Basically, I'm wondering. I'm a proponent of the belief that no idea is unworkable, that some just take more work than others...

But the Marriage Contract Plot is particularly stubborn. I've got no idea on how to make it not suck.

So i turn to you guys. Any idea on how to make it suck complete balls without changing it fundamentally at it's core?

The best I could come up with in the usual scenario is that instead of there being the same old "If x doesn't marry y, then x/y will lose their magic," there is, in fact, some kind of upside to going through with the contract. Like, the contract, in itself, provides some kind of positive result or reward.

Basically, something that makes a contract attractive to one or more parties involved. And I have no clue what might do that beyond pre-existing love.*

*Note that I'm assuming we're going with the usual X just learned he has to marry Y because of the contract and is surprise because he doesn't know Y, scenario.

 

You write it as a sexual comedy.

Alternatively, you make it a purely political arrangement that doesn't require the partners to get on, speak to each other, or even live within a hundred miles of each other. The characters don't have lovehate, they are simply indifferent to each other, acquaintances at best, and both recognise the political expediency of the arrangement. Over time the nature of their arrangement means that they end up meeting with increasing regularity to address various issues/work together/be seen together for official events/political reasons. You then write a regular romance, just like you'd write any other romance between what are essentially colleagues.

 

Well you could use it as a way for purebloods to keep lines "pure". They seem to care about that a bit. Something that is made early on between two families. Granted, I don't see this being done with Harry and he is usually the focus with these types of fics.

 

The idea that you have to fuck someone's relative in order to trust them(or have a business arrangement) and vice versa is so archaic and tied to a dated moral code that using it comes of as laughable in almost every case. Why would Harry feel any need to honor such an agreement? If it is "magically binding" you could just as well have made a document that secured that both sides honored the agreement without the sex. A marriage contract purely based on breeding is of course different but those aren't that common.

 

The easiest way to avoid having to explain why it exists is to have them make the contract themselves, not inherit the contract. A consensual, loveless marriage of political expediency, maybe made during the war. We come to the fic post-war where they're now realising that they're stuck with the arrangement for the rest of their long lives.

Of course, the real problem here is that you still have to explain why marriage has political benefits in a world where women are more or less equal to men and therefore aren't possessions to be handed out to seal alliances.

 

Bah, even then, Arranged Marriage Plots work better. They're usually enforced by the parents, not some flimsy scrap of paper. Plus the whole, "I'm in love with this girl, but her father decided to marry her off to this smug, pompous ass... what do?" is actually a classic.

Gah, this is fucking disastrous. Any idea should be workable, without inherently making fun of it! But I can't think of one for this. It seems impossible! Why have a Marriage Contract Plot, when you can write regular romance instead? It's simply a poor, bastardized version of Arranged Marriage Plot and fails in any way i can think of it....


EDIT: people posted while i was writing...

 

I remember reading Harry Potter: Whiskey Accident. Whole story is based around that marriage contract, but I don't mind. I don't know why. I think it's written in less offensive way, or something. I also remember reading it out of curiosity as to how that relationship is going to work (it's Harry/Narcissa). It's (mostly) enough for author to present me with two people that I can hardly imagine being together (age difference, clashing personalities, etc.) to keep me reading. I suppose that leaving goblins (and that "magically binding") bits out of it could also help.

Nonsense. That's very lazy thing to say.

 

Any vague enough idea is workable. If you get too specific there's not enough wriggle room to make it not-shit. And marriage contracts in Harry Potter is too specific, to make it work you have to warp it to the point that it's only tangentially related to the original idea.

 

The only way I can see it working is in a severely AU world where a lot of wizarding society revolves around who is married to whom. Perhaps some politically and magically powerful wizard in ye olden times cast a curse that prevented any himself from conceiving children with anyone but his wife (so that he could be as indiscreet as he liked without risking bastards). Later, after his death, his children discover that they have inherited the curse and can only conceive with their wife (maybe it's men only, maybe both men and women). Specifically their first wife, as the curse does not recognise divorce as a possibility.

Nobody knows the magic to counter the curse; that died with the wizard. The family, being something like the Malfoys, don't appreciate the idea that they not breed to prevent the spread of the curse so they take advantage of the curse to have their fun before getting married and carrying on the lineage. Over time this leads to the majority of wizarding society carrying the curse, with only specific families (like the Gaunts) remaining curse free.

Thus we have effective marriage contracts without being (too) contrived.

 

"You have to marry Draco," said Dumbledore. "No," said Harry. And Dumbledore was sad, because he couldn't make Harry marry Draco, which was his fetish.

The theory checks out.

