I did? Oh wow that was stupid. FML.
I posted them because I enjoyed them but wasn't sure they were up to DLP's stringent standards. Sorry.

 

The worst part isn't just that Harry is a rapist. It's that the women he rapes then serve him willingly, like all you have to do is rape a woman and she becomes yours.

Fuck this guy. Hell, I've written a rapist Harry (in Secrets) but the way this author does it is just... urgh. It feels inadequate to call it unrealistic. It's offensively unrealistic - not because I'm "squeamish" but because of what it reveals of the author's opinions.

 

This is basically the story in a nutshell.

I even acknowledge that there are probably outlier women like the engineer Harry rapes. The scandalous news stories of women who love and get impregnated by serial killers while they're in jail or fall in love with their rapists. The Milgram experiments that show how much they as an gender are susceptible to undiluted authority have been around forever. It hasn't been a new, edgy thing since Vash wrote it years ago.

What drives me crazy about the author is that the rape just contaminates the uplifting story of humanity rising against its oppressors, achieving the impossible.

When I reached the climax of the first story arc, my "That was epic" reaction kept getting short-circuited by the fact that the unsavory aspects of the story... just don't belong. It's just not part of the intuitive formula. Like a sports underdog movie with a global warming message.

This is the data-corrupted version of a legendary-class story. This Harry should naturally fall into the heroic, inspiring leader role. The emotions of his escape from the mine... it's just all slanted by the rape.

I do respect the plotting ability and the long-view. The escape from the mine was indeed epic, and there were shades of ME2 in how Harry assembled his squad which should have been 100% badass, the Five Fleets which require maneuvering and some politicking, the abandoned research facilities of corporations.

That's all great.

That meeting in the mess hall after one of the most badass escape sequences in fanfiction? It's like "Fuck yeah".

But the sociopath manipulator identity that the author gives Harry makes it nihilistically empty. The women are objects, the rest of the characters are just there to play power games with Harry. You fundamentally can't invest in a story like this. You may want to, but you're locked out.

 

Having read the available chapters, I think I can call The Star Hegemony a bust. I felt like I was reading a story that went out of its way to be completely average. Any well written scene was inevitably bogged down by Harry's sociopathic tendencies, and the amount of effort put into making it all as brutal as possible detracted from what could, and should, have been an epic story.

An Empowered!Dark!Harry thrust into the Mass Effect universe, enslaved by Batarians, plotting his escape and becoming a pirate? That's cool. If it was handled by damn near anyone in the WBA section, it could have been the defining ME/HP crossover. Instead, any remotely appealing scene was overshadowed by the knowledge that Harry would show off how fucked up he was immediately after.

And it wasn't even funny how touched in the head he acted. It was brutality for the sake of brutality. There was no dark humor to grimly laugh at, just rape after brutal murder after nasty thought.

I don't think The Star Hegemony deserves a rating. Rating it implies that I care about it, and the most I feel for it is meh. So no rating at all and I'm not gonna recommend it to anyone, not even almost recommend it.

 

This probably belongs in the for review section, but I'm not sure it would get more than a 3/5 and I'm too lazy to format it for the For review section:

Harry Potter and the Primes of Merlin » reviews Merlin, on his deathbed, split his magic, and prophesized that nine people of his choosing would be given a piece of it. They would be the Primes of Merlin, and the Ninth of them was prophesized to be the strongest, inheriting the most of Merlin's magic. Harry Potter - Rated: T - English - Adventure/Friendship - Chapters: 11 - Words: 188,256 - Reviews: 393 - Updated: 7-11-11 - Published: 7-2-11 - Harry P. & OC - Complete

It has several cliches, most notably that of Merlin having heirs and magical cores, but it plays it off well. It subverts almost as many cliches, seeing as Dumbledore is good and only somewhat manipulative, Harry isn't the only heir of Merlin, etc. The romance is really barely a side-plot, and the fighting is good, IMO. Good two hours' read.

 

9 isn't a prime number.

First thought that went through my head. Also this sucks.

 

Prime can mean leader (ie. Optimus ) or first, chief and a lots of other things , but yeah it's bad and you should feel bad.

 

Oh, this makes it okay then... /sarcasm. Yeah, I wouldn't even recommend this to someone I hate.

 

Never mind the prime not-prime shit. "Prophesize" and "prophesized" are words only in the minds of idiots.

 

I don't even understand why prophecy has to be a thing with stories like that. I mean, the author could've just said "Yeah Merlin's power was split into 9 bits and the 9th bit was fucking great because root 9 is 3 or fuck whatever."

 

A guilty pleasure I like to read sometimes. But the author wrote very little and extracted a lot from canon, literally. Imposible to rate.

 

The Star Hegemony is really, really annoying. I love the premise and it'd be a really good fic if it wasn't for the fact that the author is intent on having Harry be a psychopathic rapist.

I don't understand why he has to be that way for it to be edgy or interesting or whatever the author is going for... Just have him be a cold-hearted bastard instead who eventually starts believing in Humanity's plight, falls in love and in the end saves the day.

Now I really want to read more HP in Space

 

To be honest, I really like The Star Hegemony and look forward to updates. Sure I am disgusted by rapists in real life, but this is just fiction and therefore it doesn't bother me to read about it in a story. Also, I don't think Hegemony is nearly as graphic as The Star Empire was. In that story the author wrote the rapist scenes in excruciatingly explicit detail, while in Hegemony the author only shows the basic beginnings and simply alludes to the rest. Overall, I find the story interesting and a refreshing, if a little severe, change of pace compared to most fics I read. For me personally, I would give it a 4/5, but due to its niche nature it probably deserves closer to a 3/5, hence it being only almost recommendable and not library worthy.

 

TSH just makes me tired reading it. Harry does something awesome, Harry does something evil (but it makes sense because it fulfills his goals), Harry talks to himself/Backstory is presented of Harry before his dimension hop, repeat ad nauseam.

I do not even know why this guy writes? Mainly because he does not even offer any kind of justification for Harry being an unrepentant douchebag rapist murderer. While the Harry that I know would at the very least feel bad, and only come to be a fucking monster after years and years of cycles of torture and vengeance. Sure we get the parts in the back story where Harry is doing evil things to evil people who "deserve" to die. But Harry Fucking Potter battled Voldemort with a fucking Disarming spell rather than stoop that level. This is not Harry, this is some sick self insert that I can not be fucked to deal with.

Oh and the various inaccuracies about rape and the human psyche made me wonder if this guy ever took the time to do any research on the single most important part of his fanfic. If I wanted to read a story about rape and fucked up relationships I would need something at least as good as Lolita.

 

Just one chapter so far, but Darth Mars has a new fic:

Firebird's Son
Author: Darth Marrs
Think you know what the magical world is like? You're wrong. A completely AU story of Harry Potter in a world with four times more women than men. But will a world run by women, in which wizards are commodities to be controlled and threats to be contained, actually be any better?
Rated: Fiction M - English - Drama - Harry P. & Luna L. - Words: 3,824 - Reviews: 29 - Favs: 42 - Follows: 105 - Published: 10-21-12 - id: 8629685

As it's Darth Mars, I think we can expect a rapid and consistent update rate to completion.

My review (spoilers for ch1):

 

^That Fic has more than 5 chapters in His Yahoo group.

Mostly a Meh fic for me. Suits this place well.

 

The most surprising: it Darth Mars, but yet.... is not a crossover. D:

 

It's Darth Mars, which means he'll finish it, but his writing is not actually readable, so there might as well only be one chapter of his story. :/

Like having fifty rusty pennies (there's a more apt analogy but I can't think of it now).

 

Finally. I thought I dropped into bizarro world when his tripe was suggested here. Where would that end? Can we post the stories of radaslab, robst, broomstick flyer, chem prof and that ilk too now because the audience is desperate? There needs to be some kind of standard

 

Better to masturbate than stoop to having sex with a fat chick.

(There's the analogy I was looking for.)