Title: Reformed, Returned and Really Trying
Author: Starfox5
Rating: T
Genre: Adventure/Humor
Status: In-Progress
Library Category:
Pairings:
Summary: AU. With Albus dead, there's only one wizard left continue his fight. His oldest friend. His true love. There's no better choice for defeating a Dark Lord bent on murdering all muggleborns than the one wizard who gathered them under his banner once before. True, things went a little out of hand, but Gellert Grindelwald has changed. Now, if only everyone else would realise this...
Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13045929/1/Reformed-Returned-and-Really-Trying

This is the first of Starfox5's stories that I've considered readable - so far, it does not look like a super!Hermione wank like his other fics, nor a preachy, wizard-bashing extended rant.

The fic has an interesting premise: Grindelwald escapes prison and comes to join the fight against Voldemort, post-HBP. At the very least it's something worth keeping an eye on, and though the fic has just been posted, we can safely assume that it will update reliably.

Unfortunately I think the interest of the premise has been rather undermined by the somewhat crackish tone. There's something quite absurdist about the Grindelwald PoV narrative - the way he interacts with both his followers and the Order feels very off. He lacks gravitas. He's impulsive and jokey. He's tone deaf. He's almost like a wizard version of HK-47 from Star Wars.

This happy-go-lucky Grindelwald characterisation also creates a problem in that it belittles the Order to the extent that it feels like bashing/the author taking potshots at canon. Of course Grindelwald, being a wizard of Dumbledore's level, should be able to run circles around the Order when it comes to magic. But the author has presented it so that the Order is not seen as some kind of underdog, but rather the comic relief. They are not there to participate, but rather to spectate - and we are supposed to find their reactions amusing, I suppose. It just feels a bit insulting to me.

The other nagging annoyance is how Muggle-ish the wizards are. The geopolitics of the wizarding world appears to be very similar to the Muggle world - the way wizarding nations posture and sabre-rattle. The fic seems to ignore all the important ways that wizarding nations are different from Muggle ones, most importantly that they form a single, global hidden community. So it misses a beat on interesting political mechanics in favour of nostalgia for the 19th century. For me one of the most interesting things about the canonical geopolitical set-up is the question of how nation-states compete when they are forbidden from going to war with each other and apparently have complete free movement of people. It forces you to think outside of the box and come up with subtler means of inter-state competition/tension - personally I take a lot of inspiration from intra-EU political relations.

Another example of annoying Muggleness is that these wizarding nations apparently have armies. This in turn removes the other most interesting political question of canon, namely the outsized power than individuals can hold, to the point that individual wizards rather than states are the superpowers of the wizarding political world. Similarly, Grindelwald has been changed so as to have performed a territorial conquest like a Muggle, rather than being the leader of a movement to throw off the Statute of Secrecy within the global wizarding community.

All these political changes seem to have the result of removing subtlety and interest in favour of more traditional, simpler political relationships.

The final oddity is the line that has been taken with Dumbledore and Grindelwald... I never got the impression from canon that Grindelwald ever reciprocated Dumbledore's feelings, or even if he did, that they had ever actually been romantically involved. But that's a small thing.

Still, it's worth keeping an eye on.

 

Taure right now.

 

I've never been more skeptical of anything in my life than Starfox5 moving past his favorite tropes. From the OP, the only part that's missing is Hermione wank, (though Hermione is far from the only reason why Starfox5's stories are such tremendous wastes of potential) and she is listed under characters on FFN, so who wants to take that bet?

 

I still cannot fathom why people dislike Starfox5‘s stories so much. Yes, his Wizarding World worldbuilding isn't really in-keeping with canon, and he overplays Hermione rather too often… but his are still overall enjoyable, well-plotted romps. It's not Tolstoï but I think his works deserve their popularity.

As to this specific story and your thoughts on it… it's true, again, that the relationship between magical states isn't as interesting as it should be, but it's fine and self-consistent. It's not the story's focus, any more than the specifics of the canon government's rules were the focus of canon; it's just background stage-setting. Would it better for it to be better-thought-out? Yes. Does it matter in the end that it's not? No.

And I really like the tone. Overall, I prefer my HP fanfiction to be humorous in tone (this definitely falls within “humorous” as opposed to “cracky” for me; for reference, in my book “humorous” is this or, say, Oh God, Not Again!; crack is something like Dear Tom or Like a Red-Headed Stepchild; and there are some fics that are on the fence, like Seventh Horcrux), and Grindelwald as a POV-character is a good venue for that. If someone as wonderfully silly as Professor Dumbledore had a crush on this man and considered him a kindred spirit in their youth, I'd be extremely surprised if he was anything but snarky and happy-go-lucky.

Yes, the Order of the Phoenix basically serve as “comic relief”… but I don't think that's a deprecation of them as characters. They're not made out to be incompetent or mean-spirited by the narrative; they are merely shoved by the plot into situations where the interaction between a given Knight of the Phoenix's quirks and the world around them results in something humorous. As befits a comedy.

