Took the time to read through this story to see what the fuzz was about.

The story have an interesting premise, and the characters' reaction seems quite believable. Something that I thought of while reading (something many fics with the premise "Harry begins to take studying very seriously") is that it's lot of telling how he studies. The dialogue also don't really fell like something that children would say, even children that's hellbent on revenge and justice.

But overall a good read and worth the time.

I'll give the story 3/5.

 

Alright, so this was pretty much one of the last "classic" stories from yesteryear that I had never gotten around to actually reading. Well, that's not true. I've tried to read it a few times in the past, but the first two chapters just really aren't that interesting to me, so I never got past them. Well, this time I sucked it up and read everything. First thing's first, I rate this a 4/5. It's actually closer to a 4.5/5 in my books, but I won't round it to 5, since I don't think it is a 5/5 story. Perhaps if it was finished, or showed potential of being finished, I might. Or maybe if I had read it back when it was still an active story.

My faults with the story are mostly minor, and probably the sort of thing that if I had read it when the story was active, I either wouldn't mind, or would have hate it more.

Mostly, it's the fact the whole story is a training montage. Sure, that's pretty much expected, given the premise, but it's not even thinly-veiled. You're given exactly what is expected. And that's fine. It's well written. Extremely well written, even. I don't think I saw a single spelling error or grammar mistake. But, you still have things like Harry learning indy!Harry staples like "wandless" magic, occlumency and stuff like that. Sure, it's well done, but the biggest reason I don't like that stuff is that they almost never have a use in the actual story. And, to clarify on that, I mean a use that isn't strictly constructed just for the sake of saying that they had a use. So, they're mostly extraneous and doesn't add anything to the story that couldn't have been done in other ways.

I guess that's part of the problem why I downrated the story slighty. Everything is too mechanical and formulaic. All the drama was carefully constructed so the author had an excuse to use a character as a mouthpiece to "solve" frequent fanfiction dilemmas. It happened at least 3 times, and it was heavyhanded each time.

First time was when Harry and Ron got into an argument. It was random, and literally happened with no warning. It really felt like the author was just looking at his notes and saw that "Ron and Harry have an argument" and had to fill in the blanks for what that argument was. In this case, it was about Unbreakable Vows. I found both sides of the argument to be nonsense to be honest, and I'm not sure if that was intentional, or if the author was trying to hard to make it feel like Ron was mostly in the right with providing what the author probably felt was a sound argument (though I didn't seem that sound to me), while Harry still had some valid points. Regardless, the whole thing felt out of place.

But that sort of thing seemed to set the tone. It happened at least two more times, one with the random Statute of Secrecy topic, which really felt like the author simply wanted to present his opinion on the whole muggles vs wizards thing, but do it it a manner that was more concise and well-thought out than other fics that mostly use the topic as a bashing method. It fell kind of flat to me, since decadency and complacency are a real thing.

The third time was that super random "debate" in the middle of the great hall with Zacharias Smith.

Oh, and there was also the whole Dementor argument. Seemed kind of pointless.

So yeah, it felt kind of heavy handed, and wasn't really that interesting. Still, a good story.

 

Anarchy: Yeah, it's pretty dated at this point. I can remember when a lot of these ideas were (kind of) shiny and new. Forging the Sword is well written in a technical sense, but the story is a mess. Honestly, this reminds me a lot of A Cloudy Path by LacksCreativity. The writing is good enough, there's even a few tidbits of interesting worldbuilding on occasion, but there are fundamental structural problems and pacing issues throughout the story. This doens't really have a plot, per se, and ACP inherited all of Worm's growing pains because of Lacks' lockstep pacing with canon- with none of WB's skill at characterization. By today's standards, Forging the Sword really is a 3.5 to 4 depending on one's taste- but when this was first written, it was clearly a 5/5.