Well it's been a while since i last posted...anything so I wouldn't be suprised if nobody remembered me. But on to the good stuff:

I was reading a Sirius is really Harry's father fic when i thought that there might be another, original way, to show that Harry has been under glamours cast by his charms-gifted mother since birth (the original idea being that Harry's resemblance to his father, except for his eyes, being mentioned a few too many times in canon). The idea was that Harry was trying one of those bait-and-switch deals with a "clone" adopted by many Independent!Harry fics by giving a dose of polyjuice to it with his hair. Once the clone changed (I am assuming here that glamours/any charms on the subject don't appear on a polyjuiced body) he would find a face, and body, that he didn't see everyday when he looked in the mirror.

That's about it.

I'm apologizing in advance if this is in the wrong section of the forum, please move it if it is (and that doesn't mean i'm too lazy to find the right place, it just honestly seemed like it was), and if this idea was mentioned before. I did a little bit of skimming through search results but I find that most of the time when I search for something I end up getting completely random threads because someone typed my search term in response to something completely different (maybe I'm partially incompetent, there is always the chance, but maybe there is an inkling of truth in what I am saying).

so.....peace, love, and cargo

 

if its a challenge then it should be in the challenge section. Other than that, its not a bad idea. I like it.

 

Wasn't a challange as of yet, wanted to test the waters - make sure it wouldn't kill that precious, yet fragile, reputation...for the moment at least - first. I just feel like since there are so many cliches infesting the "community" we might as well exploit them. Besides, it's not much of a challange yet seeing as it only has one recquirement (and where is the fun in that?)

 

I always liked Sirus!Father fics...

 

As you all know, I'm not much of a veteran, but can comments like that be banned, or at least be officially "not worth bandwidth cost"? I'm all for expressing views (and I know I sound like an ass) but that really didn't contribute to the conversation. And for the record, I have no problem with different parents fics, I was just suggesting a new way to spill the proverbial beans.

Kick me if I'm out of line.

 

Comments like this are always seen... but as it seems you want feedback of the story... original?

 

You've had to have seen it, when he fakes his death/wants to go for a romp on the town in secret...

 

Yeah, IP82's fic begins like that. It is a very interesting idea, and just going by the way that IP wrote it, if Dudley had taken the polyjuice and looked like someone enirely different...that'd be an interesting plot.

Now...I don't like Severitus and Sirius!Father Harry because...I don't see Lily as a woman who would carry another man's child and marry James all the same. I like Lily and James, and quite frankly, reading that Bully!James scene in OotP irritated me to no end. I frankly don't see the point; why can't Harry's parents be perfect? They're dead, so it doesn't matter at all. And honestly, the slew of Asshole!James stories where Lily slowly sees him mature is more than annoying, its a cliche unto itself. I used to enjoy the pre-OotP James/Lily fics, but with the Bully!James persona having become so popular, it's just annoying.

Bleh, I'm a romantic, sappy guy, so the idea of pure love without the 'I'm not even talking to him until he gets his head out of his ass' garbage appeals to me. And quite honestly, unless you've got some psychological issue, all men know that being a boastful little turd isn't going to enamor you to the woman of your dreams. So casting James as the pureblood with a bloated ego just doesn't make sense when he falls for a Muggleborn. To transcend such estabished social 'rules', if you will, requires a level of maturity and understanding, not a egotistical view of oneself. :/

Also...I quite like Harry's physical description. The black hair, features similar to his father and eyes like his mother's is a nice way to look at Harry. It makes him his parents' son, y'know? I dunno, it's weird, I guess, but I find it more fitting than any other description of his physical features. That's why I was so relieved in SotMV by Mrriddler that Harry didn't transform into some silver-blonde dude...that just isn't Harry anymore.

Bleh, I guess having Harry look the way he does in canon, at the very least, keeps it as a Harry Potter story rather than a Gary Sue. And while I'm all for the ponytail/dreadlocks/bald!Harry (it gives the author the ability to change Harry's looks to match the new personality given to him), having his face change just seems like too much.

So...nice idea, very interesting. But unless the idea is changed to make it so that the 'clone' doesn't have the scar, or something equally important, and thereby lead to a Manipulative!Dumbledore plot or something along those lines, I don't think I'd be very interested in reading it. That is, of course, only if the fic is nothing spectacular. If the story itself is incredible, with a strong, powerful and intelligent HP, then I will always ignore little problems that I percieve in favor of the author's writing ability.

 

As it were, I agree completely with most of your comments (mostly asshole!james). I do appreciate it in canon, it gives him a physical connection to his otherwise ostracized relation to them (besides the album, cloak, and character destroying memory).

Truly, because I'm not an author (as of yet), I'm just using this post to hash out a few ideas that I have while reading. I guess that means I should site The Next Great Adventure(?) I feel like plot bunnies are being pounced on long before they've been thoroughly thought out these days and I'm battling that one thread at a time (call it my hero complex).

