Title: Motivations
Author: Jeconais
Genre: Romance
Library Category: Romance
Pairing: Harry/Astoria
Chapters: 1
Words: 51,156
Published: June 4, 2016
Status: Complete

Summary: Harry joins a new club, wanting to keep up with his Muggle subjects. Having more friends leads him on the sort of path he had only dreamed about.

Link: http://jeconais.fanficauthors.net/Motivations/Motivations/
EPUB: http://jeconais.fanficauthors.net/ws/public/epub/678/

This is a well written one-shot that I found entertaining and it has generally good pacing. I like the concept of a non-DA cross house club and the author does a nice job of explaining what their club activities contained without going into too many unnecessary details. The romance between Harry and Astoria is really cute and I don’t see the standard fanon clichés about the Greengrass family here. I found the portrayal of the Malfoys as family oriented yet opportunistic really believable.

However I have a couple of concerns. One was the trivialization of Voldemort; he got eliminated a tad bit too easily by Lucius for my liking. Also, the ripples that resulted from the existence of a cross-house club felt a bit minor considering its scale and the influence past members were alluded to have. Some people might not like how Hermione was bashed and turned into a clichéd Dumbledore supporter, but I found it nice to see Ron not being the target of hate for once.

Overall, while a bit bulky for a one shot, but this was an entertaining read for me. Once you get to the end and read the author’s notes, you WILL want to revisit some parts of the story.
4/5 from me
Edit: Added link to EPUB

 

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Not for that author. (Only his oldest stuff is found elsewhere and none of it is on ff.net.)

As for the story, I read it when it came out since I'd enjoyed some others by the same author (Hope was pretty good for its day.)

Honestly, I found this story to be bland pablum with little actual conflict, nothing that held my interest, at any rate. Too many opportunities for real dramatic tension were avoided, leaving a story that felt like a bunch of characters going through the motions. Add to that that the love story between Harry and Astoria, such as it was, wasn't particularly interesting.

It just wasn't my cup of tea, I'm afraid. I'll round my scoring up to 3/5, guilty pleasure territory but nothing more.

 

Pretty standard Jeconais. Probably could have stomached it better if it had fewer dramatic scenes in the Great Hall with all of Hogwarts looking on. 2/5 because it had proper spelling and grammar.

 

This is firmly etched in Almost Recommendable territory. It's guilty pleasure stuff, the type of story you'd read and enjoy if you shipped Harry/Astoria.

Problem is, Astoria's "pureblood" diction just comes off as stilted and weird, and the whole "My Lady", "My Lord" thing drove me nuts. Voldemort almost seems like a minor nuisance compared to the Dark Lord he should be, and to be honest Harry/Victoria made much more sense than the Harry/Astoria pairing which felt extremely shoe-horned in.

So yeah, I can't give this more than a 2/5.

 

I like Jeconais' stuff, but someone once described it (and it stuck with me, enough to re-use the metaphor) as junk food. It's not exactly bad, but it's nothing great, and it is pretty standard. The story is nothing special, but the writing is good - I didn't stumble on any of it.

However, I knew I'd read the story before. I'm subscribed to Jeconais, so I read everything he puts up.

But I couldn't remember much of the story, even if I was vaguely aware of the broad strokes, which is much unlike WKGQ or some of his other stuff. It isn't really anything stand-out, even though it only came out three months or so back.

3.5, but rounded down to 3/5. If you like his other stuff (now, not in 2007), then you'll like it, if you don't then you won't.

 

This is terrible.

I like Jeconais' earlier stuff. Many of his stories are enjoyable guilty pleasure fics. Hope is among my all time favorites.

This is terrible. Harry is totally out of character for no reason whatsoever, and the club exists because Jeconais said so. It doesn't make any sense in context. It's filled with paper-thin OCs. This may not be a major issue, sure, but then we've got atrocious writing like this:

This is an 11 year-old girl speaking.

Isn't Jeconais like 40? "Fortunately, she didn't yet have boobs"?

Counting the paragraph previous to this, that was the entirety of Harry's fourth year.

Yep, we skipped from second to the end of fifth year within like 200 words. I mean, I get that he wants to get to the good and interesting stuff, but holy fuck at least pretend to make an effort.

I'm done.

 

I've read most of Jeconais' earlier fics and generally enjoyed them. Some were undeniably guilty pleasures, but others were near the upper bounds of the fanfiction at the time.

But standards have gone up since then. I'm not sure if the quality of the average story has gone up, or if the increased production rate combined with a constant reading rate just means I can be pickier. Regardless, this feels like a step backwards.

2/5

 

The only merit this has is as something to laugh at as all the characters marvel at how perfect Harry is in the most comedic ways. Or things like Astoria's reaction to receiving some candies:

 

This suffers from the common Jeconais issue of having no real conflict or challenges for Harry to overcome, but that I don't terribly mind, and I've enjoyed several of his works. What's really hard to get over in this story though, is just how completely out of character nearly every single person is, from Harry to Ron to Sirius to Lucius. In fact, I think Draco is probably the only one who appears in anything remotely close to more than being in the background who isn't completely OOC, and that's still just basically for comedic relief.

2.5/5, but I'd be more inclined to round down than up.

 

Fairly disappointing read. I haven't read anything from Jeconais in years, and apparently I had a false impression about the quality of his writing. Couldn't make it too far into the story, but the very beginning just reads like a fantasy fulfillment story. Author wants Harry to have more friends and be the popular kid in school, and he creates a story that revolves around the concept of Harry being popular.

2/5 - Not sure if it qualifies as a guilty pleasure, or just guilty reading it.

 

Read it a while back. Not really entertaining as his older stuff is. There aren't enough Harry/Astoria stories, and this one's just disappointing.

2/5 from me.

 

Yeah... Not the best of Jeconais' stuff. Not only was it extremely fast paced, but the character were off which made them more irritating than interesting.

2/5 because the writing was readable, despite its quite 'meh' quality.

 

If I were to rate it as a serious fic, I'd give it something around two, but since this is one of the clearest cases of guilty pleasures I've ever seen, I'm going to give it a 3/5. It can be a fun story to read, if you ignore its greatest problems, but, all in all, it's pretty Jeconais, if you know what I mean.