Leilin’s Reviews > Manacled > Status Update

I have not read it, it is hard for me to read fanfiction of things I know well and love (I am weird, I know and an exception to a ton of normal fan behaviour), but I am trying to read Alchemised and I keep stopping and thinking of who is supposedly who. The worldbuilding does not quite work in the tradpub, it's too much too soon and all the pathos about the dead rebellion and all does not quite work if I do not keep thinking ah dumbledore, or ah, harry potter...

I am very curious about your thoughts on the fic!

I am actually pretty sacrilege on that front, as I am not an HP fan, at all - I actually dropped the series past the 4th book, back then, and only watched the first couple movies. ^^

But what you just said about asking for too much too soon from the reader makes a lot of sense - I was purely thinking about the amount of hurried world/character set up that this would require, but yeah, it would make a lot of sense that this is also going to be asking A LOT of investment from a reader who basically met those characters 10 pages ago!

I really think traditionally published fan fiction is just publishers thinking they can (probably under)pay someone whose work is already known, saving themselves the need to invest in editing or marketing... or really anything, since in this case I think they even kept the one of the main original artists for the trad pub too. Fanfic readers also have a lot more media literacy within that niche, and know what they are getting into - I don't see some of the themes going over very smoothly once in the main publication stream honestly.

Popular Fanfic writers getting published traditional got guaranteed engagement, particular in social media. At least the first, the most goundbreaking example, but I think with these draco books this year, I think there is little groundbreaking still to do. It's gone as far as they can possibly legally do (and publishing an adaptation of a fanfic and having the association really public might not feasible for fandoms whose authors might object a lot more. And if RPF even worse)

This book I think got a lot of editing work, to scrape the connections and all. And it's not badly done at all, so far, it is just the structure is all different, hard entrance into worlbuilding...

I am less sure if I will finish it, since I seem to have put it down for some days!