Title: King of Limbs
Author: Zeitgeist84
Rating: M
Genre: Adventure/Tragedy
Status: WIP
Library Category: Adventure
Pairings: Harry/Hermione
Summary: Post-DH. Non-Epilogue Compliant. As Magical Britain begins its return to normalcy, Harry once again finds himself ensnared in a worldwide web of lies, disillusioned with being an Auror and his changing relationship with his two best friends. Unwillingly, he is forced to become a hero once more. Likely epic length. Disturbing themes. Eventual H/Hr.
Link: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8180049/1/The-King-of-Limbs

So far this story has really caught my interest. The writing style is excellent though not perfect. The Noire theme really pulled me in. Though it seems like it will shift to a more Action-based in the future.

Anyways, I give this a rating of 4.5/5 with a possibility for a 5/5.


If you put in the pairing here, put it into a tag as well. --Sesc

 

Descriptive to the point of redundancy, the author informs the reader three times in as many paragraphs that the language being spoken is Arabic. All the while using Arabic words.

A chunk rambles on about how war-torn the middle east is, including the military industrial complexes of the west. Apparently magical society there is no different from regular society, which is to say that there is no magical society in the story so far.

Wizards use both guns and magic, mostly Ak-47's. A handgun is mentioned.

Magical cores.

Soul magic.

One of the characters is actually called 'The Teacher'.

Do not want, but finished the chapter.

The actual writing is fairly solid, but it's not great: 3/5. I can't say it's terrible, but I sure as hell wouldn't read it based on what I've seen.

 

@styx044 The prologue is the weakest point of the story in my opinion. It gets a lot better afterwards.

 

I gave it a second chance, and I couldn't get through the actual first chapter. The jokes sucked, the dialogue is just painful, and the author has the annoying habit of referring to their characters as 'the [last name]', which would be fine, if he didn't insist on calling Harry 'the Potter' mid-sentence.

 

I've been reading this one. It's a decent story. The only thing about it that really annoys me is the fact that anyone Harry ever talked to at Hogwarts seems to be an Auror. Why couldn't the author just use OC's?

Still, it intrigues me. 4/5 from me.

 

I'm going to have to agree with Styx. I tried reading it, but quite frankly, the dialogue especially irritated me. The author seems to have some sort of personal grudge against the word 'said' so he writes dialogue like this:

"Orders," The Teacher smiled, " A message. From Ha-ne-va."

"Know them?" The Teacher grinned, "No one knows them. We all simply work for them. And you do, too."

Altogether too much smiling/grinning in the first chapter. Felt like half the page was filled with either of the two words.

Oh, and this: "... black stubble around the man's mandibles..."

Last time I checked, we only had one mandible, and bones didn't grow hair. :facepalm

The concept is original, though I didn't find it particularly interesting or attention grabbing. The writing isn't all bad, even if it contains more than a few punctuation errors when you start reading further into the story.

Not something I would read.

2/5

 

Don't quite know why, but from the title I thought someone had made a Hill of Swords tribute fic where Shirou got that title instead of King of Swords, due to his habit of removing limbs from his enemies.

 

So, I have sat down and read this fic to the end, before really judging it.

And, now, I'm still mixed on my opinion about it. It has moments when you can become interested in the plot, and some of the ideas are good, and many interactions are well handled, even though might feel a bit too pronounced at times. That by itself would be a good plus, enough to be worthy of a recommendation.

The stylistic choice is to give us a hint of a harsher Harry, and then show how he 'fell' into the state he was shown. That's not very new, but not really overused, and the whole fic is Harry explaining his life to someone.


On the other hand we have these two annoying problems - the before mentioned the Potter and some redundancy - that's strictly style mistakes - enough to be annoying if you care about things like this, and for me it proved distracting at times, but not worthy to pronounce the fic unreadable.
(I have combed through a lot worse just because of a few good ideas).


