Patron (Harry Potter AU) (Complete)

I think that's partially caused by preconceptions bleeding in from so many "Britain is the ass-end of the Magical World" stories. I do think Hermione dismissing the notion that France is more liberal should be enough to show that is not the case.

Preconceptions seem to be rather rampant in general. I had "Dumbledore is a manipulative old fool" reactions at the start of this story, until Dumbledore's motivations for opposing Harry becoming Hermione's Patron were revealed, just because "Dumbledore not going along with what 11 years old Harry and 12 years old Hermione want? Manipulative evil Dumbledore!" seems to be almost a reflex these days. One poster here assumed the story would be bashing the Weasleys just because they were not present in the first chapter. And of course, as soon as one doesn't white-wash bigotry and stupidity, people scream "bashfic!".

Next weekend, or a bit beforehand.

A raid from the perspective of a poor pureblood Death Eater who is angry that some mudbloods are actually living (slightly) better than he does. Maybe some thoughts from Voldemort, looking down on useful cannon fodder with delusions of equality.

 

To a certain extent maybe, however given the last few posts I think it's mostly that you presented the British Wizarding world a lot worse than you meant to.

LOL! I wish someone would write a story where Harry is presented with proof that Dumbledore was spending money from the Potter's accounts, and monitoring everything Harry did, etc... leading to him to claim (with the help of [insert Slytherin]) independence/block dumbledore...only to have the "Helpful slytherin" reveal they were acting on Voldemort's behalf and dumbledore's actions were actually perfectly resolvable.

By the same logic a poor white man in the 1920s american south wasn't any better off than a black man in the same location and time. I'm sure there were members of the KKK who were disgusted at seeing Blacks who were actually living (slightly) better than they were. That didn't make the fact that the poor white man had MANY advantages.

 

Or I did not present Magical France bad enough - but then again, it makes sense that as personal guests of Fleur's family for a week, Harry and Hermione wouldn't really encounter the less nice parts of French Society.

Indeed, but even those relative advantages didn't mean he was likely to ever move in the same spheres as the son of a robber baron.

Although the standards of living for poor wizards are still around "muggle middle class", or better, thanks to magic. Not that the rank and file of Death Eaters in the story actually have any sane reasons for their crimes. They are a bunch of delusionals fools who are blindly following their leaders and reveling in violence. The leadership had not many true believers either, originally - many of them joined for power. Though as the "movement" grew older, the attitudes became more ingrained in the members and their offspring. Draco certainly buys into the ideology since he was raised that way.

 

Heh. I have a list of anti-cliches I'd like to see explored in a fic; I'll have to add that to it. Some others:

• Harry gets removed from the Dursleys to a better home. As a result, he is not protected by the blood wards, and his new family has to deal with multiple assassination attempts by 'ex-'DEs.
• Draco gets his wand before his school robes; he and Harry never meet in Madame Malkin's. Thus Harry never hears Draco's bigoted views on the houses, nor does he ask Hagrid about it and get the 'All Dark wizards are Slytherins' speech. The encounter with Draco on the train goes as normal, but Harry comes out of it thinking 'Wow, that guy is a git' rather than 'Wow, that would-be Slytherin is a git'. Thus, when he's being sorted, Harry does not say 'Anything but Slytherin'... and ends up in Slytherin. (There are lots of 'Harry the Slytherin' stories, but they all go changing Harry in order to get him in there. I want to see how a Harry who is as close to canon as possible does in there.)
• Any fic where Ginny gets character development despite not being Harry's designated love interest. (Most fics either give her development in order to make her 'worthy' of catching Harry, or they write her off ASAP - dead, or a nasty breakup that makes her an antagonist, or simply ignored.)
• Someone important discovers Harry's terrible home life and wants to remove him from the Dursleys; Dumbledore opposes this like a powerful and intelligent political figure - his opponents find themselves discredited, he controls the media to manipulate public opinion, and, if all else fails, he loses gracefully rather than turning his own supporters against him by openly supporting child abuse - instead of mindlessly repeating 'No, it's really for the best' and 'Surely you must see it's necessary'.

