Does that mean Potter, No Angst ends up Harry/Luna? :awesome

On topic, this is a piece of shit. Well that might be a bit harsh, but it's not great. Don't get me wrong, I like a little bit of Luna as much as the next man, I really do, but seriously, Seer!Luna? That was old and overdone when it was new. And that's basically the tale of the entire story, or all of it that I made myself read at least, overused and badly executed cliches all over the show.

I mean look at this:

I'm certain that there is a template for Indy!Harry stories somewhere, that people just copy and paste this paragraph from. I've seen it pretty much word for word in about fifty different stories, none of them good.

I haven't even reached the end of the train ride and I already hate all of the characterisations. Luna is such a badly done attempt at being "Loony" that it hurts my brain to read her lines. Harry is just utterly bland, and far too accepting of everything that Luna has to say. This fic manages to reignite my utter loathing for fanon Hermione, she knows absolutely everything, and gets outraged at the smallest thing. And I don't know why she was willing to go along with Luna, when she was the the exact opposite in canon. And don't get me started on Ron here, it's the awful, cliched, Stupid!Dumbass!Ron, and that's enough on it's own to stop me reading.

I skipped to the end and found this line that rather nicely sums up this fic.

A rather horrible, run on sentence, complete with obligatory spelling mistake (As I doubt that Dumbledore was killed by a town in Northern England, but I could be wrong, I didn't read it all). And to top it all off, he ends up going to the perfect magical America, because everyone knows that America is perfect. A quick check of the author profile confirms that it's written by a middle aged American man, which explains that bit at least.

tl;dr 2/5, say hello to the trash bin.

 

And this is why you got a warning - and why I merged this with "Almost Recommendable".

 

By the same author that brought us Remus Lupin, PI. Interesting so far, but too short to really judge. Will be following, though.

 

It looks good but your right about it being too early to judge, I got a bad feeling its going to become a manipulative!Dumbledore story though.

 

Mainpulative!Dumbledore with the testicular fortitude to wipe Britain off the map gets a thumbs up from me. I'll be keeping my eye on this, and crossing my fingers that it doesn't get real stupid real fast as this genre is wont to do.

 

It's certainly... interesting. And for simple readability is miles ahead of anything I have seen in weeks.

I'll probably keep following it, unless it really turns bad. I can forgive a lot at the moment for a readable story.

 

I like how Hermoine's parents haven't just been described as competent individuals (the usual), but have actually been shown to be competent individuals through their competent actions. This was the least grating appearance by them that I can remember reading.

Redo stories must walk a fine line between too much change and too little, and the limited information mechanic that appeared here seems like it will be helpful in accomplishing that.

 

Ickle Ronnikins

A one-shot by our very own Perspicacity. It's a bit sad piece of tale with Ron as the lead character. I am not going to say much other than if you're put off with Ron, just give it a try. You'll most likely like it. Pers does a great job of taking complete canon information, detailing it in a way that only a author of his caliber is capable of and producing this excellent one-shot.

I liked the entire story much better than the ending. Not to say that the ending is bad. It is quite unexpected. But I enjoyed the earlier parts much more, they were in a way quite touching.

 

Touching? Maybe. I thought disturbing would be a better description. But still good.

 

I'm sorry, but even if Dumbledore is awesome in this story, I won't be reading it; practically every story on FFn now uses the Manipulative!Dumbledore trope, and I'm -personally- sick of them.

It's just as bad as pussy!Harry crying, to me.

Was Dumbledore manipulative in canon? Yes, he was to an extent - but not to the reaches fan fics go to.

 

This has a lot of admirable qualities, but

Spoiler

Unbreakable Vows being given under compulsion is just a trolly trolly mechanic, and implies a lot of profitable and in character terrorist activities the Death Eaters could've engaged in that they didn't.

 

Watching the solar eclipse here (which just started where I am)...

The Ron story was written because Cenares's thread annoyed the crap out of me. The ending was a bit of whimsy, admitted, but Ron deserves better. As others have noted, he's one of the most authentic characters in the series and deserves better. Hooking him up with the "accountant" uncle seemed the best I could hope to do...

Having just done a search and not finding it referenced (save obliquely in the Remus Lupin, PI thread), I'm going to go ahead and recommend this author's magnum opus, Out of the West, as well. I don't think it's quite Library material because of a few issues that I'll touch on, but it's good reading and a complete, 200k+ word story:

The summary gives you basically no information, so I'll give you the essentials here: because of the advent of nuclear weapons, a subset of humanity has started to mutate, with a class of supermen having various ESP-type powers coming to the fore: telekinesis, remote sensing, mind-reading, etc. Each successive generation seems to express these powers more strongly. Present-day humans are at generations 3 or 4. The central characters in the story are members of this secret society comprising such people, who exist in fashion parallel to wizardkind: secret, isolated, possessing their own laws and customs, yet interacting with "Normals." They clash with the canon Harry Potter magical world starting around year 3 in HP.

