It kind of feels like you used the newspaper articles for parts of the story that you would've been better off just telling? Maybe it was a stopgap measure as the deadline approached, I don't know. I really would've liked to see Harry actually tackle the Ministry and try to find his wand, use what he's learned during his years of working for the Ministry to its disadvantage and deal with the corruption, personified by Scrimgeour. That would've been pretty satisfying, but it's just not there.

Another problem: Daphne dies and Astoria comes for revenge. It gives her a strong hook to be involved in the plot. Meanwhile, Harry is mostly just reacting and never acting in the parts of the story we see. I don't get the sense that he really wants revenge on Scrimgeour for setting him up or for killing Daphne (random schoolyard crush aside); he just goes with the flow. Astoria lays down her life for him but there's barely any emotional reaction from him to that fact.

The ending line is also a bit odd; Harry miscarried justice, yes, but him ruminating on what's justice and what isn't didn't play much of a part in the story itself. You could've used Daphne's framing as a way to expound on what Harry considers justice and his role in it.

As is, though, I'm rating based on what there is, not what there isn't, so I'm giving this a 2.5/5.

 

It sort of reminded me of Sesc's noir Daphne story, which was pretty charming. I think it captures the same kind of charm well enough, with the looming dread that seems to prevail throughout the story. The Ministry is pretty well established as a complete bureaucratic mess, which allows for the setting of the story to contribute to the passing events. Though it's a bit too short for that sense of dread to actually manifest properly and have much of an effect.

It also feels like the characters don't really behave in a sense that actually fits into what is established about them, instead they assimilate into the plot, staying as just gears in a box rather than actually standing out on their own. I think it could have done much better if the characters became more independent, and more established as their own persons to give the story an extra dimension, rather than depending it entirely on the plot.

I'm also not really sure about the mystery part of the story, if it was even intended. The plot sort of just unfolds on its own without any real internalised conflict in the characters, leaving them behind to fulfil the ultimate resolution of the story, and that's a bit disappointing.

2/5, because it could have been much more.

 

First of all, I didn't like the prose at the start, I'm not sure why but it was off putting to me. Secondly, I feel like you could've paced this a lot better by adding scenes showing what had happened in the most thrilling parts instead of copping out and putting them in Newspaper articles.

Though I did like the twist that Daphne died, I didn't like the fact that Harry didn't remember Astoria. If he really was infatuated with Daphne at Hogwarts he should've remembered at least that she had sister, if not the name.
I would say that's one of the things this entry lacked the most, world-building and the scenes. You could've talked a lot more about why Harry had changed so much that he would go along with corruption, explained that the war went on longer and more brutally. What he's like as an auror, more about his past lovers and etc.

I think this fic could have been a lot better even if it was the same length if you'd just have replaced the newspaper articles with scenes of Harry actually going through the action, like how he was at the pub thinking maliciously about how he would get Daphne to concede to his deal then fighting an getting arrested by trickery, him mourning daphne, him hating Imp/Astoria then at least regretting her death, an finally him killing scrimgeour, and going through trial.

As it is, I would give this a 2/5.

 

Summary

This competition is an absolute rollercoaster. The last story was interminably long, and this story is much too short. As such, I'm probably going to end up giving you the exact opposite advice that I gave the last author. Find a middle ground between the two sets of advice.

That said, this is fine. It's not a particularly bad story, but the fact that it's so bare bones means that it all rings hollow. We're encouraged to empathise with Harry merely because he's Harry, even though the little we see of his character is basically repugnant, and we're supposed to feel something(? presumably?) when Astoria dies, despite having known her for about thirty seconds.

The piece entirely lacks stakes: for the characters, for the society, but way, way worse, for the reader. I feel like maybe for you as an author there was some emotion underpinning this, but it doesn't carry through into the text.

Development

The Daily Prophet articles are, without a shadow of a doubt, the laziest possible way that you could advance the plot of the story and drop some exposition. Honestly, I'm not sure that the story isn't inferable from the scenes that would remain if you just cut them entirely. It might genuinely be an improvement if you did.

As I mentioned before, I don't know that we see enough of any character to get any indication of what they're like, or what motivates them. I think if I were going to start building this I'd probably try to give this all some emotional context that isn't just an info dump. Give Harry some context for the heinous way he acts at the beginning of the story. Give Astoria a reason to believe he's telling the truth when he says it wasn't him. Characterise their thirst for vengeance in a way that isn't just 'well they fucked us over so we'll get them'. Give Astoria something, anything, to make her a rounded character whose loss we'll feel as a reader. Give Harry something to tack some sort of personal redemption or, really, any growth or change.

