story ideas I will never write

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

professorsparklepants:

Won’t someone think of the children

Emma: Okay so like. The most fridge horror thing about the triwizard tournament is that they’re like “we added an age restriction!”

Emma: Not “we raised it!” Just “we added one!”

Emma: Which implies that previously, 11 YEAR OLDS COULD ENTER

Emma: Like I doubt they were ever chosen bc someone whose magical repotoir consists solely of “swish and flick” is not the best candidate for their school but what the FUCK

Meghan: AU where the Tournament happens 1st year, the other Champions are the same (17) and throw the whole competition making sure Harry doesn’t fucking die. They even let him take the Cup bc he’s so tiny and adorably earnest…

Meghan: Obviously that backfires, but Cedric isn’t dead at least.

Emma: THANKS I HATE IT

 

lullabyknell:

Oh, no, TINY HARRY in the Triwizard Tournament. That’s AWFUL. 

I love it. 

AU where the Tournament happens in 1st year? I suppose Quirrell is still the DADA prof, but you could actually have him as the Muggle Studies professor still if you wanted Fake!Moody as the DADA prof. I think Scabbers ran away before Percy could give him to Ron as a pet, if you wanted to have Peter also helping Voldemort. (Oh, man, this is a nightmare. It’s great.) 

You could only make this work in fanfiction, but I would LOVE to try and combine books 1, 3, and 4. (I don’t think Lucius would have thrown the Diary into the mix of this, so we thankfully don’t have a basilisk slithering around too, and I don’t think Dumbledore would bring the Philosopher’s Stone into this. Although you could add those for the ULTIMATE nightmare scenario.) 

I’m thinking like, “Harry, you’re going to wizard school! And you’ve been tossed into a death game where all your competition is 17! And since your photo was in the paper, your mass-murderer godfather escaped prison! And now the dementors have been stationed around the school to keep this Tournament from going even more horribly, horribly wrong!” 

I’d love to combine this with the Veela!Viktor & Werewolf!Fleur AU (obvs if Viktor takes Hermione to the Yule Ball, it’s purely so Harry can have friends there). Throw Remus Lupin into the mix as another DADA prof? With Fake!Moody? If you wanted to pull a “give Hogwarts more staff” AU just to add to the chaos, so you can have both (evil!)Quirrell and Burbage as Muggle Studies professors. 

Oh man, your readers would be screaming at you the entire time, because tiny Harry would be surrounded by so many danger elements and they would have no idea how everything combined would unfold. Cedric, Viktor, and Fleur would probably be mild audience!inserts for this fic, doing everything they can to keep the littlest Champion safe (because clearly this is a plot to kill the BWL) even though he’s insisting that he can do this himself and doesn’t need help. 

“GET THE BABY BOY OUT OF THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO NOW, PLEASE,” says the audience. “Lol, no,” says the author. 

 

professorsparklepants:

Knell you have an evil, evil mind, and I’m dying. (I am laughing over the idea of Victor Krum, international Quidditch star with magical love powers, taking an eleven year old girl who doesn’t care about sports as his date to the Yule ball, as a favor to the tiny eleven year old champion who does care about quidditch. Ron called first dibs as Harry’s date and regrets it.)

Throwing in Sirius is such a terrible awful move. Everyone is talking about the mass murderer who broke out of jail and the sinister omen of death spotted during all the tasks and tongues are waggling like crazy.

 

lullabyknell:

Prof, that is absolutely the picture I am going for here. Viktor Krum is the ultimate gentleman to his date (a twelve-year-old girl who has no idea who he is) and is having a great time listening to her chatter about her first-year classes. Veela!Viktor and little!Hermione dancing together is melting my heart. 

#HP tag #fic ideas #I love this#I also want to know how the HECK do we get Harry out of the graveyard alive?#does it involve Sirius? I think it involves Sirius#I can see his efforts to protect Harry landing him there too#smash up Voldie’s return with the Truth Of Who Betrayed The Potters#but this time it’s told gloatingly#Voldie doesn’t kill Sirius asap because ‘aw Bella would have more fun’#‘don’t you agree Wormtail?’ #yeesh I gave myself the creeps (tags via @mzminola)

Min, I love you. 

Can you imagine, Cedric and tiny Harry in front of the Triwizard Cup in the center of the maze, and Sirius Black shows up? (After people have been gossiping like mad, egged on by Skeeter, over the terrible death omens looming over the Boy-Who-Lived.) Let’s say that the Cup was always intended to be a Portkey back to the beginning of the maze, so Sirius overhears this piece of information and realizes that the Cup is the perfect opportunity for something to go terribly wrong. But Harry is obviously not going to listen to “Mass-Murderer Sirius Black” desperately telling him not to take the Cup. 

