I've been planning a Harry Potter story for a long time now - and the story itself doesn't have Harry as its main character.

Personally, I'm concerned with the reception to a story that isn't Harry-centric. Perhaps this has been asked before, but why do most DLPers prefer Harry-centric stories (if indeed they do?)

To my understanding, Harry's greatest advantage is that he is rather bland and featureless - the everyman that everyone can emphasize with, that anyone can think of as himself/herself.

Yet arguably this also makes Harry quite uninteresting - thus fandom's (and DLP's) tendency to make Harry more motivated, smarter, or otherwise snarky. My own opinion is that the Harry Potter series as a whole is interesting, but mainly because of the fantastic world Rowling created and the relatively interesting plot that we want to see resolved. Harry Potter himself, as a character, is not particularly inspiring. That was fine when he was a child, but not when he grows up and is expected to bear the burden of being the Hero protagonist. Compared to various other fantasy characters - Dresden; Tyrion Lannister; Locke Lamora; and so on - he's plain water to the others' intoxicating wine.

So: Are Harry-centric stories generally preferred? Is this due to the nature of the books (Harry Potter and the etcetera)? What are your preferences in regards to alternative protagonists in HP fanfiction?

 

Yes there is a preference for Harry-centric stories here on DLP (I think), and I do not presume to know why, but what I do know is stories based on characters (for example, Dumbledore) other than Harry are generally well-accepted if they are well-done.

The issue is Harry is pliable, he is more easily molded into other shapes, so stories centered on him are bound to be very diverse in scope and interesting. Other characters (again see Dumbledore for example) are less malleable, they have to conform to a certain criteria (especially characterisation) even if they are been re-imagined in some other format (lest they lose their identity, and that takes away a certain element of experimentation and leaves behind a "generic" confinement. Harry is not so restricted, hence he's funner to mould and play with. These are just my thoughts though, so don't take them as gospel truth - I'm sure someone more experienced can posit a better explanation.

PS: Even I don't fully understand what I wrote.

 

If you aren't writing a story starring Harry Potter, and you change the rules of magic because you like them better that way, then really you aren't writing Harry Potter fanfiction.

You're writing original fiction using someone else's background characters and pieces of setting. Instead, just make your own setting and characters and write about that - there's an Original WbA forum here that would welcome new authors, I'm sure.

If you really want to keep the whole "modern-day magic" thing and don't want to seem like you're ripping off Harry Potter, then pull a Butcher and make a joke about it on occasion.

EDIT: Sesc's comment below was true enough, I had in mind you wanting to write about either an original character or an "underused" character who might as well be original and/or self-insert (like that recent Pure-blood Princess fic that ended up not in the library). And Sesc's post reminded me of a Dumbledore-centric series - author was "Grandson of Dumbledore" or something - that was not horrible.


Other than the exceptions (and exceptional) Alexandra Quick and the Apprentice mentioned above, I've never read any non-Harrycentric story that was worth a damn. You can start your AU from any point in time you like - thus making Harry's personality changes believable; just have it focus on Harry.

 

People don't care about fics being Harry - the character - centric. They care about the main character having the name "Harry Potter". You can make him as OOC as you like and so long as he still has that name the fanfiction readership will automatically adopt him and root for him.

Perfect example: Santi's Boy Who Lived story. Really, in that story, Nathan is Harry Potter, and the character we're reading about is an OC. But Santi knew that no one wants to read about an OC brother of the Boy Who Lived. They want to read about Harry Potter. So he called the OC brother Harry, and renamed Harry to Nathan.

So write your OC character. But call him Harry Potter*.

*Or at least have some connection to Harry in there. You can get away with a different name if:

A) It's fem!Harry.
B) Harry changes his name to Rakesh or something like that.

 

P.S. You can't change his name to Rakhesh and get away with it.

 

Worry about writing something that's compelling and interesting over who the main character happens to be.

Tons of non-Harry-centric stories are enjoyed by folks on the site. Aside from the ones mentioned: BajaB's Dark Marauder, jbern's Number Games, Lady Altair's Cauterize, bobsaqqara's Lily Potter and the Worst Holiday, respitechristopher's and Inverarity's next-gen stories, Arsinoe de Blassenville's The Prefect's Portrait, Blu Taiger's The Best Seven Years, Darth Marrs's The Boy Who Fell, to name just a few. Not all are in the Library, but many are.

 

If a story is compelling and well-written, it's completely irrelevant who the main character is. Or at least it should be, although there are some members of DLP who disagree for reasons I will never understand.

 

To be honest, I don't care to read a story set in the Harry Potter universe if the main character is not Harry Potter. This is simply a personal preference similar to some people just not willing to read a story if it has a certain pairing they dislike, no matter how awesome the story is besides that point.

 

I think there's maybe 3 stories that are non-Harry centric that I've enjoyed, and they were all part of the DLP writing contests.

I understand what Taure says about the name-shifting, but I've always gone on the books as saying that Santi's BWL isn't that great, so I do believe there's a threshold where it's tolerable, and then you jump the shark.

I'll read any story, but they just have to be interesting enough. I find it hard to care about OCs when I have no attachment to them, and just attaching the name doesn't always work, except for that one story that was originally like Daphne/Theodore then was switched to Daphne/Slytherin!Harry just by switching the name.

 

Quoted for truth.

Because Harry is the only character with the Greek-Hero-Journey-Of-Awesomess; the most easily moldable of the saga, as APH said; the only one with a Nemesis in the form of LV (totally moldable too); one of the most charismatic characters in literature; and the main attraction of the billboard.

That's why.

 

Just so. Swap the names and leave everything else the same, and Boy Who Lived wouldn't be a tenth as popular as it is. The characteristics that help make Harry interesting (his talent, his dislike of many canon characters, etc.) would suddenly become turn-offs. There'd be cries of "Gary Stu!" left and right. All this even though the story would in fact be exactly the same.

Does that mean that for many of us, the phrase "Harry Potter" is like caffeine to a daily coffee drinker? That even a good 'drink' is unsatisfying without that chemical jolt to get us going?

Interestingly, this phenomenon can sometimes work when you turn it on its head. A top quality (or shitty but very popular) bit of fanfiction is ultimately just fanfiction: of interest only to niche groups. But if that fic has little relation to the original material, you can sometimes change the names to OCs and get something with publication potential.

e.g., "Master of the Universe" was a horribly bad, yet wildly popular bit of Twilight fanfiction. Rename the characters, rename the fic to "50 Shades of Grey," and all of a sudden it's a horribly bad yet wildly popular book that's made its creator a fortune. :awesome

 

If the names were swapped around, everyone would just assume the author was self-inserting into the fic. I guess I have that mentallity as well. I'd rather read about a 'Minerva McGonagall' rather than a "Susan McSmith" even if the story was identical, because the McGonagall name means something to a reader.

 

The core of the Harry Potter fanom is "Harry will have to fight Voldemort". Any story has to kowtow to this point, or else remove it.