This has continued to update at a great pace. I tend to skip the romance-y scenes and get irritated with the way Harry's written - I guess the word for most of what I skim is melodrama, which is one of the great AO3 syndromes. Anyway the fic itself has still been great so these are relative nits to a story I'm still enjoying and interested in. It looks like we're getting the hints to some more canon divergence, even if it's just slight, and that's been exciting.

 

Half a year later and we're sitting at 77 chapters. I still don't care for how Harry's written. I'm not totally sure what's going on with the situation at Hogwarts at the moment. But the story's been good apart from those two pieces. I'm still interested. I definitely recommend it to anyone who's been considering reading or looking for their next fic.

 

Yeah, I'm very glad that we're getting—or at least appear to be getting—somewhat regular updates now. We're at about ~760k words which seems insane, but it's still probably the best actively updated fic out there at the moment.

 

I've come around more on disliking the way Harry is written since the last time I commented here - there's definitely an air that the author wants to go more 'injured fawn' with him but is restraining herself. While he's certainly done his share of sullenness and brooding in canon, A key characteristic of Harry is that he's never been willing to sit down while there's problems he can go run down, and going back and rereading, I feel like it's been definitively lost somewhere - there's a great deal too much of Harry basically suffering paralysis (in both the emotional and narrative sense) when something sufficiently traumatic or upsetting occurs.

Or, in simpler terms - Harry was always a 'fight' person in the 'fight or flight' equation, even back in the early books, after he found out he was a wizard and had parents who loved him; prior to that, with the Dursleys, he was mostly avoidant or emotionally shut down. Here, in this fic, while he is still a fighter when someone goes after his friends, in his interpersonal affairs, he seems to have been switched over fairly consistently to flight or even fawning in some cases - the latter of which was never seen in Harry repertoire that I can recall.

However, my admiration of the prose remains the same - there's a beautiful gift for evocative language that's present in the places where teacup takes the time to wax poetic, and she also seems fairly adapt at making each character feel alive even in a few sentences of dialogue and description - there's never a case of 'character named X showed up' and you get no impression of them, and that's impossible to accomplish by accident.

The same for Malfoy and his relationships - he's consistently extremely alien in how he thinks about them based on his upbringing as basically a Victorian noble with the same sense and sensibilities, and I appreciate that he feels alien as well.