story ideas I will never write

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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gallusrostromegalus:

kyraneko:

gallusrostromegalus:

miswrit:

Not nearly enough “Sirius Black makes himself at home in Privet Drive because there’s nothing the Dursleys can do to get him to leave” fic out there, and it’s a crying shame.

Harry just rolling up like WHADDUP THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT FAMILAR HE EMOTIONALLY SUPPORTS ME BY MAULING PEOPLE WHO THREATEN ME.  And Sirus dog-charades AND THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT COUCH YOU CAN SIT ON THE FLOOR FUCKERS.

You know what else is good “Dudley gets on top of how fucked up his parents are faster” fic, and i feel like “Sirius Lives at Privet Drive” dovetails nicely into this:

  • Dudley, age 14 and realizing his mother’s Loving-but-Ill-advised cooking is setting him up for some serious health problems, and that he’s tall enough to look his dad in the eye now, so his previous rationale of “If he’s hitting Harry he’s not Hitting Me” doesn’t hold up now, and goes full Eye of The Tiger to cope.
  • This means Sirus gets dragged along on a lot of Parent-avoiding “Walkies”
  • So many that one evening after a fight Dudley is trying to round up Harry and Sirius for a cooldown run and Sirius groans “Oh you’re big lads you can jog to the tesco on your own.” from the couch
    There’s a hot moment of silence.
  • “He’s a Magic Dog.” Says Harry.
  • “What do you mean your dog is a 40-year-old man?”
    “What do you mean your Dad’s BFF?”
    “What do you mean convicted criminal?”
    What do you mean WIZARD HITLER WANTS YOUR HIDE??”
    “..Shit I gotta up my workout routine.”

    “You’re not gonna punch Voldermort out Dudley.”

    “Not with these wimpy biceps I won’t.”
  • Shit’s getting increasingly tense in the house so when Ron announces they have tickets to the Quidditch World Cup Harry has to ask “Hey, can Dudley come too?”
  • Dudley might be short on wizarding skills but one thing he’s learned at Fancy rich boy School is the art of Schmooze.  They meet Corneilus Fudge and Dudley charms the hell out of him. Fudge doesn’t even realize he’s not a Wizard.   Harry tries to impress upon him the ‘VOLDERMORT’S ALIVE WITH A CULT DIPSHIT” upon him and nearly ends up in tears before Dudley takes his arm and whispers “Let me Handle This.”
  • Thirty minutes later Corneilus is organizing a Task Force of Aurors. 
  • “What the fuck do they teach you there?” asks Harry.
    “Oh, buttering egos, Trigonometry, grift, the usual.”
    “What’s Trigonometry?” Asks Ron, walking with them on a field trip through Muggle London for Nandos.  Dudley’s Uncle “Gerald White” is supervising them it’s fine.
    Dudley stares for a moment.
    “You guys… are learning math, along with your Divination and Transmorfigication and whatsits, right?”
    There is an awkward silence. Even Sirius considers morphing back into a dog to avoid this conversation.
    “Oh for fucks sake.” Sighs Dudley, texting Hermionie to see if she brought her Muggle textbooks along.
  • (She Did)
  • IDK what happens when the school year starts but I love the idea of “Well some snitch (Snape) might notice if Sirus is hanging around, so instead he goes with Dudley to Fancy Rich Boy School.  Maybe they’re short a teacher there and he can reccomend his friend Remus, currently out of work for reasons that aren’t his fault…

Yassss!

