Chimera has been updated.

Overall it is an enjoyable read. My only complaint with the chapter is with the Occlumency part.

 

*gaping at the screen*
No Fucking Way!
I sound like such a fanboy, but no matter.
I love this story.
*Scurries off to read*

*many minutes later*

It was bloody amazing, sure my view is a bit biased, yet I loved the way that Harry first follows his impulses and how his own mind is telling him to steal, then his conscience kicks in and it all changes.
Very manipulative of him to do what he did.

As for the tea leaves.
Saw those coming from afar.

Yarrgh says he's getting engaged...wow, hopefully that will go good for him.
Then again it might cut down on his writing time...

Once more, great update (I sound like a scratched record)
Hopefully there will be another in a few months.

Never rated this fic in post.
I gave it an Outstanding originally, still would.
So 4.9/5 The whole, organize the entire mind seemed like a cliche. I know I've seen it before, various times, and it didn't make much sense when Tonks obliviated herself or the explanation he gave...letters...wtf?
Still an awesome read though.
^-^

 

can't wait!!
hurry up and update!!

 

Meh.... Read the first couple chapters...double-meh

Any fic starting off with Harry already having clued in to being manipulated as in this one and gotten flawlessly ruthless, as well as having already come into that much power and such just starts out with it's legs cut out from under it.

Your grammar and story telling skills are decent, so pluses there... but this whole "Harry is clandestinely hiding his light under a bush" sort of thing is not just hard pull off in a story... it's hard to swallow as a reader. So unless your quality of storytelling improves dramatically, I'd say you failed at justifying him being capable of pulling this miracle off. Harry simply doesn't have the guile to pull this off... and even if he did develop that much duplicity, it takes time to work up into something as difficult as this would be.

If it were the case that he was just hiding his abilities and everything, then Harry would have never reacted like he did to being told about the prophecy, as such it undermines the believable mentality of the character.

Additionally, there's this whole vibe of ruthless action without consequences thing you've got going on. The "cleansing ritual" for example... that one can engage in the darkest of acts and just by doing some cleansing ritual it won't permanently stain them and their magic.

ummmm... yeahhhhh. Yer losin' me right there. Morality is a choice... if you engage in dark and corrupting behavior out of choice...no ritual can or should be able to clean your conscience or let you get off scot free. It's that choice to engage in bad or good behavior the marks and determines what you become. At least that's what a good story will tell you. Simply creating some Deus Ex Machina sort of ritual that allows you to not be held accountable for doing nasty stuff...well, it's just you as a writer trying to circumvent the moral consequences of bad behavior. I shouldn't have to tell you...this is poor story telling.

For example... look at each of the major dark magics seen in the story to date. Horcruxes, they require you murder someone in cold blood. You have to CHOOSE to kill someone intentionally and premeditate it... just so you can create one. Then there's the Cruciatus curse... it requires hatred for a person ( a specific dark emotion) and a desire to hurt them(another dark/evil desire) to invoke it properly. Imperio more or less requires that you have to be willing to try and take someones free will away from them and use them as a puppet or toy. All these things share one thing in common, the caster has to engage in a selfish desire to profit in some way at the expense of others. Avarice of course, is one of the seven deadly sins. If say some dark ritual requires the blood of a newborn, forcably taken, that required an evil willingness to even engage in that sort of behavior. No ritual should simply be written up that just lets the character skeet out of paying for this sort of behavior.

There's also entirely too much wussification of the girls going on... Tonks especially. I love a good Honks fic... but Tonks is a Genki girl... she's full of roughness and life. She's most certainly not the sort to get all weepy and trickle a few sad tears when Harry is telling her stuff like the prophecy.

I'll give it a average rating... the characters are just too out of character to rate it any higher for me.

 

You raise some good points although when I read that I understood that Dark magic will morally corrupt you but it is the physical stains that it leaves behind which will be erased once you do the ritual.

In the sense that you have the moral part hanging over you but the darkness isn't as compelling as it would be if you were already covered by it.

Like how it says the chaotic energies frome Voldemort's magic fuel him, that is what it would be taking away, cleanse the magic not the mind.

I am probably not making much sense but seeing your post made me think things through once more and thus coming to this conclusion.

And I thought Harry was basically raised by Slytherin so wouldn't cannon Harry as we know him not exist?

 

I will be surprised to see the end of this fic or even another couple of chapters. It looks like the author is too busy or not interested in writing.
Sad to see great stories go down like this.

 

As far as I know Yarrgh is still writing...

 

Garret: you raise a couple of good points. However I don't really see the point in talking about the blatant OOCness of the characters in this story -- it irked me too at first, but then the world created in "Chimera" is both related to JKR's and radically different. It's deeper, darker and I'd say more adult. Yarrgh doesn't play by JKR's rules; he doesn't follow her definition for the Dark Arts, or even her description of the main characters. IMO, Chimera is an Alternate Universe fiction. While there is quite a lot to pick on in this story, the OOCness and alternate vision of the Dark Arts isn't quite it, for those are the premises of an AU story.

That said, because of all those things Chimera should be the last story I'd choose to read (Harry/Ginny fluff, slash, childporn and possibly incest fics excepted). I actually started reading it only because Yarrgh asked my opinion on it. Past the first two or three chapters, I found it well-written and compelling enough to continue reading in spite of everything. In case you'd be considering giving the story another try.

 

I try to... raise good points. When people raise bad ones it usually earns my ire.

