Title: The Well Groomed Mind
Author: Lady Khali
Rating: T
Genre: Drama
Status: Work In Progress, Frequent and Recent updates.
Library Category: Dark Arts or Alternates.
Pairings: None.
Summary: On Halloween 1994, Harry learns his mind isn't his own. On Samhain morn, he vows to question everything. Armed with logic and an unlikely ally, Harry makes a last ditch bid to reclaim his life. The goal: survive at all costs.
Link: Chapter 1

I am not one to lightly recommend stories, seeing as how I'm fairly aware that my tolerances tend to differ from much of DLP's.

That being said, this is the BEST new Purely-HP fanfic I've come across in some months, at the very least. If you were going to describe it with tags, it'd be an AU with Manipulative!Dumbledore, Talented-But-Abused!Harry, and Misrepresented!Voldemort

But the images and cliches those bring to mind do not do this story justice. To be honest, I'm not even a good enough writer to do this story justice in summary.

I've consumed it rabidly over the past couple of days, reading whenever I had a spare chance and the mental acumen to appreciate it fully. The story has a mature tone centered highly around character development and dramatic plot progression, with little in the way of action be it quidditch or duels.

There was a discussion some time ago in a subforum about why we tend to like stories where Harry is more 'Awesome' than he is in canon. And it was explained very well that in general it's because the average DLP member (and intelligent reader) would put much more towards learning and mastering magic than Harry's rather disappointing attempts at learning.

This is that same concept, a Driven Harry who slowly sheds the shackles that formerly held him back, done very well indeed. It's shown to be the struggle it should be.

In general, I find this entire work to be excellently done. With only the most minor of concepts that disagreed with me here and there on a rare occasion.

From a technical standpoint the writing is near flawless, and enjoyable as well. The fic caught me off guard with it's humor and comedic timing on more than one occasion and I ended up literally LOLing at points.

If I had any criticisms, it'd be the near-absolute lack of action.

4.25/5, with the potential to be kicked up the last .75 to a full 5/5 if it continues with the same quality as it's had so far.

 

1/5 because of unbelievable OC characters. This "story?" makes no sense to me.

 

The manipulative!Dumbledore cliche is overdone but the writing here is really good. I liked the fake Moody/Harry interactions. 4/5

 

I read part one of this when it was first posted a while ago (we discussed it in the Almost Recommended thread), and actually re-read it yesterday when she posted the first chapter of part 2, to remind myself.

So the fact that I felt it was worthy of two reads says something good about it, I think.

However, I do have some problems with it that spoil my enjoyment of it.

Hurt/comfort

It cannot be denied that a big part of this fic is Lightning on the Wave style "woe is me, I've been abused, now I need fixing" amateur psychology wherein the main character suffers non-canon symptoms of an abusive childhood like anxiety and panic attacks, occasional crippling self-doubt, and a deep rooted inability to accept that they were abused, despite what they know analytically.

Similarly to Lightning on the Wave, this is a long running theme which never goes away: breakthroughs are made, then things go back to how they were before, more or less. Though Lady Kali isn't anywhere near as bad as Lightning on the Wave on this. There is progression.

Now, maybe this is a more realistic interpretation of how the Dursleys treated Harry in canon (though in this fic their abuse has been stepped up to a greater degree than canon) but it's not the kind of thing I want to read.

(For this reason I always tone down the Dursleys in my fics - let's face it, their treatment of Harry was a proper Disney-style evil step-mum cartoonish portrayal, and completely disconnected from Harry's defiant character).

Anti-wizards

Another problem with the fic is that it's really anti-wizard. Over and over again, the author takes care to depict the magical world as completely inferior to the Muggle version in terms of societal norms - in terms of attitude towards safety, etc.

A more accurate title for this fic would be "Harry Potter and the Health and Safety Regulations". At times this fic reads a bit like the wet dream of a health and safety officer, going into great detail about where magical people haven't properly analysed a situation for potential problems and risks.

