Title: Patron
Author: Starfox5
Rating: M
Genre: War/Drama/Romance
Chapters: 61
Words: 542,636
Updated: April 23, 2016
Published: February 28, 2016
Status: Complete
Library Category: The Alternates
Pairings: Harry/Hermione
Summary: In an Alternate Universe where muggleborns are a tiny minority and stuck as third-class citizens, formally aligning herself with her best friend, the famous Boy-Who-Lived, seemed a good idea. It did a lot to help Hermione's status in the exotic society of a fantastic world so very different from her own. And it allowed both of them to fight for a better life and better Britain.
Link: ff.net AO3

Where to even begin? The alternate universe of this fic is subtle and intelligent in a way that few fics ever written have been. The wizarding world feels like a world of wizards – not 19th century oddballs with magic tricks. Nobody is required to be stupid for the plot to function, least of all the usual suspects: Voldemort and Dumbledore. Instead, the fic is truly about a wizarding war; not in the dumb cliché sense of people lining up on the lawn of Hogwarts with wands drawn, but an insurgency. Both sides act and react, there is an actual society with texture and character for them to fight over. Voldemort is human, sane, and definitely evil. Dumbledore is not a blind idealist, but a weary leader fully cognizant of the sacrifices of war. Lockhart? The Death Eaters? The Aurors? Well, I won’t spoil any of that. Magic makes sense (Magical cores? Perish the thought!) as does the international order and wizarding culture. All of it interlocks to create a rich wizarding world comparable to that of Prince of the Dark Kingdom in scope, style, and detail, if not word count.

I was put off a bit at first by Hermione’s legal/semi-magical subservience to Harry, but it isn’t what you think going in at all. The low status of muggleborns makes sense in the conservative pureblood culture of this universe and isn’t egregious in any way; it’s just a source of conflict and world detail, as well as a systemic injustice for Hermione to struggle against. Nothing creepy or weird is done by Harry to Hermione, at all, and they relate as equals except when formal wizarding society demands otherwise.

Also, I know Harry/Hermione fics don’t have the best reputation here. This is very much not the trashy sort of H/Hr fic revolving around soul bonds and Hermione being an unparalleled genius who solves all of Harry’s problems so he needn’t trouble his poor brains. Ron is not unceremoniously dumped off of a pier so that everyone can focus on the Twoo Luv Couple. This is a fundamental reimagining of the whole series that casts Harry and Hermione as the primary protagonists in a way where their relationship makes sense. It definitely isn’t the main focus, though – that would be the war.

Easily a 5.

 

Pretty sure this has been posted already...

*Edit: Perhaps I was wrong. At any rate I gave this a read, up to about chapter 12 so far. It's interesting at times, but has some issues. Quite a few grammatical issues crop up. It doesn't have much style and it drags often. Also the qualities of it Harry and Hermione are off.

On the positive it's long.

 

I'm two paragraphs in and i already don't like it much. When do you ever just sit around listing your friend's good points? Well maybe when you're contemplating doing something horrible to them or asking them for money. It reeks strongly thus far of Perfect!Hermione.

The prose is workable but nothing special, and nothing really leaps out to me in such a way that would make me want to set aside the many hours I'd need to read this 400k behemoth.

I'll abstain from voting because I've only read most of one chapter but so far it's a 2/5.

You know what would be fun though? If in a Crackfic! Harry went mad with power and started forcing Hermione to do all sorts of weird shit, like making her sneak into the Slytherin dorms to piss on Malfoy.

EDIT: Wait it's been completed on ff.nethttps://www.fanfiction.net/s/11080542/1/Patron, probably should link that one.

 

Completed? Check.

Long? Check.

My preferred pairing? Check.

I guess I'll slog through this this weekend, but after skimming a little, I suspect it's not going to be much more than a decent enough time killer, even for a fan of the pairing. I hope I'm wrong!

 

^ Does that checklist mean you've read all of Robst's stuff? I remember when I first entered the fandom I read half way through a lot of them before bookmarking them when the fatigue got to me. But when I finally got back to them the cracks had become too much for me. I kind of regret that.

Also the author has written something like 3 long ass fanfics with a predominantly muggleborn v pureblood slant. If anyone who's read through it could give insight on whether the author has managed to avoid sounding biased or preachy that'd also be great.