It's no different from Rowling herself frequently finding material for comedy in Moody's paranoia or Dumbledore's antics, without it robbing either character of their narrative gravitas when the plot calls for it — and it's all the more at home in a story such as this which, very wisely, ups the "humor" element.

 

Yeah but you see the thing is this "comic relief" you're talking about is just Starfox masturbating to himself about how much he thinks Rowling sucks at writing.

 

If the fic is meant to be a comedy, then it suffers the problem of not being funny. At all. Ultimately that's the different between a comedy and crack: a comedy is funny; crack is absurd. This fic has elements of absurdity to it, but no jokes.

As for why I dislike Starfox's fics in general:

1. Super!Hermione makes a fic unreadable to me, as does Hermione PoV.

2. I greatly dislike his approach to magic, which nerfs it considerably compared to canon.

3. He commits the sin of making an AU but simultaneously using it as a criticism of canon.

4. His narratives applaud the Mugglisation of the wizarding world (aka "health and safety!Harry").

Thinking on it, Starfox's fics share many things in common with MoR.

 

I won't pretend to be a fan of Starfox5 and most of his stories (especially that thing he called "Hermione Granger and the Marriage Law Revolution), but in his defense I thought "The Dark Lord Never Died" was a pretty good story. It had a fairly unique setting, the characters were all reasonable without either Bashing or Sue-ing, and it even made Ron an important, likable character.

 

Starfox5 is one of several reasons why I wish Hermione died in canon.

As for this story, I didn't like it very much and I can't recommend it. If I need to give a reason, it is because it's too muggle.

 

Perhaps the most damming thing ever said.

 

Have to agree about the tone Grindelwald's POV gives off. The story is tagged as humor, but it all comes off as very odd. Same with Harry and everybody else's reactions to him. It just feels off. This first chapter could have come off much better if Grindelwald wasn't so cheery and lighthearted. I could get behind it if it felt like a genuine redemption story, but it's just goofy here.

No reason to give a rating yet imo, so I'll keep an eye on this. But I'm not sure if I expect much.

 

Oh come now. The man who has written so much fanfiction exploring the ins and outs of J.K. Rowling's works cannot consider that she's a terrible writer. The notion is ridiculous. You can, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, think that she's a competent “children's writer” but lacking in common sense; you can, as do I, think that she's a good writer if nothing superb. But someone who writes over 100,000 words of HP fanfiction cannot in the secret of his soul truly consider that HP sucks.

Absurdity is a form of humor in itself, though. And, what can I say? Matter of tastes, but I did find it funny. Not terribly funny — I'm not about to go recommending it in “Funniest fic” threads or anything — but the situation of a reformed Grindelwald being forced to lead a bunch of still-very-convinced pseudo-Nazis about to do greater good, the sheer mental image of Harry's reaction when he finds Grindelwald on his doorstep, and the way Grindelwald tries to do good but keeps unintentionally achieving this in very "evil" ways (the "disposable decoy" thing, calmly planning the slaughter of the Death Eaters, liberal use of the Imperius Curse)… all of these are elements I find quite amusing.

…Why? I mean, I understand how the first one can get obnoxious, in the way that any Super!MC story can get obnoxious (though honestly, give me Starfox!Hermione over Dark!Indy!Harry any day…) but the second one, I simply cannot fathom. Harry, Ron, Hermione, hell, even the likes of Luna are all sufficiently likeable characters in canon that it should not be an instant close-tab sign if any of them are the main character.

And there's a reason so many stories choose a Hermione PoV. It works. Hermione's curiosity and bookishness and cleverness make her a very easy character for a HP fanfiction reader to identify themselves with, for obvious reasons. No one's saying (or at least, I'm not saying) that Rowling was wrong to pick Harry as a PoV character for the canon novel; but Hermione is a good potential fanfiction protagonist who can be made to star in many great tales.

Again, yes, many fanfiction writers butcher her character, but many fanfiction writers butcher Ron or Dumbledore or Tom Riddle, and that really oughtn't devaluate one's opinion of these characters in general.

That's definitely a good point, but not enough to make me dislike the stories outright just for that reason. Magic in HP is a setting and a plot-device more than it is a draw in itself. Cool magic is nice to have in a fic but short of a Muggle AU I can deal with a lot.

I do recognize that this is one of the points where it's simply a matter of tastes — your in-depth work on what you think canon magic is like shows that you care very deeply for it and who am I to judge? You like what you like. (Only, the fanfiction community isn't composed only of Taures; there are many more people out there who dislike and belittle Starfox's works than you, and you don't see any of them writing in-depth essays about the magic system, so…)

Eh? What makes this a sin? Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're referring to. But “canon may be nice but [Thing X] made no sense there; in my headcanon-universe for my fic [Thing X] will work out right, that way my story's world makes more sense and I've pointed out an underreported flaw in canon to my reader, two birds, one stone” seems like a sound line of reasoning to me. It gets obnoxious if a whole fic is just a string of that, but a few winks of the "wait, they built the World Quidditch Stadium how high? it's going to be practically empty, the relevant wizard architects must suck at maths" sort don't hurt, in my opinion.

