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All Holly Potter wanted was to know was what strange and mysterious secret was hidden in that cupboard under the stairs, which her aunt and uncle never let her go near… and what did it have to do with “those lesbian freaks” Aunt Petunia would complain about?

Hello to you, and welcome to Holly Potter and the Witching World,  a complete AU/re-imagining of the classic Harry Potter and franchise; it’s more adult-oriented, more LGBTQ-focused, and definitely more feminine than what we’re used to from the Potterverse.

Yes, it’s Fem!Harry, but it’s more than that. In this universe, more than 90% of magical births are female. Hence, you have the “witching world” instead of canon’s “wizarding world.”

It’s not really a harem story, at least not the kind of “harem story” you usually get with HP fanfiction… though harems and polygamy are central to the witching world and will play a large role in the story. After all, when there are so few men around, women have to either share, or learn to get by without men. (Or go find themselves a Muggle man, but that brings with it its own set of problems when Muggles aren’t supposed to know about magic.)

Magic works a little differently in this world as well… so if you, while reading this story, come across a section that makes you go “Hey! This isn’t how things work in canon!”… well, then, you’re probably right.

But for all that, the story still starts with a neglected orphan whose entire world changes when she is introduced to a world of magic, who finds herself off to Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and who eventually will have to face down the evil wizard who killed her parents.

(Story is up for heavy revision, not to mention I’m tearing myself further away from the HP creator and her utter hateful bigotry… but you can still read the first draft on AO3)

FAQ
(Because I imagine you have some questions)

 

What happened to the witching-world.com site?

I closed it down. I originally established it to have an alternate place to host the fic in addition to AO3, but with the fic on long hiatus and artofdinam.com expanding to include more of my writing, there was no real reason to keep paying for keeping the site up. The revised, much more developed, more adult-rated and much less respectful towards JKR, fic will be posted here. In the meantime, the original version will still be available on AO3.

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Harry Potter?! Come on, Dina! Don’t you know that Rowling is a TERF and a bigot and supporting that wizarding world of her is the same as giving money towards the continued oppression of trans people?

Yes. Believe me, I know. That’s why I’m going away from the HP franchise that I used to love. I do, however, have a few stories in me that takes a stand against JKR and everything she stands for, and one of those stories takes the form of a horny AU that takes the form of an unorthodox and heavily lesbian harem story.

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Be honest: This entire thing is a rip-off of Darth Marrs’s Firebird trilogy, isn’t it?

I’ll admit that it can seem that way, but I hadn’t actually heard of Darth Marrs or the Firebird trilogy until I’d already done quite a bit of worldbuilding for the witching world.

When I found out there was already a fic out there with a predominently female magical world where harems were a thing, I immediately found Darth Marrs’s Fanfiction.net account and started reading…. and quickly found that it wasn’t quite my thing, and that Darth’s Marrs’s take on a predominently female, harem-centric magical world did not resemble mine.

Well, okay, I did swipe the word “coven” from Darth Marrs, as a word for the harems, because it was too good a word not to be used. But otherwise, I’m telling a very different story set in a very different world.

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So if not from Darth Marrs, where did the idea for the story come from?

Online roleplays. And yes, a large number of them were VERY adult-rated. I’ve always liked designing and developing fem!versions of male characters, and a number of the people I played with were interested in harem play, so the combination made sense… a world where there were a lot more women than men would probably mean that the women were more inclined to share…

But what started as a mere excuse for harem-plays took on its own life.  I got much more interested in the backstory, the way a magical society based around polygamy and a general lack of men might function, and how the various characters would be different. Obviously you couldn’t just copy-paste the canon world, history and backstory; the personal histories of the characters would be different, the entire “Marauders” story would need to be drastically altered, and with the “fewer but bigger families” idea you’d have several people who were unrelated in canon but would be at least half-sisters in this universe… and you needed more characters to flesh out various covens and groups…

I might have got slightly carried away, because in the end I’d written like twenty pages of backstory, with fifteen additional pages of character lists and descriptions, and I hadn’t even got to the part where the main character was to start Hogwarts. And I thought “no player’s going to bother reading all this! Maybe I should try turning it into a proper fanfic…”

And so started my quest to write an actual story, which I gave the name “Holly Potter and the Witching World.”.

 

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Okay, okay. But there ARE boys in this AU, right? Which characters are still male?

Well, it’s not a complete list, but I have these characters listed as being male:

  • Dean Thomas
  • Albus Dumbledore
  • Tom Riddle
  • Rubeus Hagrid
  • James Potter
  • Sirius Black
  • Arthur Weasley
  • Lucius Malfoy
  • Xenophilius Lovegood
  • Filius Flitwick
  • Gilderoy Lockhart
  • Garrick Ollivander
  • Amos Diggory
  • Cedric Diggory
  • Ernie Macmillan
  • Theodore Nott
  • Cormac McLaggen
  • Gabriel Truman
  • Newt Scamander
  • Gellert Grindelwald (though he’s not played by Johnny Depp)
  • Nicolas Flamel
  • …and of course the legendary Merlin.

Harry is NOT male because frankly it was too much for him to be both “the important Chosen One” and one of the very few rare boys out there.

 

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Are Hagrid and Dumbledore a gay couple in this story?

I… honestly don’t know? I didn’t intend for them to be when I started writing the story. Well, I knew that the Muggles of Privet Drive would think they were a gay couple (and kind of silently disapprove of it) and of course I knew Dumbledore was gay… but I didn’t think of them as an actual couple.

Still… reading back on some of those scenes, there is a bit of a “gay couple” vibe between them, isn’t there? And now my mind flipflops between whether they are a couple or not. Sometimes I think they are, sometimes I think they’re not. It all depends on whether Hagrid swings that way, and if Dumbledore is his type if he does… and I don’t really know.

I suppose it all comes down to what you as a reader think. If you want them to be a couple, they are. If you don’t, they aren’t. And I know it feels a little wishy-washy to be vague about this one pairing. It’s not intentional queerbaiting, I promise. (I’ll take heart in the fact that there’s plenty of queer content elsewhere in the fic.)

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