That the sense of taste of Harry has been violated

 

Taure, you've got a very logical way of explaining your feelings and I appreciate that. With the bean, I can really only describe it like this: EitD was my first attempt ever to write creatively. When you're first introduced to writing, there's a sense of freedom to it. I can do whatever I want, you know?

That's how the bean came to fruition. It was a decision made on a whim. 'Oh, this will be funny!'

If I were going to rewrite the story, I'd either take it out or more vaguely hint that a semen flavored bean is a possibility.

There is one claim that I would dispute, however. You see Harry as "evil." I see Harry as a psychopathic kid who has no direction. Voldemort's the one who has influenced Harry most heavily so far. In the chapters succeeding where you left off, Harry grows more attached to his friends...and Voldemort. Harry is doing evil acts, there's no doubt about that - but is someone evil for not feeling what they should feel? What is evil? Is evil premeditated?

Without spoiling anything, there will come a time when Harry, who has been working and planning with Voldemort, will have a realization regarding everything he's done. And then, at that moment, he will not be able to hide under the umbrella of ignorance. He'll have to choose.

Sincerely, though: Thank you. You're perspectives, Taure, are perspectives that I've never considered any of my readers to have. I should be doing more to connect some things in the story. You've given me a lot to think about.

 

I'm fairly certain it counts as an act of evil what Lestrange does to that muggle couple in the sequel.

 

Oh, definitely, Odran. Do you remember Harry's reaction? He did what many people do every day - he blocked it from his mind and did nothing. Does that make him evil? And if so, what does it say about society?

 

I think the murder of the centaur is enough to establish Harry as evil. Sure, the centaur allowed it in his weird fatalistic way, but that doesn't absolve Harry of moral blame. He's still the cause of the whole sequence of events.

 

I didn't get very far into the sequel, so I don't know anything about this Lestrange incident, but i see evil as something irredeemably wrong, so person who is capable of most despicable acts whitout any feeling of pity. I am pretty sure that canon Voldemort falls into this category. I don't think that Brigade's Harry is evil. Iirc, he had to think weeks about whether he will kill that centaur. Also, he seemed to feel genuine sympathy and guilt for Ron, there at the end.

 

So a murderer isn't evil if he feels a bit bad about it? If anything, thinking about it for weeks makes it worse, as it was thus premeditated murder.

 

"irredeemably wrong"? That'd be something like "Complete Monster"?

 

I've purposefully given Harry "outs" to his moral dilemmas so far. 'Oh, the centaur is willingly giving itself up? Good - that makes my decision easy!'

The peak of Harry's moral compass is probably when he defends Draco. I've also made him deliberately less moral since. That should be viewed as Voldemort's influence. Harry did feel some sorrow for Ron's death, but it was pretty muted. His moral and emotional development was stunted at the orphanage.

 

What I miss here is development. Harry is pretty much evil from the get go. There is no reason for him being evil, apart from his hatred for the Dursleys. There was the Draco-Flint incident, but it was late and it was confusing. Why did Flint do that? I mean Snape is right next door and he likes the young shit.

I would much prefer for there to be a legitimate reason for Harry to be evil in such a long series, but this works well enough.

I think the sequel has more potential, though the murders in the muggle village were in my opinion superfluous and confusing. A week before Harry was eating ice-cream with his mates and now he has no qualms about killing random people (and why do they even kill random people? Canon Voldemort did not do this, did he?).

 

Well, evil person is someone who kills people constantly and does wrongest things that can be done, right? Harry killed centaur, so he is a killer and wrong person. That, however, doesn't mean that he couldn't realise "errors of his ways" sometime after that, and change himself. I just see evil as something superemely wrong. J. P. Moreland said that "Evil is a lack of goodness. It is goodness spoiled." If a person can feel remorse, then he isn't evil, just someone very wrong.

 

Here I though that the Centaur was under an Imperio. Anyways, we have a genre called Dark Harry, Taure.

So....yeah evil Harry isn't anything new.

Hell, Antivash wrote a story of Harry killing his brother and screwing his mother.


Also, you people seem to think that there wasn't any development of evil. Harry grew cold early on, and learned that being the bully is the only way to not get bullied, force begets force, and power is the only thing that keeps you secure. Because the moment that this Harry chose Voldemort, he made a decision, and he must now stick with it if he is to survive and become powerful like he wishes. He isn't a psychopath, he isn't Voldemort by a longshot, he isn't even a hardened killer/soldier going by how he had to look away with Dolohov had himself some fun.