…I mean, why not? The Wizarding World's quaintness makes its charm for the reader but there's no denying there are many ways it could stand to be improved (*cough* nonhuman rights *cough* better education *cough* widespread study into the Resurrection Stone *cough*), and a reasonably rational and moral protagonist ought to be able to see that. If they can spend the time to do so there's no clear reason they shouldn't seek to make the worlds they live in “safer and healthier”.

Hence, I wouldn't be interested to read in a story where the Wizarding World is ‘mugglized’ from the get-go, because that's boring. But I see nothing wrong with the characters, over the course of the narrative, beginning to improve the Wizarding World.

Hey now, I don't think that's fair, to either; HPMoR simply isn't in the same genre as Starfox's stories. HPMoR has more to do with ‘modern retellings’ of fairy tales than it has with HP fanfiction as such; it took the Harry Potter mythos (not so much the Rowling novels themselves as the fandom's perception of the Harry Potter story, complete with movies and popular fanfic tropes) that it assumes its audience is familiar with, and hammered it into a different, but related tale with its own agenda.

It's not the hubris-filled “here's how Harry Potter should have been written” that it's made out to be, it's not "here's an AU where all the familiar characters you know and love are put into a different context and plot", it's not even the "here's a honest look at what the Harry Potter plot could be if more characters knew rationality" that it's often elevator-pitched as online. It's "here's a fun novel about rationality, which happens to take advantage of your foreknowledge of the Harry Potter mythos".

You might say that this distinction is more insulting to Starfox, because Starfox is trying to write genuine HP fanfiction and ends up looking like it's a cynical non-retelling with its own agenda, meant to manipulate its audience more than to satisfy them. Or that it is more insulting to MoR, because unlike Starfox who does a honest attempt at HP fanfiction even if he falls short in some ways, MoR disguises something that's ultimately not really HP fanfiction as one in order to gain a wider audience.

But it's an important distinction.

(…Boy, I wrote a novel there, didn't I. Sheesh.)

 

Wow, lots of words in the last post, possibly more than SF's first chapter.

The one Starfox fic I recall sort of enjoying was his boat girl one. That was weird enough to work for me. The others? Not so much. I started this one based on the premise but was not hooked. The tone, as Taure and others have noted, felt off and I doubt I'll give it another look until it's a dozen or so chapters in and there's enough to think about and write about. So far, it's a somewhat interesting premise and setup, told through a suboptimal POV, and not much more. I'll come back and edit in a real review when there's enough to merit one.

I have to confess, my enjoyment of Starfox fics tends to suffer from his being annoying on /r/hpfanfiction. I know it's a cardinal rule that one's to separate artist from art but I just can't do it. I'll never enjoy a John Ringo story for much the same reasons. Or enjoy Game of Thrones since GRRM (who lives a few miles from me) is an insufferable windbag in real life.

 

@Lord Twain tg

 

So, we now have a "why Starfox5 sucks" thread. Jolly good.

That's just not true.

Why what, why Taure dislikes Hermione's PoV? That's subjective, like humor. I could also quote Potter Law here, but I'm too lazy.

Get outta here with your mudblood ways. You're thinking like a muggle. A lot of the charm of HP comes from how wacky the world can be. The health&safety wank (often paired with general muggle wank) is just lame. Often it begins with a rant about how Snape should never have been allowed near children. This is one of the things I truly despise in fanfic. MoR made the same points, that the Stone should have been mass produced, that rational, moral people would exploit gold exchange rates and make millions off goblins, that house elves are obviously slaves and that satellites should break the Statute of Secrecy. Pffft.

The bolded part is the key. That mugglewank improves the wizarding world. See my previous paragraph. Are we enjoying (fan)fiction here, or writing legislation?

I mean, you're allowed to be wrong.

@Perspicacity, you can't just namedrop GRRM like that and leave us hanging. We promise we won't tell.

 

Wrong, we now have a thread about how Pers knows GRRM and what the contents of his trash might be.

 

Toasting in epic bread.

 

Incomplete drafts of his next installment, no doubt. He lives in a different gated community though so I don't have a chance to scrape off the coffee grounds and mine them for words.

I wouldn't say I know him. We've crossed paths a couple times (Santa Fe is a small city after all) and he's always struck me as aloof and a bit overly fond of his own cleverness. His purple Tesla Model S was pretty distinctive though. I probably drove past him a dozen times.

 

Reading Taure's OP, what's the actual selling point with this fic? Why is it in for review? All I see are a bunch of reasons as to why I shouldn't bother opening the fic, and that's without even looking at the author's name.

 

My headcanon is that Starfox kidnapped Taure and is holding him at gunpoint inside of a bunker in the Swiss Alps.

 

One can also question why Taure feels the need to start a hate-wank thread.