As it is, right now there's nothing. There's just a drab series of events with no significant weight to them. No particular sense of struggle, or characterisation, or well, anything. Things happen because they need to happen to further the plot and then it ends without having really said anything at all.

I'm going to briefly digress, but please bear with me. Back in the '90s, there was a sudden surge of very talented comic authors (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, et al.) creating super dark, gritty and sophisticated comics. They were great pieces of art, and super lucrative, and they spawned dozens of incredibly pale imitations. Overnight the industry became flooded with a bunch of comics that had all of the obvious trappings (they were dark, gritty, and realistic) but that all missed the inherent sophistication that made them work.

The reason I bring this up is that it's how I feel about this story. It has all of the trappings of a noir story, without any of the content. There's no spark of creativity here, just a bunch of dull cliches half-digested and regurgitated into a barely coherent plot.

Another reason I bring up comics is that there are obvious parallels between this story and Marv's from Sin City. I'm not saying there was any direct inspiration, the similarities are just the trappings of noir, but Marv's story is thick with dramatic irony, with characterisation, with a level of self-awareness, all things that would have been appreciated here.

This was a pretty epic digression, and I've sort of lost track of what I'm trying to say. Maybe it was that you're not as good at telling stories as Frank Miller. Go figure.

Stylistic

There's just not very much to say stylistically about this piece. Your writing is fine, but unremarkable.

The only thing I did note was that there was a little bit of cringe induced when you lasciviously and entirely unnecessarily, gave a groping description of Daphne's body. The story probably could have done without this.

Conclusion

This is probably a 3/5 purely on the basis of style rather than substance. I don't feel like this story particularly broached a topic or any particular themes, but the writing was adequate and you told a complete story, which puts you head and shoulders above much of the competition so far.

With each story in this competition, I'm going to give two pieces of advice that an author can actualise upon, and immediately improve their story. So here are yours:

1) Read the first piece of advice I gave Entry #5. It applies equally to you. I feel like your core idea needs some development.

2) Do the opposite of what I told #5. Get other people to read it, get their opinions, find out if they were able to follow the plot, what they felt about the characters. Make sure that you're getting what you're thinking and feeling onto the page, rather than leaving it in your head.

 

A short and not so sweet story. It’s difficult to get my thoughts in order for this one. It just seems very jarring. The newspaper articles tell something I would have much rather read about from Harry’s perspective.

Harry’s perspective: When does he have a change of heart? His thoughts while he was arrested and put in a cell and his realization that Scrimgeour finally betrayed him, I would have liked to read those. Instead all you show is he’s got a headache and he goes along with Astoria.

Getting to Dawlish’s office and the fight against the gargoyles was good but then once again a key piece of the action gets told via news article and the reader is left a neat trial to conclude an unsatisfying story. The actions sequences are well executed.

To summarize my rambling thoughts: This is too short in the wrong places.

 

(other reviews - have I read them? Fie)

General opinion:

I think I can express this simply.

You wrote this:

I laughed out loud. Then I thought, hmmm. Then I thought, I'm not sure that was meant to be a humorous.

The good:

It was well written from a copy-edit view. I also enjoyed the use of articles - we don't see them much in the competition entries. Although newspaper excerpts are the most played out method, you could say, I think there's something added by using interspersion of 'non-fiction' into your narrative. Going to the effort of formatting could take advantage of xenforo to do things that you can't easily arrange on ffnet. You see it more on some good SB/SV fics - Tabloid being a great (worm fandom) example of this with lots of art and clever stylistic choices throughout.

It was entertaining, and particularly the opening - it had a distinctly PI Harry feel throughout the first part of the opening.

The bad:

The opening would be one thing if Harry maintained that character throughout. The opening would be one thing if Harry maintained that character until the moment of climax at which point he made a rejection of his iniquity and undertook a new choice he could never have made earlier in the story. Instead, he maintains it until the end of the first scene, and changes to be a more reasonable man the moment he wakes - to a far more unreasonable Greengrass.

The very opening paragraph also made me think he was propositioning her, offering her freedom for sexual exploitation until I reread it. Something about the wand and how you described it I think. Then the description of her appearance in the most supremely male gazey way as he beats her to the floor with a curse. Holy subtext Batman!