Well that's the thing. This IS a Harry Potter story. By writing a story about Harry Potter you obligate yourself to write him in character if you are picking up after a certain point in the books, or start over clean and write his new character from the beginning of the changes, showing how the gradual changes took place. Thus OOCness is a cardinal sin in my estimation. If you can't write the characters, in character or show justification for their changes, then you shouldn't be using them at all and should instead confine your writing your own new characters and let the work stand or fall as an original work based in the shared setting.

I can accept a Harry Potter story where he grows up differently, or has an epiphany where he decides to change his behavior, Both of these sorts of events allow the author to establish that Harry's personality is significantly different or will be undergoing gradual changes than what is in the HP books. But, these sorts of events need to be SHOWN, not told about. The key issue here is that the Author of this fic just slams the reader with exposition ... telling them that Harry was argued and taught to think differently in one scene... and the author never bothers to show us the cataclysmic life and personality altering events.

Stories where Harry wises up are in fact some of my more enjoyed fics. But, when you pick up the story after a certain point the events in those books, then you have to recognize that how he responded to those events are items you cannot ignore. Those events shaped who he is as a character. If he went through those same threats and events and did the same things... to have him just suddenly start acting totally OOC without rhyme or reason is just too jarring, and severely damages the ability of the reader to suspend disbelief, in my opinion.

Deeper I can buy, and why I gave the story a better rating than I otherwise would have. but it's the darker thing I sort of disagree about. By that I mean the merit of darker being better that you're attaching (or maybe implying). I find that the whole focus on dark = better to be kinda emo and dumb. If dark magic was such great shakes it would have taken over the world ages ago. The problem is, people these days equate the light with sunshine butterflys and pacifism...basically with being a "make love not war, man" wimp

A few centuries earlier a warrior of the light was an ass kicking, heathen chopping, dark blood shedding crusader out to kick the ass of anything dark that crossed it's path. Light!magic should not mean pussy!magic in my opinion. Yeah, yeah... I know "dark lord Potter"... but to me the whole "darklord" thing isn't about Harry being "dark and evil" but about him not taking shit from anyone. To him standing up for himself and kicking ass... hard.

Take the Illiad for example. That's a fine piece of very adult literature. The heros are classical heroes, not dark.

Well, that's an issue right there then. If you think it's okay to change the character fundamentally and still call them the same characters... bully for you. Myself I think that that's crappy writing. Creating your own characters and just slapping the names of Harry , Ron, Ginny, and whatnot on them is disingenuous to the reader. You're camouflaging your original work with names of people that the characters are not... just to get readers.

Oh I'd agree, it's well written...when viewed from a technical standpoint. The grammar is good, the descriptions and action is reasonably polished.

However, plot holes rapidly kill a story for me no matter how good the writer writes.

Most specifically, the whole thing of having harry somehow hide all these fundamental differences in his personality from everyone. It's just too big a stretch to say that he went from nice innocent heroic Harry... to this new Harry without anyone picking up on the changes to his basic personality . Harry has always worn his heart on his sleeve... and while these sorts of changes would be going on, he'd not have the duplicity to ACT like the old Harry, but THINK like the new one when the way they view things is so diametrically opposed.

 

And as I said, I feel about the same away; Chimera was the one and only exception to that rule, because the characters and world crafted interested me (and also because I loved the descriptions). As a result I don't really see this story as a Harry Potter fiction, which, in fact, makes our whole argument pointless.

As for the too-quick explanation for the OOCness, it annoyed me as well; which is why I waited till the fourth chapter or so before I really began to enjoy the story.

 

Garret's objection appears to be not with anything in story in particular, but with the whole sub-genre of Alternate Universe fanfic.

All fanfiction is to some extent alernate universe and OoC - unless you're JKR, you're writing it differently to how she would have written it. This story is simply even more so.

I see no real point in trying to make stories that seem like canon - if I wanted canon, I'd read canon. I read fanfiction exactly because it is different from what JKR wrote, yet set in the same world (though the world may be slightly altered).

The main attraction of the Harry Potter fandom is not the plots (cliche good vs. evil battle) or the characters (classic charactiture villian and misunderstood hero) but the world. So long as the world is recognisable, you can mess around with the characters or the plots as much as you want and I don't care, because its not the characters or the plots that make Harry Potter Harry Potter, its the setting.

My two cents on Alternate Universe fanfic.

 

I can definitely see where Garret is coming from, as I had this argument with Gio a bit back. There's a difference between AU, and then just taking Harry and making him cease to be the Harry we know. I, individually, love fanon because it lets me see what other people do with Harry and the wizarding world, and I can't stand it when they completely revamp his character into something that I personally can't recognize.

I can read a story where the changes are gradual, and happen for legitimate reasons, as then it does become Harry's character, and I can't even read the ones where he has an "epiphany". But when the changes are unexplained and totally drastic, as Garret pointed out, then the author might as well write a separate and original story.

QFT.

That was the central thing that irked me about this story, that he just outright said that Dark Magic was the most powerful kind. That kind of philosophy is what spawns little maggots like Malfoy, not the philosophy of a character as great as either Harry or Salazar. The strength of the magic should depend on the wizard's talent and skill, not the brand of magic that he is using. Dark or Light magic can also be in the intent of the user, but any way I look at it, I just can't agree with the idea of Dark magic being inherently stronger than Light, because then why is Dumbledore so G? He couldn't be, if that was true.

There's only so much you can change about the story before it becomes a different one, and to just throw it into overdrive and start the story with Harry as a completely different personality with just an exposition is bad form. Overall, I'd say it was good story, but it crossed over the line from being AU to being almost a completely different tale.