Yeah - this makes no sense to me. When an author writes an AU - how can "writing anything else" be dishonest to the AU he is creating? It just makes me think he doesn't know what AU means.

At the end of this story, the only difference I see between this Slytherin Harry and Gryffindor Harry, when faced with the same situations, is that he wears a green robe. And even though he's in Slytherin, he's still friends with mostly the same old people - not really believable.

Unfortunately, its just not enough to keep me interested in seeing what happens in Book 2.

 

I think Drizzle wanted to write a story where pre-Hogwarts!Harry believably evolved into whatever he would have become had he been sorted into Slytherin. There's five books, and I'll tell you as someone who's read the first four and actively reads the fifth: I may have some qualms with this story, but how Slytherin-like Harry is, isn't one of them.

 

The author is writing an AU. He virtually gave us the same story, but with a green robe. That's not AU enough for me. YMMV.

And while everybody keeps saying it gets better, I'll just point out that a whole bunch of people said the same thing about 'Twilight'. Thanks, but no thanks.

 

It has it's weak moments, but I rate 4/5. I like this type of stories.

To author: I have a question. Who is Fleur Delacoeur? Must be an OC. I don't remember such person from canon. Maybe try to describe her more, or, alternatively, check your spelling. It's Delacour. It's not really that hard to remember, right? There is also this nifty little function in MS word:

In all seriousness, it's normal to misspell a word. But this is a name. It should be spelt correctly. Fix it, please.

 

Ah, that's fair. The actual French word for "heart" is spelled with the e, so it's almost automatic for me to type it into Fleur's last name. I thought I had caught all of my accidental extra Es with the search function, but apparently some managed to sneak into the published story. I'll give it another look and see if I can get them corrected.

 

Reading through this series for the first time and I am really enjoying the story so far. Currently on 4th year.

Two Questions about this here thread though.

1- Why is this in the Recycling Bin? It's 4/5 stars.

2- Why is the rest of the series not linked in? Precedent from the rest of the library, while a touch inconsistent, seems to be that sequels just get linked in the initial post.

 

The rating is 3.54, just around recycling bin rating.
Not that I don't think it belongs in the library personally, but DLP disagrees.

 

To expand on my previous post, I thought the fic was adequate years 1-3, and good at the start of book 4. However, things jumped the shark at the First Task. It was so bad that the one scene was enough to completely undermine the entire series, pulling in some of the worst tropes in all of fanfiction and putting them into one sequence of events.

Firstly, and least sinful of all, it was unrealistic, overly dramatic and badly explained. Killing a dragon by igniting their inside is just bullshit. I don't care what explanation the author puts into their story as to how the dragon just so happens to have this particular weakness that Harry just so happened to exploit, if it leads to that end result the author should not have made the world work in that way. It's also an extremely unmagical description of dragons.

Secondly, we have ranty Harry telling off adults, which the adults just take. This is in my top five most hated tropes. Harry is a kid. He doesn't get to lecture adults. If the story was told via the visual medium it would be immediately laughable, and the fact that we might have a tendency to imagine Harry as older should not excuse it. What makes this trope worse is the presence of the biased narrative. Now, normally the narrative being biased is fine, because we're on Harry's side so the bias favours us, but when Harry is so obviously and completely wrong the bias becomes glaring. There's no foil for Harry during his rant, and the author failing to provide a foil comes across as authorial endorsement of what Harry is saying.

The first and second points combine to make the third: artificial conflict. We see this a lot in manipulative Dumbledore stories: the author arranges the worldbuilding and character actions to result in a state of affairs that is unrealistic and borderline absurd (Dumbledore stealing Harry's money, Harry being forced to blow up a dragon). This state of affairs is then used as the basis of a conflict, a conflict that we're supposed to side with Harry during. But we can't, because the conflict is based on an event we can't invest in due to its lack of realism. Dumbledore wouldn't steal Harry's money, our incredulity to the matter prevents us from sharing Harry's righteous anger when he finds out. Instead Harry just looks like a tool. It's the same with Harry blaming Dumbledore for his being forced to kill a dragon.

Fourthly, in addition to Harry going off on a rant, said rant is a very public display of unstable emotion. Harry is, to put it mildly, making a scene. This is just cringe worthy, and against all previous characterisation besides. It's unseemly, immature and attention seeking. He's having a public tantrum you'd expect more from a 6 year old -- I wouldn't be surprised during that scene if he just started wailing loudly and hammering his fists on the ground. It's not something canon Harry would do, never mind Slytherin Harry, who is even more conservative regarding public displays and has an amount of level-headedness that canon Harry lacks.

Despite this scene being so terrible I did, in fact, read on, hoping that the First Task would prove to be an aberration that I could quickly pretend never happened. Alas it was a sign of things to come.