 

@Above: Starfox at one point has Hermione suggest killing every single Pureblood to preserve the future of Wizardkind, as well as a lovely variety of "I'm an idiot and don't understand how politics work" kinds of ideas. When you enter a Starfox fic, I always think that there's a tag missing:

Nazi!Supremacist!Hermione.

Starfox somehow manages to make a character who is almost universally at least 'preferred elsewhere' in fanfiction, into an actual Muggle supremacist. In any of his fics, Hermione would not be out of place saying "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for muggleborn children."

 

Starfox.. Isn't that the dude who fills his story with Pro-muggle stuff all the time?

 

It's the dude who spams pretty much every reddit thread with his story. Maybe if it was good (which it isn't) I wouldn't mind so much. But, I've never been able to get far enough in to give it an actual star rating.

 

I think he must have matured before/during writing this one, then, because I don't get that at all from this story. He wrote the Marriage Law revolution fic, right? Yeah, I always thought that one was trashy for several reasons, but this isn't. Pureblood culture is shown to be restrictively conservative in some ways, very liberal in others; muggleborns barely exist. Hermione is emphatically not a crusader. Not even for house elves. She's upset by her status and wants to work to change it, of course, but there's no Nazi!Hermione to be found here at all.

It's complete on ff? Thanks for the heads up!

I would definitely not judge this story by the first chapter. I probably should have put that in the first post tbh because the first couple of chapters are really not very good - too much Harry and Hermione, too much life debt nonsense. Not much of what a person is likely to dislike about the first few chapters sticks around as the story continues. The story improves a lot when Harry and Hermione only get about half of a chapter to themselves each time because Voldemort, Dumbledore, and other adults are doing really interesting stuff - if you can stick out through the end of the Triwizard tournament then the quality really improves from chapter 10 on. It does get better than the first chapter leading up to that, too.

 

500k+ words, and complete is my ideal story so I was looking forward to sinking into this one. I'm around 4 chapters in so far, so obviously no rating until I finish it - but some early thoughts:

- The writing is readable, but average technically.
- There are elements of being told what's happening in the story as opposed to shown. I feel as if the blow-by-blow flashbacks which explain past events could be done in a more elegant fashion with less detail, allowing readers to infer events or fill in the gaps themselves. The author had plenty of opportunities to show us Harry's character, morals and beliefs in various scenes but instead elected to use Hermione's reflections to just describe him as a string of adjectives that left Harry being rather flat and one-dimensional.
- There are several cliches already, namely life debts, hints of manipualtive!dumbledore, and overly mature 11 year old children politically out-manoeuvring adults in their first conversation. Dumbledore's character is also just off, although I admit to being spoiled by fics like 'What you Leave Behind' which write him perfectly. Minerva McG also suffers from this. It feels as though the author has got a one word summary for each character which he uses to base their entire personality on. In this story, it's noble!Harry, patronising/manipulative!dumbledore, strict!Minerva, evil!malfoys and so on.

Not too impressed so far, but we'll see if it improves. Review will be updated as that happens.

No Rating till finished.

Update 1, as of Chapter 8: Still no improvements as of yet. While I like the idea of alternative Triwizard tasks having elemental themes, the tasks themselves are bland and one fails to get excited about them. Compared to the imaginative alternate tasks in JBern's The Lie I've Lived, or the novelty of the tasks in canon, these read like the author is attempting to make things different solely for the sake of being different in an AU - as opposed to defined changes in the universe which have knock on effects in a variety of ways.

Another example of this is in the frustratingly frequent mentions of "The year of discovery", which is essentially the 6th year of Hogwarts where apparently every student engages in massive orgies and a year-long sex fest. Subtle mentions of it in conversation indicate differences in the wizarding culture from that of canon (all well and good), but it fails to be subtle when it's brought up at least 4 times per chapter. One dimensional characterisations strike again here, with nearly EVERY SINGLE CONVERSATION involving Sirius including a nudge-nudge, wink-wink reference to Harry about his year of discovery. Writing Sirius as a womaniser is fine, making that his sole personality trait is not.

The brief forays into the political machinations of 14 year old Parvati Patil and Pansy Parkinson, while perhaps slightly unrealistic are at least moderately intriguing. They can also be explained away by unreliable narration, since it's entirely possible that Pansy is just being a nasty bitch but thinking of herself as a political mastermind while doing so.

