Sounds like you may be confusing "OC" with "OOC" a bit, T3t.

If we use the strictest definition of "out of character," then it's true that some rather good fanfics have a Harry with some degree of OOCness. In some cases it's minor, and in other cases it's pretty extreme. Sometimes people muck with his basic ethical or emotional traits (his nobility, his propensity for self-sacrifice, etc.). Sometimes they mess with his magical traits - for instance, any Harry whose magical ability approaches or matches Dumbledore is OOC.

The example that Tenages quoted is somewhat like an OC because it's being built from the ground up with a different background. In theory you could make an OC that ends up being far more like canon Harry than many of the great OOC Harrys, but in practice they rarely are. They often suck, as well.

I do agree with you in one way, though: making an OC called Harry is not an automatic fail. Since most of us like Harry Potter and the Boy Who Lived and its OC Harry, most of us agree with that sentiment. The only thing that Santi's Harry has in common with canon Harry is that he's not predisposed to taking advantage of his family and friends like a sociopath.

 

Basilisk's idea from the last page (Harry/long lost squib sister) can work, with one condition: the sister is already dead. Everything he did, every law he broke, all for nothing, and the Old Men still won.

As for gullibleoats' idea...why not try another angle, and use Dudley instead? He's thrusted into the Wizarding World after exhibiting accidental magic, is given to the Potters (let's say James & Lily didn't die in this universe, due to Tom Riddle staying legit and forming a government instead of going full retard...I mean going Dark Lord). Arrogant Potters (or just James), sympathetic Lily (and maybe Harry), etc.

 

Why would the sister have to die? Having the fic end with "And nothing changed because it was all for nothing" is one of the worst endings, only beaten out by "It was all a dream".

 

NO. the worst ending is : All was well.

 

No, the worst ending is: "...and Harry and (insert female name) had twelve kids, Harry became master of (insert subject), and everything is good! nice! forever!!1!!"

But as Basilisk himself said, and I quote,

And sometimes, downer endings are just better than happy ones.

 

No, the better ending is for Harry, being the main character, to find a way to sort everything out. There can be bad things happen, there can be negative consequences, but in the end the Hero should actually...win. If she gets killed and that provides the motivation for Harry to bring about the downfall of the Ministry, fair enough. But just to say she should die so that the entire thing was for nothing...

 

I suppose it would also depend on when the squib sister died, but Harry could take up the charge for change to occur anyway, for her. They could even name some new law after her if/when he succeeds.

Oh yeah, and at least five of his children. A fanon must.

Edit: Lol. six minutes too late.

 

I'm getting a V for Vendetta vibe (oops) out of this. In the good way, though.

 

Running with the whole "Squib Sister" plot, if you're going to have him fight the society that exports squibs to the muggles, you've got to go full intrigue mode. I say the squib sister is long dead, but a mostly suqib-level metamorphmagus is masquerading as her to help get some support for his little rebellion.

The Old Men™ try to squash it with infiltrators, double agents, Hourse-elf Suicide Bombers, coupled with the slowly unraveling plot of the body double's. There also has to be ninjas, a car chase, and lots of explosions. Harry finally finds out that the metamorph isn't his sister. She can't remember her given name or anything about her birth family, but managed to find Harry's sister's file. As a reverse double twist, it turns out that the metamorph actually is Harry's sister, but they used a potion to lock her form (like in just about every metamorph Harry story) into that of a Muggle family's dead daughter.

 

Only one question. Will there be a global conspiracy of Masons, Vatican City and the Swiss banks?

 

Of course! And don't forget about how Harry is actually descended from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, and Cornelius Fudge is Pontius Pilates reincarnated by the Pleiadians to help them probe the Wizarding World.

 

About Harry’s sister-thing, I have an idea that jumped into my head this morning. Basically it started as another Harry’s Sibling fic: Harry has a twin sister, who’s been living with him for the whole ten years with the Dursleys. They got into Hogwarts together, and that because they have each other, they didn’t care about befriending anyone else. They were sorted into Gryffindor, started school, have to face problems together, their relationship become more developed (maybe put some HarryxHot Sister here), etc etc.

But something is strange: The professors, other than Dumbledore and Snape, seemed to never know that Lily and James gave birth to ‘twins.’ All they know is that Harry is the only child of Potters and also the sole remaining member of the family. In the third year, when Harry met Lupin and Sirius, they also tell that they never know about the existence of Harry's "sister" until now. So who is she, actually?

