I recently made a very difficult decision with regards to this fic: I elected to discontinue it. It took me a lot longer than it should have to realise that what I was trying to do here was to tell two very different, mutually exclusive, stories. This fic started off as a lighthearted, surreal seventh year fic where Harry confronts his own fame, now that he has nothing left to do with regards to the whole war thing. Then, I realised that the story basically didn't have an overarching plot, and that it was basically just a series of funny events, and that was when I had the idea to have there be another war that Harry was, inexplicably, called upon to fight on his own. The problem with this plot element isn't that it's bad or that it doesn't add anything, the problem is that it adds too much: it naturally leads to a story with a very different tone than "wacky school hijinks."

I think it's fairly easy to go through the story and say which story any given element was meant for initially. To be perfectly honest, the ultimate point of this story basically went from "Harry has a normal year for once and also there's a transfer student" to "Harry, during the last war, had to do some unsavory things, and is now forced to examine just how far he's willing to go in this one." The climax of the story was actually going to involve Harry fighting three Death Eaters at once while Hermione was simultaneously fighting three others, one of whom would have gotten in a lucky shot and killed her. Harry's reaction? Screaming in Hulk-like rage and blasting all three of his opponents back with a blast of pure magic before killing the guy who did Hermione in. If that sounds familiar, it should: it's basically the final battle at Hogwarts, the primary difference being that Harry has taken Voldemort's place, Hermione Bellatrix's, and random mooks those of the other combatants. Yes, I wanted to have Harry slowly turning into a second Voldemort, all in an effort to defend the wizarding world.

But, at the same time, I really wanted to have those lighthearted adventures that focus on little moments of friendship between the protagonists. That, and I really wanted to write a halfway decent Harry/OC story, since (as I spend, like, eighteen paragraphs trying to convey in my bio) I'm really not a fan of cannon pairings, and there aren't any cannon characters whom I really ship Harry with. I didn't actually handle that particular element all that well, but I'll get into exactly why that was later.

Being that this is the first story that I've ever published to this site, I felt it only appropriate that I took some time to go through it and work out some of what worked and some of what didn't. So, with that said, let's look at this objectively, shall we? (Fair warning, I think that, even if the site didn't have the order in which I published this stuff, it would be pretty clear that this was my first fan fiction, so this analysis will probably lean towards the latter.)

What works:

I'll be honest, there isn't much in this story that I genuinely like. Harry's outfit is cool, I enjoy what little is seen of Harry's relationships with the non-Ginny Weasleys. Writing Harry as a trickster archetype, even if it's fairly understated, was actually a lot of fun, and I took great pleasure in explaining how he messed with the heads of various people. I enjoy reading over the narration again; it might be some sort of positivity bias, but I actually felt like it was pretty funny. Outside of a few instances of unashamedly expository dialogue, I feel like the character interactions are pretty good, too.

I'm glad that I decided to include Teddy and Andromeda. They're two of my favourite "sort-of-but-not-really-in-the-story" characters in the series, if only for what they mean for Harry. He doesn't like it, but he's a natural leader, and having those qualities put to use in raising a son (albeit not one by birth, but I have a hard time believing that Harry wouldn't treat Teddy as though they were blood-related) is something that's both interesting and never really shown in cannon, so it's pretty natural territory for fan fiction to explore.

I like Ron's line in the second chapter "it's what [Hermione] did to Harry that really throws me." It probably wasn't clear, but this was meant mostly to show that, even after she and Ron got together during the Battle of Hogwarts, the most important relationship between the three of them was their friendship, not the fact that two of them were constantly necking in public places and making other people really uncomfortable in the process. (Bit of head cannon, there: I like to imagine that Ron would start snogging Hermione in front of other people just to annoy them.)

I kinda like that the Death Eaters attack Flourish and Blotts, thinking that Harry's there because he wanted to avoid the crowds. I dunno why, it just seems like a cool detail, even if it doesn't really matter.

What doesn't:

I could just say "everything else" and have done with it, but let's take the time to actually examine why it is that these things don't really work, shall we?

1. Bashing: As I say in my profile, character bashing is lazy, and I was very lazy with this story, indeed, the Ginny bashing just being the tip of the iceberg. (I'd like to think that my being self-aware here kind of makes it better, but it really doesn't.) Actually, my reasoning for Ginny sleeping with so many guys was a bit more complex than "Ginny sux she dumm slut," but that doesn't really excuse just how poorly I handled the whole thing. Something that I came to understand as I was rereading this story for the purposes of this reflection was that it was really intended as more of a comedy than anything else, and the image of a whole bunch of guys begging Harry's forgiveness after sleeping with his supposed girlfriend was something that made me laugh, so I just threw it in. I also figured that I could handwave Ginny being incredibly OoC by saying that she behaving the way she was because of stress, but I never got far enough to address that, and it wouldn't really have meant anything if I had, either.

