Harry Potter: The Prince of Slytherin

AN 1: My goal with this fic is to take the bog-standard Slytherin Harry/WBWL story and subvert its traditional elements. Of course, in order to subvert those tropes, one first has to establish them, so year one basically follows the standard arc for a Slytherin Harry/WBWL story with a few deviations, leading up to some BIG deviations at the end. Year Two diverges pretty significantly from canon, and by Year Three, I don't anticipate following the canon plot at all beyond the basic plot point of Sirius getting out of jail. The novel break-down (for people who don't want to read 300,000+ words at one go) is as follows:

Chapter 1: Prologue. What you're reading now, a flashfoward set at the end of Harry's Fourth Year before we go back to the beginning.

Chapter 2: Halloween 1981 and the tale of how Sirius ended up in Azkaban despite living Potters.

Chapters 3-34: Harry Potter and the Prince of Slytherin (Harry's first year).

Chapters 35-82: Harry Potter and the Secret Enemy (Harry's second year).

Chapters 83-ongoing: Harry Potter and the Death Eater Menace (Harry's third year)

AN 2: Harry is relatively OC compared to canon, which, I think, is inevitable for a Slytherin Harry story. This is Harry if he learned on his 11th birthday that his parents had faked their death and dumped him with the Dursleys for contrived reasons that imply they love the WBWL more than him. The result is a Harry who's basically canon-Harry plus a certain amount of bitterness and a monomanical obsession with proving himself superior to his brother. He is also much smarter than canon-Harry for reasons that will be revealed later. Also, for what it's worth, Jim Potter is basically canon-Harry if he'd had two loving parents and had grown up with the privileges and responsibilities of being the Boy-Who-Lived as well as being terribly spoiled by his father and godfather (who isn't who you think it is). While he may not acquit himself well either in this chapter or the first few chapters of Year One, he is not the gibbering "idiot who normally plays the role of WBWL and will undergo significant character development starting with the end of Year 1.

AN 3: I freely confess that I can't write like an 11-year-old worth a damn and at a certain point I just gave up and hand-waved it away with a magical explanation for why children this young were so well-spoken. For one thing, there is a good bit of humor as well as drama in this work, and frankly, 11-year-olds aren't generally very witty. If 11-year-olds who frequently talk like well-educated and occasionally smart-ass 14-year-olds is a complete deal-breaker for you,

you should probably move along.

AN 4: Harry is the hero if this story, albeit a more reluctant one than canon. He acknowledges that he has a strong Gryffindor instinct with which he grapples from time to time. This will not be a "Dark Harry tortures everyone to death while laughing maniacally"story.