It doesn't seem like that's precisely true though, Dumbledore does seem to have some information on the Hallows that Harry did not if I'm not mistaken

 

If that kind of travesty of justice (it is Wizarding World, so it wouldn't be the first time they deemed someone guilty without a trial) was possible, Umbridge would definitely have done so when she was a headmistress. Both in this fic and in the canon. So yeah, I'd like to think that something called proof would be necessary.

Just because it worked in Harry's favour doesn't mean it's any less nonsensical.

 

There's a slow build to this story where as it gathers momentum it gets easier to look past the flaws at the start, and eventually you're just enjoying the ride. I quite like how the last few chapters have been handled, and a lot of the bashing-lite that characterized the earlier parts of the story has resolved itself into a more three dimensional perspective.

 

Here we go! The endgame is nigh, almost 500 fucking thousand words later the final battle begins. Will this story truly live up to its title, bet's are on now!

That being said the Hermione reveal was pretty obvious. On a positive note, all those pesky horcurxes are goooonnneee. Bit frustrated we haven't seen what uniting all the hallows allow for.. maybe I'm rushing this claim so I will wait and see a bit longer before judgement.

 

What a fucking waste of a chapter. When Harry believed he destroyed that locket in the cave, there was a possibility of a good plot where his stupidity comes to bite him later.

Instead, we have an annoying Hermione, the locket is conveniently found and destroyed just in time. What was the point? There were far easier ways to get rid of Hermione who isn't even really all that important in this story. Harry still blames everyone but himself for every mistake he does. Fleur is still alive and just as annoying.

I hope the fight against Voldemort turns out good.

 

Yeah I'm not sure what that was about, there was an opportunity there to go much further but the author seems to have decided to wrap everything up fast and everything is just getting tied up. Not super happy about it but it could have been worse, guess it depends how the next chapters go.

 

Firstly, infiltrating Gringotts cannot - must not - be this easy. Harry should have known far more about the Thief's Downfall considering he had what amounts to internal intelligence, and should not have been able to escape at all after that colossal fuck-up. Neither should he have gone ahead with that "plan" in the first place.

Secondly, I would rag on the author about how he wasted a perfectly good plot point he had spent months foreshadowing with Slytherin's jewellery; but I actually think he wrote that one into a literary dead-end 30 chapters ago and realised this way too late. What even happens when Harry kills Voldemort without destroying all the horcruces, do we wait 10 more years and have Harry's one-eighth Veela offspring go through a canon rehash? Because that's all I can see here. Furthermore, this was already heading towards the end and Harry quit Hogwarts right after he destroyed the fake horcrux - and hadn't had anything to do with the Order for a long time -, Harry would not have seen Hermione again before the climactic battle unless the author shoehorned in a confrontation... which is exactly what he did.

Basically, having Harry destroy the fake locket without checking it is a perfect twist... That simply could not be executed in any meaningful way within the confines of this story.

Anyway. This is my review concerning chapter 96 and only chapter 96: It was fantastically done. The overall writing has been a level above his other work with great (if ever-so-slightly clichéd) imagery to boot. The parallels between Harry's duel with Draco and Harry and Voldemort's duel at the end of GoF, while definitely not subtle, were done right. The author also did something he'd never done since the beginning; he humbled Harry. Perhaps even humiliated him. He had been arrogantly jumping to conclusions and being a Mary Sue for the last 50 chapters; and for once he got what was coming to him. Dumbledore turned out to be entirely in character, and in the end his forgiveness was heart-warming. Overall:

This chapter gets 5/5 from me. I read it about 6 times.

In fact, no matter how many gripes I have with this story; I am bumping my rating of it up to 4/5. Just because of chapter 96.

PS: I did read some people say how the way Harry killed Dumbledore did not make sense. I disagree with that on the basis that this only worked because Dumbledore was heavily incapacitated by the potion. Remember, this is the same potion that made Dumbledore vulnerable to Draco Malfoy's Expelliarmus in canon. How did Harry know? Felix Felicis™ - it's an Archangelus Ex Machina!

In that it's a DeM made believable by the constraints applied to it and by having a failure clause.

 

Sure it could. Voldemort comes back the next day and kills Fleur, and Harry realizes his idiocy. Or, the locket wasn't the fake Horcrux, and Harry ended up destroying the real one in the cave. At least it would be better than the useless plot point that the author created.

 

If Voldemort could come back the day after he was turned wraith, he would have come back in November 1st 1981 and not June 21st 1994. You could argue he would have made plans to make sure that didn't happen again, and I could argue that if he could have, he would have before the 1st time. Perhaps he did in fact have a plan and that's why he went to Albania (he didn't make his first horcrux there, so why exactly would Voldemort's soul ever be torn across an entire continent unless he intended it to?), but I would assume the same reason he didn't get resurrected immediately the first time would apply. And the stone is destroyed, wouldn't he need another fresh batch of blood from Harry?

If Harry ended up destroying the real one, the author (hopefully) wouldn't have left it up to our imagination and have Harry check it for one second. Otherwise we would be yelling at him for creating useless doubt. We would still get a useless plot point, just an unintentional one.



People, please don't ever make me defend DarknessEnthroned again.

 

The reason he didn't get resurrected the first time was likely because of several factors such as him not having thought the possibility of his death, his followers not trying to resurrect him and him not having a readily available method for resurrection. I doubt it had anything to do with the absence of Harry's blood. He tried to come back using the philosophers stone before he tried the blood. If it was just about Harry's blood, that's what he would have gone for in the first place. So it is very likely that he gave the matter far more thought after his first death and also after his return.

