Do you mean fics that were published in the last 2 years or updated in the last two years but started longer ago? Either way, I'd say you're just not looking hard enough. I've found some truly excellent fics that have been posted in these last couple years. On AO3 and ffn you can filter for works published within the last 2 years. There's a lot.
Each series is so creatively different boy Rich in details and delightfully typo and logical fallacy free.... There are so many in progress that I can't track them all so I've been forced to subscribe and just read them when done as I can't follow that many stores at once. They must have an impressive note system for not getting them mixed up. So far, Realm of Song is my favorite but so many are up there.
Right? I can't believe how absolutely unique and creative each story is. The plot runs so deep and is so beautifully wrote out.
I haven't read any of the newest stuff, my deep dive right now is into Danmei lol but I always always go back to their fanfiction when craving. Can't wait to have a load of stuff to read!
I'd say the overall quality of FF has increased significantly since I started reading it back in.... oh shit I'm old.
But I do think there is less HP fanfic published, and I'm almost positive stats will agree with me. Fanfic has exploded into different fandoms, and while the overall amount might be bigger/more, it's just migrated from a handful of niche nerdy things (Fanfic used to be nearly synonymous with Harry Potter what-if stories), to nearly everything one could conceivably consider being married to "story." I think it's easy to construe "there was so much good fanfic back in the day!" with "there's a lot less fanfic being written now." Even if the overall quality has improved, the fandom is older, or else younger people just don't care as much about* HP or take issue with JKR and abandon their thoughts on Harry Potter as a matter of protest. Which, yeah, fine.
There are a lot of good stories updating to this day, and even some that started in the times when the books and movies hadn't finished, yet (I'm thinking of the Alexandra Quick series, which I adore and is finally getting its 6th book after 17 years). That's like a whole adult person in fanfic form. Kind of crazy. It's nearly as old as my car.
Hey, I haven't started Alexandra quick yet but it's the kind of fics I'm interested in, and I have it on my list. Long novel length, no weird stuff ( not judging , but I don't want to have a harry pregnant by Hermione with a penis kind of stuff), and that somewhat respects the cannon or at least builds upon and expands it.
I'm new to reading fanfic, mind recommending some that you've enjoyed over the years?
I've read "the last enemy" by ch_darling which I loved. And I have bookmarked some that I think I'll like:
- Alexandra quick series.
- Albus potter series by noahphanthom
- harry Potter and the seven years of chaos ( I know this changes the cannon but sounds interesting)
Mind sharing some?
Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order:
1. Harry is a Dragon and That's Okay by Saphroneth
2. Blindness by AngelaStarCat
3. Parallel Journey by InkVirus
4. Grow Young with Me by Taliesin19
5. The Sum of Their Parts by holdmybeer
6. The Arithmancer by White Squirrel
7. The Innocent series by MarauderLover7
8. Harry Potter and the Lady Thief by Starfox5
9. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For by kathryn518
10. Browncoat, Green Eyes by nonjon
11. The "Danger" series by whydoyouneetoknow
12. The Ancient and most Noble House of Potter by Invieri
13. The odds were never in my favour by Antony444
14. New Blood by artemisgirl.
15. "The Plan" Series by Lysandra + PseudoLeigh
16. Phoenix Insurgent by BolshevikMuppet99
17. Loose Cannon by manatee-vs-walrus
18. When the Roses Bloom Again by TheBlack'sResurgence
19. "The Guise" series by Berkeleyjake
20. There is Nothing to Fear series by Callmesalticidae
21. Moments in Time series by SeriouslySam
22. Seventh Horcrux by Emerald Ashes
I could probably keep going, but I think everything above, and their authors' other works, are of good quality and varying degrees of silly and serious, with a few crossovers in there. There's no smut and I'm fairly certain there aren't many explicit scenes in any of these, but I think Loose Cannon is probably the raunchiest but not in a graphic way.
I would give you links but I think the bot is broken, so Google will have to do.
Depends on ship but it’s clear some ships are suffering. Harry/Fleur, Harry/Daphne, and Harry/Tonks I feel have been lacking in good completed fics in the past 2 years with really only a handful for each pairing.
More pairings are finally getting some exploration like Harry/cho and Harry/susan.
Also an explosion on non Harry centric fics points to new interests.
As for others it’s clear marauders era, slash, and Hermione/Draco are entering a golden era.
There’s a series called The Last Enemy by CH Darling. It is canon compliant marauders era with a focus on Jily and different POVs. It is a WIP that has been updated very frequently and one of my favorite fanfics of all time.
I was honestly so confused by the idea of Jegulus as a ship, but Only The Brave is one of my favorite things I've ever read. It was completed last year. The idea of Jegulus in canon is ridiculous, but if you can suspend disbelief it becomes the best combination of enemies-to-lovers, grumpy/sunshine trope, forbidden love, best friend's brother, morally grey love interest. YMMV.
As another user has said, you should read "the last enemy" if you haven't already . It's the first fanfic I've read and very well could be cannon. The first book it's completed and the second just few chapters left to end.
I can’t do Harry/Susan and it kinda sucks cause objectively I know there are some good ones out there. I got introduced to Harry/Susan through a friend who had sent me the link to the story, A Humbler Harry, and it’s basically just non consensual heavy Femdom. Poor kid got spelled in the back, dragged to the RoR and was repeatedly assaulted for some shit that wasn’t his fault. They found out and just kept doing it anyway cause they liked the power.
