WARNING: SPOILERS

While I agree that it was a cop out of sorts, I also think that her death presents the best opportunity for Harry to become less " the cook " and more responsible and knowledgeable by being the only Curse Breaker left besides Bill. If he wasn't motivated enough before, now his whole team's safety depends on the warding skills of him and an injured Bill.

And Jbern, shoot this idea down if I'm wrong: But is Harry's patronus slowly fading away from that of James's animagus form and becoming his own? Maybe a side-effect of becoming an animagus the way he did? Or am I just reading too much into it?

Also wondering to myself how long its gonna be before Collins fucks up royally, with his unstable mind, and gets more people killed

 

Spoiler:-

It would be sweet if Collins ends up blowing Thundecloud away after he wakes him up from a nap. Collins is going crazy I can see him sleeping with his gun then blowing one of them away as he wakes up.

 

I like Thundercloud.

 

The only character I guarantee will live to see the sequel is Harry. Everyone else's fate is up in the air.

As for Harry's patronus, I will neither confirm nor deny Gurukid said. Though under the current level of stress, it may be harder to consistently form the patronus.

Thanks for all the comments.

Jim

 

Jim I have a question. Are you going to update your storys 1 fic per week or finish 1 and work on the other two or what? Cause I would much rather see this one finished first.

 

Right now, I am working on chapter 31 of Darkness. I'd like to get The Lie I've Lived to chapter 3 before I focus on completing Bungle. When I complete Bungle, I plan to alternate between Lie and Darkness until I finish Darkness. After the August 1st deadline for the competition, I will start the sequel to Bungle.

Hope that answers questions.

Jim

 

Awesome. That death was necessary but pretty cheap in a way since you killed off a not very liked character. Would have been great if Either Kwan or Bill got killed. If it were Kwan then it'll sad cause he's one of the best OCs out there. Pretty sad story. If it were Bill I could see Harry calling all the shots now but he would pretty much have a hard time. Btw, how many chapters before Bungle ends?

 

3 more chapters in the ruins. 1-3 after that to tie up loose ends.

Jim

 

Ok, right now I see a twisted kinda 'family reunions' between the kids because one of the babysitters died trying to cross the street to get the ball without looking out for traffic. In fact she did dodge a car or tree but the truck had a supercharged engine and 'Carmageddon' painted on the hood.

I also see Bill having a talk with Harry (or the other way around) about the way Voldie thinks. What I wander is what tone will Harry have: will he be angry, subdued or demanding?

 

Lookin' good. Hell of a way for Sanchez to go. Sudden though, that's good.

Can anyone else see Collins cracking up, waving his rifle around, screaming, "There's movement all over the place!" or "It's game over, man! Game Over!"

 

A good chapter though i must admit i was expecting something like Sanchez about to be killed when the bones impaled collins, guess for me this was kind a suprise in the obvious that Sanchez died.

Look forward to the next chapter.

 

I have finally got my lazy self to read some of your work, and in a fit of momentary madness I decided to review it as well. I’ll try to be as exhaustive as possible — but since it’s 4 a.m. I’m likely to forget a few things on the way.

Overall? Mixed feelings. I need to compliment you on several aspects of the story, for both form and content, and I also need to drown you in huge heaps of remarks and hopefully constructive criticism — again, for both form and content. I may come out as harsh, I might even come out as insulting (again, it’s 4 a.m. and I’m afraid I was never good at that whole diplomacy thing, a reason why I sometimes appear, much against my will, as a tactless bitch), but rest assured it was never my intention in the first place.

Right, onto the review…

Form:

There is a lot to say; most of which is, of course, about your very peculiar choice of a point of view. This is the first second-person story I have ever read. While a bit unsettling at first, I got used to it and wasn’t even noticing it after a few chapters.

This quick adaptation is both a good and a could-be-better thing. The good thing is that you mastered your 2nd person enough so that I wasn’t slowed down in my reading by such an unusual process. However, it led me to wonder what the interest of using 2nd person was. I mean, what does it bring to the story? Certainly not an easier identification to Harry; for that we have first person, which is smoother than 2nd person 99% of the time. Actually, the way I felt it (especially in your first chapter), reading a story in 2nd person was as if I was hearing an external voice — it could have been you, fate, Harry’s inner voice, the reader, whoever — describing and commenting Harry’s doings as he moved through the story. A voice that would be sardonic at times, compassionate maybe some other times, or, why not, just a mildly puzzled observer. It would be up to you to play with the different intonations, according to the situations Harry is confronted to.

