Ali Abdaal was eating lunch, stick getting cold, when he started explaining a 371,000-word Harry Potter fan fiction set inside a forced breeding program run by a victorious Voldemort. That is roughly the conversation he has been having with everyone he knows for the past year, unprompted, with mounting urgency. The stakes, for the skeptic who has written fan fiction off as romantic fluff for teenagers, are simple: there is an entire genre of genuinely great literature sitting free on the internet, and most people who would love it have no idea it exists.
Abdaal, the productivity and AI creator who has been making YouTube content for nine years, stumbled into this world through a Reddit thread about a title he had been ignoring for five years despite three separate trusted friends recommending it. Cliff Weitzman, the founder of Speechify, had gushed about it. Abdaal had brushed it off each time. Then the Reddit thread appeared and he finally gave it a go. He describes what happened next as being gripped from the first pages in a way words cannot fully capture.
The one that started everything
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky, is 662,000 words, roughly two-thirds the length of the entire original seven-book series, and covers only Harry’s first year at Hogwarts. The premise is a single altered detail: instead of Aunt Petunia marrying Vernon Dursley, she marries a chemistry professor at Oxford. Harry grows up surrounded by science textbooks and nerds, so when Professor McGonagall shows up to confirm he is a wizard, his response is not wonder but immediate empirical suspicion. He arrives at Hogwarts as a kind of socially awkward, hyper-rational prodigy who immediately starts running controlled experiments on magic itself. Wingardium Leviosa: why those specific words? Is there a mass limit? What happens if you alter the incantation? He drags Hermione into the research.
Abdaal read the first 200,000 words and then switched to the fan-produced audiobook, which includes professional-style voice acting and sound effects, for the remaining 462,000. All fan fiction is free under JK Rowling’s rules: no one is permitted to monetize it. He recommends loading EPUBs onto a Kindle as the cleanest reading experience, and links to the files are in his description.
One friend’s 65-year-old mother, a lifelong Harry Potter reader, finished it and called it incredible.
Four more that made him cry
The Debt of Time, by Sha Lonnie, runs 727,000 words and is told from Hermione’s point of view, picking up at the end of the Half-Blood Prince. Hermione discovers a blood magic ritual that can retrieve someone from beyond the veil, which means Sirius Black does not have to stay dead. Sirius’s presence during the Deathly Hallows changes every subsequent event. Abdaal finished it in tears, the same tears, he says, that the real Deathly Hallows produced.
The Riel Black Chronicles, by an author writing as Murky Blue Matter, is currently four books totaling 1.4 million words, longer than the entire original series. Its alternative universe has Voldemort as a pure-blood supremacist politician rather than a dark lord, and Harry Potter as Harriet Potter, a girl obsessed with potions who cannot attend Hogwarts because she is a half-blood. She and Sirius’s son Archie swap places using Polyjuice Potion: he goes to the American Institute of Magic, she goes to Hogwarts disguised as him, gets sorted into Slytherin, and becomes Snape’s protege. Abdaal calls it probably his favorite of the five and is openly begging the author, who apparently moved to Taiwan and had a baby, to write book five. The Discord server for this series still has roughly a thousand people waiting.
Backwards with Purpose, by Dead Woodpecker, is 392,000 words across two books. Harry, Ron, and Ginny survive the Battle of Hogwarts but almost no one else does: Hermione, the entire Weasley family, everyone gone. Three years later, suicidal with grief, they brew a potion called the Tears of Merlin over four years and travel back to 1991 as fully powered adult wizards trapped in eleven-year-old bodies. They know every secret, every betrayal, every horcrux. Ron still has Scabbers. Abdaal is especially enthusiastic about how the book handles the logic of time travel without the idiot-hat plotting he finds frustrating in lesser fiction.
Manacold, by Sen Linu, is 371,000 words and the darkest entry by a significant distance. Voldemort won. The surviving women from the series, including Hermione, are pressed into a forced breeding program serving pure-blood families. The story follows Hermione inside Draco Malfoy’s household, and Abdaal flags multiple trigger warnings alongside his genuine recommendation. It has since been published as an original novel under a different title and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first week.
He put it plainly mid-bite, sushi going cold in front of him: ‘I love it when they’re sincerely taking the premise like super sincerely and they’re really really good.’
The Discord server with a thousand people still waiting
The Riel Black Chronicles fan community has been holding for updates since June 2022, when Murky Blue Matter last posted. The Discord is active. The readers are patient, mostly. Abdaal is not.
The five books together run to roughly 3.15 million words. He is already into a sixth series, the Alexandra Quick sequence, at 1.5 million words, which he says starts slowly but picks up in the second book. His total reading slate, by his own count, has sorted the next two years of his life.