 

The main problem is that it seems to be used in fanfiction as a lazy way to force specific characters together, and that generally leads to bad stories.

 

Perhaps if they are not a real marriage? Make the "Marriage contract" being a symbolic way to seal an alliance but take away the need for sex and stay married. Then make it traditional. Something like, the marriage goes through, they live together for a month or so with people acting like it is a real marriage and then they divorce if they want to. Make it so that it is a traditional way to make a contract that two families will help each other in times of need (with subclauses about which need and which help it talks about) but that as history progressed and the idea of marrying out of love gained traction it lost the real marriage aspect so that wizards and witches could marry whomever they wanted afterwards.

Then make it common and something not only used to make alliances but to show friendship between families. Something like saying "friends forever!" but by law and for a determined amount of time and for specific things unless you are really friends in which it is a way to show that you are friends.

 

The basis for such a fic being interesting and funny would have to be a couplet hat have no business being together, written in such a way that they do not fall in love in three chapters (or ideally at all, although with occasional moments of sexual tension to keep it interesting). It would have to be a complicated drama, involving a quite a few OC's and a fair bit of world building.

My image of such a story would be perhaps Harry and Pansy for some reason or other in such a contract and incapable of escaping for at least their minority. Thereby Harry is drawn into an aristocratic world of ritual that he has to survive and evade. There would have to be a threat of some kind within it, Pansy is perhaps a femme fatal and is using the contract to get something, there is some plot going on in the family, but not outright wizard nazi's as in canon. And a considerable B plot from somewhere outside of this insular aristocratic world but in some ways interacting with it.

Sounds like it could be a basis for a noir/thriller type thing, without Harry Potter having to be a PI years post-hogwarts for some ridiculous reason, and could happen in school years.

 

I sometimes like to take things like this on as a challenge, if for no other reason that it stretches my creativity and helps me see what may or may not be viable before I write a few thousand words on something.

So, marriage contract:

Problems:

1. cliche
2. outdated
3. illogical to create a contract with no way out

Things to avoid:
1. comedy
2. superfluous
3. dues ex machina—putting two people together
4. Large backstory that focuses primarily on contract.

I think the first list can be handled by lampshading it. The second list can be avoided by the story itself if written correctly, except for 3. That's pretty tough to get around. So what would such a story look like?

How about something like this:

Back story: marriage contracts were of the consensual sort in wizard world until Grindelwald's war. The influx of continental wizards with their own traditions after that war caused too much turmoil in many of the British wizarding society. As a result, many traditions were swept away in successive acts of the wizengamut, including the laws concerning marriage contracts.

Opening of the story: the second war grinds on after Voldemort dies, virtually bankrupting the Ministry. After years of fighting, the ICW steps in and mediates a compromise government. But the British wizading society is so fractured that the Wizengamut can't get anything accomplished. Society continues its deterioration, and the British wizarding world is on the break of another war.

To head it off, a leader emerges from the Death Eater/pureblood faction, leading a small faction of wizengamut members from both sides work together, giving in on key areas for both sides. One of those areas is the reversal of some of the acts described above after Grindelwald's war.

It is done late at night, and even later that night, it is voted on. However, the law that governs voluntary marriage contracts was part of the act, and someone removed "voluntary" before the final act was delivered and voted on.

Then, through blackmail, Death Eater purebloods force pureblood families who aren't in agreement with them to enter into marriage contracts, but it's all done in secret, so most of the families think they're the only ones dealing with it (Not so uncommon, actually).

The leader continues to pull people together, drawing the society back from the brink. He's lauded, and becomes the Minister of Magic, turning it slowly into a dictatorship.

Once he has a firm grasp of power, he changes laws, gathering power to himself, slowly asserting the Pureblood agenda under a new guise, annuling any marriage to a Muggleborn, and along with that, reinvokes familial marriage contracts that weren't fulfilled between families half a century ago.

All of that story runs in the background while two young purebloods are living their life, until the law pushes them together. Both of them were engaged to be married, but those engagements are invalidated, and they are thrust into a relationship. The witch is a Death Eater Pureblood, the wizard a "Muggle-loving" Pureblood. (Done this way to avoid the "Bad Death Eater Rape helpless witch" trope in Potterverse).

Worse yet, both of them are heavily involved in trying to "liberate" their society from the other side, and from the new "leader" who they both think is selling them out to the other side.

-------------

It may not be Shakespeare (no Romeo and Juliet pun intended, thank god), but I think if it was done right, it might make the marriage contract idea viable.

--done off the top of my head, I'm sure there's a thousand plot holes at this point--

 

That's like taking a marriage contracts fic and combining it with a marriage law fic.

Stop giving people ideas XD