Partially Kissed Hero
Partially Kissed Hero is a Harry Potter story by longtime fanfiction writer Jared Ornstead. Ornstead is best known for his work under his long-standing handle (and Author Avatar/Self Insert name) Skysaber, including the "Otaku" series of SI stories, a number of contributions to the "Bet-verse" of Gregg "Metroanime" Sharp, the "Mirrors Multiplied" Ranma ½ Self Insert; and more recently the controversial Naruto fanfic Chunin Exam Day.
In order to start fresh without reader preconceptions about his work, though, he released it under a new identity with the name Perfect Lionheart.
Partially Kissed Hero, is like Chunin Exam Day, a highly reviewed (11,000+ and counting) and very long (98 chapters and counting) fanfiction arc.
The story is set just at the start of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and immediately deviates from the storyline when Harry is partially kissed by a Dementor aboard the Hogwarts Express, prompting his soul to absorb the Horcrux Voldemort created inside him. Oh, and Dumbledore's evil.
From there, things get... complicated.
It can be read here.
Tropes used in Partially Kissed Hero include:
- Alternate Universe: And how. Starting with an Evil!Dumbledore and far more abusive Dursleys in the Backstory.
- Artistic License: Biology: In the same chapter Ornstead has his lengthy rant about vampires, he posits that vampires are vulnerable to infection by decompositive bacteria and that 'antibiotics wouldn't help because the vampire has no metabolism and so drugs would have no effect'. In the real world, antibiotics inhibit the growth of bacteria regardless of whether said bacteria are cultured in a living medium or a nonliving one, as anybody who's done that lab experiment with the penicillin and the petri dish knows perfectly well.
- For that matter, precisely because vampires are not living beings and have no metabolism to damage, they could simply use disinfectants internally if they wanted.
- Author Appeal: All of the women are easily won over with really shiny things, immortality, eternal beauty and/or power. For all that they don't mind being forced into anything and happily accept Harry as their Dark-Er, I mean, Light Lord and master.
- This seems to be a theme for PL. His earlier fic Chunin Exam Day had essentially the exact same things used for wooing women, just flip 'really shiny things' with 'really great massages, hand-made clothes, and really good food'. Come to think of it, at least those things are a bit more believable as reasons to fall in love.
- Author Filibuster: Every chapter has at least one of these. Some chapters are nothing but these.
- This is a trademark of Skysaber/Lionheart's writing.
- Big Bad Wannabe: Severus Snape's real reason to hate James Potter was that all of James' bullying him during school time was what prevented Snape from being taken seriously enough to become a Dark Lord on his own right.
- Big Brother Is Watching: Dumbledore knows everything that goes on in Hogwarts and can see any possible threat to him... Except for the attempts on his life and who's behind the constant attacks and inconveniences Harry and co cause.
- Justified in that the author shows his work re: where the gaps are in Dumbledore's surveillance systems, the inherent limitations in any surveillance system (particularly the one that it cannot be set to report every occurrence of a routine and harmless-appearing action without inundating the system's owner in false positives and thus ruining its own usefulness), and how Harry has to subtly sabotage parts of the system and/or operate in areas outside its coverage to get any room to work.
- Culminating in Harry finding and sabotaging the system's alarm log, so that it stops recording system alerts for later (without looking like its sabotaged, of course) -- thus guaranteeing that unless Dumbledore happens to already be in his office and looking at the system readouts right at the instant of an alert, he'll never receive it.
- Bruce Lee: Is saved by Trelawney's time meddling and trains Harry Potter.
- Butt Monkey: Dumbledore, Snape, Draco, most of the Slytherins and Ron are the main ones.
- Chekhov's Gun: To something in canon that is never later referenced: the scar on Dumbledore's knee, referenced as a throwaway joke in his first scene in Sorcerer's Stone, that provides a perfect map of the London Underground, is actually his reference and control system for his multiple underground black-market warehouses.
- Contrived Coincidence: Malaclaw venom causes these due to it being bad luck in a bottle.
- Malaclaw venom is canonical; the malaclaw, whose attack does cause bad luck, is an entry in Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. (The supplemental book, not the movie).
- Crack Fic: At times, can match Thirty Hs in sheer weirdness. One example would be the incident in which Harry is inadvertently transformed into a flower garden, allowing Luna to excise his remaining personality flaws by going weeding.
- Creator Breakdown: Obviously just a temporary and minor one, and he seems to have recovered admirably, but people who previously didn't have anything in particular against him found it quite disturbing to read a goodbye message that sounded like he wanted to condemn anybody who had ever disagreed with him about some story to eternal torture, in archaic speech no less. Of course, some of his former acquaintances apparently had such a reverse-scaled focus in their counter-reaction that... it depends whether you like him or hate him.