 

There is a fic --- Harry Potter and the Garden of Intrigue --- where Sirius is freed, takes custody of Harry, and

Spoiler

minutes after the Dursleys sign it over, there is a Death Eater attack, in which named characters die.

 

Spoiler

I'd hope the dead named characters had the last names of Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle, Nott, etc.

 

Spoiler tags, please.
And I doubt it; the way he said it strongly implies friendly deaths. It certainly wouldn't satisfy the spirit of what I was asking for if the consequences of losing the blood wards only hurt the bad guys.

 

You asked for a fic that had Harry's new family deal with multiple assassination attempts by "former" Death Eaters. I thought that implied that those attempts failed.

 

Even if there were only one, Harry kinda has to survive in order for the story to go on~ But, to elaorate, what I'm looking for is basically for a story where Harry is removed from the Dursleys and losing the protection of the blood wards is shown to have negative consequences. It bugs me that there are so many fics where he gets sent somewhere else and everything is perfect and safe and hunky-dory, totally ignoring that there was a reason he was placed at the Dursleys in the first place (it's up for debate whether it was a sufficient reason, but it's not one that can be outright ignored).
It does not necessarily require that named protagonists die or anything - just having to live with strict security measures and the constant threat of attack would be enough of a consequence to satisfy me - but if all that comes out of it is a bunch of DE's getting themselves killed, then it's rather missed the point I was looking for.

 

I would prefer stories where the protection actially does something. Harry being immune to Death Eaters, Pettigrew failing to stun or otherwise hurt him in the graveyard. Malfoy not getting defeated by Dobby in book 2 but casting that spell at Harry - and getting blown to ashes when it backfires.

I am constantly underwhelmed by the protection.

 

At best, it seems to keep hostile magical people from finding him at home, outside of the burning Quirrelmort scene in Book 1, which may well have used up most of the active protection (that idea is used a lot, with at least the active protections needing to be recharged by the love his family has for him... yeah, no wonder that never happened again).

Doesn't change the fact that waiting for the last minute to get Harry out of there, rather than (for example) exiting a day early and leaving a bomb in the house, was utterly moronic.

 

A protection that can be equaled by a Fidelius doesn't really sound like it's worth living with the Dursleys. And from the stupid "flight of the 7 Potters" plan, we can deduce that the blood protection did not extend much past the house, or Harry could have traveled easily by himself to Grimmauld Place before the protection fell, with the Death Eaters unable to attack him. So, yes - the blood protection doesn't seem to do much.

 

What, you expect the good guys to lose one of the most powerful bits of magical protection they have available to them, and actually benefit from it?

No, it can't. Harry under Fidelius can be attacked when he isn't physically in the protected location, which limits his movement severely, and it requires a Secret Keeper, whose death will cause everyone privy to Harry's location to become a Secret Keeper. Like @macjord points out --- to match sacrificial protection would require a lot of work, precautions, and restrictions.

No. The protection would drop the moment he left the Dursleys' home with no intent to return.

Voldemort was able to attack the moment Harry abandoned the Dursleys' home for the last time. At the same time, neither Voldemort nor any of his people ever attacked Harry in the summer, even though Harry probably didn't spend the whole summer literally indoors or on the property. From that, we can deduce that the protection was conceptual and social in its scope, not geographic. Harry going to the supermarket to fetch some groceries for the Dursleys would be just as protected as Harry sitting in the cupboard.

 

Also, it would be rather absurd to entrust Harry's safety to a Fidelius charm immediately after it failed spectacularly in protecting his parents.

