13 KiB
[RT][FF][WIP] Horry Patter and the Philologer's Stone
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Author: u/Makin- homestuck ratfic, you can do it*
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12717474/1/Horry-Patter-and-the-Philologer-s-Stone
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Score: 58
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Created: 2017-12-16T20:15:02
Post:
Comments:
u/fawnmod [+39] (6 hours later)
I wondered why I suddenly had 600 more views today than usual...
u/Makin- [+28] homestuck ratfic, you can do it (15 minutes later)
When I was first linked this fic by an acquaintance I was skeptical, it really looked like a poorly written parody at first.
Then wizard bitcoin, library of babel-style spells, zero knowledge proof-based concept-fidelius, and other complex magical concepts were introduced and I realized this was something worth recommending. It's a mystery to me why this hasn't been posted here yet.
If you enjoyed HPMOR you'll definitely enjoy this. I get the feeling it's going to focus way more on "understanding magic" than HPMOR ultimately did, and it has a far more likable and realistically competent main character. Don't take this as a dig towards HPMOR, it's actually a massive compliment towards Horry Patter.
I think it's worth posting at this point, even with only 20k written words. Update rate seems to be once a week, with a backlog of at least 30 chapters according to the author.
u/eternal-potato [+7] he who vegetates (2 hours later)
So, is there a reason all the names are mangled? It's extremely annoying.
u/Makin- [+23] homestuck ratfic, you can do it (2 hours later)
The inspiration for the fic came from this picture, but I think there is meant to be a deeper reason, there is one character without a mangled name in the most recent chapter.
u/Gurkenglas [+9] (5 hours later)
Also Dumbledore was about to call Horry Harry in the second chapter.
u/Frommerman [+13] (12 hours later)
It's pretty clear that this universe got fucked up at some point, and originial!Dumbledore is trying to save it through cryptic messages inserted into the timeline in advance. That would explain the fucked up names and how ludicrously complicated magic has become.
Actually, what if Voltebort-he-who-must-be-named succeeded, only his goal was to twist the universe so everything was predetermined, rather than the opposite of that? That also works. In any case, we have what appears to be a normal Dumbledore who doesn't realize Harry=Horry attempting to manipulate things through minimal involvement for some reason.
I'm interested.
u/Makin- [+9] homestuck ratfic, you can do it (14 hours later)
Dumbledore would never wear those clothes, I'm pretty sure it's yet another .
u/infomaton [+4] (a day later)
Yeah, I'm not sure if this is me projecting or not, but I sort of got the sense from the list of friend candidates that future Harry's have been iterating through alternate past universes for a while.
u/infomaton [+3] (9 hours later)
I don't think that was Dumbledore, their descriptions are significantly different.
u/None [+4] (3 hours later)
Well damn. I didn't even notice that the first time through.
u/EthanCC [+2] (11 hours later)
Hermany Grinder sounds like something you only ever hear about on the cooking channel.
u/bassicallyboss [+2] (4 days later)
So... Does it have philology? Because, not gonna lie, that's pretty much the one thing I was hoping for.
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN [+0] (a day later)
When I was first linked this fic by an acquaintance I was skeptical, it really looked like a poorly written parody at first.
What chapter does it stop looking like a poorly written parody?
u/AurelianoTampa [+5] (a day later)
In some ways it doesn't. Every character's name being goofed up continues all the way through - except in chapter 15, where one of the original characters' names is still the same (although going by canon she shouldn't actually be in the same year as Horry, Hermany, and Romb). And, I suppose, that "Alvin" is an actual name (even if it's not an actual HP character name).
That said, after the first few chapters the differences start to become really pronounced, and by chapter 9 or so it starts to feel distinctly different. It feels very much like Harry Potter got crossbred with The Magicians and a bit of Through the Looking Glass.
u/Flashbunny [+5] (2 days later)
It becomes less grating after a few chapters - especially when Horry leaves the Dorbles for the last time and it stops reading like a parody of child abuse (which seems to have been the point actually, if you consider some of the descriptions) and shifts to introducing the wider wizarding world. It definitely reads better as it no longer seems to be deliberately hamming up canon, and though the names are still scrambled it reads more as a deliberate stylistic choice than a bad joke. Which considering what appears to be happening/have happened, is sort of the point.
u/None [+13] (2 hours later)
This is excellent. I'm not even sure how rational it is, but it's very clever, and very fun. Eliezer made Harry Potter rational... by making Harry Potter rational. This guy makes Horry Patter rational... by making the world of Horry Patter rational.
Also, contains at least one excerpt from a self-help book written by not!Hagrid.
u/None [+2] (3 days later)
Huh. I just recalled that Harvey (Hagrid) was a psychotherapist in the Porry Gatter book series (Russian), which is an HP parody and one of the best humor fantasy books I ever read.
u/AurelianoTampa [+9] (a day later)
Gave it a shot, and I'm glad that I did. I think the feeling I'm left with is "uncomfortable but fascinating." So much is similar to Harry Potter, but so much is tweaked, and the differences keep getting to me. I think the first chapter summed it up perfectly:
He knows that something is broken. That his uncle is broken. That his aunt is broken. That even his cousin is broken. And most of all, he knows that he himself is broken.
Each of the familiar characters are just a bit off - Horry is more reclusive and depressed, Uncle Durbly is more physically abusive and terrifying, cousin Dobley and Pelilah are both kinder to Horry but clearly abused by the uncle, Alvin is older and more weary, Horbid is more aggressive (and uses magick openly), Dargo is more chill, etc.
