I'm near the end of the second book and I'm enjoying it so far, but I have to concur that the tropes might grow annoying quickly.

Spoiler

"Voldie" is only the single one that actually made me cringe, but there are many tired cliches in here. Still, executed with some nice restraint and polish

EDIT: There are also quite many inconsistencies like the author had forgotten what they've actually written in earlier scenes

Spoiler

As the most obvious example, Harry talks in a letter about meeting Scrimgeour in the birthday gala in book 1, but in book 3 there's a line about having no idea who Scrimgeour is. I'm sure I noticed more errors like this throughout

EDIT2: It actually reads a little bit like CarnivorousMuffin's description about reality as his main character sees it: it seems there's a framework of events the author has in mind, but stretched over that is the flimsiest logic and reasoning by the characters to bring them in line with the plot.

And for another example of the author seeming to suffer with short-term memory loss:

Spoiler

“Lumos,” Harry said. Several other voices joined him; wandlight filled the compartment. They stared at each other.

“Maybe we’re picking someone up?” Neville said uncertainly.

Hermione looked out the window. “It’s the middle of the woods—wait—never mind, I see someone moving out there—”

Neville and Blaise clustered with her to look.

“In a hood,” Blaise added.

Harry and Theo drew their wands in almost the same movement.

3/5 For being technically good and still entertaining despite the flaws.

 

Just finished the first book in this series.

I do consider myself a fan of the Slytherin!Harry genre - hell, I'm writing one myself, after a fashion - but I think I am perhaps more endeared to the idea of what Slytherin!Harry could be, rather than the genre as an established set of fanon tropes. Much like the recent discussions we have had on "independent Harry", at the core of Slytherin!Harry I see interesting ideas buried under a certain amount of unfortunate fanon baggage.

My view of Den of Snakes is that it approaches the heights of what can be achieved within the limits of sticking to that baggage. Which is to say, it is a well-executed attempt at bringing to life some fundamentally bad ideas. As such, it also neatly demonstrates the limits of the concept "there's no such thing as a bad idea, just bad execution". I am not really a believer in that philosophy, and accordingly my enjoyment of this story has an inherent ceiling to it.

And to be clear, when I refer to "baggage" here I am not just referring to the most obvious stuff like James abandoning Harry to the Dursleys, or the inevitable over-reaction of the WBWL to Harry being sorted into Slytherin. By baggage I mean stuff like kids referring to each other's families as "allies"; the over-emphasis placed on people exhibiting the values of their Hogwarts house; and the absurd level of analysis which is put into children's social interactions, which borders on conspiracy theory levels of seeing everything as an intentional scheme (and, worse, the narrative itself endorsing that view, with successful Xanatos-type schemes left, right and centre).

Putting the baggage aside, what you have is a well-written but somewhat bland story.

Characterisation

Probably the best element is the characterisation. The cast is quite large, but the characters are all fairly distinct. You feel like you know how a given character will react to each situation. However, the author is helped along in this task by the fact that they never really stray far from the fanon stereotypes of these characters. Further, I feel like an awful lot of the characterisation is done via telling rather than showing - the reader is spoon-fed the characters' various beliefs, attitudes, habits etc. rather than deducing them from seeing them in action.

Consider, for example, Pansy. This is how we're introduced to her:

This is characterisation on easy mode. We're told Pansy has a "cunning smile", which is just a way for the author to hide a character trait within a physical description (physically, there's no such thing as a cunning smile). Similarly, when Daphne and Pansy make eye contact the "temperature drops", even though we've given no real cue for what is causing this - Harry is receiving divine insight into these characters' attitudes to each other, without the reader really seeing through word or action how Harry is reaching those conclusions. And then the crowning jewel: a paragraph in which Pansy's core characteristic is told to the reader, all of it hanging off a single, innocuous piece of dialogue: "What relatives?"

Here's a trick: let's view that conversation again, sticking only to the words and actions, without the narrative commentary:

Now, from her words and actions, does Pansy come off as a) cunning b) a social queen bee or c) a gossip? I don't think so. And yet those are the things that the reader is told to deduce from that conversation. The amount of insight Harry gains into Pansy's character in this interaction has no basis in what is actually occurring in front of Harry's eyes; it's purely told to the reader as stuff the author wants the reader to know. And because of that, it feels like it lacks depth.

