Sree read and flamed chapters 1-6 -- find the thread here. Now here's the flame for chapters 7-12.

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Now, now, let’s cool down for a minute. We need to take a deeper look into this story; in fact, I am sure it’s sadly misunderstood, as all geniuses’ works are. Indeed it is a form of art, new and intriguing, subtly constructed around specific themes. I could detect several in just the 6 chapters I have read.


Part One: Of Character-Raping and Convenient Canon-Forgetting

Harry Potter, hero of this story. The Boy-Who-Lived, who is going to take control of his life at last and actively fight Voldemort, and woe to anyone standing in his way!... Therefore, driven by his desire to be the master of his own future at last, he waves Hermione goodbye and keeps lazing around in a Muggle institution while the war is raging outside. This is some clever plan. Subtle, I tell you.

Now let’s take a look at our hero’s unforgettable actions in aforementioned Muggle institution. For instance, the part where he learns meditation.

Since I hate leaving a hero wondering about existential matters, let me answer questions 2 and 3 for you. Why don’t they teach this at Hogwarts? …Maybe because when you’ve got a wand, even Divination sounds more exciting than any Muggle discipline. And he wonders if he could teach this to Ron? Wrong question. What he should be wondering is: why would he even want to teach *Ron* meditation? Seriously. Meditation? And to RON?

When you’ve managed to answer this question, ring me.

Moving on. We learn, in the same chapter, that Harry’s not interested in his schoolwork. Gasp! Shock! Paul, his shrink (see Part Two: Of Original Characters Begging For Castration) wonders why. Minds are boggled… Personally, my answer was: …Duh. The guy just spent 5 years in a *magical school*. I’d take Transfiguration over math any time.

(In fact it was because he “hated starting something he knew he couldn’t finish.”)

Then Harry chose a second language. He picked Spanish over French.

…Fail.

And at last, Harry Potter discovered a class of martial arts, and somehow, he knew, at first glance, that “he would absolutely love that class” (yes, I’m quoting here). This is certainly another clever ruse, disguised as an example of the Japanisation infesting Harry Potter fanfiction like a purulent leprosy. And the fact that Harry suddenly guesses how much he’ll love that class, when he’s never *ever* showed the slightest interest towards martial arts (or the tiniest skill at Divination), is certainly not a botched-up shortcut painfully striving to mask a glaring plothole. Nahhh, never!

Still about that martial arts class: I love the part where he’s supposed to learn how to break falls. He starts hyperventilating and shaking at once… From a guy who escaped Voldemort four times and plays a sport involving ugly crashes and fifty-feet-high falls… I mean, *I* learnt to break fall, and if *I* can learn something even vaguely related to sport and stay calm through the whole process, anyone can…

Throughout the story, we also get glimpses of your Harry’s powerful intellect. For example: “Everyone, well, except Sparky, loved to eat. He decided it was because they were all teenagers.” WELL DONE, SHERLOCK!

Or,

Wow, I understand why you’re taking the time to tell us he IS following. That is so incredibly hard to understand. Wonder how he can resist the urge to take notes.

Or,

No, he could not. Two reasons: first, he can’t do wandless magic. Hardly anyone can. Second, if he ever poses as a Jedi, I’m hunting you down and cutting you in tiny little bits that I will fry and drown after I’ve hanged them, because the concept is so freaking retarded it defies imagination.

And last,

I’m bracing myself for the tantrum. Also, don’t forget to make him wave his fists around while he screams for a lollipop.

That’s all for Harry, I think… No, wait. What’s that?

…He put gel in his hair. GEL. Fifty bucks he gets contacts next.

Fifty bucks, please.

Now that is truly all for Harry. Now, one of my favourite points in this story: the portrayal of Hermione.

Our dear, clever, quick-minded Hermione gets a letter from Ron telling her he’s been taken into a Summer Studies programme at Hogwarts. So Hermione, being clever and quick-minded, wonders what that is all about. She picks up Hogwarts: A History where is stored all knowledge gathered since mankind mastered the skill of writing, and finds out that such programmes are held in case of war or epidemics.

So she logically wonders: “Why would the Summer Studies programme start up now?”

The suspense is killing me. Why now, indeed? After all there absolutely isn’t a war going on at the moment. Voldemort is in fact a chief scout hiding in the countryside, his team playing against Dumbledore’s. I even think their scout names are SnakeFace and MerryPhoenix.

“Well, logic is saying that there is something that is going on that children wizards can do that adult wizards cannot.” OR, that would simply mean that they need all the warriors they can find, thus they try to train teenage wizards (calling a fifteen-year-old a “child” might earn you a sharp blow on the nose).

Speaking of Hermione, why does she refuse to alert the Order, again? Because this girl, who has faith in magic and in Dumbledore above everything else, thinks Harry’s better in a Muggle institution, is that it? There’s something I’m missing here…

By the way, since when is Harry calling her ‘Mi’?

