Barb's Psychic Serpent Trilogy Discussion/Criticism

Ok, I read this story a while back, and recently, I've been thinking about it almost constantly. Perhaps if I enter into some sort of discussion I can get some closure.


Basically, the story, while VERY well written, is so dissapointing in the end, its almost painful.

SPOILERS AHEAD_______________________









Having Harry lose his magic because he wanted to save Malfoy in the end was just...utter bullshit. The ending totally ruined it for me. For the first time, I read a tasteful H/G, probably the only one.

Second, the story had some parts that were so unbelievable, it was...well, unbelievable. The whole broom squadron scene in the forest was just surreal.

Had JKR stayed quiet about it all, I would have believed that the stories were geniune Harry Potter canon. The teenage angst, the bullshit way to defeat Voldemort (Making Ginny the Girl Who Lived because of Draco's Love???), and the fluffy giving of second chances, all JKR material. Harry is totally Gryffindor. Slytherin, is of course, evil. How else would Harry be a Gryffin Animagus?

Barb pushes so much Judiasm into the story, its kind of forced. Its nice that you're Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, but keep it out of HP fanfiction. Actually, I would like to see Muslim stuff, would be kinda interesting .

The Second Story was Amazing. The scene where Harry is forced to kill his mother stands out in my mind as the most memorable scene in all the fiction I have ever read. The emotional shock is just amazing. I have no doubt in my mind that Barb is a wonderful writer, but it is just too canon for my tastes. Harry is for the most part, the hated goody 2 shoes naive Gryffindork. Even JKR portrays him darker.

Example?

When Harry is sad at his loss of magic and his ability to properly see Hogwarts (as he is a muggle now and is now forced to see Hogwarts as some decrepit ruin) Dumbledore pats him on the back and says soemthing along the lines of:

"Harry, even now, you are the most magical person I have ever met."

The breif fling with Katie Bell was cool, but of course, Harry MUST pair up with Ginny.

The religious references, as stated above, were overwhelming. The theory of the afterlife left me wondering what kind of crazy theoligist person Barb was. At one point it seemed like Barb was trying to convince herself, not the reader, that we each suffer our own hell or heaven, based on how we view it.

Dumbledore is entirely useless in the story. Voldemort is used more as some symbol, temptation or absolute evil than a person. He is some unstoppable force. Not much character there. This I feel, is because of its nature as a Post GoF story. Book 1 -> 4 were entirely fantasy based, ith little in the way of problems.

Without OOTP, the series gets entirely too loose and easy to meld. I feel that OOTP is the drive for Darker fanfiction, as it is the only book with canon evidence of a darker Harry.

Without the prophecy, Ginny is able to kill the Dark Lord. It is as ridiculous as it sounds. Yes, Harry is not special at all in this story. He's just some random, average bloke with some really good luck. The series's realism takes a big hit as it goes on.

All in all, the trilogy is filled with incredible amonts of teenage angst, love and goodyness. Book 1 and 2 are pretty good, but book 3 just ruins it all. If you are looking for a canon answer to the story, and have no need for anything dark and love fluff, look no more. Here it is.

Thoughts anyone?

 

I've never read it. It was always one click away, but the Ginny part scared me away. From what I just read, I thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I didn't read it.

 

A legend. I loved HHr romance and animagus training in part 1 and Slytherin!Harry alternate universe in part 2, but I agree that the final book totally sucked.

Almost everything about it was stupid - Harry/Katie romance doomed to failure, a guy who can turn muggles into wizards, foolish Dumbledore and ultra evil Voldemort and Harry feeling guilty for stealing Ginny from Malfoy. The ending is probably the worst Voldemor's death scene in the history of HP fan-fiction. I mean, after all the duels and skills Harry had acquired, he was still helpless in front of Voldemort's freezing stare. How lame is that? Not to mention that Harry's entire role in Voldemort's demise was to trick him into eating WWW candy, so his enchantments would ware off. WHAT.THE.FUCK. And then, he is killed by god damn Ginny, thanks to Draco's power of love? I won't even go into Harry sacrificing his magic to revive his rival for Ginny's love. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I agree that the third part, and especially the ending partially ruins the whole triology, but it's still a classic.