 

Starfox has improved as he's written, his earlier works are rough but his current one, The Dark Lord Never Died is pretty solid.

3/5 for this one though, I like the AU and the plot even if the prose isn't all there.

 

The prose is a little rough, but he is doing interesting things with it that aren't immediately apparent - just...mostly with the adult characters, who have subtle motivations and actions that the author's style is actually quite good at presenting in a casual, understated way. You get a sense of how Voldemort, Dumbledore, etc. are quite different from their canon selves through how their segments are written and what they are thinking about instead of the story really spelling it out very much, which is nice. The first few chapters are very exposition-heavy because the AU needs a lot of explanation to make sense, and it does not do the story any favors to start so slowly and with its cliches front-loaded, unfortunately.

I don't mean to be overly defensive of this story as it isn't perfect, but it requires reading through chapter 20 or so at least to understand why I am recommending it to the Library so strongly, I think. The first ten chapters are almost an extended prologue to familiarize you with all of the changes to canon up to GoF. The compelling aspect of this story for me has nothing to do with Harry and Hermione, though they're fine enough main characters; it's after Voldemort is resurrected and is active (in chapter 10, as I don't think that disclosing that Voldemort returns at the end of the Triwizard tournament is much of a spoiler) that the story's strengths become apparent. Most fics, I think, focus on Harry and his friends and the war is used as a backdrop; the sensibility of the actions of the adults often doesn't really matter. Canon is like this too, in that Dumbledore, Voldemort, the Ministry, etc. are transparently dumb in one or more ways that, if they weren't that way, the story just wouldn't work. For one thing, Voldemort is always sitting around not really doing anything, which is both dumb of him and pretty boring. Voldemort in this story is basically never inactive - he hits the ground running (after a much more sensible resurrection) and is constantly up to something. Often, personally. His scenes are fun to read in a way that's hard to describe - he's just so intelligently evil. On the same note, Dumbledore is even worse about sitting around in canon - not so here. He's one step ahead of Voldemort just as often as Voldemort is one step ahead of him. Even Fudge isn't an idiot, really. He's a politician. This story strips away a lot of the caricature elements of the canon characters and canon wizarding society in a way that's pretty compelling. The story also has minor perspective characters - a pair of Aurors, an up-and-coming Death Eater, Aberforth, etc. - which really provide a much fuller sense of the world and the war than you usually get in a fic.

Like I said in the first post, the best comparison to this story is probably Prince of the Dark Kingdom. That story is also pretty rough prose-wise IMO and takes a while to rev up, but the characters, the magic, and the world make up for it.

Edit: Oh, and the combat is really good. Here's an excerpt from chapter 26:

Spoiler

The Dark Lord Voldemort, polyjuiced into the form of Finnegan Greenbrand, smiled when he spotted the witch he had been looking for sitting at a bar among other wands for hire in Knockturn Alley. Lucrecia Browtuckle, her robes cut to reveal her numerous scars, had spotted him as soon as he had entered, and he could see her slightly tense up as she downed the rest of her drink while he walked towards her.

"Miss Browtuckle." He nodded at her.

"Mister Greenbrand." She barely moved her head, her eyes meeting his. There was a change in her behaviour, compared to the last time they had met. He smiled. Perhaps she knew who he was. If so, she showed remarkable composure.

"The situation in Britain is no longer a brawl between children." He ordered a fire whiskey for himself. "It's a war now."

"Nominally at most. I haven't been impressed much by what I've read and who I've seen. Grindelwald's wizards would have eaten them alive without breaking a sweat." The old witch glanced over at a loudly bragging wand for hire who was trying to impress the waitress with made-up tales of bravery and daring.

Voldemort smirked. "Those are the dregs and the inexperienced. The skilled ones have already been hired. Most of them."

"Is that an offer?" She wasn't calling him 'lad' this time. She knew, or suspected.

"Yes. A very generous one. You are among the most experienced and skilled wands in Britain. And one of the few not already committed." He raised his glass to her.

"The wise mercenary doesn't get involved in conflicts where the outcome is not yet clear," Lucrezia said.

"Waiting for the best offer? It can be dangerous, if you wait too long. One or the other side might decide that preventing you from joining their enemy would be safer than hoping to convince you to join them." Voldemort smiled pleasantly, despite his threat.