Since when is she referred to as ‘beautiful’ every time there’s a scene with her?

…Since when are authors so incredibly bad at foreshadowing romance?

Third in the list of butchered characters, is Voldemort. You know, the bad guy who’s entering Harry’s head every now and then, puts him to bed, tucks in the sheets, sings him lullabies and buys him ice creams, right before torturing him – all of which in order to persuade him to become his second-in-command. Bit odd, come to think of it. I mean, if he didn’t know at first that you can’t achieve anything by being as coherent as an oyster in a speedo, he should’ve noticed it by the fiftieth time.

Oh, I loved that line, too:

I’m sure he can’t. It’s not like he’s intelligent or anything.

Just a note in passing: Malfoy’s redeemed. You really can’t stand a single bad character staying bad, can you?

And last – the Dursleys. I’ll skip ‘Petunia, the Return of the Loving Aunt!’ and get to the Dudley part. I cannot resist the temptation to quote the entire letter he wrote to his beloved cousin:

Quite aside from the fact that it is unknown whether Dudley has mastered the art of writing coherent sentences of more than three words, or even is familiar with the concepts of grammar and spelling, allow me to doubt that he would want to write frequently to Harry. Let me explain: teenage boys don’t like to write all that much, especially to the magical cousin who’s been terrifying them for the past 5 years. Also, and I’ll say that in bold because I think you really need to hear it, therapists aren’t the miraculous solution that makes everything change in a few days. They don’t have some stupid, spoilt, power-loving, Harry-punching, all-the-cake-eating oaf suddenly write niceties and wish their hated cousin a happy birthday and ask if they can write to them often. I suggest you find another way, less lame if possible, to solve your characters’ problems. By the way, might I remind you that JKR never had Dudley come out as even vaguely intelligent, even if she sort of redeemed him in the end…

And since we’re talking about it, let’s get to the Convenient Canon-Forgetting.

I’ll skip the part where Voldemort said he offered to bring Harry’s parents back… Everyone who has read the books knows that it’s a cheap line from the PS movie, and that Dumbledore told Harry no spell could truly awaken the dead (he also said it in the movie, in case that’s your only reference).

What really gets me is Harry’s telling of his life in the wizarding world. At least we can’t deny you have a wild imagination.

PS:

Are you sure we read the same books? Because I don’t remember him having much interaction with other wizards outside of Hogwarts… let’s see, when he was buying his books on Diagon Alley… no, doesn’t fit the description. The Quidditch World Cup? Hardly. The hearing at the Ministry? Yeah, he was really popular then… Nope, sorry, I must be having a lapse of memory, I just can’t recall anything like that. Especially the part where women cry over him... Oh right, the bar scene in PS.

Yep. Still no women crying.

CoS:

Snape? He stared at Harry with a calculating expression when he heard him speaking Parseltongue. Wow, that’s incredibly supportive! No wonder his name came first to Harry’s mind! As for Dumbledore, he contended himself with telling Harry he thought him to be innocent; such indifference, such ambiguity are positively shocking.

No, very few people do. Dumbledore might be one of them.

OotP:

Yes, he did tell him. In fact he did so as soon as he thought about it.

I trust you mean “Dumbledore’s Army”. I also think you need someone to translate the fic for all of us who have actually read the HP books.

Let me address this issue once and for all. Yes, Dumbledore is manipulative to some degree. No, he never prevented Harry from getting out of the house. If you had actually read the books, you’d remember he spent entire evenings wandering outside of the Dursley house in OotP — incidentally, that’s how he met the Dementor. If you actually had one ounce of intellectual honesty, you’d know Dumbledore did not make Harry’s life the living hell you portray. Then again, if you had one ounce of intellectual honesty, you wouldn’t have twisted canon again and again to suit you — come to think of it, you wouldn’t have written one line of this fic.

…Ooh-kay. If you think, even for one second, of uttering the words “Dumbledore forbid him to grieve” whether it is through the mouth of the slimy slug you’ve christened ‘Harry’ for some reason, or through this Gary Stu of a non-character of a shrink (see Part Two: Of Original Characters Begging for Castration), let me remind you of half a dozen pages in which Dumbledore finds normal for Harry to grieve over Sirius, even telling him that’s what makes him human. If you ignore common sense and memory alike and actually write that Dumbledore is yet again responsible for Harry’s pathetic weakness, I would very much like to see the consistency of your bowels before I make a lovely garter-belt out of them.

All this being the most painful aspect of this instrument of torture you wrote, let’s now talk about something else: your lovely OCs.


Part Two: Of Original Characters Begging for Castration

Well in fact, there is one main character: Paul, Harry’s psychiatrist. And his new best friend, might I add.