Of course, it does this in a very unbalanced way: it ignores the reason for why magical people are like this. Namely, they have magic. Now, it wouldn't be correct to say that magic has no presence in this fic, because it does, but only in a schooling context. Magic has a completely non-functional role in this magical world.

Essentially, Lady Kali's magical world is a Muggle world full of incompetent people who happen to be able to pull rabbits out of hats. What we might call the Vernon Dursley model of magical society. She doesn't really consider the way in which magic changes societal norms, and that in fact a lot of the things we do as Muggles become unnecessary with the correct application of magic.

Magic is extremely limited in this fic. The Bubble Head charm doesn't provide air, it traps it. The warming charm only goes part way to warming you, and you can still feel cold. An unbreakable chain can still be broken if you pull it hard enough. And so on.

I suppose this limiting of magic is necessary if you want to demonise the magical world. If magic were effective then a lot of the problems Harry goes on about, when in his Health and Safety mode, wouldn't be problems. "What are you thinking, sending children into a freezing lake?" Well, that's only a Health and Safety problem if magic can't completely solve the problems of cold and lack of air.

So magic is hobbled in order to twist things so the author can make her polemical point. A big part of this fic is trying to "explain" parts of canon, but I think some of the solutions presented to plot holes here are often more problematic than the original - which is why so much of canon has had to be changed to fit.

Now the pluses:

Very well written

Technically speaking, the fic is very well written, though sometimes it goes into a massive tangent on some topic. The thing about Muggleborn genetics comes to mind. Harry sends a letter to someone asking about parseltongue... he gets a reply which has almost no information about parseltongue, but a massive infodump on the nature of Muggleborns which the author wanted to give us.

It's worth mentioning the fic's writing is often a bit melodramatic, though it never again reaches the heights of flowery prose reached in chapter one. There are lots of cultural and historical references made that Harry should not be able to make - to classical mythology, to modern Muggle history, etc.

No bashing

This is a major plus in my view. Harry tries to keep his friends (though the fic is somewhat anti-Ron), and even Dumbledore, though depicted as unequivocally evil, is shown at least to be competent. There's no moustache twirling Dumbledore ranting to no one in his office here. And when Harry does get something past Dumbledore, the fic normally explains why he was able to do it a few chapters later - through often, this actually feels retconned in, probably a reply to reviews saying "that isn't realistic". There's a lot of use of bonds and contracts here. The fic is very legalistic in general (see: Health and Safety).

Competent Harry
More or less what it says on the tin. The fic features a competent Harry with a nice pace of advancement: not too fast, not too slow. It's a bit irregular though, which goes back to my point about magic being ultimately impractical in this fic. Harry is said to be doing NEWT level magic by the end of his fourth year, but it never really impacts the fic in any way.

Moreover, I'm not sure if I like the way it's been done. Essentially we have "wish magic" here. Harry doesn't learn spell theory, or even spells - he's just learning how to point his wand and want things really hard. So he's basically a magical brute. Further, the fic goes no way to explaining why it is that only Harry, in his year group, is able to perform complex magic just by wanting it to happen. When the warming charm consists solely of thinking "warm 35°" and wanting it really hard, then we have no explanation for why there's such a wide range of magical talent and abilities.

Interesting Voldemort
The way Voldemort is handled here is very interesting. A big fear is that he's been made too good. I'm really hoping that later chapters will show Harry that Voldemort is still a evil dark wizard, even if he did

Spoiler

help Harry.

Speaking of:

Spoiler

Harry's going over to Voldemort was well done, and by the time it happened we were really rooting for it. We never really got into the position of thinking it was stupid or unbelievable.

It's a hard fic to rate. The irritations I have with the fic make me want to give it a 3. But I think taking the fic as a whole, it's both highly readable and enjoyable. So I'll give it a tentative 4, though later chapters will be important in deciding if it stays a 4, or goes down to a 3.

 

@samkar, I'd like to know what you consider to be a 5/5, if you respond I expect my mind to be fucking "blown". I want to be amazed by the quality. Now back to the review.

