After the End by Arabella and Zsenya

No, indeed, I am neither dead nor retired, but I have been a little far away from Harry Potter lately. Hopefully updates will now re-commence with (somewhat more) regularity. In the meantime, I've received a few requests to review this story, and as it was already on my to-do list, I happily oblige.

First, let me mention the ways this fic is, for all of its faults, a blessing upon the HP fandom.

1) Correct usage of grammar! (A concept I often believe is utterly unknown to the average HP writer.)

2) An ending! With -- may it please the gods of common decency -- no sequel in sight! (Ditto.)

3) Good writing! (Ditto. Ditto. Ditto.)

I had high hopes for this story when I first began to read it, light years ago and many cynical-making events past. I thought it had the potential to be a fantastic depiction of certain major characters rebuilding a way of life for themselves after unspeakable trauma. And there is a much-needed place in HP fanfic for stories in which the line of extrapolation from canonical characterizations is as short as possible, as I gather Arabella and Zsenya strove to do.

Now, before anyone gets their knickers in an odd configuration about what exactly constitutes a "canonical characterization," try this on first: a) you know exactly what I'm talking about, b) splitting hairs down to atom size about reader-interpretation-this and who-cares-about-authorial-intent-that is a ride I've been on, barfed on, and toddled off wearing the T-shirt and the cheesy little stickers for, and c) I'm about to start jawing off on where exactly they muffed it all up, so hold your piss for just a bleeding moment, all right?

Aside from the fact that the cutesy symmetry of Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny invokes in me the same reaction one might have to the sound of a gnarled claw scraping down a blackboard, I think it's the side effects of the effort to create such symmetry that really provide the most fodder for snark. Because, simply put, making Ginny extra-extra-special does not automatically turn her into the Only Stunningly Gorgeous Flame-Haired Lass with Porcelain Skin and Flashing Emerald Eyes Who Is Worthy Enough To Be the One True Love and Destined Soulmate of Harry Potter the Boy Who Lived. No, really, it doesn't. No, really. It doesn't.

And, yes, it is my own fault for not seeing the warning signs and bailing before Ginny Sue had the opportunity to make her odious appearance (although I do have a track record of such blindness, see previous reviews). But honestly, how was I to know that in Chapter 21 it would be revealed that -- gasp! -- Ginny had all of these sekrit and heretofore-yet-unmanifested superpowers, and was really an empathic Healer (with a capital H) wunderkind who could, in a single story, Heal (with a capital H) a bunch of sick dragons, Hermione's catatonic mother and father, and, of course, Harry's poor, lonely, beaten and battered soul?

But wait, there's more! Because not only that, she also pulls a Snape and singlehandedly brews Wolfsbane Potion! And, when she gets it wrong and Sirius chews her out for it (amid many cheers from my direction, lemme tell you), later he acts like a hypocritical moron who can't take his own advice, so everything he says is a load of crap anyway! Plus, Ginny, and Ginny alone, holds the One Ring -- er, that is, you know, the key -- to proving Malfoy is nothing but a great big Death Eater! Man, that Ginny Sue. If you could bottle her up and sell her over the counter, you'd make millions.

I'm not sure anyone but the authors really cared about the Bill/Fleur thing, so I won't bore you by talking about it, especially since I refused to bore myself by reading about it. There was some stuff going on with the Weasleys and an angry, missundaztood orphan kid, but I couldn't for the life of me pay enough attention to figure out what on earth it had to do with the rest of the story. Also, there might have been a Quidditch game. I could be mistaken. Kind of hard to follow the plays when your eyes are busy glazing over.

When all snarkiness is snarked, however, the strengths of After the End are still readily apparent: there's the Trio's natural chemistry, the flashbacks to what happened during the war, the patient and compassionate Remus characterization, Sirius's frustrations regarding his guardianship, and the fact that Draco Malfoy, finally, is Draco Malfoy. (How I've missed that poisonous little bastard.) So on the whole, if you ignore the rest of the shippery Mary Sue-ish foolishness (and I didn't even get a chance to take a bite out of all the prim eyes-averted non-smut schmoopiness of the Ron/Hermione pairing), the story comes out in the plus column.

But that begs the question. Which is, for once, darling HP fandom, could you please produce a fic where one needn't disregard entire chapters just to make the overall experience palatable?

