Hey guys. I'm sorry to double post like this, but I just wanted everyone to know that chapter 3 is now live. I think it is even better than the last two, but I may be biased. As always, feedback is appreciated.

 

Spoiler

Somebody pissed off daddy-squid.
And why is Dumbledore randomly dead?

It's a decent fic with a pretty good premise, but like Tinn said it's hard to follow some of your transitions.

 

New chapter is a bit lulzy at first, but then turns deadly serious. I'm a bit confused by the unevenness of the tone. Is this intended to be a light-hearted, fun comedy or a 'serious,' conflict-driven, squid!Harry fic? It can't really be both.

Harry's interactions with his friends honestly reminded me of 'Finding Nemo.' (How is it possible, though, that his great-great-grandfather was a guppy? Was that just a figure of speech?)

But then things turn extremely violent, Hagrid almost dies, and a major character dies with no explanation. All of a sudden the tone is very grim. Color me confused, but I'll keep reading b/c I have no idea what might happen next.

 

Well, personally, I'm out.

The calamari idea appealed to me as something bizarre, bordering grotesque, that could be written in a number of fun and/or interesting ways -- although still in a pretty odd fashion. Being supportive of the "there's no bad plot ideas except MPreg" theory, to a certain point, I was curious to see what you were going to do with that.

The way James's character was written rather pleased the inner fangirl which, sometimes, rears its ugly head and starts squealing feebly before I silence her again with a cleaver. But even my inner fangirl can't take massive doses of heavy-handed angst; and a few lines in this chapter were definitely too melodramatic.

Plot-wise,

Spoiler

you should mention Harry's safely back into the lake. You never talk about the tank again after papa-squid comes to the rescue.

And it's a bit of a plothole to have Sirius and James fill the tank with lake water instead of using the Aguamenti spell: since they wouldn't need to touch the calamari while doing it, explaining it away by saying "they preferred to restrain from using magic" doesn't convince me entirely.

Did I mention that, even to human ears, the merpeople spoke intelligibly while underwater? They're only talking in screeches when they're out of the water.

Last, the fight itself has Hagrid badly injured because of his own incompetence; or at least that's how it sounded. I thought he was better than that at handling a furious squid, since he's the one taking care of it all year long.

However, the real reason why I'm quitting is the writing. You still struggle with points of views. You add to Harry's point of view bits of information he can't possibly have about the start of term, magical parents, or Dumbledore's attempts to find a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher.

The flashback was... a flashback. Flashbacks aren't good.

The tone of the writing is unbroken even as the tone of the story changes drastically; the fight is described with an almost scientific detachment that completely ruins the impression of sacred terror induced by this one sentence:

James's thought process as he is attacked in turn is... inconsistent. For personal reasons I disliked the fact that he flirted with the idea of letting the squid kill him, but what irked me more was that after he let himself be dragged into the water without resistance, he suddenly found his survival instinct again and decided to get out. Without transition.

Lastly, when James recalled how Dumbledore tried to convince him Harry's fate wasn't Pomfrey's fault, I had a nasty OotP-flashback... I'm more bothered by the characterisation of Dumbledore than by the déjà-vu, though. The use of the adverb "tearfully" was the final blow. It sounded as though Dumbledore was not only incompetent, but also whiny.

I struggled to finish this chapter.

It's still too early to outright label this a bad story, but it certainly is a mediocre beginning.