Title: I'm Still Here
Author: kathryn518
Rating: M
Genre: Drama/Romance
DLP Category: The Alternates
Pairing: Harry/Multi
Chapters: 12
Words: 251,149
Updated: Sep 6, 2015
Published: Sep 21, 2013
Status: WIP


Summary: The second war with Voldemort never really ended, and there were no winners, certainly not Harry Potter who has lost everything. What will Harry do when a ritual from Voldemort sends him to another world? How will he manage in this new world in which he never existed, especially as he sees familiar events unfolding? Harry/Multi eventually.

Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9704180/1/I-m-Still-Here

I personally really liked this fan-fiction. The writing is fluid and there are no noticeable grammar errors. The author likes writing long chapters (200k words in 11 chapters) so she updates every couple of months. Some people, however, may consider her attention to small details a drawback.

Due to the war, Harry has a very different personality then that seen in canon. Although, unlike canon Harry blames himself for his friends injuries/deaths. In the story, Harry can be a bit angry and antsy. The part that really strikes me, is the character development and the types of relationships Harry builds with other characters.

Overall 4.5/5 which is rounded down to four stars.


Checked by Minion, October 3, 2015

 

Cliche but readable. It's in the almost recommended thread, which is probably where it belongs. 3/5.

 

Honestly the first 4 or so chapters aren't bad but it really jumps the fucking shark in chapter 5. He has 2 animagus forms, one is a phoenix, a special powerful wand made from basilisk fang and is immortal. He's now going by the name "Ares" and is the flamels heir. Furthermore everyone seems to use magical oaths like they're going out of style.

I'd give it a 2/5 so far.

 

I've read the whole thing, and I definitely enjoyed parts of it. It does a few things that appeal to my personal tastes. I've always been a fan of stories where, for whatever reason, Harry conceals his power but also makes a few dramatic magical gestures (fighting off Death Eaters, usually) without revealing his identity.

This leads to a type of scene/dynamic that I love, which is where the audience knows more than the characters, who are scrambling around like chickens with their heads cut off saying, "Who is this mysterious badass?" This kind of scene can be done rather badly, usually including discussion of power levels and magical cores. In this one, I think it comes off fairly well.

That's not to say the fic doesn't have its share of cliches - it certainly does.

My biggest gripe with this fic is that it's badly in need of an editor. The author has a very "more is more" mindset, what with the 30K chapters and Harry's Sorting taking up what feels like at least 5,000 words. Brevity and conciseness is not this fic's strong point.

It's a great fic if you're really in the mood for a few specific plot points (Harry/Multi, time travel, hidden Harry) and are willing to overlook some hit-you-over-the-head cliches. The writing isn't bad, though it's very workmanlike and swerves into Purple Prose territory at times.

It is what it is. Read a few of the author's notes, and you'll get a sense of the tone. To me it seems like a story that was written very much because the author(s?) wanted to see a few specific plot points, not because the story was itself that compelling. I'd read it for the same reasons.

 

Hmm... I'm not sure.

This fic feels ever so slightly different to the one that I know and is a guilty pleasure of mine... if it is that fic, I'd give it a 3/5 or so, but chapter 4 feels different, and it reads as if it was mostly the other fic, with a few of the author's changes in it. I'm trying to find the fic I'm referring to right now, because if this is plagiarized, I don't think any of us would stand for it.

EDIT: I am wrong, and it is not plagiarized. I found it in my email alerts by the same author, and if I was to hazard a guess, she's reworked a chapter or two just enough that I wasn't sure if it was her.

Anyway, fairly good technical writing and long updates do make up for some of the overpoweredness of Harry. It's a decent guilty pleasure fic, not much more than that. So yeah, 3.5/5 for me, leaning towards 3/5.

 

IMHO it's the best currently "active" long and high quality story at the moment even with a few tropes and some inconsistency issues with Harry. It shows that certain tropes/cliches are only bad if the writer throws them into your face because they don't know what they are doing.

The characters are interesting, quirky and the plot feels fresh, well constructed and not really predictable. Somebody who can write a Draco as a supportive/main character I have no problem reading about does something right. If you haven't read the story yet and Draco is a warning sign *don't* be afraid. He's still Draco but matured with some touch of Ron and some really smart situational comedy/interaction.

This story is more than its parts. I truly enjoy reading this not just once.

P.S. This is far beyond the quality of what I would call guilty pleasure.

 

If this is edited version, I don't want to see the original. The author seems to be under impression that copying and pasting several paragraphs and then rephrasing them is a good way of fixing the word count. It isn't, it's bothersome to read when you have to scroll through repeated information (tell, tell, tell, tell, tell - 5 times - don't show).

After a general edit, removing about half of it, mostly the perspectives of unimportant people, especially where there's no new information it might be library-worthy. I mean, it's not terrible, but Harry is such a whiny bitch and his capabilities are totally out of sync with his description (he's supposed to have killed more witches and wizards than Voldemort in his world, plus thousands of demons, yet he's having trouble against a few drunk, out-of-shape Death Eaters, or just one later on).

Oh, there are also scene breaks in the middle of the scene. Several times. Weird as fuck.

2.5/5 rounded up to 3.

