I read all the Harry Potter books, but I never appreciated Rowlings' style until I tried to change it.  Sentence after sentence, I copied the original, sneered a little inwardly, rewrote it reflexively in my style, and then looked at the result and said, "Wait, her way's better."

This is not simply pasting in different character names, although I would have done that if the resulting story had made sense.  Most of the changes are in the middle third.

It's interesting how large changes in the backstory require tiny changes in the story that produce large changes in its meaning.  For instance, when Snape calls Lily a mudblood, he's letting out his own twisted feelings that he's been suppressing.  Afterwards, his loathing of Harry is partly self-loathing, because he knows it's partly his own fault that he lost Lily.  When Spike insults Rarity, it's deliberate, in order to stop her from kissing Blueblood.  And when he loses Rarity as a result, it's not his fault.  Which makes a person more bitter?

kavic did the artwork.  I'm very pleased with it.

And, yes, 'pensieve' is capitalized in the books.  That was a mistake on Ms. Rowling's part.  I have a note from Professor McGonagall.

>>704550704550 u retard again?

stupid spammers

Wait. Rarity married Blueblood? And that's the only thing I take from this? Meh.

>>702723702723 I looked at this a while ago and read your comment, then did a few other things, then came back and read it again because I've been thinking about how to reply, and lo and behold you've edited it. I don't know if remember what you said the first time but I felt like it raised a few interesting points about the story that are now lost.

Like me, I sense that you edit for conciseness to the point where the words lose their power. I learned to do this after reading The Elements of Style, which (idiotically, I now believe), implied that you should count the number of words in every sentence and see how few you can get away with, as if every superfluous word cost a kitten its life or something. When really, most readers don't give a darn about word count and just want a good story.

This crossover must have been a really interesting and difficult writing exercise, then, as you mentioned. J.K. Rowling is clearly a master storyteller and a lot can be learned from her. It makes me want to start writing some short stories in different author's styles just to try them out. (I tend naturally to write in Victorian prose because of my Dickens fetish, which means lots of annoyingly long sentences, commas, and semicolons; I should try something like The Road to take me out of my comfort zone, eh?)

Now I want to comment on the actual story but I have an exam in less than 2 hours. Sorry.

Oh, and re: your missing cutie mark comment, PRAISE THE LORD you didn't give him a lightning bolt.

What ze buck is zis sh*t?

>>704770704770

I'm also a victim of the Elements of Style, and of many writing classes/seminars/workshops, etc.  I'm increasingly of the opinion that the entire literary establishment has been off doing its own thing for the past 100 years, and no longer has any notion of what makes a good story that people like to read.  If one of them accidentally writes something that people do enjoy, they're embarrassed by it, and try to claim that it was meant ironically.

But it seems I have no notion of what people want to read, either - this story has 3 thumbs-ups and 5 thumbs-down.  I remember a Yu-Gi-Oh self-insert that was a sequence of random battle scenes, with no punctuation or even paragraph breaks, that did better than that.  So I'm scratching my head over the strong negative reaction.  Do people just get to the end and say, "Oh, that was sad, I'll give it a thumbs-down"?  The most-favorable interpretation I can think of is that they feel that the one remembered scene would not be enough to change Rarity's feelings that much.

This was a great short story verision of one the key chapters in "Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoneix", J.K. Rowlings really knows how to write.

Intresting to see that Blueblood is James Potter, Rarity is Lilly, and Hoity Toity is either Sirus Black or Petter Petigrew a.k.a Wormtail.

>>705177705177 You have no idea how wonderful it is to hear someone else say that.

It's probably being downvoted immediately for the premise, rather than any actual problem with the story. Harry Potter fanboys are flankhurt because you messed with their characters, people who expected comedy got bored in the first five seconds (MLP mashups scream comedy, apparently), and so on. I don't read crossovers, myself, and the only reason I even commented was because I found your author's note so thought-provoking. Oh, and your username.

omg this is sooooo bucking awesome i love harry potter so this is extra awesome have a stach

Hmm.

Having not read the books myself I have no idea whether this is simply copied from the book itself and the names and species changed to reflect MLP-- but if not, I must say it's an interesting idea and I would like to see more of it.

Too bad it's marked complete; I would like to see something more along these lines.

>>709730709730

Thanks!

I would guess that 3/4 of the words are copied.  Most of the changes are either in the descriptions, in character reactions where the original wasn't appropriate to the new character, moving small bits around as a result of other changes, or in the middle section.  Also, the original is much longer.  For instance, the red parts below are new.  I moved the pensieve because the original location on the desk was physically impossible, moved "looked down at the legs of Snape's desk" into a different paragraph because it had been dangling by itself between paragraphs in a way that had suggested Harry saw something there instead of making it clear that he was avoiding Snape's gaze; and changed the descriptions of Spike.

Spike was standing behind his desk with his back to Harry, removing, as usual, certain of his thoughts and placing them carefully in Twilight's pensieve, which stood on a tripod in the corner behind his desk. He dropped the last silvery strand into the stone basin and turned to face Harry.  Harry looked up into the glittering reptilian eyes for a moment, then quickly looked down at the legs of Spike's desk.

"So," Spike said, in a voice that could almost be called quiet, if it were not so deep and resonant that it set Harry's bones shaking. "Have you been practising?"

I'm confused by this.  I wasn't going to bother trying to puzzle out a reason for it to exist, but then my subconscious suggested that maybe it was a writing experiment.  (But even so, I don't necessarily see why it's here?...)

It's interesting what this says about the characters (all of them).  Canon!Spike probably would do that.  I think it says different things about Spike than it does about Snape, but I'm not sure.

Why did you decide to make Spike Snape?

>>24003732400373 It was a writing experiment, but I was also interested in the story. I made Spike Snape because of the parallels between their unrequited loves.