  • “What’s trigonometry?” some pureblood at the World Cup asks him. “It’s a variant of arithmancy,” says Harry, who’s become somewhat adept at bullshitting translations between magical and muggle things when the incentive was avoiding Aunt Marge’s wrath.
  • Nobody’s ever heard of trigonometry except for one elderly pureblood witch, who had heard it mentioned once back in school by a classmate who went on to become a famous name in advanced and extremely theoretical arithmancy.
  • Everybody loses no time in agreeing that trigonometry must be this tremendously advanced arithmancy specialization and Dudley Dursley must be an absolute arithmancy prodigy to the point where even the arithmancy buffs don’t want to risk making themselves look stupid by asking him about his research.
  • OBVIOUSLY Dudley goes to some extremely foreign wizarding school with an advanced research program available. There can’t be many of them with an advanced “trigonometry” program like that, so nobody asks which school it is because what if there’s only one of them and they look stupid for not knowing about it?
  • Besides, Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, is giving him the time of day like he’s someone really important, so, yeah.
  • Oh, yeah, he’s definitely the type of absent-minded brilliance that forgets his wand regularly, head in the clouds with all those theorems.
  • Dudley actually takes up computer programming at Smeltings. He tried it out because he likes video games, and then sort of fell in love with the process, the building something up out of lines of code, the thrill of success when it works. The awestruck reactions of wizards who see a couple of his notebooks when he sits there scribbling out code on a spiralbound notebook with a ballpoint pen is almost tangible.
  • The ballpoints and the notebooks take some suspicion for their muggleness until Harry points out that you don’t need to pay attention to how much ink is left and when you need to dip it, so it’s perfect for somebody who might want to scribble out whole pages of that stuff without noticing whether they’ve run out of ink, and the notebooks have pages so you could remember where something is. Pretty soon quill-tipped ballpoints are all the rage and spiralbound parchment stacks are being sold in all the stores.
  • Somebody asks Dudley about his family history. “Oh, they’ve all been like me,” he says, “as far back as anybody remembers” and he means not-a-wizard, but everybody thinks the opposite.
  • His father is blustery and yells and prone to explosive bursts of anger, he says, and his mother is obsessed with cleanliness and etiquette, and everyone is perfectly happy to never suggest they’d like to meet them.
  • Once Dudley figures out that everyone thinks he’s a wizard, he and Harry have a solid laugh over it and Harry teaches Dudley what he’d need to know to continue the deception. Fred and George are brought into the equation and provide him with lots of cool tricks and such so that he can appear to do some small bits of magic now and again.
  • He eventually marries Daphne Greengrass, who knows about his muggleness at that point and loves the idea of getting one over on her overly bloodpurist parents without them ever knowing about it. Harry and Sirius quietly gift them Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, and the assumption that Dudley has the sort of money that buys a historic Pureblood property as a starter home goes round and round.
  • Dudley ends up on the Board of Governors, and later Minister for Magic, and in their old age Petunia and Vernon suffer the mingled pride and fury that their son is a Government Minister and they can’t brag about it.

Two other AUs this goes well with:

  • “all the pureblood dipshits tithed thier land and holdings to Voldemort so when Harry kills him, all the assets go to him and now he owns half of wizarding UK.”
  • “early on his career as a wizard, Dudley goes to Wales to meet another Famed Arithmancer and becomes close friends with fellow videogame and rugby enthusiast Howell Jenkins.”

Tags:

#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #abuse cw? #embarrassment squick? #oh look an update

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

damianwaynerocks:

ok but if bruce wayne somehow came upon zuko fresh out of banishment he would lose his mind.

black hair? check. bad parent(s)? check. trauma? double check.

bruce: how’d you get your scar?

zuko: my dad got mad at me for saying that killing people is wrong so he lit my face on fire and banished me.

bruce, vibrating with excitement, already pulling adoption papers from his utilility: that’s terrible. how do you feel about capes.

 

explorerrowan:

Zuko: Do you mind if I wear this blue demon mask?

Bruce: *sniff, tear in his eye* Not at all.

 

jess-the-werefox:

*Zuko fighting the Joker*

J: “wan na kno w h ow i go t thes e sc ar s”

Z: *rips off mask* i don’t give a fuck

 

fefeman:

I’m still stuck at the “batman has adoption papers in his utility belt”.

“Quick, it’s time to use the Bat-adoption papers!”

 

silverscreenx:

Bat-option papers

 

phantoms-lair:

Okay, but you’re missing the best part of this.

Alfred and Iroh complimenting each other on tea while they discuss their overly dramatic children.

 

damianwaynerocks:

iroh: once, i told zuko that he needs to work on his inter turmoil. he screamed at me that he had no such inner turmoil, and then proceeded to go to a cliff during a thunderstorm to scream at God to strike him with lightning

alfred: master bruce and i have that interaction at least three times per week.

 

coffeebuddha:

@absentlyabbie​

 

animate-mush:

I see your “Alfred and Iroh as tea bros” and raise you “Alfred and Iroh as tea rivals”

Consider

Iroh: you too must learn patience. Boiling the water ruins the delicate flavor of the white jade

Alfred: oh I’m dreadfully sorry – for some reason I expected this tea to have TEA in it

(later)

Alfred: *aggressively laying out full tea service with milk, lemon, sugar, and, just to drive his point in, jam*

Iroh: *dying inside*

 

damianwaynerocks:

excellent addition

 

whetstonefires:

hey bruce spent a lot of his bat-study abroad in the far east and has kind of a weeb weapon collection so proposal, what if Bruce appreciates Iroh’s tea

while Zuko is enthusiastic about cream and sugar

further fueling their dad-figures’ passive-aggressive rivalry?

