Title: Melissa Mielfée and the Omphalonian Orchid
Author: Benjamin Newman
Rating: G or maybe T
Genre: Drama, written as a song cycle
Status: complete
Library category: AU crossover, HP / Charlie and the Chocolate factory
Pairings: none
Link: https://bn-songbook.dreamwidth.org/66405.html
Summary: Melissa Mielfée and the Omphalonian Orchid is a Harry Potter x Charlie and the Chocolate Factory crossover fanfic in ten songs.

I am (and you should be) completely done with Harry Potter as a commercial franchise, due to the author's ongoing vocal transphobia. If you're also completely done with HP as a fandom, obviously skip this one. Roald Dahl was also not an unproblematic author. Both authors included problematically stereotyped servile diminutive races in their worlds, which this fanfic calls out and attempts to correct.

==== Review ====

Without making spoilers, there are no transgender characters in the story or anything like that. It's a political drama about a house-elf / Oompa Loompa rebellion, in the form of ten songs, each of which is a parody or rewrite of some more widely known song. The author is one of my favorite filk (SF/fantasy) songwriters, and I only recently came across this work by him, which is brilliant. I could imagine it being performed as something like an opera.

Each song is in its own blog post (start from the link above) giving the lyrics and linking an mp3 of the author's musical performance, and at the starting link you can also download a .zip of all ten mp3's. I think the story is best experienced by playing the mp3's in order and possibly reading the lyrics alongside. Since the blog is in the usual reverse chronological order, the first song is way at the bottom and then you have to go through them in what might seem like the backwards direction, but that's no big deal.

The lyrics are great, clever, heartfelt, mostly well-rhymed, the whole thing. The story is quite powerful if experienced by listening through. The mp3's are definitely listenable though the author doesn't pretend to be a pro level musician. He sings on key, conveys emotions expressively even without much vocal technique per se, and accompanies himself tastefully (though again without virtuoso technique) on a guitar. Listening to him doesn't hurt my ears or anything like that. And it's not a fancy production at all (just a guy singing into his phone or similar). It's ok, listen anyway, you're there for the story and lyrics rather than a concert or studio-like audio product.

Ok, minor spoiler, here's an excerpt from song #3 which foreshadows the main plot, more or less. The song is mostly to "Don't Push That Button" by Duane Elms and it's sung in the story by Professor Sprout. It describes the Omphalonian Orchid of the title:

Song #4 is titled "Honey for Dobby" so you can see where this is going. Other songs in the cycle use tunes by Bob Dylan, Stan Rogers, Jonathan Coulton, and others.

Rating: a definite 5. There are some flaws here and there but the creativity is right up there with the best other fanfic that I know of. That is based on the writing of course. The audio is more like demo recordings. There are other people in the filk community who are more performance specialists and it would be great to hear a more polished version of this.

Total length of the audios is around 30 minutes for all 10 songs. Highly recommended.

 

I've never seen a work like this and I think that it's an interesting concept... but with that being said, I didn't like the author's voice very much, and I'm also sort of baffled. I won't rate it, but I don't think that song fics (if that's what they're called) should have a place in the library.

 

Yeah I rated it purely on the story and lyric writing, not the recording which I see as a demo rather than a "product". The mp3's are listenable, but as I mentioned, there are others in the filk community who are more focused on performance. The author of this piece is first and foremost a lyricist. I'd like to see some kind of musical collab someday.

Entertainingly, someone seems to have rated it 1, which is pretty low, I suspect purely based on the dig at Rowling in the blurb. I can only snort and say that's why this site is dying.

See if you like this, probably the most elaborate filk production ever done, about the Star Wars prequel series (not HP related):

 

I read the whole thing out of sheer curiosity. The plot is definitely original - it's a story about freeing the house-elves, but there's also chocolate, Willy Wonka, and Oompa Loompas. Treating the writing as poetry, it's honestly rather bad. Nothing stood out to me, and some of the rhymes were just straight up meh; out of all the 10 songs, there was only one line where I thought, that's a cool line. Reviewing this as a Harry Potter fanfiction, especially considering the ranking system of DLP, I can't give this anything other than 1/5. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone - if you want to read a good HP story, this isn't it. If you want to read good poetry, this isn't it. If you want a good song, this also isn't it. I struggle to come up with any reasons someone would want to read this, apart from the sheer curiosity of trying something new and weird. It's possible that others could enjoy it, and it's just not for me, as I'm not usually a huge fan of things like musicals, etc. - but I can only rate it based on my own feelings.

 

I can't think of any song lyrics anywhere that hold up as poetry for reading. Well, very few anyway. They aren't the same medium. Lyrics are intended to be combined with music, and they work if the combination has the intended effect. I found this thing impressive and enjoyed it a lot. That said, I agree that a few of the rhymes really didn't work and that gave some moments of disappointment.