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.

 

Chapter 78 is up. This version of Harry is so frustrating. Good chapter otherwise. Next one expected in a week or two.

 

What's wild is that Harry in here doesn't really do anything more reckless than in Order of the Phoenix, conceptually - the only difference is that he's dealing with a much more competent Voldemort and Death Eaters, and that consequences in the books were fairly limited to just him with Sirius's death; something that was very much not guaranteed given he was taking plucky teenagers against terrorists with body counts.

The consequences here? Good god. You have to applaud the author - there isn't a more fitting straw that could have broken this camel's back.

 

I've gone back to re-read this from the start, and it's been enjoyable. Gorgeous prose, compelling characters - the kind of things that matter most to me as a reader nowadays.

 

Isn't he a bit more appraised of the consequences and aware of the risks in this fic? And still goes ahead and takes the risk anyway?

He's just so whiny, self-absorbed, and apparently willfully helpless in this one. The verbs the author uses for him give away how nuts it is - he gasps, cries, hisses. "Harry smiled into her shoulder, brittle, and withdrew." He's written like someone's caricature of what a sensitive guy would sound like, where the writer doesn't know guys particularly well. Guys obviously can feel vulnerable and experience feelings. That's not the problem, it's that the vulnerability and neediness seem like an identity for this Harry.

Anyway, next chapter is out tomorrow LFG

Edit: @hobbesian how'd you find this fic in the first place? Any tips for finding good new fics that may be escaping the rest of us?