The story is rich as an AU, with a fully fleshed out alternative world with its own set of powers, etc. It's a refreshing read--not another "year 5 AU/Harry goes shopping and trains" fic, to be sure. The characters are nuanced and textured. Leo, the main character, is a sympathetic sociopath, and Liz, his sister, is fun to read. Some things that might disqualify it from DLP Library inclusion: It's not HP-centric. It focuses more on the world and characters of the mutants than the HP world (and probably could have been a stand-alone novel in this world). While well plotted and internally reasonably consistent, it's not well paced in spots--many of the side-stories are interesting in their own right, but detract from the whole when told together and there's a fair bit of bogging down reading about people who wouldn't warrant a name if they were cast as movie characters. It falls into some annoying tropes (hyper-manipulative Dumbledore, e.g.) as well.

On balance, I thought it was a worthy read. I added it to my favorites, but for the DLP crowd and its preferences, I'd rate it a solid 3/5--better than many of the 3/5s out there, but not to everyone's tastes.

 

The author of Out of the West needs to learn that parentheses do not belong in works of fiction. Otherwise it's seeming to be an interesting read. Will report back later.

 

Sanguine Spirits » reviews The Boy Who Lived, a Dead Man Walking, and a Poltergeist walk into a bar. Or rather the Leaky Cauldron. And there was a certain Miss Granger trying to make sense of the whole hullabaloo. For a matter of fact, so am I. Series of oneshots, punny
Crossover - Harry Potter & Touhou Project - Rated: M - English - Humor/Parody - Chapters: 4 - Words: 19,460 - Reviews: 11 - Updated: 4-30-12 - Published: 3-22-12 - Harry P. & Merlin P.

This is a story that I thought was rather funny. It's filled with puns and cheap jokes. It may not be everyones cup of tea. Which is why I posted it here in Almost recommendeable.

 

If you can't even manage to have proper grammar in the very first line of your story, you shouldn't be writing creatively.

 

This. Nothing kills a story faster for me than use of parentheses. I don't really mind the very rare parenthesis, but when I start seeing multiple parentheses in every single paragraph, I almost immediately know that the story is going to be shit and not worth my time to read.

Bitches need to learn how to write properly.

 

Admittedly, JKR makes a poor role-model in what belongs in a work of fiction, but...

On the following page she uses bunches of all-caps separated by em-dashes, too. Must have been a nightmare for the typesetters.

 

I agree that their overuse can be distracting, particularly if they don't balance (as is often the case with this author). I find that there's a sense of breaking the fourth wall with their use in third-person prose, since they act like an aside that the writer is communicating directly to the reader.

Odd conventions are employed a lot in writing. Faulkner used many parenthetical phrases in his prose (which at times was some of the most evocative in the language), yet claimed to be incapable of using a semicolon. Vonnegut said of the semicolon, "Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college." Melville used them frequently, however, and is regarded as one of the finest writers of the English language. Cormac McCarthy eschews speech tags altogether and uses colons frequently, yet never a semicolon himself. David Foster Wallace uses a gazillion end notes in Infinite Jest (the book is about 1/4 end note text) instead of parenthetical text, and also seems to love the semicolon. Vonnegut, in Breakfast of Champions, avoided the semicolon, but compensated by drawing weird little pencil sketches of assholes and women's pubic hair and chickens interspersed throughout. I'd hesitate to say that any of these uniquely indicate horrible writing.

Stylistically, Larry Huss's writing probably most resembles Jack Vance's, an accomplished writer who broke many conventions himself.

 

Heh, from certain people, I would suspect it was a subtle barb regarding Hermione's gender.

But, yeah, nothing in fanfic rubs me the wrong way quite like finding errors in the title, summary, or first paragraph of a story.

 

Twist of Fate, written by FirePhoenix8, is so far decent, but sadly I'm going to have to drop it. It has Harry being sent back in time because reasons, so he grows up with Voldemort.

However, I hit chapter 7 (After dealing with several likable OCs) to see:

"Oh, and this will certainly be a fic with SLASH for the final pairing, though there might be HET in between."

Fuck you FirePhoenix8. I know you have some creepy obsession with Voldemort/Harry (What the fuck is wrong with you seriously) but most authors can deal with not dickslapping their favorite pairings in your face.

I skipped to chapter 29 to see if it had appeared yet - it hadn't. So the story is currently at least mediocre - not amazing, not terrible, just mediocre.