Sirius tries to tackle Harry, but they both end up in the graveyard. (Cedric is panicking back in the maze.) Peter and Sirius recognize each other immediately. Harry has no idea what’s going on. 

Then you have to choose how you want the rest of this AU to go. (Voldemort obviously gets to give the Classic HP Final Confrontation Explanation of what’s been going down behind-the-scenes all year.) Does Voldemort get resurrected in Harry’s first year? Or is Voldemort’s resurrection foiled by Harry and Sirius somehow and put off for some future plot? 

Either way, I think it’s highly necessary that Sirius punches someone in the face. If Voldemort is resurrected, then it’s definitely Voldemort. If Voldemort isn’t resurrected, then it’s probably Peter. These fists were made for punching and that’s just what they’ll do. “STAY AWAY FROM MY GODSON.” *CRACK*

If Voldemort is resurrected, then Sirius probably gets to witness Harry’s Priori Incantatum with Voldemort! (Would a Priori Incantatum work with Peter if Harry doesn’t get to duel Voldemort? Since Peter used Voldemort’s wand to kill Cedric?) OH MAN, THE DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS PAIN OF SIRIUS BLACK GETTING TO SEE A REMNANT OF JAMES AND LILY POTTER. I WOULD DIE. I would be FACE-DOWN on the FLOOR. People would be poking me like, “LK, are you okay?” And I’d be like, “Absolutely not.” 

In either scenario, I think everyone escapes. Peter and Voldemort escape. Sirius picks up Harry and just books it. (Maybe Sirius has Harry’s Firebolt for some reason? Would Sirius still send Harry the Firebolt? I know the Firebolt didn’t come out until 1994, but the idea of an 11-year-old getting a Firebolt is so funny. Hermione has no idea why everyone at the Yule Ball is freaking out over Harry’s new broomstick; it can’t be that good, surely.) 

Harry ends up stranded out in the countryside with the godfather who never actually betrayed his parents, getting to know Sirius, and is probably actually really relieved to have an adult handling the situation (Sirius is… not the best adult, but Harry is eleven here) and to get some family. Voldemort might be back and that’s awful, but Harry’s actually kind of having an alright time? He’s away from all the stress of Hogwarts and the Tournament for once. 

Meanwhile, Cedric Diggory has alerted everyone back at Hogwarts that Sirius Black has kidnapped Harry Potter and they are LOSING THEIR MINDS. 

 

phi-of-two:

I love this concept, and I wonder what an equally speedrunny sequel would look like. Books 2 and 5 seem like they’d mash up pretty well? 

Harry comes back in September, and no one believes his story about what happened at the end of the last task, because it’s frankly pretty unbelievable. Also he’s apparently a serial killer apologist now? Dumbledore’s backing his story, yeah, but the Prophet’s been saying for months that Dumbledore’s a liar.

And that’s before the petrifications start to happen and it comes out that Harry’s a parselmouth.

The kids close to Harry’s age mostly shun him as evil, but also concerned older Hufflepuffs start to approach him, saying that they don’t know exactly what happened over the summer but Sirius Black is not a person to look up to, and they know Harry’s just a kid but petrifying people to impress your serial killer idol is not okay actually. 

On top of all that, Umbridge is the DADA teacher, and she’s a lot more intimidating to a twelve-year-old.

(something DA-like could still happen. Being twelve, Harry’s too young to be teaching it himself, even if people were willing to be taught by the probable Heir of Slytherin. But he talks about Umbridge to Sirius and Sirius talks to Lupin and Lupin knows the castle, he can sneak in if he needs to help these kids that he got attached to last year. And yes, sneaking is required, because Umbridge does not want filthy halfbreeds in her castle.)

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #fanfic #Harry Potter #long post #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

klondikehn asked: The average population in Uruguay is 3,457,000 and the average population of kangaroos is 57,000,000. Meaning that if kangaroos decided to invade Uruguay, one single person would have to fight 16 kangaroos at once. Thought you might want to know about this important fact.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses:

SOMEONE WRITE THE FIC

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #story ideas I will never write #kangaroo

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

I want the next YA scifi/fantasy trend to be dragon / other animal companion soulbonding but with AIs

There’s some of this already – telepathic captain and starship fic – but there should be more! more teen-and-their-AI-companion novels! more lone AIs who’ve had no human companion for ages finally falling for the spirited, honorable human protagonist and bonding with them!

