It is a truth universally acknowledged, that fanfiction is glorious, self-indulgent trash.

Before any fangirls try to smite me, I will say I adore fanfiction. I read it avidly. I write it (badly). I once managed to convince a university to actually give me money to read, write and study it. I will be the first person to defend fanfiction as an important medium for the exploration of women's creativity and sexuality and for the exploration of family and/or relationship dynamics that are not usually given attention in popular media. Bi, pan and asexuals are valid? Sure! Trans people are valid? You betcha. Polyamory is an accepted dynamic? Hells yeah! Heteronormativity is questioned or put aside? Bruh, heteronormativity is smashed into glittering shards and remade into something new and sublime. Fanfiction is amazing.

However, there are some fics that are not as "socially acceptable" as others, and I am not referring to the ones that showcase weird kinks or other oddities. I am referring to stories that seem to willfully misunderstand a character so fundamentally that the character becomes unrecognizable. I am referring to the rare fanfictions that will ignore positive same-sex relationships in favor of heterosexual relationships that everyone agrees are forced. Finally, I refer to stories that smash canon in the face with a hammer and not even in a fun way.

I'm gonna go ahead and put it out there. I'm making fun of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

SOME SPOILERS AHEAD! Skip to the next bolded heading if you want to avoid Cursed Child spoilers.

The three biggest complaints I've seen about Harry Potter and the Cursed Child involve:

1. The butchering of Cedric Diggory's character, because it seems implausible that he would become a Death Eater.

2. The fact that it didn't make Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy a couple even though there was ample opportunity to do so.

3. The fact that the time travel was a mess...a mess that resulted in Harry Potter having to WATCH his parents die, and that is the opposite of cool.

Basically, Cursed Child is a fancy fanfic that makes embodies what people think of when they think trashy fanfiction.

SPOILER ALERT OVER

So...in an attempt to make up for some of the failings of Cursed Child, I offer some other time-travel fanfics that are at least as good. They too, punch canon in the face, but they do so in a way that doesn't make our beloved Harry Potter characters (too) miserable.

Word of warning, I read most of these back when I was first starting out in the fandom world and still had my heteronormativity goggles on. However, there is one LGBT romance here, and the author has several more under her belt.

Presenting...four time-travel fanfictions at least as good as Cursed Child!

1. The Broken Wall by TaraSoleil

One of the tags for the film The Mummy is "It's only a book. No harm ever came from reading a book."

It wasn't true for the protagonists of The Mummy, and it's not true for the Golden Trio in this hybrid time-travel/ghost story. Taking place in Harry's sixth year, this story starts with Harry walking back from a private lesson with Dumbledore when he's accosted by the Hogwarts caretaker, citing all manner of terrible things that Harry's supposedly done that evening. Filch is certain he saw a boy with messy black hair running around and causing trouble, but Dumbledore assures Filch that Harry isn't to blame. Once the situation is worked out, Harry heads back to his dormitory and sees the boy Filch is talking about. He follows the boy and discovers that he looks exactly like Harry. Both boys assert that they've been attending Hogwarts for years, and they've never seen each other. Before they can say much more, the boys have to run away from Filch's cat. Harry recounts these strange things when he gets back to Gryffindor tower and realizes that Hermione's been distracted by her book the whole time.

Over the next few days, each member of the Golden Trio and a couple of other characters have encounters with a boy who has messy black hair, a beautiful girl with red hair and green eyes and a handsome, gray-eyed boy who's taken quite an interest in Hermione. Almost all the while, Hermione is glued to her new book. Our heroes soon learn that Hermione's book is a badly translated, Muggle reprinting of an ancient magical text that deals with necromancy. Worse, Hermione read one of the "poems" aloud: one that tells the story of a boy orphaned by war bringing his parents back to life.

As teenagers displaced in time and liable to stop existing at any time, James, Lily and Sirius are compelling as both ghosts and time travelers, and their interactions with the Golden Trio are fun to read. The story also has romance and deals with the consequences of selfishness.

2. Time Interned by TaraSoleil

This story is something of an inversion of the previous, and it's far more typical of time-travel fanfiction. One of our beloved characters is sent back in time. In this particular story, it's Hermione.