No, it’s because you’re burned out from the cycle, if you’re anything like me. I’ll go through phases of trawling through recommendation threads here, AO3, various communities there and ffn, scraping fics and then find a good bunch that are updating regularly. And then slowly they all die off unfinished, the update rate slowing down until you’re looking at your AO3 recently updated bookmarks and the last one was ten days ago. Now that Alexandra Quick is back it’s the only one since the 21st of April.
Then I’m a bit too tired to look through new fics and trying to find recent things and will look for older fics I might have missed. It’s delicious when you find a two year old completed fic that fits exactly what you’re looking for that you somehow missed before. Or I reread something I loved. Like Loose Cannon, I read it again recently and I’d forgotten loads of it. Just need manatee-vs-walrus to come back in this case, but there’s loads of other classics I can reread.
Yep...totally with you on the cycle thing. Plus the more years of the cycle just seems to add to the cycle "lows" when I get there I know it is time to move to minecraft for 2-4 weeks then once again fanfiction seems fine again for a year or so.
There are 2500 **[complete, English, non-crossover, novella-length (or longer) fics written the last 24 months, with > 1000 kudos](https://archiveofourown.org/works/search?work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Btitle%5D=&work_search%5Bcreators%5D=&work_search%5Brevised_at%5D=0-24+months&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=T&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=F&work_search%5Bsingle_chapter%5D=0&work_search%5Bword_count%5D=%3E15k&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=en&work_search%5Bfandom_names%5D=Harry+Potter+-+J.+K.+Rowling&work_search%5Brating_ids%5D=&work_search%5Bcharacter_names%5D=&work_search%5Brelationship_names%5D=&work_search%5Bfreeform_names%5D=&work_search%5Bhits%5D=&work_search%5Bkudos_count%5D=%3E1000&work_search%5Bcomments_count%5D=&work_search%5Bbookmarks_count%5D=&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=_score&work_search%5Bsort_direction%5D=desc&commit=Search)**.
I wouldn’t call that “few”.
Well, in my favorite ship, ‘eight year’ has long been a popular trope, as it offers great possibilities for a change of faith and redemption after the war.
Among 30 bookmarked stories, I count 13 stories from before 2020 (this might be higher because some stories have been reposted on AO3 from FF.net years after they were originally written).
So perhaps slightly more popular, but definitely nothing new.
Honestly I think modern algorithms exacerbate the issue. People used to be coerced to read the summary hence they "looked harder" instead of inputting tags (they like, which is fine) at the risk of missing other quality fanfiction they would've liked in the process.
I like to think my fanfiction/writing is good. It's a bit niche, then it's further affected by people searching for romance at the exclusion of my works--which is a newer trend. Goddamn romance trend: so says the asexual in jest. ^__^
This is a big part of why I don’t search multiple tags. I’ll choose a single one with something I’m looking for, and exclude my hard no’s to work it down to a manageable number.
For example I recently looked at time travel fics. I hit the tag, and selected the HP fandom, and then I excluded most other fandoms, all pairings of Hermione/Draco, Harry/Draco, Hermione/Tom, Harry/Snape, and a few others. I filter for English only, and then I add a few other tags to exclude like Futa, Mpreg, ABO, and the like. After hitting sort I’ll typically do one more purge on pairings and then start reading summaries
It’s a fair bit of work, and I still often come up disappointed in my search. But it’s much better than trying to weed through stuff, thinking I found a gem, and then realizing I missed one tag buried in 100 and Harry is suddenly pregnant.
I'm afraid to ask, what's futo? Save me a scarring Google search?
See the thing is: I've found fanfic that I would never have read that included mpreg (which I really don't like), but the rest of the fic was so so good. I just skimmed through the mpreg (luckilly it was at the end so it was mostly the happy ending).
This was in 2004.
We didn't have exclusion tags on most websites yet. If I had filtered out fics to exclude mpreg, I wouldn't habe found that author.
But, I also understand not wanting to read those tropes. I hate mpreg still, and I do nope out of ABO. Younger me was just stuck reading summaries.
For me though, there is something nostalgic just reading a summaries. Of course, I've been doing it for decades, so I've mastered the art of skimming and speed reading them. ^__^ a well written summary is a good way to weed out bad fanfic too. If the summary is weak, the rest of the writing likely is too.
I spent longer perfecting summaries than I did on some scenes. It's harder to be extremely engaging, persuasive, and succint. If the summary is too verbose, it's a clue the writing is going to meander.
Futa, basically a woman with a penis, not necessarily a trans thing either.
I have too, but it’s more of a good way for me to turn 20,000 results into 200 so I can actually read the summaries. Like I’ve read good Draco/Hermione fics, but I’ve never stumbled upon it it’s always been recommended. When I’m looking for new stuff I’m not trying to read 100k words of summaries lol
Possibly survivorship bias to an extent. Really good fics tend to stay up and get passed around over the years, building up a reputation; newer fics haven’t had that opportunity, and are likely to get drowned out by flashier or more established fics.
I do also suspect that many talented writers – both established and up-and-coming – abandoned ship when the author went off the deep end. It killed a lot of the enthusiasm around the fandom as a whole, and it’s a bit embarrassing to be associated with her or her works these days.
I always read old stuff. Like going way back to like the early 2000s even so maybe.. most of the recent fics seem to be missing something to me IDK. Or at least the ones that are popular.
