We all have that one fic which we thought was going to be impressive based on summary or having read the author's previous work. However, upon actually reading the fic you start cringing as the chapters drag on until you finally give up.

For me it was

[Not so gentle](https://m.fanfiction.net/s/5399481/1/Not-Go-Gentle) by Cloneserpents.

Cloneserpents has written the hilarious crackfic called Crack'd Mirror so I was expecting this to be good. Instead I got continuous rape scenes and Bellatrix inserting gems in Harry's cock. The Order of the Phoenix and the ministry is extremely incompetent while Voldemort and his minions are extremely intelligent and regularly murder muggles and Hogwarts students and get away without repercussions. A very boring and uninteresting read. The "shocking imagery" fails to shock at all.

 

I thought Nightmares of Future Past would be good from the summary and the amount of recommendations it had. Unfortunately, it's unfinished(I thought for some reason the author just forgot to label it as complete), or perhaps that's fortunate since I found what little I read of it to be overrated.
Basically, it really suffers from having been written before DH comes out, it's filled to the brim with false impressions of characters, the whole idea of horcruxes was basically just ignored, and it's not that realistic or interesting of an AU. I suppose Harry's toeing the line with the amount of changes he makes to the continuity to keep his knowledge of the future from becoming irrelevant, but it really doesn't make sense that he would succeed at that. In a more realistic story, even small changes butterfly into totally different stories, which in turn makes things more interesting as we diverge from canon.
I would have to guess the popularity of the story came from the fact that it started in 2005.

 

Oh man. NOFP was the first HP fic I ever read, and I was really into it, back in '06. Looking back though, it really wasn't particularly good. Writing was competent, and at the time most of the ideas behind it were novel, but that's about all it had going for it.

 

Harry Potter and the Temporal Beacon is high up there on my disappointing list. For its time (2010) it started off pretty strong and had an interesting concept. But then nothing of note happens. Harry and Hermione just get bogged down, never achieving anything. Turns out there's a reason for this: the author never had any intentions of writing a conclusion and wanted to endlessly just add new things to it as they came to him.

 

Fics being bad overall doesn't bother me nearly as much as a pretty good fic having a shit ending. That list is sadly long and distinguished. A few notables:

• Unsung Hero: One of the best WBWL fics there is, in my opinion. Still a bit tropey at times, and it's very old so some of the ideas have been invalidated by later canon, but it's an awesome read until literally the last few paragraphs.

• The Psychic Serpent trilogy: Not to be outdone, this is a three book series that holds up surprisingly well for its age, has one of my favorite dimension hops ever, and is another great piece of fiction... until the last chapter or two. You kind of get this sense of dread in the buildup to it, like "oh fuck, there's no way she'd do that, is there?" (Narrator: "she did that.")

There's a part of me that is almost glad we never got an ending to PoTDK, because it ending badly would have been almost as tortuous as the author ghosting us after over halfway through the seventh bloody book.

 

Ekcentricity-Muse Harry/Romilda fic, which prompted something like a 1k+ review from me.

Disappointing because I really liked her characterization of Romilda but the Harry was off and I could never fully enjoy it. I wanted it to be excellent and it never quite made it. So not bad but elicited much disappointment.

There was a Harry/Daphne story along the same line that had genuine manipulative Daphne using Harry for her own ends and then evolving over time but Harry still caught wind of it and was righteously pissed. It was doing a really good balancing act of these two and then tried to rush a conclusion without any real payoff or climax to what was an excellent buildup.

 

Harry Potter: MOR really

I was expecting the pace to get up and for it to actually get interesting and creative

Instead we got a cross between Harry Potter, the God Delusion and Atlas Shrugged.

 

Hard to pick for me. Perhaps "whatever happened to the likely lad" by nonjon. Just goes to show that the fandom moved forwards, but he didn't, and he really hasn't been seen since.

 

Delenda Est by Lord Silvere. I remember liking that story so much, and then like halfway through it went off the rails and took a real nose dive in quality.

 

And it was one of the few promising time-travel stories too.

 

Almost immediately after they went back forwards in time. It was almost remarkable how quickly it happened.

 

Once there was a million random OCs (were there a shitton of Potter girls, or am I remembering wrong?) I was out. The intrigue of Harry trying to influence the war and becoming a major player was so interesting too.

Unfortunately the clock struck midnight and the story turned into a pumpkin.

 

That is the sequel Para Bellum. That story has their children from the timeline in Delenda Est going to another HP world.
More meandering plot follows.

 

Universal agreement that the fic lost steam the moment the forward time jump happened. There was a great story going in the 70s era, and then the author had to wrench it back toward canon territory.

In the last few years, no fic was more underwhelming for me than Sum of their Parts. It's touted as the post-Hogwarts dark!Harry fic, it's oh so realistic and inventive.

It's not bad, but kinda boring and does little with the evil Ministry in the post-Voldemort reconstruction period, and the premise of Dark Lord being an actual legally recognized position was just silly. I can see the root of an interesting faction-building, fall-to-the-dark-side story in it, but that story is contained within the time skip the author throws in before the epilogue.

 

I found Delenda Est to be trash from the very beginning. Didn't even manage to reach back to the present part.

But the biggest disappointment for me has to be Harry Potter and the Accidental Horcrux. I need to suffer through the rest of it and review it some day. Why is it that trash in the library?

 

Delende Est is a weird fic to look back at in retrospect. It's like a literal switch was flipped off in the author(s) mind, and they just stopped giving a fuck about keeping the fic on the serious side. I would say that the actual deep end happens at chapter 20 when the goblins are revealed to know about the timetravel the whole time, but there are some circumspect stuff before that. I think the sequel is a further example of that, because it sucks. Or perhaps it's simply a return to form, given the other stuff that they wrote, and shouldn't be a surprise.

 

I've still got no idea how Voldemort didn't just run shit being given like 15 more years and never being killed. The whole country was super chill, like what was he doing and why is he such a big deal if he could never accomplish anything.

 

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.