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Yeah, I kinda feel the 'Image of God' spell is ridiculously problematic from any narrative perspective... A remake reality spell that requires potentially lethal sacrifices? I know they expounded on the problems of such a spell within the story but really? Barely anyone remembers such a ridiculously overpowered spell?

 

The author has shown a tendency to overpower some spells and still didn't do anything against that (Obliviate, Confundus...)

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However, I thought the explanation that everyone suspected of knowing how to do it is being killed immediately to be quite sufficient.
Apart from that, the sacrifices seem to be horrendous, especially if you additionally take into account what Dobby said about this dangerous "wild".

 

I liked this one quite a bit. The cliched start was a bit of a turn off majorly because I didn't expect the author to do a good job explaining the tropes.
The characters are likeable enough. The only one that sticks out like a sore thumb is James's; he seems to be acting very unreasonably IMO. Even his slytherin bias seems a bit weirdly written even after taking into account the prophecy.

4/5

 

I actually do think the author tries to "fix JKR" occasionally. But he doesn't state "it should have been like this", instead he only says "I would have liked it better if it was like this".
And in my book that's a completely understandable thing to do in one's own fanfiction.

The new chapter was interesting as usual and its title seems to point towards quite a close conclusion (as are the dates).

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Although I think these computer-style diary thoughts in Ron's mind were a slightly misplaced joke. Ruined the scene a bit.

Apart from that, I definitely did not see the newest reveal coming.
Additionally, the author manages to write very well tension-wise (at least in the last updates) - the chapters usually start off with the less interesting scenes and proceed to have a very exciting/interesting conclusion/cliffhanger.

 

I'm not going to lie... I find many of the things happening in this story fascinating and original yet the smallest of things just seem to completely blow my immersion at times. As aforementioned above, the ludicrous sentence phrasing in regards to the Tom/Ron mind mirror scene was horrifying (that is, horrifyingly bad). He even mentions in the A/N about trying to make it terrifying but the tone of the words used to convey what was happening I felt was at stark contrast to essentially the description of legilimency and occlumency throughout the rest of the book. The words were far too technical and seemed like some sort of computer analyzing Ron's brain for inconsistencies to target and deal with. Yuck!

 

Thoroughly meh. You claim that the fic has a novel take on these various cliches, but in the end it appears that all of the cliches present are used just as poorly as they always have been. The wrong boy who lived cliche, and the bad potter family cliche, and the slytherin harry cliche, and the meddling old coot dumbledore cliche, and the... It just keeps going on! Rather than a interesting way to breathe new life into these tropes, this fic reads more as a compilation of all of the overdone cliches with this sort of story all in one place.

Not impressed. 2/5, tops.

 

And how much of it did you read?

Let me guess: Not more than at best 30 chapters. Because especially "wrong boy who lived cliche" and "meddling old coot dumbledore cliche" are simply not there or applied completely differently if you really mean this fic. By the way, what is "slytherin harry cliche" even supposed to BE?
Seriously, it starts to get annoying that everyone has to spill his bullshit in here without reading the fucking whole thing.

 

But you can't deny that this thing starts off pretty shit. The fact that the author redeems the story doesn't change the fact that the beginning chunk was pretty painful. I'm with you on this; the way that the author took the cliches and made something interesting from them is praiseworthy, despite the occasional flaw in execution. But the author would have been better served putting more hooks into the reader earlier to get them past the start.

 

Well seeing as the first 30 chapters are easily the length of an average novel the fact that their quality is average at best is extremely pertinent. I personally think it just took the author a while to hit their stride, and when they do there's some great fanfiction. However the fact of the matter is that the first part of this story isn't very good.

Rated as a whole I'd give this a 3/5 with the first part being a 2 and ~ch30 being a 4 and the latest updates edging a 5. However I really believe that the second half of this belongs in the library so I'll give it a 4/5 overall. I'd say just skip the first half but unfortunately it's kind of necessary to the secend half.

 

Definitely. But I think he made fairly clear that he read at least part of Narf's post - and the main point of that post was to make people realize: "The story starts out clichéd, but the clichés are explained or carried out in a very interesting way. You will find that out if you read the whole fic."
So, to come after that novel-length post and say "but there are clichés and you said it would be interesting" - despite obviously not reading the whole story - is quite ridiculous.

On another matter: The author changed this strange "computer-diary"-thing and the scene indeed is far better now.

I liked most part of the new chapter.