While we do see Pansy consistently interested in gossip over the course of the first year, I don't think there's ever any moment in which she exhibits particular cunning or social dominance. So viewing the character from the whole-year perspective, only one of the three core characteristics which we are told she has at her first appearance is ever really made out.

This approach to characterisation is pretty consistent across the story. So while the characterisation has some merits with regards to how the author has thought up distinctive roles, backstories etc. for each of them, the way the narrative establishes those characteristics is, I think, not particularly stellar. We're being info-dumped the author's character profile document, rather than seeing the characters' personalities through their words and actions.

Setting

Where the blandness really comes into play is in relation to the setting i.e. the wizarding world.

Setting - Portrayal of magic and magical talent

The magic is somewhat uninspired, both in theory and in practice. It's not really a focus of the story, which is itself a disappointment, especially after the promise of the early chapters in which Harry is built up to be particularly talented. That whole character arc rather fizzles out by the time he gets to Hogwarts, and the story's focus on magic fizzles out with it.

I think the author has written this area of the story without a plan in place. Harry is given pre-Hogwarts control of magic, something we associate only with the very top tier of wizards, but none of that talent ever shows itself in his wand work. It's like his wandless use of magic is a completely isolated ability, mysteriously cut off from the rest of his magic use. This is a strange, counter-intuitive approach. The fact that Harry is instinctively achieving things which wizards normally have to be educated in should be a sign that he has a generally strong insight into magic. Instead it's treated almost like a mutation from X-Men.

The worst example of this is that Harry's weakest subject at Hogwarts is Charms. Of all the subjects the author could have chosen, this makes the least sense, because Charms is precisely the subject area which Harry so excels at in wandless magic (heating, freezing, floating). Imagine if the author made Harry instinctively learn to become an animagus in his pre-Hogwarts years, then showed him as useless at transfiguration once at Hogwarts. That's what we're dealing with here.

This whole area of Harry's characterisation feels like the author threw an arbitrary weakness Harry's way just to avoid accusations of him being a Gary Stu, but it just comes off as poorly executed. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that the way this arc has developed means that the story fundamentally fails to deliver on a promise it makes in the early chapters. Harry is initially presented as a Tom Riddle-esque talent. The story then progressively downgrades him to the point that he's barely above his canon self: he excels in a couple of specific areas, but is otherwise merely above-average. The type of wizard who might become an Auror but not more than that.

As a result of Harry's magical development being abandoned as a major plot element, the story largely ignores the existence and use of magic and the setting suffers for it.

Setting - Location

The other way in which the setting is bland is that of location. Hogwarts here just doesn't feel very alive. It's just the routine use of canon locations without any element of recalling the magic of first reading about those places or the general charm of the wizarding world. Hogwarts is just there, but there's very little sense in which this is a real school filled with real people. The magic and charm of the school has been completely lost.

I think this is down to a lack of description, as well as an absence of any original additions to the setting.

Overall, I think this falls into the upper end of Almost Recommended for me. Written by someone who knows what they are doing with words, but let down by the inherent limitations of its premise and a certain lack of vision. 3/5

 

"Gossip" and "Queen Bee" are, I think, definitely doable from words and actions alone. That said, I'm not demanding that an author never describe Harry's impressions of people to the reader. Rather I am saying that those impressions need to hang on something, rather than come out of a vacuum. Harry's impressions should expand upon a characteristic which is already germinating in the reader's mind from the dialogue, body language, etc. That way, his impressions will ring true to the reader as they will confirm (and then proceed to detail more completely) that which the reader already suspects.

Cunning is a different matter. Cunning is not a conclusion that you can reach about a person from a brief interaction with them. It is a characteristic which can only be perceived following a course of behaviour. Indeed, the very nature of cunning is to be disguised - cunning which is obvious as a first impression is not, in fact, cunning. The only authentic way to really show cunning is to have that character perform a course of action which is only perceived in hindsight to have been cunning, without anyone realising at the time.

