I'm about halfway through Delenda Est (2013 edition) right now so have avoided reading the most recent few pages of this thread. The story seemed to take a massive stupidity pill right around when

Spoiler

Harry met with Voldemort and escaped being killed. It's crazy that Voldemort doesn't attempt to hunt down and kill Harry or vice versa. Voldemort starts killing other people, Dumbledore and others know there is a dark lord on the loose, but Harry doesn't share his knowledge so they can dispatch Voldie with minimal fuss. I guess that wouldn't be much of a story.

What is this about a reboot? Should I give up on the old version?

 

I read this a decade ago and it was barely readable then. The point is you shouldn't bother reading decade old fanfics. They barely age well. Most of them are trash by modern standards.

 

Thanks. I just got to the part where they jump forward in time. Maybe I will quit reading at this point. That's interesting about older HP fanfics not being good. I'm relatively new to the HP fandom but there were some excellent fics 10+ years ago in other fandoms. I wonder if HP is different because lots of the early fic writers read the books as kids no later earlier (edited) than the 1990s when the books were first published, so they were still teens or not much older when they wrote the fics. By comparison, I know of at least a few Star Trek fic writers who are getting up there in years so they had seen more things by the time they started writing.

I do mostly like Bellatrix's character in this story, and I liked the earlier parts of the story. But too many characters have the idiot ball by now. Harry and Voldie both need to read the Evil Overlord List and take its contents to heart.

 

I'm actually enjoying the post-forward-jump part more than the part immediately before it. It's more crack-ish, funnier, etc. There is less annoying idiocy. In the first half it baffled me how Harry could arrive in the 1970s with all that advance knowledge, with the goal of battling the not yet so powerful Voldemort, and still manage to almost lose. At least the change-up was Voldemort instead of Harry being protected by plot armor.

I see the "reboot" is 100k words instead of 400k, so I guess I should have read that instead. I have never understood why people seek out ridiculously long fics. They are always horribly slow paced. Delenda Est is not as bad as some others in that regard though.

Lots of other fics could use rewrites with 4 to 1 size reductions!

Added: ehhhh the idiot ball is back and it is large. The lawn mowing and

Spoiler

leaving Pettigrew alone with the diary.

. Anyway that's where I am right now. I expect to read the rest but this story overall is a let-down.

 

The reboot is ongoing and will probably end up being very long too.

 

Ah oh well about the reboot. I finished the original version and overall I'm gonna say I liked it, despite some serious cringe in the second 25%. I liked the part after the forward time skip, basically the second half of the book. It was suspenseful and funny, self-aware, didn't seriously pretend to be logical, so the illogicality didn't bother me as much as it did in the first half. Compared to most fics of this length, the writing didn't drag too much most of the time. Bellatrix's character was entertaining, with her brains, nuttiness, and immaturity coming through in different places. She wasn't a convincing teenager because as usual in HP fics, the plot required teenage characters to do stuff (like in wizard politics) that would normally be handled by older people, so the teenagers have to act older. It's ok, we're used to it.

I might look at the "reboot" sometime but have had enough for now. Meanwhile, 3 stars. Could be quite a bit better with some fairly small fixes.

 

Ok I read what has been posted of the reboot. It fixes various issues of the original and introduces new issues of its own. Overall quality is about the same as the original so far. Decent but not great. It keeps some tension going so the slow pacing isn't so obvious, but unfortunately seems headed for ridiculous length again.

I think of newer fics I've read and maybe they haven't been the right ones, but contra @Pikachu I haven't noticed them being better than older ones. New Blood is the main WIP that I've been following. It has some good ideas but it plods ridiculously, is at least 4x too long for its content, and regularly has updates posted in which basically nothing happens. I will look at some of the recent recs from the Haphne thread though.

 

Try this

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...4gy933HW9485k3x_Ac1JsV1alT8/edit?usp=drivesdk

 

That's basically sorted by # of times the story has been mentioned here or on reddit or something like that? Hmm, I've found that sort of thing to not be so informative. I remember you made a few specific recs in the other thread, so I've been wanting to get a look at those.

One thing I notice about these Bellatrix stories is that aside from the initial plot setup, the character herself is almost interchangeable with Daphne from various Daphne stories. Heh.

 

Honestly if you want a good Bellatrix fic read Fury of the hellspawn it's old and one of those old dark Harry fics and mostly smut but it's worth a read. The writing quality is very high

http://web.archive.org/web/20070318011725/http://www.ficwad.com/viewstory.php?sid=39859

 

Anyone know how to get the @Xion bot to post updates about the WIP reboot? It does that for other stories but I didn't find instructions on the scryer site or Xion's profile page.