FanficRecs Hateful, ranty and OOC
Apparently this is supposed to be a Deconstruction of various Harry Potter tropes. What it in fact is, is a massive Hate Fic that occasionally feels more like a rant than it does an actual story. In fact, this is pretty much a paint-by-numbers "here's-why-JKR-sucks" fic, where the author angrily denounces everything about canon they don't like. Selena's review called it; this is a fic for those who are bitter about how canon turned out — lots of self-righteous anger and ranting about how wrong, wrong, wrong J. K. Rowling was and what terrible people anyone-but-the-author's-favourites are/were.
Problem is, most of the arguments this fic presents against JKR and the main characters are flawed at best and total Ass Pulls at worst. The author claims to be true to canon, but is really more true to her own, very biased interpretation of canon; a lot of time is spent twisting and bending canon events and personalities in order to make sure Harry and friends come off worse and the author's favourites come out smelling like roses. Already the very first sentence of the story reveals that nobody's going to be in character in this story — unless you think you think it's even remotely in-character for Harry to scream angrily about how people like the Malfoys got off too lightly and he wants to see some punishment, dammit.
In fact, the blatant misrepresentation of canon reminds me a lot of Cori Falls's Team Rocket fics, to the point where I was half-expecting one of the author's notes to explain that the books had been Harry's delusions and that this story explains what really happened. I suppose I should just count myself lucky that Harry never says "AUGH!!!" or ask people why they're being so MEEEEAAAN to him.
And that's not even getting into Jane Rochester, a particularly loathsome Fixer Sue whose main role seems to be the biggest Author's Mouthpiece in an already-too-big cast of Author's Mouthpieces, and get together with Snape because obviously Lily was a terrible person who didn't deserve him.
The more extreme Slytherfen and Snape/Malfoy apologists will probably like it, but the hatred and sheer spitefulness of this fic is too much for me.
FanficRecs Wish Fulfillment for the Slytherfen Soul
This is just the fic you're looking for if you're quite bitter with DH and badly need a good, long, main-character-trashing, canon-ship-trashing, Slytherpology session, and aren't too bothered with canon being both subtly and blatantly subverted. It's very impressive in its all-inclusiveness —- anyone who has ever had a gripe with the HP series, no matter what it was, will likely find it addressed in this story, for it functions as one huge, sermonic platform on how poorly this or that or the other issue was handled in the books, and how much the respective characters suck for going along with said handling. Folks who dislike having the author in their ear telling them how to interpret what they've read might have an issue, though —- the messages of authorial intent are far more heavy-handed then anything Rowling's ever come up with. People hoping to read about recognizable HP characters may well be disappointed, too: the characters of this story function wholly as the author's mouthpieces, just as surely as if they were sock-puppets s/he was controlling from his/her badly-hidden position behind the makeshift stage. The few times they bear more than a passing resemblance to their canon selves are brief, and often pointless. But readers may be willing to let that go just to marvel at the Mary Sue who trumps all other Mary Sues by being the perfect-but-modest-about-it descendant of Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre. Only the best for Snape, after all! ;)
FanficRecs All that glitters...
Arsinoe de Blassenville's The Golden Age is more a Book Review than a fanfiction and it works because it dramatizes and exposing the aspects of the story that she dislikes. I don't entirely agree with her arguments but in terms of how she writes it, the bitterness with which she unpeels the middle-class flat magic-less world of wizardry which is what is made at the end of the series and the manner in which the main characters are kind of unpleasant when you come down to it.
To put it simply, The Golden Age is a good story that explores the So What Do We Do Now? aspect of post-war gloom and doom that characterizes the epilogue of many stories. I don't care for the new characters so much as the bleak afterglow that runs through the series. The main characters of Harry Potter are kind of entitled brats who were entirely under the thumb of adults and without those adults all they have are themselves and the hollow life before them. The patent sweetness with which the main series ends always left a bad taste in my mouth because it felt false and rang hollow. The problem with stories, as Neil Gaiman said, is tell a story long enough and they all end in death.