Title: Harry Potter and the Darkest Vindications
Author: Xarkun
Rating: T
Genre: General
DLP Category: The Alternates
Pairing: None yet, not even foreshadowed.
Status: WIP (I hope)
Summary: How Harry's life would have changed had he never heard that Dark Wizards come from Slytherin. Would he still be the hero we know and love, or would he become even worse than Voldemort? How would he navigate obstacles? Who would help him along the way?
Link: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5231328/1/

I admit I wasn't very hopeful regarding this fic, I was just looking for a quick fix, but it proved to be a rather good surprise. The rather subtle ways in which this departs oh so gradually from canon at first so become increasingly divergent later on, even while never going explicitly against it are very clever. Also depicts a rather realistic picture of the influence Slytherin would have on a young impressionable Harry.

While there is a friendship with DM, it doesn't really get annoying as so many of these do, and the author said it won't be slash in an a/n in the middle of the fic (because I know someone will complain about that).

Also, as a bonus you get the most original characterization of Daphne Greengrass I've seen, though this only shows up in the second year.

4/5

 

The author wrote two Twilight stories...

Lunar Eclipse » reviews Edward is able to stay away from Bella, so she falls in love with Jacob. Then he is forced to leave when he becomes a werewolf. Edward gives up on staying away then. Bella will be forced to choose. Jacob or Edward? Meanwhile, James wants to kill her.Twilight - Rated: T - English - Drama/Romance - Chapters: 10 - Words: 27,060 - Reviews: 24 - Updated: 6-12-09 - Published: 4-10-09 - Jacob & Bella

I might still give this a go, because it looks like decent Slytherin!Harry.

 

This story is quite good.There is nothing new in the first few chapters except for Crabbe and Goyle hating Harry.But as the story progresses,there are lot of changes in the plot direction.

Daphne Greengrass characterization is superb and Lockheart has been dealt in a manner befitting of a Slytherin Harry.

The one thing I didn't like was Harry becoming too much of a mudblood hater but still not hating Hermoine

Anyway I give the story 3.5/5

 

This is the shit that makes me hate Hermione. Seriously.

 

It starts pretty good, but it gets less and less readable later. Overly abusive Dursleys (they actually try to starve him to death), Harry not hating them enough given their attitude (well, he might not hate them at all for all we know) can't give me good reading experience.

Oh, and just because the author made Daphne retarded it doesn't mean that her characterization is superb.

Overall, 2.5/5. Rounded down to 2 because of tendency for quality to decrease.

 

This.

And the writing style somewhat irritates me. Also, I found the story a bit bland.

2/5.

 

That was fucking terrible, all he done was recount canon with the barest of necessary changes for Harry to be a Slytherin. Daphne being retarded, as said before, does not make good characterization.

 

It's okay, but not great. The writing is fine, but the story focuses on all the wrong things. The main interest of the story should be Harry's character development, and how this differs from canon. Instead it's mostly a canon rehash. 3/5.

 

Mostly...?!!!? For the small differences of Harry actually being in the Slytherin house, there are practically no differences from the canon events... no strike that, no differences from the book itself, chapter by chapter, and paragraph by paragraph, to make it any interesting read at all.
I understand that the author himself intended it to be that way, but that doesn't make it any less boring to read.

After reading the first two chapters I gradually started skipping larger and larger parts of the chapters. And that was until chapter 12 where all I read was "Snape got him a present" and then from chapter 13 the all too familiar line of Filtch looking for someone in the library... without reading I knew what I've skipped...

3/5 until that point, and that is just for the good use of English and nothing more.

edit: A surprisingly good chapter 14 but I'm still reluctant to change my rating...

 

Eh, got a couple of chapters in and then x'ed out the window. Canon Rehash stories can be okay at times, but it's ridiculous (almost spelt that with a k, that's just sad..) when McGonagall talks practically word for word like Hagrid, accent or not. It didn't even really bug me until the Voldemort explanation scene and she became so out of character - then it was just outright annoying.