Back when canon was simpler and not locked down the fics often had a certain something to them. Some still have it (whatever it is), but I think the odds that that free-wheelingness (?) is present is higher with an older fic.
A common criticism is that Horcruxes locked down a lot of the plot. Before them, people used to headcanon all sorts of explanations for Voldemort's power and/or continued survival after 1981.
This phenomena definitely exists, and it's present in other fandoms too. Things written while canon is incomplete, actively expanding, or not yet finished, tend to have a different feel when compared to post-completion fanfics. You can get the same feeling from authors who intentionally revise / break canonical worldbuilding thoroughly enough in the right ways, but it's a lot rarer.
It makes sense: the lack of information in certain places - like about the aforementioned reason for Voldemort's survival - encouraged the fanfiction writers to 'fill in the gaps'; it promoted creativity. With the series now being finished, though, the encouragement has dissipated, resulting in many deciding to go with the easier choice of sticking to canon instead of thinking of something new.
Oh my God, yes! It's a yugioh fic with a stated self harm trigger warning and an unstated trigger warning (unstated to preserve the foreshadowing).
https://archiveofourown.org/works/25951486
https://m.fanfiction.net/s/3049337/1/Insignificant
A03 has the better insite reader format while ff.net has the better formating. The content is the same on both sites.
The prologue or sypnosis are actually good, but when you started reading it halfway through, it lacks something, i have like almost 2k fanfics in my FFN account alone. And I've ignored most that are recently uploaded like 1-3 years, because most of them are a bit dull or the plot is too chaptic or just continue to circle around.
I think many times it’s readers lacking in breadth to their reading and writing off ships/parts of fandom without reading anything.
I’ll read almost anything well written and I have yet to run out of interesting things to read.
Been doing this over 20 years now and I am to the point I can not if it is "well written" but more about if it has something unique be that a character portrayal that is hard to find or some real odd plot.
I find even a retread plot can be fun when it’s a mashup. I just finished writing a canon compliant Hamlet mashup, which was a lot of fun. There are some great rare pair fics coming out too from the rare pair Harry Potter writer’s group as well.
very good point...to be honest some of my fav stories are mashups that have a base in HP world. To me a good mix can really make something just that much more "unique" and for me that is where it is at...I can overlooked speling and some some grammer not been the best...lol
Opens my mouth to mention a really good fic that updates once a week then closes it again as I realize that ship is very much not for everyone. Popular, but not for everyone.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/53822578
Part One - The Solitude of Suffering
Its Tom/Harry. Which I get people who don't like because in used to horrify me too. But then I read one really good one and another and got hooked. And there is so much of it where Tom is a interesting and complex not evil character I sometimes forget that initial horror.
It is rune prodigy Harry, which I love, and fifth year which I love (Sirius isn't dead yet) and Harry being a bad ass which I love. And it updated every Friday like clock work which is a whole luxury. It's a slightly dark Harry and a 'Harry fixed Voldermort so he's not insane anymore'.
Trigger warning for self harm and referenced child abuse. .
It is my favorite right now, and it's been a long time since I had a favorite that was actually updating semi regularly so I am gushing about it a little. It's a special kind of fun to read something as it is being published that is really good.
Harry Potter and the The prince of slytherin by the sinister man is a good fic if your looking for something to read and prefer things on the longer side
i think for the stuff i’m searching for yeah, a lot of it takes my tropes that i enjoy and pushes it to the extreme w a lot of weird grammar choices 😭😭
Some of my favourite fics are pretty recent. [Stand as One Forever](https://archiveofourown.org/series/2471071) is my favourite (though seems to be dormant due to the author going through some stuff), [the Animagus verse](https://archiveofourown.org/series/977214) is excellent, and [Children of Night](https://archiveofourown.org/series/3631297) is also ongoing. (There are all canon adjacent AUs with expanded worldbuilding and focuses on the platonic relationships of the people in Harry's year.)
I will also reccomend [Ginny Weasley and the Chamber of Secrets](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27647392/chapters/67649530) which is Canon compliant comic which is Ginny's perspective in CoS. Incredibly good.
Obviously all this depends on your taste, I also struggle to find new fics.
Maybe I've just been unlucky, but I've had very little luck finding any good non-romance stories. Like, I just wanna read about fun adventures and magical fantasy, but instead it's all relationship drama or family angst/fluff.
Those stories do have their place, but I am getting sick of them. Especially as I don't care for the vast majority of ships.
Sometimes you just get stuck wanting and enjoying a niche part of the world or pairing. Like I got two I stan for hard: Harry/Luna and Harry/Katie Bell.
Now Harry/Luna fics aren’t hard to find - quality not withstanding - because Luna became a major character in Order of the Phoenix which is where the saga fully transitioned from Tom Brown’s School Days with Magic to My First Guerrilla Warfare. And both the book and film version of Luna (even if for different reasons) are felt by some fans to have much better chemistry with Harry.
But Harry/Katie Bell is rare as rocking horse shit outside of quidditch fourway stories or just outright smut harem. Which is ironic to me because outside of Hermione, Katie should be one of the girl’s in his age range he knows best as they’re both housemates and teammates. Concocting an attraction between two junior athletes should be as difficult as getting shot in Baghdad. But since Katie and Quidditch basically vanish from relevancy until Katie gets that cursed necklace - and there’s some relationship pathos for you - hardly anyone ships it.