I'm giving it a 4/5 because of Thewalkingdisaster's reasons listed above. I would have given it 5/5. But, I didn't because I feel as though if Dumbledore truely wanted to get Harry alone it would have happened, based solely on the fact that he's Albus fucking Dumbledore, that man makes shit happen. I'd reccomend this story to others.

 

I have been following this story for some time and I used to look forward to updates.

The first part is about how Harry deals with the Triwizard tournament. Overall, the fourth year was written quite well and has some excellent ideas and good humor. The severe: wizards are backassward morons theme was irritating, but manageable.

Barty Crouch Jr. as Moody was written well and reasons were given for his ability to mimic Moody so thoroughly. The Abused Harry part did not overshadow the plot.

Dumbledore's character was the problem. It went from wise mentor to manipulative, power hungry bastard so fast, I got whiplash. If his reasons for trying to manipulate Harry were given more depth, this story could have been very good.

Up till the end of the fourth year I would have given this story at least a 3/5. Ignoring the sudden shift in Dumbledore's character, I could have given it a 4/5.

Spoiler

Harry's dramatic shift in behavior is given a reason. His going to Voldemort to get out of Dumbledore's clutches was decently written and did not have Harry turning into a muggle hating, puppy killing Dark Lord wannabe.

But, Lord Voldemort's ideology is not explained thoroughly. From mass murdering, baby killing psycho, he abruptly turns to a rational and strict uncle.

The wizarding world and the muggle world have the same laws. That, was quite difficult to accept.

The author has started the fifth year as a continuation of this story. Two chapters are up as of now. This is where it really started to piss me off.

The abused Harry cliche has reared it's gigantic head and eclipsed the actual plot. Dumbledore's minions in the Order of the Phoenix seem to be mindless fools trying to please him without any views of their own.

Spoiler

The Dark Lord is seen to be such a swell guy, what with his bequeathing of his emergency food storage wallet, which he's kept with him since his first year, to Harry. It was so sweet, my teeth hurt.

He also treats his house elves very well. They speak proper English, are well fed and not punished when we know from Dobby that they were treated like vermin during his reign.

Somewhere along the story, Dumbledore and Lord Voldemort switched bodies.

I'm going to to wait and watch to see what happens with the story.

 

3/5 from me. It's a fairly interesting fic, especially considering I haven't been able to stomach a new Harry Potter fic in weeks.

The technical writing is great, if a bit filled with...legalesse? I guess Taure describes it better. It's certainly better then 99 percent of the shit out there when it comes to actual execution of writing.

The huge problem with this fic is its just basic premise. In the first chapter's A/N she tells us this story was derived from a discussion of a basic plot hole list. So her Harry goes through the fic pointing out these problems. The problem with that is JKR's narrative is FILLED with this fucking shit, so having your protagonist wandering through the story constantly pointing shit out is really irritating. It really reads like a fix it wank. Really this story is sorta succeeding DESPITE it's terrible, cliched, awful premise.

I really like magic to be a big aspect of a story. I feel like magic should be this wonderous thing that is absolutely fucking amazing, and trivializing it kinda rubs me the wrong way. I wish more fic's worked more with that concept. This one doesn't. (and as Taure said, even nerfs it to apply more lolol look at the plot hole fix it moments.)

Competant Harry? Always love it. She used the "omg Dumbledore mind-raped me" to make Harry OOC out of nowhere. I'm only willing to put up with that because of how much I enjoy reading about competant Harry, even if he's a bit angsty.

I dunno. I just feel if the author came up wtih a better original concept to start from; she could make a really fucking epic story. All the ingredients are there, and she has the ability to mix them, but this one big thing just kinda poisons the whole project.

JKR's narrative is so riddled with holes, that making a fic where you're constantly pointing them out is just really sorta...hollow, I guess. As fanfiction writers, it's usually a lot better to just kinda smooth out and ignore the edges of that.

