I lied; this post does not contain art
It contains PURE LIQUID GOLD. What would happen if you made Harry Potter into 11-year-old John Locke and rewrote the entire HP world in the style of "Atlas Shrugged"?
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality would happen.
Want some convincing? Read one of the early chapters (nope, no spoilers: just Diagon alley) and see if you end up choking on tea.
It's written by an extremely articulate and aggressively well-read cognitive philosopher/artificial intelligence researcher. It is a thing of love and beauty and extremely excellent dialog. (It also has some great illustrations piling up for almost every chapter, but I'm actually a bit daunted by the idea of drawing from it; most of the glory is in the discussions, not in the scenes.) In this fic Harry's not good or evil; he's just an extremely brilliant and rather home-schooled 11-year old (his father, a biochemist professor at Oxford, pulled him out of public school after he bit a math teacher, and the main character struggle the protagonist faces is treating other humans, especially adults, like actual people. It's okay, Quirrell gives him some good advice on that.) Harry's a self-proclaimed rationalist champion, and over the course of more than 60 chapters he nearly ends the universe several times through Science (or more specifically, experiments on his path to becoming the magical equivalent of Newton.) The series is packed with subtle references to everything in the rich and silly scifi/fantasy background that everyone grumbles is eclipsed in popular culture by Rowling's monopoly on children's fantasy. Ender's Dragon Army? It's there, and I wonder if anyone's told Orson Scott Card. Mercedes Lackey's villains show up in name cameos, canon characters have very reasonable arguments over how Gandalf could have optimized Frodo's chances for survival, and Harry and Draco have a spat involving the Gom Jabbar sometime after Harry attempts to explain Mendelian inheritance using small pieces of paper. Chrestomanci might have walked by in the background, Kao from Bridge of Birds is mentioned, and in this very, very AU fic, a couple of dark wizards are extremely interested in the Pioneer probes. (The fanart for THAT definitely gets a snarf-warning, but it's also a spoiler.)
So you should go read it. I'm not much of a rec person, but it's sort of criminal not to bring this one up.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality would happen.
Want some convincing? Read one of the early chapters (nope, no spoilers: just Diagon alley) and see if you end up choking on tea.
It's written by an extremely articulate and aggressively well-read cognitive philosopher/artificial intelligence researcher. It is a thing of love and beauty and extremely excellent dialog. (It also has some great illustrations piling up for almost every chapter, but I'm actually a bit daunted by the idea of drawing from it; most of the glory is in the discussions, not in the scenes.) In this fic Harry's not good or evil; he's just an extremely brilliant and rather home-schooled 11-year old (his father, a biochemist professor at Oxford, pulled him out of public school after he bit a math teacher, and the main character struggle the protagonist faces is treating other humans, especially adults, like actual people. It's okay, Quirrell gives him some good advice on that.) Harry's a self-proclaimed rationalist champion, and over the course of more than 60 chapters he nearly ends the universe several times through Science (or more specifically, experiments on his path to becoming the magical equivalent of Newton.) The series is packed with subtle references to everything in the rich and silly scifi/fantasy background that everyone grumbles is eclipsed in popular culture by Rowling's monopoly on children's fantasy. Ender's Dragon Army? It's there, and I wonder if anyone's told Orson Scott Card. Mercedes Lackey's villains show up in name cameos, canon characters have very reasonable arguments over how Gandalf could have optimized Frodo's chances for survival, and Harry and Draco have a spat involving the Gom Jabbar sometime after Harry attempts to explain Mendelian inheritance using small pieces of paper. Chrestomanci might have walked by in the background, Kao from Bridge of Birds is mentioned, and in this very, very AU fic, a couple of dark wizards are extremely interested in the Pioneer probes. (The fanart for THAT definitely gets a snarf-warning, but it's also a spoiler.)
So you should go read it. I'm not much of a rec person, but it's sort of criminal not to bring this one up.