 

Yeah, it would have been harder to fake his death in that story if I made it so Harry's appearance was just a glamour. Everything since then has been a glamour or polyjuice (or dopplejuice) or something like that, but underneath it all, Harry's true last name is POTTER. He pretends to be a lot of people, and people pretend to be him, but his parentage remains the same.

I like the idea, but it's probably not something I'll ever write. It's a new way to introduce the plotline, and that's great, but too many people will just use it for Severitus fics. James might have been a bully (God I hated that scene.) but Lily was not a whore.

 

I would think that, since a glamour goes on 'over the skin', so to speak, that if Harry had one on him all of these years, the polyjuice he took in 2nd year wouldn't have worked. That is, he would have changed to look like Goyle but the glamour would have still been projected over top of it, thus making him look like the polyjuice didn't work.

You'd have to explain away why the polyjuice he drank covered the glamour but the polyjuice used to copy him didn't copy the glamour. If the glamour spell automatically kicks off when he takes polyjuice, etc. then that's a pretty complex friggin' charm.
Not to mention that I have a feeling Dumbledore can see through glamours and illusions* just like he can spot invisible people (though it could be that he can only do that because he's picking up the surface thoughts of the invisible person, so...:?.

Other than that, it's a neat way for Harry to get a rude awakening that, yet again, nothing in his life is simple and rarely is it ever as it appears.

*Though if he already knows Harry's under a glamour and/or is responsible for it, this doesn't matter.

 

True. How many impotent people do you know that:

A. Had their best friend bang their wife?
or even B. Would let their best friend bang their wife?

Close as brothers or not, my wife is mine. Go get a hooker, Sirius.

I liked the Bully!James bit.

It's annoying how, after you die, everyone only has nice things to say about you. Makes you wonder if you're at the wrong funeral or something. Never mind the man you pay to tell you good things about your friend. What's with that? But I digress.

On the other hand, the Bully!James scene has encouraged stupid shippy fangirls to pair up Snape with Lily. Because Snape has gotten tired of Jailbait!Hermione and NAMBLA!Harry.

Ever wonder why he's such an ass? He can't get laid without paying people!

And yet, most fan fics describe exactly that. Including this really popular fan fiction septology by someone named J. K. Rowling... oh, wait a minute... heh, heh. My mistake; that's canon.

But he can't be too much his parents' son, though. That's all that anybody seems to see ever. Either James Potter the Second, which in fan fiction, translates into Harry playing pranks left, right, centre, and a spin-deke or the Boy-Who-Lived and Savior of the Universe, ie. Canon!Harry. You just know he's going to die a virgin.

 

Considering I've been invited to more than one threesome with a certain married couple, and know a lot of other swingers, I'm going to say "a couple". Yes, those kind of weirdos who can share their wife exist, but they certainly aren't common. My social circle is just filled with odd people so I can honestly say I have encountered that situation.

Personally though, I agree with you. When I find my wife, I'm going to be a jealous little bastard. And for the record, I said no each time. I still remember why she and I broke up so I won't be travelling down that road again and certainly not while her husband was watching.

 

I've just wrote a little silly joke following the accident with polyjuice and Harry being really Sirius' son. Sadly, it appeared to be close to 2 thousand words so I decided to post it on ff.net instead. Consider it an answer to the challenge. hehehe. Or my another self-introduction:

Old Dumbledore Faked My Scar!

 

I've given myself a few days to think about and have come up with one way to make it work.

To your suggestion that glamours go on over the skin: You are probably correct in your assumption and that is why I would have to tweak my side of the discussion a bit. Instead of using a glamour what if Lily (or someone else, that is a known transfiguration expert, such as Dumbledore) utilized precision transfiguration, much like a plastic surgeon, to alter the way that his body would look in the future (something that I haven't seen in any fanfic before). The problem with this being that it would be hard to know what he would end up looking like and therefore would not look exactly like James (unless a Seer was involved and it is commonly assumed that Seeing is not the precise art needed for such a task). But back to my thought process. If he was transfigured instead of glamour-ed, and if we can assume that polyjuice replicates a person's physical appearance by looking at said person's genetic make up, because dna is unalterable (I am also assuming that transfiguration doesn't affect dna), then the person that took a potion with his hair/nail/etc. then they would look exactly as he would have if he had not been transfigured.

Yes, I do know that this is far too complicated to happen in a majority of the differentparents!harry fics, and probably too complicated in the fanfiction as a whole. My aim was simply to come up with a solution...and cover the proverbial ass of my weak idea. It would also take a writer far better than me to convey this concept while still adhering to even a small amount of the assumed rules of Rowling's "Wizarding World".