Also, he needs the blood of an enemy. I'm sure he has far more enemies than just Harry. The point of using Harry's blood was to deal with the protection Harry got from his mother's death.

Sure, the author could have had him check to make sure the Horcrux was real. He didn't, thus creating a possible interesting plot. And just four chapters later he decided not to use it? That doesn't seem likely. I think it's more likely he just wanted to use it as he has now, which makes it a shitty plot.

 

1. If Voldemort didn't think death was a possibility, why would he make 6 horcruces? I imagine that, originally; Voldemort had a plan and ran back to a headquarters in Albania, only to find it deserted. His followers had not been expecting the Dark Mark to fade, so either went to the Longbottoms or started plotting out how to evade incarceration. Either this, or Voldemort simply did not tell them. Are horcruces common knowledge? After his original demise though? I'm uncertain. What I'm not uncertain of is that it would not be as easy as you make it sound. The 10 years part was just a minor jab, but it would take anywhere from weeks to months and make its own story that should be contained in its own universe because it's an entirely anticlimactic and deeply unsatisfying plot point. Especially because we would have seen it coming from a mile away. No, the supposed "cadmean" aspect doesn't justify it either.

2. Point, though I maintain that it would take prep work that would take considerable time. The author explicitly stated that for this story, the ritual is the only way Voldemort could come back aside from the stone. Source: CH96.

3. I completely agree; the author created a plot point that fizzled 4 chapters later and could have been extraordinary, and it made for a shitty subplot. My original review of this story was a shitload of text about how the author appears to stumble on some really interesting plot devices and then just wastes them completely. I'm not arguing that this is actually fine, I'm just saying the author might not have realized how there would be no way to make this work. They might have, maybe they did intend to pull this crap. However, whether they intended to waste it like this or not; I don't think it possible to make this twist work within this story in any way that would be enjoyable to read.

 

I'm not denying 1 and 2, you know. When I said the next day, I meant in the sense that it wouldn't take years or decades for it to happen. The author could easily skip to a point of time few months ahead with maybe a chapter in between and get to a newly resurrected Voldemort. My gripe is more about point 3, where the author just fucked it up. It'd have been better if he hadn't introduced that plot at all.

 

I'm just displeased with the pacing ramp of the last chapter, and the locket was a big part of that. It's just dissapointing more than anything, I mean with how conviniently it was dealt with it pretty much serves no purposes other than to close Hermione's chapter because it may as well have been destroyed in the cave for all the difference it made. I'm not sure I'm pleased with Hermione's end either.

 

I'm not, because wearing that thing for such a long time and not noticing anything creepy about it is simply not Hermione. Especially when you think about Neville's initial reaction to it.
The Locket also wasn't extraordinarily subtle in the books - they knew very fast that it didn't have a good influence on them.

 

They knew it very fast because the other 2 people were there to observe how the wielder acts differently under its influence. Harry (I think it was?) did not notice how much it was affecting him until the other two realized it and made him take it off.

You COULD, I would argue, make that into a believable story and posit that the few people around her thought she was cracking due to the war. I think that's what the author intended, actually. However, for that to work; you would need to have your main character actually interact with Hermione instead of just eavesdropping, you would have to tie it into Hermione's gradual character development instead of an instant face-heel turn and, most importantly, make it extremely subtle. How many people just in this thread foresaw Hermione having the locket?

Actually, now that I think a little more about it... That would be a balancing act. If you made it too subtle to the point where revealing "but it was all because of the locket" would undermine the character... Huh. Might work from Hermione's pov?

 

I agree with Hakairyu that if you did it like he suggested it might work well. However I don't think it was very well done in A Cadmean Victory and I am honestly disappointed in Hermione's demise. I don't buy that she spent an entire year with it without noticing the influence it had on her.

 

Hermione had few friends. Her friendship with Harry was destroyed, Ron lost his father and we can´t realy say that Neville and Hermione were close friends.
There wasn´t anyone to notice the changes and we can´t forget that Victor died in strange circumstances were Harry was envolved.

Everytime we had a murder in Hogwarts we also had a chapter showing Hermione more tired.

No one noticed a first year girl leaving her dorm to open the Chamber of secrets so I can´t realy see why it is so far-fetched that a lonely girl being know to spend a lot of time studing alone had a change of heart.

 

Neither can I, hence why I said "it COULD work". However, if Harry isn't there for at least us the readers to see it... Then why the fuck would you include it in your story in this way? A subplot is not excused for being logical, it must also be satisfying and it is entirely within the author's powers -not necessarily their talent or lack thereof- to make it so. Doubly true for fanfiction where we already know the world and how its elements can be -and so far have been by other authors- twisted to make a new story. I can imagine a Hermione-locket subplot where Voldemort isn't two inches from victory working its way in the background with a wonderful climax to boot, or as I said a story that revolves entirely around that. The way the author did it wasn't implausible, it was just written badly.

Every single criticism I have of this author comes back to this: They come up with great subplots that have so much potential, some of them entirely original, and then they completely and horrendously waste it executing it in the worst way possible.

 

The Locket could have been done better. After Harry beats Voldemort he could find out any number of ways that Voldemort is not dead; the most obvious being the ring. After that Harry can find the Horcrux later then chase down Voldemort's spirit and finally banish him before he can get another body. There's other ways to do it, but the author took a lazy path instead of making it an interesting plot point.

 

Actually based on what we know of the ring in this story I think it would show Voldemort whether he was really dead or not.

EDIT: See it's chapters like this (101) that make me glad this story has a very fast update rate. I hate cliffhangers.