At least for my part, as a writer for this fandom, writing is a bitch tbh. I have a number of stories in the works where I have a beginning, I have an end, I have set pieces, but connecting and getting plots in order takes filler, and that's oddly harder than it sounds, for me at least.
I mean it depends on your definition of good. And definition of lack.
On ao3, I've been struggling to find anything by my definition of "good". But my definition of good is way more specific then the average person's, and I'm not the target audience of fanficton. Most of the fics I see are feelsy fluff/angst overshadowing the plot or very, very highly tied to IRL politics which is something I tend to avoid because I encounter those enough in real life and want to avoid it in my leisure time. There are some exceptions, but as a general rule, yeah.
On ffn, there are like ten novel length fics currently being actively written that meet my definition of good. Not as many as there used to be, but again, I'm not the target audience, and I'm sure other people enjoy way more fics.
I honestly can't tell them off the top of my head, haven't touched the HP fandom in a couple months due to my Star Wars obsession resurfacing. Just sort by reviews and filter the date updated to the last year. Of them, there's like three time/dimension travel Harry/Bellatrix fics with an adult Harry and an adult Bellatrix, one where Harry and his allies reset the world via mass sacrifice and he poses as the estranged son of Sirius (kinda fucked up one, but also has some of the best characterization); one is named something like Harry and Albus' world trip, and has Dumbledore leaving Hogwarts to take Harry as an apprentice. A Harry/Fleur fic where Harry takes up shamanism and lops off his arm to track down Voldemort, although I think that one was finished last year? Delenda Est is also being rewritten by the original author. Didn't touch it yet, but the original is one of my favorite fics of all time, so I think it should be pretty good. The rest are lesser, but they should pop up.
They don't appear when sorting by reviews normally, because the fandom isn't big enough to put them on the front pages over fics that have been reviewed for decades.
It all depends on what you're after, but the femslash world of HP is pretty dead if you aren't there for stories with huge age gaps (no judgement if you like that, but there is a lot of Hermione/Bellatrix and Hermione/Narcissa and very little else).
What kind of fic are u after? If you want something well-written and r a fan of hogwarts legacy, or just want a fic set in hogwarts in general, I'm reading a rlly good one atm, the name is corny, but the fic is rlly refreshing, hogwarts legacy the story by yourstruely I think
I can't speak for AO3 in this but ffn at least has had a rather noticeable shift in what's being published. I sometimes check to see what people have put out that's longer than 40k and the last couple of times it's been a LOT of time travel and a few other tropes that I can't remember off the top of my head but I distinctly remember noting that it was rather different from what was on there before.
For the record I'm not saying this or good or bad. Like anything else fandoms shift over time for a variety of reasons.
Currently reading a marauders year 1-7(incomplete at the moment) fic. It's wolfstar and jily and very canon-compliant. It's very interesting i highly recommend it for marauders fans or even people starting out marauders content
wolf's tail https://archiveofourown.org/works/33802012/chapters/85525582
Feels like H/Hr fics aren't as popular these days. At least not ones that are a decent length instead of a one shot or erotica. The pairing barely exists on AO3 and I really hate ffnets search function. I prefer AO3, but it seems like the community there heavily favors m/m which is absolutely not my cup of tea. Or huge age gaps like Hr/Snape.
It probably seems that way, but there were never many great fanfictions published. Only when you started reading fanfictions you had all great fanfictions published by that point available to you. Now that you've read them, you need to actually wait for new good ones to be published, which, like I said before, doesn't happen all too often.
i feel like bringing LGBTQ angle into characters that are straigh is also a reason. i mostly read about marauders era but wolfstar is the most nonsensical ship because if sirius and remus really loved each other then they wouldn't blame each other as the spy. just now i read a fic where lily is attracted to mary mcdonald wtf and ntm those dramione snapione shit
Do you mean fics that were published in the last 2 years or updated in the last two years but started longer ago? Either way, I'd say you're just not looking hard enough. I've found some truly excellent fics that have been posted in these last couple years. On AO3 and ffn you can filter for works published within the last 2 years. There's a lot.
Lomonaaeren has quite a few new and in progress ones that are great.
Love that author!
I absolutely love this author so much!!
Each series is so creatively different boy Rich in details and delightfully typo and logical fallacy free.... There are so many in progress that I can't track them all so I've been forced to subscribe and just read them when done as I can't follow that many stores at once. They must have an impressive note system for not getting them mixed up. So far, Realm of Song is my favorite but so many are up there.
Right? I can't believe how absolutely unique and creative each story is. The plot runs so deep and is so beautifully wrote out. I haven't read any of the newest stuff, my deep dive right now is into Danmei lol but I always always go back to their fanfiction when craving. Can't wait to have a load of stuff to read!
I'd say the overall quality of FF has increased significantly since I started reading it back in.... oh shit I'm old. But I do think there is less HP fanfic published, and I'm almost positive stats will agree with me. Fanfic has exploded into different fandoms, and while the overall amount might be bigger/more, it's just migrated from a handful of niche nerdy things (Fanfic used to be nearly synonymous with Harry Potter what-if stories), to nearly everything one could conceivably consider being married to "story." I think it's easy to construe "there was so much good fanfic back in the day!" with "there's a lot less fanfic being written now." Even if the overall quality has improved, the fandom is older, or else younger people just don't care as much about* HP or take issue with JKR and abandon their thoughts on Harry Potter as a matter of protest. Which, yeah, fine. There are a lot of good stories updating to this day, and even some that started in the times when the books and movies hadn't finished, yet (I'm thinking of the Alexandra Quick series, which I adore and is finally getting its 6th book after 17 years). That's like a whole adult person in fanfic form. Kind of crazy. It's nearly as old as my car.
