Gemfist's Totally Radical HP Prompts

by Gemfist

This is a collection of awesome, badass, spectacular writing prompts for Harry Potter. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a totally awesome HP story off one of the prompts. Warning: Incredible levels of imagination were involved in the writing of these prompts. No magical creatures were harmed in the creation of these prompts.

Hey, it's Gemfist, with my first actual prompt!

This is an idea that occurred to me way back and has kind of been stuck in my head for a while now.

This is an Animagus!Harry prompt, but not one of those overdone Phoenix!Harry or MultipleAnimagus!Harry fics. The idea I had involved one of the most overlooked magical creatures in the HP universe, a Boggart.

My ideas for this story include:

Describing Boggarts to a high degree (You can get creative with how the species began and such, but I'd rather not have "Yup I'm a magical shapeshifter who is incredibly powerful," with no explanation.)

A powerful Harry (but not Godlike, he should be powerful enough to stand on even grounds or even slightly above Voldie, so basically more powerful than anyone 'cept Moldyshorts himself)

No excessive bashing of any one character (as every character has their values and senseless bashing tends to annoy me more than compel me to read further)

The setting would preferably be fourth year (but not just jumping right into the action, with his buddies abandoning him and such, I'd prefer some buildup, or maybe even a thorough fleshing out of Ron's character which reveals his incessant jealousy and explains his attitude to Harry a bit more.)

For pairings I personally love singular pairings, I'm a romantic at heart and though I do enjoy the occasional multipairing/harem fic, most tend to stop being about the story and more about tons of sex and gathering more girls, or even worse, the plot continues on but the girls just randomly show up in the harem with explanations like "Oh I've always liked you," or "You just get me so hot." So yeah, singular pairing. (Don't really care who the pairing is with, but it would be nice if you tried something different, used a side-character and gave them actual life. And, please, please, for sanity's sake, if you decide to do a Hermione/Harry pairing don't just make it like: "We've been attracted to each other forever." Or just dump them into a relationship as if they've been in one forever, the same really goes for any other pairing too.)

For the Boggart side of things, the Boggart's true form should be something badass but not totally left field. (Some ideas I had for it were: a pile of black smoke, a small animal with horns that glow when Harry changes out of that shape, or even a completely regular animal that has some magical feature, maybe even an animal that wizards classified as something completely different from a Boggart, having never seen one change shape.)

As for the powers being a Boggart Animagus grant Harry, I was thinking to stick with the canon abilities, so no overpowered teleportation abilities, or instakill abilities, maybe give him some incontrollable occlumency skills as a result of his transformation. Maybe expand on the things we've seen from Boggart's in the movies: fitting in extremely small places and shifting shape into different fears it absorbs from people. (For the fear induced shapeshifting I think Harry should struggle to control himself from changing when someone approaches his Boggart form, for at least a couple of months, eventually gaining more control over it as well as gaining the ability to change into any of the fears he has absorbed in the past.) For example: If say Hermione's greatest fear is a basilisk after the occurrences of second year than Harry can turn into a basilisk, however changing shape into a magical creature should not grant Harry all its powers as that would be OP as hell. He can either gain a watered-down version of their abilities, one of their abilities, which he can't choose, or none at all. Also, the size of creatures Harry can turn into should be limited by how many fears he has absorbed. In essence: Harry can't just use someone's fear to turn into a giant off the start and absolutely crush his opposition.

I always hate how in typical group animagus stories Harry gets something cool like a Shadow Wolf and everyone else gets shafted, so if you choose to give more people animagus forms, maybe make them unique, there are tons of creatures that don't get much time in the Potterverse. You can make Ron a niffler animagus, Hermione a Cornish pixie animagus (To be honest a little blue Hermione flying around sounds adorable), you can even make Voldemort some kind of powerful serpentine animagus like a basilisk or a dragon. But if you do give other characters animagus abilities try and expand on what their forms can do as you did with Boggart!Harry. Maybe Pixie!Hermione has incredible amounts of strength (as shown by how a handful of pixies lifted Neville in book two), or Niffler!Ron has an innate sense for finding lost things (which would really help on a certain Horcrux hunt).

I know I kind of just dumped a lot out into that prompt but, like I said, I've been obsessing over this idea for like—ever. If someone does choose to try it, I would love to read it! So, let me know if you choose to give it a whirl!