Title: The Universe is a Great and Beautiful Thing
Author: attica
Rating: M
Genre: Romance/Angst
Status: Complete
Library Category: I'd say this fits more in Gen Fics
Pairings: DM/HG
Summary: One of the greatest surprises in life is finding out how you’re going to die, and the fact that nobody can ever spoil it for you. COMPLETE. DHr.
Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4820712/1/The-Universe-is-a-Great-and-Beautiful-Thing

I recced this in a story search thread but recently gave it a reread and felt it deserved more appraisal. The writing captures you from the first line and doesn't let go until the last. And the last line...brings the circle to a full close. It's not easily forgotten.

The story is about...Draco Malfoy, asshole extraordinaire, being trapped in his own body and unable to move or talk, stuck in a hospital room for the past 8 months. And also...it's about Hermione Granger, who becomes his attending nurse and treats his immobile body like her own talk therapy. This is a pure introspective piece that covers a lot of deep topics. Maybe a bit too deep for a two-chapter fic. But the imagery is beautiful and so is the writing. For that alone, I think it deserves to go into the library.

 

...Come the fuck on.

 

It wasn't quite as terrible as I expected, but it was still pretty bad.

Pure introspective piece indeed. Nobody here cares about Draco Malfoy, though.

2/5.

 

The pairing sends up red flags, but alright, I could perhaps buy it if the story is extraordinary, but the given description sounds terrible. It's not a story, but hurt comfort nonsense.

I can't bear rating a fic without at least giving it a look [not even for a trashy sounding 1-star fic], so I decided to quickly skim the first chapter, just to make sure. My response as I was going through it was variations of boring booooring boring booring still boring. More boring.

It's terrible. Beyond terrible. And the prose is over wrought and dreadful. After two years on DLP the OP should know better.

 

Skimmed a bit of the first chapter. Makes no sense and it didn't catch my attention in any way. I'm sorry, but Malfoy is just such an utter cunt of a character. It'd have to be a spectacular author with a spectacular idea to even make a barely readable story.

My advice is that you think real hard before recommending this kinda crap again.

 

I read it.

I liked some aspects of the story, but it's not a fanfic. This isn't a story about Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger. This is a story of a muggle with the same name, and presumably similar appearance, lying in their deathbed.

The man in question is a Muggle through and through, thinking in modern terms and modern concepts. The television in the hospital is of the same importance as a window next to the bed - and the boredom with a certain sense of hopelesness drive the piece.

It's a story about a person being trapped in their own body, and listening to someone else talk. It could have been a muggle named Hermione, it could have been whatever person talking to an unwilling listener. And after listening for a longer while, this Draco realises that she is better than a TV, because she at least pretends she is talking to him.

And with whatever strength he has left, the last quarter of the story is Draco, desperatelly trying to raise his last boner.

No, seriously.
(If you want to know, he fails.)


As a purely Muggle story, it's actually half decent. Probably even 3/5.



As a Harry Potter fanfic, this story fails to, well to be a fanfic in the first place. I'm not going to do a recount, but I think there were two mentions of the 'Dark Lord' and one of those was amidst the paragraph where Draco's daydreaming is mentioned. Right next to the line about having supper with Napoleon.

Otherwise, Draco only keeps a certain rudeness which is supposed to have come from Rowling's Malfoy, but it manages to be even more shallow than in canon.

So yeah. Not a fanfic.



Some other things of note:

It's a static piece. In a strange way, the story is meant to be about Draco and his changes inside, the way his worldview shifts and turns for the better. Yet, even as he changes, he remains the same, narrativelly speaking. There's some depth, but it's compeletely alike Draco's condition, unmoving. He starts thinking about Granger differently, but he never changes inside, never has that promised revelation - or if he does, it slides into the pattern with other thoughts and is forgotten.

The unanswered half-questions are never answered, nor are they really asked. The only resolution we get is from Hermione's younger brother's subplot, and that is also unsatisfactory. In a way, "unsatisfactory" seems to be the general message of the story, thus resolving by leaving thing unresolved, but it removes the visible depth.

Well, what did I expect?



Oh, and there was a weird moment when Hermione reads Malfoy 'the Alchemic'. Leaving aside the quality of Paulo Coelho, the message of the book has only one thing in common with the story. "It's the journey that's important." But, there's not even a goal reached, even if the last thoughts of Draco point to him dying with a measure of the satisfaction, that satisfaction is fake. Oh, sorry, spoiler alert, Draco dies at the end.

His last goodbie is an illusion, same as his imagined romance - and that makes me doubt if there ever was a 'journey' to have in this story.


As a final note, I remembered one of the more interesting characters of The Count of Monte Cristo - an old man who never moved, but for his eyes. That man was everything this Malfoy is not. Forgetting the fact that there's Legillimency, and other, oh so easily thinkable magcal ways of reaching and communicating with a thinking wizard stuck in his near lifeless body, I've been mostly let down by the lack of any sort of fight. Any attempts at communication. Any experments.

He could move his eyes easily, he could open and close them - yet, it never occured for anyone to try the older than dirt method of 'one-blink-yes-two-blinks-no'?

That would have been believable. That would have made a fight for something tangible a central piece of the story. That very conflict could have shaped and driven their interaction, and... Gah, I'll just use other names for what could have been:


++++

Imagine Noirtier de Villefort, a young man who has lost his body, but retained his mind. He has been a ponce and a pompous arse his whole short life, and no one ever visits his almost-deathbed. His wife hates him, so he never tries to get her attention, and she never visits again. His former friend despises him for he had betrayed their frenchship before succumbing to the sickness.

Yet, he gets a frequent visit from someone he hated, someone he never liked, but that someone is the only means to any sort of communication. First, he is hopeful, then, he is angry for her not noticing, and then, when he decides that he hates the world and wants nothing to do with Héloïse, she notices his look - his tired roll of the eyes, and asks him about it. She asks him a yes or no question, gets an answer, an leaves for a while. He waits for her, more than he has waited for anything.

Here comes the fun part. See, she was gloating to him. She thought that he couldn't talk, couldn't respond, and had gotten careless in her self-made therapy. And now, if she helps him communicate with the world again, she would never look at him the same way again. And what if, what if that rich Villefort family man gets a 'word' outside? What if someone else starts to talk with him, and tells all about her misdeeds and misthoughts?

Thus, we have a man, desperate to reach out, and a woman, wanting for her secrets to stay burried. Yet, as she cannot help but pour her problems into him, he cannot help but become enamored with her tales, with living life through her.

The story could be a tragedy, where he dies after using her help in establishing communication with his family, and accidentally revealing her poisonings, or it could end on a bittersweet note where the romance part could come in.

There would be a bond, a communication, a common ground to bind them tighter than any schoolyard romance, yet they never would find happyness beyond simple comfort. And then he could pass away, and she would be one of the many attending his funeral. Many, many unimportant faces, waiting for their piece of old family riches, and a lone woman, who understood that old bastard better than anyone else. After all, no one else came to visit.

Credits roll.

+++

Now that story I'd like to read.

Alas.

I'm rating this one as 2/5.

 

You must be commended on your ability to read and comment on shit fanfiction, Nauro. I have no such mental fortitude.

 

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much this.

 

It's a curse.

Whenever I read a story and it has at least a half baked idea that resonates, I start 'writing' my own version in my mind, and comparing the two versions. And it takes a long while into a long, shitty story to realise that I've only read so much because I wanted a resolution for my version, and I've been reading terrible, terrible things, which will never give me the closure I wished for.