Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness

Also for the record, I hung around the fringes of the DAYDverse for a while, and almost went to the "convention" (I gather it was not much more than a meet 'n greet) in the DC area back in December 2009. Unfortunately it snowed buckets on that very morning, and I was no way going to mess around with the Blue Ridge in that kind of weather. So I stayed home safe, warm and dry, wondering what I'd missed.

Turns out I missed a lot. One thing led to another (I'm not going to go there, you can find it for yourselves), and I backed off and became much more skeptical of the whole thing.

Probably just as well all things considered....

edited 10th Jan '12 7:06:51 PM by Maven

(to Iaculus) I don't know. Working your batshit out on paper in a fictional format can sometimes be therapeutic - doesn't mean it's good writing or pleasurable reading, though. (IMHO it's neither.)

To be honest, though, it just seems like he's trying to market it in a different way, and by all accounts, the inner circle of DAYDians are getting pretty scary themselves. Thanfiction does not seem like the kind of guy who's prone to sober introspection.

As for Turimel, the lady who wrote that book... yeah, she was pretty crazy for a while. Seems to have calmed down a bit lately, though, and even had the decency to apologise to kumquatwriter (Thanfiction's ex-girlfriend and the writer of that blog) for her behaviour towards her.

edited 10th Jan '12 11:12:54 PM by Iaculus

The fact that they existed before they became Harry Potter characters explains why he's so protective of the DAYD characters. There always seemed to be more to that rant than just a "hey, that's my fanon, what gives?" and now we know why.

I'm another of those who used to like DAYD, before the things that bug me really started to bug me and now I can't stand it.

Szaleniec, I think at this point the club of "people who used to like DAYD before what bugs them really started to bug them" is larger than the circle of "DAYDians". Oooooh, I bet that rankles!

There are two lovely sporkings of DAYD out on the Web, one by "nevermore", formerly on HMS_STFU, and the other by "uke_nagashi". (The latter doesn't have an index, you have to keep paging forward, sometimes through lots of extraneous personal stuff.)

So far no one to my knowledge has sporked Sluagh (I wonder how many people actually got through it). I'm certainly not going to try - reading it once was enough. :insert Mr. Yuk face here:

edited 11th Jan '12 9:06:27 AM by Maven

Cheers for the links! I didn't know that Nevermore had finished their sporking; I lost track when The HMS STFU closed.

I've read DAYD and it's enjoyable enough, I guess. There was a lot of things I didn't buy into, though, and these things are why I've set myself the challenge of trying to top it (a work in progress).

I think that the author just goes way OTT in tems of what people can do and what is done to them. The way a number of characters act also felt off to me, notably Snape (which has been discussed) and Neville who... well, becomes an expy for Harry circa Order Of The Phoenix.

In short, the author could have used a second opinion on a lot of things.

I've read the Trope pages for the sequels and it seems they just keep going in this direction so I'm not going to bother reading them.

edited 12th Jan '12 10:01:34 AM by TheBatPencil

Could someone please sum up for me what in the bloody hell the Thanfiction cult thing is all about? I've been reading that blog posted on the last page, but I can't make heads or tails of what exactly happened, how Thanfiction is a horrible person, what was the deal with him being Victoria Bitter, and various other things.

So confused.

Well, I don't know the guy personally, so this is just what I can make out from reading what other people who know him have said, along with my impressions of him as a writer.

But personality-type-wise, he seems to be a charismatic, grandiose dreamer without enough grounding in the real world to make the things he wants to be true a reality, and when forced to confront this fact he turns sullen and immature. Because of the charisma and the way fandom attracts lonely people who want the magic to be real, he can coast on the goodwill of others for long stretches, seemingly without much regard for them as equals.

As for what he's actually done, from the looks of things he's accidentally committed some minor crimes and intentionally committed one or two others, and just generally combined normal fandom creepiness with the clout being a decent writer has given him.

Well, these two posts basically provide a rough draft of the history of what happened, so they're good for an overview. Later posts go into further details on specific incidents - 'Operation Catch and Release', for instance, explains how kumquatwriter escaped the cult.

I think we need to back off on this before it bumps up against The Rules. Persons wanting to know more can do a Web search on "andrew blake", "thanfiction", and "Victoria Bitter". It is not pleasant reading.

Added: if you do a Web search on "amy player", you will find an explanation of sorts that sounds almost sincere. At the time. Perhaps.

Maybe early on there was a miniscule chance that he had begun to try to clean up his act - but not now. And I don't think anyone outside, perhaps, his inner circle will ever extend him a scintilla of trust again.

And after all that, he can still keep his head together enough to write coherent fiction? I have to give him some props for that much.

edited 12th Jan '12 7:16:29 PM by Maven

Hey, his talent for cooking up coherent fiction was what started the whole mess.

edited 12th Jan '12 11:35:03 PM by Iaculus

Anyway, I keep checking to see what he does with A Peccatis next, even though I really don't like where it's going. He posts chunks in his little DAYDverse before putting finished chapters on Fanfiction.net, and at this point the chunks are about a chapter ahead. But for all his "promises" to buckle down and push ahead and get it done, sometimes days go by between chunks (and sometimes longer).

