Huh. Looks to me like you didn't understand canon all that well. YES, Dumbledorre tried to set things up to have the best chance of working out, but to say he might do something to "railroad Harry back into line" if Harry got outside his "boundaries," you don't understand Dmbledore at all. AT ALL.


Dumbledore did his best but he knew that, ultimately, this was Harry's fight to win or lose. D'dore made his play at putting Harry into position and arming him with the tools to win - loyalty, friendship, support, love, courage, conviction, etc. - but to say he might've had "boundaries" is ludicrous.


How long have you been under this misguided notion? Or have you just been reading indy!Harry fics for months on end?

 

I doubt it was in Dumbledore's plan to help Harry break the law by going back in time in third year.

Dumbledore was there to guide and support Harry as best he could. If Harry had branched out and decided he needed to do X or Y. Dumbledore would have looked at the situation and decided on a course of action that would help Harry and hopefully keep him intact to face Voldemort.

Dumbledore was no heartless general.

 

Deadwoodpecker (Ella) has the best romance stories in the fandom. BWP is time-travel on top of that, while Yellow Submarine is just romance. Both are H/G, but both are good.

 

Backwards with a Purpose is hardly a romance. It's a redo everything to make it perfect, but perfection doesn't actually exist and they find it out the hard way. It's still a good story though, even if you don't like Ginny. The middle of the first story does tend to drag though.

Rebel in the Chosen is just about the most boring story I've ever read. Nothing happens in it. The romance just consists of Harry and Tonks waffling about for 30 chapters. Harry goes "We can't do this for X reason,", but eventually gets convinced that it can work. And the very next chapter, Tonks then takes her turn to go "Oh, sorry, this actually really can't happen for Y reason," Yawn, snore, lets try and come up with a bigger contrived reason to create drama in this story. All because there is a severe lack of readable Romance in the fandom does not make it a good story. It just means everything else sucks.

 

Yeah, I stopped reading around chapter 15.

So we've got, what...

Yellow Submarine
Coming Back Late
Hocus Pocus, Adele Polkiss
Contemplating Clouds
The Lie I've Lived (sorta)
And my fic, I guess, if you aren't picky.

And that's about it for readable romance.

 

Except Yellow Submarine isn't finished. Which is a damn shame. Unless it was done on the livejournal page, although I could never find an update there either.

 

I disagree with your interpretation of the character. It might have been what JKR had in mind but it's not really matching the conclusion I got about the actual written series because as a reader you try to apply logic beyond what's written or implied.

But if you look back to HBP Dumbledore stone walled Harry about Severus/Draco and when Harry found out the truth about Severus's involvement in the prophecy he put on some emotional show and then stopped any deeper discussion with his journey to the cave.

 

This reminds me of the reason I stopped reading The 5th Element.

 

You're forgetting Narcotic Effects by Mehetabelo. Awesome story, that is, with an admittedly weak ending.

 

I think it was better than average, but not amazing. The romance fic that would have been the best of them all would've been The Art of Healing by jon3776. By far the most gifted writer, and it was a story that made you care for Gabrielle and Harry. It's abandoned at a stupendously filthy cliffhanger.

 

Exactly. That was the whole plot of Fifth Element for like 300,000 words. And then, when Harry finally gets his head out of his ass, the storytelling went straight to hell.

 

Which is, of course, why it's funny to throw it up in their faces at every opportunity.

I have to agree. Harry was right the whole time, and while Dumbledore and Snape also knew it, Ron and Hermione were just needlessly and stubbornly obtuse about Harry's suspicions. It was a real blow to the idea of Hermione being not only smart but also to the break she had from her "the authority figures have it under control" attitude in OotP.

I hate when people hate on JKR by saying she "lobotomized" Hermione in HBP, but when you think about this part, it's hard to dispute.

I thought Yellow Submarine was a hurt/comfort type story where a younger-than-canon Ginny had been kidnapped as a child and brutalized by Death Eaters?? Doesn't sound like much of a romance to me...

I stopped readin gComing Back Late. It was just too much for my suspension of disbelief with all the shoe-horned faux-intrigue and the butchering of Ginny's (admittedly thin) canon characterization.

And I don't think of Contemplating Clouds as a romance so much as a fluffy almost-crack piece. It's sweet and all, like watching cute puppies, and the writing is really good, but I wouldn't call it a romance.

HPAP and TLIL - those two I'd say *do* qualify as romances. Many on DLP would disagree though, as they hated one or both.

I'd add to the list of romances:

After the End - I always recc this one, and it's not *just* a romance, but it *is* romantic and superb on several levels (though it may not have aged as well as most would prefer)
Lovegood, Boobs Gooder - I'd call it a bittersweet romance, actually
Vox Corporis - drawn out, and I can't remember all of it, but it's definitely romance
Winter Solace - another one I'd call bittersweet
almost anything by michelle-31a over at FF.net, though it's mostly Hermione/Luna

I also liked that one quite a bit, but yeah, the ending was subpar, iirc.