I got this impression in your first chapter. It was confusing as hell, and not in the best way — some indications about Harry’s whereabouts, earlier in the chapter and perhaps inserted as context into the whole inner monologue, would have been welcome — but at second read I was able to fully appreciate the use of 2nd person. It was well-done, with small touches here and there to evoke that outer voice (the “tags” such as, ‘isn’t it?’) and I liked the effect a lot. The absence of dialogue allowed you to focus on Harry’s train of thoughts, which made it easier for you to play as much as you wanted with 2nd person, I guess. It was a really good exercise of style, but it also was more than that. It was the introspection into Harry’s mind by that ‘voice’, which knew all about him, could see the thoughts forming in his head and quickly drew itself the conclusions, even if it meant coming back on its words if they weren’t completely accurate. The sarcastic comments didn’t sound like they were coming from Harry, but rather as if someone else was expressing his thoughts in a scathing tone Harry himself would not use.

Then again, it is only my interpretation, and after I saw your characterisation of Harry in the later chapters I am tempted to think it’s a completely wrong interpretation. Still, I liked the idea, which gave some meaning to the presence of that ‘voice’ — for as long as there is a ‘you’, there’s someone who is addressing someone else by calling them ‘you’, or so my good old logic tells me.

However, you didn’t really keep up that aspect of things… In chapters 2 to 4 (which, I have to tell you in all brutal honesty, were complete disasters in my opinion), your 2nd person gets drowned in the almost omnipresent dialogue, and is therefore emptied of all its interest. Most of the times it sounds like a third or first-person literally translated into second-person; as if you had artificially replaced every ‘he’ (or ‘I’) by a ‘you’. Later in the story, there are a few well-inspired, or even truly beautiful paragraphs in which the 2nd person take its full meaning again, but on the whole it pretty much loses its interest.

Something else is probably a consequence of your choice of a 2nd person point of view: the whole writing seemed… uniform to me. Nothing stood out. The battles were told just as Harry’s training, Harry’s misadventures in town or Harry’s little fits against his former friends were; same tone, globally same sentence structure… The only moments when there was a change in the writing, suggesting an acceleration of the action, were Harry’s thoughts in his transformed state. The short and terse sentences allowed to create a nice effect there, in spite of the slightly retarded ‘Me-Tarzan-you-Jane’ like speech (not a criticism here, I am aware that such a speech was needed in those circumstances). You were probably slightly hampered by these ‘you’s’, but your writing globally came out as rather dull. True, the chapters were dotted with comments that made me smile a few times, but they weren’t quite enough to make up for the general blandness of the writing. Without mentioning the fact that I didn’t get half of the jokes, this being probably due to my nationality, source of so many joys on a forum full of British and American males =).

I can’t really think of any solution for that problem (which might be only a problem for me)… except, as I already said, to fully exploit the potential of your 2nd person instead of avoiding it.

I mentioned chapters 2, 3 and 4, didn’t I? Okay, so I hated them. Really. I had to struggle through them and I would probably have dropped the story there if I hadn’t decided, for some strange reason my foggy brain produced, that I would review it all. Those chapters were, forgive me but I can’t find other words for it, low-quality fanfiction. The characterisation, style, pace of the story, almost everything in them was from not-that-good to plain disastrous. The events occurred too fast without real and believable changes in Harry’s perception of them, that would have justified this haste. On one morning he’s all happy, and the following night he leaves the house with a few insults for its occupants. I mean, what? That was quite clumsily described, rushed, and with a rather poor development of what’s going on inside Harry’s head. That’s how I felt it was anyway; it reminded me a bit of the first version of a one-shot I once wrote. It was rushed too, and it felt off, as several reviewers pointed out. Here, Harry must have gone through a mental revolution, but it’s as if we only saw the beginning (‘Ginny’s my girlfriend, she tastes like strawberry, humm nice; and Hermione is getting better, and she’s curvy, life is wonderful’) and the end (‘Wait, I snogged Hermione! Wait, my potion is a fake one! Wait, those two are talking about me, and they’re treacherous bitches!’) without much of a transition.

Also, while I’m at it… him finding out after overhearing a conversation between Hermione and Ginny explaining EVERYTHING was kind of lame… This remark should have been in the ‘content’ part but to hell with that, better mention it before I forget.

