Title: The Uprising
Author: Captain Cranium
Rating: T
Genre: Mystery/Friendship (should be Mystery/Crime)
Status: WIP, but already pre-written
Library Category: General
Pairings: None central to the story, so far.
Summary: All is seemingly well in Wizarding Britain as the last aftershocks of the War against the Dark Lord fade away, but a series of murders lead ace Auror Daphne Greengrass to a threat that may throw her world yet again into imbalance.
Link.

Best new thing I've read in a while. Bullet-points: Post-Hogwarts, Daphne-POV, Mystery/Crime, all of those decently done. The biggest caveat for most will probably be that it really is a Daphne-story -- she's the main character. Harry is there, and important, but this isn't his story.


Backstory is that Greengrass senior died, there was no heir, and so Daphne ended up picking a job as an Auror at the Ministry. Harry, meanwhile, had left Britain after Voldemort's defeat for an extended holiday, and is now back in town -- and ends up as Daphne's partner with the Aurors. As far as the further plot goes, it deals with a case of murder on one hand and post-Voldemort politics on the other, and both quickly become linked.

Daphne's POV takes up most of room, but occasionally, we're with Harry. I like Daphne's character (she's cast as a conservative pureblood, but not retardedly so, and otherwise very competent at what she does), and Harry's is solid, IMO -- he starts off tagging along and making rookie mistakes, but he becomes useful quickly enough (wouldn't matter to me, but I hear YMMV >_>).

As a downside, I didn't particularly like Ron's interpretation; I had a sudden flashback to moRon-caricatures by Harmonians. Luckily, he's got only a handful of lines.

The writing is competent; e.g. scenes like

where the author manages to wrap lots of history into just a few words. I really like stuff like that. So all in all, from me, a solid 4/5.

 

Eh. It shouldn't change the quality of the story here. The thread's for us, after all, not for him. What it obviously does is prompting me not to leave any review there. Telling me to review or else simply has the opposite effect.

 

I seemed to me very much as a "have history"-thing, between Harry and Ginny. Interaction and behaviour says were together once, then split, and now stuck in this awkward phase were you know you aren't together but haven't quite formed a new (unromantic) relationship to take the place of the old.

As for Elder Wand, Bones, and AU: Looks like the author does what I do, which is basically use whatever of Canon he likes and then calls it "Post-Hogwarts". So I wouldn't assume too much, it might not or might have completely differently happened in the AU of this story.

 

Updated.

That Harry hasn't told Daphne about Hermione is bleh, but on the bright side, he can now floo! It's evolving!

Spoilers ahead.






I wonder where the focus of the plot is going to be now. The chapter was very fast-paced -- I probably would have made staking out Ynys Mon an entire chapter alone, if only to use the great setting it offers. Instead, we skipped right to the next attack. Perhaps the story is not about the attacks, but what comes after? The only reasonable reaction after this can be to storm Ynys Mon, they can't continue sitting around and (not) watching them go in and out.

Another issue that ties with that is that the way the attacks have been going, I see the story writing itself into a corner. So far we had taking advantage of Muggleborns, screwing over Muggleborns, and now raping and torturing Muggleborns, and it's starting to stretch believability, IMO. It's right at the edge now.

I'm down with Muggleborns getting the short end of the stick. Connor was a dude that I felt fit right in. Doge was a surprise, but who knows, right? Some people are like that. But if now purebloods generally have a spot of torture with their tea and usually are psychopaths, we reach shit-fiction territory. If I want comically evil Death Eaters, I have the entire rest of FF.net.

The author would do well to stick to reasonably unpleasant purebloods. There's more than enough ways in which they can screw Muggleborns without being psychopaths, and they're more interesting on top of that. Or this was the final straw, before the story takes a different turn. Either way, I think I'd have preferred the story without the Notts.

 

Same thing, though. It's uber!evil in the way Death Eaters are portrayed in those stories where the author can't think of any other way to portray evilness, and so they rape Muggles/Mugglebors every minute for no reason. It's superfluous, I think that's my problem -- the theme has been well-established, and this doesn't add anything except crossing a few moral event horizons to show the last retard that ZOMG EVILZ.

If the focus really is a renegade band of muggleborns attacking purebloods, it'd be much more interesting if the story kept to ambiguous evils, and stayed away from beating me over the head with absolute ones.

 

Updated.

The obvious parts of the mystery are resolved, I wonder where it's going now. The conflict, I think, is an interesting one: The Ministry needs the Muggleborns to function, but what do you do if they refuse to work? It's the magical equivalent of a general strike. The usual options for those hit by the strike are either compromise or force, but I have to think about how magic affects this problem.

Either way, it's a highly interesting scenario. The only downside is that the story as such can jump the shark any time, because it very easy to use it as a soapbox for whatever opinion the author has on the matter (so far, he managed to stay mostly clear, though).

 

Improved in what way? I'd rather say it's inches from crashing.

We're now at the stage where the over-the-top evilness I pointed out earlier comes back around to bite the author. Unless he goes for what 90% of the readers would probably see as the downer-ending -- that is, the Muggleborns are right that they are treated badly, they are right to fight against that, and then they get crushed and the purebloods live happily ever after, the end -- I think he has written himself into a corner. I almost can't believe it's pre-written. (I mean, that end would save the story, but it takes massive balls to pull it off, so it's quite unlikely to happen.)

The point of this story is a moral dilemma. As soon as there is an obvious answer to "what's right", the story is over. And we have now nearly reached the point, because the Ministry (e.g. in person of the Minister) is portrayed as completely unreasonable.

And as a side note, the nonsense with the No-Name-Minister was interesting the first three times, and thoroughly annoying afterwards.

The story should have stuck with Daphne's POV. Her slant on things counter-balanced the events as they happened, and a struggle against her own believes would have had much more depth than reasonable-Harry vs. unreasonable-Ministry. That's just cheap conflict -- which is the reason this chapter was bad.