"You haven't made an actual offer yet." The witch shifted a bit. He recognized the way she got ready to move.

He pulled out a piece of parchment, put it on the smooth bartop and slid it towards her. She didn't touch it, just looked at it and raised an eyebrow. "Quite generous indeed. I will have to consider this offer carefully."

"What's there to consider? The payment's far higher than anything the Ministry could offer." He knew that well. "Other parties lack the means to pay you even half that. Not without crippling their other efforts."

"I might decide to leave Britain until this war has run its course." Lucrecia smiled, but her eyes were cold.

"If you were going to do that, you'd have already left. You're one of the most experienced mercenaries; you know the rates, you know the score. If you are still here, in this bar, it means you've been waiting for this offer. Or it means you're already working for someone else."

He silently sealed the room. He had already blocked apparition, portkey and floo travel before he had entered. She might simply be holding out for more money. Many mercenaries would do that. But he didn't think so. For all her experience, she hadn't fought in the kind of wars he had been waging, and would be waging again. Not on his side, at least.

She was fast, and skilled. As good as her reputation. Her first spell was cast silently, not at him, but at the floor, blasting the stone there into shards as sharp as knives, all directed towards him. They met his silently cast shield spell while he pushed away from the bar, diving to the side before the transfigured claws sprouting from the bartop reached him.

The low-lives in the bar had just started to notice the battle at that point. Voldemort hadn't touched the ground yet before he had conjured a dozen sharp blades dripping with poison and banished them at the witch. She twisted out of the way and one of them took off the top of the head of the bartender while he was still opening his mouth to shout something. Voldemort pushed himself off the ground, evaded a series of Piercing Curses and turned the air around the bar into poison gas. A waitress started choking, and dying, but Browtuckle was unaffected - it had to be her robes, he didn't see a bubblehead charm in effect.

The smarter wizards and witches were trying to flee now, but the room was sealed. The Greenbrand identity was too valuable still to leave witnesses. Lucrecia had jumped behind the bar, taking cover from his own salvo of Bludgeoning Curses. But that gave him enough time to cover the six mercenaries at the door in acid. Half of them screamed and flailed around, the others turned towards him, protected by their robes. Not for long, though.

"Sectumsempra!" His shouted curse went straight through the shields and robes of two of them, cutting them in half. The third one stared in horror, and Voldemort would have killed him with his next spell, if he hadn't to defend against Browtuckle's next attack - whirling ice blades, intermixed with fireballs, and behind them, a salvo of Cutting Curses.

The Dark Lord raised a slab of stone in front of him, catching the first ranks of the blades, giving him time enough to wrest control of the other blades from the witch - he had fought against Ottoman wizards more than enough to be familiar with those kinds of spells. The Cutting Curses destroyed his makeshift barrier, and the fireballs destroyed the ice blades before he could use them. But her attack had been stopped.

A flick of his wrist flung a waitress who had been cowering behind an upturned table at his enemy. She didn't dodge the screaming witch, and so his Piercing Curses missed her. His living projectile shattered Browtuckle's shield though, giving him an opening. The nimble witch dodged again then, and his fire spell only hit the waitress, who turned into a short-lived torch.

Browtuckle dropped all restraint then, and filled the room with explosions and splinters. Voldemort's shield held though - it was a tactic more appropriate for taking out large numbers of average wizards and witches, not a wizard as powerful as the Dark Lord. So, why would she…

His respect for his foe went up a notch when he spotted the black carpet made out of crawling bugs move towards him, hidden behind the dust and debris caused by the explosions. Egyptian magic as well! It was a shame he had to kill the witch. A wave of water brushed the cursed beetles aside, then roasted them when he poured lightning into it. Browtuckle herself was forced to climb the bartop, or share the fate of her conjured bugs.

He had been counting on that, and as exposed as she was, she couldn't dodge or shield all of the necromantic orbs he shot at her. Even so less than he expected hit her, and while her skin was starting to rot off, she was not out of the fight yet. "Avada Kedavra! Avada Kedavra!"

