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i am begging you to try harry potter fan fiction

2026-07-10 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 24:57 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books and reading · mode: Review and recommendation · tags: He changed his mind

Ali, who calls Harry Potter fan fiction one of the three things that changed his life in the past year, explains how he went from dismissing fan fiction to evangelising it and recommends five long Harry Potter fan fictions: Methods of Rationality, The Debt of Time, The Rigel Black Chronicles, Backwards with Purpose and Manacled.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Three things that changed his life this year, and why a video on fan fiction

  • ★★ Ali says three things changed his life over the past year: having a baby girl, discovering Claude Code and getting obsessed with Harry Potter fan fiction. — 00:00:00 · Claude, Harry Potter (book series)

00:00:29 — What fan fiction is, his old view of it, and how Methods of Rationality won him over

  • ★★ Ali used to think fan fiction was teenage girls turning book scenes into spicy romance, as his wife's school friends did with Glee fan fiction; that description misses a lot, he says, like calling all books Fifty Shades of Grey. — 00:00:53 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ Ali held that view of fan fiction until about the middle of 2025, when he came across a Reddit thread about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. — 00:01:23 · Reddit
  • ★★ Over about five years three friends independently recommended Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to Ali, among them Cliff Weitzman, founder of Speechify, and his brother; Ali ignored the recommendation at the time. — 00:01:48
  • ★★ Once Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality had been recommended by enough different sources, Ali gave it a go and was hooked at once; it became his gateway into Harry Potter fan fiction. — 00:02:22 · Harry Potter (book series)

00:02:47 — Book 1: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; reading fan fiction as EPUB on a Kindle

  • ★★★ Ali's first recommendation for people getting into Harry Potter fan fiction is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky. — 00:02:47 · Harry Potter (book series)
  • ★ Ali notes that Eliezer Yudkowsky is also one of the original AI safety researchers and has recently published a book, which Ali calls If We Build It, It Will Kill Us All (as heard) and has not read. (hedged) — 00:02:47
  • ★★ Ali says Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is 662,000 words long, against about 1.1 million for all seven Harry Potter books. — 00:02:47 · Harry Potter (book series)
  • ★ Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Ali explains, follows Harry in an alternative universe where Aunt Petunia married an Oxford chemistry professor instead of Uncle Vernon. — 00:03:16 · University of Oxford
  • ★ The premise of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Ali says, is Harry going to Hogwarts and testing the principles of magic to understand the physics of its magic system. — 00:04:15
  • ★★ All fan fiction is free, Ali says: J. K. Rowling does not allow anyone to monetise Harry Potter fan fiction, so reading it puts no money in her pocket. — 00:04:53 · Harry Potter (book series)
  • ★★ Fans of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality have turned it into a full audiobook with sound effects and voice acting, Ali says. — 00:04:53
  • ★★ Ali read roughly the first 200,000 words of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and listened to the remaining 462,000 words as the fan-made audiobook. (hedged) — 00:05:35
  • ★★★ Fan fiction is found mainly on fanfiction.net and AO3, mostly in EPUB format; Ali's recommended way to read it is to send the EPUB to a Kindle and read it there. — 00:05:35 · Kindle
  • ★ Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has no romance and no R-rated content, Ali says, because Harry is 11. — 00:06:04
  • ★★ Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has a slow start, like a TV show or an anime, Ali says; practically every friend he recommended it to who got through the first five chapters told him how good it is, including a friend's mother of about 65. — 00:06:34

00:07:03 — Book 2: The Debt of Time; start with Methods of Rationality

  • ★★★ Ali's second Harry Potter fan fiction recommendation is The Debt of Time by ShayaLonnie. — 00:07:03 · Harry Potter (book series)
  • ★★ Ali says The Debt of Time is 727,000 words long, against 1.1 million for the whole Harry Potter series. — 00:07:03 · Harry Potter (book series)
  • ★★ In The Debt of Time, told from Hermione's point of view, Hermione brings Sirius Black back from the dead in chapter one of 300 chapters; that is the premise of the book. — 00:08:53
  • ★★ The Debt of Time has some romance and a handful of R-rated scenes, which Ali says are not central to the plot and can be skipped. — 00:09:15
  • ★★ Ali cried when The Debt of Time ended, the same tears he shed at the end of Deathly Hallows. — 00:09:45
  • ★★★ Ali's fan fiction picks can be read in any order, but he recommends starting with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality because it already exists as an audiobook; the others can be turned into audio with something like Speechify. — 00:10:12

