Title: Ice Princess
Author: Luan Mao
Rating: T
Genre: Romance
Status: One shot
Library Category: Romance
Pairings: Harry/Daphne
Summary: Building a romance from a fanon cliche turned on its head.
Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5864749/1/Ice-Princess

I really like this fic it was good and I am rather surprised it is wasn't put up for review before seems right up DLP's alley anyway go check it out I give it a 4/5 for a original plot and a new look at Daphne.

 

It's a pretty old fic and has been discussed in Almost Recommended for quite a while. It's there in the almost recommendable archive.

I liked the fic when I first read it and have gone back and reread it time and again. It's got one of the few Harry/Daphne romances I can really stomach without it getting out of hand. The parody is spot on with the proliferation of the "Slytherin Ice Queen" shit at that time. Still, I'd give it no more than 3/5 because reasons. I agree with it remaining in Almost Recommended.

 

This one is just all over the place. The author stated that it was conceived as a parody and then turned into a romance. The problem is that it's lacking both humor and romance, not to mention characterization.

The parody, I guess, is supposed to lie in the reasoning behind Daphne's 'Ice Queen' persona:

Spoiler

her evil father beat her as a baby, giving her brain damage, and now has plans to sell her to a brothel

She's also plain-looking rather than hot. Instead of having wicked wit and offering to help Harry navigate his way through politics, Daphne has a total lack of personality. She's a fembot who can't express emotion or use contractions in speech. I guess that undermines the trope, but it doesn't make it funny or interesting.

Everyone else around Daphne and Harry is two-dimensional, and the fic veers straight into crack at the end, with the random deaths of two Professors and an absurd ending for Voldemort.

Maybe I just don't get the humor. But it seems to me like this is a fic that doesn't know whether it wants to be serious or absurd, so it settled on making a mess of everything.

2/5

 

Pretty much this.

I read it ages ago and it struck me as one of the worst fics in the HP/DG part of the fandom. It tries too hard to parody the “ice queen” tropes and ends up with unfunny humor and a boring romance coming from a character whose only real character trait is absolute blandness.

1/5 trash.

 

Same tbh. He has a lot of great funny fics but this one is just bad. 1/5 from me.

 

For some reason I like it more than I should. It's kind of hard to write a long review for this one, because the story is quite simple. Nothing too fancy about the writing, the dialog or the description.

In the end I think it depend if you think the story if funny or not, and I thought this ''parody'' was funny enough to make me crack a smile.

So 3/5 for me