 

The fidelius charm failed because they chose the wrong secret keeper - Dumbledore could have chosen himself for Harry's fidelius. They could have set up a floo to get him out. Or they could have simply side-apparated Harry out the day before the protection fell - who cares if the protection goes down once you leave for good if you're already safe at Grimmauld Place 12 the second it happens? The "7 Potters" plan was an example of incredible stupidity without any sense.

That doesn't change the fact though that the blood protection is not doing anything. Powerful? No. Death Eaters could harm Harry without trouble at Hogwarts and elsewhere - where he spent most of his time. It did not stop Dobby nor did it did not even stop the dementors from attacking and almost killing Harry, which means an indirect attack with a patsy or puppet would have worked as well. Color me unimpressed.

Now, if say the protection would cause Snape top collapse in pain each time he harms or wants to harm Harry... if Malfoy wouldn't be able to touch Harry if he believes in blood superiority... if Pettigrew couldn't touch Harry, fopiling the resurrection... then we'd have a Point.

But as it is, "Blood protection" is a silly, contrived and stupid excuse for having Harry suffer the "poor orphan" trope.

 

Heh. Imagine a story where the Blood Protection is a Thing... and the story starts off with the protection killing Scabbers on the train (he's a marked Death Eater after all), giving Ron the impression that Harry is a Dark Lord in the making and completely alienating him.
This could have many consequences, such as the meetings with Draco and Hermione going down differently (Malfoy comes along after Ron fails to turn Scabbers yellow in canon, right?) and Harry not wanting to go into Gryffindor where all the other Weasleys are.

Such delicious butterflies...

 

While the blood protection is indeed unimpressive in canon - sure there weren't Death Eater attacks on him at Privet Drive until the protection ended, but since we don't see them actually trying and failing the blood wards might as easily have been a tiger repelling rock, or have prevented attack through the Death Eater's presumption that they couldn't get through extra-special wards Dumbledore set up personally - as it was explicitly a defense against Voldemort and implicitly the Death Eaters, the dementors (acting independently) and arguably Dobby (employed/enslaved by a Death Eater, but not acting on Malfoy's behalf or intending actual harm to Harry) don't count as evidence against its efficacy.

Given Harry did survive everything up until he willingly gave himself up, and even survived his death, it wouldn't be too hard to maintain canon events and recast the protection as employing a Felix Felicitas-like effect, using coincidence to prevent lasting harm, if you had a reason to discount the burning of Quirrelmort as evidence for it as a direct effect only. After all Hermione knocking over Quirrelmort when she was trying to prevent Snape's spellcasting, Harry ending up in the presence of probably the only person who could have protected him from the dementor attack on the train, and various other incidents are rather unlikely, though you could also present these coincidences in character as Fate/Destiny/The Prophecy ensuring events play out as foretold.

 

That might work - but I am rather sick of the whole "Dursley's get to abuse Harry" canon shit to start with. I find it overdone, stupid, and wrecking my SoD, as well as making it hard not to spit at Dumbledore and everyone else for letting such stuff happen to Harry. In my honest opinion, the whole "evil Dursleys/blood protection" causes more harm than good - far more harm. It should either be changed so it actually makes sense without mental contorsions, or dropped.

Plus it is pointless angst and misery. Harry can be angsty enough without getting abused by his remaining relatives.

That's why I tried to change both the effects of the blood protection, and the nature of the Dursley's problems with Harry in this story.

 

This still doesn't adress the issues of growing up under Fidelius. Think Harry grew up lonely in canon? Try having him grow up literally unable to leave his house ever and functionally invisible to everyone except a short list of people who have been told about him.
Also, was that even an option? If it were, then why would he not have served as the Potters' secret keeper? IIRC, the Fidelius is described as old, lost magic which Lily researched and rediscovered, and it doesn't reappear until it's used on 12 Grimmauld Place in OotP; maybe Dumbledore didn't learn the charm until well after Harry had been placed at the Dursleys.

That I will admit; if nothing else, they could have rescheduled to some randomly selected day between one and two weeks before the protections fell.