 

Like Ferdiad, I got to the fifth chapter and thought the entire thing was going to hell. Nevertheless--as it stands now--I'm more inclined to consider the consistent cliches as a protracted and subtle parody of typical fanfiction, as the author(s) taking the standard super!Harry fic in all of its ridiculousness and twisting it into a real, character-driven story (how many of the most ridiculous cliches have really mattered so far?). Of course, I'm not at all sure that's what the author had in mind, and there's certainly still room for the story to take a nosedive in this regard. Pending such a nosedive, however, I'm inclined to think the overall writing and character quality edge this into library territory.

I give a 3.5, but round to 4 given the increasing quality of the later chapters.

 

Great Fic! I like the different viewpoints, and the details. I like the take on Slytherin's dorms, the changes in this world, and the slow build of the story. And it's got one of the few likeable and well-explained Dracos, good action scenes, and epic magic.

There's not that much "Superharry" there, after all he got tagged and almost died fighting mostly the same idiots who had trouble beating 6 kids in the ministry while outnumbering them 2-1. I'd simply consider this Harry as what a mature Harry should look like after fighting Voldemort for a decade or two. So 5/5.

 

This fic is the equivalent of a bunch of cats pretending to be Swimdraconian writing Circular Reasoning, weekend at bernie's style.

And they aren't doing a very good job.

--------------

For those of you hoping for this to improve, the beta/collaborator for this story is fucking Plums, and the final lines of chapter 11 seem to indicate that this Harry, despite being 23, is just as blushing and virginal as all the other iterations of Harry written by Plums. Not to mention the horrible way in which Harry's age seems to be completed forgotten about and the idea of statutory rape seems to be completely lost on the author and subsequently Harry himself. Which again begs to question why I'm not just reading Circular Reasoning instead, considering it takes this actual problem and doesn't handwave it for the sake of a wish fulfilling harem.

Also, Ares.

Why not Harry? There is literally no reason for him to be called Ares considering Harry Potter doesn't exist in this universe and it'd even be easier for the few people who know who he is to just call him a familiar name instead of a bullshit alias.

2/5

 

All I can say about it, that it is long winded. Very long winded. Soooo much tell.... Also the cliché pile is very annoying, otherwise the basic concept of afterwar!accidentalimmortal!Harry is sound to me.

3/5

 

Never before has so little been said with so many words.

Incredibly droning and long-winded writing aside Harry shows no consistency at all, in the prologue he's built up as veritable asskicker who singlehandedly whittled down Voldemort's army to nothing. All of that disappears when he does the mirror jump and all of a sudden can't do shit and is so busy narrating what he does that he constantly gets injured in stupid ways.

Oh, and that constant bitching and whining he does really grates on your nerves, fortunately it seems to pick up a bit in the later chapters but this will never move beyond guilty pleasure at best unless a full rewrite is done.

 

About the injury as far as I understood it's caused by timing(old body with a bad knee vs new young healthy body) and the surprise about his magic which seems to be fueled by the connection to his sister. It's not really well developed in that scene but is more or less implied in the next chapters.

The bitching/whining is probably the way to show how damaged he is from his past experience which Perenelle argues with him. It might not be really working or the problem is that as a reader we don't enjoy that as it doesn't fit with our own impression of the character. But I can't really fault the story for that. How would you do it otherwise? A completely depressed Harry would be far worse.

What I see though is a really great Draco character with a hook which make sense. The Flamels are interesting. The phoenix cliche isn't just a "cool" gimmick but make sense with the story background. Regulus seems to be interesting with some conflict potential. The small things we've seen from Sirius/James/Bones felt real and not just cookie cutter. The plot isn't predictable. I also fear the Plums/Harem/Romance foreshadowing but until now that's not really the driving element.

 

It is clearly explained in the story that "Harry" is a dumb name for a pureblood in that universe, so in order to keep his cover he needs another name.

 

Almost the definition of readable-but-not-great guilty pleasure.

If you just want a light read with a Harry that is stupidly powerful and aren't overly concerned about literary quality, this is a good bet.

Personally I kind of like this sort of thing given everything that's going on in RL with me - it doesn't take itself too seriously while not actually being humor, per se.

 

Just because they gave a reason for it doesn't make it not stupid.

 

Well, if you look at canon names, it kinda makes sense.

 

Ares isn't a part of some tradition for the Flamels like constellations and stars are for the Blacks, and for fucks sake it isn't even french. Most of the other purebloods also follow Ancient Roman nomenclature, and Ares is a greek god. There is literally no reason for it be to Ares, and Harry would be better for so many out of story reasons (and it's also at least french, and the pureblood tradition is a moot point anyway because Harry admits he's adopted) that it shouldn't have even been a question.

Though I admit I straight up skipped the entire segment with the Flamel+Harry dialogue after he woke up there because I knew I wouldn't survive it.

 

If you aren't going to read the full story, why bother commenting when things dont make sense? Quite a few plot holes are tied up in Harry-Flamel conversations, ignoring them is silly.

 

This fic updated a few days ago. I'm sure it was mentioned here before, the author also writes "I still haven't found what I'm looking for".

Well, the chapter-length is crazy (35 000 words?!?), and the story is incredibly (annoyingly) slow-paced. The author uses quite many clichés (Manipulative!Dumbledore, Harry/Multi etc.), but I'm still following it anyway.
It's a guilty pleasure, and everyone who likes dimension travel fics might give this a try...