Reviews of A Bend in Time
A Bend in Time
EsliEsma
- Overall Rate
- Writing Quality
- Updating Stability
- Story Development
- Character Design
- world background
There will be no harems in this tale. I've tried to channel my inner J.K. Rowling to match some of the writing styles and try to create that Harry Potter feels in my own writing. I'll be incorporating many of the minor characters that would have existed during the marauder's era in an effort to try to maintain the real-world feel of the series. There will be new characters that I will simply need to create, but I will try to use surnames that suggest that they might be related to minor characters or some of the 28 families surnames that simply weren't even mentioned nor used. The main character is not overpowered as Harry Potter wasn't himself. There will be cheats, yes, but not to the grade that the storyline falls into second place. The storyline is the first objective!
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I haven't read any HP fanfics from this time period and I have to say that I'm loving it so far. I like distant cool headed instead of stupid mc like so many hp fanfics have. You insert a new character which most of the time I don't like, but you've pulled it off well. It is an enjoyable novel to read and I can't wait for more updates! highly suggest you read this hidden gem!
For anyone that has even tried to claim a semblance of love for the Harry Potter-verse as they decked themselves out in house colours, hunted for their Patronus or playfull cast a correctly pronounced Wingardium Leviosa. If so then this is the Fan-Fic for you. If not, then maybe this might help you heathens find that little bit of magic in you yet. Through clever use of writing styles that feel like they hauntingly belong amongst our favourite books as a missing sibling "A Bend In Time" Is a truly wonderful creation that comes to life through an amazing eye for detail and a clear love for everything involved. The characters grow organically and there is a depth and originally that brings life to the story as a whole... The world scapes are explored in a beautiful and unique way as original twists are so intricately blended to the canon we all love and know. The author stays true to the roots of the stories as they weave interesting tales and create characters that are both loveable and relatable. Not to mention how it is so wonderfully written. This isn't just some wish fulfilment in which a character prances around without a care in the world. But I will leave you to find out how lovely it is. So, if you are interested, come, have a read, let your inner Potterhead be entertained. On the off chance, you happen to be one of those pitiful little heathens, so devoid of magic, then come find it inside.
So the synopsis is really misleading. Apparently Snape travels through realities saves his parallel self and sends her into his timeline when he was a kid. Now the MC is actually a female twin of Snape. This is really important as you have no idea until chp 3 the gender of the FL. Anyway this gets 3 stars as I dropped it due to your misdirection.
This is pretty much what you should expect when a woman writes a book with a female mc they're able to put themselves in their characters shoes so you can expect drama lots and lots of drama the mc acts cold but the drama will always be there, as a male reader it's hard to place yourself as mc since a woman is much more complex, as I observed males are more goal oriented when they are mc as such no matter the personality their aims are clear. As for women her goal was to save this world and severus but her goals aren't set. As a male reader some of her actions confuse me a lot since she acts cold and aloof but she's emotionally unstable..
I should start with saying that this story is very difficult to review. For the first 450ish chapters, it's 5-star worthy and amazing, easily being one of the best HP ff I've ever read. Which makes it all the more disappointing that by chapter 600 it's just degraded to the point of well-written garbage. It's a shame to see such a great author become worse at writing over time rather than better. It's getting by on 3.8 stars only because it's a dead corpse riding on the back of a fantastic foundation. I'll try to avoid spoilers and just give general comments and gripes with character designs rather than mentioning anything specific. For the first 450 chapters of the series It's probably one of the best harry potter FF I've ever read, the characters are well-researched, the backgrounds make sense, the interactions feel real with individual personalities and actions along with dashes of mystery and some drama. If that's all that was currently out I'd have given the story 5 stars in basically everything. Around chapter 450 though the author seemed to have hit a rut.. they just copied the original main plot (the subplots still fine though for a bit) making characters inconsistent or utterly betraying all their characteristics until that point in order to force certain extremely stupid events to occur just to make an already lazy plot work. Which is fine, just mediocre, I'd be mildly annoyed but still like the series if that was all. But then it just keeps getting worse and worse... by chapter 600 there are poorly thrown-together plot threads that feel rushed and serve little purpose besides overcomplicating things and shock value. The characters themselves become flat, losing all the personality that made them unique in the beginning, Heck, I'm pretty sure if the characters in the story just talked with each other instead of refusing to tell each other anything like a group of grade schoolers gossiping about a secret the story would have been finished by now. The same character has made the same epiphany 3 times within 100 chapters and had the same freaked-out reaction each time, acting as if they figured it all out for the first time all over again. I'm half expecting them to have the same revelation again at some point. The actual plot also just stops making any amount of sense, new powers and mcguffins keep popping up for no real reason, the mc will have a problem and spontaneously decide to start reading a random book on a shelf and suddenly find the answer to their problem (but refuse to tell or ask anyone for help despite having access to 3 world-class wizards 2 of which she trusts with her life). The author also seems to have a really weird male superiority complex. Now, this is odd because the mc is female and the author at least claims to be female. I don't mean male political power or anything about males thinking they are higher than females. Those can get a pass because of purebloods and such, it makes sense for the setting. What doesn't make sense is seemingly magic itself is so much stronger for males than females that any female might as well just snap their wand if they want to compete in their version of HP. Despite the mc getting McGuffin after McGuffin and power up after power up even at the expense of her own health and has gone on the record to be told she is containing so much power it's starting to affect her because of the cost of such strength for her body. She is then repeatedly told that she is weaker, dumber and just worse than another character in nearly every way and is then trounced by them when they've done literally nothing besides be a guy going to school with 0 McGuffins, powerups or sacrifices. Heck, some of her power-ups are even turned into weaknesses and she's told 'all power comes at a price but he gets it for free because he's a male'. It's so bizarre to see just how pathetic they make the mc just to make the other character seem better despite them doing basically nothing for 600 chapters. The mc went from this fantastic feisty little ball of paranoid witch into... well a bit of a mess that's still magically weaker than a completely normal 7th year male for some reason despite getting so many McGuffins and power-ups which means her normal strength must have been truly pathetic. There's a female that's at one point almost r*ped and she just acts like its another day after, they don't report it or anything she even acts like it wasn't that big of a deal being more annoyed that her friends were trying to look out for her than the boys attempting it. She's not even shell-shocked or anything she just acts like an NPC with no personality reading off scripted lines even making jokes and calling someone that helped her rude for not offering to walk them back yet making no comment about the boys. I just don't understand why the author turned such a fantastic story into this.