It keeps him from being assassinated before the age of 11 by any Death Eater who knew Point Me and Bombarda. We don't see it doing anything because when it works it's a non-event.

And it was never meant to.

Who was a) a house-elf, apparently able to apparate through almost any wards, b) was not an enemy, and c) had no intention to harm Harry.

Who were not Death Eaters, agents of Death Eaters, or connected to Voldemort in any way at this point.

Snape was not an agent of Voldemort at this point. (Whatever his personal politics, he had betrayed the Dark Lord and was no longer working for him; his hostility towards Harry was for personal reasons, and thus not a legitimate subject of the blood protection.)

The blood protections guarded against Voldemort and his agents, not 'blood purists'.

Okay, that one's fair; they could have protected him against Peter in the graveyard, and the fact that they did not is a mark against them. Not, however, a fatal one: they were strongest against Voldemort himself and when living with his mother's blood; the fact that they were unable to defend him against an agent during the school year does not mean they could not and did not protect him against agents while growing up or during summers.

Another option: the blood protections were supposed to protect Harry like you want them to. That's what Dumbledore expected when he placed Harry with the Dursleys, and if it had held true his decision would have been entirely justified. It didn't, but that just means he was wrong, not that it was a bad judgment call.

I suppose what really bugs me is failure to follow through. You want to write a fic where the blood wards are weak and worthless? Fine, they are weak and worthless. So why did Dumbledore want to put Harry with the Dursleys? If you are writing your Dumbledore as a comedic bumbling fool (e.g. most of Rorschach's Blot's stories) then you're good; he was stupid and wrong, let us laugh at him and move on. But otherwise, you need to deal with the implications somehow. So either:

• The flaws in the wards were subtle. In which case, your favourite character does not get to lambaste and hate Dumbledore for wanting to put Harry there; it was a mistake anyone could have made (though a moment of sorrow and disappointment when they realize that the Great Dumbledore is not nearly as infallible as they had thought is appropriate). You also have to explain how your characters discovered this flaw when Dumbledore did not.
• Dumbledore knew the wards were worthless, and wanted Harry there anyway. This implies an ulterior motive, which means an evil (or at least amoral) manipulative!Dumbledore. But if you're writing Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, Order of Merlin (First Class), Grand Sorcerer, Supreme Mugwump, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, Defeater of Grindelwald, and 50-year-experienced politician as a manipulative antagonist, you damn well better not have the protagonists running rings around him.
• Admit canon non-compatibility and declare AU. The wards are weak, and the flaw are obvious. Thus, non-stupid, non-evil Dumbledore never even considers placing Harry with the Dursleys.

If all that is too much to deal with, you can always assume that the wards aren't worthless - in which case we're back to my original point: taking Harry away from their protection should have consequences.

Hmm. I agree that it was badly handled - or, rather, I have a hard time coming up with an interpretation where there wasn't something Dumbledore could have done to improve things. But I don't find it SoD-breaking. There are a number of factors to consider:

