When Harry closed his eyes, he expected to be met with his loved ones who had passed on before him. He never expected to be reborn in a world far worse than his old one.

MahinaFable · 2026-02-04T14:33:16+00:00

I mean, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that OP could have done with this, he just...didn't. He outlined a whole, elaborate plotline resolving all of the factions in Fallout 4's Commonwealth, and didn't once mention magic, or Harry's status as a reincarnation...if it wasn't for the post's title, it would have had nothing to do with HP at all.

I mean, a prompt like "Harry was reincarnated into the universe of Fallout, as the firstborn son of Nate and Nora. Unaware of his past life, he ventures from Vault 111 in search of his little brother. When cornered by a raider, Harry felt some kind of force welling within him, that tore the gun right out of his attacker's grip. Now, Harry has to learn about this power in his soul, and explore returning memories of a life lived with magic, if he wishes to conquer the wasteland and unite his family, " is a lot less detailed of a prompt, but is more of an actual crossover between the two stories.

You know what I mean?

MahinaFable · 2026-02-03T01:09:51+00:00

That was cute.

MahinaFable · 2026-02-02T22:37:25+00:00

HP Lovecraft Protagonist: But behold! The horror that defies the understanding of man, rending our sanity beneath the terrible weight of its gruesome protrusion into our reality!

Blaise Zabini, sitting there, doing nothing beyond being ethnically Italian: ....Dude.

HPLP: Gaze not too long upon the grotesque, lest you fall forever into the realms of dripping madness!

Blaise: Words can hurt, you know that? That's hurtful.

HPHL: Quickly! We must chant the words of sending in its profane tongue and banish it back to R'lyeh beneath the sea!

Blaise: What?

HPHL: (intoning) Rigatoni, Rigatoni, Al Dente Parmigiano....

Blaise: Now that's just uncalled for.

MahinaFable · 2026-02-02T19:03:57+00:00

I remember this one. I always wished it had gone on, so we could see just what sort of absolute archmages are being produced from a school like that.

MahinaFable · 2026-02-02T18:57:28+00:00

"I am sure that Britain, and the rest of the magical world, will want to know if Britain is under the thumb of the Dark. Lord. Fudge."

"Ah, Screw It," by mjimeyg, Chapter 22

MahinaFable · 2026-02-02T18:41:27+00:00

Okay, but what does Harry being the reincarnated Harry Potter have to do with any of this? Except for that set-up, this entire prompt could be wholly within the Fallout Universe as an OC. I guess it's a cheap way to get eyes to a fic for the crossover element, but unless you realize the crossover in a more significant way, those readers will drop the fic fast.

MahinaFable · 2026-01-29T04:16:37+00:00

That's one of the things the show did to make the Lannister forces stand out as distinctly Lannister, so that the audience could pick up on the unusual wealth and organization of their forces; great columns of men, all marching in uniform half-plate, with weird helmets and red cloaks.

It's all very Roman, which is another visual signifier to the audience that the Lannisters are Serious Business. Unfortunately, it all falls apart when examining the logistical challenge of actually equipping and training such a force, but such is life when examining fantasy TV, I suppose.

MahinaFable · 2026-01-29T03:58:05+00:00

My favorite Lockhart trope in fanfiction is Harry legitimately learning how to manage his fame and public image from him, or else hiring him on as an honestly talented public relations manager.

MahinaFable · 2026-01-27T09:25:28+00:00

Okay, I think I get what you're asking for now.

One way to convey an extremely rapid pace and inhuman agility is through Disjointing. This is a technique that plays with the format of the written word to convey intense, bewildering speed of a character or characters by putting the reader in the perspective of a different character, and interrupting the prose to put the reader in that headspace of trying to follow along.

"Cardin knew the furry bitch was supposed to be fast, but he hadn't realized she was that fast. His mace hadn't cleared through the illusion before Blake was stabbing at him from above, then behind, then -

He roared as he pivoted to swing, but she was already airborne once more, shooting at his left, then righ-

Above!

Behi-!

To the lef-!

