First off, my fanfiction.net pen name is NamelessHeretic. Some of you may or may not remember a fic called Crimson. It started off okay, but after a while I lost interest and the quality was deteriorating rapidly. For a while now I've been working on a rewrite, and I've settled on something. I'll gleam over some of it in this thread. Some things will remain from the original.

1. Neville is the Boy Who Lived. Harry is just another kid orphaned by the war.

2. Harry will have some muggle friends (not a lot, probably only two or so), but I plan on having this from the beginning. This just seems like a more realistic scenario than everyone being too scared of Dudley to be Harry's friend.

3. Harry will become a powerful wizard, but not as quickly as before. He won't be going toe-to-toe with Bellatrix when he's twelve.

4. Use of minor characters such as Su Li.

One of the main problems with the original Crimson was the lack of any real direction. All I had really done for the overall story was copypast the Mibu from Samurai Deeper Kyo and replaced the characters with the Hogwarts founders, Merlin, etc. I hadn't really thought any of it out in detail. I also laid it on pretty thickly that Harry was a genius obfuscating stupidity. This time around Harry will just do average on paper do avoid the Dursley's wrath.

For the rewrite, I'll be focusing on things stemming from the consequenses of a larger magical population (think like the Baby Boomers after WWII), if Harry's mother worked as an Unspeakable (well, more like an apprentice Unspeakable or assistant due to being fresh out of Hogwarts), the exact nature of the DoM's work (not assassination and special ops, but magical research and stuff), a magical take on transhumanism, the exact nature of the prophecies, Harry dealing with living in two worlds (this wasn't really addressed in canon since Harry's pretty much removed himself from the muggle world), and a magical society that had long ago removed itself from this world and developed in a different direction.

Plot-wise, it will focus on Harry's own destiny and some things originating from his mother's work in the DoM. There will be some connections with Voldemort, but Harry won't be taking over Neville's role in the world.

Thoughts?

 

Really? I know there are a lot of fics that have the sibling mistaken as the BWL, but I didn't think there were many fics that made it true.

I've been struggling with this and you bring up a good point. If I dawdle too much on Harry's childhood it'll get boring. A timeskip could fix this, or I could start off with Harry in Hogwarts and use flashbacks/summer for exposition.

I plan on throwing some real heavy hitters at Harry once he starts getting into the stuff his mother was working on. Eldritch Abomination type stuff. But you're right. I want to avoid doing epic battles or DBZ fights for its own sake.

What I meant was having minor characters in canon as major characters in my fic. For example, Harry's group/posse/whatever would be made of characters that didn't get fleshed out in the books, which gives me some flexibility in their characterization.



Another thing I want to avoid is making Neville a complete jerkass. His head will be a little big because of all his fame, but he'll still be Neville and feel the pressure form his grandmother to "be the hero". I think I overdid it the first time around, basically making him a competent version of the BWL-Neville from SilverAegis's stuff.

 

The only obstacle with Neville being placed away from all his fame is his grandmother... I guess, is if he convinced his grandmother to leave the country until Neville's schooling came around...

There's an idea.

As for Harry's house, I'm considering two possibilities: due the greater population of the magical world, Hogwarts teaches more students and the house system has been altered to be used for students who study past their OWLs, while younger students just get mashed together.

However, it's more likely that magical families will homeschool their children or there will be more, smaller schools with Hogwarts just being the most elite in Britain.

That said, Harry will most likely be Griffindor. There's no reason to put him in Slytherin, since his childhood will mostly the same as in canon.

Flashbacks are awkward and disruptive, so either I'll just say it straight in the narrative or reveal background info through dialogue.

 

This is the problem I have.

Of all of that post, your discussion of the actual plot of the story was all of two lines.

Having aims like "Harry will be a powerful wizard after a realistic arc of progression" is not a plot. That's something that comes with a plot or augments one.

Unless you come up with something properly unique this'll just be another canon rehash from a slightly different perspective with a slightly more likeable Harry.

 

That was a very brief comment on the plot, not a summary. If anyone ends up rehashing the plot it'll be Neville. Harry will have his own things to do.

 

So are you going to have Neville kill Voldemort? What is Harry's use in this story? If Neville is the BWL did Harry's parents get put in a coma or are they dead? How is Lily's work relevant to the war and if Harry's parents are dead or in a coma how will Harry learn of said studies?

 

"Things to do" is not a coherent, unified plot.

At the moment this sounds like one of those episodic TV shows where each episode stuff happens by there's no single plot thread running through it all.

Harry merely living his life is not interesting for a reader. You need a particular story to tell, contained and focused.

 

*sigh* He says its a rewrite. There is a plot in the original, it just apparently wasn't going anywhere.
It has something to do with some shadowy group who plotted out the rise of Voldemort and such.

 

Hey, you're right. "Things to do" is yet another brief comment on the plot.

I haven't said a word on what the actual plot is. "Things to do" and "Harry's own destiny" don't add up to everything that I have planned. All I'm saying is that Harry's story won't be as in Canon.

 

So that narrows it down to infinity-1 possible ways you could take it...