Lust Over Pendle by A.J. Hall

I got a request to review this one, which was a bit of good timing as I'd been thinking I needed to branch out from Trio-centered fic, as well as try to review a story where my positive comments would be more than just afterthoughts tacked on as post-rant ballast. There are a lot of story spoilers here, because I'm still trying to figure out the review business and how much information is necessary for good critique. So please, don't read this unless you've read the story.

( Onward... )

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Lori

(or, my personal title, The Story with a Thousand Reasons to Die, Die, and Dammit, Just Die Already)

Note: This review also spoils the hell out of the two prequels, The Paradigm of Uncertainty and The Show That Never Ends.

You know, when an author flat out warns her readers in the title of a story that the show is never gonna end, I can really blame no one but myself for still being on the boat when things start making like a really, really expensive James Cameron movie.

Why did I stick around this long? Because honestly, it used to be a pretty decent fic. Part One was a fun, rollicking action-adventure cum romance, and, I admit, it almost made me cry. (Oh, shuddup, I was premenstrual, all right?) Part Two, for all of its "Harry&Hermione are soulmates and beloooooong together" craptacularness, actually had an interesting breakdown in the relationship and a knock-you-on-your-ass ending executed with all the precision of an arrow to the heart.

Part Three? Should have ended five chapters ago. Because all I've seen so far, in chapters averaging upwards of a hundred pages each, is an extremely bloated play-by-play of wedding preparations for the Couple of the Century (insert rude noise here) and a lot of incredibly tacky and childish voyeur-interest in Harry and Hermione's icky squirrel-like sex life (not sure whether I'm referring more to the supporting characters or the intended audience -- oooh, wait did I just say that?). Yes, I know we finally got a wedding in the latest installment. Doesn't mean anything actually happened. The bad guys seethe for a scene or two every 20,000 words, but damn me if I can figure out what they're actually contributing to the story. Or, you know, what the point of the story even is.

On that note, could someone please tell me what it is about this fandom which encourages diarrhea of the author? Is it so hard to bang out a plotline, tighten it, use it, adhere to it, and subsequently restrain yourself from crapping out piles of unnecessary verbiage? People, "The End" is your friend. Get there faster. Especially when story quality is deteriorating at the speed of light.

For example, see Chapter Four, in which we find Harry and Hermione recapping for Ron the entire plot of the trilogy so far in -- get this -- transcript format. Because what, writing actual prose just wasn't cutting it anymore? Way to chop the legs off what could have been a truly affecting, character-developing scene. Or, to take it back to even earlier feats of lameness, how about Buffy and Spike of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame going for a completely unrelated and gratuitous stroll through Chapter Ten of STNE? Because that was just too cool for words. No, really, there are no words.

(You there. Don't even get me started on the swing dancing.)

As I said above, the first two stories did have some moments of greatness. Lori's prose, when she uses it, isn't groundbreaking (someone please keep her away from anymore overblown descriptions of architecture or furniture or fashion or, god help us all, sex), but sometimes she does manage to hit a core of deep-running emotion. Paradigm of Uncertainty was one of the first stories I ever read in the HP fandom, and there are bits of it and STNE that are still stuck in my mind today: Hermione's memories of finding Ron's body, the high-five after their first time, her first kiss with Harry, the revelation of the Pensieve. Unfortunately, for a series which was actually kind of seminal in my perceptions of quality HP fanfic, those moments of greatness are now long, long past.

Trouble in Paradise by AngieJ

Speaking of soap opera. Here we have a story where when it comes to telling the truth, Ron weasels his way in and out and right back in, Harry and the rest of the Weasleys run around contributing nothing of significance until the last two or three chapters, Angelina Johnson sticks her nose into other people's business again and again and again and AGAIN, and Hermione screeches her way through every -- single -- chapter.

That said...well, no. I didn't like this one so much. I mean, I finished it, and I started the sequel, but I think there are whole chunks of this story which I completely skipped over: Angelina's background and musings on her marriage, whatever the hell was going on with Hermione's research, anything to do with the energy leech masquerading as Draco Malfoy. I mean, if I hadn't, I'd probably still be sitting here trying to puzzle through the labored, labyrinthine relationships of the plot, when really all that drew me in the first place was the promise of major marriage-demolishing theatrics. Ron and Hermione's marriage, that is (since I rarely pass up the opportunity to see a beloved OTP self-destruct).

