How about a Harry Potter fic that, despite being a blend of various clichés, was still interesting enough for me to re-read it?
Harry Potter & the Curse’s Cure by Dragon-Raptor is a harem fic where Hermione and two other girls sleep with Harry at the beginning of the story arc. It has Slytherin House being written as what I call “implied suffering porn”. It has Weasley bashing. It has a manipulative “road to hell is paved with good intentions” Dumbledore. It has some kind of soul-mate bond. It has a veela bond. It has Lily Potter not actually being dead. It gives Harry a massive Potter Estate. It kills off family members of some of Harry’s friends in a rather formulaic way. It has OCs who threaten Voldemort’s significance as a villain. It has an unprofessional use of an ampersand in its title.
…and, despite all of that, it does well enough and has enough novel elements that I remembered it, sought it out again, and re-read it.
It justifies and redeems Ginny… but not in too “happily ever after” a way. It has things getting bad enough that it shocks Dumbledore into re-evaluating himself… yet he struggles with slipping back into old habits and modes of thought. It gives Luna a cat-sized pet dragon. It actually has some entertainingly novel ideas for what the Potter estate encompasses. It gives Hermione an uncle freshly retired from the military who is an enjoyable character in his own right. It gives Lily Potter a “not dead” setup that I’ve not seen done before or since. …and, in general, it starts out tolerable and progresses into being very engaging.
All in all, I’d give it a 4 out of 5 (+1 on a scale of -2 to +2) and say that, once it gets going, both the harem element and the “bringing the muggles in on it” element feel as if they took some small amount of inspiration from Effects and Side-Effects and benefited from doing so.
That said, I do wish it didn’t take its dragon lore from How to Train Your Dragon. When Harry’s animagus form is revealed to be a Night Fury, the fact that it’s a random detail borrowed from another fandom (that’s not being crossed over with) shouts “Hey! Author laziness here!” to me, which needlessly wears on the story’s sense of immersion.
Fanfiction – Harry Potter & the Curse’s Cure by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I never did get to finish reading this but what I did read I enjoyed. Now if only I could find the spin off(?) of it that’d be good. Though for the life of me I can’t imagine women in the forties or older agreeing to have sex with a minor of Harry’s age in this story. I’m referring to the one where Poppy, Mini and Andromeda Tonks do what the girls in the original one did for Harry. It might be on ff.net but at the moment I can’t access that site. Something Google did to my email account makes it impossible for me to do so. It keeps asking if I’m human but not accepting when I say yes. So, until I can get it straightened out, I can’t search it.
Just a bit of an add-on to this post. There are actually two spinoffs of this story. One is a lot more girls Harry’s age the other is the one I already mentioned. If I remember correctly the first spinoff also had Manor Trunks in it. They could all be interlinked to form a sort of world inside. You could place one in a broom cupboard in say Russia and another or the main one on an island in the South Pacific somewhere. You could then enter the one on the island and exit the one in Russia without any trouble. That was the one I was reading and never go to finish.