TLDR: She should be writing a different type of story. If she did it'd be amazing.

edit: I hadn't gotten to the recent chapters yet. Why the fuck is Voldemort an amazing misunderstood good guy? Super OOC Harry is tolerable. Why the hell is Dumbledore Evil McDouchenozzle and Voldemort is Slashfic!Misunderstood!Malfoy

 

I just finished the first chapter, and my first thought is kind of ‘bleh’. The writing is alright, but it seems more like a façade than actual genuinely amazing writing, if it makes sense. Not that it’s bad – it’s fine – but it seems like the author is going out of her way to make it seem as such, and you can kind of see that. It doesn’t really affect my view on the story though, since that just means that the story has some flow and some character beyond cookie-cutter paint-by-numbers literature.

Anyways, the fic jumps the shark pretty early I guess, changing stuff from the very first paragraph. I’d have liked it to me more of a smoother journey of discovery rather that just stating a bunch of factual changes. The author goes out of the way to make blatant changes rather than just incorporating them into the story – such as the title of the one book “Only Dead Imbeciles Stun”. Okay, we get it.

There’s too much effort put into legitimizing the situations that appear. Either defending or quantifying, and while the writing flows well, the beginning plot doesn’t. The first example is pretty much Harry deciding right off the bat that he wanted to just live long enough to graduate and never have to deal with Voldemort again, and ‘justifying’ to himself with a pretty weak idea that he wasn’t going to go after Voldemort because killing is part of war. Yawn.

Oh, and he was a ‘conniving little snake’ before coming to Hogwarts, fighting his battles with calculated words and trickery. Right, we’ve already jumped the shark this much, might as well go all the way. It’s a neat trick the author is trying to play. Instead of changing Harry now, the author is pretending that Harry has had some of these qualities all along, and is now only going to start using them more. Clever, but still contrived.

My biggest gripe up to this point is that you don’t need to justify every single change in character, since that just makes it disjointed even further. Show it happening, rather than telling. Have Harry put to the decision making test, rather than the author.

I guess I should mention my extreme hatred of Occlumency and Legillimency. “Every wizard worth his salt knows Occlumency”. For what, to protect against three people, one who many think is dead? No, this is just more blatant foreshadowing. It’s all just quite heavy handed, and I’m finding it hard to really see it as believable.

First and foremost, this is a fix-it story to change Harry’s perception on the world, to see it how it truly is by the author’s discretion. It’s all about cause/effect and question/answer, and it doesn’t make for that great of a read.

This line shows that pretty well –

“My breath hitched as the answer hit me. Moody had a reasonable expectation I wouldn't read it, much less apply it. He gave it to me to look like he was helping me without actually helping.
To hell with that.”

Right. What follows is an Occlumency training scene. Oh joy of joys. If there’s anything worse than a training scene, it’s an Occlumency training scene. And while there’s no mindscape or truly stupid shit, it’s still a training scene, and seems to be the entire focus of this particular passage. I’m sure it serves a purpose, which is to prevent the first scene from happening again, but it just falls in line with the rest of the story – cause/effect. Something happens, Harry fixes it right away with whatever random justification that he wants to at the time. It’s quite boring.

It’s a journey of discovery to how badly Harry has been wronged through his life, either accidently, purposefully, and usually with ‘good’ intention in mind, and it’s a journey of change to react to them. The author rambles on trying to justify all the changes she has in store from him, and the delivery just doesn’t work for me. It just drags on and on and on, with him having epiphany after epiphany about the world. It downplays many aspects, and polarization many others, but it isn’t done in a subtle way. It’s done all at once, and you’d be blind to not notice how heavy handed the changes are.

I like a Harry where his worldly perceptions change, where he starts finding that the ideals and traditions of a pureblood society are not as farfetched as Hermione/Dumbledore had shown him, and he slowly changes his opinions, but this story isn’t that.