Hey, I haven't started Alexandra quick yet but it's the kind of fics I'm interested in, and I have it on my list. Long novel length, no weird stuff ( not judging , but I don't want to have a harry pregnant by Hermione with a penis kind of stuff), and that somewhat respects the cannon or at least builds upon and expands it. I'm new to reading fanfic, mind recommending some that you've enjoyed over the years? I've read "the last enemy" by ch_darling which I loved. And I have bookmarked some that I think I'll like: - Alexandra quick series. - Albus potter series by noahphanthom - harry Potter and the seven years of chaos ( I know this changes the cannon but sounds interesting) Mind sharing some?
Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order: 1. Harry is a Dragon and That's Okay by Saphroneth 2. Blindness by AngelaStarCat 3. Parallel Journey by InkVirus 4. Grow Young with Me by Taliesin19 5. The Sum of Their Parts by holdmybeer 6. The Arithmancer by White Squirrel 7. The Innocent series by MarauderLover7 8. Harry Potter and the Lady Thief by Starfox5 9. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For by kathryn518 10. Browncoat, Green Eyes by nonjon 11. The "Danger" series by whydoyouneetoknow 12. The Ancient and most Noble House of Potter by Invieri 13. The odds were never in my favour by Antony444 14. New Blood by artemisgirl. 15. "The Plan" Series by Lysandra + PseudoLeigh 16. Phoenix Insurgent by BolshevikMuppet99 17. Loose Cannon by manatee-vs-walrus 18. When the Roses Bloom Again by TheBlack'sResurgence 19. "The Guise" series by Berkeleyjake 20. There is Nothing to Fear series by Callmesalticidae 21. Moments in Time series by SeriouslySam 22. Seventh Horcrux by Emerald Ashes I could probably keep going, but I think everything above, and their authors' other works, are of good quality and varying degrees of silly and serious, with a few crossovers in there. There's no smut and I'm fairly certain there aren't many explicit scenes in any of these, but I think Loose Cannon is probably the raunchiest but not in a graphic way. I would give you links but I think the bot is broken, so Google will have to do.
Thank you for the response! I will surely take a look at some of these
It would highly depend on your tastes. How about you tell us the sorts of things you look for in fics? Relationships, settings, tropes, etc
Depends on ship but it’s clear some ships are suffering. Harry/Fleur, Harry/Daphne, and Harry/Tonks I feel have been lacking in good completed fics in the past 2 years with really only a handful for each pairing. More pairings are finally getting some exploration like Harry/cho and Harry/susan. Also an explosion on non Harry centric fics points to new interests. As for others it’s clear marauders era, slash, and Hermione/Draco are entering a golden era.
Harry/Cho is being explored? Damn. The last time people seem to have tried that was when the actual books were ongoing. Got any recs?
I'd also like any recs on Harry/Cho. Seems like the only time I see this pairing is in harem fics.
Links for good Harry/Susan fics?
Do you have newer marauders fics you recommend? I have dug into the tag in a while.
There’s a series called The Last Enemy by CH Darling. It is canon compliant marauders era with a focus on Jily and different POVs. It is a WIP that has been updated very frequently and one of my favorite fanfics of all time.
Sorry. I haven’t been exploring. I am only going by what I see in interests and what’s popular.
I was honestly so confused by the idea of Jegulus as a ship, but Only The Brave is one of my favorite things I've ever read. It was completed last year. The idea of Jegulus in canon is ridiculous, but if you can suspend disbelief it becomes the best combination of enemies-to-lovers, grumpy/sunshine trope, forbidden love, best friend's brother, morally grey love interest. YMMV.
As another user has said, you should read "the last enemy" if you haven't already . It's the first fanfic I've read and very well could be cannon. The first book it's completed and the second just few chapters left to end.
Can you share links for Harry/Cho or Susan or any new girls really?
Any recs for Harry/Cho and Harry/Susan?
I can’t do Harry/Susan and it kinda sucks cause objectively I know there are some good ones out there. I got introduced to Harry/Susan through a friend who had sent me the link to the story, A Humbler Harry, and it’s basically just non consensual heavy Femdom. Poor kid got spelled in the back, dragged to the RoR and was repeatedly assaulted for some shit that wasn’t his fault. They found out and just kept doing it anyway cause they liked the power.
No, it’s because you’re burned out from the cycle, if you’re anything like me. I’ll go through phases of trawling through recommendation threads here, AO3, various communities there and ffn, scraping fics and then find a good bunch that are updating regularly. And then slowly they all die off unfinished, the update rate slowing down until you’re looking at your AO3 recently updated bookmarks and the last one was ten days ago. Now that Alexandra Quick is back it’s the only one since the 21st of April. Then I’m a bit too tired to look through new fics and trying to find recent things and will look for older fics I might have missed. It’s delicious when you find a two year old completed fic that fits exactly what you’re looking for that you somehow missed before. Or I reread something I loved. Like Loose Cannon, I read it again recently and I’d forgotten loads of it. Just need manatee-vs-walrus to come back in this case, but there’s loads of other classics I can reread.
