I felt something died when the story ended. Oh, must be Dumbledore.

This story never fails to impress, up to the end. I wish the last chapter could be longer, but probably because I'm used to the "slower" pace of earlier chapters. Shock value is shock value.

 

I'm officially teased. When will we get to see Battle Maidens (honestly I think the title induces visions of leather thong armor and grappling in dust =P)?

 

I'm about 25k into what used to be Battle Maidens. Everyone told me that the title blew chunks and it took awhile for me to figure that out.

By 28k I expect to be done with the first arc of the story. The entire thing is expected to run bwteen 75 and 80k.

In between, I need to write more fanfic and more Dead Eye - very busy summer.

 

Is the new title of Battle Maidens to be decided?

Really look forward to everything.

 

Right now, I'm going with Spirals of Destiny Book One: Rider.

It could morph into something else (Broken Spiral?)

Obviously, the spiral refers to Majherri's horn.

I pretty much suck at naming stuff.

 

Ride 'Em Hard
Ride 'Em Rough
Ride 'Em Raw (Trilogy)
Battle Maidens Ride Bareback
Be Gentle--It's My First Time (Hurling Fireballs at the Infidels)
Is That A Horn On Your Head Or Are You Happy To Be My Unicorn?
So, What Else Can You Do With That Horn?
Broken Horn, Broken Hymen
What Would Jesus Do (If He Were A Pubescent Girl With A Magical Unicorn)?

Okay, I'll shut up now.

 

I laughed. I really did. But some of those titles are a little disturbing at the same time. Have you read any Unicorn/LittleGirl sex stories of late, perchance?

 

Four or five, that Fantasy/Beastiality/Lolita site I found was downright helpful for my sick and disturbing fap material.

 

I can has sauce?

 

http://www.asstr.org/

You'll find all your sick and disturbing fap material right there my friend, enjoy.

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=268922&page=1

That's also pretty close, not quite, but almost there, enjoy!

 

You guys have no *fap fap fap* shame.

 

Just finished reading this over the course of the past three days. Don't know how I skipped over this gem, but somehow I did.

May I just say, if I were to ever write fan fiction, this is basically exactly how I would've wanted it. God fucking damn, jbern, you unseated A Black Comedy as my favorite fic of all time.

...

Well, maybe they sit side by side.

 

This is one of my all time favorite fics. 5/5

 

This is one of the best stories I'v read and by far the best 1st person story that I'v read by far 5/5.

 

ARGH! You made me think that there was some sort of sequal info...

Your review pains me.

 

It's not as good as Bungle or Turn me Loose, but still a fucking good fic.

4/5.

 

Okay, so, while the other thread about the fic was quite trolly, I do think that there's an interesting discussion to be had about looking back at TLIL. It's an immensely popular story but I'm not sure if it's all that deserved.

I have four main problems with TLIL:

1. Fleur

2. Harry's character

3. The altered Triwizard

4. The technical writing

Let's deal with each in turn.

Fleur.

It's the Harry/Fleur that really turns me off TLIL. All the other problems move the story into "guilty pleasure" territory, but the approach to Fleur makes me actively dislike the fic. The problem is that she lacks agency as an independent character. She exists in the story largely as wish fulfilment/arm candy. Her entire plotline is defined relative to Harry's own - she exists solely to augment Harry's narrative.

The most glaring example of this is her reaction to discovering that Harry had completely violated her privacy on multiple occasions, displaying a complete lack of respect for her and women in general, a disregard which is made even worse by the narrative apparently considering it No Big Deal. Harry never seems to feel guilty in any meaningful way about spying on Fleur, or conflicted about it. Fleur's reaction is hugely understated, and she certainly shouldn't be going on to develop a romantic relationship with him. The entire fic conspires to make out such an immoral action as totally okay. Now, I don't object in principle to a storyline where Harry is tempted into spying on Fleur. But the topic should be handled delicately, not as a whitewash. The story should give some consideration to the morality of such an act and the damaging impact its discovery can have.

It's simply not enough to make Fleur "kick ass" i.e. give her magical talents/martial skill. This is a mistake Hollywood continues to make today. Female characters who feel real and who have depth cannot be created simply by making them win a few fights. They have to be shown as having equal agency to the protagonist, rather than being plot devices with boobs.