EDIT 'cause I forgot to address this.

Your first paragraph makes no sense; are you trying to say something there??

Second paragraph: Um, yeah. D'dore told Harry to STFU about it, because (1) he trusted Snape to suss it out and (2) he had a whole lot to do still and needed to show and tell Harry a WHOLE LOT in a SHORT AMOUNT OF TIME, since Dumbledore was, y'know, DYING and all.

Don't you think that telling Harry to zip it since the two of them were about to go into an unknown hell to retrieve a piece of Voldemort's soul was just a wee bit more pressing than Harry's concern about just *who* told LV about the prophecy? Particularly when D'dore KNEW that Snape's soul was still crushed about all that? And considering that until that very moment, Harry had never given a damn about who'd done it, since it was sort of irrelevant? And since D'dore knew the truth and needed to keep Snape safe as the spy, telling Harry would be pretty damn stupid considering Harry's complete and total lack of anything resembling subtlety??

Dude, this whole "Dumbledore is a manipulative old shithead!1!!11" trope has been done to death and we'd prefer to get past it, okay? Just like we'd all like to stop hearing "Ginny is a love-potion brewing size-queen!!1!"

 

I stopped reading this the minute that Hermione dosed Teddy with veritaserum and Harry defended her when Teddy bitched.

The bashing didn't help either.

 

I think TLIL vaguely qualifies as a romance if you accept that it is James Potter/ Fleur and not Harry/Fleur, and if you do think that, then it's more just a horny guy trying to get laid with some shallow romance scattered about to try and legitimize it.

The thing with romance is that normal romance is just so boring most of the time, and people try and fix that, but they always end up going to the extremes to make a batshit crazy plot with the romance forced in ( I still don't get why Bungle and sequel have Luna in it at all). There has yet to be a great story that balances an amazing plot with believable romance, its usually just one or the other.

Case in point (sorry Silens) http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4373628/1/The_Night_They_Remembered
The plot is absurd, but it is a romance in a vague way, and it is a decent read.

 

Coming back late lost me when after three days of being back in the magical world Harry decides he loves Hermione....

 

Methinks that reasoning has just sunk 80% of the shitty indie!Harry/'manipulative'!Dumblefore fics on ffnet.

 

I see what you mean. For me personally though, it was more of a potential to make me care. I just think the developments between the characters was too quick. The point it got abandoned is a kick in the balls though, no question about that.

 

And Harry is going to think that's adequate? Snape has repeatedly screwed Harry over and defended Malfoy throughout the series. Harry doesn't trust Snape for the longest time in canon, despite Dumbeldore's words.

Edit: Quickreply, missed the second page of development:

I put the little quotes around boundaries for a reason, and I thought about explaining but I typed that post in a hurry, so, my mistake. Dumbledore had a specific set of things that he believed (and ended up being right, but that's a different discussion) Harry needed to do. Stopping Malfoy, or even hindering other Death Eaters in any way, wasn't one of them. So he thought Harry was wasting time, when he should have been, I dont know, thinking about Horcruxes, etc. He didn't tell this to Harry explicitly, and probably for decent reason. "You don't need to waste your time trying to fight the enemy" would be condescending and would likely make Harry all the more frustrated, though perhaps being forthright would have worked framed the right way, I'd have to see how it was done.

Also, I'm obviously exaggerating when I use the term 'railroad' since all he did was deflect in conversation - he didn't use any other power to force Harry away from investigating Malfoy, he just didn't actively help. I probably misused the whole path/railroad thing, when something like 'objective' or 'goal' for Harry would be more accurate. Re-reading my post, I can see how this would be misleading. Blah.

 

While I don't believe in evil Dumbledore, I never got the sense that he was really arming Harry for anything. That is, of course, if you could arm anyone against a Dark Wizard with several decades of experience - i.e. Harry being trained from Birth and not facing Voldemort until he's 30.

Dumbledore always struck me as a Après moi, le déluge type character, and since most complex plans are a bit like Gold Ruberg machines in real life (one thing goes wrong, everything comes tumbling down), I'm not quite sure that isn't the case.

The only other possibility imo is that Dumbledore was overly relying on the prophecy for things to turn out well. Then I can look at it cynically and figure he let Harry be pushed into bad situations to continually test the prophecy more than anything else. Still not evil but gray.

Of course, you can all hinge it on "power the Dark Lord knows not" and just say Dumbledore had no fucking clue and just kinda let things happen hoping Harry would learn it by chance.

 

The correct answer is that Rowling had no idea what she was doing when she wrote book one, and probably didn't know how to get out of the mess she made for herself after she thought up the prophecy.