After the Digimon/HP thread that came up a few days ago, I just wanted the forum's opinion on crossing Harry Potter with Anime in general. I know that there is an abundance of Harry Potter and Naruto crossover fanfiction on FFN, but I've never been able to stomach it. Personally, I find that Anime requires a major suspension of disbelief due to characterization extremes or a writing approach that cuts out most of these eccentricities from the protagonists.

For instance, Naruto is a character that's so ridiculously stupid and bullheaded that he should have died the second he charged Zabuza's clones head on. Instead, antagonists have to be characterized in such a way that they all enjoy picking him apart piecemeal, giving him enough time to formulate strategies that honestly shouldn't work against Shinobi of their skill. The same can be said of his fights with Orochimaru, Neji, Gaara, every Akatsuki member, etc...

It gets to the point where characters are defined by a sole aspect of their personality or actions, which often leads to easy, repetitive drama.

In contrast, Harry Potter is a novel with arguably multidimensional characters. Though they have quirks that many fanfic authors often define their entire characters with, such as Harry's bravery, Ron's hunger or jealousy, Hermione's waspishness and know-it-all attitude, or Dumbledore's manipulations, these are not the depths of their characterizations. Each of these aspects define actions, not the person. Anime characters are near completely defined by single character traits. Who would Tsunade be without her amazing temper? Who would Gray Fullbuster be without his need to take off his clothes? Who would Miya Asama be without her Hanya masks and propriety? Who would Jiraiya be without his super perversions?

Due to this difference, I think that most novels like Harry Potter are nearly impossible to crossover with an Anime without destroying the fundamentals of either world. If you add Harry to an Anime, he must become like them. His character must become defined by a sole attribute and any attributes that contradict this nature must be done away with. If you add an anime character to a novel, all the face-faulting, nose bleeding, Team-Rockets-blasting-off-again nonsense must be immediately done away with.

Thoughts?

 

I love how this thread went. You pick the most stupid anime in existence to try to debate your point and then attempt to strawman all anime to that level.

It is like me going on a TV show forum for something like Buffy and ask if it can be crossed with books and my examples are Twilight, 50 Shades of Gray, and whatever other trash I could think of.

 

It depends on the anime of course. They're not all Naruto, thank god.

That proposed Harry Potter cyberpunk thread (not something I'd associate with really, but just as an example) immediately made me think of Ghost in the Shell. Not shonen, no face-vaulting and blast-awaying or anything in there.

 

It depends entirely on which manga or anime you decide to use, and your knowledge of that specific world in relation to your knowledge of HP's specific world.

I would hold up Retsu's Forry as evidence of this. It really depends on the knowledge and skill of the writer, in addition perhaps to the compatibility of the narrative worlds to begin with.

EDIT: Ninja'd.

 

Besides even in the most anime/manga/etc aside from the characters' defining characteristic they do usually get their personalities improved. (at least if they are worth their salt)

If the author is talented enough I think any crossover is viable. For example; Sekirei is pure shit but (I'm pretty sure that many of you will disagree) gabriel blessing did make it work with Fate/stay Night, he did drop the ball off later on but this is not the place for that.

Don't get me started on the awesomeness that's Shezza's work, but even Esama (you know, that Esama) did a halfway decent Yu-gi-oh/Harry Potter crossover.

The quality and the potential of the crossover is not depended on the original work but the author's own talent in my opinion.

 

I feel like there are plenty of one-dimensional characters in every form of art.

You may as well ask "does fiction work" - it depends on the author and the reader. True, there are different conventions in different media, and perhaps anime and novels don't particularly lend themselves to blending with one another, but that is the whole point of crossovers - the hope of creating something new in the collision of the old!

 

Please show me an anime that even halves the number of Naruto fanfiction out there. Death Note maybe has a tenth of the stories, while Bleach, Inuyasha, Yu-Gi-Oh and Hetalia make up a similar amount combined. If there's a discussion about fanfic compatibility, we should use the most popular anime in fanfiction. Yeah, a skilled author can make any situation work with enough effort. Yeah, we could always take those diamonds in the rough, that I'm sure you have more knowledge of than myself, and combine them with novels, but my premise was that Anime in general is incompatible with novels without losing something essential from either style of writing.

