Title: Pathetic
Author: A-Kubrick-Spent
Rating: M
Genre: Tragedy/Romance
DLP Category: Dark Arts
Pairing: Harry/Parvati, Harry/Luna
Status: Complete
Summary: Harry Potter has failed -- Hogwarts and Britain are lost, and the Dark Lord lives still.
Link: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5241798/1/Pathetic

This story has its share of problems. There are a number of stylistic errors, a few of the character interactions feel forced, and the dialog falls groan-worthily flat in a couple of places.

That said, I've read very few things like this. My story ("To Children Ardent...") touches on a lot of the same tropes of war and loss, but this is far darker and far madder. Despite what the title and genre suggest, there is no angst -- it is an increasingly surreal apocalyptic nightmare with mythic elements and tantalizing hints of backstory.

 

I honestly couldn't get passed the first chapter due to the grammatical mistakes I was seeing. There was an overabundance of dashes for no apparent reason, which didn't help the cliche war-torn world we were introduced to. And...Oathbreaker...yeah.

1.5/5

 

The fight sequences are awful, too.

Writer tries to spice it up transparently by trying to seem like a globetrotter - Algiers this, Monte Carlo that, but the description-work never takes off for that to contribute to the fic's flavor.

This is exactly the type of writing (uncapitalized-nonsensical-chapter-titles, ridiculous melodramatic speeches, self-consciously vague backstory) that is becoming increasingly pandemic.

:facepalm

What a corny scene. The guy walks into the scene of a slaughter, the perpetrator is all huddled up covered in guts, and then there's exaggeratedly casual conversation like nothing happened, all of this is designed to get the reader off guard and think that this is supposed to be cool, right? People still write like this?

The conversations are stylized to such an excessive degree. The girl says she's "not a little girl", followed by the rebuttal that leads to her realizing and admitting that she is in fact a little girl, complete with ellipsis. In a great film noir that would be okay, but in this fic it's painful.

The grammar mistakes are distracting, not because they are just mistakes, but because they result from a calculated attempt at a dramatic-sounding turn of phrase that gets mangled like so:

Screams that can hear, who would have thought.

Oathbreaker is far from the only retarded concept.

Chapter six is a holy-shit bonanza.

Star Child and Daughter of the Moon.

Excuse me?

What? Norse mythology? What?

What is going on?

Instead of building things up properly, he goes the route of trying to overwhelm the reader with as much bullshit as possible. Even though I wasn't impressed with the story up till chapter five, I was certainly not expecting things to fall apart that drastically.

Generous way to put it, that the story incorporates "mythic elements".

These very, very severe problems aside, this is not how an excellent author introduces a god:

2/5, 3/5 pre chapter 6 and 1/5 chapter 6 onward. No offense, but I hope that the writer gets over this phase and that this type of writing just slinks back to wherever it came from.

 

I haven't read the story yet, but reading that review...holy shit. I'm now actually more likely to read it, just to see how much nonesense one story can contain.