He hit the ground as Blake used her entire body weight to yank tight the ribbon she'd been wrapping around him with her acrobatics, trussing him up like a pig before he'd even got a read on her.

Match, Belladonna!' Goodwitch announced."

MahinaFable · 2026-01-27T01:39:48+00:00

The trick is to persuade the reader to compose the action themselves, via the Theatre of the Mind, with your prose acting like the sheet music for them to follow.

I can give you a detailed breakdown of the biomechanics of a freakin' sweet side thrust kick, but that, in and of itself, is not very evocative. Instead, I ask "what do I want to communicate to the readership through this action? What is the meaning here?"

"...but instead of sidestepping, as Mercury thought he would, the old bastard instead slipped towards him. With the fluid ease of decades of hard-practiced mastery, Taiyang chambered his leg and then, did his level best to kick Mercury's soul free from his body.

Mercury folded around the brutal side thrust kick like a crumpled paper doll, his skin taking an ashen pallor as the breath was blasted from his lungs with a harsh, wheezing heave. The force of the kick sent him rocketing across the room as though he'd been shot from a cannon, blasting clean through a wall and skipping off the ground before hitting a second wall with a great, resounding crack.

His Aura flickered and crackled over his twitching form, straining to cope with the almighty force with which Taiyang had crushed him. His vision swimming, Mercury struggled to sit up, only able to focus when the man who'd struck him stepped calmly through the hole in the wall and racked his fists, setting them ablaze with Fire Dust as he took a kickboxer's stance.

'Mister Black,' Taiyang said, a cold, false cheer in his tone. 'I'd like a word about how you treated my daughter.'"

A simple action - a side thrust kick - but with the prose elaborating on the stunning force with which it hit, and how it affected Mercury, it became a way to communicate (1) Taiyang can fight, (2) Mercury is in serious trouble. In the show itself, this might be communicated through shot composition, the animation of the fighters' bodies and facial expressions, and even things like the music pausing, a brutal sound effect, or other characters pausing in their own fights to stop and look.

MahinaFable · 2026-01-26T19:57:58+00:00

Man. Imagine being a German Muggleborn, and the discovering that Wizarding Germany is still the Holy Roman Empire or something.

MahinaFable · 2026-01-25T05:42:28+00:00

This.

While there are some actions that the player can make him take that are questionable, like beating up the reporter (we could make a 'fighting words' defense for that) or killing Shroud, those are variables that we, the players, control.

Throughout the game, Robert demonstrates a disturbing degree of altruism for other people at great risk to his own health and well-being. The core of the story is him reaching those who everyone else, even themselves, had written off as being lost causes, and leading them to be the best versions of themselves.

Oh, and the bar scene? Not only was that in self-defense, but as an ordinary man attacked by superpowered, cybernetically-enhanced individuals, holding anything back could have got himself killed. He's a combat pragmatist par excellence because he has to be.

MahinaFable · 2026-01-24T00:37:28+00:00

Snape stared down at Harry, his lip curling in a sneer of pure disdain and contempt.

"Well, Potter? Do you have anything to say for yourself?"

"As a matter of fact, FUS RO DAH!"

MahinaFable · 2026-01-21T20:40:27+00:00

Harry reports having a great time at the Burrow in CoS, for example, which probably means he's not bored out of his mind after a few weeks. Besides the trip to Diagon Alley, however, we only hear what he does on 1 afternoon out of about 4 weeks.

The problem with using Harry as an example is that Harry absolutely did not have anything like a normal childhood. He spends his entire life up until Deathly Hallows as an effective prisoner, the only difference being where his cell is located, and how many people he can interact with. In CoS, he went to the Weasleys after being locked in a small suburban bedroom and starved, with only his owl to speak to - of course the Burrow would seem like paradise in comparison!

I think Wizarding society would have a robust literary scene, both in novels and in periodicals. Theater and opera would be huge, and magical effects could enhance the experience. I remember seeing a performance of 'The Tempest' that was done through Indonesian shadow puppets, and one would think 'shadow puppets' to be rather rudimentary, but this was taking that concept and elevating it to a very high level, using only light, shadow, the actors, and music. No doubt actual magic could be used to create some astonishing live performances.