Then the fourth year came, and this is where everything's revealed: Harry’s sister is, in fact, isn’t his sister at all. She’s a Horcrux. A perfect, breathing being and a Living-Horcrux of Harry Potter that was created by Lily Evans in the night Voldemort attacks the Potters through a bizarre and terrifying ancient magic with a purpose to give Harry immortality. It was that when Lily split Harry’s soul, those part of the soul was so powerful that it creates a body and a form of Harry Potter’s body - with female gender. Harry knows this from Dumbledore, and is proven when Voldemort cast a Killing Curse at Harry, attempting to kill him in their duel at the graveyard. Harry doesn’t die, the Killing Curse rebounded again, and he escapes by using the portkey.

After that, pretty much everything becomes fucked up. Voldemort rages, declaring war while Harry and his friends are in their summer holiday. The ministry was taken over, no one can stop Voldemort’s forces because the Aurors aren’t ready for a battle in that scale. Then, in the same day, Voldemort attacked Hogwarts. With no one to defend Hogwarts except some numbers of teachers and Dumbledore, Voldemort took over the school. Dumbledore dies in an attempt to save the teachers, and pretty much Voldemort gains victory.

With the remaining of Order scattered across the country, Harry and his sister didn’t have a place to shelter. They left England while Voldemort took the whole country and started his campaign on Europe. What happen next is a big manhunt conducted by Voldemort on Harry and his sister (Horcrux).

The story continues as they travels around the globe, all the time evading Voldemort’s forces and anyone else that tried to catch them (hit-man, assassin, people that were interested in capturing a Living-Horcrux), while also at the same time trying to reunite the Orders and the Resistances around the Europe to take off Voldemort’s Regime.

 

I like it on principle, but I initially thought you would have the sister be a figment of Harry's cracked psyche, a la A Beautiful Mind. /sadface

So anyway, I'm reading your plot-bunny and it sounds doable, except that I don't know that you've thought through the ramifications that are beyond even what you've got written.

If the sister is Harry's Horcrux: Once that becomes known, not only will Voldemort take steps to ensure his own Horcuxes (Horcuces?) are untouchable, but Harry will be looked upon with a lot more suspicion and fear/awe/discrimination/etc. I mean, he was crucified for being a Parselmouth, and that was just a talent, not anything he'd done. How are descriptors like "his Mudblood mother used Dark magic to split his soul" and "his best friend is a homunculus with a piece of his own soul in it" going to play to a wider audience?

Evil-Overlord!Voldemort is feared and hated, but so will Harry and his Sistercrux (TM) be. This might be good material for conflict, given that this becoming public knowledge could make it far more difficult for Harry and company to secure help from outside sources, i.e. other governments or even Order members.

TL;DR: Write it.

 

There's also the relationship/character development front - Sistercrux would most likely knee Ron in the groin constantly for being a twat, thus putting a road block in place for any potential friendship between him and Harry, and I doubt that Ginny would be able to get a foothold in Harry's life because of both that and his sistercrux being a prominent influence.

I doubt he'd see Ginny as a romantic interest at any point because of the similarities that his sister (which is a reflection of himself) has with her. Boohoo for Ginslut.

There's also Hermione; would she also be kept at arms length inadvertently because of her personality/the unintentional actions of the sistercrux? Would they be friends initially, but would Hermione's belief in authority break that friendship off?

And Snape? Seeing a female version of James/Harry walking around, with Lily/Harry's eyes?

There's also the horcrux ritual itself - having your soul split would fuck Harry and his sistercrux up mentally and a little physically; how would this also react with the shard of Voldemort's soul lumped onto Harry's?

And since the sistercrux is a neat slice of Harry's own soul, would the chip of Voldemort's soul be torn into two chunks and split evenly between the two because of the unusual connection they'd have? (So they'd both be scarred/marked?)

From the impression that I got from the books, the shard of Voldemort's soul isn't a proper horcrux, but a chipped off chunk that's incapable of taking Harry over, is lumped to Harry's own soul in a fairly unique way and is kept there/protected from/neutralized by because of the whole 'love thing' (both sacrificial and prophetic) Harry has.

How would a 'neatly divided' chip of Voldemort's soul be affected by such a situation?

I could see the events of post-Fourth year going off like that, but I'm not too sure if it'd be stretching things a bit far, and possibly alienate readers...

 

You forgot that Ron is generally a decent guy. He didn't do anything particularly twatish until his fourth year.

The chances of a friendship with Hermione is far less likely than a friendship with Ron; the only reason the boys became friends with her was because of the troll incident. Otherwise they would have most likely continued to see her as an obnoxious show-off.

