Oneshot - Undrentide by ExcentrykeMuse - T - [Harry/Astoria]

[Sesc]

Title: Undrentide
Author: ExcentrykeMuse
Rating: T
Genre: Romance/Supernatural
DLP Category: Romance
Pairing: Harry/Astoria
Status: Oneshot, Complete
Word Count: 15,456

Link: http://harryhetbigbang.livejournal.com/6374.html?nojs=1

Summary:
AU. Chamber of Secrets never happened because Lucius Malfoy never slipped the diary into Ginny Weasley's books. Instead, it remained in his library, half forgotten ... until Astoria Greengrass found it.


A darker variant of the diary idea, and one I quite enjoyed reading. It focuses on the characters, so don't expect any action; even the outside world is reduced to the bare necessities, though the small glimpses that were given are nice, including the by-the-way dismantling of both Daphne's name and the Fanon version of what arranged marriages are supposedly like. The end gets at least half a point extra.

4.5/5


Checked August 10, 2012:
Story was removed from ff.net but is still available on the author's livejournal (thx to T3t)

Added attachment. -Sesc

[T3t]

I remember reading this, and liking it a lot more than Amortentia. Until the ending, which I hated. Still, probably library-worthy.

[NuitTombee]

Eh, I couldn't read it all the way through. I had to force my self to even make it as far as I did. Well written though it may be, it just didn't catch my interest. 3.5/5

[Devour]

4/5. It was pretty good, but I admittedly skimmed over some of it because of a lack of interest. A small thing that ticked me was how Astoria described Harry/Voldemort as having "Pureblood cheekbones," or "Muggle green eyes." I don't really see how muggles have their own colors in this case.

3.5/4 rounded up because it was well-written, and the fitting end.

[yak]

It was an unusual story. It's biggest fault is that it's uninteresting. There's little to keep the reader hooked.

I'd ordinarily give it 3/5, but given that we don't have much like this in the library, I'll bump it to 4/5.

[Christinathewitch]

Didn't find it interesting at all. The fairy idea did nothing for me. While I admit there wasn't anything bad there was actually nothing that I liked though I skipped most of it as the style was uncompelling.
The only thing that I found ok was the writing itself so imo this deserves: 2.5/5 rounded up to 3.

[Andro]

It didn't catch my attention, more it fought me off from reading. It's a style of writing which is only an absence of bad things, with nothing inherently there to draw your interest.

It took me a while to recognize the songfic element, but that definitely doesn't help either.

It's an idea that hasn't been done before, but that the same time it isn't an idea that excites you.

I'll give it a 3/5.

[Euro]

It's too plain, a hogwash of the Diary plot and worse; it's meant to be a tragedy and fails spectacularly. Even Romeo and Juliet had some fighting at least. Harry is totally OOC with his 'heroic' efforts.
The whole story left me feeling like I hooked a fish while fishing and then I let it reel itself out to sea all the while crying for the the drama of it all. Waste of cyberspace and total tease with the pairing. I hate it.

-1/5

[Richard]

Boring as hell. I didn't like it, and the ending was disappointing as shit. 2/5 from me.

Edit: Forgot to mention that there's basically no friggen pairing at all. Lame ass story.

[Portus]

Originally Posted by Sesc

Summary:
AU. Chamber of Secrets never happened because Lucius Malfoy never slipped the diary into Ginny Weasley's books. Instead, it remained in his library, half forgotten ... until Astoria Greengrass found it.


A darker variant of the diary idea, and one I quite enjoyed reading. It focuses on the characters, so don't expect any action; even the outside world is reduced to the bare necessities, though the small glimpses that were given are nice, including the by-the-way dismantling of both Daphne's name and the Fanon version of what arranged marriages are supposedly like. The end gets at least half a point extra.

4.5/5

You prettied up the gist of it a bit, Sesc. The top of the page has this:

Pairing:Harry/Astoria, Draco/Astoria, some Harry/Luna

but that wasn't the worst part. This was the head-scratcher for me:

Warnings:language, mentions of prostitution and infidelity, possible character death, ambiguous ending

Seriously? You "warn" us about mentions of prostitution, then cop out with the quasi-spoiler of possible character death and an ambiguous ending??

Fuck you.

BUT - I decided to give it a try, seeing as it's a one-shot and not a multi-chaptered monster I'd have to commit loads of time to reading. More after I address some other posts.