The structure of the piece isn't strong. Let's use the most magically powerful number, all things considered, and discuss a nice simple seven point structure you can apply to even a short scene and have a logical progression.

1. Character weakness/moral need
2. Character desire
3. Opponent
4. Plan
5. Battle
6. Self-revelation.
7. New equilibrium.

I think you failed at 1, 6 and 7 and so you failed at telling a compelling story. Reading it, it just didn't read right at the most basic level. There was the imp suddenly, the character decisions all the way through. Because we can't even assume correctly about the characters - I have no grasp on which parts of canon you've accepted and what's different. It's basically all new characters, and we learn nothing about them.

It was all events, no cohesion, no character. It was season 8 game of thrones.

 

Auror Harry is usually a favourite genre of mine, but unfortunately things didn’t really work out here. Many background facts are confusing, the threads unpleasantly difficult to follow. Harry Potter is part of a corrupt law enforcement force? Orchestrated by a (somehow alive) Scrimgeour? And Daphne Greengrass was a Knockturn Alley prostitute? All of that is thrown at the reader with little to no explanation.


My biggest point of criticism is that the actual worldbuilding in the story is severely lacking. Instead the reader is simply bombarded with twist after twist after twist, with little time to dwell on any of them. The newspaper excerpts go out of their way to tell us things I’d have much rather read about myself, only working to confuse the reader even more with their sudden time jumps. And in the end we don’t even find out what happened with Scrimgeour to make him rule the Ministry like a dictator. It seems to me you had a certain set of OOC character developments in mind, but rather than tell the story of how those happened (with Daphne perhaps playing a part in Harry’s decline), you simply declared all of them real and put together a flimsy revenge story around them.


I would also like to add that prompt use is somewhat dubious. Daphne only appears in the first scene and is otherwise reduced to the thinnest of plot devices, while Azkaban is never really in the picture, existing only as a concept of an all-too-short purgatory in Harry’s mind.


I also found the singular fight scene quite hard to follow. It was somehow disjointed, despite very little actually happening beyond Harry getting crushed by a gargoyle. Did Dawlish wound Astoria, despite the remaining Greengrass sister having the element of surprise and her questioning Dawlish mere seconds after she entered the office? This is where the 3rd-person limited viewpoint shows its limitations most clearly.


Lastly, a word on Harry as a character. He seems to think himself rather grandiose in the first scene, but then regresses to a mere tool of vengeance afterwards, passive and without any real agency of his own. His reaction to Astoria’a death – sacrifice – is strangely muted as well.


All in all, this gets a 2/5 from me.

 

Very arresting opening paragraph. It’s a good example of something that just throws me into the action and makes me want to puzzle out how the characters got there.

I don’t really like the newspaper articles. They feel like a means to advance the plot forward rapidly, but to be frank I’d rather read what they describe. I’d like to see Harry’s confusion as he’s found with Daphne’s blood and his anger or pain or whatever it is he’s feeling as the Aurors arrest him and send him to Azkaban. Instead we have Skeeter’s summary.

This moment doesn’t land for me, at all. It is just very melodramatic. Harry and Astoria’s conversation up to that point felt more expository than human, so then when you try and hit me with this gut-punch I just don’t buy the emotion you’re selling.

And then again we have the news article summarizing something that would be interesting to read. How did Harry convince the Minister to confess? I would’ve liked to read it.

The ending just feels needlessly bleak. Why exactly did Harry get life in Azkaban? For exposing corruption? I’d like that to be justified a bit more if you truly intend to have this dark of an ending. As it is, it just feels perfunctory--This story is a noir, therefore it must be melodramatic and depressing.

The ending, to me, feels needless in the same way that upping the Dursley’s abuse to torture or maiming of Harry feels needless. Edgy for edginess’ sake,

I think 3/5 even though I’ve been mostly critical. The scenes that you’ve written are pretty good, and that’s why it’s annoying that we gloss over other interesting scenes with just newspaper articles. So I guess what most irks me is that it feels like you didn’t have enough time to do the whole thing, and that the dark ending doesn’t feel earned. It just pops out of nowhere.

 

This is interesting. It feels like the more noir-detective stories, and I appreciate that, but I'm not sure you could have pulled it off with the wordcount given you. I'd peg this at a 40-60 thousand word story, something that you could put thoughtful pieces in, showing the buildup through hindsight. Working it in, you could put clues through the story that would be much more easy to spot the second or third time through. You could easily make this a proper mystery novella.

