Average. But better then nothing.

 

It's as popular as it is because people are starved for good Marvel fics.

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@Hero: I just read the first chapter. I think average is putting it kindly.

 

The second chapter was better, but then it nosedived.

 

I agree, especially when the author said that any future pairing for Harry will be slash.

 

Huh... I have it, but why was it removed?

Are the FFN staff feeling frisky because it's summer, or what?

Precisely. Sometimes it seems that fanfic writers have no concept of this strange suspension of disbelief thing. Jesus Christ, it's not like just because it's fanfic we checked our brains at the door.

Self respect and expectations of quality, maybe, but not our brains.

Time travel via potion has ALWAYS bothered me.

I mean, I know this is another one of those situations where someone could just parrot the word "Magic!" at you, in response, but what about potions says 'time travel' to these people? Come on...

Maybe if they were poured around the perimeter of a ritual circle or painted as runes onto the person who will be sent through time, but a random explosion of someone's magical fucking zit cream sends you back in time? Kindly fuck off.

You notice it's always a canon potion they're making in class? Because odds are that no one using a potions mishap to initiate time travel has the imagination to simply make up a potion.

Why were the sixth years making a first year potion, anyway? Uh, because the author is a vacuous nincompoop, maybe? :facepalm

Using potions for the gender change thing was almost acceptable the first time, but it has been utterly played out.

In my gender swap story, Harry spontaneously changes into a female because his mother was a frog. Lily was short for 'lily pad'. :awesome

Yeah, yeah... potions mishap worked for The Flash. Whatever.

 

I would read that, if for no other reason than the influence of your twisted, tl;dr sense of humor. Kindly upload, please now, motherfucker.

My thoughts exactly, though to be fair to both today's readers and to fans of The Flash, the days of "industrial/chemical accident gives strange powers" coincided with the days when (a) 'science' was still about as uncommon a concept as 'plastic' and 'jet propulsion,' (b) mind-boggling things like the atomic bomb had just been invented, and (c) your average reader was happy to accept an alien baby routinely saving the world as long as this Superman looked white and grew up an apple pie-loving American.

I know C.S. Lewis was before The Flash, but when a dominant voice in scifi thinks that interplanetary space is *warm* then the "sci" in scifi is really a misnomer.

That said, I could get behind a "super-powers via potions or even industrial chemicals accident" type of story if - and it's a big if - it were handled correctly. And by correctly, I mean written believably but not overly technically, as in the author trying to explain every nuance with pseudo-science or magical cores.

Oh, and for me to take any such story seriously, there must be an equal or larger power-up for at least one of the Big Bads or said Big Bad's henchmen. Nothing can ruin a story quicker than "[insert hero's name here] awakens his/her ability to [insert conflict-crushing dynamo power here]. [insert villain's name here] had better watch his/her back!!"

 

Well, I could make a list... :awesome

I'm writing several, actually, as well as a 'vanilla' story.

While getting to know the DC world more in-depth (and this involves -basically- torrenting comics, watching the TV shows, and mentally chuggin' down wiki/Comic Vine page after page after page), I'm planning out my own, major DC/HP crossover.

In the mean-time, I'm writing several omakes/spin-off one-shots for Power of Oa (the main one being a "re-do" of Kara's near rape by Lex, and Harry having a true struggle not to viciously rip out Lex's tonsils via his scrotum and anus), and, as previously mentioned, a psychological-fuck-up oneshot of Harry being stalked by an unbalanced girl.

Trouble is, work is going slow on 'em because of my prostatitis - it's fucking up everything in-general, at the moment. So yeah, not fun.

 

This is what I was trying to suggest in my own confusing way. And yes, I agree, Grunnings was a terrible example but it was the first thing that came to mind when I was posting.

 

Something that irritates me about crossovers to either DC or Marvel is that they usually bring in the American superheroes like say the X-Men or the Avengers or Batman, when there's a respectable magical sub-group in both companies (though far more in DC than in Marvel), and even British characters like Captain Britain, Blade, MI-13, Excalibur, etc...

Heck, Captain Britain/Britannic itself easily fits into any crossover attempt. Canonically speaking, the Captain Britain Corps exists across the multiverse, with one on every unique Earth. So in the case of a Marvel cross over, the Sword of Might and the Amulet of Right exist and are magical tools on par with the Deathly Hallows, or event greate,r. Having Harry take up the Amulet of Right while Voldemort takes up the Sword of Might balances the two's power gains easily.

As for DC, there's Jason Blood/Etrigan, Andrew Bennett very recently (Brit turned vamp that's doing the species well in I, Vampire), the Shade, Shining Knight, the Gentleman Ghost, Manchester Black & Elite, Holly Granger (one of the versions of Hawk from Hawk & Dove), Lady Vic, the Knight & The Squire (think British Batman & Robin), Phobia, the Canterbury Cricket (don't ask), Lady Jane, the first Azriel, Lionheart, etc...

Those are pretty much the biggest names in both companies, but you get the jist.

... Got a bit carried away there.

 

Two reasons why Harry Potter crossovers with comics tend to skip the local flavors of magic.

1. No one outside of true comic geeks knows them. I mean come on- we want to see Harry pwning Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark or Wolverine. Potterland magic is just personal enough to make it a 'fair' fight. "You wrote a story where Harry beats down Brother Voodoo? Why'd you make it a racial thing, man?"

2. The native (comic-verse) magic almost always involves summoning otherworldly powers. Whether it's the crimson bands of Cyttorak or the demon bonded by Merlin to Jason Blood, Dr. Strange and Etrigan are playing the 'deal with the devil' escalation game. I've always admired the HP magic for steering clear of those metaphysical/faith-based powers, almost as if 'even Voldemort isn't stupid enough to open THAT can of worms'. Yet in both the major companies' magical systems, the real power comes from the invocation of extraplanar, god-like patrons.