Originally Posted by yak

It was an unusual story. It's biggest fault is that it's uninteresting. There's little to keep the reader hooked.

I'd ordinarily give it 3/5, but given that we don't have much like this in the library, I'll bump it to 4/5.

I'll go ahead and tell you that's no reason to vote it into the Library. There are exceedingly few slash stories in the Library and if anything, the bar is set far higher for those kinds of stories because they're slash.

IMO, fics involving character development (or whatever you want to call this one) should be voted based on merit and merit alone. The idea that DLP would have an affirmative action policy on its Library is pretty damn lulzy, now that I think on it.

Originally Posted by Euro

It's too plain, a hogwash of the Diary plot and worse; it's meant to be a tragedy and fails spectacularly. Even Romeo and Juliet had some fighting at least. Harry is totally OOC with his 'heroic' efforts.
The whole story left me feeling like I hooked a fish while fishing and then I let it reel itself out to sea all the while crying for the the drama of it all. Waste of cyberspace and total tease with the pairing. I hate it.

-1/5

Harry is totally OOC with his 'heroic' efforts.

Wat. In case you haven't actually *read* the HP books, heroic!Harry is canon!Harry. Are you saying that the *way* he tries being heroic is OOC? Because that I could maybe agree with.

...

So about the story. I liked it and I didn't like it. I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned how very creative the setting is, with the tree grafting and the kidnapped girl being placed in an enchanted sleep, etc. That right there impressed me more than any other part, and I applaud the author for it.

As for the writing - meh. It was certainly good in that there were few spelling or grammatical errors. Nonetheless, the author was trying too hard to show how us what we already know (assuming we're not retards), and that is that the souls are merging or being consumed, etc.

I mean, when the author goes to the trouble to point out to me that Astoria's thoughts on Harry called him into the dream, I go to the trouble to point out that I'm not a moron who needs to be hit over the head with explanations, thank you very much.

Does anyone think that Harry knows trees well enough to notice that parts of one tree are different (other than wildly different leaves or bark color), or that he'd ever recognize a yew tree, FFS? Shit like this is mentioned in passing, but it's info that Harry would never, ever have picked up on so pointing it out in Harry's POV is just forced and dumb.

That whole segment told from Tom's POV could have been left out completely, and if the author felt it so damned important to see that Diary!Tom might feel some smidgen of regret? Well show that somewhere else; don't write a whole overblown segment on it and cause my already terrible eyes to start bleeding.

The entire "Draco fancies Astoria so-o-o much!" angle was unnecessary and reeks of either Mary-Sue self-insert or horrid slash leanings, and I can't quite decide which is more likely. I mean, Draco's internal thoughts contain this gem:

He knew it was only a matter of time before someone else realized how intelligent she was, how beautiful—Astoria wasn't the eldest daughter, but compared to Daphne and her shrewish ways, anyone would prefer Astoria if they were only looking at her surname and so many others would just want Astoria for herself, regardless of bloodlines or ideas of political marriages—she was incandescent.

And this one:

Astoria would love to pour over the full Malfoy library over the many decades of their marriage, Draco thought happily, if only he were able to make it through this year alive—which he was determined to do, with the hope of properly courting Astoria as an incentive to not only survive but to succeed in the near-impossible task that the Dark Lord had set him.

And of course this one:

With his blasted fame and fumbling charm, Potter could probably finagle an introduction to any witch and because he was the fucking Chosen One, his lack of social grace or knowledge was often overlooked and Astoria would be far too polite to cut him completely at the very beginning. Potter had enough of that idiotic charm to get him through and Astoria, well, sometimes Draco caught her looking at Potter a little too long in the Great Hall.

Her eyes betrayed nothing, not even a passing interest in his fame or whether or not the rumors about him were true, and that frightened Draco more than he cared to admit. She was deliberately hiding any emotion she felt regarding the Boy Savior when, if he had been unimportant as Draco clearly was to her, she wouldn't bother to do so. No, instead, she chose to hide her thoughts, keep them veiled, which meant that she felt something—and whether that was good or bad for Draco was a mystery.
Everything about her thoughts was enigmatic to Draco, making her all the more intriguing as well as desirable. And he would marry her. He was determined to.

