Steelbadger: Perhaps the dc world is nerfed here, but it has wizards with the big stick. Wizards are portrayed as competent too, which is rarely seen in hp fanfictions.
• World on fire by TheWiseTomato
• Beyond the Curtain by Bobika: Highly recommended. Cliche title and non Harry perspective has made it less popular than it deserves. Completely new concept.
• The havoc side of the force
• Son of Thanos trilogy: Magical world comes into focus late though. A little too much angst, but it's wild and unpredictable.)
• Fictional by Dark Syaron
• Browncoat Green eyes: A little too much Harry wanking, but it has its moments
• Equilibrium by Jon: SW/HP crossover
• Demon's feign and merlin's pain
• Awaken sleeper
• Discordant by Heather Sinclair: SW/HP
• Harry Potter and the greater good: Not as stupid as title sounds. Grindewald and Dumbledore (whose sister is still alive) have conquered muggles.
• Skitterleap: I do not remember it exactly, but I think muggles were conquered by Grindewald.

Edit: Ordered it with brief description.

 

Thanks, I've read several of those and really liked them. Without looking them up, Toppling Heroes, Havoc Side of the Force (one of my favorites, did it ever get finished?), and Browncoat Green Eyes are all fantastic. I'll try to look the others up, especially if you're putting them in the same category.

But it's specifically the British wizarding world he's disillusioned with in this idea. You're right that abandoning the wizarding world entirely has been done a lot and but abandoning magic isn't what I want to write and a living in the muggle world with magic would be really tough to write without losing all semblance of conflict (although I have toyed with the idea that the conflict is staying below the threshold of what the ICW can detect, it still gets OP super quick with even just low level magic; it's a fun indulgence, but hard to write an actual story).

Dang, every time I re-read your post I catch more things I missed or poorly addressed.

This is exactly what I want to fix. They're popular for a reason and they have bad rep not because they can't make a good story, but because they're hard to write well.

This is an excellent point. I think in my implementation you might argue that the focus is shifted, but the intent is to still give the real magic its day both in addressing the protective magic and in the protective magic which prevents a simple mundane counter in the first place. I will definitely need to keep this overall concept in mind though and consider whether some of the writing should better focus on the magic.

 

Truly Mugglewank is a cancer in this fandom.

 

No doubt. Do you have any recommendations as to how to avert this fallacy without ignoring the obvious writing opportunities presented by the issues above?
In case it's not clear, my intent is not to write "Harry uses muggle stuff to stomp Voldemort". That's stupid and way overdone. My intent is to write "while less powerful, muggle stuff could still play a valuable role in fights against magic if properly integrated."

 

I recommend that you don't put guns in your story.

In my headcanon, there was a wizard in Hiroshima on Aug 6, 1945 and he walked away unscathed.

 

Muggle stuff having value is the Mugglewank.

 

Why distance Harry and Ron? While the appeal for only Hermione and Harry to go to beauxbeaton is understandable, but the approach you are using will be cliche and worse, unnecessary. There are easier excuses to keep Ron in britain. Like, Weasley family not allowing Ron to move out of Britain or something.

I am saying this because it breaks the biggest rule in fiction. The one rule that nearly all big rules originate from. Do not write anything irrelevant to the plot.

If you are writing a sudden crack between Ron and Harry's friendship when there was none in canon, readers will be expecting a good reason for it. If you were trying to make readers more detached when Ron dies due to necessary and plot relevant reason, the distance would have been completely acceptable. But this isn't happening in your fic. What you are doing here is promising readers with something, making them raise their hands up in anticipation and giving them no resolution. Only those readers who actually dislike Ron's existence to the point that they are willing to swallow an edit to the canon will not feel frustrated with this.

It seems more like, that you do not like Ron. In which case, do not enforce your feelings on the readers. That's character bashing and there is just enough of that in hp fanfiction.

For the same reason, do not add guns and muggle stuff. I felt like the above example was necessary to reiterate the point of no guns. You are adding enchanted muggle weapons for no reason except you that like them. If there was some canon precedent for it, sure go ahead. But there isn't. It makes readers wonder why all the muggleborns did not think of the same thing in canon. Why did Tom Riddle, raised in a muggle orphanage didn't think of it. It seems like a deviation from canon. A deviation, I would repeat, with no other reason than you like it. And even if you do it well, this is a deviation that's been read hundreds of times with no resolution, and readers will be frustrated enough with it that no resolution you could do will be good enough to satisfy them. Maybe you are trying to not introduce muggle superiorty in your story, but your idea of enchanting muggle weapons is close enough to it that people will not like it no matter how good your execution is.

My advice is to first find what's the plot of your story. Harry learns Hermione's parents are planning to shift and he joins them, but stuff happens and he is still forced to fight voldemort? Now, that's a good story. I will read it if I see it somewhere, hell I will even beta it if you want. But just remove the unnecessary stuff unrelated to it's conclusion.