I'm sorry to say that I'd be the 70th review. 69 hehe. Well, it had to happen. I couldn't just go on without reviewing this. This. Is. A. Hidden. Gem. It's as if... JK Rowling decided to write a fanfic of HP herself. It basically has all the magic of the original Harry Potter, but explored a bit more, and set back in time a little bit, so the author's free to develop her characters to her heart's content, since all the other characters aren't there. This is the crown jewel of all the Harry Potter fanfictions on here. The protagonist is an OC called Rowan. A twin of Severus Snape. I know, it felt cringey when I heard it at first too. Like, oh no. This is going to turn into another one of those trash fics, isn't it? No. No. No. Argh! I can't even begin to describe it without going into spoiler territory or being a general fanatic. Anyways. Writing Quality: There are a few misspelled words here and there (what stood out to me was her constant misspelling of prefects lmao perfect), some parts don't flow that well, but it's expected of a webnovel with 1k+ words per chapter that comes out everyday. And also, if you compare it to some of the popular novels on Webnovel, it's writing at perfection. It's writing style is like that of a published novel too. Stability of Updates: This author updates daily. And currently, she's uploading two chapters per day. Author, I love you. I actually love you. If you decide to eunuch this, I'm actually going to castrate you. Story Development: Ohhhhhh, I actually love you. This webnovel doesn't go 3 chapters without some huge plot twist happening. It always keep you on edge. It's as good as, or even better than the translated Korean novels out there, which is saying something. (Cough cough Second Coming of Gluttony, I love you, but sometimes you get dull asf) Character Design: Since the author has set the background of the story to the generation before Harry Potter- (basically, in the same timeframe as James Potter and the rest of the Marauders) those characters aren't fleshed out. So the author does the fleshing out by herself, which results in, of course, me actually caring about the characters. Not many authors are able to do that with their own OC, and basically, a ton of blank slate characters. World Background- Harry Potter. Need I say more? However, since this novel's setting isn't exactly the same as Harry Potter's, there are some other things that are delved into, that I can't say without spoiling. Go read the novel if you've already scrolled to this point. I guarantee you won't regret it. It's really fuqing good. And it almost has 300 chapters.
The writing is great, concise and direct. There might be a missing word from time to time, but could be easily patched through context clues. The characters are well-written for a fan fic. The author made this as accurate as possible just from the tid bits of personality traits of the OG franchise. Mad props to author for this. The release speed seemed to drastically slow down compared from the start, but the 1k+ chapters available is definitely a 5/5 for me. The world background is expounded, something vastly missing from the OG books. I read a few fanfics already and some are just to overreaching, the author chose a few fan theories and carefully entwine them and didn't make this fanfic look like just another wish fulfillment novel. The first 3-4 arcs are really fun to read, the pacing is more of a slow burn but it's still fun and interesting to read. My biggest complaint is the 5th yr arc, it just dragged way too much. I don't mind some side character chapters, but this arc are just filled w/ chapters about characters that unrelated to the MC. And if there are chapters with Sev & Row, it would be fixing someone else problems. A more visual comparison is ch 1-600 is vol 1-4. 600 up to my current ( c800+) is still December of Row & Sev's 5th yr. It's not much of a problem for now since there are lots of available chapters, but I'll probably have a hard time to read this further once I caught up.
(as of chapter 522)I've been reading this ff for a week now and i must say it is a treat. I never mind that the MC is a girl (though there are times it becomes a bit too akward for me lol). Everything is great, writing quality and all. The only problem I have is that the MC is heavily nerfed despite her constant power ups while her twin is as strong as her even without doing anything at all! Nevertheless, it is a great story, might change later though let's see.
This review is going to be similar to another review because it pointed out the same problems I have with the story. The character development is really good with 3D characters but the main character can be seen lacking with them acting out of their character a lot and this is just excused as they have some fancy bloodlines that effect their personality. For some reason the MC got really nerfed around 450 because apparently magic is stronger in men because the MC is really weak compared to some men who shouldn't be so strong, also the nerfed aren't even well explained the reasons given are that "he's a man so he's stronger, smarter, and overall better." I hope this recovers some of it's former glory because I'm at around 550ish and it's really poor writing right now.
