Fic: Remix Revival 2017 - Hunting the Lion (Harry Potter)
Hunting the Lion (The "Truth in Fiction is Strange" Remix) (5369 words)
Inspired by Hermione Granger and the Amazing Outfits of Luna Lovegood by likeadeuce
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Words: ~ 5400
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Luna Lovegood
Characters: Hermione Granger, Luna Lovegood, Harry Potter, Minerva McGonagall, Parvati Patil, Ginny Weasley
Additional Tags: Lions, Remix, POV Luna Lovegood, characters reading comics
In which Luna Lovegood prowls through darkest Hogwarts with wand and costume(s), hunting a very particular lion.
So I started spelunking through a large swath of other material, pausing briefly in a couple of parts of the MCU -- when I happened across the above-referenced Harry Potter story. And I was immediately both charmed and inspired; the author's hand with the core relationship was light but sure, the story was ideally suited for a POV flip -- and Luna happens to be one of my favorite of Rowling's secondary characters. Never mind that the only other core Potterverse fic I'd written was a tiny comic ficlet (featuring Hermione and Ron), unless one counted a brief Stargate SG-1 remix set in the Potterverse. Never mind that I mostly write in smallish fandoms or on the fringes of larger ones. Luna was calling me, and this was a remix that felt both worthwhile and entertaining.
I set out, initially, to do the story as a fairly close scene-for-scene POV reversal. Which was fine as far as it went, but became more challenging as matters progressed. I did a good bit of Web-crawling when I got to the scene at Professor Slughorn's party, in order to keep myself as canon-compliant as possible. I made a deliberate nod to one of the commenters on the original story during Luna's appearance costumed as Wonder Woman; of course she included a tiara and a golden lasso -- which in turn introduced a new plot point that proved absolutely essential to the remixed climax. The additional detail also tilted certain other aspects of the relevant scene in a different direction from that of the original story, which in turn rippled forward into later sequences. As a result, the back end of "Hunting the Lion" is markedly more direct about its characters' intentions than its source tale...which is, I suppose, part of what makes it a remix.