 

First of all, thanks a ton for the feedback and engagement of what must seem to you to be an old tired idea. This is why I brought this here. You guys are brutal on campy ideas and I figure if I can get my idea to where it gets past you guys I’ve probably averted the worst of the campiness. I know myself, and I know that I’ll tend to campiness if I don’t make a deliberate effort otherwise.

For the thing with Ron, my goal is to get Harry out of Britain without mutilating his character. While it’s easy to come up with a scenario where Harry should leave, it’s much harder to come up with a scenario where he would leave and the fact that its obvious Ron wouldn’t leave his family and his family wouldn’t leave Britain is a big part of why. After book 5, Harry had stronger friendships through the DA, but before that, it’s really just Ron and Hermione. So my thought was that it’s much more plausible that he’s willing to leave him behind if that relationship becomes a little more brittle.

You make a really good point about this though, and I’d be more than willing to change that if the general feedback was that Harry leaving Ron and his family behind was plausible without this change.

Now, I know that wasn’t your main point, so let me respond to that. First, you’re right that part of what’s going on here is that I personally like guns. Guns and modern weaponry have been a significant part of my life, and so when I think about how I would attack an objective I can’t NOT think about how I would use such weaponry as PART of such a scheme. So their absence in, say, the battle of Hogwarts feels like a gaping plot hole to me. For goodness sake, they know they’re getting attacked by giants, and they don’t even have ballistas on the towers? (I’ll note here that no one would complain if I introduced ballistas manned by squibs, but if I want those squibs to be using a logically better choice such as RPGs or 120mm sabots, now all of a sudden it’s not cool. I know there’s a thematic reason for that, but there’s no canon one afaik) Now, we can, and should, provide some surgery and come up with reasons they’re not there, but as soon as we establish those reasons, they become challenges which could potentially be solved by our characters. My goal is to write it such that I’m not changing cannon, I’m trying to develop a reason for why such weaponry is missing then create a context where their presence would be consistent with that reason.

Now, with all of that said, there is also a plot relevant reason for the weaponry. In canon, Harry defeats Voldemort with trickery and deus ex machina obscure magic Voldemort didn’t understand. I’m going for something a bit different and want to fight him militarily. But the problem with that is Harry is ridiculously outmatched and outgunned by Voldemort alone, not to mention his death eaters. A common way to deal with this is to make Harry super powerful. Quite frankly, I find that a bigger change to canon and less plausible than him teaming up with some military friends and mercenaries, some of whom aren’t wizards themselves, and all of whom have figured out how to use more than just spells to attack wizards and magical objectives. Even if we lean hard into the one piece of evidence that Harry is powerful (the patronus), we still have a stark difference between the canon descriptions of Dumbledore (“things with a wand [at his OWLs] I’d never seen before”) and Tom Riddle at that age, and Tom has been relentlessly pursuing more power for another fifty years on top of that. So Harry needs a huge power up to beat him regardless.

But you’re absolutely right that to write this we have to answer why Tom Riddle didn’t use a gun. I feel like I’ve tried to do some of that homework already and also that part of my idea isn’t coming through. I don’t really plan for Harry to use a gun more than, say, Bellatrix used a knife. Harry’s a wizard, and in most situations, can contribute more to a fight with his wand than with a gun. That doesn’t mean he won’t carry one, and it doesn’t mean he won’t ever use one, but it does mean that my idea is for magic to still be the go to option for those with the power to use it.
Sorry for the long reply, but there was kind of a lot to unpack there. My intent is to engage your feedback and respond to it, so if I’ve come off as stubbornly defensive, please let me know.

 

Format your posts better, walls of text are hard to read.

 

Presumably that’s because he had magical protection up? (Otherwise you have to explain why bludgers and falls break bones)
If so, did you miss the part where I said “only magic defeats magic”? Because a wizard surviving Hiroshima would be consistent with my concept.
Also, sorry about the formatting, I’m traveling and will try to clean it up when I’m settled.

 

Stop soliciting advice. Go write. Even half as many words of story as you’ve written in your essays on this thread would be 100x as helpful to improving as a writer.

 

Don’t worry, I’m working on it. But I’ve read some really long really poorly written fics, so it’s clearly not simply a matter of doing. I’m also well aware of how many fics get abandoned because they had a plot bunny, but wrote themselves into a corner.

 

What? Everybody sucks at first. Writing fiction is like any other skill, and no amount of advice will make a novice writer the next James Joyce. The only road to improvement is to write.

 

Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that it wasn’t important, just that it wasn’t the only thing necessary.

 

Harry takes a bludger moving at presumably 150 mph+ (firebolt accelerates to 150 mph in 6 seconds and bludgers can still chase them down) to the skull and continues playing a practice match during HBP. Harry takes a bludger to the skull again in the same book and falls from the air to the ground and only cracks his skull, which is "mended at once" by Pomfrey. A muggle taking a solid iron ball to the skull at 150 mph+ would be decapitated.

I've seen meth heads get shot and still walk around for a solid few minutes. With wizarding resilience, I want to see a fic where a squib mag dumps Voldemort while he looks amused, and then kills the squib and heals his wounds with two flicks of his wand.