I don't think Harry should equal Dumbledore's influence, I was just drawing the comparison because I think the idea that Harry's fame is just good for Lockhart publicity stunts is pretty ridiculous. I don't really understand how someone could can defeat Voldemort - who had taken over the Ministry, risen from the dead, had everyone too afraid to even speak his name - and then go on to become little more than an oddity in the wizarding world but whatever, I've said all that before and you don't agree.

I probably did gloss over how easily the public could be swayed and I guess that deserves consideration, but I don't really think the purebloods could easily get it to a level where the entire population would be willing to believe anything about Harry at the drop of a hat. In canon Fudge had the advantages of being well established in power as well as the fact that after defeating Voldemort as a baby, Harry pretty much had done nothing of note and so was pretty much an unknown to the public, no one knew him so no one could refute the claims - making it easy for him to get experts in to theorize on how the Killing curse could have addled his brains etc and have it all seem very believable.

With the entire wizarding world located in one place and everyone seeing Harry regularly now I assume, it would be a lot harder to convincingly paint him as unstable.

Ehhh when I finished DH my impression was that the imperius excuse wouldn't cut it a second time. It's one thing when Voldemort gets defeated alone and no one even saw Lucius etc doing anything. You'd need a lot of proof to barge in to Malfoy manor and take Lucius in, since he hasn't done anything which clearly shows him as a DE. This would also mean that a ton of his cohorts would retain their Wizengamot seats and be able to vote in his favour. It's another matter entirely when all the DE's at the battle of Hogwarts are rounded up and unmasked after the fight.

I think the fact that Harry can get into this position without anyone so much as batting an eyelash really shows him as being a lot lower standing in society than Malfoy, which is what irks me about it.

As I said above, IMO the end of the second war is entirely different to the end of the first one, so I just found it jarring that these people not only got off, but somehow retained all their belongings and obtained a higher social standing than everyone else.

I didn't mean that, as I said I have no real idea where the plot is going. During a lot of the scene's I was able to guess what was going to follow and that killed from the suspense/surprise they were meant to create.

An example would be near the start where they're in the supermarket. When I read about the dementor mist I expected an attack to follow, and when they found the young Auror in that state and didn't check him over for bites I expected him to turn into a zombie. I expected the attack to happen at the pharmacy, but from the outset of the scene I felt it was kinda obvious that A) There would be a Dementor attack B) One or more Aurors would be lost and C) The purebloods would blame it on them expending resources to support the muggles.

It would have been more surprising to me if the mist nearby wasn't explicitly stated to be dementors, or if maybe they saw the other Auror running towards them from the direction of the dementors, assumed he got away, then were attacked, or something.

 

It's rather difficult to pay homage to things like fame when you have a pack of rogue Dementors traipsing across your backyard. Harry will and should have some political sway, yes, but you must consider that this is Harry. He dislikes having to use his status as the Boy-Who-Lived and thus wouldn't have really capitalised on his political puissance immediately after Voldemort's downfall, when he could have put himself in an eminent position of influence. Hence, it's unlikely that this twenty-something Harry would be the Messiah of Wizarding politics, even if he wanted to (which is doubtful).

The Wizarding World, at least pre-Voldemort, was fickle and feckless. Insular and obtuse, the society was a bit like Ancient Rome, swayed by petty things and behaving in normative, obstinate manners. Although Hermione was perhaps too aggressive in her approach, she probably did have a point when she claimed that the Wizarding World was backward. As Tenages mentioned, they ousted even Dumbledore in their paranoia.

Now, DH does suggest that post-Voldemort, things would have changed drastically. If Rowling's Word-Of-God is any indication, the Shacklebolt Adminstration was very thorough in introducing new, corrective legislation. Hermione herself, who would have been an absolute pain in the Purebloods' behinds, entered the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures to enforce Elfish Rights, which is a blow against Purebloods. Then, she supposedly secured a high position in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to, alongside Shacklebolt himself, abrogate all laws in favour of the Purebloods. [source]

Normally, I'd agree with what you're saying. Yes, I did wonder why the Purebloods are unusually dominant in this set-up. In a post-DH world, the fickle norms of the Wizarding World would have been replaced with sleeker, new legislation. And the Purebloods would be either stuck in prison or restricted by harsh, pro-Muggleborn Laws. Harry would be far more respected and have pseudo-amnesty in the political sphere.