All it's got in common with Rowling's work is a handful of characters In Name Only and a general sketch of where they are in space-time. Rowling kept her work to a soft PG-13 - this is a medium to hard R (casual F-bombs, overly graphic descriptions, drug abuse, etc.). She wrote about a world that was inherently fantastic and yet recognizable - this is gritty, grungey verismo with a thin (cracking, splitting and peeling) veneer of the fantastic. By this point the setting is In Name Only also, and sometimes in clear violation of canon. (Aurors are the wizarding equivalent of NCIS? Since when? Healers know the Muggle concept of triage and even use the Muggle indicators? Since when?) Stuff like that keeps jolting the reader (me) out of the story with a "Waitaminnit!" or even a "WTF?".

How he's ever going to get this back in line with Rowling's light and fluffy Epilogue is entirely beyond me, especially considering one of the developments in Chapter 9 (and the way it's harped on afterward).

edited 2nd Nov '12 5:53:00 PM by Maven

A lot of fanboys and fangirls (especially the kind who write Dark Fic) regard the Epilogue as Dis Continuity anyway.

Oh, but he has said he's going to do it. That'll be some trick to pull off!

So, another whole chapter of A Peccatis is up at Fanfiction.Net, and my "This-is-going-to-Go-Horribly-Wrong"-dar is off the charts. Haven't Neville and Co. taken a good hard logical look at the obvious patterns that are developing? Somebody wants Neville to know that he was supposed to be The Chosen One. Somebody else wants to shut up - permanently - everybody who Knows Too Much about that. And this lot are scurrying around arranging protective measures for their families and friends, most of whom don't know jack about the past? And they're going to leave someone who probably does know dangling as bait?

And they have already been told - and it's even been Lampshaded - that just this sort of maneuver blew up in Dumbledore's face back in 1981?

Yeah, how could anything possibly go wrong this time? :snark:

Maybe the person doing the scheme is, while an impressive Chessmaster in his own right, someone who never learned from that mistake, or that he made an erroneous assumption regarding Neville. Maybe someone who is connected to the backstory of Dumbledore and Grindelwald through family, trying to plan in the same vein as Dumbledore and failing quite miserably.

It's Neville & Co. who are doing the scurrying. And they haven't so much as tried to sit down and figure out what all the murders have in common (besides being connected to Harry, Neville or both). If they had, it would be fairly obvious what's going on, and it would sharply narrow the pool of suspects.

Hermione was right (all the way back in Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone): most wizards don't have a lick of logic. And that includes Harry and Neville both. (And no, she's not in the "detectives' club" - she's a suspect and they don't trust her. Can you say, "WTF?")

Paranoia + PTSD does not equal sane, rational logic.

I'd say everyone involved is a little bit crazy at this point.

edited 22nd Jan '12 4:38:39 PM by NickTheSwing

I'd say everyone involved is a little bit crazy at this point.

Some of that has to be from the writer putting his characters through another and even worse round of hell just a few years previously. And that was the writer's choice, not something the characters had anything to do with.

Indirectly I'm complaining about the writing. If all the characters are so wacked out or brain-damaged they can't look at a developing situation and see the patterns in it, there's a name for it: Idiot Plot.

Perhaps the characters are too wacked out at this point, and the person planning the scheme has counted on that.

He certainly chose a very, very good time to launch the Xanatos Roulette.

But it is quite realistic, of course PTSD Addled Characters cannot be at their best. This might even be deconstructing shows that have dysfunctional protagonists.

One wonders, then, why they've still got their jobs.

Oh, wait. Potterverse.

Not even Potterverse - Thanfictionverse, where nothing happens but what he wants, the way he wants it to, whether or not it makes royal hash of the original Potterverse, whether or not it makes any in-story sense.

All of the harping on and referring back to the original "Prophecy" does more than just ignore Rowling's point about prophecies mattering only if you believe in them - it Crucios it to death. She was quite adamant that the only reason it mattered was that Voldemort chose to believe it, chose to act on it, and therefore made it self-fulfilling. Harry only "had" to fulfill it because by then he wanted to, and would have taken on Voldy any way he could even if there had never been a prophecy. (So would, and did, Neville despite not knowing anything about what the "Prophecy" said.)

From a certain (Delphic) point of view, it didn't even matter which boy was "actually" meant - with both Harry and Neville having excellent reasons to hate Voldemort, one of them was going to get him at any cost. And as things turned out, it required both of them, with a little help from various friends (and Voldy himself).

And another chapter has been posted, in which, for a change, not an awful lot really happens. But is this a case of "the dog in the night time"?

So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my original understanding - that the sequals to DAYD go clean off the deep end - was a correct one?

Off the deep end? Pretty much. Thanfiction even rushed in where JKR decided not to.