Because it's cool to pile on. It shows how in touch you are with your literary self.

What I don't get is however much people seem to hate on this story, they're still reading it and bitching because they think it's so bad. I get why they hate it. That's not the problem. I hated on MoD after the sixth or so chapter, gave a couple of chapters to redeem, and then promptly gave up and quit reading. I also quit visiting the thread.

I also did this with some other story the multi-time travel Bellatrix/Harry one. Same shit. I bitched for two chapters and moved on.

You people are like cutters. You crave the punishment or something. It's becoming pathological. "Why does it suck so much? Why do I keep reading? I can't stop myself from bitching. Where's my knife. The world is so unfair."

Get a life and move on. Jesus.

 

On topic: I agree with above. I dropped this story a good two dozen chapters ago. Redundant, pointless bitching doesn't help the thread at all.

 

It's not like this story was shit from the start - it was good enough for us to invest time in reading it. It's only the last 3 chapters that I feel it's fallen apart.

Because the story WAS good and had a lot of potential. We all got excited as to see where it'd go and now we're all lamenting the fact that it could have/should have been better. And I think we're all still reading it on the off-chance that it might get back on track, hoping that the issues are all just minor hiccups.

Though after this chapter, I think all hope is gone. That scene with Luna and the Dursley's just felt like something you'd read in some terrible half-crack independent Harry fic.

 

Meh.

There's always going to be the "bandwagon" and the "anti-bandwagon bandwagon." Somewhere along the line, agreeing on things or having similar opinions became a bad thing. :facepalm

Yes, of course, there are those who only pipe up with their two cents so they can be part of the group. But, for every person like that, you'll have more that are simply trying to say, "Hey, yeah, that's what I thought, too! I guess I'm not the only one."

And, for every person hopping on the bandwagon solely because they want to be part of the 'cool' group, there's a person calling people out for being part of said bandwagon, either because it's 'even cooler' to be part of the anti-bandwagoners... or because it's a cheap-ass way to try and invalidate someone's argument, or even their honest opinion(!) without doing any work.

I'm not sure which is worse, so for the time being I'll settle for, "They're equally lame."

As for Firebird, I'm still waiting to see if Hermione's behavior is still obnoxious the next time she's 'on screen.' That (and the looming specter of a possible WTF Gainax ass-pull ending) has been my only notable complaint, so far. The bad stuff hasn't nearly been sufficiently bad for me to stop reading it.

This isn't anything mysterious: The more people like something, the more nuts they're going to go when they perceive it to be going in an undesirable direction. The more you invest in something, the more there is to lose.

Sometimes all it takes is a single word, say "delusional" to make half a fan community go entirely apeshit.


And, some people just can't stop watching train wrecks.
And, some people just like to bitch.

MST3K and Rifftrax wouldn't have gotten very far if everyone simply turned their backs and went on about their business when they decided something sucked; out there on You Tube there's practically a cottage industry of making fun of things for profit... though, I grant without hesitation, MST3K is at least funny, while bitching is usually just bitching.

 

All Right.
This is not a necro posting. The author recently finished the last book of the Firebird Trilogy - Firebird's Fury; Here is the link:
FanFiction.Net

Now, after reading all the three books in a row, I must say that the first page of reviews on this thread is misleading. This story in my opinion is one of the best comprehensive AU's available in fanfiction as of now. The AU is based on canon, takes major elements from canon, but is still far from anything JKR wrote. If she had written anything like this, Harry Potter could never have been a children's tale.

I understand that some might find it creepy, misogynistic, etc. and at times it probably is but it all makes perfect sense if you look at the world he has created. These fics are custom designed to create anger towards the fucked up situations and life of the characters in general.

This is a harem fic, yes. But it is the first one I have read where it makes sense. He doesn't want it; she doesn't want it; they still have to do it. Moreover, the author has shown remarkable constraint in introducing and developing the characters of the girls. Hell, Harry doesn't even meet his first wife in the entire first book, that is forty chapters.

The entire trilogy is full of OCs and each one of them has been developed. It does not feel that we don't know anything about this character or something. In spite of being new, we can imagine Morgan with a cowboy hat with a feather on his head and taking the shit out of everybody.

The story really picks from the second book, action wise. Harry struggles to take the control of his own life from some old hags. He, like any normal man, makes mistakes. He rants and raves at his wives; they do so likewise. He doesn't develop lovey-dovey feelings in a moment, and himself has to take love potions to keep from going insane. His mother has laid a path for him; he doesn't know what to do with it.

Voldemort is believable here. Horcruxes doesn't play a large role but the concept is used. How the evil monster became what he became and how he absolutely hates witches in general is shown nicely, especially in the last few chapters.

One could not help but absolutely HATE goblins after reading this fic. They play a major part in the third book and are shown as absolutely evil disgusting little monsters who perform deeds of so heinous nature that you just want to blow up Gringotts with a nuclear bomb.

At its core, this is a political fic. And that too, politics between the two sexes. If the world were to spin in the opposite direction and women had all the power in the world, would they be so cruel? As I said above, sometimes this does feel misogynistic but the goblins are enough to destroy that notion if you can read that far.

One thing I really liked about this is that Harry has been given a host of seer powers but still he is too weak to fight Voldemort one-on-one. He is not super!Harry. And the last fight is one of the most realistic endings I have ever seen. Voldemort too took something from him at the end. Something irreplaceable. That does not mean he has not sacrificed before that but...you'll see.

The character of Hermione Granger deserves a special mention here. I do not like fanfics where she is paired with Harry but I too liked her in this one. She shocks you with her decision in the last chapter. That just wrapped up her character really well. Something, most authors fail to do.