The main, and the most glaring fault is the amalgamations of the Muggle and Magical, Brittish and American, Police and Aurors.
It's done deliberately, and there are small hand-waves and explanations there and here, but they are all simply excuses.
Daphne curses and uses American slang (that's confirmed in the authors note) just because the author knows that better. The explanation is along the lines of 'It's her personality quirk'.
The Aurors sometimes use firearms. There was some focus on M4 rifle, and there's a comment from someone that 'Harry should pick something more British.' Refer to Daphne.
There's an overuse of lines such as "[Term or Abbrevation] - it was a magical version of [insert the name of some organisation] in America." Again, probably because it's easier for the author to rely on America. That might be alright in the simple paragraphs where you are explained what a certain thing is, but it's bad form when Hermione says something like that to Harry. (How often two Brittish people go 'KGB, what is that?' 'Well, it's kind of like CIA they have in America'. Why not google for a bit and use SIS?)

The whole firearms thing... It could have been worse. It's handled fairily well, with lots of explanations and details, that kind of make sense for Aurors to use weapons, but it feels so forced and fake, that you don't really see the reasons as reasons - just excuses to put a firearm into Harry's arms. And funnily enough, there are no prolonged shoot-outs. No real firearm battles - they're on the side, even though sometimes there is a shot or two fired.
Why does the story need firearms? It doesn't.


The magical and muggle - there's a half assed explanation that after the death of Voldemort, people turned to muggle ways of life more. The Aurors force were organised to be alike the Scotland Yard. A lot of abbreviations are used and the structure is so similar to the muggle police that you feel like you are reading a story about muggle police, with an added thing that sometimes they, and the criminals, resort to magic to solve things.

Muggle Cameras are used to take pictures of the crime scenes and during observations, because 'Wizarding cameras have a flash that's visible'.

It's not safe to bring a wand into certain areas as there are shitload of immigrant wizards, who usually don't have wands due to the poor education and not enough cash to buy themselves one. So, having a wand means that either you're rich and should be robbed, or an Auror. So, they take firearms there.

Firearms cannot be enchanted to be silent and they have to use silencers, because, I kid you not, the firearms manufacturers have Wizards on their staffs, who make the firearms impossible to silence with a spell, by some kind of complex enchantment, and there's a rare firearm which doesn't have the charms against charming it to be silent. That's hard and complicated to break.

Why would anyone want for the manufactured firearms to be loud? Or at the very least, doesn't deal with silenced weapons on the side.
Someone has to make the silencers - wouldn't it be cheaper to manufacture weapons without the counter-silencing-charm charms?

There's also a few cases where Harry uses a mobile phone, to talk to Hermione about flooing at his place.


The magical cores, lordships, and all other bad tasting stuff is only mentioned by passing, nothing with a big focus, beside a few promises to be important in the future.


Also - AURORS are not POLICEMEN, goddammit. DMLE itself might be compared and even structured as a police force it would be kind of alright and not as annoying. But Aurors that specialize in Drug dealing... I see Aurors as something that is parallel to the specialized anti-terrorist forces - with investigation and capture of dark wizards, and not drug dealers or simple murderers. They would be the guys who walk up to the simple DMLE agent and announce that he's off the case, as there had been Dark Magic used to kill.



All in all, I'm still not sure. I'll give this story a 2.5/5 rounded down to 2, but I wouldn't mind if it stayed in the recycle bin - a story that is interesting behind the heap of faults it has - the adrenaline addiction of one Harry Potter, the Harry/Hermione thing that's done somewhat properly are the reason I'm not regretting to having read this.

 

Mostly, what Nauro said.

I really wanted to like this story - I'm a Wire fanatic and liked Luther quite a bit - but the execution falls somewhat lower than competent. The pacing seems chaotic (not in a good way) and some scenes feel downright outlandish.

Spoiler

What the fuck is up with Harry instantly joining the Circus?

It doesn't help that quotes and sometimes entire scenes are copy-pasted from the Wire. He always gives credit of course, but it reads that he abruptly reshapes everyone to fit every pasted quote/scene. Paints the entire cast of characters as incosistent.

One can be influenced by the Wire's overall setting (urban & moral decay, flawed characters, rampant corruption) without resorting to copying, I feel.

A tentative 3/5, hoping it'll get better.

 

The better question is - why does he trust them enough to let them cast a strange spell at him without protesting?

Spoiler

That knocks him out for a few days

And all this just after meeting them.