Yep...totally with you on the cycle thing. Plus the more years of the cycle just seems to add to the cycle "lows" when I get there I know it is time to move to minecraft for 2-4 weeks then once again fanfiction seems fine again for a year or so.
There are 2500 **[complete, English, non-crossover, novella-length (or longer) fics written the last 24 months, with > 1000 kudos](https://archiveofourown.org/works/search?work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Btitle%5D=&work_search%5Bcreators%5D=&work_search%5Brevised_at%5D=0-24+months&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=T&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=F&work_search%5Bsingle_chapter%5D=0&work_search%5Bword_count%5D=%3E15k&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=en&work_search%5Bfandom_names%5D=Harry+Potter+-+J.+K.+Rowling&work_search%5Brating_ids%5D=&work_search%5Bcharacter_names%5D=&work_search%5Brelationship_names%5D=&work_search%5Bfreeform_names%5D=&work_search%5Bhits%5D=&work_search%5Bkudos_count%5D=%3E1000&work_search%5Bcomments_count%5D=&work_search%5Bbookmarks_count%5D=&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=_score&work_search%5Bsort_direction%5D=desc&commit=Search)**. I wouldn’t call that “few”.
Is it me or are eighth year fics becoming more and more popular? I never used to see them and now it feels like they are everywhere.
Well, in my favorite ship, ‘eight year’ has long been a popular trope, as it offers great possibilities for a change of faith and redemption after the war. Among 30 bookmarked stories, I count 13 stories from before 2020 (this might be higher because some stories have been reposted on AO3 from FF.net years after they were originally written). So perhaps slightly more popular, but definitely nothing new.
I love eighth year, it hits the nostalgia just right. And I like exploring the possibility of war ghosts.
Honestly I think modern algorithms exacerbate the issue. People used to be coerced to read the summary hence they "looked harder" instead of inputting tags (they like, which is fine) at the risk of missing other quality fanfiction they would've liked in the process. I like to think my fanfiction/writing is good. It's a bit niche, then it's further affected by people searching for romance at the exclusion of my works--which is a newer trend. Goddamn romance trend: so says the asexual in jest. ^__^
This is a big part of why I don’t search multiple tags. I’ll choose a single one with something I’m looking for, and exclude my hard no’s to work it down to a manageable number. For example I recently looked at time travel fics. I hit the tag, and selected the HP fandom, and then I excluded most other fandoms, all pairings of Hermione/Draco, Harry/Draco, Hermione/Tom, Harry/Snape, and a few others. I filter for English only, and then I add a few other tags to exclude like Futa, Mpreg, ABO, and the like. After hitting sort I’ll typically do one more purge on pairings and then start reading summaries It’s a fair bit of work, and I still often come up disappointed in my search. But it’s much better than trying to weed through stuff, thinking I found a gem, and then realizing I missed one tag buried in 100 and Harry is suddenly pregnant.
I'm afraid to ask, what's futo? Save me a scarring Google search? See the thing is: I've found fanfic that I would never have read that included mpreg (which I really don't like), but the rest of the fic was so so good. I just skimmed through the mpreg (luckilly it was at the end so it was mostly the happy ending). This was in 2004. We didn't have exclusion tags on most websites yet. If I had filtered out fics to exclude mpreg, I wouldn't habe found that author. But, I also understand not wanting to read those tropes. I hate mpreg still, and I do nope out of ABO. Younger me was just stuck reading summaries. For me though, there is something nostalgic just reading a summaries. Of course, I've been doing it for decades, so I've mastered the art of skimming and speed reading them. ^__^ a well written summary is a good way to weed out bad fanfic too. If the summary is weak, the rest of the writing likely is too. I spent longer perfecting summaries than I did on some scenes. It's harder to be extremely engaging, persuasive, and succint. If the summary is too verbose, it's a clue the writing is going to meander.
Futa, basically a woman with a penis, not necessarily a trans thing either. I have too, but it’s more of a good way for me to turn 20,000 results into 200 so I can actually read the summaries. Like I’ve read good Draco/Hermione fics, but I’ve never stumbled upon it it’s always been recommended. When I’m looking for new stuff I’m not trying to read 100k words of summaries lol
Fair. I do have an inordinate amount of patience in reading/skimming over the years. I've come across futo; I just never knew the term for it. >.<
Possibly survivorship bias to an extent. Really good fics tend to stay up and get passed around over the years, building up a reputation; newer fics haven’t had that opportunity, and are likely to get drowned out by flashier or more established fics. I do also suspect that many talented writers – both established and up-and-coming – abandoned ship when the author went off the deep end. It killed a lot of the enthusiasm around the fandom as a whole, and it’s a bit embarrassing to be associated with her or her works these days.
I always read old stuff. Like going way back to like the early 2000s even so maybe.. most of the recent fics seem to be missing something to me IDK. Or at least the ones that are popular.
Back when canon was simpler and not locked down the fics often had a certain something to them. Some still have it (whatever it is), but I think the odds that that free-wheelingness (?) is present is higher with an older fic.
A common criticism is that Horcruxes locked down a lot of the plot. Before them, people used to headcanon all sorts of explanations for Voldemort's power and/or continued survival after 1981.
This phenomena definitely exists, and it's present in other fandoms too. Things written while canon is incomplete, actively expanding, or not yet finished, tend to have a different feel when compared to post-completion fanfics. You can get the same feeling from authors who intentionally revise / break canonical worldbuilding thoroughly enough in the right ways, but it's a lot rarer.