- Ornstead has a history of regarding all criticism, even friendly and constructive advice, as proof that he is being persecuted by a cadre of people who hate his work and are conspiring to suppress his creative freedom. He regularly responds with a Creator Breakdown and a "permanent" departure from the Net. Since he first appeared in the anime fanfic community in the middle 90s, he's left the Internet in a huff at least four times.
- Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: At least in those readers who didn't keep reading because of Bile Fascination.
- Dastardly Whiplash: As a side effect of his resurrections and losing the ability to adjust his physical age to a nonthreatening grandfatherly look, Dumbledore starts reverting to his appearance (and wardrobe and behavior!) from his physical prime -- which is that of the classic mustache-twirling, top-hatted villain.
- Death Is Cheap
- Department of Redundancy Department: The author has a tendency to repeat the same thing multiple times with similar but different wording, leading to chapters of 5,000+ words that could easily be 500 or fewer.
- Doorstopper: Currently slightly longer than Gone with the Wind.
- Evil Versus Evil: A not-uncommon interpretation of the central conflict between Dumbledore and Harry. Voldemort and his crew, for what it's worth, oppose both sides at different stages in the story, although they're rather sidelined throughout.
- Expospeak
- The Fair Folk: Harry, Hermione and Luna become the champions of the Fairy Queen who seeks to defeat Dumbledore and bring magic back the way it used to be. Fairy magic is "more magical than magic". Or something...
- Fridge Brilliance: Of the completely unintentional sort. Of course Harry's crossed the Moral Event Horizon (and then circled around and crossed it again... and again... and again...), the whole story gets kicked off by him absorbing a piece of Voldemort's soul.
- Gorn: The many unpleasant demises of the story's antagonists can stray into this from time to time.
- Guilty Pleasure: It's a God Mode Sue fic, true. It's got a Designated Hero Villain Protagonist, true. It's got horrific levels of Author Appeal, true. But, for all those reasons, it's also really, really fun to read, as long as you can avoid thinking about it as Serious Business and just enjoy the fic. The Jumping the Shark done by Dumbledore is good Comic Relief, as well.
- There's also that whenever he manages to avoid Did Not Do the Research, Ornstead actually is a very talented worldbuilder. He just can't do characterization or plot worth a damn. Catch him at the right point, though, and his work is still a lot of fun -- for as long as it lasts. The problem is, it rarely lasts.
- Hate Fic: Aspects of the fic can stray into this - it's obvious that the author has some...problems...with the canon, as he puts it in the first chapter:
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Every so often the entire Harry Potter universe offends me so deeply that I just have to react by folding, spindling and mutilating it. |
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- Hollywood Tactics: Pretty much the entirety of chapter 99, but the grand prize has to go to Russia invading Canada by marching an army across the North Pole.
- In addition to the obvious logistical and navigational flaws of this plan, there's also the part where 90+% of the population of Canada lives in southern Canada. Not only does Ornstead write the Russians choosing the worst invasion route imaginable, he then has them invading the wrong place.
- Ornstead is noteworthy in his relationship with this trope in that it's so uneven. For example, the security setup and eventual siege of Harry's private village is one of the more thorough aversions of this trope that you could find -- it makes intelligent, systematic use of the possibilities of Potterverse magic, has the defenders using sound military tactics throughout, and ends in an absolutely humiliating defeat of the attacking forces. (Who are, admittedly, total idiots who couldn't spell "tactics" with a dictionary -- but this is Voldemort we're talking about here, so that's canon.) Normally when an author falls into this trope its because he doesn't know better, so Ornstead proving that he actually does know better but then mysteriously forgetting everything he knew in less than a dozen chapters is eyebrow-raising.
- Humiliation Conga: Dumbledore gets this throughout the entire fic.
- Idiot Ball: Everyone aside from Harry and his thralls get this, making this an Idiot Plot.
- Informed Ability: Dumbledore, who is supposed to be a greater threat to Harry than Voldemort, the most powerful and dangerous and informed wizard on the planet, is fooled into believing a "Colonel Sanders" among other Muggle advertisement icons are actually dark wizards working to undermine his power.
- Partially justified in that in canon, Potterverse wizards -- even those who are department heads of Ministry departments specifically intended for dealing with Muggle affairs -- are staggeringly ignorant of basic Muggle culture. Add in that this version of Dumbledore is a rampaging anti-Muggle bigot and has concentrated all of his information-gathering networks in the Wizarding World and not the Muggle one, that the American version of the Ministry of Magic deliberately encouraged Dumbledore's delusion when he asked them for information (because they don't like him and seized a chance to have him wasting effort over nothing), and... it's still silly, but at least it isn't massively silly.
- A later chapter explains this as Dumbledore having once been very well informed about the Muggle world... but he's let that knowledge fall well out of date due to a combination of anti-Muggle bigotry and Wizard chauvinism and parochialism, the Muggle world changing far more rapidly than the Wizarding one, and having been very busy juggling a lot of balls for the past few decades in the Wizarding world and so not having much time to keep current with obscure and largely irrelevant background research (which is what Muggle current affairs are as far as Dumbledore is concerned).