But then I realised that this is a fucking AU. Why? Zombies. Zombies are what happened to the Wizarding World, stagnating progress.

MattSilver was canny enough to create a potential set-up in which a disaster of epic proportions interrupted and halted the post-war reconstruction, leaving the Wizarding World in its previous state, possibly even worse. This is exemplified by Hermione. She's dead. Without her, half of the potential pro-Muggle legislation goes flying out the window to hit a low flying aeroplane. Moreover, the Wizarding World couldn't afford to concentrate on rebuilding their society, ensuring that racism is eradicated, when a horde of rabid zombies are pressing down on them.

Hermione's fate personifies the strength of Anti-Pureblood politics and more modern injections into the Ministry. Now, what did MattSilver do to her? She couldn't possibly be dead. Maybe she's secretly vacationing in Aruba, snorting cocaine off a stoned stripper's belly. Maybe.

The Second War was different to the First War, yes, but mainly in terms of the survivors of the Second War. Many of them would have lived through not one but two wars about racism and would have therefore pursued Anti-Prejudice legislation with greater rigour than before. There would have also been prominent Muggleborns like Hermione who would've possess enough acumen to demolish the Purebloods, ensuring that the mistakes of the past were not made and the "Imperius Curse" gambit failed.

However, these changes would not happen overnight; Rowling herself implied that Hermione's Ministry career displayed the rate at which the Wizarding World rebuilt itself. Eliminating the old pro-Pureblood laws would have taken years, because of the ancient mummies on the Wizengamot. Hermione only managed to induce her legislation after graduating and concluding work for Elfish Welfare, which wouldn't have been as groundbreaking as repealing the ancient laws.

I myself find that Matt's internal logic is a bit faulty. Right now, he has handwaved many of the reasons why perhaps the Purebloods still possess their ingrained powers and influence, even though DH suggests otherwise. The reader has to do much of the guesswork, making inferences that the zombie apocalypse was the main cause. Matt has Lampshaded that the Purebloods had to still tread carefully, though. And the story is still in its nascent stages. I trust his capabilities as a writer to justify, in the story itself, how the Purebloods managed to hang on to their seats.

How would they have hung on, you ask? It all depends on when that zombie apocalypse happened. If it happened later in the canon timeline, obviously some groundbreaking work might have already been performed on the Wizarding World, and thus the Purebloods wouldn't be able to manipulate the political arena as adroitly as evinced in Incorruptible.

However, if that apocalypse happened early in the canon timeline, which I'm inclined to believe, because of Harry's relative young age, the Wizarding World wouldn't have had enough time to reinvent itself as a more equal, less insular society. Hence, the Purebloods in power.

Remember, the zombie outbreak changes everything. Hermione, who is the Poster Girl for Muggle Rights, is dead (or playing lesbian in Aruba, obviously). Yes, it'd be better if we got to see the origins and circumstances surrounding the Dementor's Stigma, but this should account for Selwyn and Malfoy.


TL;DR, this is an AU, and that's why things are different from canon. Get with it. Oh, and Hermione is licking strippers in the Caribbean.

 

I'm wondering about Hermione's cause of death. Could she, an outspoken and pro-muggleborn advocate, have been murdered by Pureblood supremacists during the confusion of the zombie outbreak? I wouldn't put it pass them, and it'd introduce a much more personal angle in Harry's fight against the Purebloods.

 

And as you pointed out above, this is years after the battle of Hogwarts. Even if the Dementor's stigma occurred days after the battle I would have trouble believing anyone would simply say "Oh, well since this has happened you're all free to go, in fact why don't you all become top level politicians in our government?"

But in Incorruptible the stigma occurred only after they had already the dementor's and sealed them away under Azkaban, intending to kill them. And even then it took weeks to surface. It doesn't take that long to jail these people.

