The fun of Harry Potter? Magical whimsy. Especially when it's pointless.

[icarus]

I'm purring over the huge pile of fics I've amassed over the last five years. These days I have two people I work with who are in fandom, but Harry Potter is the only fandom we all share. I've neglected the Harry Potter readers. (I still feel guilty about not finishing Reunion.)

One thing I love about Harry Potter is the magic. Sometimes I miss it. Science fiction demands a much higher level of plausibility, and there's a whimsical quality to a story with a pointless bit of magic. :D

For example....

- Percy learning to dance with a coat-rack in Council of Obvious Edicts.

The coat rack enchanted to be Percy's dance partner skimmed the doorway, narrowly missing a lampshade. Harry ducked as it spun circles around the couch, bowed, and pirouetted. Amazingly, it didn't knock anything over in the tiny apartment stuffed with pictures, drapes, furniture and fussy knick-knacks. Percy's desk at work was pristine anduncluttered. His flat, on the other hand, reminded Harry of a bed and breakfast. With less room to walk.

"I still think the coat-rack has all the hard moves," Harry said.

- The obnoxious junkmail from Knockturn Alley in Primer to the Dark Arts.

Harry got junkmail as usual, from various different stores in DiagonAlley. Because he paid for his own things instead of his parents buying them for him, he got all of the advertisements. He neatly ground a particularly loud one under his heel. He opened a letter and i tannounced:

"SALE!!!"

-- before he could crumple it to shut it up The entire school turned in his direction.

He could tell that the next letter - which was flashing a painful orange! yellow! pink! - was another sales brochure. He ripped it up without opening it. The store wasn't one he recognized anyway; someone had sold their mailing list. How else would he get advertisements from Knockturn Alley? At least those were quiet. They smoked and threatened the reader: "If you miss this Event, you will regret it the rest of your life." The burning letters smouldered, then burst into blames and burned a hole in the tablecloth. How anyone thought you could attract customers by sending them rude notes, Harry had no idea.

- The Equal Opportunity Employer vampires in First Signs of Magic: Hermione Granger (and the hot chocolate fountain).

"Um... Madam?" Dr. Granger asked in his most polite voice. "The orderly in the hall... he had, well, fangs..."

"We're an Equal Opportunity Employer here at St. Mungo's, sir, regardless of race, sex, creed or breed. Besides, as I always say, who better than a vampire to look after the blood bank? Killer quality control they've got."

"Vampire?"

"Now, none of that racist stuff! That's not accepted around here. Mungo's is run by the government, it is, where the minorities - " here several other employees joined in -

" - are the majority!" A black woman weighing some kind of large gold coin behind the desk laughed.

- The cruel bubble traps in Hey You.

Glaring and terrified, she shifted her glasses up the bridge of her nose and opened the drawer. A smoky black bubble immediately coalesced and expanded about the horrified woman, just as the paper slid into place. On the parchment, blue light traced his signature, flowing around the firm, dark strokes, agonizingly slow; it glowed white-hot with the Verification Spell...

...and then the bubble melted around her. The shrieking noise in the office suddenly stopped. Eunice glared at him furiously.

Loud gasps and panting could be heard throughout office in the sudden, painful silence. Several people sat on the floor, exhausted. It would have been so easy to banish the bubbles if they'd all had their wands, but they were as helpless as Muggles. Ron felt like an insect trapped in an experiment gone badly wrong.

- The ghost waiters in Far Too Personal.

He ran his hands through his hair and ordered a drink as he settled into a chair in the parlour. Ghost waiters floated trays about the room, conveniently see-through and not blocking his view of the door. If his young visitor was perchance not young - or looked like agargoyle - he would be able to make a quick exit without embarrassing himself.

- The Glamours (and Glamour fashions) used to disguise one's identity in the wizarding club scene in A Moment Of Sin.

Most everyone in the room wore Glamours to disguise their identities. You could tell by the slight shimmer as they moved. Glamours could never quite keep up with normal motion. It was quite an effect on the dance floor. Blurry, half-naked young wizards danced frantically. But like any kind of clothing, Glamours revealed a lot about their owners.