Paul… he’s like a poem. There is something perfect about the way he just makes you want to put your fist through his skull. Like that, effortlessly. He just has to show up, and miraculously, the birds stop singing, the sun disappears, thunder rolls and rain falls, and sharks eat the baby-dolphins. Is it his constantly calling Harry “buddy”? Is it his extraordinary insight into Harry’s emotions? His generosity? Or his way of accepting the magical world without so much as blinking? This is, without doubt, the creation of a genius.

You’ve shaped him so perfectly, from the hints of how good a therapist he is (when, for example, he finds Harry sooooo closed off whereas the idiot just blurted out five vital pieces of information in as many minutes, with all the quick-mindedness of a snail with Tay-Sach syndrome), to Harry’s attitude towards him (At last! Someone he can talk to! He was always so alone in his life! It’s not like he had two best friends before or anything!)… Also, might I point out that the sentence suggesting he’s a substitute for Sirius felt like an insult to Sirius’ memory (as well as Harry’s intelligence, but we’re used to that by now).

Oh yes, thank God Paul is here! Like when he tells Harry he’s watching his back…

Yup, I’d like to see Paul defend him from Voldemort. Seriously. I’d buy popcorn.

Now, where’s that popcorn?

That’s when I feel guilty for watching that on my own and invite friends. Might even sell tickets.

On to Paul’s stunning intelligence and wonderful open-mindedness:

For some reason, the first thought that came to mind was that Paul was absolutely and irremediably pathetic. In fact that’s also the last thought that came to mind, because I had to take a sedative to stop the hysterical laughing.

The always rampant Paul/Dumbledore comparison is worth a word, as well, whether it’s the self-righteous ‘Paul held his breath. Surely, the headmaster had not said that?’, the so complete trust Harry has in him that he tells him the bloody prophecy, the one he told nobody about, or Paul’s truly hilarious interpretation of the said prophecy:

No, it doesn’t make more sense than Dumbledore’s explanation. Dumbledore used common sense, while Paul (and thus, Harry) thinks with his feet.

That’s for dear Paul. As for the other kids in the institution — they all have retarded nicknames, and it seems to have transformed them into squealy, giggly idiots who love paper crowns above everything else and find Harry bloody amazing because none of them ever thought of telling the anorexic kid that he needed to eat in order to build up muscle. There are girls, too, two of which practically swoon when Harry puts gel in his hair and a pair of black jeans. This passage, in addition to being boring, painfully predictable and stupid, is the kind of thing that justifies the very existence of sexism.

Incidentally, why the hell are they always messing with Harry’s hair? More to the point, why doesn’t he break their nose when they do it for the tenth time in the same day?

And laaast… The martial art teacher. Two quotes will suffice for this living cliché:

His name – Sensei Leonard.

…

Excuse me for a second while I get a second sedative. Stupid hysterical laughter.

Second quote: his first encounter with Harry.

Never met a medium called Leonard before. There has to be a reason why mediums don’t call themselves Leonard, come to think of it. Maybe the sheer ridiculousness…?


Part Three: Mind Your Dialogues Bitch

Title says all.

Look, it’s not that hard: if someone says something, you don’t talk about someone else on the same line right after you’ve closed the quotations marks. It’s confusing as hell.

…should be:

So yeah. If you’re going to write dialogues that make me viscerally hate every single character speaking, at least do it properly.

There’s not only the dialogue, in fact; sometimes your narrative style of writing is really laborious as well (not to mention it’s in general so bland that it doesn’t help with your already tedious plot; if it wasn’t for all the flame material I found, I would’ve fallen asleep a dozen of times while reading a single chapter). And while I’m talking about your style…

When you’ve written that, you’re inches away from inserting author’s notes in the middle of the chapter. Nuff said.

Oh, I have to ask something: why did Harry ordering contact lenses made him grin evilly and say (I quote), “Old Snake Face won’t know what hit him”? I mean, what? Does he plan to destabilize Voldemort by losing one contact during battle and starting to look for it frantically on the ground instead of dodging the spells?

Oh yeah, the name-dropping. You like having Harry drop names randomly, do you? Chapter 12, “Sirius told me blah blah blah”? Well, yeah. Bad idea. People don’t do that. I mean, maybe you were trying a clever plot twist to have Paul ask questions about Sirius… Like, subtly “letting something slip…” The problem is the subtle part, of course. That kind of name-dropping shows all the subtlety of a rhinoceros with crutches (and yes, I do love that kind of comparison).

Speaking of little stylistic effects, be careful when you use them; some, instead of adding to your writing the lively touch it so desperately needs, just had me worry about your IQ. Here’s an example, to help you understand:

No, that was not the only way possible. She could’ve 1) punched him 2) kicked him 3) bitten him 4) scratched him 5) yelled at him 6) shaken him 7) pushed him 8) ripped his hair off 9) ripped his ear off 10) crushed his toes with her heel 11) hooked her fingers under his ribcage and pulled upwards 12) strangled him 13) sat on him 14) a combination of the previous thirteen 15) this involves an axe so isn’t really an option.