The story begins in the Golden Trio's sixth year, and (tweaking canon a little), Hermione has been given another time turner to complete her prefect duties and help Harry. Unbeknownst to her, Draco Malfoy has noticed her unusual comings and goings and comes to the correct conclusion. While she's studying, Malfoy takes an opportunity to hex her and take her time turner. He intends to send her to the future where she'll be out of the way and in no position to help prevent Voldemort's ascension. Instead, he ends up sending her twenty years into the past, when Harry's parents and friends were attending Hogwarts.

While there, Hermione struggles with having to pretend to be (gasp) an average student and resisting the urge to try and alter the future. Of course, because this is fanfiction, she falls in love with someone from the past, and that further tests her resolve not to change the future.

3. One Hundred and Sixty Nine by Soupy_George

Though the war is over and Voldemort is dead, the Golden Trio's personal lives are in shambles. Harry is drowning in survivor's guilt, and his marriage to Ginny is suffering. George Weasley has long since stopped functioning after Fred's death, and grief over one child's death and another's downward spiral has Mrs. Weasley barely keeping it together. Ron is trying his hardest to keep the family afloat, trying to keep his mother and brother motivated and serving as a peacekeeper for Harry and Ginny. As a result, his own relationship with Hermione is suffering.

Determined to better things for Ron, Harry and her surrogate family, Hermione's spent the last three years researching the limitations and possibilities of time travel, and when the story begins, she is ready. At the end of chapter one, Hermione Granger purposely sends herself back in time to the year 1981, exactly 169 days before the deaths of Lily and James Potter. Armed with the knowledge she has of Voldemort's horcruxes and their locations, Hermione plans on destroying them before he can kill Lily and James and then killing him herself, ending the destruction of her friends' lives.

To help her cause, she recruits 21 year old Sirius Black and Remus Lupin. She convinces Sirius to "make amends" with his family so he might have access to the horcruxes in Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange's possession. Remus helps her with research. Through the story, Hermione struggles with a suspicious Dumbledore, growing feelings for Sirius and being tracked by MI6, who are convinced that Hermione is a KGB operative.

4. Time Between Us by C.Queen

Last, but most certainly not least, we have "Time Between Us," the story that arguably most resembles Cursed Child. It's a next generation story that starts Harry's son James Potter II. He is accidentally sent back in time to when his grandparents were attending Hogwarts, and, while there, he ends up falling in love with a young Sirius Black.

Unlike some of the others on the list, James successfully resists the urge to change the future, and, as a result, canon isn't changed too much. In fact, this fic makes it entirely possible for Sirius Black to have fallen in love with (and had a gay panic over) a mysterious and sassy red-haired boy.

There are fantastic Marauders shenanigans, and James Potter II gives his grandpappy a run for his money in this hilarious and heart-warming story. This fanfic also features one of my favorite scenes in all of fanfiction.

James Potter II was brought up with affectionate stories about Albus Dumbledore, so when he meets the man, he not overly awed. He treats Dumbledore as a cross between a friend and a beloved grandfather. He's also aware that Dumbledore is gay and lets the great wizard know it.

The favorite scene in question involves young James, after hours of agonizing over Sirius and the whole situation, going to Dumbledore and demand the older man go ten-pin bowling (one of Dumbledore's favorite hobbies) with him. Over the course of the evening, they bowl and drink and talk about boys they loved who ended up breaking their hearts. It's not a campy, stereotypically gay thing either. It's two intelligent men who happen to like other men talking about their experiences and having fun as friends.

The reader gets the feeling that this scene means a lot to Dumbledore in particular. It's heavily implied that Dumbledore has had to hide his sexuality his entire life, and when he meets James, who seems so open about it and says others are too, it's almost too good to be true. For the first time since Grindelwald at least, Dumbledore has a friend who is neither in awe of his status as The Greatest Wizard of All Time, nor disgusted by his sexuality. It was a very lovely humanizing and vindicating moment for Dumbledore.

It seems like a particularly bizarre set-up, but C.Queen is one of those rare authors that can probably get away with anything once you've read a few of her other works. I started with her impressive collection of Albus/Scorpius stories, and by the time I finished those, nothing was out of bounds so long as C.Queen was writing it. Sirius and James Sirius? That's weird, and I don't see how it could work, but I trust you, so I'm down.

These are a few of the best time-travel stories I could think of after I heard about the mess that was Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I hope everyone enjoys them.