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As I really love Dumbledore in general, I'm obviously not ok with him being petrified, but that's completely subjective and has nothing to do with the author doing something wrong.
What I definitely disliked was this info-dumpy part about Ron. It was informative, yes, but it's bad style to convey information like that.

 

Lol I'm sorry but just because Narf wrote an essay on it doesn't mean his decision to simply overlook everything has to be applied by everyone. The story has a hell of a lot of flaws that you simply need to ignore completely in order to rate it that highly, and that's on top of the fact that you're asked to soldier through 30 chapters of garbage too.

In what way is the wrong boy who lived cliche not there? The story ticks every conceivable box for it. Meddling Dumbledore isn't there, but most of the components for it have simply been shifted to James. As for Slytherin Harry I assume he just meant the stereotypical indie fic where Harry gets sorted into Slytherin and suddenly gains the houses backing with no real sponsorship, speaks Parseltongue to get access to some previously unheard of position of power and learns a bunch of magics that canon Harry never even heard of or had access to all while in his first year of magic. It's not really a Slytherin cliche, but there aren't a lot of Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff stories and the general fanon approach is that Slytherin = all those things while Gryffindor Harry usually develops slower.

The big redeeming factor for the story, as almost everyone has already noted is the richness of the subplots and the fact that so many characters have relevance and depth, but ultimately that still hinges on the author tying them all together in a truly spectacular way or half of them are going to be just irrelevant wastes of words. Given that the explanation for abandoning Harry on a doorstep, never visiting him, attempting to disinherit him and having everyone including good!Dumbledore ignore it or even go along with it ended up being just a vague ancient prophecy which wasn't even hinted at before it's reveal, and that only even Dumbledore needed to know in order to not try help Harry makes me doubt whether that will be delivered on.

Honestly the best part of this story should be the character studies we get to do in seeing them react to all these new pieces of information as they get revealed. Unfortunately it turns out that James is willing to literally 180 on the son he raised and doted on at the drop of a hat, Lily is a sociopath that decides to murder Vernon despite the fact that she's still seemingly rather uninterested in supporting Harry. Dumbledore is at the very least an extreme downgrade from his canon self given how late he was going to be in offering any assistance to Harry, and even then just hearing the prophecy makes him go back to ignoring him altogether. I don't think I even need to go into Jim, although no doubt that will eventually get explained away by the magic invisible bugs, and Harry himself is extremely wishy-washy in his response to the Potter's, despite recognizing how grossly he was (and continues to be) mistreated by them.

Basically every character that matters in the story is contrived in the extreme to suit whichever plot they need to at the given moment, even Neville and Hermione have suddenly decided to be on Team Jim because the caricature they're painted as here is of having extreme moral standards and therefore they must suddenly put aside their differences and actively attempt to help him when he needs it. In the end I think the only believable and really interesting character left is Pettigrew, because at least his motivations and actions toward them have remained consistently in line for the entirety of the story.

I'm still reading, but only because I'm so far invested already. Yes originality is great, but I'm fairly sure the majority of it here is not because of some grand plan the author is slowly weaving together, but rather just to stroke his own ego by adding literally anything he can think of to the mix and butchering characters when necessary to make it fit. Thinking back, the summary was a great indication of that: no real hint of any long term plot, but just the simple promise that the guy would throw in a bunch of everything and make it work because he's awesome.

Hopefully I'm eventually proven wrong and he pulls something truly magnificent out of all this, but if it's all going to boil down to some random bugs that only Luna can see as a catch-all reason for all this and after some struggle to reveal it Harry can go play happy family with the Potter's then that won't really be satisfying to me.

 

I didn't say that. I have absolutely no problem with someone reading the first chapter and deciding "ugh, hell, no!"
What irks me here is that he obviously read Narf's post, then read a few chapters and then proceeded to say "but there are clichés" when one of Narf's main points was to clearly state that the first chapters really don't do the rest justice.
You can criticize the story for a lots and lotsof things, especially its beginning, but also more recent chapters. But you can't go, read 20 or so chapters and then say "oh, Narf was wrong, there were clichés we all know".
It's like someone said: "Climb to the highest point of the mountain, the view will be great" and then you just climb to the middle platform and complain to everyone that you couldn't see a thing because there were trees in the way.

I don't think so anymore. Jim has proved to be a better duelist and actually be a three-dimensional character which is something you can't say about almost every single other Wrong-Boy-Who-Lived there is. Additionally, you cannot even be sure that Jim really isn't the BWL.
And the WBWL cliché for me at least is also heavily defined through the flatness of Harry's brother.

