Title:Chosen Ones
Author:arturus
Rating:M
Genre:Sci-Fi/Drama
Status:WIP
Library Category:The Alternates
Pairings:Harry/OC
Summary:Born thousands of years apart 2 children of prophecy are thrown together after a cosmic accident. Paul Atreides is just beginning his journey while an emotionally scarred Harry has completed his and found that his life is still not his own. Beta read by XRaiderV1. Cover Image courtesy of Jonn Wolfe.
Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6964817/1/Chosen-Ones

This fic is legit. It plops Harry into the Dune universe and the author does a superb job of unfolding events similar to Dune cannon but diverging to a different ending as events change with Harry present. I haven't finished it yet as I'm on chapter 22 of 23 but I felt like I had to post it now.

 

I'll refer you to this post: Review Board Rules because your formatting is wrong.

 

After reading the first chapter I give this fic a negative. It's mostly "tell, not show"; in the first chapter Harry appears on Caladan, is imprisoned and by the end of it, is drafted into Dukes Leto army, without any problems. There's no mention of Earth or the fact that Harry is basically 20k years in the future. And he goes around calling people "My Lord/My Lady". Seriously?

I'll keep reading it, but after that first chapter I have a giant urge to just click the red x and forget about it. Shame, I always wanted to read some interesting Dune fanfic.

 

Just like in Frank Herbert's novels the fic doesn't go into detail about earth history. Harry would obviously use honorifics necessary in a new unknown world to adapt and stay alive. What were you expecting? That he put Duke Leto under the imperious?

 

do i need to look up the dune universe and learn about it a little bit to enjoy the fic or am i good to read it with little to no knowledge of dune

 

This is pretty poor.

It suffers from a classic malady of crossovers: protagonist bloat. There's no need to have Harry and Paul Atreides rocking around in the same world. If Harry had been reincarnated as Paul, The Prince Who Was Promised style, that could have worked well. But as it is, we just have mysterious magical man floating around and plopping crudely into a bad rendition of the early Dune setting.

There's no acknowledgement of the complex web of relationships which existed even at this early stage in Dune, and frankly that's one of the most significant elements, for all that it's also sci-fi. Harry just shows up and is inducted into their military for no apparent reason, which he just goes along with, unquestioning, because reasons.

Nobody is in character. All of the dialogue feels childish. There is no weight behind anyone's action and it never feels as if the consequences matter.

Dune was a masterpiece because it combined political fantasy with a messianic story cycle against a novel science fiction background. There's none of that here, save for a bland re-telling of sparse events with Harry in the background as a tourist with a work visa.

If you liked Dune, don't bother with this. It misses everything about it which was good.

2/5

 

The only thing(s) I know about Dune is that this guy talks about it all the time on YouTube.

I'll get into the review, despite knowing only one of the fandoms.

it's a weak opening line. I know I sound a bit pompous saying this, but it's true.

Imagine Shadow of Angmar opened with "Harry groaned and took a fart. Then he ended up in this dark castle and got a lot of boo-boos and he cried a lot"

The first paragraph is this:

I get it. The opening line, paragraph, has to be the author's best. Draw us in, set the tone and act evocative, lure us in. This opening line fails at that.

Onto the story:

The writer seems to forget the existence of commas and then remember them with every paragraph. Lines can read like

"Harry took a shit then he wiped his ass then he washed his hands and opened the door and left the bathroom"

There are a variety of technical mistakes littering this work that scratch at my eyes. Stuff like this:

At the halfway point of the first chapter, I started skimming. Always a bad sign.

As a reader unfamiliar to Dune, its world and characters, I entered the chapter in unfamiliar territory. None of the characters held any weight for me, every title and location had no resonation with me at all. I know that expo-dumps are bad, but this problem extends beyond a lack of knowledge of the source material.

There's no physical description, and I feel nothing at all reading this except the urge to stab my eyes out.

I don't know who the fuck Duncan Idaho is. If I didn't know this was HP/Dune, I'd think this was a Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfiction.

The writer's prose made slogging through the first chapter a task akin to storming Omaha Beach during D-Day. It's bland, unimaginative, and makes me dread what the rest of the story is going to be like.

It reads like a cracked out teenager got their hands on a typewriter.

Three months pass towards the end of the chapter, and I feel like it got nowhere. It tries to work as a weird sort of in-media-res, but poorly. Imagine Harry goes to Diagon Alley, and then eight paragraphs later, he befriends Hermione, Ron, and is actively working to seize the Philosopher's Stone before Voldemort.

If you think @kathryn_518 's prose is bad, you haven't seen this story.

It's a weak story, with not a twinge of anything remarkable, fun... There's just nothing. Forcing someone to read an entire Thesaurus would be less of a punishment than trudging through this mess.

I'm sorry I couldn't go more in-depth than this; I'm not at all familiar with Dune; the characters, world-building, etc. The writing is simply too amateurish and quite simply unreadable.

1/5. There are better things to do with your time than read this. Like watching a tree grow.

Edit: Belongs in the Trash Bin.

 

On another note, I posted a similar review on FFN and...

'zis is what our goodie old friend had to say.

Funny enough, arturus also blocked me before I could reply. /laughs psychotically

And, for some odd reason, arturus is now following me.