Fic Review: Delenda Est (Harry Potter)
A time-travel fanfic featuring Harry and a young Bellatrix Lestrange
Enter Delenda Est, a 400k word Harry Potter fanfiction. Bellatrix Lestrange sends Harry twenty-five years into the past, where he accumulates allies, meets a younger Bellatrix and prepares for the upcoming battle against Lord Voldemort.
This review was originally available at https://recordcrash.com/blog, dated May 19th, 2018.
Characters
The strongest part of the story, to the point the original characters are most interesting than the canon ones.
The main two characters, Harry and Bellatrix, are completely out of character, but in good ways. Harry is much more timid than in canon, which allows for Bellatrix to get some agency and provide some fun balance to the story, as well as some banter. Bellatrix is unreasonably good at magic at age 17, and though we're told most of that is Dark Arts-related, we never really see her use that many Dark spells, which makes her seem a bit of a Mary Sue. Her control over events is limited, however, since the plodding pace of the story demands it (more on that on the plot section).
Harry himself tends to over-rely on an illusion spell the moment he finds it, which no-sells the vast majority of confrontations in the book. He later on gets an overpowered teleportation spell that completes his transformation into a Gary Stu. Unlike Bellatrix, he lacks many flaws, reticence to act being the only character element that stops him from simply taking over. I will say the fact he gets a Potions Professor job has the consequences you would expect from Harry's canonical skills, so I guess that's another flaw that makes the character more human.
In the end, however, Harry and Bellatrix have a funny dynamic and their eventual romance makes sense. Bellatrix has many adventures separate from Harry, which is something you rarely see in this kind of story, and they're almost always funny, since her banter is not limited to Harry.
Orion Black and particularly Romulus Malfoy are fantastically written, and it's amazing that the fic makes you feel sad when bad things happen to the Black and Malfoy patriarchs, even though they do nothing to contradict their canon Black and Malfoy values. The OC kids are annoying but effective plot devices. Sidra Potter seems to be literally written to be an evil brat, and it's implied she ends up with Draco Malfoy for some reason. Considering she replaces Harry in the timeline maybe that's a clever meta joke, but I doubt it.
Supporting canon characters are good enough, and pretty in character. Something that's very surprising is the slow transition (enabled by the slow pacing) of Draco Malfoy from his canon self into a shrewd businessman with experience in the Muggle world, all set into motion by a lawn-mowing job. This sounds extremely silly when I write it down, and it's definitely comic relief, but it somehow works without breaking suspension of disbelief.
Voldemort is weak and mostly non-threatening, since his magical power is bypassed by the previously mentioned Gary Stu powers, and his political power is nullified by actions taken by Harry in the past (more of that on Plot). There is an okay subplot about finding the horcruxes, which are somewhat better hidden than in canon, but the lack of good villains is a definite flaw to this story.
Plot
Harry and Bellatrix are both about to be executed by Voldemort after the good guys lose, Bellatrix having disappointed Voldemort for the last time and Harry being harry. Bellatrix pulls out the Plot Device, a hairpin that demands a blood tribute in order to send its user through Time (she doesn't know this). She makes Harry kill her with it to avoid further torture, unwittingly sending Harry 25 years into the past, when Bellatrix was his age.
The story is split in two parts, resulting from the time travel plot device. In the first part, Harry takes on the identity of Harry Ashworth, a wizard from Australia. He quickly uses a 17 year old Bellatrix to achieve connections in the Black and Malfoy families, helped by the fact he is Lord Black by blood (inherited from Sirius in the future).
He uses this to prepare a strong government for the Rise of Voldemort while feeding some information to the good guys. He gets a job as a substitute Potions teacher from the aforementioned connections, which helps him keep an eye on potential Voldemort recruits. Harry soon meets his parents as children, and through some crucial scenes leads Snape off the bad path and makes James become less of a bully. His political power rises, and events allow him to gain access to the Malfoy fortune, further reducing Voldemort's political power.
He also gatecrashes a potential Death Eater meet-and-greet, making Voldemort suspicious of the connection between them, which leads to some conflict. Finally, the main characters go Horcrux hunting to the Riddle mansion, where Voldemort defeats Harry and Bellatrix soundly, the hairpin sending both characters into the future. Voldemort assumes they died in the Fiendfyre during the fight, and he goes back to putting his plans into motion.
The second part of the story begins here. The changes Harry did to the timeline have stopped Voldemort from doing much 25 years later (canon sixth year), though he still terrorizes Muggles through random attacks. His parents are still alive, though they believe Harry Ashworth dead, and society is overall in a far better state than in canon.
Harry and Bellatrix create the "Ghost of Ashworth" through an illusion spell, and terrorize Death Eaters and Voldemort with it, making him unsure if Harry actually survived. This mostly goes nowhere. Bellatrix messes with Draco as a way of protecting him from the war (part of a deal with his mother) by removing his magic and trapping him in Privet Drive where he has to get an actual job. Harry and Bellatrix decimate the Death Eater ranks while collaborating with the new kids (Sidra Potter, Rose Potter, and Leo Black) and the Order of the Phoenix to seek and destroy the remaining horcruxes.
Harry's influence and actions eventually get him a short-lived Minister for Magic job to end the Voldemort threat and rebuild society. He corners Voldemort in a cave, where he easily captures him (!) and the remaining Death Eaters. An epilogue shows everyone a few years later, happily ever after, with Bellatrix as a Minister this time.
The story has some very original scenes, and some interesting focus on politics that is lacking in the original Harry Potter books, but god is it a slog sometimes. The story is 400,000 words long, the higher end for fantasy novels, but not much actually happens. Bellatrix and Harry have the unlikely combination of Mary Sue abilities and extremely limited agency. Harry is fully able to defeat Voldemort shortly after the second part begins, but he takes another 200k words defeating random Death Eaters as "psychological warfare", which is completely pointless, since Voldemort considered Ashworth a threat from the beginning.
He ends up defeating Voldemort by using his ministry connections to trap him with wards, and then he just... throws a portkey at him. He doesn't even need to use his overpowered illusion spell (which makes his main body invisible and usable and lets a projection walk around) to defeat him. There is a previous battle with him, where Harry steals his wand before the duel even really begins. Voldemort really has a hold of the Idiot Ball in the second part of this story, and he never even figures out who Harry is. He just gets soundly defeated, very slowly at first and anticlimactically at the end.
The story also wastes around 30,000 words on Amelia Bones, which is ultimately irrelevant to the plot. She's not alone in this. Even with Harry and Bellatrix's relative lack of plot agency, we get many viewpoints into the minds of random canon characters who just don't do all that much. It really seems like at some point the writers (this story has more than one for some reason) preferred writing "Random Slice-of-lifeish Scenes in the Delenda Est AU!" instead of advancing the plot, which only hurts the story due to the fact the end comes abruptly and anticlimactically. There is no time spent in the revelations of Harry Ashworth actually being Harry Potter from the future. There is no scene for the TRIAL OF LORD FUCKING VOLDEMORT(!!!), despite it being hyped up for a couple of chapters. The story just skips past all the interesting scenes that would emerge from that, and just focuses on MORE POLITICS.
6/10 - Cool concept, cool characters, plot aiming in the wrong direction
Jesus, I actually can't believe I enjoyed the story at all now that I'm looking at this summary. I guess that has to do with the excellent technical writing, Bellatrix's banter and the interesting OCs. The plot itself just isn't that good, and the illusion spell was a huge mistake. You could tell this 400k words story in 150k better words.
I (somehow) still would recommend reading it, just don't expect good fight scenes and fast pacing.