That's an interesting viewpoint actually, didn't see it like this, but you could be right. Wrong actions because of a prophecy, shady decisions and strange ideas of right and wrong.
However, it doesn't seem as bad at least to me, because we don't know James as well from canon.

"Butchering characters" is definitely there at some points, you're right. Although I didn't notice it on most adults, only on the kids. As of now.
However, I'm not sure anymore about the "ego" point. Ten or so chapters before, I might have agreed, but the teams Lockhart builded, especially "Mysterioso", did lead to a point, so I'm carefully optimistic for the other main plotlines.

What I also wanted to say: One of the reasons I'm defending the author might be that I sympathize with how his story progressed.
A few years ago, I also wrote a story that was completely fucked up - and after one year of writing I suddenly noticed just how bad it really was. And then I tried to explain away all the illogical and clichéd things that happened in the beginning.
I think something similar happened to him, because there are some things in here that seem simply strange in terms of natural story progress.
And if someone would've judged my story because of those awful 10 or 15 first chapters back then, I would have gotten quite pissed. ^^

 

The WBWL cliche to me is derived from the ridiculous premises that are used to toss Harry away to the Dursley's to suffer and completely forget about him, followed by the token attempt to pick him back up once he turns 11 and comes to Hogwarts and him spurning them and then in no time at all outshining his brother that grew up in the magical world and was trained from a young age despite having far less resources.

I disagree heavily on Jim being a three dimensional character as well. You're relying entirely on the bugs clearing his irrational actions to make it so, but without his irrational hatred of Harry what's interesting about him even left? Despite how much he's featured in the story so far, the answer is literally nothing.

You're right about Mysterioso, it's the main thing this fic has holding it together and it hinges so heavily on that paying off. The Pettigrew plotline will no doubt also eventually be interesting when Sirius' innocence comes out, but as I said before, both these storylines are very heavily weakened by the terrible characterization.

Reading James/Lily/Jim's reactions to the Mysterioso findings as they came out bit by bit might well have been really interesting if it was hinted that their actions were unnatural or odd before and they picked up on it themselves and wondered about it, or others did and at least tried to do something. However even people like Dumbledore in the story just took it in stride as normal behaviour, sweeping aside that and all the other ridiculous shit they do. We have little idea of their thought processes, and if Mysterioso somehow explains it all away into a neat little bundle and they do another instant change then that's just another point to how utterly contrived their characters are.

Same thing with the Pettigew storyline, he's going to come out as guilty eventually but when the two most affected characters are this version of James and Lily I don't know how interesting it will really be to read.

 

Not quite. I think he's courageous and wants to save as much people as he can (Basilisk scene, the scene where he saves that girl) quite a bit like the real canon Harry. Additionally he wants to meet people's expectations (his training) and is afraid of disappointing everyone (him being afraid of Harry surpassing him). That's backed up by quite a bit of actual skill (him surpassing Harry in the duel).
Yes, I think him to actually be three-dimensional, not just seeming like it.

 

Agreed. The characterizations and the tactical writing style (style of writing taking each chapter as it comes) are great. My only complaints with this story are on a plotting/revelation of information basis in the beginning. I think the way that Jim and Harry are portrayed in the recent chapters is 3d, realistic, reasonable in the character strengths and flaws especially given the age, and has a number of side-plots I find fascinating.

 

The new chapter was absolute and pure gold. Nothing more to say about it.

If he keeps this up with the "Endgame" chapters that are about to come, I'll lift my rating to 5/5.

 

Yep, The cliffhangers are real. I got to hand it to The Sinister Man, he knows how to build tension and intrigue.

 

I haven't been overtly analyzing this fic, just casually reading it, but I always felt like James (really, the entire Potter family besides Harry) was being manipulated by Pettigrew in some way (be it magically or otherwise) to act as horribly as he has been. This ties into the muggle hating magic that is tethered to Harry, which I also thought was Pettigrew.

Maybe that was just me jumping to crazy conclusions. I don't really remember whether this was hinted at or not.

 

Nope. At least I'm 100% sure there's nothing hinting of that in the story so far. If the author comes out and announces that it was just Pettigrew all along at this point then IDK, not a very good reveal anyway IMO, neither in the sense of it being good storytelling nor in believability, since Pettigrew's already toeing the line there anyway with how much he seems to have been getting away with.

Pettigrew doesn't really gain anything out of it anyway either since it's in his interests for the Potters, as his patron to be as strong as possible.