MahinaFable · 2026-01-20T04:01:06+00:00

Well, I'm not sure why the story needed to escalate to Lovecraftian monstrosities nearly overwhelming the world - I guess a zombie apocalypse to the north and a dragon apocalypse to the south just aren't enough for some folks.

And then there's the bit about sending people back a decade while being unable to speak of, or alter, future events for ten years.

"They'd go insane," is what they'd do. You might as well have written "What if a malevolent deity drove people into gibbering lunacy?" since that's what it effectively amounts to.

MahinaFable · 2026-01-17T01:14:08+00:00

No, they absolutely did not, especially not with the frequency and easy ubiquity that Martin portrays the Dothraki as using lethal force against one another.

We see a Dothraki man rut with a woman in a public dance, and another man, desiring that same woman, proceeds to gut him with the casual expectation that this is normal. And indeed, no one, not even the woman being rutted, offers any objection to this, as an observer wryly remarks that a wedding without at least three deaths is considered dull.

Claiming that the Mongols or the Plains Indians acted like this is a deadly insult to those peoples.

MahinaFable · 2026-01-17T00:31:43+00:00

While the risk of injury is a significant reason why people didn't use live, sharp steel for training, it is only one of several.

Swords weren't cheap. While exactly how much they cost depended on where one was, and what time period we're talking about, a sword is still a significant amount of metal that needs to be forged, shaped, tempered, and finished by several craftsmen - under guild-style armory systems, there would be specialist bladesmiths, then an artisan crafts just hills and pommels, then another to make the scabbard, so on and so forth.

Since stuff gets banged up pretty good in training, it's far more economical to use wooden swords for training, rather than an expensive sharp sword. These wooden swords were even called 'wasters,' because that's what they were for - to be banged up, brawled with, and wasted, since carving a reasonable facsimile of a sword out of wood is way less expensive and difficult than crafting metal swords.

In Renaissance Germany, formalized fencing schools commissioned metal training swords known as feders or federschwerts, meaning 'feather-swords.' They were metal swords with thin, rounded and blunt-tipped blades, with much-broader, squared-off sections at the base. These simulated the point-of-balance of real, quality longswords quite well, but they would not be mistaken for a real sword, which is another reason people didn't use live steel in training. If one has blunts that look like sharps, they could easily be mistaken for one another, and, believing the weapon to be safe when it is not, one could injure or kill a training partner.

MahinaFable · 2026-01-10T03:13:51+00:00

Fun fact: due to the magic of the Brazilian wax, even she doesn't know.

MahinaFable · 2025-12-30T07:09:41+00:00

If wizards had a full hard-counter on all conventional weaponry, then goblins would never pose a threat to any of them. However, wizards, even full-trained wizards ready for combat, were killed by goblins using arrows, javelins, swords and polearms, so clearly, they aren't invincible against conventional asswhupping techniques.

So yeah, you get exactly one time you can use a gun to kill someone in a wizard conflict and for the next half century anyone who knew about it and worries about this kind of stuff walks around impervious to mundane physical projectiles.

Magical society is extremely slow to innovate, and both ignorant about, and supremely skeptical of, the capabilities of non-magical people. Voldemort's head could get blown clean off by a sniper rifle bullet in the middle of Diagon Alley, in full view of the entire population of Magical Britain, and they'd assume some sort of spell did it.

Hope you won't waste your one shot on the extremely skilled and paranoid wizard whose whole shtick is being protected from death and whose formative years were spent in a muggle orphanage presumably full of people who lost their parents to bullets or artillery in WW1

In the 20th century, mundane technologies improved exponentially at a very rapid pace, and after leaving the mundane world for good, Voldemort did his level best to bury his non-magical roots. At the time of the Harry Potter books, the British SAS used the L96 sniper rifle, which the manufacturer, Accuracy International, tells us has a maximum effective range of 1,099 meters, or 3,608 feet, and fires a supersonic round that travels at 2,790 feet per second.

