Don't really have time for a line-by-line C&C, but I will say that I 
liked the premise this fic.  The execution, however, I thought was a 
little off.  I don't really have any specifics, but it seemed a little 
rushed to me.  For the most part, it seemed like you were depending upon 
the names of the techniques and spells from the other series to explain 
themselves rather than showing how Harry adapted them to his own use.

Rather than just going through the list of books and games that Harry is 
using as inspiration, it might be more useful to do a couple of scenes 
with him working on specific techniques and succeeding and failing (the 
latter would be helpful in showing that Harry isn't capable of doing 
anything he wants and that some things just don't fit into the HP 
concept of magic).  For instance, rather than just saying that he uses 
the Flame and the Void and giving a short description, give us a quick 
flashback of his learning the technique. 

Perhaps he has a particularly bad encounter with Dudley and his friends 
just after reading The Eye of the World, one in which his magic fails to 
work at all for some reason.  After that, angry and hurt, he decides to 
try it to get away from the pain by trying something new--and with his 
emotions on the boil, the Flame and the Void seems appropriate.  I'll 
admit that I've tried doing it myself and for the most part, with just a 
description to go off of it basically amounted to distracting myself 
from whatever I was feeling at the time.  Which to some extent is 
exactly what its meant to do--Harry realizing something like that and 
having the technique work a little differently than how Robert Jordon 
describes would help make this seem more like a coherent whole.

In general, bits and pieces of things are likely to be useful, while 
others won't be for Harry--I would just work on showing us some of the 
differences and places where things don't work in addition to the things 
that do.  Aside from successfully integrating the components that you're 
pulling from different worlds, what will likely end up making the story 
a fun read is creating new challenges rather than rehashing the ones 
that are already faced in the original story.  I could see this Harry, 
not as close to his friends as the original, failing to keep Voldemort 
from the Sorcerer's Stone, for instance.  This would do two things at 
once--it would challenge some of Harry's preconceptions from his books 
(how often do the good guys actually fail in fiction?) and would turn 
the story in a direction that might challenge an "Arch-Magus" more than 
the smaller challenges that JK Rowling built Harry up with.


The only other thing that I wanted to mention specifically from the 
story was the scene with Hagrid losing his temper and using his wand--I 
would go with something other than the pigs tail and probably on Vernon 
rather than Dudley.  The reason he used that in the book was that Dudley 
was stealing Harry's cake.

-- James M. Zema



the DragonBard wrote:

Harry Potter, the Arch-Magus

by

the DragonBard

  

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