I've noticed that, while originality is usually appreciated and people mostly hate canon rehashes, there are cases where readers reject a fic which doesn't give enough of a sense of familiarity with canon on the grounds of "not Harry Potter fanfiction". Maybe the authors change the names and backgrounds of canon characters, or maybe they keep just the names but change the setting and the plot, or change something fundamental about HP magic.

Off the top of my head, I've seen this happen with Alexandra Quick and (I think) A Second Chance At Life, but other people can probably list many more examples than me.

I'm asking because the story I'm planning or outlining is very large in scope and I try to make it good as a standalone piece, so that someone who hasn't read the books can read it, enjoy it, and not get confused by abrupt introductions of canon material (even though fanfiction readers are used to that and don't expect seamless expositions). As well as that, I decide whether to include or exclude material solely on the basis of whether it does my story any good, or aids me in telling the story I want to tell, as opposed to including it because it's canon.

The result is, well, that these criteria have led me to such an extreme AU that someone may come and say, hey, just change the names and publish it as original fiction. To me, though, the characters are uniquely and unmistakeably HP, and the names are there to stay.

Where do you place such stories? Do you refuse to read them, add your voice to the chorus that says "change the names and publish it", accept the premise of extreme AU and give them a shot, or... what?

 

If the answer to the question "Would this read better with different names (i.e. original characters)' is 'yes', then you know you've gone overboard.

 

Who hasn't read Harry Potter? :/

 

What the author can get away with depends on the skill of the author, and what they're changing. Also how much the AU is signposted by the summary.

It also significantly depends on the reader's preferences. For example, any AU which makes HP magic less useful/weaker is going to receive my disapproval, and if magic is downgraded to the point where Muggle technology is a threat to it then I'm heading right for the red X.

 

Hmmm, Wastelands of Time pretty much describes the change-the-names-and-publish-it-as-original fiction thing, and it was very well received. So if the story is good I don't think anyone will complain too much.

 

My opinion is that any amount of AU is fine as long as the divergences are logical. So it's fine to have a story where magic is something like the Force of Star Wars, or where the Statute of Secrecy was never implemented, but if you have them both in the same story then it's going too far (unless you can reasonably explain why the second followed from the first).

Choose what is different, and follow that to whatever logical extreme you wish, and it's fine by me. Just don't change multiple things without linking them together.

 

You need to see a difference between an Alternate Universe and an Alternate Timeline.


Alternate Timeline - Happens with canon rules of magic/reality. Introduces a plausible POD that creates differences in society, such as: someone dying in an accident, or someone not being born, or born with a different gender, someone being Sorted to a different Hogwarts house or someone simply making a different decision in a given choice.

Alternate Universe - Affects canon rules of magic/reality. Introduces PODs that seem implausible or outright impossible from a canon perspective, such as: magical cores, muggles acquiring magic, Crumple-Horned Snorckacks existing, male veela, etc.

 

Wastelands of Time doesn't just describe, it is an active example, considering Joe's first book of the Reminiscent Exile series, DIstant Star, is basically Wastelands. Literally.

 

A similar question that I think is a bit easier to answer is "Would people call this a ripoff of the source material if you don't call it FF?".

I personally thing Wastelands of Time would have been significantly better if it wasn't pretending to be HP fanfiction. OTOH, I probably wouldn't have read it at all if it wasn't.

 

Heh. They were written at the same time, so Wastelands started borrowing from Distant Star, when I got lazy. To me they've always felt a little like companion pieces, given the unlimited number of parallel universes theme, all written within fiction books, I established in Reminiscent Exile.

Eh, Wastelands was the one where I began to think I should take my show on the road.

Been rather a fun tour, so far.

 

You asshole, where's my Heartlands update, huh? HUH? You went pro and forgot all about your ff roots, is that it?

 

Harry Potter and the Heartlands of Time​

Chapter 17: The End​

"I'm sorry I started this trend of putting seemingly profound and yet hopelessly broad quotes at the beginning of chapters."

~ Joe Ducks ​

After a thousand years and twenty times that many deaths, all I wanted was a good drink, some dim light, and the love of a good woman. Alas, for I had to defeat a Dark Lord first.

And even then, once that impossible task was finally complete, I'd gone and knocked-up Fleur - which meant my days of debauchery and drinking were coming to a dire close. All the bro high fives in the world for tapping that French croissant could not make up for the inevitable late nights and screaming kids.

Knowing my luck, it'll be twins, and one of them will be destined to save the fucking world from the next Twat Lord.

So I'm using another ancient ritual, much like the Groundhog Day incantation that forced my current situation, to hop worlds and start anew. If there are an infinite number of worlds out there, I will not rest until I find the one where bottles of scotch grow on trees and the rivers run red with Shiraz.

"Later, bitches."

The End

*~*~*~*​

There. You're welcome.

OT: If anything, the Hero Trilogy is a better example of going too far AU. I lost control of that bad boy about 400k in, but kept it running to the bitter end regardless.

 

If you can create compelling fiction then the setting doesn't matter. Fanfiction borrows on the reader's already developed perception of the magical world and its characters. There's already life and history to them which, if you're reading fan fiction, you probably know intimately.

So if you can create real characters, with real emotions and desires, and a solid world with space for adventure and exploration, then go for it. And if you can't, well you learn to write by writing anyhow.

