#also thank you tumblr for making posts non rebloggable lmao

[vvettell]

sorry but i have to take a moment to giggle about tom asking seb if he sees himself in max and seb being like n..o.... uh no?? it made me laugh hehe :)

[bonetrousle]

ok officially asking you what's up with the published drarry fanfic with the numbers filed off

Okay sorry it took me a while to get to this I had to. sleep etc. I'm making this post non-rebloggable bc im 99% sure the author has a tumblr and I don't necessarily want them to see me slagging their book off LMAO. under the cut bc its pretty long

Ok so my partner tumblr user tackythor went to the bookstore. To get some books. As one does. And someone working there was giving her recs including this book. She gave kind of an inaccurate description of it too by the sounds of things? So anyway she brings some books home including this one and I'm reading the blurb which is like "two boys who hate each other fall in love at a magic school in new zealand!!" im like ok. sounds bad but i wont say anything bc i dont want to be a dick. I read the first page and am like ok yeah this is NOT for me.

So tumblr user tackythor reads some of this book and im like ok how's it going?? She's trying to figure out how to explain it and goes ok so it's like the characters are basically Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. That's when the PENNY DROPS and she's like oh my god that's. that's LITERALLY what it is. So me being nosy I rifle through the book and find thank you's/acknowledgements to people on tumblr and ao3. It's all starting to make SENSE. Anyway a real quick google of the books title will rapidly find you the title of the og fanfiction AND a pdf of the (now deleted) fanfiction which I obviously immediately downloaded and read so I could compare the two.

ANYWAY, the book isn't great, because none of the characters really have a personality. This is because you are expected to already know who they are. Because they are harry potter characters with established personalities and backstories. None of these made it in to the book however. Ron and Hermione have been genderswapped to make it less obvious that they're Ron and Hermione. The Harry character is a real cranky dick a lot of the time, which makes sense if you realise he's Harry and has gone through a lot of trauma, but makes less sense for someone who's Literally Just Some Guy at a School. There are also no descriptions of the school beyond "there are no windows and it's grey and depressing". There are also no visual descriptions of any of the characters save Harry and Draco. There's also a lot of weird... sexism? and other isms? in the og fanfiction, most of which has been thankfully edited out, but occasionally some weird stuff filters it's way through (can't think of any examples off the top of my head rn, a lot of kinda strangely rigid gender stuff for the most part.) the general premise is they have to raise fake egg babies for a class assignment which is how Harry and Draco get together because they partner up to get back at their exes and I guess.. pretend flirt in the process? In the book it's not really clear why they don't like each other. They just sort of.... don't. Draco isn't a wizard racist but just a rich guy from a big city who pulled a couple of pranks on Harry or something. Again, not quite on the same level of trying to murder the headmaster etc etc but WHATEVS.

This book won an award which is how it got published. I think the fact that it's a queer novel set in nz with a POC as the main character and an indigenous magic system means that people sort of focused in on that, and thought it was a unique premise for a book and glossed over the fact that it is not super well written and the plot is very, very thin, because it is of course mostly a vehicle for drarry sex. (which has been edited out but the book is still fairly adult for a YA novel). Clearly the people running the award had no clue??? There are some nuggets of interesting stuff in there such as the system of magic but again, these are a bit of loose world building that aren't fully fleshed out. I could GO ON but I'd need to do another rifle through the book/have another discussion with tumblr user tackythor to refresh my memory about some of the finer details of the book lmfao. Anyway everyone's giving it really good ratings and reviews and it JUST DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE TO ME but I don't really read YA so who the fuck knows. Maybe it's good in the YA world. I find that difficult to believe though. The editing really improved the book though. Like by a LOT. But where it struggles is in the lack of fleshed out ANYTHING.

I've avoided mentioning the title so far bc i dont want this coming up in the search results for the book LOL so I’ll mention it in another post. yes im paranoid what about it