Also we finally learn why Harry hasn't done anything about Peter Pettigrew despite knowing where he was.

 

The whole "Dumbledore put your name into the goblet" was a deal breaker for me.

Edit: I can ignore the other clichés, and I would still read the fic. But honestly, I can't understand why people still write Manipulative!Dumbledore? That's completly stupid! Don't they have any original ideas? Especially because in this fic, there is no reason for it at all: Why not just respect canon, and have Crouch putting his name in the goblet? Argh.

 

... I think they are going with Crouch putting it in, he's just wrongly blaming Dumbledore

 

Unless I am mistaken wasn't there a scene from Fluer where she saw Bagman talking with a rat faced man? I'm assuming that was Pettigrew. Ergo Bagman was the one who did the Confundus charm. And they are overthinking the Goblet.

 

Past the potions lesson with Snape's cameo was alright readable as a guilty pleasure and in need of work as mentioned previously, this last chapter though...

 

I'm frustrated that in over 100k words nothing really noteworthy has happened that didn't, in some way, happen in canon.

 

Spoiler

Pettigrew's death maybe? But he never really ended up doing anything of importance in canon.

 

Except, you know, resurrecting Voldemort.

No Pettigrew and no Crouch Jr means likely no Voldemort resurrection at the end of the year.

If there still is a graveyard scene, that's when we know that the author will do absolutely anything to keep following canon storylines.

Loss of the Holly wand means no priori incantatem if Harry does meet Voldemort.

Destruction/absorption of the scarcrux changes many things too, though I suspect we haven't seen the end of it (the author seems to enjoy making plotlines appear tied off only to bring them back).

 

Yup, they're gone, so the last 4-5 chapters could be interesting. In the interim we get more scenes of Harry talking in the chamber with Salazar, more of Fleur's conflicting emotions, and more of the author going out of his way to bash characters. So far Hermione and Ron have been two of the primary characters (not named Fleur, Harry, or Salazar)in the fic and the only purpose they've served is to be assholes who don't add any value. And when you try and point this out to the author you get condescending responses ("umm the title tells you everything you need to know about the plot.."). At this point the only thing keeping me reading is the daily updates, and honestly I wish the author would take some time to think the chapters through.

 

While I understand where you are coming from, I'm almost glad he/she is sticking to their guns. I usually hate the fics where authors create polls and such for their readers to decide on ships and other plot points. It demonstrates a lack of pre-planning. Of course, a lack of flexibility from an author is almost as bad, unless they are simply brilliant.

 

I get sticking to your guns. That's not my point. My point was that there is no overlying plot, nothing in the story makes me want to read more because I feel as though I could skip large portions and still not get lost.

 

Oh look it's a new chapter with a rant demanding a new DLP review.

 

Not entirely sure what the "it" refers to when he talks about "the DLP review". At first you'd think he's referring to my review, since it's the OP, but a lot of the things he talks about (such as the contractions issue) aren't brought up in my review.

Anyway, the author is generally confusing in and out of universe criticism. A lot of his arguments are mentioning (or going back and creating by edit) some in-universe reason to explain away a certain oddity. But that misunderstands what the reviews here are criticising.

The criticism is "why would the author choose to make that part of the story in the first place?" not "that doesn't make sense within the story world". Any author can justify something within their world, because they have complete ability to arbitrarily determine people's beliefs, knowledge, character, magical law, etc. But that doesn't make it a good decision from an out-of-universe position.

For example, with regards to Harry's jump in skill: yes, you can justify it in-universe by saying he was like that all along and this is an AU, but that doesn't explain the out-of-universe question: "why you would choose to declare your character as more skilled than canon rather than show them developing into someone who has more skill?". Character by development is simply superior writing to character by declaration. Whether or not the character is logical given that fictional universe's arbitrary axioms is irrelevant. It's the choice of axioms we're criticising, not the logical deduction that follows from them.

Similarly, having Hermione be shallow and one dimensional and completely renege on her friendship with Harry. Sure, you can justify that in-universe with sufficient events and AU changes to her character. But again the question is: why would you want to? Why would you want to turn a reasonable, relatively 3D character into an antagonism machine that doesn't act like a human? Again, having characters who act like people is simply superior writing to having characters who act as plot devices.

Also, with regards to clichés, there's another misunderstanding. People don't dislike clichés because they're common, they dislike them because they're bad. Some ideas are just intrinsically not good, because they require certain conditions to persist. For example, the idea of portrait!Salazar in the Chamber of Secrets tutoring Harry. It's not bad because it's been overused, it's bad because:

1. If portraits had enough knowledge and sentience to teach magic, Hogwarts wouldn't need teachers.

2. The story doesn't explain how Salazar Slytherin can speak modern English.

3. The story doesn't explain how the books are written in modern English.

4. It's too convenient for Harry. Good hero stories create conflict; convenience for the hero is anathema to good hero writing.

5. It requires significant amounts of backtracking/reinterpretation of previous events which definitely happened in this AU (events of CoS).

And here's the thing: even if you create in-universe reasons to explain all these points away, it's still not good writing, because the very fact that it's going to require heaps of exposition to justify means that it's weighing the story down. General writing maxim: if an idea is so at odds with the rest of your story that it will require a load of justification to shoe-horn into the plot, you shouldn't include it. If a writer is trying to justify something to the reader, they've already failed. Good writing doesn't need to justify things to the reader, because everything already feels right.

 

'Experiment with contractions'? What?

I asked about it/ pointed it out in a review and the author said that's how they spoke.

Unless... Is the author another unreliable narrator?!

Dun dun duuuuuun

That's some next level shit. Mind. Blown.

Changing my review to 5/5

 

Is the rest of the story as badly written as the author's note?

 

So basically this latest chapter has an AN that rants because he feels that DLP has been bitching about his fic and hasn't had positive things to say. He also claims to have gone back to update the first fifteen so the DLP community would be happy about it. Honestly I can't be arsed to go back and look, and I thought Taure actually had a pretty positive review at the beginning.
I honestly have found this story pretty readable as far a most average/below average fics are concerned. Now I'm just starting to get sick of it.

 

Lol, the fact that Taure was the one who put the story up for review was pretty complimentary.

 

I always thought that if you were looking for reviews on DLP you expected to be chewed up and spit out. Usually I took that to mean you at least had a readable fic. If you were mentioned on the DLP forums.
As for Taure recommending your fic or anyone else's fic. I'd say that is a compliment. I've never come across a fic he's recommended that I honestly couldn't bring myself to read all the way through.

 

Beyond that, the premise of the AN - complaining that the summary and review were not updated to match the changing nature of the fic - is flawed. No one updates reviews in the ways he suggests. They may come back and write a later one, but they don't edit the first page (if that's even possible this long after) so people won't get scared away - that's just the nature of the library.

Alexandra Quick, for example, will always have the first 5ish pages dominated by abuse in its thread, even though they were written years ago and the consensus swung pretty heavily in the other direction.

Not to mention, the consensus that I've seen has, in fact, swung in the other direction, so I doubt the author would be happy if it was updated.

 

Had nothing to do and binge read the entire story.

This story has many cliché, but most of them are good and a reader can ignore those.

My peeve about this fic is Harry himself. We get all these training montage scenes behind the scenes, but the magic he performs during the tasks is basic, self transfiguration aside.

Also, the scarcrux fate felt like a cheap letdown.

Dont like Fleurs characterization spread over whole chapters.