Another, even more complicated, solution: This solution involves legilimancy, but instead of making the mind see something that is not there, it is making the tRNA (correct me if I'm wrong, only one year of biology under my belt a few years ago), which is used as the framework for the replication of dna, function as normal yet have another set of "base" DNA (presumably that of James with a slight alteration that would allow for Lily's eyes) that would be used for the forming of the body in the zygotic stage (the legilimancy would make the "mind" of the cells (or the initial cell) believe that it was using the correct strand of dna when it was using the "planted" one, and because you would not want to stop the body from its normal process of replicating the true dna because that may damage the subject in many unforeseeable ways they would both be copied). this way the body would be using a set of DNA to form the body, just as it normally would, but when the polyjuice was used, the magic of the other person would only replicate the true dna because legilimancy was not used on the other person.

Yes, I am grasping at what isn't there, but I took your comments as a challenge and wanted to come up with at least two situations in which I was correct...Napoleonic Complex I guess. The justification for the second is that because Dumbledore is obsessed with making sure that Harry is "normal" (as proven by his failure to tell him the prophecy any earlier, whether that was a completely bad thing to do or not) and as such would do anything in his power to prevent the general population from seeing a "bastard" saviour.

Anyway, I'm done giving ammunition to those that would tear down these dissertations, take them as you may, disregard them as you may, and if you can, replace them as you may.

 

Well, the easy way to do this, with a minimum of headaches for the writer as well as the readers, is to make some shit up.

I already pointed out the issues with keeping a glamour up, from birth, with zero maintenance and still have no one discover the truth.

Transfiguration would be difficult because you'd likely need someone to update it frequently, as it wouldn't 'grow with you', so to speak. Also, it could be canceled by someone almost as easily. If Transfiguration could work so well in the long term, for making you appear as someone else, people would be using it all the time. Sirius could have used it to freely walk in public.

I offer you. Blood Magic.

Magic using blood and blood ties is ancient, it's not well known, even to other wizards, and it's seen as somewhat forbidden... Also, it's a good way to keep people from asking questions.
No one knows how Lily protected Harry from the Killing Curse but the whole series is built on the assumption that she did, in fact, do something. Next, we have those infamous blood wards that keep Harry stuck with his obnoxious relatives. From these two little things in the books, we get the entirely new field of 'Blood Magic'. It's extrapolation at its finest...or something.

I submit to you that there is a complex and taboo ritual that could be performed, using the blood of Lily and James, to make Harry look like their offspring. The very nature of this spell would make it so that it grew along with him, making him look like a feasible combination of the people whose blood was used in the spell.
A spell such as this could have been originally created for a number of reasons; most likely so that if your wife was unfaithful, you could make the bastard child look like you and avoid the public humiliation (Purebloods, go figure...).

We (the readers) sort of already know how Glamours (Charms) and Transfiguration work, which makes it harder to suspend our disbelief and easy to shoot holes in what you're trying to do with them. We don't know how "Blood Magic" works, so we just have to nod our heads and agree. When in doubt, make up a new type of magic (or in other words, know how to bullshit).

There is one foreseeable catch with the blood magic angle: How is it altering his appearance? If it's altering Harry's own blood, one might assume the affects would carry over in the Polyjuice. Still, the ritual was focused on Harry, so I could see the 'decoy' taking the Polyjuice, looking like Harry for a few seconds while the Blood Magic tries to maintain its influence on both Harry and the decoy, then as the magic fails, the polyjuiced decoy melts/morphs/shifts to look like Harry's true appearance. Leading to Harry's 'WTF moment' where he realizes he isn't what he appears to be.

The other explanation is that the blood magic ritual uses a physical object (like those dreaded Horcruxes) to maintain the spell; maybe an object containing a lock of Harry's hair from when he was a baby, and the blood of Lily and James. As long as that object is intact and no one willfully tries to cancel the ritual, the spell will continue to function. Maybe this item is being kept in the Potter vaults, maybe it's in the Headmaster's office somewhere... Since the target of the spell (and the focus item) is Harry, the polyjuiced decoy wouldn't be affected.

To cancel the spell, one could destroy the focus item or purposely perform a counter ritual, which would, essentially, disrupt the magic and destroy the focus 'by remote'.

(Want to get really far out? Maybe the Focus Item was one of the objects that Harry damaged during his Rampage in Dumbledore's Office and now the spell is on the verge of immanent failure. It's only a matter of time before the spell ends, with or without any outside help.)

Oi. Did I just write that? Anyway, it was just a thought. HTH.

EDIT: (This probably isn't so different from what has been done in those 'Sirius is Harry's father' stories you've mentioned but it is, perhaps, a bit more fleshed out. I wouldn't know, I don't recall reading any and I avoid Severitus like the plague.)

 

LIke this fic Blood Magic

WARNING! This is a Severitus Challenge piece. Its #2 in my list of good SCs (There are 3 fics in that list)

 

If need be i could skim over it and copy the parts about Blood Magic so no-one else has to read it??

Edit to the last: nr2 has slash (probably not DLP material)

PS. Edit doesnt seem to work