Why are they in Gryffindor anyway? I'm not going to argue about which house canon!Harry 'belonged' in but it'd be refreshing to see the twins (can they really be considered twins) put in Hufflepuff or Slytherin together instead.

 

I would be quite interested in seeing this plot bunny live just because of the word Sistercrux.

Will she/it have a personality, beyond talking to Harry? Does it have feelings? Will she know what she is? I could definitely see her being pretty possessive of him if you decided to keep Horcrux making dark.


Depending on how early you reveal what she is to the audience, you might want to fast forward through the first years with a couple of the more different scenes shown.

 

They would be closer than twins, really. After all, the Sistercrux is formed from a piece of Harry's broken soul. You don't get much more alike than that, at least physically.

And fuck putting them in the same House; split them up like the Patil twins. Harry in Gryffindor and Sistercrux in Slytherin is the easy way, so why not have it reversed, or Hufflepuff!Harry and Ravenclaw!Sister.

The point is, if "Lily made Harry his own Horcrux" is the jumping-off point, for fuck's sake, don't be a lazy douche and try a canon rehash.

And by the way, this has sorta been done, in BajaB's The Substitute. (I think that's the title)

~ OR ~

I'm sure this has been done, and in fact, I think this is the premise for wordhammer's Spiral Path, but if we're talking about Lily making Horcruxes, it's far more plausible that she'd have made a Horcrux of her own, either as a safeguard to allow her to live on and protect Harry, or with the intention of making it (her Horcrux) an autonomous weapon, with its prime directive being (a) protect Harry at all costs, or (b) exact unholy retribution on those responsible for her or Harry's death.

I'm picturing a ruthless, calculating Lilycrux wading through Death Eaters, perhaps waiting to ambush reborn-Voldemort at the end of GoF, or perhaps even being activated by those events, having lain dormant until something like Voldemort's resurrection triggered its wake-up call.

Example: Harry is hit with the Killing Curse at the end of GoF, and this releases Lily's Horcrux inside him. Either she takes over his body and wastes a bunch of Death Eater's through the unexpected element of surprise, or (preferably) a new body is formed on the spot, and after taking Harry's wand, Lilycrux starts flaying LV's supporters.

Fuck, now I want to see this written. Where in the world is nuhuh??

 

Portus - I'll take a crack at this,

with a few of my own twists. It'll probably be a one-shot, 1-2k words. I'll be home in three hours so hopefully I'll have it done in five?

 

To be completely honest, I didn't think that far, I'm sorry :| though maybe I can give answers for some of questions above.

Ron would try befriending them at first. He's Ron, after all. He's not a complete twat, he's just a normal boy like in canon. About Hermione... actually I was thinking of her being killed by Troll in the first year - she was insulted by Ron, ran to the bathroom, killed there without no one came to help her. Then, it would publicly known that the reason she was in the bathroom in the first place was because of Ron. This will cause most people, including Harry and Sistercrux, to take distance from the "rude, asshole, and killer" boy.

--> I admit that I'm not fond of Ron, I'm just trying to find out how to kick him out in the early story so he won't be such hindrance later.

I actually planned that. The Sistercrux also had some chip of Voldemort's soul too, so in the end, not only Harry had to die to get rid of Horcrux inside him, he also had to kill his 'sister'. Or maybe find a more complicated and complex way to remove the Horcrux without having to kill her (throw a lot of dramas, angst, some good-bye hot-blinding-sex, and thingamajig-kind of magic here).

About them being in Gryffindor... I thought that it is one of the easy ways they could gain trust from people when they rebuild the Order and Resistance for fighting Voldemort's forces. After all, wizards always see "Gryffindor as Heroic, Brave, and Light," right? But maybe some of you had other alternatives? I'm not expert in this House-thing.

Of course he would make his move to her: trying to convert her into Lily 2.0, perhaps. That would make a good pedo!Snape.

Oh, and also don't forget that Snape will see Harry (who is a carbon copy of James Potter) walking around with, always laughing with, and always together with her (the mini-Lily Evans). Naturally, he would get jealous, things would get worse, and then we'll begin the grand tale of love triangle between Harry-Sistercrux-Snape!

 

Ideas spawning ideas spawning ideas...

Here's mine.

Lets run with the Lilycrux plan, but stick closer to what canon shows us. When Voldemort was 'killed' he remained a wraith, right?

Who's to say that doesnt happen to Lily? She clings to a nonexistence but follows her son around doing whatever she can to help him out. She possesses people momentarily to... nudge them in a direction she wants, thus creating Harry's 'luck'.

...thats...all I got actually.