This started out as a comment to a journal but got a bit too long so I’m posting it here.

A friend writing about framing fanworks asked for comments on Manacled and Alchemised, the fanfic and subsequent published novel by senlinyu. If you are in the HP fandom you might know the fic in question and if you love it – fine, you’re welcome, though I’d in turn simply love to know why you do. It’s not my jam, as will become apparent in the following critique. If you haven’t read it, and think you might, – please don’t read my critique till afterwards because there are spoilers galore. This is not a review, as such. It’s more musings on my personal reactions to the book. And it’s a hefty book: 300,000 words plus. I haven’t mentioned the actual writing, which is technically good though slightly repetitive – just the contents.  

Manacled by senlinyu: a brief critique

I’m not sure where to start. Despite being a Harry Potter fan, I don’t think I was the target audience for this. I did manage to wade through to the end, but can’t imagine trying to read the novel Alchemised, because from the sample I looked at on Amazon, it’s the same – though all credit to the author for re-imagining a magical world in order to publish without breaching copyright.

It isn’t that I love the HP books. I read them with and for my students when I was teaching, and although I was impressed at the way JKR got teenagers to read long texts with no illustrations, I found the writing style rather flat and most of the characters two-dimensional. However, I liked the concept of the wizarding school and thought JKR did a better job with it than numerous other authors. Then I watched the films and fell in love, perhaps not least because the interior of Hogwarts reminded me of my own boarding school and also I was very familiar with the English education system. I am not at all keen on JKR’s current ‘political’ activities but am able somehow to separate the films from the books, knowing that many of the actors also disapprove of her position on trans women. I can understand not paying anything that will go towards funding her anti-trans stance but I don’t really see why the reputations and royalties of the film cast should suffer. And of course fanfic is not for anyone’s profit even though it may help to advertise the original author.  

So anyway, I embarked on Manacled expecting a type of slave fic with Draco and Hermione as the main protagonists.

I usually enjoy slave fic because it is interesting to explore the power dynamics. I also read rape fic when it results in hurt/comfort (including fics where the comforter is the original rapist). I will read war stories, too, though I’m not keen on the ones that focus on fighting and death.

I really don’t like fics, whether fanfic or original, where the author is clearly anxious to share their obsession with pain and suffering with readers, with very little action, character development, etc. I can only think I’m in a minority here, because so many readers seem to like Manacled.

Manacled fall into three sections: the first has Hermione manacled and enslaved, in a state of  amnesia, with Draco as her ‘keeper’; the second recounts the events that led up to the situation; the third takes the reader through the aftermath when Hermione has recovered her memories.

The first section is unremittingly miserable. Hermione and others are at the mercy of the death eaters. We learn that pregnancy might shake Hermione’s memories loose. The sex scenes are cold and clinical. Draco as rapist doesn’t appear to be getting much pleasure, either physical or psychological, from his actions. The memories Hermione does have are dreadful, telling us that many loved characters experienced awful deaths though it isn’t clear yet whether all these are true. It becomes obvious that Draco is protecting Hermione but not why. I wasn’t totally sure I wanted the walls of Hermione’s occlumency to shatter because what she did recall was bad enough. Her pregnancy ends the first section.

The second section is all ‘flashback’ and we see Hermione manipulated into a relationship with Draco who wants to help the Order to avenge his mother. He remains high in Voldemort’s regard and this gives him access to information. He also kills, usually humanely, which is not the norm for death eaters. The way Hermione’s friends and colleagues interact with her is almost as bad as enslavement. Needless to say, Hermione and Draco form a bond, though it is never really clear whether this is a kind of mutual Stockholm syndrome or a genuine growing feeling for each other. The section ends when Hermione, in order to protect Draco, puts herself in a position where she is captured. There are a couple of short sex scenes, both taking place in Muggle hotels, where we might see an actual link between the two characters if we squint but they are over too quickly to affect the general ambience. Knowing that enslavement is coming adds to the sense of doom whilst reading this section.

The final part of the book sees Hermione recovering her memories. Now they have to get rid of her manacles which enable Voldemort to track her. Draco does his best to protect her at great risk to himself. Eventually, Hermione works out how to remove Draco’s dark mark (also a tracking device) and to that end, amputates his lower arm. For some reason the author warns us about the details of the amputation and puts them between sets of asterisks so that readers can skim. I found this very strange given the enormous amount of detail about other medical issues. The author delights in creating worse and worse curses and then inventing some cures but not before dwelling on excruciating deaths and suffering.

Naturally, Hermione and Draco escape, Hermione creates a useful prosthetic arm for Draco with a built-in wand, and the baby is born successfully. The final chapters are told in almost journalese style, telling us what happened but not going into any detail. The book ends with Aurore Rose, suddenly grown up, coming back to a Britain that has been rescued from Voldemort.

As I said, I wasn’t convinced by any hints of romance. I thought both main characters were more in need of therapists than each other, both during the flashbacks and afterwards. Hermione is apparently able to forgive and forget everything that Draco did, and the reader is expected to excuse him on the grounds of a difficult childhood.

Whilst I can admire the author’s creativity in regard to curses, I really didn’t need to know about things like the flaying curse at length, in detail, and more than once.

Why is the book so popular? Do people really enjoy vicarious pain so much? I suppose they must. It would explain some of the popular films with torture, explosions, death and very little else. It would, I suppose, also explain why people seem to accept the idea of war, famine, etc. until it affects them personally. It might also explain the popularity of other fanfics turned pro, like 50 Shades.

I felt almost violated by the end of the book. It is very long, but has a plot that would at most take a couple of chapters. The rest is simply a hymn to misery. As such, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I was discussing this with a friend who objected that I love Game of Thrones which has more than its fair share of violence and suffering. Well, yes, but in between it has complex politics, three dimensional characters who evolve in reaction to events, lots of interesting action and great world building. The author of Manacled has kept JKR’s two dimensional characters and wizarding world and has not added any complex plot arcs.

In fact: the characters never develop – the ones who were teens in the book remain as they were, simply older and so allowed to have sex and babies, while the ones who were adults are still stereotypes; the world building never happens – the wizarding world remains set in its ways, and can be good/light or evil/dark but nothing else, and action is limited to a small group of countries; the action is predictable and lacks any genuine thrills of surprise. In another of my fandoms, LotR and The Hobbit, fans got upset with Tolkien’s ideas and wrote a lot of fic generally classed as ‘everybody lives; nobody dies’. I have written a couple of those myself. In Manacled, the order of the day seems to be ‘everybody dies; nobody lives’. Most of the characters we care about from the books and films are killed in ingenious ways, then Lucius partially redeems himself by dying in his efforts to aid Draco’s escape, and even Severus is conveniently murdered by ‘dark creatures’ who are Romanian rebels. The only survivors so far as we know are Hermione, Draco, Ginny and perhaps Parvarti. I am not at all sure how to feel about this brave new world or even whether to care about it at all.

I was intrigued enough to struggle through, but then wished I hadn’t. If I want long fanfic in this fandom I prefer things like Wind that Shakes the Seas and Stars, which is more creative (apart from the Manacled curse creations) and takes the entire cast in different directions. I don’t want pain and suffering in fiction I read for escape (there’s enough in non-fiction and the news) but accept it for plot development.  Clearly, as I have said, I’m in a minority.

Basically, I disliked it, and am still wondering why so many people disagree with me.