This is a vaguely okay beginning, except you immediately spiral into rather unfunny directions. I think the bit about Neville being a fat English cunt was where I realized this wouldn't be for me.

I mean, humor is difficult. Most of my jokes are awful, as am I. Still, this ain't it, chief. The dialogue isn't good; "lovely evening, my sweet" is so cringy I legitimately expected Harry to tip his fedora at her. Daphne at first seems to want to tell him to knock that stupid shit off but then engages Harry on his own ground, to my immense disappointment.

From thereon out I basically just skimmed and saw nothing to make me stop doing so. I can't, in good conscience, give this more than a 0/5.

 

It's an attempt at humour, I'll say that, but it sort of just falls off when it tries to be funny. It's a bit too exuberant for my taste, and the characters try to act funny but just are more annoying than anything else, really. It's a bit uncomfortable to read.

There also really isn't a plot. They talk, and they act stupid, and nothing happens. The story doesn't begin anywhere, and it doesn't lead anywhere, nothing happens. I think the cuntiness or whatever shouldn't have just been the only appealing factor of the story, and it wasn't really pulled off properly, so it's just a whole lot of nothing stacked onto a layer of nothing.

I don't think it would have been much of a problem if the funny bits were actually funny, but they're just uncomfortable, and remove substance from a substance-less story. It's kind of the problem when the entire story is just relying on the novelty of it, and there's not much too it other than that. Maybe it just isn't my type of humour, but incessant name calling isn't really my idea of a laugh.

0/5, It's an attempt to be funny but it really isn't and there's not much else to the story.

 

This feels as though it were written by two people, one of whom was actually not a bad comedic writer, and the other who has had a full frontal lobotomy. It's honestly a shame because the opening paragraph is a real corker. There's more than a touch of Douglas Adams to it, and although I'm not a fan of basically anything comes after it, there's an ember of genuine merit here that could be kindled into something better.

It's unfortunate then, that this writer then got either very lazy or handed it over to his idiot sibling. Almost everything else in this story is bad, and not in an 'I wrote a humourous shitfic' sort of way, but rather in an 'I am thirteen and I don't understand comedy' sort of way. Which is a shame, because as I said, there's the potential for something good to have arisen from this work, and I don't think it would take a considerable amount of work to unearth it.

I don't often write humour (and, as we're about to see, for good reason) but I'm going to take my life into my hands here and make an attempt at analysing and rewriting some passages from your work to see if we can bring some of the intended mirth to the fore.

There's a commonality here between this and Entry #9, which is that both pieces miss that brevity is generally a huge component of wit. There's not a single joke in this story that isn't flogged to death, and well into decomposition. Furthermore, the jokes themselves often (to my uneducated eyes at least) have a few too many words in them. If we tighten up some of the writing here, we'll forge a quicker route to the punchline, and give readers less time to anticipate the way that this is going to go.

This then leaves an issue in this passage of multiple punchlines falling in quick succession without enough of a stopgap to properly wind up. I feel this is why it was so artificially padded with extraneous words, but I think you can actually restructure the jokes to make them land harder without the cruft.

This rearrangement gives the jolt of the angry epithet room to breath and also sets up the final punch of the segment much earlier. We have established that the tree is sentient early, so that the punchline that Neville, of course, can't understand it, has a little more set up.

That said, I think we can improve it further by once again using Neville as the butt of a joke, and by tightening up the epithet to give it more character.

It's still not great. As I said, humour isn't my strong point either, but I feel that with the necessary amount of time and care, you could massage the opening section into something genuinely funny and whimsical.

Unfortunately, the latter two thirds of this piece are entirely beyond saving, which is a shame. It felt as though you didn't really know how Daphne meshed with the original scene and so it just devolves into a nonsense conversation. I think if you'd had a better kernel of an idea, this could have actually been pretty good.

As it is, you get one point for the opening paragraph. This is a solid 1/5 for me. And yet, somehow, this isn't the worst story in the competition. So props for that, I suppose.

