Premise
The Dark Lord Never Died features a canon divergence from 1981, on the night James and Lily are killed. Lucius Malfoy rallies the Death Eaters after Voldemort’s downfall, pretends to the rest of wizarding Britain that the Dark Lord is still alive and takes over the Ministry of Magic in his name. With Dumbledore and the rest of the Order fled to France, we pick up in 1999, when Lucius Malfoy has had 18 years to cultivate wizarding society as he wants it.
The story clocks in at just under 180k words and has an M rating. Nothing explicit occurs on page in terms of sexual content, but in certain parts there is some graphic violence.
Plot
The set up for this story was exceptional. I love this premise and the world building that goes along with imagining a society run by a Death Eater. Lucius Malfoy has himself set up as Minister for Magic, and has divided society into a caste system according to blood status. Purebloods at the top of course, with Half Bloods relegated to second class citizens, but it’s what he does with Muggleborns that really takes the cake.
Rather than having Muggleborns killed or existing as a slave class, Lucius bans magical folk from all contact with muggles, with the Obliviators acting as watchdog. When magic is detected in Muggle Britain, Obliviators are dispatched to either deal with a law breaker, or to abduct a young Muggleborn witch or wizard showing their first signs of magic. The parents are usually either killed or framed for the abduction of the child. The children are beaten and obliviated and told throughout their lives that they were saved from their abusive muggle families, shown mercy by the benevolent Minister despite their tainted blood. They are taken through a special program at Hogwarts which trains them to become soldiers in Lucius Malfoy’s personal army – The Wand Corp of Britain (excellent pun by the way). Hermione has been raised in this new society and is a Wand Leader in the Investigative Branch. She loves Lucius Malfoy, as any truly brainwashed child unquestioningly adores her parental figure/Dear Leader. The author has cited this concept as being inspired by the Jannisaries of the Ottoman Empire. It’s also pretty much the plot of She Ra.
The story kicks off when the Dark Lord finally does return after 18 years of silence, and Lucius Malfoy does not wish to relinquish his power. He tells his subjects that they are under attack by fanatics and a pretender – since he faked Voldemort’s death ten years previously it would look rather embarrassing for him to acknowledge the real one now. Voldemort is so livid at Lucius’ betrayal that he prioritises taking power back from him over going after The Boy Who Lived.
Meanwhile, the Order have been infiltrating Britain to try to bring the regime down, and Ron has just been dispatched to pose as Antoine Dupont, a Québécois ex-soldier seeking a new life. When Death Eaters attack Diagon Alley, Ron and Hermione literally fall on top of each other during the crossfire, fighting back to back and sparking an action spy movie romance.
The plot from there focuses on how The Wands fit in as the tipping point in a greater game for control of Britain. There is a heavy emphasis on political moves for power and tactical moves for war. Whilst I give it top points for planning, I will say that it didn’t often feel as though the stakes were particularly high. Given how much action occurs in the story and how often people die, it seems counter-intuitive for me to say that there isn’t much conflict, but no one we care about dies or loses a battle or anyone they love. Despite Ron directly quoting that “no plan ever survives contact with the enemy”, actually all but the very last one do, and being completely secure in everything always being fine for our heroes makes me less invested in wondering what the outcome of a dangerous situation will be.
There are however, some great action scenes. A lot of effort is put into giving us a riveting blow-by-blow of the duels our heroes get into, and the quick and creative spellwork they use to outsmart the enemy. If this story were ever adapted for the screen it would undoubtedly be an action flick. Possibly starring Angelina Jolie.
It is a very structurally sound story. The author knew exactly what they were going for when they wrote it, planting and paying off to great effect. The story is paced very well, the plot neither moving too fast nor meandering. The overarching theme is of resistance to oppression, and I feel that this was handled very cleverly. Lucius Malfoy is an extremely shrewd man, able to not only demean the Muggleborns as he always wanted, but to make them love him for it. In fact, my only real critique around structure is that overthrowing Lucius should have been the crux of the story, as he was a much more compelling villain than Voldemort.
One of my favourite tidbits from the world building of the Wands was that along with their earliest memories, all of them are stripped of their last names. When I first read these formal British soldiers addressing each other on a first name basis I thought it was sloppy writing, but it’s actually genius. It unifies them as the orphans of Britain (“Britain is our family” is the tagline) and ties their identity to the Minister, who represents the sovereign nation. Simultaneously it denies them the respect accorded every other citizen who are referred to by their last names – a constant reminder of the Muggleborn’s status as the lowest ranking class. I was extremely impressed by how cleverly and believably the author set up this alternate universe.