EDIT: lol, anime is incompatible with manga.

 

Agree with ocs. Even when the original material is flat and stereotypical, a good author can make it work. If Nuhuh can write The Stalking Blood Sack, then anything is possible. A canon character is cliched, one dimensional, uninteresting? Then make that character better - there are no limits in fanfiction. Either reinterpret them, or put them through events that force them to grow.

 

I think it depends on the anime. Naruto's power source = Chakra. For Bleach it's Spirit Energy. HP's magic system is... complicated. Nuhuh used Bleach's source and explained the switch via Harry being dead. For Naruto, it's a lot harder. However an anime like Medaka Box, they could explain away abilities via HP magic a lot easier imo.

 

If the anime doesn't suck. Unfortunately, that very very rarely happens. I'm looking at you, fans of Naruto.

 

I like how you state this. Your original question was, can books work with anime? Simple answer, yes. That wasn't what you wanted to hear though, so you threw out the answer and restated the question.

Then you asked, can Harry potter work with Naruto? Then since you knew the answer was, 'A good writer can do anything.', you restated the question again. 'Can Harry Potter work with Naruto when written by a bad writer?' and then roped in all of anime as well. Since you want really hard to get this answer. Yes, Harry Potter/Naruto crossovers written by bad writers do not work. Therefor, by your logic, Harry Potter/Anime crossovers are terrible. Well done, you got the answer you wanted.

It is impressive, I've never seen someone begging the question so hard in DLP. How worthless.

 

Please show me another book that even halves the number of Twilight fanfiction out there.

LOL HP is incompatible with books.

 

HP and Death Note totally work. So that's one example.

 

Just like anything else it seems rather property specific though I think a good writer with a good idea could probably make anything work. Though these discussions (here and in the fusion thread) have made me wonder if a Harry Potter crossover with a mechs series (like Gundam or Patlabor) could work.

 

Maybe my premise was just stupid. I rarely make threads in fanfic discussion for that very reason, but don't tell me that I kept rewriting my questions to work around the responses. The thread's very title states that I was concentrating on HP and anime crossovers.

Yes, I wanted my opinion to be correct, but there was never a point where I discussed this by way of bad versus good authorship. I may have stated my points badly, forcing me to try and reevaluate them, but I never stated that stream of nonsense you just wrote. If you look back, nearly every response I received had the bad versus good author argument. I agreed, and then moved on to my point.

I said that most Anime, especially those common in fanfiction, have characters with very flat dimensions that don't work well unless you change this. Bad fanfiction authors may do the same thing to a novel fiction's character base, but characters are designed in most Anime/Manga to be predictable. I'm not saying there aren't many exceptions; I'm saying that it makes writing crossovers between them more difficult.

Redlibertyx: at what point would Harry's magic ever come into play within a Gundam crossover? Maybe building the machine? Otherwise, he can't exactly have his mech waving around a big wand and casting spells... That's my point: If you add a character from a work like HP, with magic and a whole history of motivations that rely on Voldemort's war, how can an author add that character into the Gundam world and truly retain what was so special about the Harry Potter series? Harry's now just a really brave, lucky, selfless guy in a mech suit who might have once been a pretty decent wizard who saves the world.

 

You just need to find a setting that doesn't fight Harry Potter every step of the way.

A Certain Magical Index/Scientific Railgun, could maybe work. Multiple kinds of magic is already a given in that setting, so adding one more isn't too tough. I'm not sure what sort of plot you'd go for, but then I'm only familiar with perhaps a quarter of Index and most of Railgun.