There seems to be a very Quixotic view of Evil here, and what must happen for people to be it, and that they must have a few explicit reasons for it. What we have witnessed is Harry go through a slow, gradual slide to what we would call evil, slowly ramping it up, with Harry justifying it all the way one way or another with a goal.

Goal-Oriented Evil is not nearly the same as callous and wild evil. If you are going to give a bad review because you rather explicitly have a very narrow mindset of what Harry is allowed to be in any fic, regardless of how well the fic does what it sets out to do, you really shouldn't be reviewing fanfiction at all. This Harry didn't evolve over night, he was a different person from the moment he had nothing to do with the Dursley's. And he is written as a boy, not a girl, so he responds to emotional and physical abuse accordingly. Lashing out, instead of curling up and hoping it stops one day.

Because the main conceit you must make, is that something or someone or multiples of the same, WILL be very VERY different, and as such, the story will be different, and thus the reason for fanfic in the first place. If you can't accept that, please.

Fuck off.

 

First off, that's extremely sexist. I would like to introduce you to some of my exes... But, that aside. What does "Goal-Oriented Evil [...] you really shouldn't be reviewing fanfiction at all." even mean?

The problem is he isn't consistent. Voldemort in canon was. Tom Riddle did not care about anyone at all. He was lacking empathy (the love Dumbledore talked so much about), but this Harry doesn't. At some times he is impossibly cruel for little gain and at others he reaches bad fanfiction levels of angst. Considering Draco FAMILY after a couple of months of a very casual friendship? Even JKR didn't go that route.

I have a lot of problem seeing this Harry as a character I should be interested in, rather than a random bloke that is only used for the author's current plot point.

 

The issue isn't whether the author is allowed to write Harry as evil. Certainly he is. It's his story. He can write whatever he pleases.

As earlier posters have mentioned, there are a bunch of extreme AUs featuring Harrys-in-name-only which are generally held in high esteem on DLP. The problem here is, evil Harry isn't particularly interesting to read about. It doesn't matter how well-done the story is or how plausibly the descent into evilness is handled, because we, as generally normal people, just can't empathize with the main character. So it doesn't make for an enjoyable read.

Yeah, he can write about an evil Harry all he wants. I just don't know that he should.

 

So I've now finished volume one, Enveloped in the Darkness. It's certainly better than first impressions, but I still have mixed feelings about it.

Pros

- Decent technical writing, though there are occasional errors.

- Interesting ritual magic. This is hard to get right and a lot of fics fail at it. The sacrifices involved here are genuinely substantial, and the rituals themselves are quite simple, and innately disturbing.

- Duelling pit. While I have reservations about the believability of how far things are allowed to go in there, it's still a fun concept. Who doesn't love gladiatorial arenas?

- The author grasps the difference between intelligence and maturity, with Harry being very intelligent academically speaking but not very mature/wise. He's easily influenced by those who appeal to his particular emotional weaknesses, and struggles to see beyond his own narrow perspective. That's typical of people his age regardless of intelligence. Far too many fics have a Harry who is not only academically gifted but also goes around dispensing "wisdom" (normally just the author cheating and letting Harry perceive things like Neville's confidence issues and potential).

- Harry's loyalty to Voldemort, or more precisely lack thereof, is plausible. Harry doesn't become a Death Eater. He's purely pragmatic: Voldemort has things he wants, he has things Voldemort wants, and they trade. He doesn't forgive Voldemort for the deaths of his parents, he simply is able to temporarily suspend it. (Though why he gives Voldemort greater latitude than Dumbledore is inconsistent, but see intelligence/maturity).

Cons

- As previously mentioned, the slash overtones in the early chapters (mostly the use of language with sexual associations when Harry is in Voldemort's presence, but also the semen bean).

- Boring, well-worn magical theory. While some specific pieces of magic are interesting (see: rituals), the underlying magical framework is dull. I like the rejection of magical cores, but their replacement with chakras isn't much better. Also featured are rune based spells, and the ever-annoying: "magical theory is superfluous to magical practice, to cast a spell you just have to want it hard enough (but only if you're the main character)" intent-based casting.

- The writing occasionally goes off on random tangents at highly inappropriate moments, completely breaking pacing and tension. A particularly glaring example is when Voldemort reveals himself to Harry... an extremely tense moment of bargaining which is interrupted by three paragraphs of magical theory explanation.

- Harry's magical development is far too rapid, with him able to defeat a 6th year in a duel before even the Christmas holidays of his first year. A big part of the problem here is the magical theory the author has committed to (the aforementioned "just want it really hard" spellcasting) as it means that formal education, academic knowledge etc. is almost entirely unnecessary, and so lack of academic knowledge is not a barrier to magical ability.