So to that extent, I agree, you can't get a reader to think "this character is cunning" from a conversation alone. But I disagree that this justifies having the point of view character divine that characteristic instead. Just as the reader has no basis for concluding that a character is cunning, neither does the point of view character. If a reader is coming away from a first interaction with a character with a belief that the character is cunning, something has gone wrong.

 

I read this series a while back, up to The Center of the Maze I believe. I really liked it and I think that it's one of the better Harry Potter fanfics that can be found on AO3.

From what I remember I think that it deserves a 4/5. Well worth a read.

 

Showing someone as a gossip through words and actions alone is very easy. You show them freely sharing information given to them in confidence. You show them wheedling a person to give up personal information. You show them engaging in information exchange with peers. You show them as chatty, open, and friendly, frequently moving between different social groups. Observing people doing that is how you conclude that a person is a gossip. No one in real life meets someone, hears them say two sentences, and immediately thinks "this person is a gossip".

You are right that there is no "gossip tell" in the sense of being able to just look at someone and know they are a gossip, without actually observing them engaging in the activity. Which is my point. If there's no tell in real life, then you shouldn't have characters reaching that conclusion in fiction.

There's no basis for Harry to look at Pansy and conclude that she is a gossip, because all she's done is ask him a question in a perfectly polite, "small talk" manner. Harry's conclusion is completely unjustified by anything he has seen, and therefore feels unnatural to the reader. It is not really a conclusion that the character has come to, but rather information the author has told the reader by artificially implanting in Harry's head.

Either the author should show Pansy actually engaging in gossip, or remove Harry's impression that she's a gossip. Likely the latter, because showing her engaging in gossip would derail the scene. In any event, that short conversation is far too soon for Harry to be forming such a complete view of her character.

Which brings us back to my point. Throughout the story, characterisation is done by fiat rather than earned through natural human interaction. Characters consistently have impressions of each other that go way beyond the kinds of impression that they would realistically have. Those impressions are frequently used to present characters to the reader fully-formed rather than having their characteristics reveal themselves over time.

 

I'm not sure, but I feel like many people are rating this story pre-maturely. I read it a while ago and firmly feel that this story (as a whole) is in the 4 star range as far as entertainment value/character building goes. It's one of the few actively updating stories that I read immediately when I get the update e-mail. First year does go into some seriously cliche territory, but it's far and above the normal trash we get these days. I'm actually starting a re-read and will update this post with more content later. I remember absolutely loving the aftermath of the Tri-Wizard tournament and how this Harry dealt with the situation.

 

I read up through to about halfway into what's written of 5th year and enjoyed pretty much every story until then.

The banter in this between the main cast is fantastic. Gold star. Loved every bit of it. The stories are well plotted, and the cast of child characters seem like children. Also superbly done, as @Sesc pointed out.

The author does a great job of adding nuance to the cliché pureblood nonsense and explores the idea that a lot of the purebloods dislike muggleborns because they refuse to integrate into what is essentially a foreign culture they are immigrating into. This is well done.

The 'Light' side suffer from a complete lack of nuance. To the point where, as Sesc pointed out in the initial post, they're obnoxious. For reasons.

Even if I accept that James is a complete fuckwit and Dumbledore is a manipulative bastard, the reactions of literally every member of the Order are so mind-bogglingly stupid that it kinda wrecks what was otherwise thoroughly enjoyable.

The author has attempted to create a nuanced, complex pack of antagonists in the case of the Death Eaters and Voldemort, and has done a stellar job of this. The unfortunate thing is that they did so at the expense of making the Order (the other antagonists) a pack of blithering idiots without an ounce of nuance in their bodies, with their whole ideology boiling down to "hurr durr, Dark equals Evil". Which, fine. That would work if the rest of the series didn't repeatedly argue that this is a dumb idea and that anyone who believes this is stupid. There's no (and I'm going to use this word again) nunace to the Order et al. And it's depressing.

Also, the entire attitude of several adults assuming an abused child at age 11 was at fault for being sorted into Slytherin, and also to blame for being resentful that their actions resulted in said abuse, was irritating in the extreme, and it only got worse as the story went.

TL;DR there's a lot to love here, and I enjoyed it right up through Year 5, at which point the primary antagonists (Dumbledore and company) became entirely unrelatable simply for their non-Canon portrayals combined with rampant idiocy. The first I can handle so long as it's not paired with the second.