All in all, this has action, drama, romance and a little bit of humor as well. But mostly, its a quest to change a rotten up system with something worth living for. The quest to change the world.

I really loved this one. 5/5 from me for the sheer zeal the author must have possessed to complete this massive series.

 

Pretty sure it's still a shitfic.

 

The Firebird trilogy is one of the most comprehensive AUs in the fandom - the worldbuilding is great and unique. Hardly a shitfic, although the last half of the final part and the beginning chapters of the second one are pretty bad.

Overall I would say that the setting of the story is great, but the execution leaves much to be desired.

 

A very detailed shitfic is still a shitfic.

 

Without context it seems like you're describing a Second Chance at Life.
Which is at best divisive.

Anyway, because it's complete now, I tried to reread it.
But while technical writing is IIRC at least decent, the premise and the events were just so grimdark I didn't really care anymore.
I had to stop around the whole Luna dildo thing - if you've read it, you'll know what I mean.

 

read the first book. Felt no urge at all to keep reading. 2/5

 

The basic thing you realize very early on in this series is that no matter how bleak and depressing things look, they always get worse in the chapters ahead.

Having somewhat of an occasional liking for the grimdark, I gave this a shot, but holy fuck, there just comes a point where it's not grimdark, it's just plain stupid. As BTT mentioned, the whole Luna 'healing' event, where she's pretty much brutally raped by a large dildo, in order to fix her up so she could have children, is where most folks seem to stop. You just stop and look at it, and wonder "When the fuck are good things going to start to happen?" and they don't, so you end up stop reading it.

Oh and Harry seems to be a pussywhipped bitch, so yeah, not my favorite thing. Sure, sure, try to explain it how it all works in the harem mechanics, but I just plain don't give a shit. It's not my thing. But for all the neat stuff it did, the depth of reworking the entire world, and I do mean entire world and not just Britain, this story gets a solid 2/5.

 

Didn't hate it, didn't love it. I did finish it, skipped through a lot of it though. Even for a grimdark fic it came off as trying too hard and the author takes himself way too seriously. The main positive for me was the harem, ironic considering my hatred for the genre, but it was done rather well. Some might say the ending was realistic. I found it ridiculous.

 

I thought Book 1 was extremely solid; it took HP and did something unique with it in a way that was comprehensible and well-written, which is enough, in my book, for it to be noteworthy. The first book makes Harry feel like Harry and the world feel developed, with dark mysteries only hinted at. It made me want to read about how Harry was going to come into his own in such a seemly unjust world.

The second and third books are not my cup of tea.

I've said it before somewhere, but I'll repeat it here - this series is a classic example of Darkness Induced Audience Apathy. Stories are allowed to get grim, stories are allowed to get dark. By all means, kill off major characters and have terrible things happen to the people they love. Executed well, these can be great dramatic moments. You can even lead your story to an unhappy ending and have it come off well.

But you have to leave a door open.

Even if I'm reading a cavalcade of horrors, I still need some kind of outcome or character to root for. By the middle of Book 2, I was "rooting" for Harry to smother all four of his wives with a pillow, and for aliens to destroy Earth.

ASOIAF, for all its fantastically grim overtones, gives you characters like Jon Snow, Arya Stark, Tyrion Lannister - people you can really get behind, characters where it's easy to be in their corner. Firebird has... Harry, I guess? It's hard not to see him as a gun designed by Lily who ended up on a path with steel side-rails, though.

That's the rub, for me. I could get behind Harry and his crew if he made the determination that he didn't still have to do it. But the world has been designed to be so laughably horrific (and his own choices and path designed well in advance by his zealous, borderline sociopath of a mother) that he doesn't have a realistic choice other than to try to work the system (with the Light Covens, the IWC). And the system is so monumentally fucked that for me, the door closes.

The author is a solid writer, did an excellent job worldbuilding, and really knows his way around generating extreme, slow-building and deep-burning disgust for certain individuals and groups. Parts of Book 2, where it looked like the Muggles might be able to help after all, and then it's like, "oh, wait, no they're torturing witches instead" really reminded me of the Seanchan in Wheel of Time.

RJ did such a great job, in The Great Hunt, of putting you in Egwene's head and showing you the utterly dark and disgusting way the Seanchan view female channelers. It was tough to read. And then, over the rest of the series, you get these deliciously satisfying scenes where some of those same characters get what's coming to them - the leash holders getting leashed themselves, a taste of their own medicine. Symbolic, satisfying, and deserved. Note that it wasn't all sunshine and puppies - the Seanchan are still around at the end, and it's not like the whole society woke up and realized that they were horrible people who condoned slavery. But the door is open.

The Firebird trilogy doesn't have the second half of that. And, by making Harry and his crew so unsympathetic, even if it did, it wouldn't have the same punch.

It's a 3/5 for me. Worthy of note, worthy of discussion - and, judging from the amount I've written here, good at engendering discussion. It's not a fic where the author had a story to tell, and couldn't really articulate it. The author is a good writer, with a good concept of pace and story - I just take issue with the particular story that he/she wanted to tell, insofar as it's not a particularly good story.

 

Volsemort's death scene actually made me want to throw up. DM never changes.

 

Surprised that this trilogy of HP FanFics isnt much more popular

For those of you wondering im talking about the FireBird Trilogy by Darth Marrs. Its probably one of the few decent Harry x Luna fics out there. If you're bored and open minded, you might want to give this a go.

Link: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/8629685/1/Firebird-s-Son-Book-I-of-the-Firebird-Trilogy

 

If you are really curious, browse the thread into which I just merged your post.

How about leaving a nice, elaborate review?

 

Sorry, guess i didn't think about already existing threads
Thanks for merging!