Hell, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha (it's a sort of quasi-sci-fi/magical girl show for those who aren't familiar with it) practically begs for a proper crossover with Harry Potter. It has a multi-world magical government thing, lots of room to have an intriguing plot going on, and explaining why Potter magic is so different from Nanoha's wouldn't take too much effort. The timelines even mesh well, since Harry would be between 25/26 (At the time of the first two seasons) and 35ish (during StrikerS). Lots of potential there, pity that nothing decent has been written as yet.

Those are the first two series that come to mind for a crossover to me at least. Nasuverse aside, obviously.

EDIT: For the most part though, I sort of think that anime just tend to have settings that don't mesh well, or premises that don't react well to the inclusion of wizards. Maybe because things like shounen and other fight-type shows tend to have power-curves that get shattered by people who casually break the laws of the natural universe with a couple words.

 

That's kind of a flawed argument.

The question is, "Can HP/Anime crossovers work?"
However, your answer seems to be, "The majority of people shameless/clueless enough to actually publish their shitfic also have bad taste in anime. Case closed"

That's not 'case closed,' that's an incomplete answer to a different question.

Totally agree, but I may be biased because (if you hear a loud, fleshy, noise after reading this, it's the entirety of DLP rolling their eyes) I actually have written roughly 8k words of outline for an HP/RailDex story...
That will never see the light of day.

While I don't know that I'll ever finish anything I write, anime or otherwise, that's down to my shortcomings as an author; however, it's not like I start writing this stuff because I don't think it can be done.

So, that means I also think HP can work with Neon Genesis Evangelion, Hellsing, Strike Witches, Dance in The Vampire Bund (in all fairness, I was feeling somewhat annoyed and was in the mood to write a curbstomp), Bleach, and so on.

Really, it all depends on what show you're trying to use, and how hard you're willing to work to make it fit in the same reality as Harry Potter, or vice versa. Any crossover, whether it's two books, a book and a movie, a comic and an anime, a comic and a book, or any other conceivable combination, is going to be hurt if you take the easy way out of getting the two settings together.

Hell, you can even ruin a story with a flimsy method of getting an HP character from the present to the past.

What? Harry ended up a few decades in the past/future because someone dropped a zit potion in class? Really? I've never been able to fathom how people think that, somehow, Potions=Time Travel. The short answer is that it's a bad writer. And it's always a potion from the books (like the aforementioned boil potion), because they have no imagination of their own to invent a new one. And, invariably, this is only used as a way to get Hermione into a yesteryear Hogwarts so she can fuck Sirius/James/Remus/Snape/Lucius/Tom Riddle, and that's all the writer cares about. They don't want to concentrate on making it work, they want to hurry up and masturbate to the scene they're imagining between Hermione and a murderous racist; or indirectly killing Harry by boning his dad in the past... way to go, best friend.

See, all it takes is a bad or lazy writer to make a crossover tank. Shit, with a bad enough writer (lol, zit potion time travel), they can even fail at crossing over Harry Potter with Harry Potter!

The bad taste factor cannot be ignored, either. It's going to be tough to make a decent story by mixing HP with the lowest common denominator of anime, or any category/genre. Sure, Myth Busters proved that you can polish a turd, but you've got to pick the right turd, and you've got to work really, really, hard at it.

A competent enough author could make HP/CHUD or HP/Attack of The Killer Tomatoes work, given enough effort and skill (although, at the end of the day, there may be no point other than proving it can be done).

A lot of people concentrate on anime that uses magic, then complain that it's hard to make it work beside HP style magic, due to differing power levels or what have you. Yes, that can be difficult (witness the hoops people often jump through to make HP/Dresden fics internally consistent, or how about HP/Wheel of Time, HP/Star Wars, HP/Nasuverse?).

This overlooks, however, that people have been crossing HP over with books, movies, et cetera, that have no (or little) magic at all, for years. While it may or may not be my (or your, or any DLPer's) idea of fun, it wouldn't be hard to mix HP with Lucky Star, Whisper of The Heart, Steam Boy, Metropolis, Ghost in The Shell, Gunslinger Girl, Karigurashi no Arrietty, Durarara...

