Title: Dark and Light
Author: Faust VII
Rating: M
Genre: Drama
Status: Complete
Library Category: Dark Arts Restricted Section
Pairings: Harry/Many (Slash)
Summary: He was a genius. He could paint, play music, talk to snakes, control fire. He was more powerful and intelligent then any knew. He had strong 'friends'. The problem was, he had few emotions. Dark Harry. I Do Not Own Harry Potter. -Slash-
Link: FanFiction.Net

I happen to like super!harry, so this is one of my favorite Dark Arts stories. It's fairly long with about 102k words, and 53 chapters, but it's complete. The one thing I didn't like was that there is a LOT of slash. Some might think it a bit unrealistic, and I would agree, but It's an overall good read. I give it a 3.5/5


Edit by Minion: Fixed the Category. Blatant slash goes into the Restricted Section.

 

It's cliché-ridden and horrible. Whipping by Dursley, Snake-Familiar, Trust-Vault vs. Family-Vault (though not available yet), pre-school wandless magic...

The writing is uninspired and boring, usually a string of short sentences not able to inspire my fantasy picturing a setting or a scene:

At least the obligatory shopping spree is mentioned in passing:

1/5

EDIT:

Still not convinced?

Spoiler

"Harry Potter." The hat whispered. "Would you mind letting me in your mind?"

He was sure no one else had heard and slowly let the energy seep out from around his mind.

'Interesting. Those were almost like occlumency shields, yet something else. You were just using your magic to block me out, not mental shields; no mental shield could keep me out.'

'That makes you dangerous.'

'If I could tell anyone what I had read, yes, it could be dangerous. But I have spells around me to make sure all students keep their privacy.'

Harry gave a curt nod.

'Now let's see…'

The hat was silent for a moment.

'Oh my…A fire elementist. And you already have a solid grasp on wandless magic. Simply amazing. Not even Dumbledore can do what you have done and he's hailed the strongest wizard of the centaury. You are powerful….I believe the last time I saw such power was in my makers. The Founders.'

Harry just tilted his head slightly.

'Ah, but that's not the issue. I'm just here to sort you.'

Harry smirked slightly.

'Where to put you….Where indeed?'

Harry let the hat riffle through him.

'I believe you would do well by yourself, don't you?'

Harry gave a small smirk. He preferred alone. But there were only four houses, each quite full, so what did the hat mean alone?

"HOGWARTS APPRENTICE!" The hat shouted.

 

Hahahahaha.

1/5.

 

I don't think I have ever encountered a confusion with this homophone.

Garbage/5.

 

"Eyes clothes", is that some kinda retard word for glasses?

 

To be fair, he'd just drunk the obligatory Dursley poison, administered out of the blue. I can understand his confusion.

 

Pissing DLP off with an extreme slashfic?

--> Stupid and without merit even for a green behind the ears troll.

At least you could've used a fic that is actually well written, not garbage like this:

1/5

 

HAHAHAHA!!

Epic troll is epic.

EDIT:

Rule of thumb: Anybody who calls himself Faust is going to produce pretentious garbage.

 

I figured I would actually try and give my reasons (I'll try to read as far as the third chapter). Starting at the beginning, these are the first words of the fic:

"...Harry Potter was a small boy for his age being inches shorter then his other classmates. He was also a very beautiful child."

Immidietly, the story was unlikeable to me. Most notably, it was because the first thing we gleaned about Harry was that he was:
- (a) small
- (b) beautiful.
Both of these aspects are extremely superficial, leading me to believe the same thing about the author. Why? Because the first thing we were informed about the central protagonist was about his physical externalization. Those elements aren't nearly as important compared the external emotional structure - which what truly drives most Harry Potter stories, I think (or more specifically, the acts of putting Harry in life-threatening situations and watching how it changes his emotional psyche). In essance, what I'm saying, is there was no hook. I don't give a flying fuck if Harry is beautiful. There is nothing to make me like or care about him in the first three paragraphs.

"...He looked like the example of the perfect silent child sitting in the room filled with children who were crying for their parents, making noise, yelling, or running around."

Yeah yeah, I got that the author was trying to juxtapose Harry's maturity level to that of his peers in order to heighten their previous assertions that he was intelligent... but it was done with a bluntness akin to beating your audience over the head with a large, wooden, baseball bat. Shit like that needs to be subtle. Otherwise people are just going to roll their eyes.

"It had all the dimensions almost perfect and even had the petals weighing down with the dew"

There are a few things wrong with this - most notably being that children, at age seven, do not posses the knowledge (I am not talking about intelligence here, but pure knowledge) in order to acheive a feat like that. Why? Because it requires having a level of competency in physics and art, something that Harry most obviously would not have if:
- (a) he was seven
- (b) it was his first time fucking painting.
And again... it is hard as fuck to do painting that realistic using fucking watercolors. Lets also consider the time it would take him to paint such a picture. I don't give a fuck if he is a prodigy, or a genius. Painting things of that quality take a /while/.