• How bad were the Durselys, actually? Was what we saw directly in the books the worst of it, or just the tip of the iceberg?
  • When Harry arrives at Hogwarts, he is skinny, but he is not malnourished. So, while they weren't feeding him like Dudley, they weren't starving him - and given how Dudley and Vernon turned out, he probably was better off for it.
  • Harry speaks excellent English. This implies that someone spent many painstaking hours teaching him to speak correctly. Well before school age, too, which implies it was either Petunia or Vernon or they hired someone to do it.
  • Harry has glasses. Old and patched with tape, but functional. Which implies optometrist, glasses stores, etc., again placing a minimum level of effort and money they expended on him.
  • There is no evidence they ever physically abused him, outside of the infamous frying pan incident. Which, I should point out, happened when Petunia thought Harry was threatening her son with black magic.
  • The cupboard is a problem. The best excuse I can come up with is that he was placed there when he first arrived, as a make-shift crib, and just sorta never left: every time they started thinking about moving him out to a proper bedroom, he would commit some (real, imaginary, or magical) misdeed and be left there 'a little while longer' as 'punishment'; by the time canon started, the Durselys knew that he was getting too big to fit in there and they would have to move him soon - the letters just pushed up the timetable. However, that's a pretty weak explanation, I'll admit.
  • Conclusion: The attitude and environment Harry grew up in was deplorable and negligent, but his actual living conditions and treatment were, with the exception of the cupboard, no worse than a child from a poor, but not destitute, household. (Which is totally unfair to him, given the Dursleys were wealthy middle class, but means Dumbledore wasn't enabling outright child abuse by leaving him there.)
• How much did Dumbledore know about Harry's actual living conditions? The whole 'magical monitoring devices' thing is, AFAICT, fanon. He had Ms. Figg, of course, but she can only report what she sees; whether the Durselys were abusive or simply negligent inside their own home, their facade of normalcy would require that they keep their treatment of Harry within socially accepted bounds for a 'problem child' in public. (C.v., at the zoo, after getting Dudley his ice cream, Harry gets a ice lolly because the person selling them asked him what he wanted before they could leave; they bought him the cheapest thing available, but they still bought him something rather than try to explain why one child was getting a treat and the other nothing.)
• What could Dumbledore do? The Dursleys hated and feared wizards; consider how they reacted to a brief, friendly visit by the Weazleys. If he had come into their house, remonstrating them for their parenting decisions, they would have taken it out on Harry after he left. Dumbledore might quite reasonably have decided that he wasn't going to step in for anything less than a critical incident, because his presence would just make things worse.
• What standards were Dumbledore judging by? He was born in 1881, remember. Harry's treatment may seem abusive to us, but how bad was it by the standards of the late 19th century? (Note that corporal punishment wasn't banned in British public schools until 1987, and child labour was quite legal at the turn of the century.)

 

I generally make the blood wards matter. As much as Harry suffers - and he is systematically abused, if not physically - the price he is paying is so high, they have to do something much more than in canon. I usually go with "immunity to Voldemort - soul, spell, horcrux, whatever" - at least until the revival, meaning almost all protections on the horcruxes are worthless against Harry. I consider that the bare minimum. Or the wards frying death eaters regularly - each year, the DMLE collects corpses of "imperiused" DEs who tried to kill Harry. If like Snape - he is marked, magic counts him as a DE - they just want to harm him, they suffer instead.

But I do not believe that the wards did anything at all in canon, not since there was never any hint of them doing anything. We never saw DEs getting turned around, we never hear of them stating they could not find him - heck, they were waiting in ambush for him so planning an attack was obviously fine.

No, Blood wards in canon were a weak, stupid and cheap excuse to have Harry suffer as the poor abused orphan without Dumbledore looking like an evil bastard. And that's such a stupid idea, I refuse to follow it in my stories. If Dumbledore is not evil or inept, then either a) The wards are worth the suffering, b) The Dursleys are not evil abusing freaks, or c) The whole "placed on the doorstep" doesn't happen.

But canon? Fuck it. There is a point where canon is so utterly insane, one cannot follow it anymore, and the "Dursley abuse, power of love, blood wards" plot has reached that point long, long ago.

 

... so it sounds like we both follow basically the same reasoning about the wards, except we have different opinions about their effectiveness in canon; you go 'The wards were never explicitly shown protecting Harry, therefore they must not have', while I say 'Harry wasn't attacked, ergo the wards work'.

 

It would have been so easy to show it. One flashback, about a weird, crazy man found dead in the quarter, and only Harry remembers him. Or some "Don't worry, Harry. The Death Eaters cannot even think of ambushing you as long as the wards are up. We just have to move without tarrying when we leave, and you'll be fine - they would never even find the address in that time." scene in book 7. Just something, anything to show that they worked. That they were worth it. As it is, all they did was killing more good guys in that stupid, stupid plan.