Harry's character

This is a very disappointing aspect of TLIL, because the core concept is very interesting. I've always enjoyed the idea of fics where Harry has to deal with foreign memories, and James Potter's memories are a novel source.

However, once again the fic chooses whitewash over nuance. There's no struggling to incorporate the memories, no worries about issues of personal identity. It's basically an instant character transplant, and from that moment on there isn't really much thought given to Harry's identity. There's no development.

There are two ways, in my view, to handle the "foreign memories" type of plot. The first is to have the memories incorporate slowly and the character struggles to retain a sense of self against an increasing tide of foreign ideas and instincts. The second is the reverse: the memories all come at once and there's a character transplant, and then as the fic continues the character tries to recover some part of their old identity or establish a new identity that isn't just the identity of the foreign memories. (The second one is where TOHF was going, had it continued).

Either way, you have continuing character development as the story goes on. In TLIL, on the other hand, the issue of identity was treated as a kind of preliminary to get out of the way. The memories came, Harry struggled with them for a bit, but then the dust settled and Harry continued for the rest of the story with a static and established identity. There was no character arc.

The Triwizard

My final major problem with the story is that much of it is just boring. I think, with the Triwizard, the maxim “less is more” definitely applies. Jbern’s tournament had too many tasks that were either not interesting, redundant, or repetitive. The most painful example was the endless duelling, which ran into the problem of “too much action”. Action is good, yes, but when you have too much of it then you become desensitised to it and your emotional investment in the outcome lessens. The same principle applies to the number of tasks being too high.

I don’t disagree with coming up with new tasks in principle, but I think it was a real mistake to have so many tasks where the champions were in direct conflict with each other rather than each trying to overcome some challenge in a better way to their rivals. The most interesting thing about the tasks in canon were that they involved, in theory, great feats of magic. Or, alternatively, ingenious solutions. By focusing so much on inter-champion conflict, that was lost.

Technical Writing

In addition to these three major issues, I don’t think the technical writing is all that great. I think the narrative tone is overly chatty, and that there are often examples of awkward phrasing. There are also too many straight-up errors. But the worst aspect of the technical writing is the character voice. More or less all the characters seem to speak in the same jokey, trying-too-hard to be witty, very informal way. This is then combined with an unfortunate tendency for unwieldy exposition to take place through dialogue, where characters speak in ways that don’t feel at all like natural speech, but rather are clear examples of the author speaking to the reader through a character mouthpiece.

The good

So what’s good about the story? The Sorting Hat is funny. The core idea, however hamfisted in its execution, is/was novel and has a lot of potential. The level of talent that Harry is placed at is interesting--not Dumbledore/Voldemort-level, but rather at the same kind of level as his parents and Snape.

Oh, and one final note: I’ll take it as a given that people realise that I dislike the magical theory and duelling in the story. We have both “innate power” ideas and also “point and shoot” magic that reduces duels largely to the status of slow-motion gunfights where dodging is actually effective enough to be useful. Throwing in some transfiguration here and there doesn’t do much to make the duels more interesting, as it’s pretty much all just a copy of Dumbledore’s statues in OotP. There isn’t really any novel use of transfiguration shown in duels beyond that.

All in all, I would rate the fic as 3/5.

 

Definitely Not Taure

Okay, why not.

Fleur in TLIL is very confident - on the surface. She puts on a show for everyone around and only mellows out when she lets someone get closer to her. That's what her character is built on. I agree that it's kind of cliched, because when you throw in her asskicking skills, she keeps edging towards Michelle Rodgrigues in [insert a Michelle Rodriguez movie]. That's not very interesting by itself.

However, I would argue that she's completely flat and only serves to enhance Harry's awesomeness. She absolutely has her own agenda - each of the champions does. The Triwizard in TLIL is altered to be a very big deal, pretty much the equivalent of Olympics, only with less competitors and higher stakes (similarly the Quidditch World Cup could be likened to the Football World Cup). It actually does matter if you win, or so jbern tries to tell us. The way he does it isn't the smoothest (this fic does have hammer-nail moments), but we know it.

