There’s really very few other ways I can succinctly describe the fic other than this review’s title. While I was initially pulled in by how the fic’s premise ticked a lot of boxes which appealed to me (Fusion Fic setting, Adopted Harry, and a divergent Grail War), I soon very quickly found that it lacked much in the way of originality.
In general, the fic plays most of the standard OP Harry tropes straight as an arrow without doing anything interesting with them. He’s more powerful and smarter than everyone else because of his upbringing, grows very little over the course of the series, and doesn’t have much characterization beyond the bare minimum despite being the central focus of the series, leaving him unbearably boring to read about. There’s several points where the fic essentially feels like it’s trying to “um, actually” the events of canon for the sake of propping up how super awesome Herwald is, and the fic frankly becomes unbearable to read at those points.
In terms of the rest of the cast, the HP cast is pretty much the same as canon and their interactions with Herwald are as shallow & boring as the man himself. The Fate cast, meanwhile, are generally big players outside of the start and end of the fic, and everything I said about the HP cast applies to them as well.
The fic also liberally indulges in a degree of Dumbledore bashing towards the end for no other reason than to add more fuel to the OP Independent Harry fire.
For all I’ve complained, I don’t think the fic is necessarily *awful*, it has semi-competent prose and there’s much worse fanfic out there, but I honestly can’t say it’s anything of worth other than being just the same as every OP Harry fic out there you’ve already seen a million times.
FanficRecs Derivative and disappointing
There’s really very few other ways I can succinctly describe the fic other than this review’s title. While I was initially pulled in by how the fic’s premise ticked a lot of boxes which appealed to me (Fusion Fic setting, Adopted Harry, and a divergent Grail War), I soon very quickly found that it lacked much in the way of originality.
In general, the fic plays most of the standard OP Harry tropes straight as an arrow without doing anything interesting with them. He’s more powerful and smarter than everyone else because of his upbringing, grows very little over the course of the series, and doesn’t have much characterization beyond the bare minimum despite being the central focus of the series, leaving him unbearably boring to read about. There’s several points where the fic essentially feels like it’s trying to “um, actually” the events of canon for the sake of propping up how super awesome Herwald is, and the fic frankly becomes unbearable to read at those points.
In terms of the rest of the cast, the HP cast is pretty much the same as canon and their interactions with Herwald are as shallow & boring as the man himself. The Fate cast, meanwhile, are generally big players outside of the start and end of the fic, and everything I said about the HP cast applies to them as well.
The fic also liberally indulges in a degree of Dumbledore bashing towards the end for no other reason than to add more fuel to the OP Independent Harry fire.
For all I’ve complained, I don’t think the fic is necessarily *awful*, it has semi-competent prose and there’s much worse fanfic out there, but I honestly can’t say it’s anything of worth other than being just the same as every OP Harry fic out there you’ve already seen a million times.