Tags:

#so like Project Freelancer but without the horrible trauma? #sounds like fun #story ideas I will never write #AIs

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

twocubes:

Light and dark have different meanings to honeybees.

Light means being outside, means doing work, and means being in danger.

Darkness means home (although not necessarily your home), means a promise of being with your friends and siblings (if it’s your home), means being safe (if you get in).

See, honeybees have this neat behavior where their guard bees will let bees from other hives into their own hive… but only if they bribe the guards with a bit of nectar! (this is the only part of this post that you’ll find in actual books about bees)

As far as I can tell, this is basically evolution sort of independently coming up with the concept of hospitality? Like, if everyone lets random well-behaved bees rest in their hives for a bit, then bees that get lost don’t necessarily have to die. At the same time, requiring tokens like that makes it harder to just be straightforwardly exploited. This all ends up making the species as a whole just that much more robust.

All of which helps to explain where the traditional honeybee beliefs about what night is comes from.

Night is the home of the night-bees, they say, and you have to get home before it enters the land, or they’ll get to you.

There’s even a series of myths about a legendary bee called Third Scout of the Southwestern-Lilacsmell who collects the nectar of a legendary flower that’s hard to describe without the particular technical terms bees use to describe flowers but is said to grant eternal youth, and then gets blown away by a particularly strong gust and doesn’t manage to get back home before dark, but! manages to parlay her way into the hive of the night-bees in exchange for her ambrosia.

The stories then go on to describe her adventures in the hive of the night-bees, as she encounters them and their strange customs and pets and tastes of their strange honey and bread (as is required of bee-hospitality), until she manages to make it back home to finally deliver what she has left of the immortality-nectar to her queen…

Tags:

#bees #story ideas I will never write

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

quietblogoflurk:

On a lighter note.

The main reason I ever wanted to write a Hungarian mythology-based urban fantasy is that I needed to see someone do Bread Magic in a mundane modern setting.

Bread Magic shows up in a variety in Hungarian fairytales. It works like this: when someone evil, usually the devil, sometimes a dragon, wants to come into your house and hurt you, usually by taking your children, what you do is put a loaf of bread on the windowsill. It will speak for you.

When evil demands admission, the bread will say: First, they buried me under the ground, and I survived. When I sprouted, they cruelly cut me down with sickles, and I survived. They threshed me with their flails and I survived. They ground me to flour with their millstones and I survived. They put me in a bowl and kneaded me, then they put me in a hot oven to bake me, and I survived. Have you done all these things? Until you do all these things and survive, you have no power here.

This is pretty powerful magic I think, and it makes sense in a country where wheat is the staple crop and bread is the staple food. If you have bread, you are alive, if you have no bread, you are dead, therefore bread is life. It was customary to refer to wheat as “life” well into the twentieth century, and not in high literary circles either: rural seasonal workers negotiated their wages in so and so many sacks of life.

And I totally want someone to do bread magic with a shitty store-bought muffin.

 

we-are-rogue:

There was a similar Greek fairy tale where narrating the torments of the flax was used as a delay tactic. Like, the parents would be out working in the field and the ogre would come to take the child away, and the clever grandma would say “sure, BUT FIRST, you must let me tell you the passions of the flax”. (As in “the passions of Christ”, meaning the sufferings.) Making cloth out of flax is a hell of a job with many many stages, you dunk it in water for days, you dry it, you shred it, all sorts of things (I don’t actually know what things, I’m a city kid…), so grandma would start droning very slowly and very sadly “they taaaaaaaaake the flaaaaaaaaax, they drowwwwwwn it in waaaaaaaater” and the imagery was out of a medieval torture manual and it sounded like a funeral dirge and it went on for ages, until the ogre couldn’t stand it any more and went “fuck this, I’m out, keep your damn child”.

Folk tales have some Good Takes, such as “brains over brawn” (that’s why they’re so fundamentally roguish – once in a while you’ll get a mighty warrior bashing things, but mostly it’s common peasants tricking the powerful with nothing but wits and sheer nerve), “storytelling will get you a long way”, and “grandmas are awesome”. Which may be a little self-serving (I mean, grandmas tell the tales…), but still: they earned it.

For the torments of anthropomorphised plants see also: John Barleycorn.