The bartender made a study of Glamours, Make-Up or Costumes as people called them, as he wiped out his beer steins. The surly man had caught his eye immediately as someone whose conspicuous ordinariness shouted 'don't look at me!' He was looking for anonymity, and more than likely was here for the boys. Usually, people wore Make-Up that was lovely in the extreme.

- The deadly toaster in Cursed Artefacts for Sale.

"Now. Our first item up for bid is from the estate of the late lamented Sophia Wagglesworth --"

"Bizarre woman," Severus sniped. With a slight chill, Harry wondered which of her prized collection had killed her.

"-- was a noted collector of unique New World Artefacts. This first malignant treasure is a late 1950's Andre Silex, from his minimalist period."

The drape was swept off, to reveal a squarish, metal box with two black levers on the front. Harry blinked at it.

A delighted murmur rippled through the crowd.

"It's quite rare, exceptional workmanship as one can expect from the American master, but it is prized particularly for its uniqueness." Harry squinted at him. "It was designed for his Muggle-born ex-girlfriend, who never did recover. All the working parts move properly in this devious masterpiece and it operates in a Muggle environment. A remarkable achievement from a contemporary sorceror." The crowd clapped with polite interest.

"It's a toaster," Harry whispered to Severus.

"Yes... I'm no fan of these 'Modern' Curse artists, but I'll admit that is an unusual piece of work," Severus mumbled, lifting his chin to study it. He had to lean around the large feather hat as the woman in front of him did the same. "I wonder what it does...."

"It toasts bread," Harry said with blank disbelief.

Severus shot him an irritated look. "Why Muggles can't simply hold their bread over a fire on a stick I'll never know."

Comments

[seticat.livejournal.com]

Oh,All Knowing and All Seeing [Hey, a bit of verbal candy can't hurt...] I think I'd really enjoy this fandom, but I'm just not interested in the slash aspects. Are there any gen fic archives you could point me to?

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Oh, All Knowing and All Seeing

We'll add that one to the handbook on how to de-snarkify folks. My snark quotient dropped at least 0.8% from that alone.

Hmm. Harry Potter is so huge that this question encompasses roughly half a million stories and possibly hundreds of archives. The archives tend to be character or pairing specific, not gen or slash. If you'd asked for a particular character or het between particular characters....

The Sugar Quill (http://www.sugarquill.net/) only has low-rating fics (and even the R-rated fics are very mild) and only allows Remus/Sirius slash fic. 99.9% of those fics are Gen. I've posted my longer Gen stories there (http://www.sugarquill.net/index.php?action=profile&id=544) but I've never explored the rest of the site.

Another option is to create an account at Fiction Alley (http://www.fictionalley.org/) and ask people in this forum (http://forums.fictionalley.org/park/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=19) to recommend great Gen stories.

I recommend this, actually. The trouble in HP is not in finding Gen stories. The trouble is sorting through the massive quantities of Gen stories.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I've put out a request for recs for you from any HP readers who might read this LJ. We'll see if there's any response.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

seticat, the All Knowing and All Seeing elizabeth_rice stepped up to the plate and hit it out of the park.

Hear ye, hear ye! Behold, the the longest list of Harry Potter communities yet to be seen, including several gen only communities (http://community.livejournal.com/newbieguide/1327.html).

The mass of this fandom must be seen to be appreciated. Where else can one have 17 comms dedicated solely to kink?

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, and I've been informed that there's already a thread at Fiction Alley for Gen fics:

http://forums.fictionalley.org/park/showthread.php?s=&threadid=100137&highlight=landlocked

*thanks the f-list*

[seticat.livejournal.com]

Ah... wow? I'm going to need a time changing pendent to provide enough hours in a day to even make a dent in any of these lists. *Thank* you. :}

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Yeah... Harry Potter's kind of like that. What you need are specific recs for "the gen stories everyone must read."

[enname.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Scifi does tend to have a more hard edge to its whimsy, you need to have some level of plausability, even if it is just on the surface. Either that or be so outrageous, ala Douglas Adams, that it does not really matter because the boundaries between definitions of magic and science are blurred.

*gently pets HP fandom* You always cheer me up. Or you know, cheer me up with angst.