random things that weird me out

[edenfalling]

I have a very rarely updated story (Strange Likenesses) wherein Voldemort attempts to possess Harry Potter in the mid-1980s, things go badly wrong, and they end up aware of each other around the end of PS/SS. It's very rarely updated because to this day, I am not quite sure where it's going -- I started writing with a scenario rather than a plot, and have been suffering the consequences of that ever since.

But. While I am trying to make Voldemort comprehensible (one symptom of this is that whenever we're in his POV, he thinks of himself as Tom), he's still every bit as evil as he was in the books. He's not a nice person. He's not a woobie. One of the themes of the story, I think, is how Harry (who does have morals) copes with having a person like that in his head, and having their memories effectively intertwined.

I recently got a series of reviews for that story which seem to posit Voldemort as the protagonist and Harry as a meanie for not agreeing with him and trying harder to get along with his would-be possessor.

*headdesk*

I suppose this is what I get for writing stories that don't automatically paint my villains as maniacal, blood-drenched, cackling OMG THE WORST MONSTER EVER!!!, but seriously, I have a moral center, and it does tend to influence my stories, whether implicitly or explicitly. I'm not making any effort to hide that I think Voldemort is in the wrong on pretty much everything. Trying to make him be a person, to remember that he was quite intelligent before he went bugfuck crazy the way he seems to have done by the end of the series, and to point out that Dumbledore and Harry aren't perfect either, doesn't mean I think Voldemort is good or right. I think, actually, that villains who can be seen as people are scarier than villains who are effectively cardboard cutouts.

Oh well, once a story is out in the world, there's not really anything I can do to control how people read it. Even if some of the readings make me scratch my head and wonder where on earth I went wrong. *sigh*

Now I just need to figure out how to respond to the reviews...

Comments

[branchandroot]

*hand over eyes* Oh man. What can you do with a reader like that?

I mean, your villains tend to get humanized, which makes them interesting, but it's always pretty darn clear they're still villains! I think the only one you've seriously done the redemption thing for is Sasuke, who's canonically more misled than psychotic anyway.

[edenfalling]

Nod and smile and talk about the other parts of the review, I guess. *practices smiling*

Sasuke... Sasuke has been handed a raw deal several times over, and has consistently picked bad ways of dealing with said raw deals. Consequently I tend to see him as more broken than evil -- broken with vicious edges, to be sure, and he never was a noble bleeding heart like Naruto, but still. He's a rival, not an outright villain. (Yet. Who know where Kishimoto thinks he's going at this point?)

I have also kinda-sorta redeemed Petunia Dursley, but that was mostly sloppy writing on my part; I wasn't careful enough to keep her nasty edges in full view along with the humanizing details I was creating. :-/

[jedibuttercup]

I get reviews like that every so often for my HP WIP, an attempt at a "realistic" time travel story. Mostly from people who either (a) think returned Harry is a lunatic for being wary of telling Dumbledore about it, or (b) think returned Harry is a lunatic for not acting out and changing everything and powering himself up right the very minute he returns, all of seventeen going on eleven, including denouncing Dumbledore. (*cough* Harry Stu)

I mostly ignore the reviews. Plausible characters and an interesting storyline trump random reader opinion any day of the week, IMHO. =)

*bookmarking your story to read*

[edenfalling]

I warn you that the story is far from finished, and also the first few chapters are infested with semi-colons. *wry*

I love "Back Again, Harry?" precisely because it's the most realistic HP time travel story I've ever read. Harry at seventeen/eleven has every reason to be wary of telling Dumbledore too much, and no reason to have sudden superpowers that he never had in canon. (Super!Harry stories have been a pet peeve of mine for years, honestly, along with Martial-Arts!Harry, but that's a topic for a different post.)

[iponly.livejournal.com]

Remember, you don't need to respond to reviews, especially not strange ones. Responding to crazed reviews can end up with a troll gnawing on your leg.

Anyway, considering the directions some of harry potter fandom goes in, 'm not surprised there are people out there who like Voldemort as a protagonist. think Harry is a jerk (which he kinda is in several places in the end of the series) and read stories from that direction.

[edenfalling]

I make a point of responding to reviews, though, so it would feel wrong to ignore someone simply because ze seems a bit off-kilter. :-/ I just need to figure out a way to tiptoe around the parts of the review I don't want to address.

Yeah, HP fandom is heavy on fanon over canon, and some fanon has twisted into rather odd forms by this point. There are reasons I don't read a lot there anymore.

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

If you don't want to engage them in further discussion, but do want to respond...I'd probably say something along the lines of "Thanks for reading my story. I hadn't thought of the story in quite that way; as an author, its always interesting to see how a story takes on a life of its own after its "published" onto the net. I don't update often, but hope you enjoy the rest, whenever it does come."

Or, you know, something similar to acknowledge that they read the story and you read the review. I've gotten really strange, off-the wall reviews (including one that reposted one of my stories on his lj with all grammatical mistakes highlighted and edited. It was sort of like an unsolicited betaing, I guess...kinda rude but taking it calmly resulted in an lj-friend and one who did even beta for me eventually...)

Good luck deciding how to respond. For what its worth, I really like how your stories to explore morals.

[edenfalling]

I went with, basically, "Thanks for reviewing and I'm glad you're enjoying the story so far," which seemed pretty innocuous.

Unsolicited beta jobs! *hides face* I did something similar to a poor writer, oh, back in 2004 or so -- I left a review that was basically a brief tutorial in how to correctly punctuate dialogue, since he had managed to do it wrong at least two thirds of the time. Fortunately he was gracious about it, but I've always felt rude in retrospect.