Yeah, which is why it doesn't make sense that just a few years later all these people are perfectly willing to support Anti muggle sentiments from people like Malfoy, Zabini, Selwyn etc. Sure the pro muggle laws may not have gone through as much as they would have, but that doesn't mean these people are going to turn around and throw Harry into jail. In DH there were people wandless and begging in the streets, getting spit on and cursed by purebloods, there were dozens being thrown into Azkaban for stealing magic every day. Not to mention all those who fought or had people killed in the war. And you really expect me to believe that all these people and anyone who they know is just going to turn around and support this pureblood agenda over Harry Potter just a couple years later?

Just because the fic is an AU doesn't mean it can get away without making any sense. If someone were to ask Harry in Wastelands what happened there he would be able to explain how the war progressed logically until he made a deal with whatever ancient magical creature to get into his immortality, and from there the fic progresses logically.

If a character here were to ask another how the purebloods got into such powerful positions after the second war, or any of the other concerns I brought up, the character would answer would with what? "It's an AU LOL! Get with it!"

 

That was actually a really good post. I still think its a bit unbelievable but not to the extent I was previously (your apathy point was really good). I was thinking about the case in DH where that wizard Ron impersonates was going to lose his wife as a muggleborn, and thinking of others in the same straits, and then everyone they know would probably hear about what happened and become anti-anti-muggle because of it. I guess you could view that situation as extremely rare, though.

 

If there's one thing that should have ensured a bit of progress in the canon post-DH era (if not quite a total fix of society), it's tremendous bloodshed. The second Voldemort war had this in spades.

Think about the Battle of Hogwarts, where there were more than fifty corpses laid out in the Great Hall, all from the side opposing Voldemort. If we do the math based on Rowling's lowball estimate of wizarding England's population (~3000), that's 1 and 2/3rds percent of the population. To get an appreciation of that, scale it up to the population of the real world UK, 60 million. It would be like a million people of your society dying in a single battle over the course of a few hours.

That doesn't include anyone else who may have died in the second phase of the battle. It doesn't include dead Death Eaters, and it doesn't include people killed in the various purges and hunts of wizards during Voldemort's reign of terror and government takeover.

Nobody is going to publicly blame the Muggleborns and pro-Dumbledore/Harry side for this bloodshed, and only the extreme pure-blood zealots will do it privately. Many non-aligned pure-blood conservatives will look back at the Voldemort years and see the cost in blood of the extremist Death Eater position, and the loss of pure blood that resulted from it.

In short, I think it's feasible that the Battle of Hogwarts left a bit of vacuum, capable of being filled by reformist philosophy. Obviously it wouldn't have been enough to change everyone's minds overnight, but it might be enough to give the reformer mindset an edge in government, which over the next few years and decades might have led to real change.

Back on topic: this is a damn good story, and I'm glad that it's already finished and guaranteed to be posted.

 

You're all missing one key point too. The votes aren't given to elected officials. They're given to families. The comparison to Ancient Rome is apt. The ruling oligarchy are entrenched in their positions, if not as individuals, but definitely as families. Sure, the Minister may be ousted from power because of public pressure, but the Wizengamot seems to be much more stagnant in its hierarchy, and it seems as though it has survived pretty well with the introduction of a Zombie Apocalypse.

 

New update rate strikes like lightning, and tada, Chapter Four: Influence is up now. Politics-y chapter, sure to make things either a bit more sensible or crazier, and we get more zombies next week. This chapter also makes a reference to something that makes me think it might be best to tweak the population of the wizards, and I'll retroactively fix that in earlier chapters if I have to, but if it's no big deal here, I won't have to. Either or. Enjoy the chapter.

 

Ellie <3

/10char

 

Impressive chapter again. I like Astoria - she's a nice person overall, but she just doesn't care that much for Muggles, and Harry's this gadfly who won't shut up about them and keeps awakening feelings of guilt. But Harry is patient and tolerates her relatively insignificant eagerness to reintegrate. He's playing the game very well.