The newspaper articles have their place, but I'd rather you use them the way they're used in Sherlock Holmes- something to show motion taking place behind the scenes, not taking the experience of the main characters away from us.

I'd have liked to see more with Astoria. She had interesting hints that you could do with revisiting, motivations that could come out in conversations, old flings that they fight, bribes they use, etc.

 

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.

But y tho?

I have a components of story thing that I've been copypasta-ing into each review. Let me toss it here, and then I'll give you points as I can. I'm not a noir guy at all though, so the applicability of my advice specific to this story might not be what either of us would hope for it to be.

For me, there are 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.

So, that said, let's get into this story.

It's all a bit much straight off the line. Think about your favorite bits of fiction and powerful emotional moments in them. Think about works you enjoy that begin in media res. Do the powerful moments ever come in the opening? No, of course not (unless you open with the climax of the story then skip back in time and arrive naturally, but even that is crude at best). Why is that? Because if the "powerful" moments come too early, they become parodies of powerful moments. Instead of moving us to feel, they move us to make memes. Assuming this is a serious entry - which I have - you definitely want to keep your writing more grounded early, stay away from tropes where you can, and make sure that every moment you mean to be impactful is earned.

BUT Y THO

I don't know that any amount of build can save beats like this mate.

I don't want to just take shots at this throughout so I won't, but I do think the components of storytelling above might be helpful. Especially remember the importance of constantly asking yourself why you're writing what you're writing and building characters that feel like people. I think doing those things will do a lot to ameliorate all of the issues I have with this.

 

Congratulations, y'all.

Spoiler: Pulled from my submission thread since it was locked as I was writing this up

I already brought it up a day or so back in chat, but #6 and #2 are both mine. I agree with everyone on the flaws and failings, and I wanted to thank you all for taking the time to not only read this, but to review it thoroughly, and to apologize that I could not present a tighter story for either prompt.

Inspiration for this struck the morning of the 13th.

And all it gave me was a vague notion of noir, stemming entirely back to a Harry/Daphne conversation at a dining room I'd already thrown away three days earlier. I wrote the entire thing in about eight hours, on far too little sleep and closing on far too long awake by the end, since I expected the deadline was due the next day.

The newspapers were there to fill the gap. I just couldn't think of how to write those scenes in the moment, and took an out to advance forward. Next to nothing was deliberately planned beyond Harry arresting Daphne on false charges, and him getting arrested in turn for her murder. Initially I had Dawlish straight up sucker punch Harry right then and there as the scene was wrapping up, and his last memory before blacking out was one of the cleaner's slitting her throat.

I tried to be more subtle, for all the good it did me.

Astoria popped up as I was staring at the screen with Harry waiting to go to Azkaban. I hadn't meant her to stay around beyond hearing Harry's perspective, that evolved on its own as I thought about how I could use her further.

I tried reading a noir-style guide somewhere in the middle of that and kept referring back to a few things(like the empty Ministry, Astoria filling in for the femme fatale now that Daphne was dead, and that this couldn't have a happy ending so... off to Azkaban for sure for Harry since he had been setting up and acting on the false charges for so long).

I had no idea why Scrimgeour was responsible for all of this. I was just borrowing him(and Dawlish, I suppose) from Emerald Mirror last year, and him being the generic corrupt authority figure I expected was needed for the setting. That's largely why I just skipped the confrontation and settled on another article. I almost ended it there, before I decided to tack on one last scene of Harry on trial, and as I was writing his final thoughts I was left, again, staring at the page wondering just what I was trying to do at this point. There was no proper ending planned, and I hate that, since I've let you guys down with endings before.

Through advice from everyone, I've been trying to rewrite a better story the entire reviewing period. Breath more life into the characters, the backdrop, the plot, the reasoning. Flesh things out for how they got here, why they're being done the way that they are.

But I'm still running into the problem that killed the stories I wasted this quarter with previously, I cannot settle on a serious opening and run with it far enough to grow legs of its own, even though I already have the basic skeleton here.

I had to turn off my usual incessant editing just to advance with #2 far enough to reach the prison(that entry also being written in about 8 hours on the 12th), and it wasn't much better a day later when I started with this, though I feel the Noir/Daphne submission is the definitively stronger of the two.

I really want to do this story justice. I just don't know when I'll actually manage to pull it together right, and again, I'm sorry.