Well as the title describes the following is a plot bunny that poped into my head while I was on AIM last night more than a little drunk. After scrolling up my chat log this morning I stumbled upon a random idea that came out during the ramblings. If this has been done by anyone please let me know cause i'd love to read it.

Plot Bunny: Harry is portrayed as an Idiot Savant (Incorrect Term. Modernly it's known as "Autistic Savant"). The following is from wiki-pedia...

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Savant Syndrome is sometimes abbreviated as "savantism" and individuals with Savant Syndrome abbreviated to savants. This is a source of confusion - a savant is a person of learning, especially one of great knowledge in a particular subject.

Savant Syndrome is usually recognized during childhood and is found in children with autism and other developmental difficulties. However it can also be acquired in an accident or illness, typically one that injures or impairs the left side of the brain. There is some research that suggests that it can be induced, which might support the view that unusual savant abilities are latent within all people but are obscured by the normal functioning intellect. By the help of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation researchers are providing empirical evidence for the hypothesis that savant-like skills can be approved in a healthy individual by temporary disruption of the left front part of the brain - at least with some of the probates [2].

Most autistic savants have very extensive mental abilities, called splinter skills. They can memorize facts, numbers, license plates, maps, and extensive lists of sports and weather statistics. Some savants can mentally note and then recall perfectly a very long sequence of music, numbers, or speech. Some, dubbed mental calculators, can do exceptionally fast arithmetic, including prime factorization. Other skills include precisely estimating distances and angles by sight, calculating the day of the week for any given date over the span of tens of thousands of years, and being able to accurately gauge the passing of time without a clock.

Why autistic savants are capable of these astonishing feats is not quite clear. Some savants have obvious neurological abnormalities (such as the absent corpus callosum in Kim Peek's non-autistic brain), but the brains of most savants are anatomically and physiologically normal; at least, there is no abnormality detectable by modern science. Some neurologists (see e.g., Oliver Sacks) theorize that those with savantism utilize an "innate" modular arithmetic to compute such complex problems as what day of the week a distant date (for instance, July 11th, 88182) will fall on.

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The plot bunny is basicly that everyone believes that this is Harry. He has extraordinary intelligent, but has absolutely no social skills. (or however you want to protray it). For instance Imagine that Dumbledore finds Harry, in his cupboard and inturprets Harry's lack of social skills as some kind of psychological trauma caused by the killing curse. The twist could be that he's not an Autistic Savant at all and is just faking the Autism portion to avoid being made anyones hero. You could treat it as him being cunning, possibly a defense mechanism, whatever you like. Personally I like the idea of him having some sort of mental maladie... It would certainly be a welcome reprieve from him crying all the damn time.

 

It would have to be carefully written, well researched and in no way whatsoever poking fun at autism or anythign like that. But if it fullfills those requirements then it could potentially be quite good.

 

So basically it is Rainman Harry? Does he have Tom Cruise to help him out?
I would probably read it, but it would have to be very well recommended to catch my eye.

 

That would be very interesting, actually. And as Mordecai said, it would have to be well researched.

 

An interesting idea, should it be taken seriously and written with care.... But I advise caution. I think someone prowling the boards has an autistic child and they are sort of touchy about it. I THINK its middy, not sure.