I've read part of the Saving Connor series by Lightning on the Wave
"AU, eventual HPDM slash, very Slytherin!Harry. Harry's twin Connor is the Boy Who Lived, and Harry is devoted to protecting him by making himself look ordinary. But certain people won't let Harry stay in the shadows..."
Saving Connor by Lightning on the Wave
I've been meaning to talk about this series for a long time, but my memory was recently jogged by stumbling across Heir to a Warlord by OccAmy Phyre, which is a well-written TL;DR about Harry being taken in by a Somali warlord as a young boy (and then being set loose in Hogwarts as a young man. It started off as a freak!Harry and I skipped straight to the Hogwarts invitation, at which point we encounter super!Harry(now answering only to Nuri) with a flamethrower outwitting Dumbledore at their first meeting. Where did these now-common archetypes come from - super!Harry, Freak!Harry, Lord!Harry, twin!Harry?
The Saving Connor series seems to me to be the original Harry-as-twin-of-BWL stories as well as (one of?) the original super!Harry stories. It's superbly written and very, very long, making it hugely influential. Harry is raised from an early age by James and Lily to be Connor's unquestioning protector and is taught all manner of magic and rituals and also how to remain unobtrusive. He follows the advice all too well, becoming Connor's unquestioning protector and disregarding his own well-being. Harry has a gift for channeling magic and an encyclopedic knowledge about pureblood rituals, both of which are central to the plot. There's a rich cast of characters: Draco is Harry's delicate flower of a best friend, Ron is Connor's other right-hand man, and I remember prominent roles for James, Pansy, Lucius, and Narcissa. (I confess that my reading of these fics predates my involvement as an author, so it's been probably four years since I read them.)
I can't stress this enough: the prose is superlative. The descriptions of Harry using and interacting with magic are breathtaking, and most of the characters are rendered into complete people with strengths and weaknesses. The world and its customs are extraordinarily detailed. But I stopped reading halfway through the fifth book. I found as I went through the books that the exquisite writing was increasingly taking me nowhere. I said I read half the fifth book, but it was more like I'd read, skip twenty pages, check to see if anything had happened, skip another twenty pages.... And the content that was there was no longer enjoyable to me. (Mild spoilers follow for the rest of this paragraph.) I got lost in a court prosecution of the adults in Harry's lives - they'd been accused of child abuse, and everyone going on about how Harry's so GOOD and UNASSUMING and doesn't understand that he's been abused. I've only met one HP fen in real life and at the time I was embroiled in the fourth and Harry was so overpowered (and being talked to so often about having to stop being so self-sacrificing) that I was losing interest in the story and skipping a lot. "Keep reading," she said, "that gets fixed." And then it DID get fixed and I was so excited! And then the hundreds of pages of punishing Harry's abusers in the court of public opinion did me in (it was amounting to character bashing, which I tend to hate even if done well). Oh, and the advertised Harry/Draco had amounted to Draco following Harry around like a puppy for four and a half years and then a single timid kiss, if memory serves.
You know those Reader's Digest condensed books? I wish those existed for this series to cut the roughly three million words down, because I don't know how it ends. But if you love long, detailed fics full of both politics and action, not to mention meaty side plots, this is for you. Maybe I should re-read the first two myself.
Saving Connor by Lightning on the Wave
I've been meaning to talk about this series for a long time, but my memory was recently jogged by stumbling across Heir to a Warlord by OccAmy Phyre, which is a well-written TL;DR about Harry being taken in by a Somali warlord as a young boy (and then being set loose in Hogwarts as a young man. It started off as a freak!Harry and I skipped straight to the Hogwarts invitation, at which point we encounter super!Harry(now answering only to Nuri) with a flamethrower outwitting Dumbledore at their first meeting. Where did these now-common archetypes come from - super!Harry, Freak!Harry, Lord!Harry, twin!Harry?
The Saving Connor series seems to me to be the original Harry-as-twin-of-BWL stories as well as (one of?) the original super!Harry stories. It's superbly written and very, very long, making it hugely influential. Harry is raised from an early age by James and Lily to be Connor's unquestioning protector and is taught all manner of magic and rituals and also how to remain unobtrusive. He follows the advice all too well, becoming Connor's unquestioning protector and disregarding his own well-being. Harry has a gift for channeling magic and an encyclopedic knowledge about pureblood rituals, both of which are central to the plot. There's a rich cast of characters: Draco is Harry's delicate flower of a best friend, Ron is Connor's other right-hand man, and I remember prominent roles for James, Pansy, Lucius, and Narcissa. (I confess that my reading of these fics predates my involvement as an author, so it's been probably four years since I read them.)
I can't stress this enough: the prose is superlative. The descriptions of Harry using and interacting with magic are breathtaking, and most of the characters are rendered into complete people with strengths and weaknesses. The world and its customs are extraordinarily detailed. But I stopped reading halfway through the fifth book. I found as I went through the books that the exquisite writing was increasingly taking me nowhere. I said I read half the fifth book, but it was more like I'd read, skip twenty pages, check to see if anything had happened, skip another twenty pages.... And the content that was there was no longer enjoyable to me. (Mild spoilers follow for the rest of this paragraph.) I got lost in a court prosecution of the adults in Harry's lives - they'd been accused of child abuse, and everyone going on about how Harry's so GOOD and UNASSUMING and doesn't understand that he's been abused. I've only met one HP fen in real life and at the time I was embroiled in the fourth and Harry was so overpowered (and being talked to so often about having to stop being so self-sacrificing) that I was losing interest in the story and skipping a lot. "Keep reading," she said, "that gets fixed." And then it DID get fixed and I was so excited! And then the hundreds of pages of punishing Harry's abusers in the court of public opinion did me in (it was amounting to character bashing, which I tend to hate even if done well). Oh, and the advertised Harry/Draco had amounted to Draco following Harry around like a puppy for four and a half years and then a single timid kiss, if memory serves.
You know those Reader's Digest condensed books? I wish those existed for this series to cut the roughly three million words down, because I don't know how it ends. But if you love long, detailed fics full of both politics and action, not to mention meaty side plots, this is for you. Maybe I should re-read the first two myself.