 

If i had to guess,it is by being interesting. Normally the "insert Harry into plot" doesn't work because authors hug the storyline from the movies and make it pointless for Harry to be there. This story tells the plot to Fuck off and does what makes sense for the characters to do. It helps that all the characters are interesting, and each of them has a reason to be able to relate to Harry, our point of reference. So its an enjoyable read. I would put it in the AU of the library when it is longer (up to chapter 10 now, btw) and if the author continues the trend of being original.

 

True, there's far less of an audience for them. Doesn't mean I won't bitch.

Hm. While true, I've actually like the involvement of other entities in some cases. I mean, Shadowpact, Zatanna & Zatara, Golden Age Hawkman & Hawkgirl, Captain Britain and a few of the Sentinels of Magic/Justice League Dark guys don't roll like that, and I'm cool with it, but I find Doctor Fate, Ghost Rider, the Spectre and so on all the more intriguing because of their biblical, mythological or religious ties. Could be because I'm just a mythology/religion bookworm, but having the villain desecrate holy artifacts or trying to usurp God or whoever (see The Last Stand of the Spirits of Vengeance, a truly epic story arc with the Ghost Rider mythology) is so much ridiculously cooler than "with this magical artifact, I shall take over the world and or gain immortality".

Is that just me?

 

Because with Constantine sometimes you don't know if he's even using magic. Timothy Hunter at one point was all about not using magic. And you can't really have respect for yourself as an author if one of your main characters is a talking detective monkey in a deerstalker hat.

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The Finding Home fic wasn't too bad, up to the point where Banner transformed to the Hulk as a side thing with no real comment, no build up, and the author doesn't even do anything with it.

Seriously, the fuck? Banner just morphs into the Hulk and nothing comes of it? What a complete waste. It is almost like the author took the first few chapters of another fic and tried to force the film onto it, but has no original ideas and can't allow themselves to change the plot in any way.

 

If you're insulting Detective Chimp, then we shall be dueling with pistols at dawn!

 

I think the only reason anyone would panic that the hulk appeared would be if he was out of control. Since he was acting like a rational being, who gives a shit? Keep in mind, you're in a room with someone who is a wizard, an alien/god, and a man frozen in time, then unthawed. See also: the movie itself, where once they found out Banner can control it the whole team just moved on and let him do his own thing.

 

The team wasn't there, just Fury and Natasha who spent the whole movie pulling guns on Banner.

Besides that, the whole 'Harry keeps Hulk calm' angle has me cringing in expectation of a Harry/Bruce pairing.

 

Given the quality of virtually all slash when I got to that part I started picturing HP bottoming for the "other guy"

 

lol, now I wish I'd actually written that.

I do have over 40k words in a girl!Harry story, but like all of my other stuff, there's no contiguous chunk of writing big enough to be called a chapter. I haven't touched it in ages, partially because of some similarities that turned up in another fic, which didn't sit well with me... but mostly because I can't concentrate on any one story, and I tend to take my ideas for one-shots and bloat them into novels whose size makes it unlikely I'd ever finish.

In any event, Harry's mother wasn't a frog in that one, she was just dead.

Exactly my thoughts!

Basically, whatever is the new science, and not well understood by the public, is what ends up being either the boogie man, or the veritable Promethean Fire that grants someone amazing powers.

Radiation/Atomic Energy was still the scary new tech when Spider-Man first appeared. However, when Spider-Man (2002) hit the big screen, the spider wasn't irradiated, it was genetically manipulated, because that's the current 'hot science thing' among the general populace.

Note how many movies in the past decade have featured genetic manipulation gone awry.

The most recent comic book characters that I (with my limited comics knowledge) can recall, whose powers were the result of radiation/toxic waste, are the Ninja Turtles... but they were created as a parody of several clichés.

There was a time, dare I say a more naive one, when an industrial accident seemed a perfectly reasonable catalyst.

It almost always comes down to the skill of the author and whether they 'do it right' in the end, doesn't it?

I still say a random explosion of potions routinely made by schoolchildren is a shitty way to do time travel, skilled author or no.

Of course, if the story is meant to be comedic, all bets are off on this one.

I'm not quite as concerned with this, anyway, because the level of escapism I'm looking for when I go searching for fanfic is hovering right between the "Reality sucks.", and, "Stop the world, I want to get off!", levels.

Speaking of: What I'd really like to see is a good Harry/Raven (DCAU, TYVM) fic that isn't a one-shot (or otherwise appallingly short) or abandoned... or cluttered up with stupid, juvenile 'Raven goes to Hogwarts' horseshit.

Is that too much to ask? To be honest, most HP/DC crossovers hold little joy for me, because I'm not a huge DC fan, outside Batman and some of the Animated Universe stuff. And, because what isn't slash is often lackluster in its own way.

It usually seems to come down to the method the author devised to integrate the two settings with each other. Though that is a weak point for any crossover, it just feels like the HP/comics crossovers shouldn't be that hard to come up with something for, and yet...

Often, it seems the lamest ones simply have Harry replacing a particular hero, rather than carving his own niche among the heroes. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but maybe it simply requires less imagination from the author in the first place, and that's where the trouble starts.

 

It's times like this that I wish I could actually write well enough to do some of these ideas justice (or come up with an idea of my own), but plot was never my strong suit whenever we had to do writing in English class and a story has little in common with a history paper.

 

It's about popularity - that, and anything 'British' is usually thought of as being 'dark' in the DC:U - see Constatine, etc.

I would, honestly, rather write about Supergirl/Kara than Captain Britain - not because Kara's American, but because she's both well known and her character appeals to me.

Her distrusting personality and quirks would work well with a Harry who was on the same sort of page.