- It's All About Me: Dumbledore.
- Jump the Shark: The sadly inevitable fate of most if not all later fics by Ornstead; somewhere around the time that Harry and the girls become faerie creatures, if not before.
- Just Between You and Me: There's one scene of this in chapter 79, where Dumbledore's simulacrum captures Harry and his wives in his office and gloats a bit as he waits for Snape or Filch to arrive to help with the interrogation and torture, pausing only to open a piece of Harry's mail... which blows up in his face. Literally.
- Joker Immunity: If Dumbledore were defeated, there would be no story. There are currently over ninety chapters of story. Also an example of Just Eat Gilligan and Villain Exit Stage Left.
- Love Potion: Used by Harry to turn a hundred witches into his immortal dryad sex slaves, only hot for him thanks to the fact his hair is dropped into the potion,, called Bride's Delight.
- MST: Done by members of The Fanfiction Forum. Viewing requires registration.
- Moral Dissonance: Harry's actions include Mind Rape and enslavement. Despite this, he is portrayed as the unquestioned good guy. On the other hand, after he had a particularly thorough session with the Dursleys (who regularly tried to kill him during childhood in this AU), he throws up several times and has to be comforted by Luna.
- Not that this discomfort actually stopped Harry from continuing to have the Dursleys tortured or anything.
- Moral Event Horizon: This fic's incredibly self-righteous Harry eagerly plunges past the Moral Event Horizon and dives headlong into the Moral Singularity at its center, and the narrator/author praises him all the way down.
- More Than Mind Control: Arguably for Hermione, who is charmed by Harry (who now has Voldemort's memories and power), then convinced that Dumbledore is a Dark Lord and becomes completely devoted to him and The Watson for the inevitable long, long, long streams of exposition that Harry and Luna tell her.
- To be fair, convincing Hermione that Dumbledore is a Dark Lord only requires presenting the actual facts of the situation to her in an organized matter and with logic (seeing as how Dumbledore actually is a Dark Lord in this continuity, natch). Making Hermione sit still for the rest of what Harry's been doing, on the other hand, makes you wonder if they've been force-feeding her crazy pills.
- Only Sane Man: In one of the stories' better bits, Luna is apparently this compared to the rest of her family. Particularly Grandmother Alice, who at this point operates more under Wonderland logic than Earth logic.
- Pay Evil Unto Evil: The story's central tenet.
- Polyamory: Harry has four wives, in addition to the aforementioned sex slaves. Sadly, this trope is pretty common in these kinds of fanfics.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: And how! See Moral Dissonance on this page and a good fraction of the items on the YMMV page.
- Retcon: Dumbledore started out with one Horcrux. As of Chapter 88, he has... thirteen.
- Rouge Angles of Satin: Remarkably absent, given both the size of the story and the fact that it's a fanfic.
- Same Face, Different Name: Ornstead did not reveal his identity as Perfect Lionheart until several years after he began the story. At that time he explained that his motive for publishing using the Lionheart name was to prove that the alleged cabal of haters whom he believes live to denigrate his work would not find fault with Partially Kissed Hero because the "Skysaber" name wasn't on it. Naturally, Perfect Lionheart's identity was debated strongly in many fora before this announcement (starting shortly after the first chapter was posted), with the two main camps settling out as "Oh, yeah, it's Skysaber" and "Nah, it's a Skysaber tribute band".
- Show, Don't Tell: A common criticism, of the frequent Author Tracts in particular.
- Smug Snake: Dumbledore, in private or before he Obliviates someone. Harry as well, though this is ignored because he's the "hero"
- Staying Alive: Dumbledore and Snape, who are repeatedly killed by Harry, Luna and Hermione in a variety of really sadistic ways, but come back each time because Dumbledore is Crazy Prepared and has at least thirteen Horcruxes to ensure his immortality.
- Take That: lots.
- There's a whole chapter devoted to how absolutely disgusting Vampires are, and how people who think they are sexy are Too Dumb to Live, mostly because the author's read the original Dracula and is fed up with Twilight.
- After introducing bows and arrows, there were apparently a lot of reviews bringing up the superiority of guns, which caused the main characters to realize how useless guns are. This is justified by the author in the note at the end, and YMMV on whether you agree:
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I'm tired of anonymous jerk-offs telling me 'bows suck, guns are better.' That may even be true, but it's not what I want to do with my story. So I slapped down some rules to make it physically impossible for my heroes to use them. Just because I'm tired of listening to the blind 'the way we do things now is the only true and perfect way to do ANYTHING' crowd. |
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- Villain with Good Publicity: Dumbledore, who has near-total control over the Wizarding world while being perceived as a paragon of virtue.
