The author comes off as a douche, but that's not why I hate his story.

Inverarity hit many of the high points better than I could, but I'm perhaps most bothered by how the story is an incredibly cynical riff about love: Love destroys people's lives, leaving them an empty shell of the vibrant selves they once were. It strips people of their free will, all the while distracting them from how utterly crappy their lives are. It makes people alienate their friends. And then, when they finally do manage to escape (by dying), it sucks them back into the cycle of torture once again. Lovely.

If it were obvious parody, perhaps it'd work. But it's really not. It's the pretense of parody while the author writes earnestly from his cold, black heart, all the while laughing at his private joke, how a fandom who adores puppy love seem to dote on this abortion of a story.

I'd rather read Less Wrong.

 

I'll give you credit about not judging a story based on the fic itself; that's a fair point.

However, It's actually safe to assume that an author conveying an overinflated sense of self in their author's page/notes, usually can't craft a decent story worth a damn. At best, it'll be grammatically-correct bullshit.

I couldn't even begin to give you a concrete, measurable reason as to why that is so often the case, but it never fails to turn out that way.

 

The funny thing is that there's actually a fairly strong canon background for 'soul bonds', per se. This one, like every other soul bond story I've ever perused, has pretty much ignored it. In canon, there's only one person Harry has a 'soul bond' to: Lord Voldemort. We can very clearly see that it has very little to do with love. This 'soul bond' comes in the form of an inadvertent, incomplete horcrux that allows Harry to feel what Tom is feeling, when he has particularly strong emotions, communicate through dreams, and it even allows both people to see through the other's eyes. How romantic.

 

Never really thought of the horcrux in those terms before. And now I have to go bleach my brain to remove the horrible images it has conjured of terrible Harry/Voldemort slashfics, where the two are engaging in buttsecks and can feel each others' arousal. BURN IT WITH FIRE:fire

 

:awesome

(filler)(filler)

 

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

Plot bunny!

 

SoulBond-via-curse-scar HP/LV: It's been done. Yes, I've read it. Yes, it was as fire-deserving as it sounds. Yes, I felt extremely unclean afterwards, but like a train wreck, I couldn't look away.

 

Firstly, there's no real soul bond to speak of in this fic. Soul mates, yeah (more or less). Although i's not even really a soul mate situation, either. Basically, the soul stone is just a deus ex machina that one person can give to another if they love them... and it's sentient enough that if they don't love each other enough, the stone burns them to ash. Oops.

So, no soul bond, not even really soul mates, just two people that loved each other enough that the stone didn't kill them outright, and some funky magic that decided to yank bits and pieces of their memories into their past bodies. As a side effect, because of some arbitrary Ministry rules revolving around such stones, Harry and Ginny are considered married at 11/12.

Not defending any of these aspects of the story, just clarifying.

I'll submit that there is at least one thing about this fic that is different from most other time travel redo fics: Harry and Ginny don't remember each and every minute from their original lives. They were sent back because of a freak accident, and what little they do remember, from time to time, is almost always too little to be of use, serving only to make them seem odd, worry their friends, and make the adults around them suspicious.

They don't even realize they're doing it, so usually what they remember goes without notice by them.

Spoiler

After all (so there would be a shred of an actual plot), neither of them ever remembered a single thing about the Diary Horcrux, or the Chamber. As a result, they never caught on to Ron's weird behavior, Luna ended up on the wrong end of several Cruciatus curses, Hermione got tortured, and some people actually died.

Of course, that neither Harry nor Ginny truly benefit from their situation (or exploit their power) is kind of to be expected from someone who rails against any upgrading of Harry's abilities/skills or, in fact, any deviation from canon in his profile.

There are basically a boatload of examples of him saying, in essence, that no one should EVER deviate from canon in fan fic (which raises the obvious question, "Then what the hell is fan fic for?"), one instance of him vaguely implying changes are okay (because he theoretically doesn't mind non-canon pairings as long as they make sense), and one instance of him calling someone stupid for thinking that he said you shouldn't deviate from canon.

 

I was going to make that point earlier, Warlocke; that there are basically no defining characteristics of a classic soul-bond involved, but I wasn't sure how well the claim would go over, regardless of it being true.

