Fairytale

[alice_alaizabel]

Summary: "We hate him because he acknowledges that our hero is a child. Just a child, with sellotaped glasses and knobbly knees and messy hair. A child who looks with innocence and naivety and hope for this brave new world. Severus knows this will get him killed."
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Harry Potter, Severus Snape
Word count: 982

Comments

[jobey_in_error]

Interesting, very interesting. I don't think you're being very fair to canon itself, which does have plenty of Grey. But I do love how poignant you can retell a story, I'm feeling the beginnings of an addiction.

[irishelflinwe]

That. Was. FANTASTIC.

Sad, but wonderful all the same. The Harry Potter books really are a kind of fairytale, which is no disrespect to Rowling, because she did a fantastic job of making this world that we're still going on about it after the books ended. She set out to tell a specific kind of story, and she did it exceptionally well. Your story reminds me of Pratchett's Witches Abroad in that it's about what happens when things don't fit to the tale.

tl;dr I love it! :P

[xicarus_complex]

I arrived here from fanficrants (and I fic-hopped from "Epithet"). I hope you don't mind if I leave comments on multiple stories; I know much of it is a year old, but I'm definitely interested. I like the premise. I like the way you introduced it, and I love the line "This boy grew up under the epithet of Freak - for a time, he even believed that was his name." There are some very lovely, very striking images throughout the fic--the lightbulb, for example, and "Several people know that their hero was raised in a cupboard. Snape knows that he never left it" are so bittersweet and beautiful. However, I don't know if I completely believed his friendship with Snape, partly because it seemed like the plot demanded it more than anything else. On a related note, I found the fic a little heavy-handed in places, which left me with the impression that you didn't trust your reader to grasp what you were going for, but I think you probably could've because the writing was really good :).

[alice_alaizabel]

Thank you so much! I have written an expansion, which does go into the friendship in more detail. I've finally finished it, so I'm planning to start posting it to lj over the next couple of days (having updated it sporadically elsewhere).

Thanks for the concrit, as well; most people don't bother. I have two points to make in my defence, the first being that this fic is about three years old now, so I've possibly improved since then. It also was written like it was a fairytale, so as if it were a children's story, hence the rather simplistic style. But it's really difficult to judge your own writing objectively, so I really appreciate the advice - when I next write something, I have something specific to watch out for, which is really helful.

[xicarus_complex]

I'll definitely keep an eye out for the expansion :3. I have to admit, I hesitate to offer concrit--and I didn't realize the fic was three years old, sorry!--but I decided to offer a little because I've seen you on fanficrants and as I said, I do like your work. I'm glad you found it helpful and I hope you don't mind if I continue to comment. I only have a few left.

[alice_alaizabel]

Oh no, it's fine. I'll leave a note on this comment thread when I've got the whole thing up (I originally posted in in chapters, but they were very short, so I'm still debating whether or not to just post it all in one here). Embarrassingly, I only finished it a few days ago, having not looked at the thing for a good two years at least. You'll probably find the many of the same problems in it that you have in the other HP stuff I've written - just keep in my mind I was only in my mid-teens when I wrote it! Even with the expansion (which is called Rainbow Of Grey) when I was writing the last two chapters, I was thinking "I think I'm bashing people over the head with this point, but there's quite a specific writing style throughout the previous chapters and it's going to feel more jarring if I changed that for the final two (especially as it flows better read all at once).

[alice_alaizabel]

Thank you! And I totally agree with you - Harry was a child during the course of the books - he's only seventeen in the last one, legally not even an adult in the UK or US, but he generally acts pretty mature, and copes with things really well, so I remember liking that in book 5, where the entire wizarding world - this world that is the only place he's ever felt like he belongs - is treating him essentially like the Dursleys, calling him a liar and a fantasist. Not to mention Voldemort having come back, and him feeling like he's going to have to fight him on his own, because he feels like is on his side. Yeah, I'd have side-eyed it more had he been totally calm and accepting of it.

[xicarus_complex]

I hope it's all right for me to jump in; I'm always interested in discussions about the series and I think alice-alaizabel's "Fairytale" lends itself well to dialogue about childhood, maturity, etc. both within the text and outside it. I hated OotP for the same reason as your friends when I first read it, and I haven't picked it up since, but I've realized in recent years that I could've borne a "whiny" hero if I'd had any reason to expect it. That's not to say it's unrealistic because I can see the factors that would drive him from complacence to contempt even more clearly now than I did at age thirteen, but it felt inconsistent with the earlier books and I do think the series dynamic changed. Ultimately, the change made it impossible for me to fully reconcile myself to Dumbledore as he's presented in the text and I think it led to a flawed model of virtue / morality as well. YMMV, but I liked "Fairytale" because it does well to illustrate those issues.

*Admittedly, I'm pretty critical of JKR, but for all Harry Potter's flaws, I do/did enjoy the