I think he's trying to point out something along the lines of "this fic has its flaws but it has a lot of potential to be good in the future". I have a big problem with that though.

The biggest issue I have with this being up for review isn't, like most people, with the author. I actually think that Starfox is an okay writer and that his stories can be good guilty pleasures. My problem is with the current amount of content. Given the plot and the author's writing tendencies, this story is likely going to end up easily passing 100k words. Yet all we have to rate the story on is the first chapter. How often can you judge everything about a story based on the first chapter?

This fic should have probably been given at least a few months to grow before being posted here. The potential to be good isn't enough to justify putting a story up for review. If the potential is there, wait and see if it actually manifests.

 

Because "For Review" is not for fics we think should be in the library; it's a place to discuss all and any fics. The new policy of the forum is against megathreads where people discuss fics, but for each fic to have its own discussion thread. This fic is wothy of discussion - by which I mean that people want to discuss it - and so it has a thread.

 

Real talk, the title of the fic might be Starfox trying to tell us something about himself.

 

https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ned-and-really-trying-harry-potter-au.442975/

The story is completed on alternate history if you have an account.

I'll be honest, I didn't even realize it was starfox5 until I was most the way through.

That being said, I didn't find it that funny. Something is missing. I rarely see fics that handle comedy properly though, so I have little to compare to.

3.5/5

 

Again, I acknowledge that a "safer" Wizarding World isn't interesting to read about for its own sake. But you know what's pleasant to read about? A hero whose moral code is relatively congruent with yours. And personally, I think a wizard who has access to the Resurrection Stone and doesn't make an attempt to inform the rest of humanity that the Afterlife definitely exists and they should quit worrying either has a mental bias the size of the Everest, or is outright evil.

(For the record, both Harry and Voldemort in canon have the perfectly good excuse that they couldn't draw attention to it without Voldemort learning of it, and Voldemort controlling the Stone is a much more hellish scenario than just the current situation of billions of Muggles angsting and going mad over the certainty of death and orphans growing up without parents.)

…? What I explained is objectively what Yudkowsky has stated to be his goal. He acknowledged that HP was a good children's series but he wasn't that fond of it, he said that he really liked the fanfiction community of HP, and he set out to write a book targeted at said community. This is factual, and not really the same thing as what Starfox is trying to do — regardless of whether you think that this intent was spiteful and daft, which is a perfectly valid opinion to have.

Seconded.

 

To go back a bit...

This ties in with the AU point as well. The point here is that I don't consider those changes to be an improvement. For me it's much more interesting to explore the reasons for why the wizarding world is the way it is, rather than to say there's no reason and that the world should change to suit Muggle sensibilities.

For example, take the wizarding approach to danger. Clearly, wizards are far more comfortable with children in danger than (modern) Muggles are. For example, Quidditch involves iron balls travelling at over 100mph hitting children, sometimes in the head, and it's not considered unusual to throw a child from a window to force some accidental magic out of them.

Now, when writing fanfic, you have two options.

On the one hand, you can note that a) wizards are more durable than Muggles, and that wizarding medicine is far more advanced, and so a much higher level of danger is required for irreversible damage to be done (mostly limited to situations where there is malicious magic at work, rather than physical danger) and b) that magic seems to flourish when children are exposed to danger/adventure.

Accordingly, you can write a wizarding world where there is a different culture around danger, one where a bit of danger in a child's life is considered a valuable learning experience. Wizards would consider Muggle child-rearing to be painfully boring, and dangerously suffocating besides - how is your child ever going to fully realise their potential, unless they're exposed to the occasional risk to life and limb? Meanwhile Muggles would consider wizarding child-rearing to be reckless.

Crucially, both groups have very good reasons to raise their children in the way they do, and their looking down on the other group is the result of ignorance of those reasons. Muggles cannot easily grasp just how durable wizards are, and wizards cannot easily grasp just how delicate Muggles are.

On the other hand, you can say that wizards are stupid and reckless and should raise their children like Muggles.

One of these approaches is complex, nuanced, and creates interesting opportunities for conflict in which neither side has the obvious moral high ground.

The other approach is preachy, verges on bashing (the core of bashing being reducing one side to obviously foolish/incorrect but sticking to their position), and is disrespectful of the source material.

 

You realise you'd be one of the scientists that die horribly at the start of a movie, yeah?

 

I mean, there's no law of the universe that dictates any character looking into immortality and/or communicating with the Afterlife shall be smitten by spontaneous karmic lightning. It's just a common trope that's more or less a leftover of religious dogma that condemned non-church-approved spiritism and necromancy. You can write a story where that character is the hero, as have many people in our wiser times.

Well again, like with "tamer Hogwarts", you've picked an issue that isn't what I'd be most adamant about. But since you've raised the subject, I say the wizards are in the wrong here for a completely different reason, namely depriving Muggles of their advanced healing which would allow them to allow the same type of exciting lives as the wizards. And also, again, because they don't inform Muggles that they have conclusive evidence that the Afterlife is real, and ways to contact it, and so death is ultimately not really a big deal. The key point is that the Statute is a moral abomination.

 

Yeeeaaaaahh, you're definitely dying first. Probably survive just long enough to write an unfinished warning in your blood that is only apparent after the fact.