Fleur starts out as just another prissy French girl who wants to win the big Tournament because... because losing is not an options. And she makes it very clear throughout. Then, as Fleur-Harry relationship progresses (with the Yule Ball being one of the important stepping stones, as it usually is in GoF stories), we see her softer side. One might argue that this isn't chracter development - she always had this side of her, it's just that we get to see it now. That she's not actualy changing. I hear you.

The very fact that she does let Harry closer is character development. With time her desire to win the Tournament gets downplayed and eventually, even though she's definitely not giving up, her priorities change. She's got one more person to care about now, in a way she hasn't cared about anyone before.

As for the whole Peeping Tom thing - notice that when it comes out, the whole setpiece on the Durmnstrang ship turns into a disaster, prompted by Fleur's reaction to Harry telling her the truth. Then he saves her life from the Durmstrang poltergeist. I agree that it could've been handled better, but subtlety isn't what TLIL is about. If something can happen, often it happens in an exaggerated manner and thet's part of the fun. No one has ever written a funnier way to defeat the Horntail than jbern did with the Howlers. When Malfoy tried to cheat, Harry was ready to murder him in front of everyone. Hell, the Sorting Hat tells the reader early on what to expect. This isn't WYLB, where slow-burn romance is the name of the game. Just because it isn't written in super gritty realistic manner doesn't automatically mean it's crap. It succeeds in what it sets out to do - to be a fun rollercoaster ride. And there are few fics in the fandom that outdo TLIL for pure fun factor (like ABC).

The arguments about Harry's character and Triwizard blown out of proportion can be answered similarly - that's not what TLIL's purpose is, imo. This is comedy gold. That's not to say it doesn't have more serious (or rather less silly) moments, but even then the comedic undertones are present. This kind of plays against the ending when Serious Stuff happens, but even in those scenes jbern didn't do a 180 and go all Dark Knight.

Harry in this story isn't Harry. He's not James. He's HJ. Something in between, as the fic itself very clearly tells the reader on more han one occasion. "Harry" considers what his dad would've done and what his old self would have done and then does something in between. Again, jbern didn't need to focus on the transition of Harry's changing nature because that's not what this fic is about. If everyone tried to write TOHF, Taure, then we wouldn't have TLIL. And that would be a shame.

I like to think there's a spectrum that fics can be put on depending on their "mood". Stuff like TOHF tries to "be with canon", as I call it in my head. They fall in the middle. Then you have something like Renegade Cause or Strager in Unholy Land, which is Nolan's Batman of HP fanfic. That falls towards one end of the spectrum. Stuff like TLIL and ABC is close to the opposite end. I never say that something sits precisely at the end of this spectrum because odds are something even more extreme could always be written and, as we know, it has. All the bad gritty Indy!Harry's try to make Warhammer 40k look like a unicorn meadow. 30H is too ridiculous to exist, but it does.

My point is that I don't find the fact that TLIL doesn't focus on all those transitions and shit to be a detriment, bcause that's not the point of the story. The same applies to the Triwizard. Canon makes it about "great feats of magic", TLIL makes it about beating the opponent. Nothing wrong with that.

I can't refute what you say about the technical aspect of writing, because I'd have to reread at least a part of the story and I'm not going to just to write one post, but you're not stupid and I'll assume that you're not completely wrong on this (like you weren't completely wrong on the other points, but mostly ). I will concede the point about the presentation of magic, but let's remember that this is a fic from 2007, when the gunfight interpretation of magic duels was common. It's only in recent yeas that the fandom saw a renaissance of the canon approach to magic that feels magical.

That's why I rate this fic a very solid 5/5.

 

The story was completed in 2009, it's easy to look back now and see what we don't like and say it doesn't deserve it's popularity, in fact if we did that the vast majority of library worthy fics wouldn't be shit by todays standards.

It was great then and still stands up today, if not as much. Reassess if you like, but to me ripping apart an old fic now and saying it isn't good is like meh, too late to the boat. Next up let's do Scorpion Sorcerer, or Steps Towards the End. Let's clean out the whole library.

And honestly some of the shit thats been voted in over the years, TLIL still stands up for itself.