 

I found this worse then the daphnazaban fic. This wasn't very funny of a parody fic, mostly because I was interested in seeing where the banter would go and hearing what happened to blaise and etc. Instead just like the title and ending sentence, this went utterly nowhere.
It was worse for it because of the promising beginning.
1.5/5

I think if you wanted to go for a full parody, you could've talked more about like the subversion of Daphne being (ugly? the pugnose?) made fun of the dumb blaise plot, and make it either way longer or shorter.

If you wanted to be serious you could've continued with the blaise subplot and just in general, you know built on the story. As it is, it feels like the humor and brief seriousness parts were of two different fics.

I liked the worldbuilding part about the chasewood tree being allergic or something, didn't much like else about the Neville, especially the part about Gryffindor not liking him?

Just in general, halfway through the story I realised the only cunt in it is Harry. Unlikeable protagonist, mediocre humor, no central plot or anything for an ending makes for a poor story.

 

Another weird entry. Well, whatever.

There are a lot of grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes. So many that even I noticed.

It’s called “An End of Sorts”, but I don’t get what it’s supposed to end. There is no real beginning or middle or end. It’s just one fairly boring conversation.

Humor:

There seemed to be something in the air. On closer inspection, it was Neville. But everything about Neville seemed to be up in the air, and so, his situation wasn’t too surprising for anyone, much less him.

This is genuinely funny.

Understandably, the trees spirit didn’t take too kindly to this. It yelled and cursed at Neville and tried to push him off. Yet, Neville ignored it. Perhaps this was because calling someone a “fat English cunt” isn’t proper manners, or more likely, because spirits are invisible and inaudible. Harry was all the more amused nonetheless.

And this is not funny.

I guess it depends on the taste but it just doesn’t seem all that humorous.

0/5 because there is just nothing there.

 

(Not read the other reviews)

General opinion:

Yeah, so this was interesting. I think the story would just have benefited so much if you'd explained how Harry had become addicted to Felix felicis and was obtaining it, instead of making us figure it out as the only logical explanation for his behaviour.

The good:

Let's be clear, despite what you said, it was not a good end. However, I did enjoy the 'except for the tree'.

I liked a smidge of the dialogue, in the cadence and they way it flowed. It's like if Aaron Sorkins' son had learnt his craft from audio tapes of his dad's shows and also only ever submitted first drafts.

Also, I did follow what was happening. I understood it from opening to conclusion. Notice how I don't say beginning to end, because:

The bad:

This isn't a story it's a snippet. It's an idea to build a story on and move around and construct under and over.

It hints at a style of character and a tone you want to strike in a story. But apart from a desire for, and history with, Daphne (and apparently others) that is very different to canon I can have no understanding of the context in which Harry is choosing these things.

In a different review I talked about story structure. Here I would say, there is no clearly identified thematic line, no plan, no concrete goal, no concrete plan, no concrete battle, no concrete change in the character for having experienced the story (or in other characters). I mean, physically, Neville's still in the bloody tree so there's not even a resolution for that. Cus yeah, there's no resolution. There's no ending, there's just an end.

 

Once again I find myself impressed with the brevity of entries we have seen for this competition. The humour, whether it works or not, is certainly exuberant. The opening paragraphs were particularly strong, as you kept cycling back to Neville’s unfortunate predicament, each time extracting one more laugh. And it worked for me, for the most part. It’s certainly not high-brow, but at the same time it’s not great at low-brow either. It’s in passable territory, with excursions to both above and below the usual level.


My biggest criticism is that this story feels empty. There is nothing about it that has any weight at all, and while that can work for slice-of-life pieces, even for an obnoxious prat such as Harry it ought to be possible to be serious at least once in a while. The wow factor wears off quicker than a quarter tablet of Aspirin, and all that remains is a story that runs its singular joke into the ground time and time again. Or, to use a cooking idiom, it throws the slightly undercooked spaghetti at the wall and wonders why only some of them stick to said wall.

All of that being said, I did enjoy the more than slightly lewd callback in the final paragraph. Excellent use of set-up and execution, where both the very start and another casual observation work as the lead-in for the final punchlines.

