I agree with everything elvin said and would also ad that while Harry is naturally skilled as a flyer he also had a world class broom as a 13 year old, that's a huge advantage, furthermore it's not too much of a stretch to think that Fred and George are A). close to being world class beaters. B). being "body builders." Or at least body builders compared to Harry.

To answer A) I think they were described as great beaters in canon who were great before Puddlemore. Not to mention they've been training every day for a few years, not to mention they spent every summer playing, while Harry only had quidditch practices. B) They're professional athletes who spend they're days smacking a very heavy ball using a very heavy bat.

 

This fic is interesting.

It has a barely-there plot, and while Harry appears to be the kind of person that would fuck anything that walks, I'm fairly certain that every teenage boy is that way. But what draws me in is the Quidditch. It's like the author has a real grasp of the sport, and somehow manages to mesh it with what we know of regular sports.

Horse-collaring showing up in the fic as one of Minion's mentioned extra rules is, while not supported by canon, certainly a valid rule to make. It's dangerous as hell when on the football field where the fastest players run around a 4.1 second 40, how dangerous do you think it's going to be on brooms that probably go faster than 100 mph? You could, theoretically, kill someone quite easily.

Further, some of the arbitrary rules Minion brings up may or may not be the rules imposed by Hogwarts, I'm not entirely sure of how much of the story he read.

One of the defining elements for the fic, and in my opinion is one of the things that strengthens it, is that playing at Hogwarts is much different from playing professionally. It's another comparison the author makes to real-life sports, which lead me to make a comparison between playing soccer for your high school team and then trying to play for a nationally recognized club. World of difference.

 

From my (admittedly somewhat brief) conversations with the author, he definitely seems to have something in mind in regards to the plot. I think we saw the real start of this plot with the fake snitch thing. I think he knows what he is doing well enough in that regard.

I enjoyed this chapter quite a bit. The quidditch match was good and the fake snitch was interesting (if perhaps somewhat poorly executed with the explanation, though we'll have to wait and see how that develops). Really looking forward to where he goes with it from here, particularly in regards to the consequences and reaction to the snitch/British loss.

 

Updated.

/Filler

 

Motherfucking update.

 

I liked the newest update - they were playing against Chudley, so nothing surprising really happened but despite the completely one sided scoreline I still managed to stay interested throughout. The author writes quidditch really well in my opinion, which is obviously important for the type of story he's writing.

Now if only he'd update a little faster. I completely forgot that Sirius was still alive in this story, also who that woman he kissed at the end was. I should probably read it again I suppose.

 

I love Quidditch stories and I've always been disappointed in stories that were based around it, but this is the Quidditch story that I've grown to love.
It's bloody awesome.
5.

 

Updated again.

Spoiler

Daphne's back

 

The more I read this, the more it grew on me. The early descriptions of broken bones and horribly injuries that Harry keeps playing through seem somewhat ridiculous, (broken ribs and punching someone with your broken hand in a school match lolwat) but it gets less egregious the farther through the story you get.

The characters are interesting, and it's a very different Harry than we might be used to, but it fits with the story and I don't have a whole lot of problems with it.

4/5 for being enjoyable with a few flaws.

 

It's a decent fic to pass the time. One of the minor problems I have with it is its very slow pacing. For a fic mainly focused on quidditch being 100k words in and we are only now just getting to Harry's first match is a bit much. However all the groundwork has been laid now, the quidditch has started so lets hope that side of the story progresses a lot faster now.

Good to see the latest chapter also progresses Harry and Daphne's relationship even further. I quite like the way the author has written this pairing, a somewhat believable build up to a decent relationship.

Overall a decent fic, the author just needs to speed things up a bit they ever want to get anywhere in their fic. 4/5.

 

Updated.

filler

 

Updated!

It happened.

 

Updated. More Quidditch and Daphne goodness.

 

Its not quite my style, but its very well written. 3.5/5 so far.

 

I've read the first few chapters and honestly this is getting hard to push myself through. It is an AU fic, but from what we know in canon, Harry wouldn't be a normal prospect. He was the youngest seeker in over a century at Hogwarts and he only ever didn't catch the snitch due to dementors attacking the field. With no training on a broom at all, he managed to catch the remembrall coming out of a fifty foot dive which according to McGonagall was something Charlie Weasley couldn't do. That's particularly important because later on we find out from Wood's comment that Charlie would have been able to easily go pro.

Now, there is an argument to be made that this is AU and as such he might not be as good in this fic as in canon, but if you look at the first chapter in his match at Hogwarts he pulls off a move that not many people know how to do and even quite a few of the ones that do won't even try it because of how high risk it is.

This is kind of important because there is no way any sports team would ever approach a top prospect like this. The attitude I saw in the second chapter would be more of what you would expect towards someone who just barely got an invite to be on a team not someone who got invites from multiple teams and is essentially a natural. Harry is famous outside of quidditch too which would probably make them even more accommodating to him.