The first three years had been marked by a laudable consistency and conservatism in characterisation. Harry was very much a Slytherin, but of a kind that canon Harry could have become. He was cunning, he did things for good reasons, he was self-restrained and self-aware, he guarded his privacy and worked hard.

Originally I had put this down to the author's talent. However, with how quickly the characterisation jumped ship in fourth year I wonder if the real cause was being tied to canon, and once those shackles were released the author went wild in his new found freedom. I stopped reading just before the Yule Ball when all the Ginny stuff started happening, which was completely random, irrational, unconservative, unrestrained and came completely out of left field. The only thing that could adequately explain it would be a love potion, but even then the author can still be blamed for using a "love potion Ginny" storyline.

I'd give books 1-3 a solid 4/5 for the best canon rehash I've seen, which had the virtue of skimming all those things that were not different.

Book four gets a 2/5.

I'll call that an average of 3/5.

To the author, I hope you will take this post in the spirit in which it is written, which is not anger but rather a desire to analyse and explain why a particular trope or cliché is bad. So many people, when criticising a fic, will say "this is a cliché" and leave it at that, but that doesn't really do anything to help the author. A cliché is not necessarily bad. What I've attempted to do here is to take the analysis a step further and explain my problems with the fic in more objective terms: realism, consistency, creation of genuine conflict, the principle of narrative restraint and moderation in plot decisions, etc. It's inevitable, however, that such an analysis may take on the appearance of an attack. That is not its intent.

 

I must admit the first task scene was a bit off putting. But I just tried to move past it as it was the only thing that had truly made me cringe a bit - that I remember.

 

Isn't that what you've talked about on several occasions? Teenagers acting like teenagers? Acting out, being irrational, spiteful for little to no reason, hormones wrecking havoc and so on?

 

Which is fine when you've established them as acting in that way. What you can't do is have them act sensibly for three years then, without any kind of cause, suddenly have them behave entirely differently.

Essentially it's the difference between teenage rebellion and character transplant.

 

Ah, fair enough. You've read this all in one go, right? I happened to read the 4th one as it was coming out, chapter by chapter, and the previous three ones were at the very least a few months behind. Probably why I missed it or wasn't bothered so much about it. Then again, I didn't really mind it, even though it might have been out of character. To each his own.

I myself have issues with how things progress between them later on, in Harry's 5th year, which is currently ongoing. It bothers me quite a lot, to be honest.

 

Yeah I don't like them getting friendly...

 

It's like nothing ever happened last year. And I absolutely hated that he apologized to her, but she didn't to him. God, I hate that shit.

 

I didn't like the first task either. I also dislike how a giant fuss was made, and then just completely forgotten about later. However, I did think all in all the fourth book was still worth 4/5, so I guess it just didn't bother me as much.
I didn't think the Ginny stuff was done poorly in fourth year, but there relationship later on, as in becoming friends, didn't really make any sense.
The more I look at the story, the more flaws I see, but I still think it is worth 4/5.

 

I also hated the First Task, the Ball, and a few other fourth year scenes and temporarily stopped reading around then. The First Task in particular made me cringe.

I picked it back up to read on a boring plane ride and, like I said in my prior post, I'm glad I did as so far the fifth story doesn't suffer from many of the glaring problems of the fourth. I pretend the First Task scene didn't happen.

Taure, if you ever get desperate and decide to give the series another shot, or for other people who couldn't make it through the first three books, I suggest starting with chapter 31 of the Tri-Wizard tournament. In fact, if the author were writing the series from scratch that would be where I'd recommend starting the series.

And yeah, I didn't like the Ginny stuff either and she presents the clearest danger for inducing future scenes and plots that could cause me to lose interest again. However, as far as fifth year goes, I think it's somewhat understandable.

Spoiler

Voldemort has just returned and Harry's girlfriend and best friend have dropped him like he contracted ebola. He's an outcast and unpopular, something this Harry has never experienced.

Harry knows how influential Ginny is with Hermione and the other Weasleys, pretty much the only significant support he has at Hogwarts aside from Tracey and by extension Theo. It makes sense he'd make an effort to get on her good side again.

Ginny not apologizing isn't cool, but from her point of view what she's doing is working. Harry is friendlier then ever and she's probably enjoying watching him squirm. I just hope her delight in telling Harry that she is going to Hogsmeade with Dean backfires. Instead of getting jealous, I hope Harry loses interest, otherwise I'm not optimistic about where this is going.

 

If only. I dread that this is gonna head in a different direction. Not exactly fully Harry/Ginny but leaning in that direction. The reason why? The following sentence:

The italicized part is what concerns me. Then again, I hope I'm reading too much into things. God, I really do.

 

I thought the implication in the latest chapter was that the next romance would be Harry/Luna, which I'm sort of ambivalent about. I do wish the story had less romance overall though.

