Title: Datura
Author: Katsitting
Rating: Explicit
Genre: Romance/Horror
Status: WIP
Library Category: Romance ?
Pairings: Harry/Fem!Voldemort
Summary:
“Are you afraid of me, Harry?”
His mouth opened, but no words came. His mind blanked, his cheeks draining completely of whatever color had stained them in response to the curious note of Riddle's voice. It sounded innocuous enough. Harmless with how casual she’d asked the question, but Harry knew better.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13800042/chapters/31727376

Honestly have absolutely no clue how I found this story, I stumbled upon this a few weeks ago, and completely forgot about it until I looked through my e-reader.

A lot of the appeal of this story comes from the fact that it fills up a niche that's never really occupied. The only reason I ever opened it was because it was Harry/fem!Voldemort.

The writing is technically decent on the most part, with a few areas every now and then that could've been phrased better.

The plot kind of reminds me of one in a shitty Drarry slash fic, but looking past that, I think the story is pretty entertaining on its own.

Harry's aversion to female Voldemort is characterised pretty well in my opinion. I think a lot of the story's charm comes from Harry desperately trying to avoid Riddle's advances.

I'd give it a 4/5. The story is paced pretty well, it's grammatically sound, and manages to stay entertaining throughout.

But the reason I like it the most is just because it's Harry/fem!Voldemort.

 

As much as I like my rare pairs, I'm not going to enjoy a story just because it has a unique ship. Having an interesting pairing makes a well written fic more interesting, but does not make a bad fic better all by itself. And the fact that you referred to the plot as being similar to "a shitty Drarry slash fic" does not make me feel particularly good.

Reading the story myself, I can agree that the plot definitely leaves a lot to be desired. Nothing really happens in the story. Sure, the characters do things, but they never develop at all. Fem-Tom is basically the "sexy evil temptress", and that's literally the entire extent of her character. Harry's whole character is "I don't trust Fem-Tom because she's evil but I'm also super conflicted because she's hot, oh no!". With how little development the characters had, I felt like I was basically just reading the same chapter six different times, only with the setting and plot slightly tweaked in between.

With that being said though. The writing is actually pretty good, from a technical standpoint, and if you're interested in this as a guilty pleasure then it's not too bad of a diversion. The story is probably a 2.5/5 in my book, which while not stellar is still worth looking at if the premise interests you and you go into the story with the knowledge that what you're reading isn't winning a Pulitzer anytime soon. Or, you could wait until the last chapter is out and just read that. You probably wouldn't miss much. Plus that chapter is (presumably) where all the hanky panky is, since so far there has been none, despite what the tags claim.

 

I'm a couple chapters in. It's not terrible but man oh man the author uses italics to empathize everything. Annoying. I'll finish the review and rate it when I get off work.

 

Maybe it's just personal preference, but I absolutely hate when people add a bunch of paragraphs between dialogue. It makes the dialogue feel incredibly slow, makes me imagine the people just standing there, staring at each other, while the main character's thoughts are translated into narration. The dialogue itself was mediocre anyway.

It also apparently only has one chapter left, so I'm not entirely certain what the author was intending for this story. 6 Chapters of buildup and 1 chapter of smut...? I don't know, but I'm fairly certain whatever it's going to be is going to lead to the story being largely unsatisfying, dull, and not worth it. I'm not even sure what the plot here really is besides "hot Voldemort makes Harry's brain stop working — but she's evil! — but she's hot... — but she's evil! — but she's..." and so on.

The writing is ok. It's not great, it's not terrible, it just leaves me indifferent. The author does use way too many italics.

Also, Harry's annoying in this. I get it, men sometimes lose their logical side when confronted with a beautiful woman, but it's just irritating to read.

2/5.

 

This is absolute trash.

It completely misses the tone that Harry projects, moreover it completely misses what it means to be male. Like every other slash fic, infantalising men (and women, spacebattles fucking weird obsession with 14 year old lesbians is a perfect example) is just par for the course, as is a stupid amount of italicised words, ellipses, unnecessarily long paragraphs describing scenarios as slow as possible, and of course overly contrived verbal smackdowns.

The plot appears to be little more than a weird set up over 6 chapters to the inevitable sex scene, and given that as of this review it's not uploaded, I am going to extrapolate from the tags of her other words, and from the 20,000 words already written, that it will be 3000 words of trashy magical date rape.

There are no redeeming features, the cast is 2 dimensional, the plot doesn't exist, the smut for the story hasn't even been written yet so I'm not quite sure why I'm even writing this, and while this isn't a real complaint, the overwhelming gender changes are just pointless.

I can only assume this is meant to be a femme fatale piece of smut, and in that it has utterly failed.

1/5.