Writing
The story is written in 3rd person limited, with 5 POV characters – Hermione, Ron, Lucius, Albus and Voldemort. Shifts in POV occur multiple times in a single chapter, each marked with a date and a time stamp. Stylistically this very much suits the genre of the writing, which is part action/adventure and part political espionage story. Ron even gets compared to James Bond a couple of times. The majority of the story is told through Hermione’s and Ron’s eyes, giving us a ground-level view of what the Wands and the Order, respectively, are up to.
In terms of overall quality there is little to complain about. The work was beta read, and what grammatical errors I did find were so few and far between as to not be worth mentioning. It reads well and for the most part very naturally. There are even a couple of meta jokes thrown in which I enjoyed quite a bit, particularly this one:
“Lucius would rather have a muggle hook than attach a prosthetic that the leader of the Unspeakables had made to his own body.”
The only thing which did stand out to me was some ill-fitting choices of reference to the characters (such as “the muggleborn witch”), when their name or even ‘he’ or ‘she’ would have done just fine. It’s partially because we’re supposed to be reading the story from a character’s point of view, so whilst it might make sense for Ron to refer to Luna as “the blonde witch” when he’s just met her and is unfamiliar with her, it doesn’t work when Hermione, who has been best friends with her since their early Hogwarts years, refers to her the same way. Luna is constantly called “the blonde” regardless of whose perspective we’re reading, even if she’s only in the company of another blonde, as occurs once when she’s talking with Draco Malfoy.
Needs more gray
I was going to put this under the characterisation section, but I realised it’s more of a thematic problem than one of individual characters. For a story which finds its strength in realistic political machinations, indoctrination and war tactics, it has a surprising lack of moral complexity. The good guys are good, unified, understanding and down to earth, to the point where nearly all of them seem to have the same personality. The bad guys are bad, divided into petty squabbling and have no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
What really brought this home to me was that Lucius and Narcissa have a bad marriage in this story, where in canon they appear to be very supportive of each other. Narcissa is a selfish and malcontent wife who doesn’t understand politics but constantly criticises her husband for how he handles things. Draco is an even more pompous and useless sack than he was in canon, and his primary feature is how he languishes about and abuses the power afforded to the Minister’s son in order to rape the female Wands, including Hermione. Despite being a clear and primary strike against Draco’s character, it’s also a shockingly downplayed part of the fic – no one ever even calls it rape. And despite the fact that Lucius is always extremely nice to the Wands, even when they’re children, he calls them mudbloods when they’re not in the room and from his POV we can see that he has no regard for any of them at all, or anyone else for that matter. He seems to despise other purebloods as much as he despises Muggleborns.
I’m not saying your bad guys shouldn’t be bad people when you’re writing a story, especially if you’re trying to get across a point about evil and oppression, but the fact is that even J.K Rowling wrote these characters with more moral gray matter than this, and she was the one who wrote for children and dismissed the Slytherins wholesale. To have such a realistic, gritty setting only to make your characters into caricatures of good and evil does a disservice to what is otherwise a well-nuanced story.
There are one or two exceptions to the moral dichotomy of the characters, which I’ll talk about in the Characterisation section.
Characterisation
Characterisation was not handled badly per se – as I said, the overall quality of the story was very good – but it was definitely weak compared to other story elements such as setting and plot.
I mentioned above that many of the good characters read as the same person. Little effort goes into giving ‘voice’ to the individual characters, and as a result Hermione, Ron, Dean, Harry, Colin, Percy, and at least three OC characters all come across the same in the text. And if the physical stakes in this story are low, the emotional stakes are pretty much zero. No one has any genuine fights or clashes of personality – there are no fallouts or interpersonal conflict between good guys. Everyone is totally reasonable in all the same ways, in order to not hold up the overarching plot. Even when Hermione finds out who “Antoine” really is, she just sort of says “I’m hurt that you lied to me, even though I understand why you did it”, and then she’s a bit standoffish for a while, but that’s about the extent of it. Unfortunately it means that it’s hard to bond with these characters and get invested in how their arcs pan out, and that’s a very important element to me.
What was interesting as well was how this emphasis of plot over character informed the writing of the epilogue. Epilogues are usually used to tie up loose ends and complete character arcs, especially to wrap up emotional journeys. Instead, this epilogue is sort of a condensed, one-chapter mystery plot which still largely focuses on action and intrigue, as if the author needed to stick to what they were already good at writing rather than just having a character-driven chapter to wind things down.
