Ive been reading a lot of HP crossover fics lately and Ive noticed the very sad trend that almost all of them start with Harry lying in his bed at the Dursely's house and he either gets mysteriously sucked into a portal somewhere or he was brought to earth through a portal when he was a baby and then his folks want him back so they come through a random portal to get him.

For instance Ive seen a WoW crossover where he was related to the Banshee Queen, excellent idea but it was totally ruined by the random portal idea. So after reading another excellent idea get ruined by this it got me to wondering what are some original HP crossover ideas that have been used?

 

Now see here, if people post their original ideas here, they won't be original soon.

Anyway... I'd say something about the Mirror of Erised shattering.

 

The premise of Shezza's Harry Potter and the Stargate (that is, Harry getting abducted by an alien and then deposited on a random planet) was original when he did it, but then it spawned a hundred copycats and it became a cliche.

So, as Andromalius said, all good original ideas won't stay original for long, since people will copy it.

 

Black Rock and Roll by Mage-Alia is a HP/WC3 crossover that does use a portal to initiate the crossover, but it is perfectly readable since the portal in question used was one of Nerzhul's dimensional gateways as per WC3 "canon". Besides, there were Blackrock orcs dragging his ass through. Harry's even still using the JKR world's magic, albeit through a different focus and the magic seems stronger than the WC3 world magic, or at least fairly balanced.

 

This is debatable. While many worlds from other fantasy books or T.V. have more powerful magic in terms of scale (spells that affect the weather, for instance, or make earthquakes, or whatever), the magic of Harry Potter is far more versatile, easy to use, carries no backlash, and is frankly more useful.

In most magic stories, the magic is used for the sole purpose of fighting - basically, all magic does for you is solve problems that magic created in the first place, for example, magical sheilds to protect from magical attacks. Were there no magiccal attacks in the first place, the sheilds would be unnecessary.

In Harry Potter, on the other hand, magic is used first and foremost for everyday living, and for fighting second. Things like transfiguration, useful charms and potions can do things that many, if not most, fantasy series cannot do, at least without a cost. Most fantasy has a high cost to magic, Harry Potter has none.

 

Except almost all HP wizards are incompetent in someway so you never see it see HP magic used to its fullest potential.

This is not a jab at the HP fandom, it's just the way JKR wrote it.

 

I'll agree that most wizards are incompetent, but I'll disagree that this means we never see HP magic at its best.

If one is writing a story, one writes about the powerful wizards, not the weak ones. In the case of Harry Potter, our main character wasn't one of the powerful wizards, but he was in a position to observe the actions of the powerful ones (for example, Dumbledore vs. Voldemort duel). And in the case of fanfiction, we make Harry one of the powerful ones.

 

I think when people complain about the HP magic verse random world magic this is what's subconsciously being compared. See Harry isn't that bright of a lad, he CAN'T utilize HP magic to it's fullest. Any attempt to make him powerful with HP magic just makes him NOT!Harry.

You can make him powerful with another school of magic that's powerful instead of versitle; the kind of stuff that requires will alone. I'll be fairly believable that Harry would be powerful with this kind of magic because he's stubborn emo kid. HP magic requires the user to have a brain and common sense to use at max effectiveness.

 

You do realize that the point of fanfiction is to think up ways around the limiting canon right? When it comes to the fanfic universe, canon is our mortal enemy. People who "write canon" are rarely, if ever, original.

Rowling pretty much gave us a wide-open world, which is why it's fanfiction universe is even starting to overtake fandoms that have a whole literal universe to explore.

 

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True, but most people that writes these stuff seemed to forget the character development to make a Powerful!Harry believable. Most of the time they simply hand wave this stuff which comes off as HP magic>random world magic.

You need to go from Normal!Harry to Harry gets an IQ boost to Powerful!Harry. Most of the stories involve going straight to Powerful!Harry just because he got displaced by a portal.

 

Indeed fanfiction's purpose is to circumvent the flaws in canon but I have always felt that it should be done in a fashion this is both as plausible and as close to the canon HP world as possible. I think that is the issue many authors have. To have Harry one day wake up and realize his life blows and he sucks and he has to train, is not believable. To have Harry betrayed by all his friends when there has been no evidence to point that out fails. Canon while our enemy must be tied into the story so that some semblance of fluidity can be had.