For years 1 through 4, I'll give this 4/5 rounded up. Unfortunately, year 5 doubles down on the problems of the previous stories, which I'll give a 3/5 and say that I didn't finish it due to burnout.

 

I read and enjoyed the whole thing, but I have a lot of problems with the story.

Probably the most serious issue for me is how closely the story sticks to canon. Jules Potter is very different from canon's Harry Potter, but he somehow plays exactly the same role Harry does in the plot relevant events through the first two books.

From book three on, Harry plays a much bigger role in plot relevant events, but there's still no major departures from canon for quite some time. Mind you, this Harry is also very different from canon Harry, so when events play out the same way it feels quite contrived.

Spoiler

There are times where something appears to be a divergence from canon, but the story immediately throws in something to "correct" the course of events so that the author can continue writing canon. For example, at the end of book three, there's the confrontation in the Shrieking Shack with Pettigrew and Sirius, and Pettigrew is actually captured by the Ministry. Cool, except for the fact that Pettigrew somehow escapes Ministry custody off-screen to go fulfill his role in the goblet of fire plot.

Under the umbrella of sticking to the canon storyline, events are sort of split between happening to Harry or Jules. When I was reading I had the rather annoying feeling that "good" events happened to Jules, while "bad" events happened to Harry. For example:

Spoiler

Jules becomes seeker in first year. Harry has to be rescued from the Dursleys' via flying car. Harry speaks to a snake in dueling club and is thought to be the heir of Slytherin. Jules kills the basilisk and frees Dobby. Harry faints on the train from dementors. Jules gets Patronus tutoring. I could go on.

Book four is where things actually start to be interesting, still rehashing the Goblet of Fire plot, but also including a great deal of totally original content.

I agree with others who have said characterization is the strong point of the story, but it's far from perfect. People on "Harry's side" are logical and reasonable to the point of incredulity. Everyone else is biased and unreasonable, with the exception of (eventually) Jules. Dumbledore is an OC cartoon villain with Dumbledore's name and role. The couple scenes we see from Dumbledore's point of view do nothing to explain why he does the ridiculous things he does.

A lot of the original content in this series has to do with "dark" magic, magical culture, and family magics. And the series' portrayal of dark magic frankly isn't very nuanced. As far as we know, almost all "dark" magic, including the unforgivables(?) , doesn't have any serious repercussions for the caster. I think (hope) the author is setting things up so that dark magic does have serious downsides that the cast doesn't know about but I'm far from confident things will go this way.

My list of complaints is probably growing too long. The series is well written, and the day to day interactions between Harry's friends are a pleasure to read.

Overall thoughts

This series lacks originality and comes across as part OP!Harry, part canon fix-it, and part bashing while still being a canon rehash hundreds of thousands of words into the story. At the same time, the quality of writing and characterization of the main characters is very good and kept me going through the whole series. There were enough annoyances while reading that I can't give this higher than a 3/5. A guilty pleasure for me.

 

Yeah, I'm only a bit into fourth year but I felt light side characters were contrived just so it fit Harry's narrative. I felt that James and Dumbledore were overblown but believable but when all of a sudden the Weasley parents found it alright that Harry was abused if it saved Jules I felt it crossed into just light bashing.
I'll read until the end for more of a review though, I just think that from what I've read so far it's overrated.

 

This sums up my biggest gripes. Especially the "outdated traditions" that the Wesley's want to get rid of. Like, okay, sure, you don't follow those, that's cool and totally your right. Now why, if they aren't harmful to society or any particular group, are you trying to marginalise those who DO want to follow those traditions? Tradition can be bullshit and just a mask for the lazy or powerful to keep control. It can also just be a (mostly) harmless expression of culture and heritage. Which scenario is 'true' in this AU is completely unremarked upon by anyone without Harry and Co's biases.

Ironically, I can totally understand the Ministry position: 'dark' magic is powerful, potentially dangerous if misused, and in a society where literally everyone 11 years old and up is armed to the teeth, powerful magic threatens the government's monopoly on force (please, don't start a gun debate). Thus: restricting or banning it. If you follow a (totally fanon) interpretation of Ministry power creep and overreach of authority over time following its creation after the Statute of Secrecy was implemented (which seems to be alluded to in this series), then that whole conflict makes complete sense.