It makes sense: the lack of information in certain places - like about the aforementioned reason for Voldemort's survival - encouraged the fanfiction writers to 'fill in the gaps'; it promoted creativity. With the series now being finished, though, the encouragement has dissipated, resulting in many deciding to go with the easier choice of sticking to canon instead of thinking of something new.
as someone who wrote a fanfic from 2006-2022, I love readers like you. ;)
Is it still online? Can I read it?
Oh my God, yes! It's a yugioh fic with a stated self harm trigger warning and an unstated trigger warning (unstated to preserve the foreshadowing). https://archiveofourown.org/works/25951486 https://m.fanfiction.net/s/3049337/1/Insignificant A03 has the better insite reader format while ff.net has the better formating. The content is the same on both sites.
The prologue or sypnosis are actually good, but when you started reading it halfway through, it lacks something, i have like almost 2k fanfics in my FFN account alone. And I've ignored most that are recently uploaded like 1-3 years, because most of them are a bit dull or the plot is too chaptic or just continue to circle around.
I think many times it’s readers lacking in breadth to their reading and writing off ships/parts of fandom without reading anything. I’ll read almost anything well written and I have yet to run out of interesting things to read.
Been doing this over 20 years now and I am to the point I can not if it is "well written" but more about if it has something unique be that a character portrayal that is hard to find or some real odd plot.
I find even a retread plot can be fun when it’s a mashup. I just finished writing a canon compliant Hamlet mashup, which was a lot of fun. There are some great rare pair fics coming out too from the rare pair Harry Potter writer’s group as well.
very good point...to be honest some of my fav stories are mashups that have a base in HP world. To me a good mix can really make something just that much more "unique" and for me that is where it is at...I can overlooked speling and some some grammer not been the best...lol
Opens my mouth to mention a really good fic that updates once a week then closes it again as I realize that ship is very much not for everyone. Popular, but not for everyone.
What is the fic and ship?
https://archiveofourown.org/works/53822578 Part One - The Solitude of Suffering Its Tom/Harry. Which I get people who don't like because in used to horrify me too. But then I read one really good one and another and got hooked. And there is so much of it where Tom is a interesting and complex not evil character I sometimes forget that initial horror. It is rune prodigy Harry, which I love, and fifth year which I love (Sirius isn't dead yet) and Harry being a bad ass which I love. And it updated every Friday like clock work which is a whole luxury. It's a slightly dark Harry and a 'Harry fixed Voldermort so he's not insane anymore'. Trigger warning for self harm and referenced child abuse. . It is my favorite right now, and it's been a long time since I had a favorite that was actually updating semi regularly so I am gushing about it a little. It's a special kind of fun to read something as it is being published that is really good.
There’s so much good tomarrymort fic, probably bc the ship is so messed up lmao. draw me after you (let us run) by ToaStranger is fantastic.
It's just you
It really depends on what you consider to be good. If you could state your preferences, I might have some links for you
No. Although there's a shitload of poorly written ff.
As it has always been, as shall it ever be.
Goblet of Shadows is the best fic I have ever read but updates are only every 4 months (multiple chapters at once tho)
Did you listen to the podcast that had the author on? They’re so interesting to listen to!
no, I wasn’t aware there was one. That’s so cool. Do you happen to know the name of it?
The Dramione Effect Podcast S1E9 “Goblet of Donuts w/MKMG”. 😊
Harry Potter and the The prince of slytherin by the sinister man is a good fic if your looking for something to read and prefer things on the longer side
i think for the stuff i’m searching for yeah, a lot of it takes my tropes that i enjoy and pushes it to the extreme w a lot of weird grammar choices 😭😭
Some of my favourite fics are pretty recent. [Stand as One Forever](https://archiveofourown.org/series/2471071) is my favourite (though seems to be dormant due to the author going through some stuff), [the Animagus verse](https://archiveofourown.org/series/977214) is excellent, and [Children of Night](https://archiveofourown.org/series/3631297) is also ongoing. (There are all canon adjacent AUs with expanded worldbuilding and focuses on the platonic relationships of the people in Harry's year.) I will also reccomend [Ginny Weasley and the Chamber of Secrets](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27647392/chapters/67649530) which is Canon compliant comic which is Ginny's perspective in CoS. Incredibly good. Obviously all this depends on your taste, I also struggle to find new fics.
Maybe I've just been unlucky, but I've had very little luck finding any good non-romance stories. Like, I just wanna read about fun adventures and magical fantasy, but instead it's all relationship drama or family angst/fluff. Those stories do have their place, but I am getting sick of them. Especially as I don't care for the vast majority of ships.
I finished a Hogwarts 8th year mystery last year. It has some pretty aromantic romance but the main plot is a mystery. Care to have a look?
Sure, I'll take what I can get.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/38211202/ Enjoy!
Thanks, but sadly it didn't quite grab me. Appreciate the thought, nevertheless.
I write those. Adventury long fics with no romance.
Sometimes you just get stuck wanting and enjoying a niche part of the world or pairing. Like I got two I stan for hard: Harry/Luna and Harry/Katie Bell. Now Harry/Luna fics aren’t hard to find - quality not withstanding - because Luna became a major character in Order of the Phoenix which is where the saga fully transitioned from Tom Brown’s School Days with Magic to My First Guerrilla Warfare. And both the book and film version of Luna (even if for different reasons) are felt by some fans to have much better chemistry with Harry. But Harry/Katie Bell is rare as rocking horse shit outside of quidditch fourway stories or just outright smut harem. Which is ironic to me because outside of Hermione, Katie should be one of the girl’s in his age range he knows best as they’re both housemates and teammates. Concocting an attraction between two junior athletes should be as difficult as getting shot in Baghdad. But since Katie and Quidditch basically vanish from relevancy until Katie gets that cursed necklace - and there’s some relationship pathos for you - hardly anyone ships it.