Picked up the story again a couple of chapters later to skip past the absolute crap that was the beginning and it got a little bit better, but there was still a lot of shit to dig through.

Standard first flying scene wasn't too bad. It was honestly the first real scene I enjoyed reading (Chapter 6). Picked up for me from there, especially the troll scene which thankfully really wasn't too much of the same thing except for Hermione crying and her excuse later on.

Blaise's characterization is an annoying blend of Ron/Hermione and I wish they would have just cut him altogether, but all in all the story does slowly get better.

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TL;DR - If you're looking for something to read because nothing else is updated, skip to chapter 4/5 and it's a decent read. It's not great, but it's not too bad either. 3/5

 

meh, like everyone else has said its just the HP books with some author throwing a line in hear and there... Someone mentioned chapter 14 being good, but it was just the same as cannon only Draco and Blaise were there.

1.5/5

 

*shrug*

You guys don't know canon rehash, because if you did, there is no way you could say this is simply that.

I've explicitly said that the canon departure is subtle at first, and yet that hasn't stopped people from rating it after reading a few chapters.

I don't really care much, and I never claimed this was a huge work of art (I did give it 4, not 5), but it'd be nice if so often reviews didn't operate on this basis:

 

Boring. I've read better and I've read worse - this just sorta fell in the middle.

3/5

 

Eh... maybe it's because I've read a lot of Slytherin!Harry fics, and maybe it's because I've preferred many of them to this, but I didn't find this fic particularly good.

Characterization was at least consistent, and you could tell that the author is visibly improving as the story progresses (the chapters when Harry is at Hogwarts for his second year are surprisingly good), but I still have a few problems with this fic, and nearly all of them fall into the author's writing style. His dialogue, in particular, is a bit redundant, and doesn't have the same spark that some of his description brings (although it is starting to improve). I dunno, maybe it's because his writing style doesn't have the same flair that I normally like, but I couldn't really get into the story (although the Dumbledore/Snape vs. Dursleys smackdown was much appreciated and pretty good).

What this fic feels like is average. Run-of-the-mill, a bit. There's not enough here to distinguish it from the truly good Slytherin!Harry fics. Still, in terms of characterization (at least from a first-year!Harry POV), it was consistent, and written well enough to keep me interested for a bit.

3.5/5, rounded up to a 4 because the fic does show a degree of promise for later chapters.

 

Yeah, I've read everything he posted, and it's still "subtle" (i.e. barely there).

 

You all are all talking about this as though it is somehow... complete. It's a work-in-progress, and about 1/7 of the way done. No one reads author notes, apparently. Thank you Mordac. You seem to have great insight. Most of the complaints here are the same things I get in reviews (yes, I AM the author, in case you haven't noticed yet). Canon (spelled with ONE 'N') rehash, boring, etc, etc.

I wanted to address some things that irritated me:

-Overly abusive Dursleys. Maybe it should be M rated. Get over it.

-Hermione: I was dumb. Realized it can't work. Departing from it, if you've read.

-As it goes along, it differs. The 2nd year is when it really changes. Why is that? Canon does the first year WELL. More than subtle changes aren't... you know... NEEDED.

-Daphne's characterization is comic relief. She's also basically me giving the middle finger to everyone who wanted Harry to befriend a Slytherin girl. Obviously, no one understands my sense of humor.

-As for the writing: glad some people like it. Try to remember this is fanfiction. I wrote all of it in 1 shot with very little editing, and I'm writing things as they come so it's not like I can actually... change the plot after I've already written it to make it better.

-I hit a snag in real life, so let me stress something. This fanfic isn't completed!!!

-Lastly, why don't you all discuss this stuff where it needs to be? On the review board for the fic. You're all just lucky I egotistically googled my own penname.

---------- Post automerged at 08:09 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:56 AM ----------

I agree with the 3 to 3.5/5 rating, in any case.

---------- Post automerged at 08:12 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:09 AM ----------

Also, I wrote the vast majority of this in like... 3 weeks. You write 90,000+ words in 3 weeks, and tell me how perfect it is.