00:10:36 — Book 3: The Rigel Black Chronicles

  • ★★ Ali's third pick, The Rigel Black Chronicles, is a series of four books totalling 1.4 million words, longer than the whole Harry Potter series at 1.1 million. — 00:10:36 · Harry Potter (book series)
  • ★★ The first four books of The Rigel Black Chronicles form one arc; its author, Murkybluematter, has started a fifth book, but the last update was in June 2022. — 00:10:36
  • ★★ Ali recommends reading The Rigel Black Chronicles up to the end of book four, which closes its first arc and rounds the series off nicely. — 00:11:06
  • ★ In the alternative universe of The Rigel Black Chronicles, Voldemort becomes the politician Lord Riddle, head of a pure-blood supremacist party, and passes a law that makes Hogwarts open only to pure-blood students. — 00:11:06
  • ★★ Ali promises to let viewers know when work on book five of The Rigel Black Chronicles becomes more active; they can also watch its Discord forum. — 00:11:06
  • ★ In The Rigel Black Chronicles, Harriet Potter and Archie Black swap places: Archie goes to the American Institute of Magic as Harry, and Harriet uses Polyjuice to become Archie and go to Hogwarts to learn potions. — 00:13:22
  • ★★★ Ali expected The Rigel Black Chronicles to be trashy gender-swap nonsense from its plot summary, but Reddit fans were keen, and he concluded he should not judge a book, or Harry Potter fan fiction, by its premise. — 00:13:51 · Reddit, Harry Potter (book series)
  • ★★ Ali regrets how fast he read The Rigel Black Chronicles: he should have savoured it for twice as long. — 00:14:41
  • ★★ Of his five recommendations, The Rigel Black Chronicles is probably Ali's favourite. (hedged) — 00:14:41
  • ★ The author of The Rigel Black Chronicles has made no updates since June 2022 and reportedly moved to Taiwan and had a baby; its Discord group is still active, with about a thousand people waiting for updates. (hedged) — 00:14:41

00:15:19 — Book 4: Backwards with Purpose and time travel done well

  • ★★ Ali's fourth pick, Backwards with Purpose, is 392,000 words, about a third of the Harry Potter canon of 1.1 million words. — 00:15:19 · Harry Potter (book series)
    • a number in question (doubtful): "392,000 words" — check against the recording
  • ★★ For all his fan fiction picks Ali advises not looking up spoilers, not even the titles of later books; for Backwards with Purpose he will not name book two, because its title gives away part of book one. — 00:15:49
  • ★ In Backwards with Purpose, Harry, Ron and Ginny are the only survivors of the Battle of Hogwarts that the story cares about, after Voldemort unleashes Fiendfire through the school. — 00:16:30
  • ★ In Backwards with Purpose, Dumbledore's portrait tells the survivors of a ritual, the Tears of Merlin, that takes them back to 1991, Harry's first year, with perfect knowledge of everything that happened. — 00:16:59
  • ★★ Ali thinks J. K. Rowling did not do time travel well, leaving plot holes such as why a Time-Turner could not stop Voldemort rising in book four, while the two books of Backwards with Purpose do the time-travel premise really well. — 00:19:51
  • ★ Characters in Backwards with Purpose rarely do something obviously stupid for the plot's sake, Ali says: for the most part they are intelligent and take the time to understand how time travel works. — 00:20:20

00:20:56 — Book 5: Manacled

  • ★★ Ali's fifth pick is Manacled by SenLinYu, 371,000 words long. — 00:20:56
  • ★★ Manacled has been turned into a published book, Alchemised, which came out a few months before the video and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first week, Ali says. — 00:20:56
  • ★ In Manacled Voldemort has won and sets up a forced breeding programme into which the women of the series, Hermione and Ginny among them, are press-ganged. — 00:21:25

00:23:26 — More recommendations: Alexandra Quick, and why he dislikes jokey crack fics

  • ★★ Ali calls Manacled very dark, depressing at times and disturbing in many places, but really good and hard to put down. — 00:23:26
  • ★★ Ali is now reading the Alexandra Quick series, 1.5 million words long, which starts off slow; in book two he is starting to get into it. — 00:23:26
  • ★★ Ali found The Seventh Horcrux, a crack fic in which Harry grows up an evil Dark Lord because part of Voldemort's personality is in him, too jokey and non-serious. — 00:24:11
  • ★★★ Ali prefers fan fiction written sincerely, as if it were an actual book, to stories that poke fun at a premise, which he did not really enjoy. — 00:24:41

In the description and comments

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Backwards with Purpose · fan fiction · Harry Potter (book series) · Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality · Manacled · The Debt of Time · The Rigel Black Chronicles

Also: People: Cliff Weitzman · Deadwoodpecker · Eliezer Yudkowsky · Izzy Sealey · J. K. Rowling · Murkybluematter · SenLinYu · ShayaLonnie

Works: Alchemised · Alexandra Quick · Fifty Shades of Grey · Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince · Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix · The Seventh Horcrux

Organizations: Reddit · University of Oxford

Concepts: AI safety · crack fic

Places: Taiwan

Characters: Albus Dumbledore · Draco Malfoy · Ginny Weasley · Harry Potter (character, “Harry Potter”) · Hermione Granger · Ron Weasley · Sirius Black · Snape · Voldemort

Products: Claude · Discord · Kindle · Speechify

Only in the description or credits: All the Young Dudes

Also centred on fan fiction: Why I was WRONG about Harry Potter fanfiction

Also centred on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Is This the Best Harry Potter Book Ever?

Also centred on The Debt of Time: The best Harry Potter fanfiction?

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