I mean really, would any reasonable approximation of Draco Malfoy be thinking ANY of that? Especially during sixth year, when he's supposed to bring Death Eaters into the school and, oh yeah, kill Dumbledore on the side.

Then we have the aspect of sensitive!Draco being the only one who notices Astoria's deteriorating health, and I'm reminded of the worst kinds of Hurt/Comfort shit that populates Dramione and Snarry stories and whatever it's called when Draco rescues Harry from "that brute Vernon."

I'll give the author credit for not writing a happy ending, but in all honesty, s/he probably couldn't decide whether her Astoria's savior should be Harry or Draco, and just decided on the "ambiguous" route.

As I said, it has some creative parts and I'm actually glad I read it if for no other reason than the Olde English folk tale aspect. However, it was far less than it had the potential to be, and it could be cut approximately in half without losing anything. And the pairing is useless, since Astoria could literally have been anyone at all. I could do a find/replace using Susan, Hannah, even Ginny or Daphne, and this story would be workable. Hell, you could sub in Pansy for Astoria.

Oh, and did anyone else notice that "undrentide" seems to come from a video game but apparently also means twilight? Seems like a bad omen, though the author doesn't have any Twilight fics (though she writes slash almost exclusively).

One last thing: So the premise is that CoS never happened, and yet everything following it - PoA, GoF, and OotP - all happen just as in canon, right? How the fuck can that be?

If Ginny never gets the Diary she never needs saving, and the Sword never becomes a Horcrux-killing Basilisk-venom-repository. More importantly, Harry never kills said Basilisk, which I view as one of his most defining moments - alone against a 50-foot killing machine, triumphing over almost-Voldemort, clueing Dumbledore in to Tom's Horcrux knowledge, freeing Dobby. You know, taking a huge step toward becoming a real hero.

So if little Ginny never needs saving she needs a vacation even less, so there's far less chance that the Weasleys end up in Egypt and therefore on the cover of the Prophet. BAM! No reason for Sirius to escape and so no reason for Peter to be revealed and have to flee. Oops - so there's no reason for Peter to seek out Volde-wraith and so Crouch Jr. remains under his dad's control and not delivering Harry to baby-mort for the re-birthing.

So-o-o. Harry is never entered into the Triwizard, Cedric is peachy, and there's no reason for anyone to think Voldemort's back, because he fucking ISN'T.

All I'm saying is: If you're going to excise a major plot point (a whole book and all it entails and sets up, in this case), please PLEASE do us all a favor and at least TRY to explain why the FUCK everything *after* that missing element is still the goddamn same.

I'm giving it a 3/5 because of the creativity (the Orfeo stuff, not that hand-wave shit of no CoS) and because I was interested enough to actually finish it.

[Lord Anarchy]

I don't particularly like it. I'm way past the stage of upvoting a story for the pairing. Some parts of the story were too blatant and heavy handed, while some felt vague. The overall story telling was just plain and kind of uninteresting. And the plot itself... well, some people just don't get that being original doesn't necessary make a good story. There's a difference between being creative, and being good, And I don't think this story was particularly good,
2.5/5

[Thaumologist]

2/5

It was readable, and I felt no urge to close the page, but I wouldn't have read more if it was a multi-part piece, and lots of the ideas were just used badly.

We don't need this fairy stuff added. I assumed it was sort of meant as a red-herring, but only to other characters. Oh wait, they can't all read minds, so it doesn't matter. The references to the fae just seemed like an idea she'd read somewhere else and wanted to add in, but kind of wrecked in the doing.

[Starwind]

The plot at the top of the page had me interested. The story fell short.

2/5.

[Churchey]

Great plot but huge problems in execution, most of which have already been mentioned.
1 for being readable.
1 for creativity.
-.5 for using "If I Die Young" as songfic-esque time skip dividers. Because, realllllly?

1.5/5, rounded down.

[Dark Syaoran]

It was an unusual story. It's biggest fault is that it's uninteresting.

Basically, this. Started off well enough, then got boring. Never recovered.

[Jormungandr]

Seems like it has been removed from FFn.

[T3t]

The author is one of those "authors" who can't deal with FFN drama and took all her stories off. Fic can still be found here.

[Evan Tide]

If anyone wants to keep this, they should back it up. The author's livejournal account was just deleted and this story is pending removal.

Or at least that's what this page says when I clicked on the author. Maybe I'm missing some part of livejournal or something.