With a no-magic setting, though, the challenge becomes how the characters with no magic would be able to challenge/keep up with the HP cast, be they antagonist of protagonist. Admittedly, any HP character worth their salt could plow through most of the obstacles in Highschool of The Dead without breaking a sweat.

Of course, in some of those examples, one would have to wonder what the hell kind of fic you're going to write with them. Can you stick Konata of Lucky Star in your fic and make it interesting? It could happen.

I'm sure a good, hard working, enthusiastic, author could figure it out... but what we usually get is an author that's just enthusiastic (resulting in 20+ chapters of 500 words each, or less, and every syllable is moronic crap) - or an author that is good, but neither hard working, nor motivated (which results in 3, 4-5k chapters of reading bliss, followed by a notice that they've abandoned their story).

I'm sure there will be a third chapter of Queens Of Darkness, Ladies Of Light any day now.

There's also the occasional... let's call them 'casual' fics, where magic or conflict isn't really the focus - probably one-shots, but that doesn't mean they can't be good. In those cases, it wouldn't be unthinkable to see a story where Harry runs into a character from an anime, has a conversation, and that's the end. It may not be novel-length, or action-packed, but that's not the question; the question is can it be done and done well.

Whether Harry is leading a crack team of witches and wizards to neutralize and 'cure' a rampaging Tetsuo, or ends up having a heart to heart discussion with Ohana Matsumae about the trials of growing up with a neglectful guardian, while staying at Kissuisō, there's no reason why it can't be done well.

 

Ryuugi Shi wrote an interesting and well thought out way to cross Potter with Nanoha, without raping either worlds or going into a giant power-level argument.
It's here. It's spread around a couple of pages. And here is the proof, that even with a good idea, when you are not a good writer, it will tank.

 

We know it sucks and most of us don't care because it's a guilty pleasure that lets us both rage at idiocy and see some pretty stupid-funny things. I won't argue that it's shakespeare, it's not. But anything that I can derive some form of happiness or non-sexual pleasure from is worth reading in my mind.

 

I think they can work, but not while keeping both universes completely as they were. Personally, I detest a melding of universes, because the power system and character values are just too different, and it becomes a convoluted mess.

As has been said my many people already, it really depends on the skill of the author. Pretty much anything is possible.

You seem to want to know if it can work easily and sensibly. The answer is no. When HP is the host universe, it's almost always a crazy anime crew coming in and shitting all over Hogwarts. Or a new DADA professor who's a demon, or something. Not sure if I've ever seen it done well.

The real problem here is that HP and anime in general are just so different, it's really really hard to make them seamlessly work together.

You can probably get best results when having Harry in a new universe. Remember, Harry's got magic, and stuff like time travel is possible, so it's easy to explain all sorts of cliche shit. In any case, a situation like Harry dying and ending up in Soul Society - an easy way to do a Bleach fic with Harry as a character. That way, one of the biggest problems in a Harry Potter crossover - the utter unbalanced weirdness that is the HP magic system - is taken care of. Dead people can't do magic, you know?

In the same vein, SAO crossover is perfectly possible in my opinion. He's in a virtual realm, he can't do broken stuff, he's just another character, but well, a full character.

That's sorta boring though, isn't it? Personally, I detest Harry Potter stories without magic. But because the different power systems are so different, it's hard to have a balanced crossover that makes sense and fits well together. Nasuverse works. I can see stuff like Tsukaima, Campione, Sekirei working. Any anime that has dimensional stuff, really.

Having a book universe and anime universe completely intact and true to themselves and unchanged while crossed over... never seen it happen. But it can be done, if you're willing to stretch things a little.

My main issue is usually the power system and different culture. Yours seem to be the characterizations. But let me ask you this: if you had only watched the Harry Potter movies, would you have thought about the characters' characterizations nearly as highly? It's true that a lot of anime characters are two-dimensional and just unrealistic. But when written by a talented author? They'll have depth.

So if we're talking about a serious crossover, as long as it's two decently compatible universes, and written by a good enough author, it'll work.