They don't exploit their power, as you said, because they don't realize that there's something unusual going on - nobody has yet to bring to their attention their newfound abilities. This seemed to have been a likely plot point later in the story, except I don't think he's ever going to continue it.

edit: Also yes, he seems to be a canon-nazi, somewhat inconsistently. Harry/Luna is never a realistic pairing - it would only ever work if you discount all other variables affecting them. Nevertheless that has little to do with his writing.

 

Yet oddly enough, it still has a lot of the hallmark problems of the Soulbond genre: lack of plot and extreme monotony. What it managed sidestep a little is getting overly fluffy; unfortunately it did this by being incredibly whiny. Given that the "plot" wouldn't hold any water if there were any competent teachers at Hogwarts, or if Harry and Ginny were less oblivious, all of this is to be expected.

Worldmaker is rather well known around here, I gather, mostly because he's basically the anti-Taure. Also he wrote a cookbook. I actually consider this a mark in his favor, given that Susanna Clarke was an editor of cookbooks, and she wrote the piece of pure, epic awesome that is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

 

I hate to break it to you, but those traits aren't even remotely constrained to the soul bond sub-genre.

Edit: Oh, and I agree with the opinion that the story ended rather abruptly. It's not "WTF, where's the rest of the story?" horrible, just somewhat sudden.

 

Most certainly not! I probably should have clarified- the lack of plot is constructed in a way very common to the genre: Harry and Ginny are too wrapped up in their own drama to realize what's going on, while they have epic powerz. That serve little purpose. But they have them if they need them! It's like one of the giant swiss army knives with a hundred tools; all you really need on them is the knife, the corkscrew, and the bottle opener.

Likewise the monotony of the story is emo whiny bullshit about being trapped rather than fluffy immature bullshit about puppy love, which is a hallmark of "intelligent" soul bond fics. I have more expertise in this area than I'd like- a couple of friends of mine turned adultfanfiction.net into a drinking game; pm me if you want the rules. One time we had a rash of Harry/Ginny soulbond stories. Suffice to say we were rather inebriated at the end of the night.

 

That sounds hilarious, but I wasn't aware that there were enough H/G soul-bond fics for that to even work. Intromit's is terribad, Sovran's is retardedly long, JadeSeraph's is decent for what it is, but it isn't shippy until the last 10% of the fic anyways. And I can't really think of anything else. cts's fic doesn't count, as it's utter shite, and PWP Harem fics don't either, though most of them are Weasely!bashing anyways.

 

This statement made me lol IRL. I'd be willing to bet real money that there two H/G soulbond fics for each story in the library. That's a fairly extremely conservative estimate.

 

Seriously? Because I can safely profess having had a H/G phase, and I never found anything beyond what I listed and a ton of abandoned fics under 10k words.

 

Seriously.

For the record, why would you assume that we were searching out the pinnacle of H/G?

The utterly shitty stories get you drunker, quicker. They're also even funnier, especially when you're drunkenly reading them, slurring the words into nigh-incomprehensible murmurs.

 

In what way?

'Cos he gives canon fanboys a bad name <_<

I read his profile and I felt a strong urge to do a line by line "deconstruction" of it, but I felt this would be rather sad so decided against it.

Anyway, the story is bad. Not badly written, but just completely uninteresting. There's nothing in it to hold your interest. Just another mediocre canon rehash with superficial changes. It's not original, and certainly not as clever as the author thinks it is. Nor is it anywhere near funny enough to be classed as parody (not to mention far too long: parodies get old rather quickly).

TL;DR: Fairly well-written bore-fest.

2/5 for the writing.

 

Quoted for truth. I think that too many people are getting caught up in the "don't prejudge it for being H/G or a possible soul!bond fic" to see that most of us dislike this because it is, essentially, a very poor story.

 

Personally, I liked the writing, compared to fanfic authors in general, his writing style does not make me want to drown in my own puke. I just wish this author was handed an interesting idea (that hasn't been rehashed over and over again and that doesn't involve 11/12 year-olds getting hitched no matter how good the reasoning), he could write a pretty decent story.

The story otherwise, maybe there are people out there who love it (I mean it did get almost 500 reviews on ff.net and many of them I'm sure loved it), but it is most certainly not my cup of tea.

 

This author does not deserve the glory that is death. He deserves to be made immortal, tied down, forced to read fanfics on the same level as My Immortal, and brutally sodomized with a dildo enchanted to increase diameter by 4 feet every month. I see this guy as a arrogant ass-whore who missed the point of fan-fiction.

Yes I hate this dude, with a passion.