 

Yeah, I read that before I even found ff.net. And that was a while back. I thought the changing history jazz was weird, but it was a heck of a lot better than Harry being a friggen muggle. This was far too much of a religious experience for me. Every part of it was about Good triumphing over Evil and the resisting of temptation. And it was far too long for that.

 

This is the first time I have EVER seen this fic discussed by a majority of people who disliked it.

I could not possibly talk about this fic with out insulting it so I’m just going to be brief….

I will give the author credit for being a VERY good writer, but she is definitely not my type of writer. If you like drama and angst I can guarantee you wont get much sleep for a few weeks if you start to read this, but if your like me and actually like plot devices to move a story along then you are in for one frustrating ride.

Book one seems to be totally lacking any form of a plot device besides drama. Book two admittedly has a very good plot device, but no worries b/c as soon as book three comes out we are back again into angst/drama/shit.

Barb can write buildup for a fight scene fairly well, and she can write aftermath scenes vary well, but the actual fight scenes are laughably worse then the rest of her story. Did anyone else notice the fact that barb only used like 10 new spells in the whole series, and that almost all those were just variations of confusion charms? (You think your on the sealing, you see double, your right and left get flipped…ect.) Not to mention she doesn’t seem to get the concept that people could actually try to dodge a spell. And she did one more thing in fight scenes that infuriated me beyond all others…she would have two people facing each other prepared to duel, the duel would start and then one of the duelers would fire off a spell catching the other person off guard. (she did this MANY times in her story…like 80% of the fight scenes) How the fuck are you not prepared for the person your facing not to throw a spell at you when you start a DUEL…

 

only tried reading this series once, Ive been reccomended it bunchs of times, but like Syaoran, I only ever got to chapter 2, never any further.

 

I read this story WAY back when I first got into the fanfiction, or for that matter the HP community at all. Back in those days I was a serious H/G shipper and would fight all the good qualities of it like the god damn pope fighting against abortion! Like I said, that was back in the day... and needless to say I was a naive child who did not his left from right in terms of fanon.

The trilogy in all was well written and had I never knew it was fanfiction and had not read book 5 to the point pages were falling out of it, I would have genuinely thought that it was written by JKR. It has more or less her same writing style and way of leaving plot holes EVERYWHERE. To me its almost as if Barb wants to create a new fanfiction community around her series with us kids writing off her canon.

Book 1 was a very good story, but was far to angst and filled with teen bullshit. I get plenty of that in my own life, thank you very much. I didn't like how Aberforth was like a muggle gardener and all that, but it could argubly be feasible in canon. The way she portrayed snakes was something that was well done and calculated. The limits she created for their sight was very good and believable.

Book 2 I liked even more, and I found myself always hoping that in the next chapter Harry would be going back to his own time, just so I could see what would happen. I have a rule about time traveling fics. I always find myself thinking of how time will constantly keep looping itself around that one event, like in Book 3 of cannon. Harry and Hermione are always and forever going to keep traveling back in time and reappearing back in time until... well, the end of time! It justs makes me think WAY too much. And on a final note, if Voldemort was around for as long as he was in the Barbs 2nd book, wouldn't he have won the war?

Book 3 was... depressing is the best way to put it. Okay, it started off good and I had high hopes for it. HAD! And then we get to the final battle. I thought it was complete BS how Voldemort was weakened because of mandrake candies! WTF!!! Its going to take far more to defeat Voldemort then a couple of candies shoved down his throat. And why in the hell would Harry ever give his magic up to save Malfoy? Is that even legal? Barb should be tried for such a travesty! Harry would rather see Draco kicked around dead then give his magic up just because some broad loved him or what not. Bleh. Absolute garbage.

