Live like you are not a Christian
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:date: 2020-06-28T18:35:24
:category: literature
:tags: review, harryPotter, blogComment, HPreligion

(my comments on “`Breakfast in New York`_” by Radaslab)

Finished reading the story and there are two overwhelming
thoughts in my head. The first is obvious and rather normal for
most of the fanfiction stories (and especially so-called romantic
ones): it should be cut to like one quarter or so. The plot is
not capable of carrying more like seven or eight chapters, but we
have thirty-one of them. If you write two-hundred thousand words
long story, there is always good testing question “Do I have
a plot as strong as `Moby Dick by Herman Melville`_, do I have
the same amount of action?” [#]_ OK, romance can have less
adventure than Moby Dick, but this story with its incredibly
repetitive in nature (where even Hermione gets so bored, she
obviously forgot Harry has already told her he was
a Roman-Catholic and they would have a wedding ordained by his
parish priest even telling her his name) with many long
descriptions of everything completely useless in terms of plot,
just goes on and on and on. Thank God it is so easy to skip over
huge amounts of boring stuff like that! (hint: from five days
between their engagement and the wedding, just gathering in the
park outside of Grimmauld Place and meeting at Dursleys’ carries
the plot, whole day of visiting Hogwarts and ZOO, which is like
two chapters, can be safely skipped)

You know the advice (which the author didn’t follow at all) is
“Show, don’t tell!”, it is NOT “Show AND tell! And tell again
(while she contemplates the story), and again (while he does so),
and tell once more (she has to tell her mum), then decide that
you want to actually write epistolary letter, so instead of
rewrite, you just write whole things twice more in two sets of
letters! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Makes me crazy.

However, as I have described elsewhere_, lack of editing is
completely normal in the fanfiction world, and I wouldn’t write
this review just because of that. It is something else. In the
`religionless universe of Harry Potter`_, I am very thankful for
every even hint of some person who is a Christian, and who takes
her belief seriously. However, then there are stories like this
one and `Strong Blood by CooLibrarian`_, which are just
confusing. Main characters (and many other people) are Christians
(here Roman Catholics, in “Strong Blood” Russian Orthodox), but
there is absolutely nothing Christian about them. They never
pray, never go to the church, never read the Bible, never jump to
the unknown because God calls them to, anything. And no, I don’t
think it is the traditional Christians / born-again one’s thing.
I wouldn’t mind if they go to Masses, pray Rosary [#]_, wearing
devotional scapulars, anything. Why make your characters
expressly Christian, when they don’t do anything Christian-like?

And I really don’t ask for some explicitly theological or
missionary stories. For example, `Why Time Travel Should Be
Illegal and Other Morals by mugglesftw`_ makes them normal
Christians, even though their faith is certainly not in the
centre of the story, it is just characteristic of some
characters, who are dealing with some other plot.

.. [#] If your story has one million words, the question is
   whether you want it to be as boring as `Clarissa by Samuel
   Richardson`_, normally considered to be the longest novel in
   the English literature. ;)

.. [#] Actually, it is mentioned in “Breakfast in New York”, that
   Hermione did pray Rosary during the Deathly Hallows camping
   trip, and just by listening to her whispered prayers, Harry
   converts to Christianity and only later finds out Potters were
   as a family traditionally Catholics … no comments.

.. _`Breakfast in New York`:
    https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5141159

.. _`Moby Dick by Herman Melville`:
    https://blog.fostergrant.co.uk/2017/08/03/word-counts-popular-books-world/

.. _elsewhere:
   {filename}aristotle-unities.rst

.. _`religionless universe of Harry Potter`:
   {filename}religionless-hp.rst

.. _`Strong Blood by CooLibrarian`:
   https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7211094

.. _`Why Time Travel Should Be Illegal and Other Morals by mugglesftw`:
   https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12738075

.. _`Clarissa by Samuel Richardson`:
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_novels