Some things were laid on too thick, but overall I liked it very much.

4/5

 

Oh god, this was so horrible. It was great. So many laughs.

4/5ths.

 

I've just read it. It was a beat cliche, true, yet I had so much fun reading it.

3/5

 

gr8 b8 m8 I r8 8/8 (5/5)

 

Some really good laughs. The prose isn't the best, but as far as crack goes, this was pretty cool. I must say I rather liked the idea behind Harry's final victory.

4/5

 

I enjoyed this. I feel it was a solid four somewhere before the summer going into sixth year, but I enjoyed it a little less when he came back. I agree with the above that it wasn't pretentious and, as well as this, it didn't rush itself in order to make references - I was a bit afraid it was just going to be a meme a paragraph.

The story didn't mind taking its time and being creative to set up a situation where the reference would fit well. Can't say I understood a lot of the anime stuff but the rest of it was good.

I can't criticise the fact that there was a narrative underneath, which is more than you get from most crack, so overall: Good, would recommend. The treatment of Snape, compared to all the other antagonists in the story, would be my definition of bashing. It was a bit a forced.

But on the other, weirdly larger, hand, it's not often I actually laugh out loud at a story. This did that (those poor chess pieces) so:

4/5

 

4/5. Fucking hilarious. xD

 

The problem with this fic is that it has no soul.

Let me explain that.

Referencing something doesn't immediately give you the credentials of that thing. It creates a connection, yes, but it's up to you as a writer to actually make use of that connection and turn it into something productive, funny, compelling, etc.

This problem is compounded with internet memes in two ways: For one thing, they have a shelf life of about five minutes, which means references from the dark ages like Leeroy Jenkins look beyond dated. The big problem, though, is that the fic simply uses memes rather than making use of them.

First, let's take a look at something the fic did right:

That's a pretty solid joke. It's subverting our expectations of canon!Harry, especially at the beginning of Book 5 where everything is Serious Business. I can totally see it, too: that's exactly what a fifteen-year-old would do. It's a well-crafted joke, too. Notice how there's some buildup, how the pieces fit nicely together and seem to lead organically to the joke.

Automatic -1 for using that phrase, regardless of the nature of the fic.

Here's where you start to see the wheels come off the wagon a bit. Again, that joke actually works okay, because it makes sense in context. You can connect the two elements and see the absurdity of it, and it's kind of funny. Same deal with Harry taking lolcat photos of Crookshanks. It's at least worth a begrudging smile. However, with the quote above, see how the author just runs the joke into the ground? Hermione makes a comment about understanding the reference - and, just in case you didn't get it, notes that it's from the internet.

It's not a subtle joke to begin with, and beating you over the head with it does nothing to enhance what little humor is there.

As soon as Harry says the phrase "power levels," you can write the joke yourself. I don't think the author is a bad person or that anyone else is a bad person for liking it, but you have to admit that the "over 9,000" joke that comes next is fundamentally lazy. It's like, where's the motive power in that joke? Where's the energy coming from? It's something that got steam on the internet and now it's considered funny just for existing. Except - you can't actually just plug jokes into a story and have them make it funny, like "Harry Potter plot + memes = humor." Good comedy is more than that. It's derived from every element working together cohesively, organically.

Patton Oswalt explains what I'm struggling to articulate pretty well here.

Okay, again, not a terrible joke. Parodying something by taking it to an extreme position is a comedy staple. And the three girls top themselves pretty well - I got a genuine chuckle out of Milicent's "I am a genderless pansexual homoromantic fat-positive wolfkin." That's pretty funny just out loud.

However - and it's a big however - the joke is then hit with a shovel and buried under concrete by having Hermione reference Tumblr and SJW. That's not simply over-explaining the joke, that's... I don't even know what to call it. It's the literary equivalent of an "Applause" button or a laugh track. It's just incredibly gauche.

And I'm out. If the story had spent a couple chapters building this up, making this an honest-to-goodness Breaking Bad fusion, complete with Ron taking on Jesse Pinkman's enthusiasm for Muggle science, an exploration of an underground Potions criminal empire, a morally complex Harry Potter, then maybe - maybe - it would have earned the right to use that line.

As it is, while I admire the writer's enthusiasm and appreciate the sense of fun (and the willingness to not take him/herself seriously with gags like Harry acting like a weeaboo and getting shot down by Cho), this comes off to me as one of Nietzsche's "worst readers" ("The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.") picking up a pen and making that philosophy into a fic.

It reads like someone took the framework for Oh God Not Again and decided it would be better if it was shorter and ditched the "parody of canon" in favor of "canon as a vehicle for heavy-handed jokes with the freshness and vitality of overcooked pasta mush". If this kind of humor is really all the fic had to offer over 65K words, then it was about 60K words too long.

8/10 for effort, but minus several million for style and execution, yeah?

2/5

 

I agree with you, though I'd phrase it differently.

This is an amusing series of one-shots, which share a common theme. If you analyse them, they aren't even connected, the ongoing plot points are almost non-existent and any other are discarded as soon as they did their job.

That's why I rated it as a 3/5 not a 4/5.

 

It really isn't that great a fic in my opinion. When looking for library material we are looking for greatness aren't we? It is a one-joke fic. Its funny in parts but that's about it.

Is it good?
Maybe

Is it great?
Definitely not.

 

Whether you find this amusing or not, the Library is for quality writing. I got a chuckle out of this, sure, but it is not quality writing. Also seeing a lot of people calling it a guilty pleasure yet giving it a high rating - the two labels don't really gel, in my opinion. 2/5.

 

I would phrase it differently now as well. Apparently 3 PM is the long, dark, tea-time of the soul where I get super salty, quote Nietzsche, and use the word "gauche" unironically when talking about Harry Potter fanfiction.

Totally stand by the rating, though. It's a very marginal 3/5 that gets an automatic -1 for using the phrase "a certain bushy-haired girl."

 

Everything Newcomb said.

It just spams out references to memes without any clever build ups to the jokes, ongoing jokes or good timing/placement.

Harry sounds like a hyper, immature kid who has just thought of something funny so runs around mentioning it wherever he can. Actually scratch that, he doesn't feel like a person at all. He feels like a random meme generator.

2/5. Solicited a few chuckles, but this is really low quality by even crack standards. And I can find funnier executions of these sort of things in my Facebook feed.

 

What is said above is true. And I didn't really feel the urge to finish it once I stopped reading for a while.
That said, I found it funny, some times more than others, and it doesn't take itself seriously at all.
In a word, it's average, so I'll give it a 3/5.

 

I only got about 20% of the references, and yet I still found this absolutely hilarious. Easily a 4/5- if only because, by all rights, this story should have sucked.

Harry plays video games, becomes super powerful, and starts quoting memes everywhere? 99 times out of 100 this story would be a 1/5 piece of shit- and yet, somehow, it prevails to be a legitimately funny fic.

 

Sadly this is the kind of crack that I can't stand. 2/5 at most.

 

This one goes right in my "wtf crackfic" pile, but I giggled the whole way. Being a geeky one, and getting many references made me have a snickering fit and link a handful of friends who can appreciate the humor. I'd give it 4/5, mostly because crack doesn't hit 5s for me, but it's great otherwise.