 

If this story was a girl, I wouldn't have sex with it.

But i'd damn well consider it.

5/5

 

I have to admit, you were fighting an uphill battle with me here. There were three main things working against you:

1. I have extreme dislike of zombie antagonists. I think zombies (and, by the same measure, Dementors) are terrible antagonists. They're not interesting. They're not interesting because they're not intelligent. They don't have characters. They don't have motives. They're just a threat like wild animals. Human evil is always much more interesting than something more general. Snape was always a far more interesting villain than Voldemort, for example.

2. I dislike apocalyptic scenarios. Again, I don't think they're interesting. Conflict is interesting because it's an exception. A moment of violence in a generally peaceful and stable world grabs you much more than yet another zombie fight. Moreover, while plot and interesting characters are what make a story gripping, what makes a story truly enjoyable for me is the setting. Without the milieu of civic society, and all the complexities that come along with it, your setting is greatly diminished. And sure, you have some wizarding politics. But to be honest, I'm pretty sick of reading about the Wizengamot and family seats and so on. Which brings me to the third point.

3. My general apathy towards fanfiction. For a story to grab me these days, it has to be a) technically perfect b) engagingly written in such a way that you never have to make yourself read on and c) in line with my tastes. Before An Unfound Door, the last new story that I read and liked enough to read more than a few paragraphs was back in April.

So as I say, you had an uphill battle, so I don't really consider my inability to finish the first chapter of your fic as much of a condemnation. But I wasn't able to finish it. The first minor irritation (lack of professionalism and a definite trend of cowardice among what we're told is a group of fully trained aurors) was enough to make me stop.

But props for writing it all before you published.

Edit: it's annoying that I didn't like it, given that we have Healer!Harry here. Though it read pretty much the same as Auror!Harry, only with a bit more patience.

Edit2: If I were to rate it, I would rate it 3/5. However, I'm not going to vote because I don't think it would be fair to give a 3/5 vote for it being a zombie fic. Would be like a fantasy-hater downvoting ASoIaF for being fantasy.

 

The zombies aren't the antagonists. The villains of the piece are the pureblood factions trying to abandon the muggles. It isn't a fic where Harry just goes out and blows up a lot of zombies. It's about the politics and the fight to survive.

To the people who are bashing on the politics. Harry wouldn't be an all powerful, my word is law, type figure. Yes he killed Voldemort, but after that he didn't join the ministry and reform the wizarding world. He fucked off and became a healer. While he was learning how to fix broken bones, the purebloods were able to slowly work their way back into power.

They are able to stay in power because unlike Voldemort they haven't gone off and killed peoples friends and families. Instead they are preaching a message of saving wizards. They haven't said outright "lets kill all the muggles". Instead they're saying that everyone should help themselves, that they shouldn't sacrifice wizards to save muggles. This would resonate with the common people, a lot of which are purebloods. They can also use the media to further their agenda. Canon showed how the newspaper sways the opinions of the public, and how it can be easily influenced.

Harry and his friends by contrast wouldn't look good to the common people. He is saying that wizards should give up their food and shelter to help the muggles. While this is very noble it wouldn't play well politically. The wizards don't have enough that they can go and support the muggles and still remain unaffected, so he needs to convince the people to make sacrifices, which never goes down well. Also he is proposing to overthrow a law that has been in place for centuries, and one that was put in place to protect wizards from muggles in the first place. The public will have a hard time supporting a change to something that they have known all their lives.

 

This story is a really hard one for me to judge.

I mean, it's being sold as a zombie-fic... but I'd argue it's really not a zombie story in terms of mood. While Matt does a really good job creating atmosphere in some scenes, everything seems a little bit too civilized for it to strike me as a true zombie story. Frankly, it's where my big disagreements with Taure come in, because I believe zombies can indeed be great villains, namely in the way they trigger changes in behaviour in the main protagonists... but to me, this doesn't seem like a zombie fic. There's no feelings of helplessness, no feelings of impending doom, no deeper questions regarding the nature and life and death, all questions that I think are quintessential to zombie stories. Here... yeah, I know it's early, but from the way it reads, I don't feel we're going to get a story arc like that outside of Harry's narrative.