There were three men came out of the west,
their fortunes for to try
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die

They’ve ploughed, they’ve sown, they’ve harrowed him in
Threw clods upon his head
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead

They’ve let him lie for a very long time,
‘til the rains from heaven did fall
And little Sir John sprung up his head
and so amazed them all

They’ve let him stand ‘til Midsummer’s Day
‘til he looked both pale and wan
And little Sir John’s grown a long long beard
and so become a man

They’ve hired men with their scythes so sharp
to cut him off at the knee
They’ve rolled him and tied him by the waist
serving him most barbarously

They’ve hired men with their sharp pitchforks
who’ve pricked him to the heart
And the loader he has served him worse than that
For he’s bound him to the cart

They’ve wheeled him around and around a field
‘til they came unto a barn
And there they made a solemn oath
on poor John Barleycorn

They’ve hired men with their crabtree sticks
to cut him skin from bone
And the miller he has served him worse than that
For he’s ground him between two stones

And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl
and his brandy in the glass
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl
proved the strongest man at last

The huntsman he can’t hunt the fox
nor so loudly to blow his horn
And the tinker he can’t mend kettle or pots
without a little barleycorn

 

madgastronomer:

OMG THERE’S A FOLK TALE ABOUT THE PASSIONS OF THE FLAX I MUST FIND THIS OMGOMGOMG

@we-are-rogue Where can I find this marvel?

 

we-are-rogue:

I HAVE NO IDEA, I remember vaguely the story from when I was a kid, but I can’t remember where I read it (or heard it?), and I didn’t find it online. ‘Cause I searched.

It’s also an expression in greek, though it’s a bit outdated, you can say “that poor man has gone through the passions of the flax”, meaning he’s had a very hard life. Or, if you’re a drama queen, you can say something like “fucking bureaucracy! I went through the torments of the flax to get that bloody permit!”. This makes searching for the fairy tale all the more difficult. I’m sorry. :(

 

we-are-knight:

@wearebeguiler this sounds like your kind of mischief.

 

bold-sartorial-statement:

In Swedish, two of the steps in working with flax are called “arguing with the flax” (bråka lin) and “heckling the flax” (häckla lin). That says something about how the fiber is treated…

 

sophus-b:

Etymology! Fairytales! Folk Music! Bread magic!

This post has everything!

Tags:

#long post #food #death tw #history #music #story ideas I will never write

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sigmaleph:

glumshoe:

“Ah, yes, the tropical rainforest planet.”

“By ‘tropical rainforest planet’, do you mean it’s got rainforest around the equator, or that it’s entirely covered in rainforest?“

“The whole thing is rainforest, yes.”

“Huh. Wild! Still, calling it all ‘tropical rainforest’ is misleading, as the tropics refer to the areas around a planet’s equator.”

“Oh, the jungle planet doesn’t have an equator.”

“It—what? Of course it does. It has to! All spheroid planets capable of sustaining life have equators, it just refers to the division between the poles along the axis of rotation.”

“No, no, you see, I know that. But the jungle planet doesn’t have a single axis of rotation. Instead, it wriggles around so that every part of it is equally heated.”

“That sounds fake, but I don’t know enough about planets to tell you how stupid that is.”

“The inhabitants call it Sous-vide.”

fun fact: the tropics are the area around the equator, but how much area around the equator depends on the planet’s axial tilt. a planet with a 90° axial tilt would be entirely tropical. in our solar system, Uranus is 99% tropics by surface

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #story ideas I will never write #overly literal interpretations #fun with loopholes

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tumblr_p2vx3wtc5v1ue6ghyo1_500

yieldsfalsehoodwhenquined:

sindri42:

stljedi:

It’s going to be a bad night.

Look, if it’s a real ghost, the busters get custody. If it’s just a real estate developer in a costume it’s out of their jurisdiction so we gotta hand things off to these meddling kids and their dog.

i’d watch a case of the week PI procedural about a paranormal investigator and a paranormal debunker that have to work together to figure out if this week’s ghost is bullshit or not

Tags:

#Ghostbusters #Scooby Doo #crossovers #story ideas I will never write #(duelling genre conventions to create suspense is so neat) #(I read a novel once that was both ”sci-fi dystopia adventure” and ”erotic horror”) #(which have opposite conventions for which side wins) #(so you end up *genuinely uncertain* which side is going to win) #(unlike most sci-fi dystopia adventures the good guys *might actually lose*) #(because the audience wouldn’t feel betrayed by that and the author *knows* they wouldn’t)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Rejected SCP Object proposal #137: a housecat that has an unerring ability to locate and navigate to the nearest SCP Foundation containment facility. Once it arrives, it makes every reasonable effort to get inside. It has no other observably anomalous properties or behaviours – it just really, really wants to be inside the containment facility.

