Author has written 2 stories for Harry Potter. i'm mostly a HP fanfic reader, because the setting's just so perfect for fanfiction in general. Rowling's world is so deliciously broken, it downright begs for people to improve it by writing better resolutions to plot lines, better fleshed-out background characters, better planning bad guys, better you-name-its. it's like she painted a beautiful background scene for a marionette theatre, but all the marionettes are half-done and/or half-broken, and the script is all kinds of inviting but is still just a messy first draft; you just have to finish all that wonderful stuff. and judging by how insanely much HP fanfiction's been written, i can't be even the dozenth person to think this. (i've the germ of a "what was in Dumbledore's letter to Petunia" short oneshot fic that would be gloriously snarky and seven kinds of meta. still need to percolate it a bit more; may or may not write it down.) other settings i'm interested in the fanfic of -- usually less interested, because most of them are less broken settings that therefore get less enthusiastic fan writers -- include the sort of literature i read; Tolkien, Wheel of Time, Bujold's Vorkosiganverse, Pratchett's Discworld, and Wildbow's Wormverse, among many others. (Wildbow's Worm is the one setting where i read only the fanfics. i used to read Worm itself back when it was still running, but it got too grimdark and depressing around arc 11 or so.) pet peeve: naruto anything. even though i only know of it from fanfiction, the entire franchise just rubs me the wrong way. worse than other anime, even, and i'm very notably not a fan of anime, at all. your fanfic might be however good, but if it's a naruto x-over i won't be reading it. challenge: Snakes Are Stupid. premise: there's no such thing as parseltongue. snakes can't talk, because they don't have the brains for abstract language -- as countless other fanfic authors have pointed out (and Yudkowsky might've said it best, if not first), if snakes were smart enough to understand abstract, human-level language, we would've noticed them building things and making plans before now. mind, the wizarding world might have stories and legends about snake speakers. might even have a myth about the Slytherin family being such. might perhaps even -- because wizards have no common sense, and are gullible -- believe that rot. but when Harry Potter faces a snake, neither of them communicate with the other beyond body language, because the snake's not capable of any more. the challenge, then; write an alternate second year of Hogwarts in which no snakes talk. the Chamber of Secrets is still there; there's still a basilisk in it; Harry might even get tarred with the "heir of Slytherin" brush, and vilified. there's just no magical inborn un-learnable language that snakes can understand. no matter what certain puffed-up Hufflepuffs might claim. notes: if you pick this one up, please do some research on snakes first, so you don't misrepresent the family in other ways. don't write them as "winking" when they have no eyelids, or "hearing" when they lack inner ears. or as particularly active outdoors in the middle of a Scottish winter... challenge: Harry Potter and the Periodic Table premise: in the summer of 1995, after being involuntarily used as an ingredient in an ad-hoc and partly botched resurrection ritual (and quite possibly as an entirely unintentional side-effect of same), Harry begins to develop elemental powers. only not down the fanciful Aristotelian lines you might be thinking of. more of a Mendeleevian style, in fact. specifically, he develops (some amount of; possibly slowly growing) control over the element of sodium. Na. atomic number 11; all isotopes. the element being in compounds slows him down (by how much depends on the compound -- specifically, on the total molecular weight, structure, percentage of sodium by mass, and bond types) but doesn't totally no-sell him, and more practice with it can give him more control. the wizarding world at large does not think this at all impressive, as they generally can't even understand it. some of the smarter muggleborns, however, think twice about it -- and then start to act remarkably worried... scope: short, probably a oneshot. better make it humorous, or even an outright crackfic -- because if you play this power straight, even a minor amount of munchkinning will leave you with a body-horror scary godlike!Harry. variations: introduce the power at some other time, to give him more / less time to practice with it. what might he do with a much more slowly ramping version of it during fourth, or even third, year? how quickly can he push it if he has to do it all while on the run? notes: needless to say, if you want to pick this one up, make sure you have an at least high-school level grasp on the chemistry and biochemistry of sodium -- both the metal and its compounds -- as well as its effects and functions in vertebrate metabolism and biochemistry. even if your story doesn't munchkin the power out, you as the author will need to know how to use it effectively, and so most likely will your version of Harry. Idle thought on the Star Wars universe In a setting where every other shadetree mechanic can apparently build a fully sapient robot in their garage from spare parts, how come we don't see any AI's running starships? There seems to be no reason not to. Droids run all over most of the galaxy, they're cheap enough you buy them second-hand from desert nomads; droids get trusted to do major surgery on you and maintain the space fighters you trust your life to in battle; and basically nobody ever seems to be afraid of any droid that isn't both (1) specifically built for battle, and (2) fighting on the opposite side of the war. Plus there's plenty of reason to do it. A sapient spaceship can do everything from double-check your hyperspace navigation, to keep track of what maintenance needs be done where in its hull, to help stand watch over that hypernet commlink so you don't miss any important messages, to... countless things. SO, THEREFORE: NEW HEADCANON ACCEPTED; Star Wars starships are sapient, as a rule. Some of them might not be able to speak with words, for whatever oddball and senseless reason astromech droids can't either, but they generally can at least think. The main exceptions are ships whose captains and crews would not want them to be sentient, generally for fear they might spill their crews' less than legal activities to the wrong people at the wrong time. Like, for instance, scruffy-looking smugglers from Corellia. But certainly any sensible crew on the right side of the law would want to fly a sapient ship, and any crew that basically are the law would always be - like the entire Imperial Navy, for instance. We just don't see enough people interacting with Star Destroyers to notice the ships are interacting back, is all. Heck, the Death Stars probably both of them had entire parliaments of AIs to help run them. (What brought this on? Reading Malicean's Welcome to the Club, of course. I dare you to read through chapter 10 or 11 or so without falling in love with the Lady Ex. It's in my favourites.) |