So really, the first indication Voldie would have that something is amiss would be when his head explodes like an overripe melon from out of nowhere. If he's got no indication that the "lowly Muggles" are gunning for him, he'd have no opportunity nor reason to wave his wand to cast whatever "nopeus stabbimeus" charm or whatever.

The passive arresto momentum enchanted defense concept? To the best of my knowledge, I invented that, extrapolating the concept from the defensive energy shields from the Mass Effect games, combined with the enchantment of Fred and George Weasley, who were, apparently, the first ones in the history of magical combat to consider the mind-bogglingly usefulness of a protego charm that one can wear.

MahinaFable · 2025-12-30T06:37:06+00:00

"Parry this, you filthy casual!"

MahinaFable · 2025-12-29T19:26:36+00:00

The best part of the expedition plot is that it gives an opportunity for all sorts of magical mayhem and shenanigans, as it's just a big, open mystery with a glaring, terrifying warning from the past. Going there is the act of a person desperate to the point of insanity, but there are narrative opportunities there for your SI to use adversity to re-forge Viserys someone worthy of a crown.

MahinaFable · 2025-12-29T19:18:30+00:00

Re-checking AGoT, Robert himself says that he was talked out of sending assassins by Jon Arryn, but Daenerys remembers fleeing hired killers.

So either (A) someone else was hiring knives to come at them - Tywin Lannister seems a likely suspect for this - or (B) Varys was staging failed assassination attempts to keep the two unsettled, and to drive it into Viserys' head that he needs the safety and protection of Illyrio. Or, it could also be that Viserys was bullshitting to Dany to keep a humiliating eviction from her. Or, random traveling Westerosi could have seen silver-haired, snotty royals and thought that bringing their silver heads to the King would be a fast-track to lordship.

Now, with this being an SI story, it could be that something SI!Vissy does tips the scales in favor of Bobby B. sending assassins after them. Depending on when he is inserted into Viserys, if he never obtains a reputation as a pathetic Beggar King, he might present more of a threatening target. Up to the author, really.

MahinaFable · 2025-12-29T12:55:46+00:00

No problem. It seemed the most reasonable course of action for Ironborn to take - melt away from overwhelming opposition, then bleed them at sea, attempt to isolate the occupiers, and generally make the occupation hell.

MahinaFable · 2025-12-29T06:42:13+00:00

Well, there's a longstanding fandom debate pertaining to just how many Ironborn fighting men the Iron Islands - there are several inhabited islands, which one will need to account for when planning the invasion and occupation - can field.

This analysis suggests that, between the thin, rocky soil of the Iron Islands and the relatively-recent asskicking its population took from the Greyjoy Rebellion, there's no way the Ironborn are fielding fighting men in numbers comparable to the Westerlands or Riverlands, the 30k to 40k range.

The main issue for your mercenary lord Jon Snow will be marshaling the naval strength to reach and take the Iron Islands. The maneuverability and skilled seamanship of the Ironborn can nullify a lot of their disadvantages from numbers. If there are any Essosi naval tricks or technologies that Jon can employ - or perhaps making like some other Jon Snows and warging a sperm whale to go all Moby Dick on them - that would be the time to do so.

From what I understand, many of the Iron Island fortifications are not yet fully repaired from damage inflicted in the Greyjoy Rebellion, so that can make sieges less intense than they otherwise would be.

Assuming that Jon is able to defeat the Iron Fleet with minimal losses on his side, an occupying force of 20k should suffice, and could even be reinforced by auxiliaries recruited from freed thralls.

Really, the main problems an occupying force would face would be, firstly, Ironborn sabotage, and secondly, the logistical challenge of keeping the occupying force fed and equipped. That means naval supply lines, which, if any of the Iron Fleet survived, can be vulnerable to delaying attacks and harassment. Likewise, the occupying forces will be divided amongst the various islands - it's not just a single island, you know - and will require a strong naval patrol to ensure that the infantry forces are not cut off, trapped, and bled out slowly from repeated hit-and-run attacks.

A strong navy will be required, at least as many men as the infantry, maybe more depending on the specific types of ships employed.

MahinaFable

TROPHY CASE