By the time you hit chapter three, you start noticing some serious inconsistencies in Harry's quidditch abilities. At one moment, he is copying something he saw while flying at high speeds that he has never done before and the next you see him thinking about how little he knows about flying after flying next to a professional. Yet earlier he knew something obscure that very few people know how to do much less use.

I'm also not entirely sure why they have to bring up how athletic he is so much. In the first book, Wood even says he has the perfect build for a seeker commenting on the fact that he is light and speedy. It's not like he is playing a position like beater where you need the muscle mass.

All of the sports stuff aside, I agree with quite a few of the other posts about Harry's characterization. I don't like it either, and while the writing is solid, I just can't get into this, and I really wanted to like this before I started reading it. I just can't get passed the 3rd chapter. 2/5

 

You raise an interesting point I hadn't considered there. Does anyone think there's any chance that the club officials are treating Harry like this deliberately in order to keep him grounded and avoid turning him into a spoiled athlete?

 

Teams don't worry about them potentially being spoiled. If anything they want them to feel that way so they will either choose that team or stay with that team once their initial contract is up. If you aren't a top prospect then nobody cares. You are just a number they can easily replace. They will kick you off the team real quick for a mistake that wouldn't even get a top prospect reprimanded.

As far as I can tell in this story, Harry should be a top prospect, but instead of letting Harry be the prodigy that he is, the author has inconsistent characterization to manufacture conflict. Canon Harry would probably be a starter in his first season of going pro. There aren't that many schools of magic, and Hogwarts is one of the biggest in Europe. Harry went from never flying before his first year and not even knowing anything about quidditch to being the starting seeker for Gryffindor and winning every game in his first year. That means he was better than people who have been flying for at least seven years and maybe more if they come from a magical family and he had almost no training in how to fly much less quidditch.

It seems like instead of creating conflict in professional games the author is wasting time bashing us over the head with the differences between being a pro and being at Hogwarts. I forgot to mention it in my initial review, but if you already have one of the best seekers in the league, you aren't trying to recruit a top prospect for seeker. That's not how professional teams work. You are trying to recruit a top prospect in an area that your team is weak in not wasting money on a position you already have covered.

Also, Ackerley being one of the best seekers in the league, having the quickest catch of last year, and being a good looking poster boy for the team is ridiculous. He is also mentioned as being bigger built than Harry which is not actually good for being seeker. It's just another over the top ridiculous quality to add to his characterization to say look how talented and good looking he is. See how much better he is than Harry? It feels like the author is beating us over the head with it to create cheap conflict.

 

I think the small magical population is actually the biggest problem. The process that Harry is going through really doesn't seem all that ridiculous to me if you ignore that. Anyone who has played competitive sports will tell you that there's always a road block as you progress in skill. If you're the best player in high school you still struggle to start with in college. When you're the best in college you still struggle at the professional level.

Where it does fall apart is the magical population, as you mentioned. Hogwarts has 4 seekers at any given time, and they don't all graduate every year. Who knows how many magical schools there are, but there can't be that big of a talent pool for each position. And, on top of that, we have clearly seen that Harry is quite a bit more talented than the Hogwarts players at least which you would have to figure puts him at a decent level to enter the pros.

All that being said, I'm fine using a bit of suspension of disbelief. I don't think it's that large a stretch to imagine that Harry has a long way to go to live up to his potential as a seeker. He's leaving school as a 17 year old kid who's never really done much to bulk up. I think soccer is a fair comparison here, I know that in high school (which is there age) the best players can be skinny kids who just have insane natural talent. But when you bump that up to the next level (be it pro or even college) you had damn well better start lifting so you don't get knocked around.

Lastly, I'll have to disagree with your statement about teams not drafting positions they're already set at. From what I can recall, they have a solid team already with every position in good shape. Maybe they could use another chaser, but they certainly aren't terrible there (come to think of it, why don't they have better odds on winning?). Teams will often draft an heir apparent, or just the best player available. If they thought Harry had a ton of talent and was being overlooked or could be valuable later on I don't think it's a big stretch that they'd draft him. It could provide leverage in contract negotiations with Ackerly, or a very solid bargaining chip with another team in a year or so. You don't see it as much in American Football anymore, but a few years ago it was a very common strategy to draft your next QB and sit him for a couple years to allow him to learn the ropes.

 

The main problem with your statement is essentially Krum. He wasn't even a 7th year in school yet and he was playing in the finals for the World Cup. That means he was at least 16 when he went pro though most likely it was younger than that and was one of the best if not the best seeker in the world by the time he was almost 17 or shortly after his 17th birthday.

You can make assumptions about him needing to lift weights, but I just don't think it holds for his position especially if someone who is 15 or 16 years old can make it as a pro. More than that though it's the way they describe the size difference. Wood was described in canon as obsessed with quidditch and insanely competitive. I'm pretty sure he would have had the whole team lifting if that would have given him an edge, and you can't say someone that obsessed and who wanted to go pro wouldn't know about that part of quidditch. I mean given his knowledge of the sport it would be silly for him to even point out the fact that Harry was built for being a seeker if having size was that important.