And Chogborts is slightly off as well. Magick is off. The world is broken. And it left me wanting to read more about Not!Hogwarts and what has happened to everything. It's like Harry Potter took some pages from The Magicians and some disconcerting imagery from Alice in Wonderland.
... I also just came off from playing Doki Doki Literature Club, and reading this a day or two late makes me feel like one of the HP characters became self-aware and purposely screwed with the code of the universe.
Thanks for the recommendation!
u/None [+1] (6 years later)
fretful disarm scandalous escape forgetful sloppy icky insurance shocking observation
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
u/MultipartiteMind [+6] (a day later)
Wanted to wait until finished before reading most of the comments, but beginning recording thoughts now (end of chapter 10) in no particular order so avoid forgetting them.
Chapter 9 has a 'Potter' instead of a 'Patter'. Unintentional?
(Edit, see below regarding consistency.) Marlin rule-breaking: Inherently self-fulfilling (like the HPMOR time-manipulation version), or could they be used to invalidate all the future-stories? Or would the future-stories include their usage, being on a higher level than any of Marlin's rule-breakers, and needing a different sort of rule-breaker to invalidate all the future-stories? ('Invalidation' being 'The future-story only has the future for without that extra information'. But then how would the future-story handle the representation of that part... this can be collapsed into that, if you imagine someone reading their declassified future and doing something different, what would the book say about them reading the book? Person A read 'Person A read 'Person A read [...]'''... actually, that opens up a similar issue, that of how the book represents itself being read under normal no-change-intended conditions, with the hall-of-recursion theoretically ballooning it up to endless size. Ah, it would presumably be 'copied' instead of 'read', though, since they wouldn't be able to properly read it yet.)
Spellcoin mention in the Author's Notes: One would have to keep in mind the depreciation, or rather elimination, of each Spell as it were opened and 'expired'. That's arguably something that happens already, as Bitcoin wallets are 'lost' in the form of physical destruction, data loss, death of the owner, et cetera. Trickier would be that of someone resealing a spell while distributing it in parallel, or fraudulently sealing a spell that everyone already knew. If there weren't a guarantee of never-opened-before (or at least no-other-copies-exist), there might be very little value. Hm... thinking of a mundane variety, a 'Secretcoin' could be a little amusing, verified secrets about specific people, but with similar issues of enforcement and potential parallel distribution. Perhaps if the verifiers could also indicate the original source(/subject of the secret) and level of importance, but then it would get messy and open up the seller to targeted buy-ups... separately, with current laws, if a CEO hosts a public/Internet ('open to everyone') auction of a sealed envelope with future-stock-price-relevant information in it, do insider trading laws come into play?
Reading about zero-knowledge proofs has been enjoyable!
The greater concentration of horrifyingness--such as chapter 7's bladdernorxes, and general details otherwise--is enjoyable.
'Nature only demands consistency', my earlier thoughts... this nicely (at least on the surface) seems to allow the sort of time-exploitations that HPMOR largely prevented.
Hm. By the end of the 15th chapter, I (/my reaction) can fairly-safely be described as 'perpetually disconcerted'. Curious about how things end up, and about the cryptic italisised passages at the chapter beginnings.
u/fawnmod [+4] (a day later)
Re: Ch. 9 'Potter', I really thought I caught all of these...this one is not intentional.
u/abcd_z [+4] (9 hours later)
Well, at least not!Draco is being far less rude than his canon counterpart was at this point in the story. I kind of like not!Draco, TBH. He's got chill.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 hours later)
Fanfiction.net seems to be carrying ads with some fairly nasty phishing malware of the "antivirus alert" genre. Is the story available on a site with better digital hygiene?
u/caverts [+15] (5 hours later)
fanfiction.net gets their ads from Google, so probably not.
I'd suggest you install the uBlock Origin content blocker addon if it bothers you.
u/justletmebrowse68 [+2] (a day later)
Pastebin doesn’t preserve formatting, so I put it onto a piratepad and edited the names back to canon for my own readability. I probably missed one or two.
Side note, it’s interesting that Alvin is the only character not taken hold by the “he-who-must-be-named” curse.
http://piratepad.net/tZvBVOtGZZ
Edit: it’s a .net, not a .com. Oops
u/None [+1] (7 hours later)
I got hit by that on my android phone recently as well, haven't had any problems since I grabbed Malwarebytes.
u/elephantiskon [+2] (a day later)
I know the misspellings are plot-relevant, but they really make the fiction unreadable for me (which is too bad because it sounds awesome and philology is cool!) Any chance you could eventually make an alternate version with that aspect toned down a bit?
u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN [+4] (a day later)
Perhaps we could make a list of "misspellings" and their corrections, and then use it to apply a series of regexes to easily make a fixable version?
u/Makin- [+8] homestuck ratfic, you can do it (a day later)
One problem with that is the the misspellings seem to be part of the plot, and the original names are used rarely, so that would lead to confusion. Maybe you could bold the already correct names or something.
u/MaIakai [+0] (3 days later)
i downloaded all chapters with ficsave, ran it through notepad++ and corrected all the names with simple replace-all's. it's still a pain in the ass to read. The story is not written well.
Gave up reading at chapter 10
u/Flashbunny [+2] (2 days later)
It's very grating in the first few chapters, but for me at least a few chapters later it became much less irritating. I'm pretty sure it's because the story had moved on from a parody of Harry's child abuse into somewhat newer territory, and it was no longer the most obvious symptom of "awful" writing (for meta reasons to the whole story it isn't, but it would be on its own and certainly felt that way) and was simply a stylistic choice.