Get my drift?


Part Four: Of The Reason Why I Think You Should Get Off The HP Fandom

You start by saying the sleeping pills work better against magical mental intrusion than Dreamless Sleep Potion. That in itself is frankly illogical, since a magical illness would only be cured with a magical medicament.

Then you go on saying that meditation is equal, or even superior to Occlumency — again, a monument of illogic. Occlumency is used to fend off magical intrusions in people’s mind, and while it includes something akin to meditation, I doubt Muggles can do it at all. Meditation is used to relax or think more clearly. Ahem.

Then you mention, in passing, that the uniforms at the Muggle institution are way more comfortable than the ones worn in Hogwarts.

Then you have Harry wish that Muggles subjects would be taught at Hogwarts.

Then you have him nod as Paul spits his venom against this, and I quote, “oh-so-superior society of magic”.

In short, Muggles are in every way superior to wizards. In other words, magic should not exist, it is useless and even noxious. You obviously don’t like magic. You obviously dislike the characters as they are, since you keep changing them. In other words, you dislike the HP fandom. Well guess what, from the way I had to go kill something every two chapters in order to keep my sanity, I’m sure it dislikes you right back. We could have an accord here — you stop writing about something you so evidently hate, therefore ending your pain and ours. In exchange, I will call that gentleman I’ve recently hired (I’m sure you’ll like him, he’s a really fun person when you look past the scars, the frightful snarl and the Kalashnikov) and tell him not to use the barbed wire when he meets you.

 

Are you guys going to go through the entire story?

 

Best part of the whole flame.

A few questions:

First, why did you waste so much time on a flame for a worthless story, even if Sree was pestering you?

Second, is your conclusion about the Spanish over French thing because you're French, or because the Spanish language is the single most epic failure in the history of the world aside from modern China and humanity?

Narion

 

Remember, if this chick commits suicide her blood is on your hands Tinn.

Magnifique!

 

Tinn: I love it. Hopefully, by the time she reads this she'll stop writing and then you won't have to flame anymore chapters.

Edit: Nvm...I just read Sree's post.

 

I LOVE this story. It's beautifully written and flows well. The characters are belivable and I love your characters. I look forward to reading more of your wonderful story. It's so hard to find good writers these days. I wish you luck on any exams you have coming up at your university. I just finished one of my midterms and can understand your situation. Anyway, have a great day and God bless.

Sincerely,
Seika Phoenix


Just one of the 9000+ reviews complimenting her story on fanfiction.com. What really irks me is the fact that most of the reviewers think the characters act like they do in canon, and that they are very believable. There is little hope for humanity left....

 

Wowzers, that was fun. These flames are so much more enjoyable than the story itself. I wait for more.

 

This should be a Potter Law addendum or something.

5/5 to Tinn, the only person who has gotten me to go through what should've been the "tl;dr" to end all tl;dr's.

 

Epic flame.

5/5

 

I fucking knew someone would do this. I also know that, if the author ever shows her face on DLP, she'll say something along the same lines.

If you have fun doing something, it's not a waste of time. If the end result entertains other people, even better. Get this into your heads and stop using 'lol you wasted x amount of time on this lol' as a general insult and definitely as a rebuttal to flames.

Oh and Tinn I want to have your babies etcetera etcetera.

 

She may just see fit to grant your wish.

 

Don't misunderstand - I agree with the flame. That doesn't mean that I understand putting in such a significant amount of effort into crafting it. I mean, it just ends up legitimizing a work that's best ignored - though I suppose with the number of reviews it's already received, that doesn't really matter.

I guess what I don't understand is that if we can agree that the author is a pathetic sub-human creature not worth the air she breathes - and judging by this story, she is just that - why should anyone bother addressing her or her works as anything worth critiquing on a deeper level than simply saying that she/they suck?

You offer the reason of entertainment, but it's a non-unique product, and more potently entertaining works could be created by the same effort that created this flame. Thus, I ask: what is the reason?

Narion

 

Their post are flames, to be sure, but they are insults taken to an art form, elevated through honest thought and well-applied sarcasm to become something very lulz.

If they are lulz to read, they are probably lulz to write. What more reason could they possibly need?

 

Hm... What chapter does he receive his sudden and miraculous skill in acting? I can't wait for that part of the flame.

 

Has someone sent these threads to the author? She could stand to read them.

 

I know that she's actually a member here.

Very nice flame Tinn, I am eternally jealous of your ability to destroy another person's work. I hope I don't come of sounding too sadistic there.