Then there is the sequel! SURPRISE! DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING DID YOU!!! Well, there is a sequel, and I wish I had never read it. It was written with permission by some fan of hers and it just put the icing on the cake for destroying all the good there was in Barb's work. In a nutshell, Ginny left Harry to become a major Quidditch star, taking their son and more or less divorcing him. Then the bee asks Harry to teach DADA, EVEN THOUGH, even though he can no longer do magic! If you think that is great, you should have seen what Harry was doing before all the marital issues and the job offer.

 

On a side not has anyone read the prequel?

I refused to read it b/c I knew for a fact that it would cause me to break my monitor. (I would of thrown my fist threw it)

Maybe it was just me, but did anyone else get the impression that Lilly is a whore in the series? Why on earth would anyone want to read a story about some love pentagon between Lilly MWPP and Snape. *shudders* Fangirls deserve death just for insinuating drama shit like that…

 

Blah blah...Death Eater Cho...blah blah...Ginslut, you get the deal.

 

Lily (NOT LILLY), is shown as a slut in the series, yeah.

Its kind of unbelievable.

Remus tells Harry how thankful he was of her for "relieving" him time to time when he was caught in the insane wolfsex urges.

And then she's with Sirius after leaving Snape after the death of James.

If I were Harry I would have killed Remus for telling me my mother participated in rough wolfsex to relieve his urges.

 

This was actually the first fanfiction I read. I actually tried download OotP, and downloaded this instead, and couldn't tell the difference besides ... "hey, this seems to be a bit different than I remember it."

It's written entirely canon-based, so at this community, I expect almost all reviews will be negative, however one thing that can be said is that it's all good grammar, good spelling, good length, semi-original plots (for the time), and some interesting twists.

The sequel you were talking about I didn't read, but I did read the other sequel in which all the Dragons are getting ill, and Harry gets his magic back through some cosmic imbalance or other.

Not my type of story, but not the horrible shit its made out to be.

 

I second that, and this story is supposed to be 'legendry'. I'm so happy I never even looked for this fic.

There seems to be some fanfic author obession to make Harry a complete punching bag, where nothing ever goes right for him and he ALWAYS has to sacrifice himself.

 

Any chance anyone can link me to that? Just so I can feel better about Harry's ending.

 

like so many unfortunate people, this was one of the first hp fanfics I read. I do look back and think that the second story was cool and had some interesting moments in it, but for the most part the trilogy was contrived drama that really had no plot to stand on. At the end she also tries to make all kinds of statements about her own philosophies and ideas, which personally I enjoy reading even if I don't agree but it should have been toned down a bit for a fic, not to mention the Girl Who Lived thing was utter bs. Her obsession with Ginny was both what drove her to write this and simultaneously what made it so much less than it could have been. In the end though, I won't deny she's a decent writer overall, and can really do something when she wants to.

 

Word has it that Barb is writing an original story based on werewolves. I wonder if she plans on putting the sex drive into the story.

The sequel I am referring to was official "sanctioned" by Bard. In it Harry was a complete bitch and the worlds most whipped thing ever! Whipped Cream does not even come close to how bad Harry was. And in this sequel, Ginny was written out to be a complete whore... so it had a few merits to it!

 

Back in the time it was still being written I liked it, and even thought it as the best fanfiction out there. For the first two books at least, eventhough too many things were ruined for Harry.

He gets with Hermy and they have lots of sex, but then the whole 'not in love' B/S deal happens. I was actually rootin for Harry to get Ginny until the part were it was revealed she really did want him but was letting herself be seduced be ferret instead cuz he's got problems, nevermind the fact Draco's nailin anythin that walks at the sametime.

I liked the whole second book alternate universe, mostly because of Jamie. Then of course she has to die too....

I read up to like chapter 6 of the third book... then stopped. By that point she had completely killed the story for me.

I still remember reading the many posts on the Tarot reading phrophecy heh, kinda pathetic to think back on now, even though Harry got Ginny as he wanted to in the end... by that point I hate the Ginsluts portrayal and wish Harry would just go shack up with Katie again.

 

I am currently re-reading Barb's Trilogy after about 5 years and was wondering what you think of it. I didn't post this in the Review section because I just wanted to get your oppinion on a fic that introduced many to the idea of fanfiction, or so I've heard.

Cheers