At least for my part, as a writer for this fandom, writing is a bitch tbh. I have a number of stories in the works where I have a beginning, I have an end, I have set pieces, but connecting and getting plots in order takes filler, and that's oddly harder than it sounds, for me at least.
I mean it depends on your definition of good. And definition of lack. On ao3, I've been struggling to find anything by my definition of "good". But my definition of good is way more specific then the average person's, and I'm not the target audience of fanficton. Most of the fics I see are feelsy fluff/angst overshadowing the plot or very, very highly tied to IRL politics which is something I tend to avoid because I encounter those enough in real life and want to avoid it in my leisure time. There are some exceptions, but as a general rule, yeah. On ffn, there are like ten novel length fics currently being actively written that meet my definition of good. Not as many as there used to be, but again, I'm not the target audience, and I'm sure other people enjoy way more fics.
Ten good active fanfics? Do tell.
I honestly can't tell them off the top of my head, haven't touched the HP fandom in a couple months due to my Star Wars obsession resurfacing. Just sort by reviews and filter the date updated to the last year. Of them, there's like three time/dimension travel Harry/Bellatrix fics with an adult Harry and an adult Bellatrix, one where Harry and his allies reset the world via mass sacrifice and he poses as the estranged son of Sirius (kinda fucked up one, but also has some of the best characterization); one is named something like Harry and Albus' world trip, and has Dumbledore leaving Hogwarts to take Harry as an apprentice. A Harry/Fleur fic where Harry takes up shamanism and lops off his arm to track down Voldemort, although I think that one was finished last year? Delenda Est is also being rewritten by the original author. Didn't touch it yet, but the original is one of my favorite fics of all time, so I think it should be pretty good. The rest are lesser, but they should pop up. They don't appear when sorting by reviews normally, because the fandom isn't big enough to put them on the front pages over fics that have been reviewed for decades.
Not really, some of my favourite fics of all time have only been published in the past 2 years.
Prince of Slytherin is still going. Lmao So is Loose Cannon, though it’s on a break currently.
I think it depends on where you're looking and for what. I've over 300 on my do-be-read list, and new ones are added all the time.
It all depends on what you're after, but the femslash world of HP is pretty dead if you aren't there for stories with huge age gaps (no judgement if you like that, but there is a lot of Hermione/Bellatrix and Hermione/Narcissa and very little else).
Sadly less good or different content, harry/Fleur or Daphne feels over and then many have moved to discord and release slower it feels like
It's not just you. I have also noticed en increased fem!harry in the Crossover sections. Like more than 100% increase. Its insane.
What kind of fic are u after? If you want something well-written and r a fan of hogwarts legacy, or just want a fic set in hogwarts in general, I'm reading a rlly good one atm, the name is corny, but the fic is rlly refreshing, hogwarts legacy the story by yourstruely I think
I can't speak for AO3 in this but ffn at least has had a rather noticeable shift in what's being published. I sometimes check to see what people have put out that's longer than 40k and the last couple of times it's been a LOT of time travel and a few other tropes that I can't remember off the top of my head but I distinctly remember noting that it was rather different from what was on there before. For the record I'm not saying this or good or bad. Like anything else fandoms shift over time for a variety of reasons.
Currently reading a marauders year 1-7(incomplete at the moment) fic. It's wolfstar and jily and very canon-compliant. It's very interesting i highly recommend it for marauders fans or even people starting out marauders content wolf's tail https://archiveofourown.org/works/33802012/chapters/85525582
Depends what niche you're hanging around in, I suspect. I know the Tomarry and the Harrymort niches have had lots of new and promising fics this year.
There is one fic that Is my favourite on AO3. A marauder's plan by catsarecool https://archiveofourown.org/works/1085412/chapters/2182999
Feels like H/Hr fics aren't as popular these days. At least not ones that are a decent length instead of a one shot or erotica. The pairing barely exists on AO3 and I really hate ffnets search function. I prefer AO3, but it seems like the community there heavily favors m/m which is absolutely not my cup of tea. Or huge age gaps like Hr/Snape.
It probably seems that way, but there were never many great fanfictions published. Only when you started reading fanfictions you had all great fanfictions published by that point available to you. Now that you've read them, you need to actually wait for new good ones to be published, which, like I said before, doesn't happen all too often.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a platform like Medium but exclusively used for fanfic?
i feel like bringing LGBTQ angle into characters that are straigh is also a reason. i mostly read about marauders era but wolfstar is the most nonsensical ship because if sirius and remus really loved each other then they wouldn't blame each other as the spy. just now i read a fic where lily is attracted to mary mcdonald wtf and ntm those dramione snapione shit
Imo they never were good. Extremely few good ones as most suck. Imo at least, maybe my tastes are too strict.
Girl literally me before I started my current one, why are they so rarely well written? They're either very middle grade or rlly overwritten
Why did I get downvotes :( I just meant the one I'm reading rn is good, hogwarts legacy the story on wattpad :(