As for crossovers I can see why people don't like the whole 'Harry
going to another world' type genre but I don't mind it. Yes the Harry world gets left behind, and yes it is a insert crossover title guest starring Harry Potter. But I don't think that's always a bad thing. Sometimes I find it refreshing to read a story where Harry is in a crossover with a world that I enjoy. Harry to me seems like an easily molded character. You can go a lot of ways with his character, and so I think a lot of people like to imagine how they think Harry would react if he was placed in a certain situation.

As for the original topic by sephiroththebrokenangel which I am afraid to say I have diverted from horribly, I too get pissed when I see in the subject of a fanfic so and so Xover and upon reading I notice that it's going to be a Harry gets transported to so and so land kind of story. I think the trend comes not from lack of creativity but from laziness. Authors in my opinion don't like to write the how of the story but the why, what, and who. Explaining the reason for the crossover can become tedious for the author and in their opinion waste time so what do they do? , cop out, and just say "While the inhabitants of Number Four Privet Drive slept"
because they're always apparently sleeping "a young, unruly haired boy disappeared into the night".

 

You could go for the mystery meat. A whack to the head and the next thing he knows hes covered in blood in the middle of some desert with no memory of how he got there or why hes covered in blood. (A muggle death-cultist boched(sp?) a ritual to summon some minor deity or some such
add-edit: Harry was the sacrifice, not to confuse with The-Infamous-Drestenxover)

 

Wasn't Sylvanas Windrunner a High Elf?

 

And aren't all High Elves magical crack addicts?

 

No, thats Blood Elves, High Elves had the Sun Well to draw from (If they did this intentionally or just absorbed Its ambient energy was never explained to my knowledge). Blood Elves are more vampiric In nature as they take it (often without asking).

Man, I have got to stop playing WoW...

 

And Arthas and his undead friends spanked the Sunwell good and proper, which led to the majority of the former High Elves pimping themselves out to demons for their magic fix. Somewhere between Well Spankage and Demon Pimpage, they renamed themselves Blood Elves.

RTS > MMORPG for the storylines, donchaknow.

 

Just to note, while the CURRENT wizarding world may be that way, spell names hint that such was not always the case. Avada Kedavra, for example, is from Aramaic, a language that predates Latin. Concieveably, magic started with people who figured out that they could do some wicked, evil shit to everyone else, and a few of them realized somewhere along the way that, Hey! We can do USEFUL shit with this power as well.

 

Both of these had, what I thought were, original ways of getting Harry to the crossover world/time period.

Browncoat, Green Eyes by Nonjon -

Spoiler

In addition to simply being an excellent fic, it had an original way to get a present day Harry in touch with the future crew of Serenity (from Firefly). Tired of living after the death of his wife, and knowing that the Wizarding World would probably never get any better at cleaning up their own messes, Harry removed himself from time and bound his existence to a ring. He entrusted the ring to the next generation of Weasleys so they could summon him if he was ever needed. Eventually someone does summon him...

Demon's Feign, Merlin's Pain by nuhuh -

Spoiler

Harry is imprisoned by the Minister for Magic after defeating Voldemort. He's released from his imprisonment when a group of cultists on an alternate Earth try to summon an Outsider and end up summoning Harry to their world.

 

I've always wanted to do a crossover of Fate: Stay Night. A rather ... bad anime by itself (but one of the few I've ever watched from beginning to end), but the series' mechanics would really work well with the potterverse. King Aruthur legend, summonable "servants" (heroes of past wars and great myths like Hercules, King Arthur, Medusa, Gilgamesh) – the protagonist himself is actually summonable (his future jaded self, an enemy of his summons him, although nobody knows that the summon is actually the protagonist until long after he's dead, it was actually a pretty cool plot twist). Summons are defeated by knowing their identity (most mythical people have weaknesses attached to their names) as their names are not known even to their masters.

However, as much as I didn't care for the show (the plot and characters were just BAD), I still wish to try it. Although it'd be difficult to avoid cliches. Still a great idea for a crossover timetravel fic.