I also really disagree with the whole 'apocalyptic' atmosphere of the fic, because I don't get that at all. There's way too many people alive, a lot of stable, functioning institutions, and far too much sanity (for lack of a better word) to truly qualify this story as a true zombie apocalypse, even with the Dementors. And maybe it's just me, but I don't feel the stakes for the main characters seem all that high. Yeah, I know it will really suck when the Dementors eventually hit the Muggle town, and I'm really looking forward to that scene, but ultimately, other than a moral loss, Harry doesn't have the same stake in it and thus I don't feel as sucked in from his POV.

And that leads me to the next issue I have with this story, namely the 1st person POV. Granted, it works and allows a more personal narrative, but outside of some interesting reflections on past events, Harry hasn't really provided much in the way of commentary from his POV, and that frustrates me. I mean, there's some there, but I don't think enough to justify the choice of 1st person, particularly when a 3rd person POV could have let you deliver some great dramatic scenes.

And this leads me to some things I really like about this fic: you write really solid combat scenes. They're visceral, very well-paced, and you write good dramatic dialogue. The first chapter is excellent in that regard, and I really enjoyed the hell out of it. However, much of your 'scheming' dialogue tends to fall a little flat with me - the speeches in the last chapter really were a chore to read, in my opinion, sorry dude.

And look, I know what you're trying to do with Astoria, and frankly, the segments where Harry is at Malfoy Manor are some of the best in the story, but there's a certain lack of warmth that I seem to get between Harry and Astoria, and that really annoys me. The two of them don't have a lot of chemistry, and maybe it's because Astoria really falls into the archetype of 'woman-in-the-tower', but it looks like this is slowly starting to change, and I like that.

This leads to the politics, and... okay, I've got mixed feelings here. Major points are given for having clear motivations, some reasonably interesting main actors, and a decent (if a bit unoriginal) political setup. However, I do have a few issues here. Firstly, you've got a pretty huge side cast of characters, and while some of them feel very well developed and form distinctive pictures in my mind's eye... others just don't. You do a good job developing some characters through dialogue and others through physical descriptions, but I think there really needs to be some of both here if you want have strong, memorable characters (particularly when you're dealing with OCs, or characters that are practically OCs). Now, granted, there are some cases you pull this off really well (like with Fortress), but there are a few that slip the net.

The second issue I have is more about the politics themselves, in that you're really trying to make them seem a lot more complex than they actually are. Basically, you're writing about a conflicted vote (one I couldn't help but draw an interesting parallel to here), and while you do it fairly well in handling the large cast, I really don't understand why your protagonists haven't made more of an effort to get a hold of your 'grey-zone' characters. Considering their votes are so damned important, I expected that Harry or his team would be trying a lot harder to get them on board. Here's where I think a 3rd person POV would really help, because with all the plots Harry's in, he can't be everywhere at once.

But here's the big issue I have with the politics in this story, and the real problem I have with this fic - the tone really isn't working. Don't get me wrong, Matt, I think you could write a fucking fantastic zombie fic, in the vein of the best, and I think you could write a great political drama too... but the blend between the two just isn't working for me. And here's the thing, I think it really could work, and I get snippets of how great it could be with the sequences between Malfoy and Harry at the Manor... but outside of that, the tone of the whole piece just feels muddled. I think it's the pomp and ceremony that really get to me - in the case of a true zombie apocalypse with Dementors and plague, that shit would be the first to go, and the fact that it's driving so much of the drama in this story is just painful.

And here's the thing: to me, I think this story could really work if it became a little more emotive and streamlined, if that makes any sense. To me, the ideal would be something of a cross between the early chapters of Swim's Circular Reasoning and Caliburn's Ambient, and the analytical thoroughness of your writing style while still being able to tug heartstrings on occasion would make the story a unique wonder to behold. As it is, you're really on that track, but the story seems bogged down by details and a plethora of annoying and really trivial characters. You're probably going to get to that greatness, but the story's not quite there yet.