The ‘rushing things’ part was not-that-good. The aforementioned clichéd twist was definitely bad. However, what classifies as ‘disastrous’ is your dialogues. Those unfortunately are 90% of chapters 2 to 4…

In the whole story, your style is, as I’ve said, a bit dull but good nonetheless. On the other hand, the dialogues in general are almost painful to read. They are often strained and speech and prose are rarely balanced. Since I’m sure I get the grammatical terms all wrong I’ll have to elaborate: most of the times you have your characters exchange many lines, without ever breaking the flow with a ‘context’ sentence, and suddenly you insert one, which stands out alone and isolated in the river of speech. It doesn’t flow well. Maybe you could consider going back to the very classic dialogue rules, before re-working on your dialogues again and improve them.

Granted, the dialogue rules that we learn at school, around 12 or 13 of age, are mostly made for a bunch of snotty-nosed brats with as much literary instinct as an asthmatic rhinoceros. But still, they are worth learning even if you have to detach yourself from them afterwards.

Those dialogue rules could be summed up as following, if I remember correctly: “(speech),” interpolated clause, “(speech).” The interpolated clause is most of the time ‘character said/replied/retorted/answered/grumbled/asked/shrieked/whispered etc…’. It is recommended that you should vary the verb as many times as possible without appearing artificial in doing so. That’s what you could call Granny’s advice on dialogue. Now, Tinny’s advice (for the record, I can’t say that with a straight face) would be to add adverbs and small sentences in your interpolated clause(s). It adds some context and allows the reader to picture the scene. I’m a lazy reader, I need details. Plus, that way the dialogue is inserted in a scene instead of being a parenthesis in the middle of it.

Also, avoid at all costs having your characters say something that yourself wouldn’t say in real life. Such as, calling each other’s name every few lines. You do that once or twice, nothing really bothering but I thought I’d mention it.

Another slightly off thing about your style: you sometimes don’t use punctuation as much as needed, and the result is very confusing, though I may be oversensitive to that since the French use more punctuation than the English/Americans/whatever do.

Ex, from chapter 18: “You flatten out against the shaft of your broom and pick up speed the ceiling of the great cavern is clear of rock formations and has a smooth almost polished surface.”

I am pretty sure a punctuation mark is absolutely required between ‘speed’ and ‘the ceiling.’

Also, you sometimes don’t end/start paragraphs very judiciously. One of the reasons why I never really saw a battle coming, the evenness of style aside, is that in the same paragraph we see Harry working on runes, hearing a sound and starting to fight. You shouldn’t shy away from using good old (and sometimes cheap!) stylistic effects, as long as you don’t use too many of them.

For instance, instead of writing:

“You return to your carving and are halfway finished with your next rune, when the campsites perimeter wards trigger. Bill set them at one hundred meters to alarm on the movement of anything heavier than ten kilos. Grabbing your wand, you head out the tent flap with Thundercloud right behind you. The alarm for the second set of wards set at fifty meters triggers. It is a series of stinging and confundus hexes designed to drive whatever it is away.”

…you could end your first paragraph at “trigger”. A one-liner, so what? Everyone can use a good old one-liner once in a while, as long as it doesn’t become a habit. It gives more emphasis to the fact that a bloody battle is about to start. In that particular paragraph, the lack of feelings from Harry also contributes to the general ‘blandness’ of the style. Is he scared? Anxious? Expectant? Any quickening heart beats, any surge of adrenaline, anyone? As lame as most of those suggestions sound, I’d rather have them that a Harry that only expresses his feelings with a sarcastic ‘well done, very cool move Potter.’ It would have added some realism to his character.

This brings me to talk about your descriptions, or lack thereof. Again, I may be very lazy, but I need to visualise the scenes and I need your help for it. I don’t think we get much description in the entire story. And that, too, is a reason why your style strikes me as dull: if you don’t really describe the atmosphere and locations (I mean, write more than the strictly necessary settings and such), I can’t see much difference between the place they’ve left and the one they’ve got into, I can’t see the time passing, I can’t picture the settings at all. And that’s probably why the general impression I get at the end is all vagueness. And yet — you had a beach, a palace, a Brazilian town, a jungle, ruins, and a dead city! You had all the ingredients to write some mind-numbing descriptions that would have led me to rave over a few thousands words about the quality of your fiction! There is here, yet again, a huge potential that you didn’t exploit. Especially for the dead city — the Inferi and nightmares are scary enough, I’ll give you that, but what about going in more detail while depicting the ruined buildings, the dilapidated rooms, the greyness, the shadows, the cold/heat etc.? You evoke very little colours and sensations in your fiction. However, those are essential for creating an atmosphere… You could have made the dead city so much scarier, instead of settling for an almost clinical depiction of a few rooms and buildings…

I have only a few details left to mention about the form, before commenting the content.

