Fan Fiction Fri- Tuesday!

First post. I'm sure it can only get better from here. The idea is for me to review some (usually independent) fiction. In the process I'll probably spoil a thing or two for you someday, so shut up, I don't care. 

Okay, so I want to start with some fan-fiction because it's an easy laugh and if you haven't read some I really want to encourage you, it's great stuff. I know you're like, "Sure, go for the poor defenseless amateurs," but really this is the first thing I saw under Harry Potter fan fiction that wasn't a hundred chapters long, so I'm not hedging my bets... much. 

It's called "Mercy" by HazelCharm, and you can find the whole thing here: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8511321/1/Mercy.

Well, this story takes place a few years after the end of the last Harry Potter book. Draco has apparently gotten himself into a marriage with a cheating wife and he mopes himself to the park with his son where he sees Hermoine, an unlikely partner in misery.

My first impression of this story is that it's not bad, if you are the sort of person that would enjoy being a consultant for a suicide hotline and listening to a businessman drunkenly ramble about his lost cat or some shit. Not to trivialize the problems of suicidal people or their pets, let me explain. It's meant to be utterly depressing, but the feeling is lost due to the author's long-winded explanations of emotions that read like, "The cardboard felt like cardboard. It looked like it too. He wondered if it actually was cardboard..." It gives the whole thing the feel of a really upbeat and happy sounding song in which the lyrics are about children starving in the third world and bear attacks and AIDS.

In the future of the Harry Potter world, conflict apparently has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with failed relationships—something magic can never fix. Deep shit there. It is kind of entertaining to think of Ron becoming an alcoholic because his brother died. I was like halfway though laughing at that image when he fucking pushed pregnant Hermoine down the stairs and killed her baby. This shit just got real. Draco really hits the nail on the head with his internal dialogue here: "He had killed his own child, just because he didn't want to get a job?" Yes, exactly, it is fucking ridiculous. Pro tip: If your characters can't believe the crazy shit you have just written down, maybe the reader won't either. Really? Pushed her down the stairs? What next, they fall in love and he struggles with how to tell her he has cancer? I do have to give her credit here for saying, "Fuck it, nobody wants a rambling explanation of why their relationship has failed, let's just cut to the fucking chase and make Ron a woman beating, child killing alcoholic and call it good."


But it's alright because both characters shrug it off in the next couple lines like nothing ever happened. This story apparently isn't about Hermoine and her tragic abortion, it's about poor Malfoy and his cheating wife. But she has a solution so simple that it almost seems like the author wanted to keep the story moving but didn't want to go through the complications of boring us with more dialogue (an apparently common theme). Just get a divorce! I'll go with you right now!

And done. "Had it really been that easy?" Draco thought to himself. Man, this character has a knack for saying exactly what I'm thinking. Alright, I guess you have to get to the real story somehow. Why don't you invite Hermoine over for dinner, to your house, where your wife still lives? I'm sure that won't turn out badly. But hey, conflict you can see a mile away is still conflict, right?

But the thing is it never really pays off. In the next chapter, Malfoy's wife does come out and illustrate the author's eloquent mastery of emotion by using all caps to get her point across. CAN YOU TELL I'M YELLING RIGHT NOW? GOOD 'CAUSE I COULDN'T THINK OF ANOTHER WAY TO SHOW YOU I'M MAD!!!1! But she doesn't really give a shit that Hermoine is sitting there.

Her outburst does make Hermoine reflect that the childhood enemy who she has hung out with for at least a couple hours now has completely changed. Now he is decent and obviously a good father. Yes, it is apparent from the three casual mentions of Malfoy's son that their relationship is close and beautiful. Malfoy's wife is also a cheating bitch that conveniently hates her son and there is no way you can see where this story is going, right?

In the next chapter they all go to the zoo together, 'cause, well, SOMETHING has to happen, and you can't just have them making out yet, right? Anyway, you get the idea and that's pretty much the end, for now. Stay tuned to her story for more of this exciting tale. Oh, uh, SPOILERS!

Overall this story has a strange, sort of off balance feel to it. HazelCharm apparently wanted to write a romance between Malfoy and Hermoine (don't we all!) but she didn't want it to be like all the other fan-fics ("You're a wizard, Harry," Hagrid said, and then shoved his barrel-sized...). Her solution appeared to be to develop a more believable romance instead of just piling the characters on top of each other in a sex fest. It's a good notion, but the way she did it was to jam as much conflict as she could into all the wrong places.

It's good that she got Malfoy vulnerable and open to change and realized she needed to get Ron out of the picture to make this all happen. But when a cheating wife wasn't enough she had to up the ante with a son. Something still wasn't right, how about an abusive husband? But the story just wasn't coming, so she went all-in with an old fashioned stairs abortion. The problem is none of these conflicts got in the way of the characters' romance, in fact they all helped it happen. It's like if all I cared about was getting rich and my relatives kept mysteriously dying and leaving me gobs of money. What convenient misfortune!

So now time to make up some sort of stars system.

For, uh, Punctuation and Grammar: 3 out of 5 stars. Most of the shit had periods on it. Actually it was amazingly well polished if you consider that this was fan fiction.

Plot: 2 out of 5. The conflict just didn't match up and it was too easy. If I know exactly where it's going then there's no point in reading it. Except to laugh my ass off.

Style: 2 out of 5. The emotions fell flat on their metaphorical face despite all the emo shit shoved in here. It's not the easiest thing to do, but when you have characters just sort of deadpan things like, "Then he drunkenly pushed me down the stairs and broke my arm and my baby died." And then a line later saying, "Forget about it. What's new with you?" You might want to tweak your story. A lot of the paragraphs were also a bit like reading an encyclopedia entry on the production of white paper. Not even colored construction paper. And then all those words don't help cushion the blow of her sudden realization that he is inexplicably a great father and she is falling in love with him. "He hasn't thrown a racial slur at me once today, he must be a different man." BUT I can not get over the ballsiness of the drama she tried to inject into this story.

Overall: 2 out of 5. Not as bad as I expected. I respect the idea of fan fiction, but that doesn't keep it from sucking across the board. The weird thing about this story is that she relied on the Harry Potter world for no reason. This could be a standalone story, and for that I almost want to give it a 3, but I won't.

That's it for this week. I'll be back next week with another, hopefully more entertaining review of some other independent fiction. Until then, you are always more than welcome to criticize and ridicule my own work, which you can find through my author page at amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall.