No Harry/Voldemort. Please and thank you.

 

The fact that that was your first thought proves how fucked up the fandom really is.

 

This just screams crack!fic to me. Imagine Voldemort is carefully planning to get rid of his past self and here comes Harry like a bull in a china shop ruining all his plans at the last minute.

 

Or you can have him become his past self. But it has potential beyond that. Just think of all the conflict that can be generated.

 

There are two time travel fics that I've always wanted to see done in the Harry Potter fandom.

1) Harry travels back to the second world war, planning to kill Tom Riddle in his sleep. Dumbledore intervenes and from there the butterflies explode. Ends up with a 3/4 way conflict being fought between Harry (who wants Voldemort dead), Dumbledore (who beleives that you shouldn't judge someone for what they've yet to do), Grindlewald (who's loving this chaos), and maybe Riddle or the Ministry. In recognition of WWII's global scale it would operate across the globe too.

2) Harry goes back to either his or his parent's childhood determined to change the future. He immediately brings Dumbledore in on his time travel and the two set about collecting horcruxes. But they don't find any. The reason? Voldemort's come back in time too and he's bigger and badder than ever.

Unfortunately both these story ideas would need a really good author to pull them off. On the bright side DLP probably has one of the higher concentrations of good writers on the internet.

 

I have no idea what your plans are for the story but I wouldn't mind seeing a 19 year old Harry get thrown back just far enough in time that Tom Riddle is about to graduate/start his travels. Sort of like a game of cat and mouse. Play it off as an anonymous enemy itaking measures to stop the blood purists and unravel his plans before they begin. Harry's actions attract the attention of Dumbledore/MoM, which in turn leads to them focusing on this new person nobody knows anything about instead of Riddle (in the MoM case they probably don't even know who he is), which in turn leads to Riddle rising to power unopposed. Hell if you want a plot twist you could have Harry kill Riddle early on, only to find out he's already made his first Horcrux.

Idk I'm just spit ballin'. It seems to me most good Time Travel ideas have been done and it would be nice to see a story that focuses primarily on the Voldemort/Harry/Dumbledore relationship and not just the differences in the timeline.

 

Oddly enough, I was thinking about time travel fiction while I was on a long drive today, and I think it would be perfect if you had a main character that changes time for his own personal benefit. Except, he goes too far, because he's doing it to play tricks on people instead of for good, or to gamble on events he already knows the outcome to.

-

Harry just wanted to know what Hermione was up to. It had occurred to him that she was in every class he had, as well as others that were supposedly at the same time, and he was genuinely curious as to how she managed it. Skiving off class one day, he leaves Hermione behind only to slam into her as she's rounding a corner, late for another class. Caught in a lie, he promises not to tell if she will let him use it also. She persuades him that she will let him use it once but only if she goes with him. Instantly, he agrees.

They wait until everyone has gone to sleep at night and meet in the common room. Hermione places the necklace around Harry's neck and turns the dial. In awe at the sensation and overwhelmed with the possibilities, Harry wants to do it again, but Hermione tells him that she's too tired. Annoyed, he nonetheless goes along with her.

When she repeatedly tells him she doesn't want to do it again, Harry decides to take matters into his own hands. He finds out how to get into the girls' dorms and removes it from Hermione's neck while she's asleep. Of course, Harry plans to replace it at the same time he took it, as soon as he's had his fun.

But then he realizes that he doesn't properly understand how to use the time turner.

Instead of going back two hours, he ends up four hours back. Using the Invisibility cloak and the Marauder's map (which wasn't on him during the day), he locates Peter Pettigrew and seeks him out. He finds that it is Scabbers, who has gone missing, and he subdues the rat, taking him where no one will find him. He's not sure what's going on, but he doesn't want to take any chances of Scabbers (or an Animagus) getting away.

A day passes before he can return to the classroom he left him in, but he does find the man face down, still in his bindings. He questions him, but receives very few answers. Resolving to somehow get some Veritaserum, Harry ends up finding out that Snape has some hidden away in his stores. Once again, he robs Hermione of the time turner and plans to go back an hour. He goes back in time, and goes to the store room, but Snape finds him in the act of stealing. Of course, Snape feels vindicated, realizing he now has an opportunity to really get Harry in trouble, but Harry, desperate not to be caught and maybe expelled, turns the time turner once again.

Only one problem. You aren't supposed to go back once you're already back. The time turner doesn't break; instead, it sends him somewhere he never wished to go at all. He lands at the Dursley's house just before first year. Wondering what on Earth went wrong, he nonetheless looks around at his life. But he can't find himself. Only a note, with a smiley face complete with a scar on its forehead.

It turns out he's not the only person capable of time travel, nor is he the only one actively changing things. He leaps back to the past to find that someone else is already sneakily rearranging things, making is memory of the timeline confusing at best. He wonders if the person sabotaging him is actually his own self, and begins questioning his own actions to the point that he wants to stop travelling altogether. Reality begins to distort to the point that each jump back in time becomes more and more unrecognizable.

When his own body begins to change, as some unkind result of the time turning, he begins to panic. Again and again he goes back, and never to a point he actually wants. He sees the snake slithering from the glass, but Dudley never falls into the enclosure. His head begins to ache. He goes back to the day Vernon bought his car, and how he made Harry wash the black car over and over on the hottest day of summer, resulting in a horrible red line on his neck. He begins to twitch. He sees Petunia making young Harry cook with blistered hands. Something snaps, and he blasts Petunia into the far wall. Aghast, and seeking to rectify her death, he leaps back once again.

Vernon is beating Harry harder than even Harry can remember. He leaps back again. He's being strangled, and he's only a toddler. He looks down to see there's a scar on his neck.
Another leap, and the house is on fire with only baby Harry inside. Harry feels his own skin pulling back and absolutely loses his mind.

But then, he realizes what he has to do to stop everything from changing out of his control; killing himself is the answer. But wherever he goes in the past to try and kill his other self, he can never find him. Something is interfering with his every move, and he's more and more certain that its not him doing the tampering. Finally, in his desperation, he goes back to the day he was born, but he can see someone else moving in the night. A light flashes; he succumbs to the darkness.

The last thing he could see were his own vivid green eyes staring back at him, with a smile on his burned, battered lips. He was pretty certain he wasn't standing near a mirror.

He wakes up in a room he has never seen. All around him are the sound of people's screams. A glance around him shows that he should be screaming too. And then he feels pain, scorching hot and agonizing. Worms crawl around his arms and snakes sink their fangs into his flayed skin. Through it all, a voice screams at him to wake, to try again, to rewrite history properly.

And in a flash, he finds himself standing next to Hagrid, admiring his new snowy white owl. Harry Potter remembers his purpose. He remembers everything.

 

If you do a major setting change, then don't worry too much about the setting beforehand, especially if there's no going back.

Because that story is over with, as soon as the MC disappears from it. I mean, you probably could write a plotline set in that narrative, with Voldemort hunting around for Harry, who just up and left from the middle of nowhere and seems to have stopped existing, but if it has no bearing on the plot, it doesn't need creating.

Spoilers ahead for a piece of fanfiction (by Darth Marrs), and an original series (by Darren Shan) -

Spoiler

In the third book of Darth Marrs' five way love bond trilogy (the Star Wars one), Harry Potter, the avatar of magic, is brought back to life and tortured. His bonds to life are destroyed, and he is shackled to a painful existence. All sorts of crap goes down, and then due to a war with the Q, foreshadowed from the second book, reality gets reset so that the story doesn't happen.

In the Darren Shan saga, the main character goes back in time, stops himself going on the adventure that he went on, and then unravels from reality (I read these years and years ago, I only remember because my little brother got so upset with the wasted time he spent reading them that he came down in tears to complain about it, and was so furious he ended up throwing the books onto a bonfire. Really).

Both these stories have the fact that they eliminate what you, as a reader, have become invested in. The way I felt after the DM one was that my 'efforts' in reading, my time and enjoyment, had been wasted. I have since only re-read it once (which is low considering I read it first 3 years ago, and other ones from the same time have had two or three), because I don't want to hit that ending again.

If I know that the character is going to go leave the reality that the narrative starts in, I often want to skip to that part, because up until then is basically just fluff, or character setting. It isn't important. They could all start with "And then due to magical reasons, so and so went back in time", with explanations as to why coming later, and I'd probably be just as happy.



TL;DR
Don't spend to long working on the world that we then stop seeing. It's a waste of time.

 

I disagree that the first chapter is worthless and nobody reads it anyway. Sure, you can start with Harry already landing in the past, but the first chapter is a space for you to decide if the author has decent ideas and/or the writing ability to pull them off and for the author to make you care about the protag and his/her motivations. Plus, that attitude makes you skip the opening of Circular Reasoning. Come on.

shez: like it's been said, HP Turners create stable loops and yet all time travel fics openly violate that rule. One idea that I used myself once is that if you travel back years instead of a few hours, ripple effects occur and the protag could end up in a world where not everything is as they remember. Or the stable loop theory holds and it turns out that future Harry spent years chasing rumors around the world while his younger self was at Hogwarts. Dumbledore only knew what he knew thanks to the time traveler who, for whatever reason (death? crippling injury?) was unable to assist once shit hit the fan in DH.

Then you have to consider that if you have an adult going back, even canon Harry (fuck, even canon Creevey) will probably be a certified badass. By the rule of escalation, if you buff the hero, you have to buff the villain too, or else you have no excuse for the story not ending rather quickly, especially if you go back to any time after Halloween 1981. With the foreknowledge, there's no reason not to destroy/irreversibly cripple Voldemort in a few days at most.

Going back to World War II could be interesting. Dumbledore can't be the "I win" button because he's busy with Grindelwald. If you also have the protag roughly Riddle's age (late teens) then you have a potentially intriguing conflict. Sort of Dumbledore vs Grindelwald on a smaller scale.

 

Personally, I think I'd rather go the time travel to the future route as well, perhaps inspired by the Justice League show episode Hereafter. Perhaps Harry gets thrown two centuries into the future at some point during his Hogwarts years, maybe he accidentally gets sent during the Department of Mysteries battle, and finds out the entire Wizarding World has been destroyed while the Muggle World, who now know and hate those with magic, constantly try to hunt him.

Now trying to get back home and stop Voldemort before he can win, Harry also has to survive with only his wits and his wand. Along the way perhaps he encounters an elderly Hermione, who is one of the few magical survivors and has to watch her die an old woman in her bed, while also encountering a broken and regretful Voldemort(i.e. Vandal Savage from the Justice League Hereafter episode), who perhaps trains Harry with the sole purpose of killing his younger self.

Then perhaps in a sequel or part two of the fic you could have older and darker Harry returns to the past, before his younger self even went forward into the future, trying to kill Voldemort while also secretly helping his younger survive and possibility making he doesn't also get sent back to the future.

Of course this is just a idea I made up on the spot for the past ten minutes, but perhaps it could work?

 

To be honest I only care about the first chapter insofar as it tells me what Harry is like. I read it to get a grasp on what kind of Harry is going back. I don't care much about his reasons or how fucked up his world is.

 

It takes a really dire combination of bad elements for me to start skipping forward. If I'm checking out a fic, I'll read every word. The author put them all there for a reason. If I don't like it, I move on to something else.

 

It's a time travel fic, why would you bother telling it in linear order? I personally like narrative that drops you into the action and forces you to pay attention as to unravel what came before. A chaotic opening with Harry being dropped into the past would give the story urgency and immediacy right from the get go, and the reader wouldn't feel compelled to skip ahead.

 

The challenge with something like this is that you pretty much need the whole thing plotted out from start to finish before you start writing, or else it will be difficult to keep track of things. It leaves little wiggle room.

 

Biggest game breaker for me?

If you do reveal the time-travel don't fuck it up. Seriously.

One more Harry confesses to Dumbledore for some inane shit, usually on a hospital bed, and I'll give up on the genre completely.

For something that is meant to bring unlimited possibilities people are certainly lacking in imagination in this area. World destroying feat of magic here. No worries I'll cough it up because you don't know my name and I look like a Potter.

 

Scott_Press : Not necessarily. I think the success of world building is in its subtlety. You don't need hulking chapter long descriptions of war and gore to convince the reader the future's gone to shit. I think snapshots would work just as effectively. Also, it creates a nice element of mystery, which is necessary to keep people reading.

 

shez: I didn't say that worldbuilding needs to be in-your-face, just that building something to show the situation before time travel happens helps to understand the protag's motivation for doing it in the first place (if it's a deliberate act).