To be honest, the first chapter was nearly to the point of unreadable. Not because of the written, Like other have said, it was good, but the actual plot development. Harry’s view of the world changes pretty much instantly as he ‘discovers’ many of the oddities surrounding his life, all at once. That’s how most bad indy!Harry start, Occlumency training and all. The only difference here is that is fluffed up with readable prose.

There’s a long history of accomplished writers trying to take a cliché and do it ‘right’, but this isn’t it. This is just more of the same.

I'm not rating yet, since it was only one chapter, but I don't have any high hopes of there being anything of true quality plot wise. If I were to rate the first chapter, I'd say a 3/5 would be generous. But as there's another 19 chapters, it would be unfair to rate off just the first one, no matter how unseemly it is, but it would also be unfair to expect people to read the entire thing before posting an opinion.

 

Not a fan at all. Its a generic fix it fic, manitpulative dumbledore, lists, misunderstood parselmouths, non-existant muggleborns (all squib descendants), malnutrition and unfollowed wills. 90% of the fic is Harry bitching to himself about the various mistakes apparently in canon, or info dumps of legalese.

The only interseting feature of this story is that it takes place in 4th year rather than 1st. Even then its not used excitingly, Harry summons the egg in the first task. Thats terrible. The second task is completed in much the same way as canon except Harry is more of a dick. I tried skipping ahead at this point to see if it improves in part 2, but it seems to be more of the same.

In terms of fixing-conon style stories it may be the best of the bunch, but its clear from the large A/N's at the end of each chapter as she explains her reasoning for the latest revalation of lies that thats all it is. The bashing is limited, characters (bar dumbledore and voldemort) stay mostly in character, technical writing is sound, but it really doesnt do anything for me.

1/5

 

This is my only problem with your review. I think that you fail to mention (or have not yet reached), the hints she makes that Britain is seen as somewhat backwards and retarded. I'll admit that the signs are small, but they are most assuredly there. Instead of just 'wizarding society as a whole is utterly retarded.'

Everything else you've said is a fair point that I can't argue against, though I think perhaps a couple points are overstated or misrepresented ever so slightly. But the discrepancies in opinion aren't really important enough to quibble over.

Edit: Also, LOL at people rating 1/5. That's just.. over-reacting. Your attempts to seem like your standards are so high and erudite that this story is scum of the earth trash (when better literary minds are disagreeing with you (note: I'm not including myself in that statement) ), is amusing.

 

Britain being way worse than everywhere else is just as bad as anti-wizard.

 

There are two chapters up for the sequel? I'm not quite sure where they've been posted. I just checked the authour profile and couldn't find them. Where are they posted?

 

He means Part Two.

Part One encapsulated Fourth Year.

Part Two starts in the summer between fourth and fifth, and will probably encapsulate Fifth Year at least.

 

The sequel is being posted in the same fic: chapter 19 and onwards.

Also, as far as Harry Potter is concerned, Britain = the world. Foreign wizards add flavour, but the focus is on the UK.

The "Britain is ass backwards in a global environment of intelligence" just doesn't wash with me. The thing is this: in global politics, the weak are dominated by the strong, who exploit them and interfere in their affairs to extract value from their domination.

If magical Britain were the Middle East of the magical world, then it wouldn't be so independent. The nation would be subject to the interference of greater magical nations. And yet the magical affairs of Britain occur in almost complete isolation. Which says that Britain is at least significant enough on the global scale to make other powers think twice before interfering.

 

I am not getting in a socio-political canon fight with Taure. I value my sanity far too much.

As it is, I'm glad that I didn't link a piece of smelly shit that I just THOUGHT was good.

 

This story is mostly notable for that it has a manipulative Dumbledore that isn't actually just idiot!Dumbledore, which is extremely rare. The basic problem that most stories run into is that a genuinely evil manipulative Dumbledore would win in any fight between him and Harry, and probably wouldn't get caught in the first place. Here everything is ultimately the result of just a single error on Dumbledore's part, which is both canon and sort of justified in the fic. The lack of scenes with Dumbledore sitting in his office twirling his mustache and fuming about how Harry is slipping out of his controls helps too (and considering that 'real' Harry promptly ran off to join Voldemort, perhaps Dumbledore's rewrites are actually sort of justifiable...).