@lizziegoneastray replied:

was this inspired by the library cat?

It is in large part inspired by the situation with Max the cat and the DeWitt Wallace Library, yes, but it’s also a sort of thought experiment: what is the most disarmingly innocuous anomaly we can come up with that would nonetheless give the Foundation the screaming willies?

This one has a couple of features that help it along there:

  • The cat’s existence is inherently an informational security breach, since – if left to its own devices – it can always find the nearest SCP Foundation containment facility without outside assistance. Imagine if some hostile third party got their hands on it!

  • The fact that its anomalous properties specifically target Foundation facilities suggests either that it was created purposefully, or else that it’s a byproduct of some other anomaly already in containment, and they have no idea which of those it is and no ready means of learning more.

In the containment log in my head, the cat’s existence was known for several years prior to its containment, but it was believed at the time to be an ordinary cat with a weird fixation on that particular building. After the site was closed down due to administrative reshuffling, the cat showed up at the next-nearest site a few weeks later and was recognised by transferred staff, at which point they realised something might be amiss – and upon testing and confirmation, were confronted with the fact that they’d had an uncontained and likely deliberately crafted anomaly nosing around one of their sites for several years.

Tags:

#SCP #fanfic #cat #story ideas I will never write

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

maeamian:

A scientific study of probability in the D&D universe would reveal some pretty wild shit and I don’t know why more in-universe mathematicians and scientists aren’t talking about it “Yeah, it turns out that no matter what you attempt there’s a fixed probability of success and it’s some multiple of 5%, or in a few cases a fixed probability that’s as if it were the combination of two such probabilities, for instance for subjects of the spell Enhance Ability, any task that could conceivably result in failure seems to do so at least 5% of the time. You’ll laugh when I say this, but it’s almost as if the celestial beings that control the whims of fate are rolling, and I know how weird this sounds, twenty sided dice. Not real dice of course, they’re an analogy for some undoubtedly process we know nothing about”

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #D&D

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

existentialterror:

botanyshitposts:

ive developed an eccentric character for a hypothetical youtube series called ‘ishtar ray: tactical botanist’ and i feel like i need to get it out of my system so heres the setup

-by the year 2174, plants have evolved into a violent threat against humanity and initiated a plant apocalypse. ishtar is a grad student of tactical botany sent back in time to try to prevent the apocalypse with three missions: 

1. try to teach everyone he encounters about very specific plant biology with the hopes that it will give humanity an advantage when the time comes, 

2. try to intercept current plant research to send back to his time period, as much of the higher research on plant biology was destroyed in the apocalypse. refers to all plant research as ‘intelligence’ regardless of the situation

3. in our time period, the evolution of plants into violent antagonists has already begun. ishtar must venture into the field attempting to find these individuals and eliminate them with his anti-plantometer before they can breed. these individuals are usually depicted as like. a plant with a knife taped to it

-ishtar carries around a camera to document his adventures, which he then edits into episodes (each one focusing on a certain plant/plant subject) and puts onto youtube

-ishtar wears only post-apocalyptic clothes. theres mud and dirt smeared on his face, and within the first episode we become aware that he literally lives in a tent pitched in a comically public area. he wears a military jacket with ‘KNOW YOUR ENEMY’ painted on the back (the tagline of the show), carries his anti-plantometer and various futuristic anti-plant weapons with him at all times, and overall is EXTREMELY out of place in literally every situation in both behavior and clothing to a ridiculous degree and is completely oblivious to it

-teaches the content in a deranged ranting way with the strong implication that the viewer will have to know this to defend themselves, also implies that botany is a military science 

-is HORRIFIED at the idea of houseplants. also refuses to touch any plant with his bare hands and carries salad tongs for this purpose

-once an episode stands in a public area with a relevant picket sign frantically trying to tell people about how dangerous the plant of the episode is

-occasionally interjects weird, vague comments about plant violence from the future. ‘my uncle was killed by a moss. crawled up through his window while he was sleeping. ive never seen so much carnage’. never elaborates on exactly how the killing was done

-acts very seriously but its impossible to take him seriously

-literally never relaxes

-like bill nye but botany-based and chaotic evil

this is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. please make this.

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write #plants #apocalypse cw