"That'll teach you to pass the grade with better marks then Dudley, cheating freak." Vernon hissed above him."

Yeah... that whole scene... I get you were trying to make the audience feel sorry for Harry but it really just made me roll my eyes. The fact that Harry was abused is overdone and cliche, and I can see no reason why the author couldn't have kept his living environment the same as it was in cannon. The abuse doesn't add anything to story. Merely subtracts from it.

"She seemed happy to teach someone who wanted to learn and began to babble about it not even noticing that most of what she said no grade two would understand."

...huzzah for the public education system.

"German words for fun and when he had found Harry had a knack for getting it he had started to give him private lessons at lunch and recess. Harry had got the whole language down in five months."

Damn. Huzzah (again!) for the public education system. They hired a teacher who knew the grammatical structure of German well enough to teach the concepts /seven/ year old and have them process the information. Because that obviously happen all the time.

"The door shut again and Harry studied the glass. Finally he reached for it and with a soft sigh drank it. It had an odd bitter taste to it. He was barely finished when he dropped the glass from numb fingers. It cracked against the wood as he reeled back. Poison? "

Well... that was the one vaguely original thing that was done in this fanfiction. I can't remember reading another story where the Dursley's tried to poison Harry. Just because it is original, doesn't mean that it is good, though. Most notable among my question are: how the fuck did Vernon get poison? Does he know some Black Market dealers living in England? Or did he just pick the thing up from the fucking convenient store. That being said, it was a fairly nifty way to deal with the Horcrux...so +1 to the author of this fic.

"He, for once, fought against the hands. One set of meaty hands held him down, and teeth ripped into one leg. Another set of large hands pried his mouth open and forced something inside. He frantically fought back as he knew what would happen if he swallowed."

This author really needs to learn about being fucking specific when they're writing god damn fanfics. Jesus Christ... I wasn't sure if he was being raped or if a group of people were holding him down and squirting water in his mouth. I get that it was supposed to be "suggestive" but it was poorly done. The author clearly didn't have the writing chops to pull it off.

"He tossed the fire ball to his second hand before making a few more. He started to juggle them around changing them between red, orange, blue and white."

Fucking... really?

Yeah... I don't think I have it in me to read more than one chapter. It was atrocious, poorly written, and filled with overdone plot cliche's. While I could see it, potentially, having some kind of plot in the future (most likely revolving around copious amounts of butt sex with Draco Malfoy), I certainly don't feel any desire to stick around and wait for it to happen.

0.5/5
Note: I'm being very generous here....
​

 

Pop pop!

 

This story has almost 2500 reviews. I know logically that the number of reviews have nothing to do with quality, but it still hurts me.

I'm pretty much fine with cliches; when I see these reviews and that's the only bad thing you guys have to say about it, I'll often give it a shot. I figure as a new guy my tolerance for them is considerably higher than most of you. But even ignoring that aspect, I couldn't read without starting to skim. And I still caught things like this:

Does this guy even read what he writes?

Maybe it was the beginning of an acid trip. "His felt his eyes' clothes and his ears' hat, and his head walked right off his body because, you know, the cut was clean, and then it left to go punch a mountain...in space."

 

Yeah, this is horrible. The characterization in the first section is awful.

Out of curiosity, what is with the post count for the op? I have noticed some of the new users end up getting inflated post counts.

 

I read all of these posts and was considering whether to test out this link for myself. The question I had to pose to myself - Is there any way of using all of these cliches and still making a decent story? Highly unlikely. That is a challenge for the masters.

Abusive Dursleys- Must involve whip /belt
Pre-Hogwarts magic- must involve parseltongue
The Shopping Trip of Wonders(TM)
Trust vs Family vault
Manipulative Dumbledore

Can it be done?

 

It could be done, but it's unlikely that a writer capable of pulling it off will invest the time on something that's at best a deconstruction of the various fandom tropes and clichés. A story is more than just execution after all, and most readers have gotten to the point where if we've seen a concept done a dozen times already, we won't bother picking up a new story without there being an obvious angle we've not seen before (e.g., The Santi's story). Even a story like Nuhuh's Catharsis, which was executed competently while adopting several tired chestnuts of the Indy!Harry era, fell flat compared with what he could have done had he directed that creative energy to other, more creative story ideas.

 

I assume that's because you can't see the posts in the "Sorting Hat" subforum. New users are required to post there before they are able to post elsewhere. It's the only successfull method to block spambots. The subforum isn't accessable for normal users.

 

You know, this story happens to hit all of my perverse fetishes. It is slash which I do like to read. Trust me being gay helps with that. Harry is certainly going to be a dark wizard at some point. However the writing is absolute shit.

And it progressively got worse as the chapters wore on. Yes I managed to read three of them.

Also "Hogwarts Apprentice" ugh. That made me hit the big red x.

Fail/5

 

Even ignoring the slash warning, the summary still scared me away. It just screams that this author would lack any kind of restraint, .

Yes indeed

 

2/5, but that's simply because a 1 is reserved for the likes of My Immortal.

 

I think nine days are enough for this thing.