Fanfiction – Being Harry Potter

Kirinin really has a knack for writing fanfiction that has a special spark to it. I first recognized that when I was looking for Ranma ½ fanfiction and read The Pit. This time, it’s a Harry Potter – Draco Malfoy body-swap fic with a difference:

Being Harry Potter by Kirinin

The basic concept is that Draco Malfoy wakes up as Harry Potter in year 6, with no idea what happened.

I don’t want to say much about the plot, but I will say that it follows Draco and he discovers the “who” and “why” in chapter 2… but it turns out to be a big and very novel plot twist.

This is not your ordinary “they have to lay low and slowly gain an understanding of each other as they wait for a solution” fic. (And I do really love the foreshadowed reason for the “why” to backfire on the “who”.)

Instead, it’s a tantalizing blend of “lay low because I’m too ‘set adrift’ to think of a better plan”, stuff I don’t want to spoil, and scenes that could be in a more ordinary body-swap fic, but most authors wouldn’t think of them.

Now, as a more specific example which isn’t a spoiler, I do really like the interaction between Snape and “Harry” during a detention. Draco’s preconceptions about Harry do evoke some interesting character-exploring behaviour from the both of them.

There’s also a delightfully clever “No, wait. Bad mental image.” moment in chapter 6, though I can’t quote it because it depends on details which would constitute a spoiler.

I let my note-taking slip somewhere around the middle of reading it, and I don’t have time to re-read it right now, so I can’t go into detail beyond that point (to the degree I usually would), but Draco’s character evolves very nicely throughout the story and there are some very elegant little touches (such as the role a certain jacket ends up playing).

I also found the manner in which Voldemort met his end to have a particular poetic cleverness to it.

I will mention that there is a moment when a male-male relationship comes up and the character being into guys had no basis in canon. While I have no problem with that sort of thing in and of itself, I do feel like the way it was introduced detracts from the narrative as a whole. That said, it’s quite minor so, if you just treat it as one flawed scene and keep reading, it should quickly get carried away as you get back into the flow of the story.

Before I put this review on the back burner, somewhere around the middle of the story, I estimated that I’d probably give it a 4.7 out of 5 rating because I wasn’t feeling that sense of certainly I normally associate with a 5 out of 5. While I’d probably need to re-read it in one sitting to be sure, that does seem about right.

Fanfiction – Being Harry Potter by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.