 

Indeed. I'm still working on it.

And I'm not going to start spitting out chapters before I've got an actual plot outlined. I have a rough idea for it but I'm working out the details.

 

Even if we assume that his childhood was the same [though one could reason that the lack of an ugly scar on the top of the forehead would make him less shy], Harry's conversation with Ron - if there were to be one - would have gone differently. Also, Draco wouldn't show up.

 

This is what Taure was trying to point out - your last story lacked a plot and you acknowledge there's no plot for this one at the moment. You're just setting yourself up for another story that falls apart after chapter 3.

Basically what you're asking us is to evaluate some of the cool things you've thought of:

1. OK, cool. Done a million times, but you need to start somewhere.
2. It depends on what you're doing here. The reason why no one was friends with Harry is because JKR wanted it that way, if you give him friends, you're not really contributing anything to your story. Will these friends obtain magical powers? Will they reoccur somewhere again in the story? Will they provide for some significant event in Harry's childhood? If you don't have a plot, how can you even calculate the value of these seemingly-useless characters? They sound like dead-weight OCs that will make your story drag on.
3. Awesome. So he's going to be more powerful than he is in canon, but he won't get powerful that quickly. Sounds like you're really setting yourself up for a long, drawn out story. That can work, I guess, but only if you have material.
4. Hooray for minor characters! I support you here - but realize they're mostly OCs and you already have enough of those from the sound of things.

It also sounds like you have a lot of nothing here. You don't have a plot and you don't even really have fully fleshed out ideas or even a direction or theme. You just sound exicted. And with that voice in the back of your head telling you what you're writing sucks? That enthusiasm will fade. It always does.

What you have here are a bunch of cliches - overused ideas that anyone who's read anything has encountered before. What makes an overused idea intriguing? How it's implemented and used in a plot. Which you lack.

You don't need an intricate plot outline detailing everything that will ever happen in your story - just a vague sense of what the heck you're doing. But you don't even have that. You're just saying: "Harry will become powerful but he's not the BWL and he's got friends but they don't really matter, oh and there are minor characters somewhere too. No DBZ fights here, everything will end really abruptly or maybe Harry won't fight anyone because he's devious and smart."

In the end, I can't even properly evaluate your ideas because I don't have any sort of feel of what you plan to do with them.

 

1. Again, I had no idea Neville actually being the boy who lived had been done a whole lot outside of time travel/alternate reality stuff. I guess I need to poke around more.

2. Harry's muggle friends are there as his connection to the muggle world, which provides internal conflict as he has trouble living in both that and the magical world. One of them will be versed in astrophysics. This is useful to the wizarding world which wants to find a new planet for them to settle on so the magical population no longer has to hide from the muggle world. They need the knowledge of some muggle scientists to find a good candidates for terraforming and such.

3. What I meant was that Harry won't be dueling with Death Eaters like a pro in his first year.

4. This is true. I have a thing for OCs.

As for the plot, the reason I wasn't saying anything was because I was still brainstorming and working the things I wanted to into the story. I have a rough sketch of it at the moment. This has been forming for the past few months and is still subject to change if I'm not satisfied.

First, some backstory stuff.

I mentioned that I was giving the magical population a boost. Because of this and their need to remain hidden from muggles, eugenics and population control laws are put into place. Basically a spin-off of the Marriage Law thing. Pureblood bias also has a stronger presence. James ends up being in a political marriage and Lily joins the Department of Mysteries. They end up meeting through some golem-research project and an affair begins after a time. This results in Harry, who she manages to keep hidden. James has no idea and Lily stops seeing him. Lily, fearing for her son's life and unable to simply disappear, eventually entrusts him to the Dursleys. She dies in the war shortly before Neville "defeats" Voldemort and has destroyed much of the research done by Voldemort and the Unspeakables (see below).

Above I mentioned that the magical world wants to get to another world to hide from the muggle world indefinitely. One way is for them to make some really heavy-duty portkeys to get off-planet. Problem is, they need to find potential planets to colonize. They have been collaborating with muggle scientists (who are unaware of who they are exactly) about things including astrophysics, geology, terraforming, ecology, etc. With this knowledge and magic, they wizarding world hopes to find, terraform, and colonize other worlds.

Meanwhile, Unspeakables at the DoM have been researching another way to get away from their muggle cousins. Some obscure myths tell of a magical civilization that managed to disappear overnight thousands of years ago, leaving only an empty city (I'm thinking of just slapping this in the middle east somewhere). The myths say that the wizards and witches of this civilization had gone to another world. They were uncommonly powerful and from all over the world and responsible for the creation of many magical creatures and the various mythologies of the world due to their "god-like" powers. These witches and wizards were also said to have altered themselves with their magic to become stronger and in some cases almost immortal. The Ministry isn't too concerned with this last part and consider it dark. This doesn't sit right for some Unspeakables that lean more towards pureblood supremacy.