I'll echo your thoughts on Ethan Thorne. Now That is a well written antagonist. Which, as you pointed out, just highlights the moustache twirling characterisation of Dumbledore and James. And Andromeda makes no fucking sense.

I will, probably, go back to this at series at some point. But I binged it over a week or so, and just burned out about 65k words into Year 5.

 

See, that sets up an interesting ideological conflict etc.

But yeah, instead we get the "light" side (apropos of nothing, does that term ever get used in canon?) and their infantile motivations. And even the one interesting one (Thorne) has a simplistic view that everyone who likes the traditional/dark stuff must obviously be in favour of muggle baiting and hate muggleborns.

I can't remember if there's even any serious engagement with the fact that two of Harry's friends are muggleborn, and they are also friends with several people described by Dumbledore's crew as "pureblood supremacists" despite this.

This series had a lot of potential. Although I think it would have been much more interesting if the author had scrapped the whole 'James dumps Harry with the Dursleys because Dumbledore' bit, but then basically everything else (even the interesting bits) unravel from there.

Or maybe have the Dursleys as decent human beings and the reason they didn't call James in when Harry's magic showed up was because he's the kind of dickbag that would abandon one of his sons, and Petunia didn't want her sister's son to have anything to do with him. That would set up an even more interesting series of conflicts, whereby Harry prefers living with his muggle relatives and wants nothing to do with his father or his father's friends. Hey presto: still have the distrust of Dumbledore and a desire to not be in Gryfindor, etc without the ridiculousness of the Dursleys being worse than canon (which is a trope I hate, they were bad enough).

I'm not sure if this is really the place for this though, so I'll stop.

 

I did put "good" and "bad" in quotes for a reason -- I recognize that it's entirely subjective. I agree in the general sense that Slytherin!Harry stories can often invert what is good and what is bad, but I don't think that makes sense for the specific plot points I listed.

Spoiler

Falling off your broom and having it fly directly into the whomping willow is pretty clearly a negative (is negative a better word to use?) experience no matter what house you're in. It isn't significantly less likely for this to happen to this Harry than canon Harry, but this Harry is on the other team, playing a different role, and when I read that it still happened I rolled my eyes.

I suppose the main issue here is the author sticking too closely to canon. This broom needed to be broken so that Sirius could mail him a Firebolt. This especially bothers me because I don't think it takes that much creativity to find another expensive but suspicious gift that Sirius could mail him instead.

I still think the way that Harry is left with a lot of canon's negative experiences while Jules is left with many of the positive ones feels extra contrived. Fixing the canon rehash issue would solve this though, and the canon rehash is a much bigger issue for me.

I agree having Harry avoid all the issues is a way to create a story entirely lacking in tension, but having issues that are solved the exact same way as canon isn't much better. My preference is for introducing new problems for Harry that aren't stripped right out of canon. Incidentally, Harry in Slytherin makes it quite easy to introduce new problems, and this story actually does a fair amount of that.

I also was impressed by Dobby scene.

Unrelatedly, I do think there are some fix-it elements to the story, but it's definitely less than it could have been.

 

This hits every trope and cliche for WBWL!Harry, Indy!Harry, Political!Grey!Harry, and the rest of the remnants of 2015.

But this actually does (most of) them about as well as they can be done. There's some rough patches, and some of the cliches are just crap, no matter how well written, but this is one of the best pieces of HP fanfic I've read recently. The writing itself is generally pretty good, there's only a few typos I've noticed, although a BritPicker/knowledge of history wouldn't go amiss - referring to more recent books, Americanisms, and the like. It's not a major problem (you come to expect it, tbh), but is noticeable.

Whilst there's some looking past cliches you have to do, where this really falls down is just how unbearably stupid the 'Light' side is. The story wouldn't work if James didn't give Harry away, so I guess I can ignore that (although this could have been done better). But so many light side characters are either completely fanatical zealots; or actually grey factionists who didn't realise it yet, because they weren't murdering babies, and thought that was a traditional Wizarding Tuesday activity.

4/5, but only if you can ignore the bits that are stupid.