(In my own "prodigy Harry" fic (Alexandra Potter) I got around this by having Alex delve deep into magic rather than racing ahead, e.g. she would spend first year absolutely perfecting her inanimate transfiguration rather than jumping ahead to 3rd year animate transfiguration. But this avenue is not open to the author here, as they've given magic no depth/complexity.)

- Related to the above, Harry jumps straight into the big leagues in terms of rituals, giving himself huge benefits very early on in life. It would have been good to see more restraint on this matter. In so far as rituals have pagan associations, one potential limitation could have been the building up of "favour" being required before advanced rituals could be attempted, e.g. by routine sacrifices over a long period of time. This doesn't necessarily commit to the existence of supernatural entities/gods - it could simply be that you have to build up a kind of affinity for a particular power before you can use that power to its fullest extent.

- It's not clear how much the author intended the above maturity/intelligence distinction and thus how much credit can be truly given to them for it. The problem here is that it's entirely possible that the author is actually just as immature as Harry (!) and thinks that he's in the right when he flies off the wall and has a temper tantrum in chapter 23. The reason why it's ambiguous is that the narrative doesn't really give weight to any kind of opposing viewpoint. In Alexandra Potter I had a similar situation (a prodigious main character who had gone off the rails a bit), but I always made sure to have a strong presence of authority to chastise her, culminating in the climax of the fic. There's no such balance here - Harry's point of view is the only one given weight by the narrative. He gets no comeuppance.

- Voldemort is rather inconsistent. At times he's the torture-happy insane guy of one type of fanon, at other times he's on the other side of the fanon spectrum "good guy Voldemort" who is a reasonable politician rather than a man intent on ethnic cleansing.

- Last but not least, I think there are inadequate attempts to give Harry moral complexity. The "consent" of the centaur, for example, is not really any kind of mitigating factor at all. There are not many moral systems that say killing someone is okay if they don't resist. The only reason why the centaur consents is that he considers his fate inevitable -- if Harry had not gone to the forest with the intent to murder, the centaur would not have seen his fate and would not have consented. Thus Harry is morally responsible for the whole affair. Similarly, providing Harry with friends does not make him any more morally grey. Almost every evil person in history has had friends. The idea of cartoonish pure evil exists only in fantasy fiction and in the truly deranged. Many of the most brutal child-killers in the world have been normal people 364 days of the year who no one suspects of possessing such depravity. They have social circles, jobs, respect in the community. That doesn't mean they're not evil.

Overall score: 3.5/5

 

After reading Taure's post, I see a ton of fair, useful criticism. I'm extremely grateful for it, as well.

Harry is intentionally immature and his ego has, again, intentionally, gone mostly unchecked. However, if my intentions are not readily apparent to my readers, I've still got some work to do as an author, haven't I?

I think my biggest problem as a writer of this story is not planning things out in much detail. Like I said earlier, this is my first piece of fiction, and it is a fairly long piece of fiction. I'm learning that vague ideas and winging the chapters as they come does not create a fully immersive story, regardless of the writing talent.

I sent - or am in the process of sending you a more personal, detailed response on ff.net, Taure, but thank you once again. If I rewrite the story, I will most assuredly let you all know.

 

Probably fo funzies?

 

I have to somewhat agree with this. But the story was still enjoyable.

This is about the only thing that I strongly, very strongly disagree with you about. He is a prepubescent child, Taure. Sheer recklessness and lack of forethought characterizes this age group....and it commonly gets worse.

Psychopath. Actual, legitimate Psychopathy

Yeah, Harry is evil here. But there are shades.

A cop out and a poor one

Yes, and many of them are far worse than anything present so far in this story. And far more obnoxious

....we have flat fucking ran out of Good Harry ideas and fics, and Indie Harry is getting well worn too.

I read the rest of you spiel after this bit, but frankly, its just plain fucking stupid.

You aren't reviewing the story, you are just shitting on an entire idea for one.

"Let's do something different"

But then people like you complain when something actually different is presented.

But past this, I have said my point of other reviewers, and won't keep on about it. Also, Dexter, Hannibal Lecter, etc etc etc. Empathizing is far from necessary in order to gain some entertainment.

Boys and Girls respond differently to childhood abuse. Powerfully so. Its a noticeable trend. Would you like me to link some online psychological studies and comparisons?

 

I was not aware about this - can you link something interesting?