Yeah, but anything that helps any person is still good. I don't think you can genuinely quantify how useful one charity is over another. Yes it's awesome more lives can be saved with mosquito netting, but that doesn't mean everyone should only contribute to whichever charity will result in the highest number of saved lives and not help out ones that have a higher cost per saved life.

 

That could, actually, be built into an interesting story. Keeping the HP angle, you write a setting where everything hangs on these oaths.

Everyone gets sworn in as they enter Hogwarts. To upkeep the iron-clad rules, with a punishment of death, and have many minor things that require a less harsh oath.

The Unforgivables wouldn't be sentencing you to a lifetime in Azkaban - but it could be an oath you swear as you get your want - forcing you to forever keep away from these spells.

There would be redundant oaths that wizards couldn't remove from the practices, because they swore to uphold these laws a long time ago. Thus having to bow before a wizard who has a beard longer than five feet - who in turn in required to keep his beard at least of the required length because of his position as the Minister of Magic, or face the loss of their magic.

Voldemort could have found a way to break some of the oaths - for example by enforcing the harsher ones on his subjects (it could be a plot point that two conflicting oaths interact weirdly, letting the 'stonger' one prevail.)

Dumbledore would know that Tom Riddle is dangerous when he saw him, but his own oaths as the Proffessor forbid his direct interference - thus the need to form the Order of Phoenix.


In essence, the Harry Potter wizarding world would become alike the world of Fae from Dresden Files.

"Words, promises, and oaths are binding to the wizards. They have to make good on their own promises, but also make sure that an involved human does the same. Combined with their way around words, they can often snare an unsuspecting mortal with a bargain or even an accidental promise."

After all, Lily's sacrifice worked against Voldemort because he gave an unwilling oath to Snape.

 

Forging the Sword has a section on this idea. Harry was wondering why all magical people aren't forced to swear oaths when they start Hogwarts to create a safe society, Ron is horrified. They have a falling out about it. Essentially it's a magical civil rights issue.

 

DisobedienceWriter's Knowledge is Useful, But Power is Power is based on a similar idea, but it's more of a collection of interesting ideas poorly tied together than an actual story.

 

Fuck that idea.

One thing you can do is to look at what proportion of money goes to where it is supposed to. That can range from 99.4% of money donated actually helping people, such as Global Relief, to only 8% of it going to helping people, like Children's Charity Fund.

Oh look, a genuinely quantifiable and verifiable measure of how useful one charity is over another. You can find two charities that target the same cause and give money to the more useful one.

-----------

After reading a shitty Harry Potter/Mass Effect crossover I keep thinking it could be done so much better.

The basic idea is that the Protheans didn't put all their eggs in one basket when creating the Conduit on Ilos. They had another test station deep underground on a planet next to a world of theirs. Earth.

Harry is an Auror hunting down an escaped criminal and follows them deep into a cave in the Alps, where they are pulled down an underground river and Harry captures the crim before finding himself in an underground installation partly damaged over time and through plate shifts. He activates a Prothean beacon and gets slightly messed up mentally before being catapulted through the Conduit into the Citadel.

When he arrives he creates an illusion that he is Batarian since that is the first species he sees that is roughly the right shape and confuses everyone by speaking only Prothean.


The problem is where do you go from there? I'd prefer not to make it a Harry fixes everything wrong with the Mass Effect universe by brokering a Geth/Quarian peace, curing the Genophage, etc etc. What does Harry bring to the story? It could be interesting seeing the Batarian viewpoint I suppose, and trying to get the Council to believe a Batarian.

I also keep wanting to put in various odd things, like retconning it so when Harry got his wand he asked more about the wand being the best tool, thereby finding out that Ollivander was impressed by how much control of magic a girl called Lily Evans got out of a flower.

Or some sort of bullshit like Harry wearing his invisibility cloak under his armour and being effectively immune to death while wearing it- bullets miss him more often than not, he often walks away from terrible crashes and his risky stunts tend to work.

Or pseudo-scientific bullshit like while wearing the invisibility cloak he is literally hiding from death in the form of ageing- he ages slower or even gets younger if he wears it a lot.

 

The easy way to solve the Fix It Fic problem is to have some of the things he does go wrong.

Say Harry tries to fix the genophage problem. He changes the Krogan genome so that they breed moderately compared to their natural cycle but more than they do now. The spell works perfectly, except that the Krogan are now also extremely resilient virus carriers that can harbour diseases from every species in the galaxy, but not have it affect them. They essentially become super resilient hosts to every plague going.

Or if Harry manages to broker peace between the Geth and the Quarians... by using a compulsion charm on a Geth that gets immediately transmitted to every one connected to the hive mind. He brings peace to the galaxy, but he becomes the number one target for every Geth in the galaxy.

 

In their third year, Harry, Ron, and Hermione get a little bit more out of Divination than they expect when Ron finds an obscure method to use for his homework - questioning a ghost on the future. When he talks to Peeves (who is not a ghost), interesting things begin to happen. They start seeing strange things around the many Hogwarts ghosts. Hermione hears voices that no one else can hear. Ron feels echoes of violence and pain in one spot by the lake. And Harry starts going into trances and wandering off at strange times, and he can't remember why.