 

By the same argument, every moment that you're not sharing your first-world income to improve the lives of those in the third-world, you are being immoral.

The fundamental principle of the Western societies is that of liberty, not service. You have no obligation to devote your life to charity, though we might consider you laudable for doing so. Selfishness is morally neutral, so long as you don't actively cause harm to others. Similarly, wizards have no moral obligation to devote their lives to helping Muggles. Indeed, the last person to suggest that wizards do so was Grindelwald, and that didn't go so well.

I rather like it in fanfics where someone suggesting the repeal of the statute is viewed in a similar way as someone advocating the genocide of the Jews is in modern Western society.

 

A key difference here is that if I traveled to these countries to give a bunch of third-world people advanced medicine there wouldn't be international laws forbidding me from doing so and putting me in a demon-guarded hell-prison. Any one individual choosing not to help is a different situation from it being institutionalized that helping is a crime.

Also, while it may not be the obligation of individuals to provide service, it ought to be the obligation of governments and other organizations of power, insofar as alleviating suffering is concerned (what I mean by that is that wizards don't have a moral duty to mass-produce brooms, even if it'd generally be neat, but the I.C.W. must do something about cancer).

As for publicizing the Afterlife, that in any case wouldn't take the enslaving of any wizards, surely — and denying anyone knowledge that ground-breaking seems to me to be akin to deliberately stringing along a third-world country to believe that the Earth is flat and laid on the backs of four elephants.

A) Great ideas can have supporters who are terrible people; that's like saying that trying to install a republic instead of a tyrannical monarchy is wrong on general principle because Robespierre and Stalin were tyrants.

B) Grindelwald wasn't arguing the same thing as I am anyway; "Muggles would be better off too" is only a secondary argument, with his main idea being that wizards are superior and shouldn't have to hide from 'inferior beings' ("Who does this law protect… us, or them?").

 

You realise foreign aid is miniscule internationally, right? This is not the lens through which muggles regard their governments.

 

Just because current governments don't do it doesn't mean I don't think they should.

 

Foreign policy is rarely accused of making for a thrilling narrative.

 

Well just for a simple review, I read the whole thing on Alternate History as it was being written and was suitably entertained. Was it the greatest thing ever or perfectly fitting my tastes? No. However, this thread seems a bit over the top for what the story is, a 3/5 on a good day. Starfox's stories hit a lot of the same points, if you've read one you've read a third of them all, but I enjoyed the delusional Grindelwald. I'm probably never going to pick it back up again, but let's not get too bent out of shape over a single story, I'm astonished that this thread is so active for what the subject is.

 

Well y'know. Conversations drift. Most of this thread hasn't been so much about RRaRT on its own sake as about Starfox's works in general and its widespread criticism, with RRaRT as just an example.

 

I read this fic having never heard of Starfox5, or read any of his/her stories. To a certain degree, I approached it with an unbiased mind (having skimmed the above conversations about the author).

Whilst not absolutely terrible, this fic unfortunately does not have many redeeming qualities. As opined by the OP, the premise for the story is interesting. That being said, however, the execution by the author ruins any latent potential this piece of Fanfiction might have had.

GG's internal monologues were painful to read. He came across as a simplistic happy-go-lucky fool, not an erudite septuagenarian with a lifetime of regret. Whilst canon does show GG to have had some regret towards the end of his life, this fic pulls it too far, to the extent that you can see the seams in between. I had a hard time forcing myself to read past the first chapter, hoping against all hope that the fic would get better as the chapters went on.

Unfortunately, a shoe-horned-in sex scene between Harry and Ginny, teenagers being trained by GG's old soldiers on the flimsiest of premises, and a lackadaisical approach to politics mean that things do not get much better. The author also has a bit of a problem showing, and not telling her/his story.

I definitely got a few crackish! vibes throughout the story. They weren't strong enough for me to think it was on purpose, however.

1.5/5 rated down, as per the rules.

 

Out of curiosity, have you ever considered the flip side to wizards keeping themselves completely separate from muggles and keeping the later in the dark about the existence of the former? You know, all the ways wizards could very easily screw over absolutely everyone.

Aparation and portkeys let you break in virtually anywhere, and escape from virtually anywhere in a pinch. The imperious Curse lets you control the minds of anyone in the world. Veritaserum lets you get a large amount of information. Polyjuice lets you disguise yourself as literally anyone human. Any number of charms can leave you all but undetectable from everyone. And, of course, the Killing Curse (among other spells) can kill someone in an untraceable manner.

I'm not saying that wizards couldn't do a lot of good if they revealed themselves to the world. I'm saying there's a lot of ways even a single wizard could do a whole lot of damage to the world, from stealing billions for himself to starting World War Three.

 

I'd go even farther and say that a single, very talented dark wizard could do more damage than a dedicated, large group of talented wizards could do good - with substantially less effort.

 

The problem is that as people like Voldemort and Grindelwald demonstrate, sufficiently powerful Dark Wizards with the inclination to mess with Muggles will do so regardless because they're powerful enough to shrug off whatever Auror the I.C.W. sends at them.

But to be clear, as I mentioned above, I don't think they should just repeal the Statute overnight - I'm advocating for them starting to work on it, planning out everything in advance and taking several decades if neet be to minimize any chances of catastrophe.