Occasionally funny, but ultimately too much of a one-note comedy. 2/5.

 

So I must just echo what others have said...opening line is funny. I wish it would’ve kept that amount of wit throughout the story.

This is like the seen in Spiderman 3 where he is cursed with Venom’s Big Dick Energy and he’s walking down the street leering at women and using far too many finger guns. It’s a nerd’s idea of a charming, “funny” guy. The problem is in that scene from Spiderman the movie actually makes it clear that the schtick doesn’t work.

In this entry Daphne appears to go along with it. She really finds this annoying weirdo charming? Why isn’t she casting a wedgie-hex on Harry as soon as he says stuff like:

I just can’t get over how annoying Harry is, so I think there’s nowhere really to go from here. Humour so subjective, and for me this was just not funny at all. And being funny appears to be it’s one goal. You have a submission that is 95% dialog between two characters, and it is just painful to read.

It is at least a scene where two characters meet, they interact, and then they come apart. So there is some form of structure there.

In light of that, 1/5 because it is not completely incomprehensible, but is is just bad.

 

I had trouble with this one. It feels flat, and awkward, but not in the charming awkward way, more the way that makes me want to sneak out of the room to avoid a situation.

It feels disjointed and lacking in direction and energy.

The first paragraph actually looks like it could be used for a prompt down the road, or like it was one somewhere else and adopted for here.

 

Spoiler: Standard Note

Since I'm a bit of a shit who has waited until the final moments of the review period to get around to, y'know, reviewing, this will be a somewhat abbreviated review. I've also not read much of the other feedback, and none of it in the last week. You have my apologies for both. To the former, if you want to discuss your story further after this is all said and done, respond and I'll look at it some more; to the latter, I guess you can take it as an extra voice to the chorus if I don't have anything unique to offer.

I may or may not actually finish these by Ched's deadline, but vote or no vote on my part I will finish them. You guys wrote something, so you'll get something out of me.

This is like entry one's less talented twin. With no offense meant to the writer of entry one, (and no like, grave personal offense meant to the writer of entry 10), that's really all I feel needs to be said here. Like entry one, this has a really good opening few lines, which gradually trail into lesser writing. Unfortunately, the only other positivity I can muster is to say that the piece is mercifully short.

I don't want to be an ass and drag individual bits so I won't do that, but I will leave you the storytelling spiel I've given everyone. As individual feedback, if you'd like to improve this piece, I feel the best way to go about it is to try to cling to the voice you captured in the opening throughout. That bit is quirky and generally amusing, and a short piece done in exclusively that voice and style would have been fine.

Spoiler: Writing Tho

There are - for me - three legs on which every story rests:

1. The quality of the writing - this, for me, is primarily about style and clever word choice, but high quality writing is also, of course, minimally technically sound.
2. The quality of the characters - obviously this is much to large a topic to summarize in a sentence, but some questions for guidance might go something like this: Does a given character feel like a real person? In other words, can the reader get in the character's head to see what drives them and why? Do they have depth, or do they serve only to make the plot work? On a different but no less important note, is the character interesting? Mileage will vary on that point, I'm sure, but if your characters are bland you had better be bringing some prose that'll make Rothfuss sit up and a plot that Palahnuk wants to crib from because otherwise people are going to dump you story half read out of sheer ennui.
3. The quality of the plot - much like characters, plot is tricky to define. Some questions for plot might go something like this: Is this an interesting story; that is, do the readers care about what's happening? Is my plot very clever? Heartwarming? Poignant? Why am I writing this? This last question is a biggie, so I feel it bears repeating. Why are you writing this?

Like a stool, a story stands the strongest with three sturdy legs. Also like anyone who has ever owned a stool can tell you, three strong legs can be hard to come by at times. That's fine. You're writing for a fanfiction short story competition, no one is here to rip you a new asshole for not being literally Hemingway (tm). You do need at least two reasonably sturdy legs, though, or else one hell of a leg and a keen sense of authorial poise.