 

princesscolumbia:

You had me at Zuko vs. Joker, I was crying by the Eastern vs. Western tea service

 

overlord-puffin:

Wait a minute. Batman and Zuko have the same arch-nemesis.

Mark Hamill

Tags:

#Avatar: The Last Airbender #Batman #crossovers #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #tea

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

Concept: reverse portal fantasy where half a dozen whimsical talking animals emerge from a closet on 21st Century Earth on a mission to figure out where the foretold Chosen One has wandered off to. Every week they pop out of a different closet and get tangled up in some ridiculous bullshit that just coincidentally matches some detail of the cryptic prophecy they’re working from, and every week they eventually discover that they’re on completely the wrong track.

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

skippercifer:

Wait those English bastards in Harry Potter were allowed to keep tawny owls as pets right??? AND BRING THEM INTO IRELAND??????????

 

skippercifer:

JK Rowling is the anti-St Patrick she’s here to spead imperialist propaganda and disrupt owl ecology

 

skippercifer:

274181b7aa3de5dbcdb7feecc601454d405aa803

We have something new for her callout file; get whoever’s in charge of that on the phone

 

cctinsleybaxter:

a78f8d189b70af143629af9b3120776dca819ae9

Never thought I’d say this but folks we may need a new harry potter book

 

kiwisoap:

As someone who has spent time with professional ornithologists and has seen people make 500-mile trips to see a Single Species Of Hummingbird i can say without a single doubt that wizards being discovered cus they keep bringing their nonnative birds places is a completely realistic scenario

 

dreamlogic:

i’m imagining a bunch of very confused ornithologists trying to research the appearance of non-native owls in scotland, but they keep getting turned around by hogwarts’ anti-muggle defenses and it’s this endless cycle of

“well, we know that within this few mile radius of undisturbed highlands, there are massive concentrations of owls that Should Not Be Here. we know the owls are here, we know where they hunt and approximately where they return to roost but we just. we jsut. can’t find a SINGLE fucking nest??? anywhere?????? every owl we tag has their tracker malfunction RIGHT HERE but whenever i investigate i somehow end up back home in my slippers with a cup of tea.”

 

raptured-night:

@somuchanxietysolittletime

 

dastardly-lemondrops:

I love this so much I almost want to put it in my project

 

ritavonbees:

Normal Beasts and Where You Absolutely Should Not Find Them

Tags:

#Harry Potter #owls #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #fun with loopholes #(sort of)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

seeingteacupsindragons:

prokopetz:

Concept: a D&D campaign where the players start out by creating high-level characters and jump straight into a final boss fight with an evil chronomancer. Whether they win or lose, they’re just barely too late to prevent an apocalyptic ritual that unravels the timestream.

Once the prologue is complete, they level their characters down by one level and play out the adventure immediately preceding the fatal confrontation. The next session, they level down again and play out the adventure before that, and so forth, with each adventure successively further back. No separation between player and character knowledge is enforced, effectively affording the player characters knowledge of future events (i.e., the “previous” adventures they’ve already played); exploiting this knowledge is encouraged.

Armed this this information, the player characters are able to make changes to history. They can’t prevent their final confrontation with the chronomancer without causing all sorts of nasty paradoxes, but due to the vortex of Time Fuckery™ surrounding it, the battle itself is exempt – i.e., they’re allowed change history in ways that give themselves advantages in the fight. Changes “close” to the event (i.e., only a couple of sessions in) confer only modest advantages, while changes further back in history (i.e., many sessions into the campaign) are more influential.

Every adventure ends with a flash-forward to the final battle with circumstances revised to reflect whatever changes to history the player characters just made. The campaign ends when they successfully prevent the chronomancer from blowing up the space-time continuum, thereby locking in the new timeline.

(If they manage to get all the way to level one without stopping the chronomancer, their “first” adventure has them bumping into a random NPC who they now realise is a low level, not-yet-evil version of that same chronomancer. The same no-preventing-the-final-battle rule applies, so they can’t just kill the poor schmuck, but now they’ve got an opportunity to really throw a wrench into the works!)

Every single D&D party I think I’ve ever been in would adopt him into the party.

Every single one.

You can absolutely do that, if you end up getting that far, but the Power of Friendship isn’t exempt from the no-preventing-the-final-battle rule, so all befriending the chronomancer’s past self gets you is an Anakin-versus-Obi-Wan “how could you do this, we were friends!” moment in the final battle.

(Of course, you could totally exploit that for tactical advantage, if you were bastardly enough!)