4/5 right now, but definite potential to go up. I look forward to seeing the vote fail and the Muggle town get destroyed, along with Godric's Hallow and the Burrows - if you want to write a true zombie fic, the body count needs to get significantly higher.

 

Thanks for the reviews and stuff guys. I'd thumbs up every post if I could, but don't have enough. So yeah, blanket thumbs up for all of you.

I gotta say that knowing exactly how the story goes from here, having written it all out, makes me a lot more secure in the fact that concerns will be addressed, and even that I can add to parts if need be is a nice bonus. Unfortunately, I can't really go into the hows and whys of things without spoilers, but I will say that as soon as the story's finished, I'll TLDR on some aspects of the world and on other stuff brought up in posts like Silens's. All of it in spoiler tags, and if you didn't actually read past the opening parts of the story because you couldn't get past it, I kinda hope those people will at least read the post-story sorta-essays and get why I did what I did and how I did it, you know?

But I do love that people are picking up on the little things that could lead to alternative interpretations, like Silens's note about Harry and Astoria's relationship seeming a bit cold, and soon enough stuff like that will get even more murky while being defined, and I'm looking forward to seeing how people react to that. Should be fun.

Couple things to address, however.

I kinda disagree. While you have a good point later on about Harry feeling a bit stretched thin and in a whole lot of places at once, the first person POV was always going to be essential for me, especially given the usage of the Dementors. JKR may have been able to convey the feeling of the Dementors and stuff in third person, but I seriously couldn't, and Harry's thought processes in scenes like that and later on become way too important not to have in first person. Third person will always feel weaker to me without introducing other character POVs, and since I'm not going to, it's first person all the way, every day.

Oh yeah, give it time.

Also, just for pun:

But Healer Harry hasn't had any patients for a while now! Oh ho ho. Also, the distinction between the two - Healer and Auror Harry - was never going to be that much given the circumstances, because Harry isn't going to turnaround on everything that happened before he became a Healer. Healer Harry here is a bit more "save-y people" and stuff, and doesn't feel too different because I never liked how people would imply that a Healer Harry would have like no backbone. As you'd see - okay, maybe not you, but others - Healer Harry's profession and knowledge comes into serious play for later character-y moments - let's just say I take an idea I dropped in chapter four about Harry knowing a bit about torture through his job and take it up a notch.

Chapter Five beta work is coming along nicely. I've added a whole new scene to it that, perhaps ironically, doesn't address any concerns in this thread at all but is still a valid little scene for one of my favourite relationships in the story, so yeah.

 

Hmm, interesting POV. I'd disagree with it (on a side note, apologies for any poor posting mechanics, I'm rather intoxicated courtesy of a high amount of whiskey as of this particular moment), if only because your particular style of first person POV hasn't leant itself to character digressions. If anything, I'd certainly argue that 3rd person person limited can indeed carry the same dramatic weight as a 1st person narrative, provided you've developed the characters well enough (and with some characters, you really have). And I guess that was part of my point, discussing alternate character POVs, namely in that they'd provide addition inflection to your zombie story.

Granted, I'm not saying that it's not bad, but in such a story, I really do feel that additional perspectives would be advantageous to your story arc, if only in the fact they'd convey multiple perspectives to the story outside of Harry's, which as it is, seems relatively stalwart, all things considered. Multiple perspectives work really well in zombie fics as they allow a multitude of perspectives to discuss the varying angles that the zombie story provides... if anything, I find that by limiting to 1st person, you're limiting the image to Harry's perspective. Admittedly, it is badass, but it doesn't quite draw the audience in as much as a perspective from a less-able character would - at least from my opinion. It would add a certain sense of vulnerability, a sense that the zombies and Dementors are indeed a real, serious threat.

But, granted, if you're choosing to go with this style all the way, I understand. Would not have been my choice, but I'm not writing the epic story, am I? As it is, Matt, kick some serious ass - I'm really looking forward to the next chapter.

 

Don't change to third person. Please.