 

This is, IMO, the worst problems with anyone in the Golden Trio going to literally any other House. And the most glaring. Because it is, be default, the most persistent.


....and just to be a smartass.

Puberty.

But really, the change should be gradual, and at least feel like it happened over time. It should only feel sudden after timeskips and such where they skip months at a time.

 

EDIT: I realize, in re-reading this, that I probably overused caps here. So, I fixed that.

"Attack its mouth" is a fairly acceptable trope, in terms of defeating giant armored beasts. The other option that is generally accepted: attack its eyes. If Rowling felt that a pink eye jinx was enough to disable a dragon, I think that blowing up its head would also be an acceptable solution. Additionally, blowing up a dragon from its mouth/inside is a fairly old tactical decision--see, e.g., the biblical (apocryphal?) story of Daniel and the Dragon.

I agree with your distaste for Ranty Harry, but disagree with your perception that this scene qualifies. I feel that the weakness of most Ranty stories is that the ranting party is inevitably correct, essentially becoming an author mouthpiece. "Here's a chance to tell the audience that I think a particular character was wrong, and I can do it IN ALL CAPS!" It's inelegant, and a flagrant example of telling rather than showing.

That being said, I work with 12-18 year old children on a daily basis and they frequently lose their tempers and lash out at adults. (If it happens in a home setting, the finale is usually "I HATE YOU," followed by storming off to the teenager's bedroom.) The underlying cause of many of these teenage rants is a desire for agency. They want autonomy, they want to control their own lives, they want to make their own decisions. When they can't, they rage.

In my professional (as opposed to personal) capacity, I say nothing. If I were a parent, it would be a different story, but the context of my employment I simply accept the child's impotent rage. Why? Because I understand the source of the anger. The child can't control their life in the way they want. What they can control is how they express their feelings, so they express them loudly and dramatically.

Harry has the same problems as any teen, plus the fact that people are always trying to kill him, and he is not privy to all the information about his own life. In OoTP Harry loses his temper, lectures Dumbledore, and trashes Dumbledore's office, and I think this scene is the approximate equivalent. He can't do anything to change what has happened, but he can let EVERYBODY KNOW HE IS UNHAPPY ABOUT IT!

I don't think the silence of the judges means that they accept Harry's points as valid--I think it means that they recognize Harry's essential impotence. Nothing Harry says or does will affect his participation in the next task, so they let him rage. What's the alternative? Hit him with a stunner to end the rant?

Finally, when a character is so obviously wrong in his actions there is no need for a direct foil. Take Star Wars, for example. We see Darth Vader choking out a guy in the first five minutes of the film and understand that he is evil, long before we meet Luke Skywalker, his foil. I don't need to see Luke treating droids respectfully before I realize that Vader is a horrible villain.

I think the desire to give agency to teenagers is the root of the Manipulative Dumbledore story. The author feels that depriving Harry of agency is wrong, and anybody who withholds agency (i.e. Dumbledore) must be wrong, as well. To somebody with this perspective, Dumbledore is an agency-withholder, and therefore agency withholding activities (like stealing money) are in-character, from the perspective of that particular author. I think that readers with a bit more perspective realize that there are greater evils in a world than a teenager who doesn't have 100% knowledge and control over his own life, and therefore manipulative Dumbledore stories ring false to our ears.

I think that saying "Harry was forced to blow up a dragon" is a mischaracterization of the story. It's not like Dumbledore was standing off to one side, hands steepled, drumming his fingers together, cackling maniacally while Harry was ordered to blow up a dragon or else Draco would be tortured and killed.

I actually don't think there's any conflict in this scene, at least not between Dumbledore and Harry. Between Harry and the tournament directors, or Harry and the person who submitted his name, is a different story. And while Harry might lump Dumbledore into the first group, I don't think Dumbledore bears Harry any animosity. I actually think that Dumbledore agrees with Harry, a bit--note that Dumbledore was prepared to score Harry a 6 when he thought that Harry had killed a dragon in cold blood, but spun his score upside-down and made it a 9 when he realized that Harry felt sadness and remorse for killing.

Absolutely right. I think he's pretty pathetic in that scene, actually. But it hit all of Harry's weak points all at once--lack of agency, being put in danger, death of his parents, being equated to Voldemort... So he loses control and something out of character.

Again, I work with teenagers. And sometimes teenagers act like six year olds.

Certainly, I appreciate the fact that you've invested so much thought in my story. Any time my work is challenged, I'm forced to consider more closely the reasons my characters are acting the way they do, and the reasons I am putting them in particular situations. Even if we ultimately choose to disagree, and even if I continue on my same course of writing, I'll understand it better because of the challenge. So, thanks for your loyal opposition.