 

Are you serious? You knew your story doesn't deviate for 100,000 words and you wrote it anyway? You couldn't have, you know, glossed over the minor events? Compensate with unique relationships in Slytherin to make the drudgery or rereading canon more bearable?

No, but everyone understands bad characterization. Your choice if you want to fuck up characterization and try to hide behind the excuse of "I was having fun."

-

Er, of course you can? All you have to do is excise the unnecessary scenes, then you'd trim it down to 10,000 words or so.

It doesn't need editing, it needs deleting. Reckless, copious amounts of deletion.

And? Most fics submitted for review - most fics in the library aren't completed. We can still judge the beginnings - if the author exhibits laziness and ineptitude, the story is dismissed.

It should have taken you a few days since you didn't expend the slightest creativity. Yes, even with whatever real-life stress you're whining about.

And if you rushed knowing the quality would inevitably suffer, that's your problem.

The rating for your story is actually more of a 2.5/5. It has to be of average quality to merit a 3/5.

 

Andromalius:

Bad characterization is your opinion, my friend. I'm not hiding behind the excuse of 'I was having fun' because... it's not an excuse! It's the truth. My good friend and I came up with the idea of characterizing Daphne like that. I think it's amusing.

The fic follows the canonical plot for the 1st part. It does differ, however. Subtly, yes. I was AIMING for that for the 500 billionth time. If you find it tedious or boring to read, then don't read it.

No, I cannot go back and change the plot without asking everybody to go back and re-read. Obviously you don't understand the concept of serial fanfiction which is what the story is. Maybe I should not write it that way, but I do and I did, so there's no getting around that.

I'm not whining about real-life problems. I'm telling you this is nowhere near complete and I haven't written a thing for months on it, so it's not like I just quit. That's my explanation for why it suddenly ends partway through Harry's 2nd year.

2.5... whatever. I'd give it a 3. Many other people do not share your opinion about the fic being below average. Me? I'd call it average.

To Sesc:

I don't care if you don't care about whether or not I agree. I came here to read comments, and I very well MIGHT try to use some of the criticism around here. I never knew, for example, that people thought my writing style irritating. That is endlessly helpful and I am forever trying to improve it.

And I have no idea how the site works or what it even is. I just googled myself and found it because I got really bored in a class at my school. Anyway, you're free to judge fanfiction by whatever standards you want. I don't agree with them because I don't actually dedicate all my time to writing fanfiction. I do it for fun.

Could I have edited my fic? Yes. Did I? No. It's a serial fanfiction. Once a chapter is posted, it's done. I don't go back. Another reason I don't judge fanfictions like books. This isn't an excuse, it's just how I work fanfiction.

I really have no interest in reading anything here, but thank you anyway. I haven't read fanfiction in a long time. I only write it for fun. Also, 90,000+ words is a lot for me because, as I said, I do not dedicate all my time to writing fanfiction and I can't write for extended periods of time. I'm a sprinter.

In closing, I fully intend to get back to writing the story. Today, actually. Close to 300 people on fanfiction.net have it on their alerts list, and about a third of them have it on their favorites. I came here to give you my explanations since this is obviously supposed to be an intelligent discussion about my story.

Just to point one last thing out: I really have no idea why anyone decided to post a link to my fanfic here. I do not, and never have intended to make Harry a Dark Lord of any kind. He's just supposed to be DARKER.

I lied. I want to point another thing out, though. I think it was Taure who said this story focuses on the wrong things like... characterization? The entire point of the story is to change Harry's character in a believable way. I started writing the 1st chapter one day with that idea in my mind. It turned in to what you see on the Internet today.

 

If you care to check, you'll find out that this community has a lot higher standards than "many other people".

You know, this hardly says anything. Most of slash crap has more followers. And then there's My Immortal with over 9000 reviews.

So far, you failed at that. After what your OCs with Dursleys' names did to him during the summer, he should either break or learn to hate them, not be neutral towards them.

As for Daphne's characterization: I didn't say it was bad, all I said was that making her retarded doesn't make her characterization "superb".

PS: the author arguing story's rating looks pathetic.