My other main reason was actually a response to something that kind of bothers me: there's this assumption on a lot of people's parts that, when Harry broke up with her at the end of Half-Blood Prince, Ginny was obligated to wait for him to finish Voldemort off, at which point they would promptly pick up where they left off. I remain to this day unconvinced that they were truly in love as early as HBP, but even if they were, there's absolutely no reason for Ginny to get hung up over Harry, and she has every right to live her life, something that Harry himself comments on a few times. So I wanted to show Ginny doing her own thing, rather than waiting around for Harry to be available again, but I did it in a way that completely defeated the purpose. That's also why Harry isn't angry with any of the guys Ginny was sleeping with; he took it for granted that she would move on with her life, and he doesn't really think it's any of his business what she does or with whom. As for the mention of "twenty-seven" guys, it was just the first number that popped into my head, never mind the fact that it was completely unrealistic on every level.

Really, what I should have done was have the two of them break up on amicable terms, which is what I prefer to see in stories that I read, just not in the stories that I write, apparently. Once again, it comes down to my being lazy: I didn't want to go to the trouble of writing a realistic but not strained friendship between the two of them, so I didn't even bother.

2. Planning: To slightly misquote Mr Plinkett, "the story feels like it was rushed and not thought-out, probably because it was rushed and not thought-out." I think it's pretty clear that I was just making things up as I went along, plot-wise. Normally, that would be fine for a slice of life style story, which was basically my original concept (although I didn't realise it until I was a ways into the story, by which point it was pretty much too late to do anything with the realisation), but the fact that I tried to integrate an actual story, a pretty dark one, at that, means that it wasn't really an intelligent choice to make: I had a clear picture of what the endgame would look like, but not a single clue as to how to get there.

3. Aderyn: Just . . . Aderyn. First of all, she wasn't a very consistent character, which ties in with point number two: none of her actions were thought out before they happened, they just happened because they were convenient. Part of it is that she talks like an American at times (although I might have excused that by saying that she spent a few weeks in New York recently) despite being Welsh, part of it is that I didn't have any sort of background for her, not even in my head. Why did she transfer? I dunno, she just did. Who were her friends in her old school? Where was her old school? How would it compare to Hogwarts? What do her parents do? Are they magical, too? How familiar is she with the muggle world? What was she doing in New York? Why arrive a full week before term started? All this stuff is important, but I never really bothered with any of it.

Another problem there is that I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to develop her and Harry's relationship. I really wanted to have them just be friends for the majority of the year, then get together at the end, but I also have her blushing when Harry mentions that she's fun to be around after she's only spent a few hours with him. On top of that, there's the issue of her just sort of agreeing to everything that Harry proposes. On the one hand, it's kind of necessary, or at least logical, at first, since she's new to the school and the country while Harry is an expert on both, but it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth to write such a one-sided relationship that's supposed to be between two friends and eventual love interests.

Luckily, she isn't a Mary Sue, but that's mostly because she doesn't say or do enough to become one; if I were writing this now, I'd flesh out her character before writing a word of the story proper, but whatever. Anyways, she was on the quidditch team at her old school for five years, so it makes sense that she'd be a wicked good flyer, and the immense patience she demonstrates with Harry could have been counteracted with other flaws, such as a disinterest in schooling, not really having a plan for her adult life, some degree of possessiveness, etc, but the story didn't go on long enough for any of those to become relevant.

4. The Defense classes: Harry figures out how to handle them way faster than he should, which is really because I already had an idea of how they should work and ran with it, rather than having him reach his conclusions after giving the matter some legitimate thought. So really, it was just a failure to have the characters realistically develop stuff that they should have had to spend some time thinking over, which once again boils down to my being lazy with this story.

5. Chapter length: The chapters are too short. Not much else to say, really.

6. Harry's OP: On the one hand, I like stories where his fight with Voldemort forces him to get better, as it logically should have in cannon, but that should mostly only extend to Defense-related magic. How the hell did he learn to make port-keys? He's also kinda bloodthirsty, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense given his usual, cheerful demeanor.

7. Harry's a bastard: Once again, this story wound up going in a much darker direction then what I had intended, so Harry winds up being inconsistently dickish as a result. Compare his conversation with Dumbledore's portrait in chapter two ("I'm beginning to think he hasn't realised he isn't still headmaster, yet") to his conversation with Aderyn in the common room in chapter five (super reasonable towards her for no reason other than the fact that they were meant to eventually wind up together, regardless of how realistic it actually would have been). It works for the "Harry needs to fight another war" story, but not for the "zany adventures in seventh year" story.

So yeah. That's the analysis, I guess. Although this fic is being discontinued, like I said in the AN for chapter five, I don't intend to out and out abandon either of these stories: I'll probably come back to a slice of life seventh year story eventually, and when I do, it'll basically just be a better version of this story without the war: no bashing, better focus, and a more fleshed-out Aderyn. That said, I've an obscene amount of work ahead of me in the immediate future, so it probably won't be for a while. As for the "third war" story, I'll wind up including elements of it in another fic I'm working on (a next-gen fic featuring a cast of OC villains and starring Albus Severus as the protagonist) eventually, so that's . . . something. Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read this analysis, since it doesn't really have any bearing on anything and was more of a self-reflection then anything else.