 

Okay, so let's talk about the purpose of writing an AU as opposed to regular fanfiction. You've probably heard the rule, one unicorn per garden. Now, this is kind of a dumb rule; how exactly are you supposed to have baby unicorns if you only have one to start with? It's not like they bud. But the one unicorn rule holds well because it allows the audience to keep most of the background knowledge they have about the series intact. They only need focus on one change whose fallout is shown in detail, and the rest of the worldbuilding can be imported wholesale, be it just redescribed in text or taken for granted that the audience already knows what Hogwarts and Gringotts are.

But most people don't want to deal with a single unicorn. They want a whole petting zoo of them, be it through making a change long before the story starts and letting it breed into a host of changes or telling a completely different tale while using basic familiar structures. This is where the AU comes into play. You're purposefully playing with the background knowledge of the setting and changing it to your whims. Maybe Hogwarts is a blasted pile of rubble and everyone has magic passed down through their families! Perhaps Quidditch is so huge that it's used to settle disputes between nation states and the purpose of schooling is to create the best possible teams. Or maybe it's Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Husbandry with Headmaster Hagrid.

Regardless you're tossing out a huge part of the original work and replacing it with your own. This means that one of the first things you have to do in a fic like this is establish what level of background knowledge you're using. Does Hogwarts function the same way as in canon? Does Harry have a similar background? Is magic working the same way?! You want to quickly let the reader know not necessarily what to expect, but what to not expect. How much of their background knowledge should go into understanding your world vs coming in blind to canon.

Now, you're still going to be using plenty of canon to prop up your tale; that's the purpose of fanfiction after all. But if you end up throwing the canon framework out the window because your unicorns bred like plot bunnies, you should turning it into an original work. An easy test is to just swap out the names and see if anyone in the fandom notices that it's fanfiction. There are quite a few pieces I've read which would have benefited massively from being turned into original works, as the last remnants of the fandom were holding it back rather than propping it up.

I will say though, the one real mortal sin of AUs is messing up characterization. If you're going to really alter how a character acts, there better be a damn good reason for it. Otherwise why are you using that character.

 

One way to tell you went too far: you changed the names and ended up with a "bestselling" "erotica" "novel".

 

Goblin tribalism. Giant heirarchies. Veela harems. Native American dreamcatchers. Generals. Dragon-riders. Middle Earth. DC and Marvel. Any country not in the United Kingdom. Merlin. The Founders of Hogwarts. Other dimensions. Time-turners. Buffy.

Although, oddly this gave me an urge to see Harry breeding Nifflers for Gringotts of San Francisco. Niffler-herder Potter and the Gold Rush.

 

Thanks to everybody for replying. So, to the extent that I can draw a conclusion from what everybody has posted, it's that one (or a very limited number of) major change to the universe fits within the definition of AU, but HP characters plus a 90% original setting means the story should stop masquerading as fanfiction. Even more so if they're HP characters in name only.

I don't think I could change the names and make it original fiction without a lot of people springing up and saying that the cast overlaps with HP to such an extent that it obviously started off as fanfiction.

Just to not keep everyone wondering, I'll be posting about the specifics of my fic in the Plot Bunny thread. I originally meant to keep the whole thing as a surprise, but apparently it demands discussion. Besides, to post about it here would be to lose the generality of the thread.

In terms of canon divergence, it's probably on par with your Lords of Magic, perhaps more so. (Couldn't say for sure, I read it a long time ago.) I'm not going to advertise it as anything less than vastly AU.

In the case of my fic, I definitely wouldn't say that the magic is weaker... If anything, it's stronger, more pervasive, and more esoteric in a sense. It can be tapped into for minor everyday things, and in that respect it looks a lot like canon, but at the higher levels it's more powerful and stranger than HP magic. Combat in particular is probably way different.

I'm planning the fic in such a way that the interplay between the canon events and my original contributions enhance the reader experience instead of subtracting from it. The reactions I'm looking for are along the lines of "What? That canon character in that situation? I never saw that coming... but now that I think of it, weirdly enough it rather makes sense." I try to write it in such a way as to look complete to a non-HP fan, because that's what my literary ethics command, but at the same time to reference canon in ways that, to the general HP fanfiction readership, look like clever twists.

Also, I've left the personalities intact for almost all main canon characters, except for the ones who needed a "level up" (e.g. a smarter Voldemort). What occasionally changes is the situation in which they find themselves.

Basically, though not specifically, this. My weird ideas are not everybody else's weird ideas.

 

Objections to the last one: Since there are half-veela, that means, there are full-veela, which in turn necessitates, that there are male veela.
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Depends on the skill of the writer and the taste of the reader, E.g. in my case, an overdose of OCs is confusing and weakening the magic is also a no-go; The muggles going all Hitler on the magicals after the masquerade is broken and actually wiping them out fast is a string incentive for me to close the PDF reader with the fic and delete it from my harddrive. I also hate the Wizarding World having the same prejudices as the Muggle one, since according to the accompanying material (JKRs words and Pottermore), homophobia, sex-based discrimination or racism based on skin-color doesn't really exist among wizards or is much, much less severe and prevalent than among Muggles. Or the Wizarding World being super-feudal.

 

Not necessarily. Perhaps they are ambisexual. See here: http://www.hp-lexicon.org/bestiary/bestiary_v.html#veela

 

I always thought Veela were like Asari from ME.