I can't really think of any cases offhand where Harry has backslid; instead new issues keep popping up. The main thing that annoyed me so much about the Sacrifices stories was not the quantity of angst, but rather the fact that Harry had the exact same non-breakthroughs over and over. The sheer length of the series became a lot less impressive when I realized how many scenes were just reworded versions of scenes that had happened earlier.

 

A perfect example would be this very chapter, where suddenly the narrative focuses on Harry hiding food. It had briefly mentioned that he did this when he was at the Dursleys many chapters ago, and then suddenly BAM it crops up again in this chapter.

 

I don't think that's backsliding so much as simply it's now being given focus in the narrative. If it had claimed he wasn't doing so anymore, and then suddenly he was doing it again, that'd be backsliding. This is just a case of incomplete information.

 

Yeah, it's not a problem which Harry had previously supposedly gotten over; he only stopped because of Dumbledore's mind-editing. It would be much worse if it hadn't been mentioned earlier, as it'd be a sign that we'd be getting endless new issues popping up.

 

I'm really torn on this one. Between the Potter family tree looking more like a family kudzu and the long-winded tangents about childcare, genetics and pedantic sundry, this reads like an unholy crossover between Harry Potter, Oliver Twist, and a Public Service Announcement. The manipulative!Dumbledore here may not be an idiot, but without an actual motive that doesn't make him any deeper of a character. And no, blind self-interest and hunger for power aren't adequate motives; this isn't 1984 here. It doesn't get any bonus points for being a hurt/comfort fic, not when the interactions between Harry and Crouch are so...clinical. More than anything, though, this story irritates me because it's less a story per se and more of a polemic, a vehicle through which the author can expound at length on all the horrors of the HPverse in general and Harry's upbringing in particular. I may complain about certain aspects of Harry Potter making no sense, but I at least can enjoy the books despite what objections I have. The fairly comprehensive grasp of canon minutiae notwithstanding, I get no indication that this writer actually likes Harry Potter, and that just makes me uncomfortable.

These are all serious issues, and in any other case I would consider them grievous enough shortcomings to drop this story's rating down to 2/5 or 2.5/5, maximum, regardless of the story's virtues. This may sound like a strange approach to reviewing, but I've always been of the opinion that mistakes and flaws outweigh virtues, and tend to evaluate things from a flaw-oriented perspective as a result of that. Simply put, this story does too much wrong to belong anywhere other than the Trash Bin.

And yet, for all of that, I've read 13 chapters of the story so far, and intend to keep on reading as soon as I finish writing up this review. I might even go so far as to say I enjoyed the read. I'm not sure why, but this story is quite simply better than it has any right to be. I might find the Harry/Crouch interactions to be lacking in passion, but there's a certain sense of honesty there that makes up for it. And just because Harry's psychologically damaged doesn't mean he's a wuss; he's smart, forward-thinking and proactive, all traits we appreciate seeing in our hero. And as tired a cliche as manipulative!Dumbledore is, this author actually has some sense as to how to properly portray the idea, making Dumbledore out to be this sort of political colossus whose tentacles reach everywhere. There's actually a good deal of suspense in trying to find out just how deep the rabbit-hole goes, something I like to see in stories where memory modification or elaborate conspiracy is involved. I suppose what I can say at the end of all of this is that this story is as good as the sum of its parts could possibly allow, and better than I initially thought was possible. I said before that I shouldn't give this better than 2.5, but I really do like reading stories where the execution's quality exceeds the power of the underlying conceits; it's a refreshing change of pace from the zillion-odd stories that are let down in the execution despite their fascinating premises. For this reason, I'm going to give it a 3.5/5, albeit rounded down to 3 because I still think the library's too good for it. The Recycling Bin sounds about right.