Tags:

#time travel #story ideas I will never write #D&D

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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moonlit-tulip:

One big problem with mystery shows, as compared with (well-signposted) mystery novels, is that they don’t give the viewers time to think things through before the parlor room scene. There’s no clear narrative break-point where the viewer knows they have all needed evidence to solve the mystery and can stop to think; even if the detective comments that they know who did it, what are you going to do, pause 3/5 of the way through the episode to comb over all the clues and discuss the mystery with your friends and so forth? That’s impossible during the initial serialized release (since TVs don’t allow one to pause), and impractical when watching via stream or disk (since it requires groups of people to take the generally-unnatural action of staying paused in the middle of an episode for an extended timespan, and that’s if they know where to pause at all).

Fortunately, there happens to exist an already-developed TV structure perfect for avoiding this problem: the structure of the 1966-1968 Batman series. Each two-episode story (which was the show’s default length, albeit with occasional exceptions (always in the longer direction, not shorter)) ends its first episode with Batman and Robin in some sort of death-trap, and its second episode starts with them escaping the trap and ends with them beating the story’s villain(s).

I’d really like to see a mystery show based on a similar structure. The default story length is two episodes. The first episode of each story ends with a dramatic reveal after which, by one contrivance or another, the audience is clearly told that the case is now solvable. The second episode then starts with the protagonists responding to the big reveal, and ends with the parlor room scene. Live viewers get a week to think through and discuss the solution between the episodes’ releases, and after-the-fact viewers get the advantage of a clear narrative break-point at which to coordinate their pausing-and-thinking, for an overall-improved mystery-solving experience relative to the current one-episode-per-story status quo.

(For bonus quality-of-life, make sure each episode is free to stream at least until the release of its associated parlor-room-scene episode, such that live viewers are on equal footing with archival viewers in terms of being able to rewatch pre-reveal episodes and refresh their memory about all the clues.)

maryellencarter replied: The 1970s Ellery Queen TV show had a point just before the last commercial break where Ellery would turn to the viewer, recap the case, and mention that it was now solvable. At original broadcast it would only have given you a few minutes to think things over, but it was sort of a thought in the same direction.

Tags:

#interesting ideas #story ideas I will never write #oh look an update #replies

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

brazenautomaton:

hey for those of you who liked the smut-theory blog you may want to go check out and spread this link right here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25394464

I wonder what it contains

I wonder if someone will help me come up with a better summary

Tags:

#hell yeah!! #storytime #story ideas I will never write #recs #sexuality and lack thereof #today (well‚ yesterday) in reasons I never unfollow a blog for inactivity alone #(note: these are not mere crossposts‚ but revised and expanded versions)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

abbadon-lordofthevoid:

prokopetz:

frogs-in-a-fog:

prokopetz:

Concept: immortal vampire scion of a dying royal line going to increasingly desperate lengths to get their various relations married off in a way that keeps themselves as far from the line of succession as possible, because the peculiar interaction between holy symbols and the vampiric condition means that if they ever actually inherit the divine right of kings, they’ll immediately explode.

So just… A really old guy forcing all of his grandkids to marry each other?

Precisely the opposite. Keeping it all in the family (so to speak) is a strategy for minimising competing claims to the succession; our hypothetical vampire wants there to be as many competing claims as possible, so that if one cadet branch dies out or gets delegitimised, there will be others to take up the slack.

If they’re the scion, they’ll have to go to some lengths to avoid it… depending on where they fall in the lineage. But, if it’s the English monarchy, they can just profess Roman Catholicism. Immediate disqualification.

I was about to propose some complicated metaphysical reason why that option isn’t on the table; upon consideration, however, it’s much funnier if there’s no reason it wouldn’t work, but the vampire would literally rather die than become Catholic.

Tags:

#vampires #story ideas I will never write #incest cw #death tw

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

moonlit-tulip:

One big problem with mystery shows, as compared with (well-signposted) mystery novels, is that they don’t give the viewers time to think things through before the parlor room scene. There’s no clear narrative break-point where the viewer knows they have all needed evidence to solve the mystery and can stop to think; even if the detective comments that they know who did it, what are you going to do, pause 3/5 of the way through the episode to comb over all the clues and discuss the mystery with your friends and so forth? That’s impossible during the initial serialized release (since TVs don’t allow one to pause), and impractical when watching via stream or disk (since it requires groups of people to take the generally-unnatural action of staying paused in the middle of an episode for an extended timespan, and that’s if they know where to pause at all).

