Reviews FanFic / Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality

The curse of the fanfic

To put it bluntly, this story is amazing. However it has one great flaw that is hard to overlook. It's not the occasionally droning narration, or the author using Harry to show off how much he researched certain subjects. It's not even the (alleged) Mary Sue -ness of Harry in this fic.

No. It is the fact that this a fan-fiction, which works great for it for the first couple of chapters, where it is a cheerful deconstruction of the books, poking fun at the undefined magic and the general lack of common sense permeating Magical Britain.

However, once things start to get serious, the story runs into the two biggest hurdles every fanfiction story has to overcome: the strength of the canon and spoilers. The former is self-evident. Writing fanfiction, especially one that deconstructs the original setting, will ends up being compared to the original, and when the tone the fic sets is so different from canon, there are always going to be people who would flinch away from it on a gut-level. More importantly though, just being aware of the canon spoils a lot of the story, even parts that would be otherwise absolutely amazing. Imagine how bone-chilling the final revelation about Quirrell would have been if it wouldn't be well know who he actually was to everyone. In canon it was a surprise, but he was more of a bait-and-switch antagonist. Compared to that, him being revealed as the villain here would be an amazing twist... except everyone and their pet hamster knows who he is already.

And this is the crux of my review: As a standalone story, this is amazing. It is well-written, well-paced and consistently engaging, but it can never live up to its full potential because it is fan-fiction, and it cannot be reworked into a standalone story without it losing its core. Not only that, it would work best if read without any prior knowledge of the HP series, but then it would spoil the hell out of the canon story, so it is a lose-lose situation.

But what about the book itself, you might ask? Well, it is pretty amazing. It takes it a couple dozen chapters to find its sea-legs and become more than just a deconstruction of the original, as there is a great tonal shift between the first, more comedic part and the latter, more serious part. Overall it is still a great read, with characters with actual depth (not saying the originals weren't deep, but these ones are so in different ways), a good plot and maybe just a smidgen too much self-congratulatory showing off of the contents of the author's bookshelves.

I would obviously recommend it, though I honestly don't know how. If you like the first part, you might not like the second one, and if you find the characters annoying in the beginning, you might not want to trudge through a thousand pages until the character-development kicks in. Overall all I can say is that if you have the patience and resilience to finish the fic, you will probably love it, but you shouldn't force it. It's not for everyone.