First: the story is in present and I quite like the effect. You should be careful with your tenses, sometimes you unconsciously slip back into past.

The abbreviations, such as ‘Gobs’ and ‘Parsel’, didn’t feel right for some reason. Like a bastardisation of the language. But then again, it might be just me.

Thank you for fixing your redundant typo that made you write ‘Occulmency’ instead of ‘Occlumency’ in at least 15 chapters out of 19. Again, some might find that I’m fretting over something small… but truth is, ‘Occul’ sounds a bit like an extremely vulgar French verb illustrating a sexual practice I won’t describe here; then you can understand if the sentence “I wonder what a wizard your age needs with Occulmency?” had me raise an eyebrow…

I think that’s all for the form. Now, the content:

First and foremost, I need to compliment you on your quite unusual creativity. You have built from scratch whole theories about Animagi, runes, enchanted wards etc., with an impressive amount of detail that shows just how much you worked on this. Your other inventions such as spell chains and Dodgespell are well developed and very interesting.

Although, I found the chapters almost exclusively devoted to the Dodgespell game quite long and boring. The game is a nice invention, and I can understand that you wanted to show multiple facets of it, but were the full telling of the friendly game plus the tournament absolutely necessary? After a while, I personally got the feeling that you were watching yourself typing, as we say where I live. As if you were taking pleasure in detailing the game at length, out of (quite legitimate) pride, maybe. I, for one, got bored and skimmed through it.

Now that’s out of the way, I have to say a word about the plot of this story… Well, I can recall Harry escaping, training then looking for a Horcruxe, and a relationship developing with Luna in parallel. It’s… okay, I guess. You lose yourself sometimes along the way (the Dodgespell parenthesis, for example), and there are those few ‘accidents’ such as the conversation between Hermione and Ginny that reveals everything, or the fling with Karina — everyone must have seen it coming from the ‘teach-me-how-to-magically-rip-off-a-shirt’ passage — or a few clichés such as Ron’s betrayal; but the plot stays coherent. The main problem is, because of that lack of descriptions I already mentioned, I don’t really see the progression in the action, or in Harry’s character and his interactions with others (Luna excepted). But the plot in itself is interesting enough. I’m curious as to what will happen, though I’d very much appreciate the return of those few brilliant paragraphs I found here and there in the story, and perhaps a nice bit of description...

Okay, so good enough for the plot. However, I’m afraid that your characterisation of a few people is every bit as disastrous as your dialogues.

First, the most obvious: Harry… Honestly, who is that brat who thinks himself clever/funny by calling Voldemort, “The Dark Wanker” or “Voldicrap”? So much for class and subtlety. I mean, of course I know that it’s supposed to be funny, not very serious, but even in Humour fics I can’t stand Harry calling Voldemort stupid names. Harry knows better than that. He doesn’t despise Voldemort or make fun of him. “The Dark Tosser/Wanker,” “Tommy,” “Dumbles,” “Dumblecrap and Voldishit,” all those are frankly pathetic names of Brazilianpimp’s level, therefore flame-worthy in my book. His letter to the Weasleys was uncharacteristic as well. At the end of OotP (never talking about HBP), Harry is not like that. He rarely is bratty. That’s Malfoy’s job.

Then, Harry matures extremely quickly and favours us with a few pompous sentences (your redundant dialogue problems is to blame too for the lack of fluidity, I guess…), including his latest letters to Luna; this usually makes his next “El Dorko Lordo” sound entirely off.

Last, as I’ve said, this Harry isn’t feeling enough. You speak, right after his flight in front of the dragon, of a moment of sheer terror. Well that was good to know, because I hadn’t realised he was so scared. He sounded upset at missing his target and apprehensive at being slower than the beast, but nothing more.

