Fic Updates Agent 47

[chibipoe]

The odds were never in my favor: Third task of the Triwizard Tournament

So I've started reading this on my vacation, and I can only guess the author is not a native speaker of English because the sheer number of boneheaded malapropisms is beyond anything I might expect from a poorly educated native speaker.  Characters "drawled" their wands?  A chessboard is called an "exchequer"?  And the grammar/usage is awful, and there are missing words in nearly every sentence.  It's a pity, because it's such an intriguing alternate Harry Potter verse and I dearly want to find out the point of divergence. But the writing is so bad I frequently want to stop reading and delete it from my kindle, and I have absolutely no faith the author will even bother to even suggest why its 'verse so different from canon.

It really is an odd duck. The odd word choices and grammatical wrinkles detract a lot, but yeah, it has increasingly become more of a 'original fic with very broad strokes of HP flavoring'. I've had the same thought about them not being a native english speaker. But yes, there's just so many odd arrangements and turns of phrase. Some that are antiquated, some that are correct but just so awkward in arrangement that you know they had to be written by someone not properly fluent in the written language.  And yeah, agreed on it being a pity because the plot as it goes on has kept me interested, but it becomes exasperating, frequently.

(Also, they really do like the word interlocutor.)

ETA: The Exchequer thing too is like... such an obscure reference. Per Wikipedia and other sources: The Exchequer was named after a table used to perform calculations for taxes and goods in the medieval period. According to the Dialogus de Scaccario ('Dialogue concerning the Exchequer'), an early medieval work describing the practice of the Exchequer, the table was large, 10 feet by 5 feet with a raised edge or "lip" on all sides of about the height of four fingers to ensure that nothing fell off it, upon which counters were placed representing various values. The name Exchequer referred to the resemblance of the table to a chess board (French: échiquier) as it was covered by a black cloth bearing green stripes of about the breadth of a human hand, in a chequer-pattern.