Not to mention that "They hate and abuse you, but you still have the love powered wards thanks to living with them" drivel from Dumbledore is disgusting, warped and plain sick. A perversion of the concept of "the power of love".

Edit: JKR has written too many fridge horror moments in Harry Potter. Too often, the Magical World is revealed to be evil on a scale rivaling Lovecraft's stuff. Soul-eating dementors, House Elf slavery, "Love through abuse", corrupt governments and rape potions, mind control, and genocide, and almost all of it left unpunished, or even left untouched (Elves) after Voldemort's defeat.

 

No disagreement there.

It wasn't the 'power of love', it was the power of his mother's blood. And, no matter how little they cared for (let along loved) him, they did admit he was Family - that's the only reason they didn't throw him out.

 

Not her blood, her love.

"Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn't realise that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign... to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever."

 

I have always thought that the idea of Lily somehow managing to defeat Voldemort purely through the power of love was awfully insulting to all the parents that died at his hands without managing to stop him. When I read that portion of the book I interpreted as Dumbledore deciding to provide a greatly simplified account of how Lily managed to provide him with a protection capable of turning back the killing curse and permanently warding off Voldemort. It makes sense for Dumbledore to simplify the situation and give out a meaningless emotional explanation rather than overburden the mind of a traumatized 11 year old with the more accurate complex explanation or risk the leaking of sensitive information.

 

True, that. And then, in DH, any such hypotheses were disproved by having Harry replicate the feat, except better (because it covered many more people), just by surrendering himself to Voldemort and being executed.

This. Though, as a point of order, Four-Point Spell (a.k.a. Point Me) just tells you which way is North, and its other capabilities are fanon, and if could, in fact, be used to locate people and objects, it would be OP. Also, one can make a decent case that the spell is Hermione's invention in the first place. So, to locate Harry, a DE would have had to do a little bit of legwork, like, say, looking up the known relatives of his parents.

As a fourth-generation maker of Tiger-Repelling Rocks, I resent the implication. My great-grandfather invented the first Cat-Repelling Charm, and our family has been refining it ever since. Our Rocks guard the palace of the maharaja, and Emperor of Axum himself commissioned my father to protect his home against nundu.

To quote myself from Spacebattles, I read it the way I view cartoon (or anime) violence: something that does not literally describe or depict what actually happened in-universe, but rather is intended to evoke or convey a concept or a sentiment. Just as a Looney Toons character struck in the head by an anvil sees stars for a few seconds, then moves on as if nothing happened, so does the cubpoard have no effect whatsoever on Harry's development.

The Dursleys' behavior does become less cartoonishly evil over time, and that's consistent with this framework: as the whole series becomes less cartoonish, the Dursleys' actions become both more plausible and more fit to be read literally.

 

HP would be so much better if one would ignore the last 3 books. Or treat the first 4 as some vague outline sort of prologue.

Well, even if one accepts that weak excuse to explain the cliches used in the earlier books, it's still a really bad case of telling instead of showing.

That is plausible - but it also makes me ask: "If that's the case, why do people take it seriously when writing stories that are not meant to be cartoonish?" As soon as you have to resort to reasons such as "it's not meant to be taken literally", you've dismissed an action as not really canon anymore.

 

Because Harry Potter is a children's story. The first three books especially. Four is arguable both ways, but starting at five Rowling tried to turn her children's tale into Young Adult literature.

And that is the disconnect. If you read Harry Potter as YA lit (i.e. taking the last 3 books' tone as how it was intended to be read), all the fridge horror and disconnected elements and plot inconsistencies become amplified.

If you read it as a children's series (reading it as the first three were intended to be) then the over-the-top nature of Harry;s home situation, and all the ridiculous danger, and the adults being useless make sense.

 

I'll settle for using the books as a base, taking what I can use from them while ignoring the rest.

 

Because most people aren't as brilliant and as insightful (and as handsome) as myself, of course.