Fortunately, there happens to exist an already-developed TV structure perfect for avoiding this problem: the structure of the 1966-1968 Batman series. Each two-episode story (which was the show’s default length, albeit with occasional exceptions (always in the longer direction, not shorter)) ends its first episode with Batman and Robin in some sort of death-trap, and its second episode starts with them escaping the trap and ends with them beating the story’s villain(s).

I’d really like to see a mystery show based on a similar structure. The default story length is two episodes. The first episode of each story ends with a dramatic reveal after which, by one contrivance or another, the audience is clearly told that the case is now solvable. The second episode then starts with the protagonists responding to the big reveal, and ends with the parlor room scene. Live viewers get a week to think through and discuss the solution between the episodes’ releases, and after-the-fact viewers get the advantage of a clear narrative break-point at which to coordinate their pausing-and-thinking, for an overall-improved mystery-solving experience relative to the current one-episode-per-story status quo.

(For bonus quality-of-life, make sure each episode is free to stream at least until the release of its associated parlor-room-scene episode, such that live viewers are on equal footing with archival viewers in terms of being able to rewatch pre-reveal episodes and refresh their memory about all the clues.)

Tags:

#interesting ideas #story ideas I will never write

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

bat-trix:

Bruce Wayne, mostly to annoy Alfred and partly because he genuinely doesn’t believe anyone will care about his antics, claims that his almost ten year disappearance from Gotham was because he was cryptid-hunting across Europe/Asia.

(He was learning to be Batman but whatever.)

“Yetis are real,” he tells Vicki Vale.  “And one day, I will make contact.”

Bruce establishes himself as a cryptid enthusiast pretty quickly and blames most of his suspicious childhood injuries on dumb things he did trying to photograph Bigfoot behind Wayne Manor.

So anyways, Batman shows up and Bruce is a smart guy so he knows that Batman being partially myth and urban legend is going to help his crusade against darkness.  But he’s also smart enough to know that people are going to start getting suspicious if Batman shows up at the same place Bruce Wayne is and Bruce Wayne constantly denies his existence.

He sets his plan into motion at a bank robbery he happens to be involved in.  After sending Alfred off with his costume, he slips back into the bank in time to be there when the police arrive so that he can give his statement.

Bruce makes sure to play it up: his eyes dart around nervously, his voice pitched with excitement, and asserting at the end of his statement that, “I cannot be sure, but I am pretty positive that we were saved by a large, bat-like creature.”

The officers are like ‘yeah ok whatever man’ because Bruce Wayne once fell off of a water-tower because he thought he saw Mothman flying in the night sky, but some of the other witnesses describe seeing a weird bat-thing too so really who knows at this point.

Whenever Bruce Wayne appears publicly somewhere the Batman saves the day, he always makes sure to give a statement about Gotham’s new cryptid and how he intends to be the first on actually catching it in the wild.

“This… Bat-man creature seems to have a moral code,” he tells Vicki Vale.  “If I could just,” he clenches his fist, gazing wistfully out onto the street.  “Meet him…..”

This also allows for him to ply James Gordon for information without arousing suspicion.  And because Gordon has a soft-spot for the little orphan he comforted during his worst night, he usually is willing to give Bruce a little bit of info on cases that the Batman has been working on.

Bruce: Batman is real, don’t lie to me.

Gordon: I can neither confirm nor deny those rumors. *gives Bruce a knowing smile*

Bruce: I heard that he tore through Falcone’s racketeering club the other night!

Gordon: Well…. *glances around* We did get a call from the docks the other night.  SOMEONE tied up most of the gang and left them for us to find…

Bruce: Most of the gang?

Gordon: We think five of them are still on the run.

Bruce: Hmmm……

And of course, Batman does eventually become less of an urban legend and more of a known entity. 

Bruce, busting down the doors of GCPD: BATMAN IS REAL!!!!!!!!!

Gordon: *puts head in hands, sighs*

And like maybe one time Oprah or someone confronts Bruce like “Hey people are saying that maybe YOU might be Batman” and Bruce just like… fucking loses it on live TV and is alternately crying and talking about how Batman is REAL and he pulled Bruce out of a VERY DIFFICULT TIME and how without Batman Bruce would be LOST and if people want to ruin the SANCTITY of that BOND well FINE.

And then like… Batman Incorporated becomes a thing and Bruce is all teary-eyed and smiley doing news conferences and showing off the blurry picture of him shaking (Dick)Bats’s hand and talking about how “I just always believed and I knew this story would have a happy ending and when I clutched his talon in my hand I knew that I was home.”

Bruce similarly becomes famous for insisting the Superman is a fraud put on by the government.

Tags:

#Batman #cryptids #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #embarrassment squick?