About Luna: I don’t get it. I don’t see the reason why you would change this character into a kind of… well, teenage girl that obviously needs a few slaps across the face. I’m not even talking about her scathing letters (although some of those scream ‘PMS fit’ in such a way that I feel ashamed for the whole feminine gender); but her early messages made her so very similar to Ginny in HBP that I stopped reading and stared at the screen for several minutes, trying to figure out why Luna would need to be so desperately normal. The girl of Harry’s dreams, in short. I just… no. I’m blocking on that.

The Weasleys were meant to be bashed and have been bashed in length, a little too heavily for my taste. Same goes for Hermione, Ron and Dumbledore… It was all a bit hastily explained and it sounded as if you wanted to get rid of the ‘formalities’ that are the reasons for the betrayal of Harry’s friends. On the other hand, Bill and Fleur are very nicely written. Bill is a likeable character who stays true to himself throughout the story; well done for that.

Your OC’s: Thundercloud annoyed me to no ends. The wise ‘I-see-in-your-eyes’ old Yoda-type Native American always annoyed me anyway, so I don’t really have any reproaches… other than the fact you created a wise old Native American; so never mind ^_^. The others are well characterised and well developed, although the whole female population of Brazil trying to get in Harry’s pants (Maria Sanchez excepted) was a tad irritating as well.

I think I’ve said all I had in mind, so all I have to do now is hope you didn’t fall asleep by the time you finished that overly long review. I’ll also quote here a sentence that I particularly liked, for some reason unknown even by me:

“He’s pulling on your ears, again.”

_______________

Rating: 2.5/5. Too much unexploited potential for me to give a higher mark, and the style could really improve.

 

OK, Im really impressed by that review. I dont think Ive ever seen something that in depth that didnt have assembly instructions included. Im not trying to flame or anything, just saying im impressed.
You hit all of the major points and had evidence to back and made recommendations to correct if author so desires.
Damn!!!

10ded

 

Err...

Oops?


Sorry Sree, I'll fix it... I'm used to calling them 'Indiens' in French >_<.

 

That is actually an insult to those of us who have Native American ancestry.
"Indians" are people from India.

 

That is actually a mistake made repeatedly all over the world for over two fucking centuries. I am deeply sorry that there isn't a French equivalent for 'native Americans', I will make sure to say a word about it to the first member of French Academy that I walk across to. I am also horrified that I might have let my origins trick me into writing 'Indian' instead of 'Native American'.

I find it ironic that I should write 3.2k words (I know, I'm crazy, but I just can't summarize—it's something like a physical impossibility) and you are dedicating a whole post to ONE word among said 3.2k, a word that I mistakenly wrote for another, and replaced as soon as I read Sree's post.

Now if someone wants to bitch about a lexical mistake, a grammar error or a misspelt word in my review, I'd be happy to receive a PM about it.

 

It's a tried and true character archtype, I really don't see much wrong. We have a Villian (Tom Riddle), a Hero (Harry), a Grand Vizier (Dumbledore), an Incompetant King (Fudge), a Mentor (Bill), and a few others so whats wrong with having a Wise Old Man? He's far from perfect as we see and he does have limits so it's not like he's a mary sue. All of Harry Potter is just a classical Hero's Journey. Why complain when you see the expected characters?

There are certain stages he will have to pass through and certain types of people he will inevitably meet. If it wasn't Thundercloud it would have been someone else. It is very hard to learn somethings on your own, especially things that require you to change how your mind works (occlumency and animagus in this story). It's the driving force behind all the mystery religions and secret societies in history. "Listen to us and we will show you how to see things you never would have before." Would you have prefered a priest, or a buddhist monk, perhaps he should learn from a blind child? It's something you have to be initiated into, very few can unlock their minds on their own.

 

I am not holding that mistake against you. It is a common mistake that you really can't blame the French for it either. It's Christopher Columbus's fault as he thought he was in the indies and that would make the natives indians. As for you review of this story, it is pretty harsh but everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I personally love this story because it is so far from the main stream hp fics that it makes it unique.

 

India at the time was known as Hindustan. Columbus described native americans as a people in god. In dios. It's an antiquated way of saying natives are spiritual. I s'pose that's a compliment. Common usage has molested it from there.[/digression]

The only real problem I have with this story is that the updates can't keep up with my appetite for it.
I dig the format too. Unusual things rarely have merit for being just that, but I find 2nd person refreshing instead of distracting. That, couple with a storie containing growth, pain, boobs and explosion and it's really a rare find.