And does it ever. AngieJ pretty much throws the book at it -- you've got your basic communication issues, followed up by cheating, lying, illegitimate impregnating, friends and family dragged into the secret-keeping conspiracy, memory charms to cover up even more cheating, unrequited (and yet, not-so-unrequited) love, revelations of all of the above in front of said friends and family, and finally, a big confusing battle with something nasty and evil which I probably should have thought was cool. And oh yeah, a wedding.

If you like that sort of thing, you have to give the author kudos for building it all up and then not just knocking it down, but freaking aiming a nuclear warhead at it and blowing it to kingdom come. If you don't like that sort of thing, well, you still kind of have to give her kudos. Because there's such a thing as plot, and then there's PLOT. This one was obviously pretty carefully planned out, such that all the clues were (probably, if you were a more attentive reader than me) there, and I appreciate that in a serial work-in-progress.

However, the story's emotional impact is greatly hampered by its choice of narrator. Angelina Johnson does come across as a real, fleshed-out character rather than a Mary Sue (a major, major pet peeve of mine), but she's not actually a likable or sympathetic one, to me. The plot forces her to be a snoop or to blunder into things like a blind bleeding elephant, and I have no patience for either type.

Not only that, much of the major characters' motives and reasonings remain frustratingly opaque to her eyes (and by extension, ours), even with the "all is revealed" chapters at the end. What you get, then, is a group of angry, barely recognizable people lying to and yelling at and hating each other for chapters upon chapters, without any understandable explanation of their actions.

At least the ending isn't easily resolved -- I might have revisited my lunch if there'd been some sort of soulmate-ish, symmetrical tidying up of the relationships in the last chapter. The story closes realistically, even if it loses sight of reality for much of the way.

Harry Potter and the Psychic Serpent by Barb

A very odd, at times unreadable story about Harry Potter as studmuffin beefcake, Hermione Granger as sexpot without a spine (or a brain), Ron Weasley as not-so-best pal whose main purpose is to fly into jealous incoherent rages whenever the so-called plot requires, Draco Malfoy and Ginny Weasley pushing the page count to "dear God, is it ever going to end?" just to string along the other 15% of the fandom's shipper population (the rest being distributed amongst the various permutations of pairings of the other aforementioned characters), and oh yes, Dudley Dursley calling Hermione a "woman" in one of the most "ewww! gross"-inducing moments without reference to bodily functions or fluids in recent memory. Although, now that I think about it, the fact that Sirius and Peter Pettigrew could smell certain of those fluids, and that these points were important to the story, was rather icky in itself.

And again with the so-called plot: I think there might have been one in there somewhere but it perhaps got lost under the mountains and mountains of sheer verbiage about running, exercising, bathing suits, excessive use of the phrase "pillowed her head on his chest," running, womanly curves, running, and teenage lust.

That said, I kind of liked it.

It took me multiple tries to get past the first couple of chapters, where Harry starts sprouting hair in interesting places and Hermione starts kittening up to him like the sex-crazed kitten she so very much is. But once I embraced the fact that the story was simply going to be over the top (like, the way the Sears Tower stacked onto the Empire State Building balancing on the peak of Mt. Everest is over the top), it was actually a pretty fun ride.

It's like soap operas, y'know? An entire hour goes by in which exactly one and a half things of note happen, and yet millions of bored, unfulfilled housewives sit glued to their televisions in rapt attention every single day. That was me as well, with each eighty-page chapter. Glued, I mean, not housewife. (Along with, to a lesser extent, the sequel Harry Potter and the Time of Good Intentions -- a review of which may or may not be forthcoming. I've since tuned out of the third one, Harry Potter and whatever the hell it's called.)

Don't try to understand any of the characters' motives, as they're all running around like chickens with their heads cut off (or maybe that should read, chickens with their heads replaced by giant hormone-filled sexual organs), and most of the WTF moments in the plot get "explained" by various twists and revelations in later chapters. Just nod your head at those -- they don't actually like, make it all come together or anything.

Basically, if you can allow yourself to forget the fact that you're ostensibly reading about characters from the Harry Potter books as opposed to, say, Days of Our Lives (and oooh, how much cooler would Stefano have been if he'd been played by Jason Isaacs?) or 90210, then yeah, you're all good. Of course, you might have burst a vein in your eye from sitting in front of your computer screen reading for nine straight hours, but hey, there's always beefcake Harry for a prize.