Title: Aphelion
Author: DresdenBlue
Rating: T
Genre: Romance/Adventure
Status: 19 chapters (111k words), possibly Abandoned
Category: Alternates/Crossover
Pairings: Hermione/Loki
Summary: Hermione becomes friends with the quiet young man who shares her corner of the library. It changes things - right up to Avengers, Ragnarok and beyond. Starts pre-Thor during HP&PS and moves into AU versions of movie! and comic!Marvelverse.

Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8188379/1/Aphelion



A Harry Potter/Marvel crossover featuring not the Boy-Who-Lived, but the resident bookworm instead.

I'll be straight upfront—I have mixed feelings about this fic. The story has a prologue that starts off in medias res near the climax of The Avengers, followed by three parts leading back up to that point in the timeline.

Part 1 is my favourite. It's a 7-chapter vignette series—one for each year of HP canon—that slowwwly diverges up to the point where Loki and Hermione's interactions start to be felt in Year 5. It's here where the relationship builds up, less a romantic one and more that two beings with shared interests in learning magic, a thirst for general knowledge, and love of books come to an understanding with each other.

The two first meet within the first few weeks of Hermione's first year, before she's made any friends. She first thinks Loki to be an upper-year up to the point where he vanishes and she thinks she's been led on, which becomes one of the precursors to the Troll incident. The following years she realises him to be an outsider but the promise of what he can teach her seems to outweigh her need to report him, especially since she still considers him her first friend.

It pretty much ends after the Battle of Hogwarts where the two trade barbs over their levels of involvement and they go their separate ways again.

Personally I'd give this fic a 4/5 if you read up to this point and stopped here.

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Part 2 and 3 follows a 10+year timeskip and an altered plot of Thor and The Avengers respectively. Hermione is... not quite disillusioned with the Wizarding World, but she's obviously not comfortable there. Here's where I start really finding problems with the fic. Part two is once again broken up into 6 chapters but the pacing slows to a snail's pace. This is partially because it is covering a much shorter time period, but honestly there are moments where time just skips and Loki seems to have done the entire plot of Thor in the span of Hermione having dinner or something. It's... jarring. Still, there's a sort of denouement where Loki explains his original interest in Midgard and how it relates to his actions, but then he simply ups and vanishes without even a final confrontation with his brother.

Part 3 picks up with Hermione having fallen in with SHIELD (who has apparently been under surveillance by the Wizarding World up to that point, if I interpreted some of the narration correctly). So far it follows The Avengers plot much like part 2's Thor, with just as much skip in narration as Hermione acts behind the scenes. Unfortunately it's at this point that the story lies abandoned, having not updated since Dec 2013.

Parts 2 and 3 I would rate 2/5–3/5, mostly because I dislike too much angst from any character, Harry or Hermione. I'm not a fan of how it skipped over plot points for the crossover for lots of character-driven introspection, but maybe I've just been spoiled by Wand and Shield. Character building by itself isn't bad, I just felt it was disproportionate to the plot. I felt like the first part did it much better.

For the whole story I'd rate a tentative 3/5. However, I'm offering this to the library pretty much just for the first part (which I believe to be a possible 4/5 in itself). If you like the rest of it, great. If you found the rest of it lacking, well... shrug?

 

err... no one?

I thought our Marvel fanbase was large enough to warrant at least a handful of reviews.

I'll leave this on the review board for another week, before I move it based on the votes.

 

I dunno why this is in the review board again but I second the OP. Part one is a high 4/5, parts two and three a low 3/5.

 

Eh..
It's an almost recommendable, maybe.

I've read what there was, fast and without much attention. It was - alright, for the most part. Nothing groundbreaking. A slow build up at first, with very few changes or pushes from canon territory, leading to a more interesting offer on Loki's part near the end the HP book cannon.

Then, it has a middle part which I didn't really enjoy, picking the story up after 10ish years pass without Loki, staring Hermione as a Department of Mysteries researcher sent to investigate USA's Thor's fallen hammer form the Thor film. I couldn't engage with the story completely, but it presented us with Asgard and had at least some tangible conflict in terms that Hermione doesn't really want to approve genocide while Loki thinks about it.

The third part is unfinished, leaving a lot of threads hanging, but it picked up my interest a bit. The part where Harry and Hermione meet with the Avengers had a small vibe of Wand and Shield, and in that regard, it succeeded to entice me to want to read more... Wand and Shield. Aphelion was lacking.

2.5/5 rounded up to 3/5