Getting onto an individual basis, I did find Hermione to be very believably written. In her POV chapters we see the bones of who she was in the canon translated well into someone who has been trained intensely for battle. She finds meaning in her role as a Wand, and her moral righteousness is still very much present, but turned towards the interests of the Minister, whom she believes in wholeheartedly. In fact, the dynamic between Hermione and Lucius was one of my favourite aspects, because the two of them get along very well to begin with but there’s so much under the surface. Much of Hermione’s arc revolves around her investigating what she thinks is a plot to overthrow the Minister, but instead finding out the truth of how Muggleborns are extracted from their parents. We then follow how she handles that knowledge as a member of the Minister’s most dedicated subjects.
Hermione may be a trained soldier, but Ron has also taken a lesson in Badass^(TM). As it’s an AU and it takes place when they’re all adults, this is pretty much a free pass for characterisation. Ron was a Gendarme Magique in France, which loosely translates to Magical Police (total side note: I do not speak French, and whilst I fully appreciate that the author probably speaks it well, it was at times difficult trying to keep up with untranslated French word-peppering). He has therefore had proper training and battle experience, so I do very much buy his skill level in this universe. However, very little of Ron’s canon personality survived the AU, so whilst I can get on board with his romance with Hermione, it does at times feel like Ron’s name is the only thing which makes this a Romione story.
Harry himself is far in the background, and not a POV character at all. At the crux of the story, there is a very similar scene to the end of OotP, in which Voldemort tries to possess him. We sift through Harry’s treasured childhood memories with Voldemort, but we haven’t gone through his childhood with him, and the Harry who was raised by Sirius Black in a happy environment, grew up French and went to Beauxbatons isn’t the Harry we grew to care about. With the exception of this exact scene, Harry scarcely matters to the story at all. I don’t care about his love for Ginny (which also happened off page before the narrative started), and I don’t care whether he lives or dies.
Some characters do come to life more than others, such as Luna and Dumbledore. I don’t feel like either was entirely on point, but for different reasons.
Luna sounds very much like herself, but doesn’t act like her much. She’s very affectionate here, like that cute Lolita friend who physically throws herself at you just to hug you hello, and squeals with delight whenever they hear something about your love life. It seems like she’s being shoehorned into a rom-com BFF role, where her only real purpose in the world is to pair her MC best friend up with someone. That’s a strange fit on Luna, who was never a touchy-feely person in canon and did not care one whit about love lives. Unlike the other characters, Luna’s own backstory hasn’t really altered enough to account for the change in personality. That said, she’s a journalist for the Quibbler, which feels very in character for her, and there were some excellent Luna moments which felt exactly like her. This was probably my favourite:
“So….do you want to catch dinner with me?” She added “at the Cauldron” before Hermione could ask if she meant it literally, like that time in Hermione’s seventh year.
The other character I wanted to talk about was Albus Dumbledore, who doesn’t quite sound like himself, but whose actions are 100% in character. Dumbledore represents the best and perhaps only meaningful example of a morally gray character. Since we see his POV we are privy to how very much he cares about Harry and the members of the Order who put their lives on the line for him, assuring us of his humanity. However, we are also privy to how deeply manipulative Dumbledore is willing to be for the Greater Good, and certain tactical manoeuvres he could never disclose to his allies for risk of completely losing their faith in him. No one ever finds out for example that he and Snape worked together to deliberately bring Voldemort back, knowing that his return would divide Lucius’ followers and weaken his regime enough to take over. Dumbledore’s chapters afford us a high level view of the decades-long and countries-wide chess game for control of Britain, and the moves and countermoves needed to successfully topple Lucius’ pureblood regime. A lot of people hate how manipulative canon Dumbledore was, and there is a whole sub-genre of manipulative Dumbledore fanfiction, but I’m a big fan of how his individual actions could be reprehensible, but without his machinations guiding the direction of the war, the good guys could never have won. Props for this Dumbledore.
TL:DR
Would definitely recommend this one for a read because the story is such a creative and original one, and it executes really effectively. It has great world building, detailed magical mechanics, action packed fight scenes and a really solid plot. Whilst I think the story could be rounded out by strengthening its character development and matching the moral complexity to the plot, in its current iteration it is already a tight and concise piece of work. I’d give it a 7.5/10 rating overall.
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