He dodged the first Killing Curse, then blocked the next with a conjured marble slab. He could see that she wasn't used to casting that spell - she was barely faster with it than his average Death Eater. Her robe stopped his next two curses despite its tattered condition, he would have to find out who enchanted it, but the third one got through and turned her knees into pulp, and she fell down on the rubble-covered ground

She was staring at him with hatred, her face half-rotted off, but still trying to cast when he put her out of her misery with a Killing Curse of his own. Looking around, he took a deep breath, savoring the moment. It felt good, fighting like this. Even if she hadn't touched him at all, it had been a good, challenging battle. He saluted the body with his wand, then unleashed Fiendfyre on the room before apparating away.

 

I read one chapter. A small sample, admittedly, but it tends to be enough with most fanfiction.

Already the first paragraph has me going "oh for God's sake" with detailed descriptions of enchanted robes kept at 22 degrees Celsius. The rest is an infodump of the worst tell-not-show kind and nothing in there hooked me enough to overlook all other problems.

The prose is average and colorless, doesn't draw me in at all. And that first chapter already has inconsistencies: Harry is mentioned as both a pureblood and a halfblood and there's some strange notion of "fake muggleborns", born to magical parents, so how are they muggleborns exactly?

I could overlook Hermione acting like she's 21, not 11, but then she goes and out-argues Dumbledore during their first meeting. Come on.

I won't rate after only reading one chapter, but I see nothing here that would suggest to me it'd be worth the time to read 500k words of this.

 

I'm a few chapters in, and the feeling I'm getting from the writing is that of a child who is trying to sound overly formal.

It's a little stilted and stiff. This doesn't extend only to the dialogue either.

I'll probably very slowly poke my way through it because it checks off too many of my guilty pleasure checkboxes (long, complete, H/Hr), but it's not something I'd ever recommend to anyone, as of chapter 6ish.

 

This confused me as well. My assumption was a true muggleborn is Hermione, magical child born to muggle parents. A 'false' muggleborn would be a magical child born of magical parents but raised in a muggle environment. Harry apparently would be labelled as this because James and Lily never had a 'magical marriage', so he would be Harry Evans - except the Wizengamot decided to reward him for defeating Voldemort by letting him be Harry Potter instead.

tl;dr: definition of muggleborn isn't anything to do with the parents you're born to, but the world you were raised in. He should have renamed it muggleraised or something in his AU.

 

It's more that Dumbledore is afraid that Harry will try to get his way by finding a different guardian if he doesn't give in, and Hermione is too stubborn and paranoid about the possibility of being forced into becoming a retainer of the Malfoys to listen to sense. You get Dumbledore's thoughts on the matter a couple of chapters later and the additional perspective makes the initial scene less eyeroll-worthy, though it is still a weak scene.

I was confused by the fake muggleborn thing too. At first I thought it was supposed to be people like Harry who are muggle-raised. It never comes up again, I think it's just Hermione feeling bitter, but based on information from later chapters, here's my best shot: Harry was born with muggleborn status due to Lily's status and elevated to being James's pureblood heir by the Wizengamot after the end of the first war. A 'false' muggleborn, then, would be someone like Harry would have been had James and Lily lived - legally, a muggleborn retainer to the Potter family, but factually, someone who has never lived wholly in the muggle world and who is the child of one of the pureblood families.

The enchanted robes are intended to suggest that this world uses magic more thoroughly on practical objects than the canon world, and also introduce you to the general importance of enchanted robes in particular, which serve as protection in duels. It's just...something that shouldn't have been elaborated on so thoroughly in the first paragraph, because it wrecks the pacing. I think the beta readers for this story probably deserve a lot of credit for helping the author improve because this sort of overexplanation at awkward moments goes away as the story continues. So does the stilted formality.

 

I had a fairly long comment written about this, but something went wrong during submission and now it's gone. Oh well. Long story short: I agree with Jazerus that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here once the story finally hits its stride. I'm a huge sucker for worldbuilding and minor characters taking prominent roles, as well as characters having "agency", so I like this story more than I probably should given its flaws (mediocre technical writing, some characterizations being pretty weak, dialogue).

3.5/5

 

I read this story a while back (back when there were only 35/40 chapters up yet), and I stopped going back to read new chapters after there were 3 or 4 chapters in a row devoted to all of Hogwarts watching movies...

I enjoyed the plot just fine while it was actually progressing and the interaction between Harry/Hermione and Viktor and Fleur was different enough from usual to be interesting, but the writing is just not good enough to deserve more than 3,5/5 (and that's not going into other flaws mentioned already).