Peeves, when asked about the future, deliberately triggered a rare phenomena that is usually only experienced by seasoned necromancers... whose records were all destroyed centuries before. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are going through a literal spiritual awakening, and it's stirring the dead in the castle, the Forest, and the village. The Fat Friar is the first of the Hogwarts ghosts to figure out what's happened, and is the instrumental character in attempting to help Harry, Ron, and Hermione somehow without getting them arrested for necromancy.

And by help, he intends to force them through their 'awakening' before they cause every dark soul on the continent to come running because their bodies are completely unprotected by the usual defenses of the living while they're undergoing this spiritual transformation. So he lures them out and into the Forest, to an old, abandoned structure that once might have been an abbey... with a large, unmarked mass grave beneath it.

And then there's Sirius Black, who followed them through the Forest and is trapped with them, and without Peter as proof that he's innocent.


This would spawn an AU concerning the Hallows, Horcruxes, necromancy (good and evil), the many unnamed ghosts of Hogwarts, and quite a bit of otherworldliness. I've had the notes sitting aside for sometime, but have yet to pick them up and make anything more of it.

 

Post the notes, bruh. We'll craft a fic and somebody's bound to write it.

 

Oneshot: A Voldemort-centric story in which he finds the Evil Overlord list in his youth and learns the lessons from it. He would still be an evil character, but this time he would make all the right and correct choices. And he would win, because good is dumb.

 

That just sounds like a terrible inverse fix fic.

 

Not exactly. I just want a Voldemort that isn't stupid. Harry didn't deserve to win.

 

Why exactly?

 

If Voldemort is so stupid, then he deserves to win less than Harry, who is mostly just ignorant. And since there are only two horses in that race, obviously Harry deserves to win.

The thing to remember about the Evil Overlord list is that every contributor (or every inspiration for a contribution) to the list, lost to the Side of Good(TM). They can only tell you how not to fail, not how to succeed. It's an important distinction when your foes include powerful wizards with an understanding of both magic and human nature superior to your own. Voldemort was always going to lose because his only goal was to become an immortal god over all life on an earth filled with magic-users who have potential equal to his, and because he lacked comprehension on a fundamental level of love, something that is canonically shown to have powerful magical repercussions when utilized properly.

 

Because I always, as a rule, root for the bad guys.

 

Not really. Sacrifice is. Harry didn't love everyone in Hogwarts like his mother loved him, but they all got protection from Voldemort. Harry didn't survive because his mother loved him, not directly. He survived because his mother sacrificed herself. A connection of love being required in the magic is debunked by Harry himself managing the same thing for people who were at best acquaintances.

 

I think we have to agree to disagree; it's a matter of semantics anyway. The core of the sacrifice is clearly love. Not the personal, fraternal, or romantic love that requires a closer relationship, but the generalized love for people as a whole that inspires one to sacrifice one's life for them.

Lily's sacrifice was born from her love for Harry. She wouldn't step aside and live if the cost was her child, and she knew she had basically no chance of defeating the Dark Lord. So she intentionally sacrificed herself by trying to stop or delay him anyway.

Harry's sacrifice was on a larger and somewhat more impersonal scale, but still born of his love for the Weasleys, the Order of the Pheonix, the Hogwarts teaching staff, etc.

Voldemort and Harry both define the people who would be granted the aegis of protection prior to the sacrifice. If Harry gives himself up, Voldemort would let them live. So, everyone for whom Voldemort made that offer was granted the protection from Harry's 'death.' Harry didn't have to love every single one of them, just enough to inspire him to sacrifice himself.

Both parties define the people affected; the love on one's part inspires the sacrifice of himself for the people defined; the sacrifice enables the protection on same people. The degree of love necessary is never defined, but if it inspires one to sacrifice one's life, it is sufficient for the purposes of the 'spell.'

 

Relevant links are relevant.

...hopefully.

 

If you can get a copy of C.S. Lewis' Four Loves, whether at a bookstore or at your local library, you really should read it. Regardless of what you think about Christianity, it is truly excellent. It is something that has influenced me quite a bit.

Just saying.

Although I don't know that I would consider Ludus and Pragma, as defined by the first link forms of love at all. Maybe. I need to think more about it perhaps.

 

I think it would be interesting to see an AU developed from the 'Philosopher's Stone Canon'.

What do I mean by this? Well for example, there are many things in PS that seem very unlikely if you take into consideration later books. Of course, this can be forgiven because perhaps JKR didn't know it would be a series when she wrote PS.

Anyway, the world of PS doesn't seem to have Apparition (Hagrid flew to that hut on the sea, Dumbledore flew to the Ministry), doesn't have the Fidelius Charm (for the Stone), etc. There are many differences that in my opinion could have created a worthwhile AU.

 

PS-canon definitely has less world-breaking powers (which is good if you don't want your characters holding the idiot ball).