YMMV / The Odds Were Never In My Favour

• Arc Fatigue: First Task of the EMT: One chapter. Second Task: Four chapters of prep, one chapter of actual task. Third Task: Three chapters of prep, one chapter of actual task, one chapter for judging. Fourth task: Four chapters of prep, eleven chapters of actual task, and it ended prematurely (on the third day out of two weeks) because of Ra going off the rails on the second night. People started wondering about how long the fourth task would take when it reached the second chapter.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Senior Accountant Grimjaw only appears a few times per story arc but has a lot of love for being a Badass Bureaucrat who provides a nuanced look at goblin culture.
  • Slytherin European Magical Tournament Montague has gradually won over a lot of fans despite his minor role and loyalty to Voldemort due to his constant Karmic Butt-Monkey moments and occasional Dumbass Has a Point comments.
• Fanfic Fuel: What would have happened if the European Magical Tournament had been at Beauxbottoms (which had an interesting series of events planned and would not have had a headmistress actively furthering the plans of Osiris)?
• Padding:
  • Every twenty chapters or so, there's likely to be a chapter where nothing truly relevant seems to happen and fans are frustratedly waiting around for approaching important events. This is most pronounced during Alexandra's third year, where less is going on.
  • Huge amounts of time get spent describing the highly complicated set of rules for how to win the Fourth Task of the magical tournament, only for the task to come to an end as a side effect of the main conflict long before many of those rules come into play.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Reviewers of the story are nearly unanimous in criticizing how Remus Lupin is used. He only has dialogue in two or three chapters. In the last of those chapters, he joins James and Sirius in trying to kill Alexandra for reasons which are poorly articulated despite there being some good reasons for him to turn on the Light fanatics (which is lampshaded In-Universe).
  • Yegor Poliakov, champion of Sloth, is notable for being the only Dark Champion who comes across as The Chosen Zero, is one of the few champions uninterested in villainous power games, and shows some Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass skills near the end of the Fourth Task of the European Magical Tournament. He is unceremoniously decapitated by Ra in his second fighting scene and only five chapters after getting his first line of dialogue.

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