By AU I mean a drastic change in the history of the universe that would account for Harrys character. Like it or not JK Rowling gave us the template for a muggle-raised Harry
Nothing seems to have changed enough to justify Harry's huge fucking personality switch, although to be fair I stopped a little way in.

But then again, the AU starts in HBP, it doesn't account for the personality shift.

 

I know Harry is different I'm saying there's no rationale for it. Nothing happened differently in his life to justify it.

Maybe you can deal with AUs where characters are different for no reason, I however want some sort of reason why they've deviated from the set path.

 

Which is why it's glaring and distracting for me.

It's completely different from the Santi saying "Oh, by the way the Potters survived Voldemort's downfall and had twins" he altered events which in turn led to the changing attitude of Harry towards learning and achievement. That's a natural,smooth and believable progression.

Here however there's no easing us into it. One minute Harry's harry them the next he's virtually unrecognizable.

It's one thing to want to explore a different Harry, but there has to be some logical progression from canon Harry to your Harry otherwise it's just indulgent fantasizing, which I don't want to read.

 

My thoughts have been said both to the author and in other threads here, so I'm not going to rehash my previous tl;dr.

Sesc, I disagree with you on one key point: The disconnect between how the author intended to write Harry, and how he is actually written. I love the Romilda, for all the reasons you've stated above, and because of that I am happy to ignore (and even accept) the obvious narrative bias.

Harry changing is fine. Harry changing is, as you say, a key point to any story that isn't going to slavishly follow canon. The problem is that the author clearly intends to have Harry be the 'ideal' romantic while being 'worthy' of a much more manipulative partner. Instead, Harry is just yet one more of the masses oh-so-fortunate to grovel at her feet...which, unfortunately, he spends the entire story doing, up to and including no response when she tries to drug him with a love potion.

It's one thing to have Harry change, it's another to have another party just grab Harry by the nose and change him with his passive consent. Afterall, isn't that one of your biggest gripes with Harmony :awesome

This does at the end of the day belong in the library, on the basis of its technical writing and a superb protagonist. But it will always be the story that I view as having failed to live up to its massive potential, and for that I can't really forgive it.

 

This. 5/5.

 

This story has no place in the library.

1/5

 

The author fails hard IMO to portray Romilda as an anti-character. Otherwise it'd be good. This way it's just acceptable. 3/5

 

Necropost, but I just read this one after it popped up on the "Unique Fanfics" thread.

Like many people, I quite liked the Romilda character...in a vacuum. But for an AU to work for a reader, the reader has to accept the premise of the changes. I couldn't. This Harry's circle of friends and acquaintances seemed too similar to canon, and I couldn't reconcile that with his new personality. He's supposed to be observant and insightful, and yet he didn't realize Romilda existed prior to this story, and barely noticed Romilda's sister, despite the fact that she's in the same House and same year as Harry.

Then I had a revelation. I mentally lined up the pieces:

1. The boy that Romilda has had a crush on since age 11 becomes smitten with her in minutes, and then turns out to be a more perfect match for her personality than she ever dreamed.
2. Romilda's adversaries prove to be dimwitted and offer no real resistance. The non-stupid ones are already Romilda's friends, or otherwise aren't potential competition for Harry.
3. Romilda's upbringing has made her incredibly vain yet deeply insecure about her looks. Her father's variant of pure-blood culture facilitated her second-class status within the family, yet Romilda embraces the culture with the clumsy zeal that you'd expect from a 14-year-old. In other words: a conflicted, unhappy person.
4. The heavily biased narration.

I added it all up and reimagined the story so that very few of the events in this story actually happened.

This is Fic-ception - a fanfic about fiction. It's Romilda's fantasy. It's her, looking back at her failed attempts to woo Harry (who is actually still like canon!Harry, more or less), and imagining how things could have gone differently. Not realizing that Harry was turned off by her personality, rather than any specific "mistakes."

Romilda builds this elaborate fantasy for herself because it is preferable to thinking about her future as the unwanted Vane daughter. The best she can look forward to is a marriage to some scruffy half-blood, because no, her-half brother only wants to continue molesting her. Roland Figg, marry her? Blaise Zabini? Absurd; just more of Romilda's fantasies.

I also toyed with the idea that Romilda's sister didn't actually exist in the fanfic - that she was Romilda's conception of how her life would be if her father loved her. It seems to fit because, for all of Romilda's fretting about her sister, Rosa was almost invisible in the story, and had no real effect on the outcome.

When I performed this bit of mental gymnastics, Romilda's character remained just as interesting as before - maybe even more interesting. And I could finish the story without hitting the little X in the corner. 3/5.

 

I actually like the re-imagining - it adds a slightly sinister note to the fic.

 

That interpretation makes it better.

 

Excentrykemuse took all her stories down --removed them from FFN and everywhere else except for apparently her yahoo group. Apparently they were getting flamed and so she quit writing and pulled down all her stories. Here's a link to Amortentia that still works, but for how long, who knows.

http://onj1.andrelouis.com/hp/Amortentia.txt

 

All of excentrykemuse's fics have been deleted, does anyone have or know of a copy to Amortentia?

EDIT: This is why you read the last post in a thread, despite assuming it was long dead. Leaving my mistake here, because damn, that was dumb.

Still, are any of her other fics anywhere?

 

A necro-post, I know. But I couldn't find the archives you promised Sesc.

 

Here is the link to the text edition of 'Amortentia'.

http://onj1.andrelouis.com/hp/Amortentia.txt

 

Thanks for the info. I edited the first post.

 

I reviewed the story elsewhere on the site, so might as well review it here as well.

This story is ridiculous. It is bad enough that everyone is OOC, they are OOC in a way that makes no sense. Harry is almost the complete opposite of his canon character - he is happy being set up and manipulated, and has no sense of loyalty whatsoever. He ditched his friends the moment he saw Romilda. You know, the same friends who risked their lives and fought DEs for his sake a couple for months ago. No person with a shred of decency would act the way Harry did.

Ginny is characterized even worse. I realize that most stories that have pairings other than Harry/Ginny show Ginny in a negative light (if they have her in the story at all, that is), because of course Ginny has to be evil for Harry not to end up with her. The least you can do is make her a competent antagonist and not have moments where the girl who sucks Harry's dick in that particular story stomps all over Ginny because you write her to have the intelligence of a troll.

The less said about the Girls' multi-year plans and massive conspiracies to win Harry's interest the better.

Romilda at least is interesting. Interesting in the sense that I'm fascinated by the depth of her delusions and keep hoping that someone would slap her hard on the face. And maybe then give Harry a Cruciatus or two. And then torture everyone else in the story as well, because there are barely any likeable characters and I just don't give a fuck.

This is interesting. Really, it is the only way anything in the story makes sense - from the ridiculous characterizations to how almost everything seems to go right between her and Harry. May be I'll give the story another go with this in mind.

If he was never canon!Harry he should never have been in the same place as he was in canon. As it is, everything up to Romilda meeting Harry on the platform is the same as canon, which would be never be the case with this Harry's charming personality. Santi's Harry was never Canon!Harry and neither was Control!Harry. This Harry was canon!Harry upto fifth year and then suddenly transformed into this bizarre version of himself, who is more or less Anti-canon!Harry.

I cannot imagine how on earth can anyone enjoy a story with such God Awful characterizations. 1/5.