Naturally, this attracts Voldemort's attention, as well as the attention of particularly unscrupulous Unspeakables mentioned above. Voldemort wants power. Certain Unspeakables are willing to work for him FOR (magic)SCIENCE! And power, of course. Lily ends up getting involved on the Order of the Phoenix's behalf and works with them before stealing and presumably destroying their research in the more dangerous stuff. She dies shortly after this.

This alteration of Lily's fate presents a problem concerning her friendship with Snape. Not sure where I'll go with this just yet.

Voldemort also experiments further with Horcruxes during this time, eventually developing a new application. Remember how in The Chamber of Secrets, Tom was draining Ginny's life force to manifest as more than just a memory? Basic idea is that the Hocruxes when properly triggered can overtake a person's mind and soul and make a sort of Voldemort-clone, provided the host mind has been properly tenderized through torture and they are sufficiently powerful for Voldemort's liking. This results in two Voldemorts running about while the other Horcruxes remain dormant and hidden.

One Voldemort is leading the war and eventually gets blown up trying to kill Neville, the fragmented soul getting embedded within him. A combination of the magical trauma from the ordeal and the love of Neville's mother keeps the soul fragment fairly harmless.

The other Voldemort (the "real" one) takes a group of Death Eaters and pretty much disappear for a while. More on that later.

Now, since the magical population is so huge, the Ministry doesn't really keep track of every magical child born. Magical children from magical families are recorded, obviously, but muggleborns are not. Instead they keep tabs on muggle primary schools and such and look for signs of significantly magical children who are invited to Hogwarts. Muggleborn witches and wizards who are not chosen end up either never developing their powers or developing them in a different or highly specialized way depending on their lifestyle or whatever, similar to how the human brain develops as it matures to fit a person's lifestyle.

Harry is powerful enough for the ministry officials to notice. Jumping on the roof and turning your teacher's hair blue are the kind of things that get their attention. His schooling is paid for by money in a bank account that his aunt gives him access to that originally belonged to his mother. He gets the standard stuff at Diagon Alley, except his trunk has wheels and his wand isn't the one from canon. Holly and dragon heart string, most likely. Not very important. He also gets a very fine hat.

At Hogwarts, Harry ends up getting dragged into a few behind-the-scenes adventures with some of his own friends. Neville more or less goes through the canon stuff. I'm still mulling over this, but some ideas I've had include an alteration of the Odin's Tome from the first Crimson and a labyrinth hidden beneath the Hogwarts Grounds. Over the years Harry's relationship with his muggle friends becomes strained since he won't risk telling them of the magical world (the ministry has an entire department dedicated to making sure this doesn't happen, not quite 1984) and he gets stronger and a little darker from his experiences.

It is eventually revealed that all of these adventures and traumatic incidents were engineered by an Unspeakable ally of Voldemort who is working in disguise at Hogwarts and some Death Eaters (lead by Malfoy and Bellatrix, who managed to avoid Azkaban) in order to find and groom candidates for Voldemort's Horcruxes. The incidents single out particularly powerful students, who through a combination of trauma and carefully placed information on dark magic, become darker and easier for the Horcrux to overtake, as vessels prepared through torture and malicious mind magic tend to be unstable. Additionally, the Unspeakable mucked around in Harry's head a bit, making him vulnerable to suggestive phrases. The Horcrux she intends to use for the process is Hufflepuff's Cup. This climaxes in the Forbidden Forest when Harry faces off with Bellatrix. There is a fight. Harry manages to resist the suggestive phrases once he's aware of them. The Cup is destroyed but Bellatrix gets away.

This recent revelation and his growing powers during the following summer trigger a vision implanted in his mind when he was a baby by his mother. Problem is, the Unspeakable that implanted the suggestive phrases saw parts of the vision. Fortunately the vision itself is very vague and incoherent, involving chaotic images, sounds, and half-ideas. Fortunately Harry can make some sense of it. A lot of it is based on Harry's life in Little Whinging, where he finds another clue hidden within the house. The cupboard under the stairs to be exact, which explains why Harry frequented that place as a toddler (and then was forced to use it as his bedroom by his relatives as Dudley's possessions grew more numerous).

This would be the close of Part I, more or less. I'll post more later. As for James's role in the fic, I may have him die in a political killing and have his wife plotting Harry's death as a subplot so she can keep the money. However these seems too superfluous even for a subplot.

 

It's totally up to your descretion as author to include this or not, but you should know that the canon magical world is literally light-years ahead of the Muggle world when it comes to astrography. Proof: they have perfect (stated in book) models of the galaxy a school-child could consider buying in Diagon Alley. Professor Trelawney has a animated model of the solar system. Finally, the 'globes of moons' are mentioned as hanging in shop windows in book 1, although no other details are given. Given the vastly more impressive models above, I don't think it would be that great of a stretch to speculate the moon models are also perfect.

Given the evidence, I think it much more likely that wizards are far more aware of the galaxy than Muggles.

 

That shows that they know where everything is, but not necessarily what they would need to know about the atmosphere, temperature, etc. It's likely they use their astronomical knowledge solely for astrology and divination, so they wouldn't bother researching the things I mentioned above. Thanks for the tip though. I'll have to look into it.