FimFiction Link - Short ID: 495664/the-accidental-invasion
Published: May '21 — Nov '21
This fic is by the same author as The Boy Who Disappeared (a.k.a. Hailey Potter), though it's not quite as wild so far (as of chapter 12).
The premise is as follows:
>Lyra opens a portal to HP-Earth
>due to magical shenanigans, anypony who goes through the portal turns into an 11-year-old human, regardless of actual age
>due to magical shenanigans, about 30,000 ponies get invited to Hogwarts, on top of the normal ~40 human students
Around 12,000 ponies of all ages end up attending Hogwarts as 11-year-old human children. This involves a three-tiered "student instructor" system, where the Hogwarts professors teach normal-sized classes consisting of only the top student instructors, then the top instructors teach the other instructors, and the other instructors teach the thousands of individual students. This system is obviously completely insane, even considering that most of the instructors are adults, including a bunch of professional teachers and professors.
You can tell this is by the same author as Hailey Potter because it has the same issue of the Hogwarts professors having zero agency. Dumbledore and McGonagall are invariably either playing catch-up or just going along with whatever insane thing the main characters are doing today. This starts very early in the fic, with McGonagall delivering Lyra's letter, only to find that Lyra already knows who McGonagall is and what the letter's about.
The major characters here are:
>Harry, who has rapid healing and turns into a girl when he gets hurt
>Hermione, who starts inventing new spells in her first month at Hogwarts, based on secret techniques taught to her by Pinkie Pie
>Draco, who's a generic good guy in this fic (the sorting hat wanted to put him in Gryffindor) but has yet to do anything interesting
>Bon Bon, who for whatever reason is in charge of the entire student instructor program
Aside from all the weirdness (which I find plenty entertaining), one thing I appreciate about this fic is that the author properly skips over the less interesting parts. There's a scene of Hailey at the robe shop, for example, but the rest of the Diagon Alley shopping sequence is omitted. This keeps the pacing up at lets the story get to the crazy parts quicker.
On the other hand, I'm a bit disappointed that the story so far has failed to expand on the fact that Muggles can see the Leaky Cauldron on TV even though it's invisible to them in person.
I wouldn't recommend this fic in general, but if you're looking for something weird, or you like seeing Harry, Hermione, and various ponies being OP, this might be up your alley.
Update as of chapter 20. Harry has decided he likes being a girl and has been hitting himself in the face with a textbook almost every day. Another character saw himself as a girl in the Mirror of Erised and is working on a spell that will let him transform at will. So far this reads mostly like normal TFTG to me, where the characters just kind of roll with it and don't get too uptight about muh dysphoria or muh pronouns, but there are a couple points where a character explicitly asks if so-and-so is transgender (and then has to explain what "transgenderism" is). I can live with this, but I know some anons can't.
To give you an idea of the pacing, chapter 20 is the last chapter of the summer break after everyone's first year.
It's bad form of me to review an incomplete (but probably dead) fic when I'm only on chapter 43 of 79. However, this is the first time that I've been able to fully organise my thoughts on it, so it's as good a time as any. For reference, this is a re-write of On the Implications of Parallel Worlds, which was itself a rewrite of The Gate. It takes clear inspiration from another of the author's fics, The Boy Who Disappeared, so we like to call it 'Hailey Potter 4.0'. Unfortunately, it's hard to talk about this fic without mentioning the others. By the way, it's a Rule 63 Harry Potter crossover.
The first thing that you'll notice is the extremely fast pacing at the start of the fic. For example, both the Diagon Alley trip and Hermione's introduction are in the same chapter and total 1,800 words. An early chapter also has a time skip of over a week, so we don't even get to see Harry arrive at Hogwarts. Another example is chapter 14, which has the first Quidditch match. By the end of that 3,000 word chapter, they've figured out that Snape is the good guy. Given that this is the second rewrite, I forgive this, but I feel like it had to be mentioned. I get the impression that the author was tired of writing the first year of Harry Potter over and over again.
Now to speak more generally. The one major positive thing that I can say about the fic is that, like I said about Silversong (trans!Draco) in an earlier version of this fic, the main ideas fundamentally makes sense to me. Canon forgets about this from the moment that Harry gets on the train, but need I remind you that Harry is an abused child? Harry should want to escape who he is. Not only is Hailey Potter (trans!Harry) a good idea, Harry's preference for being Hailey also makes sense. You don't even need to talk about how skirts feel nicer to wear (the fic does this a few times); Just focus on "I can escape my shit life". Particularly in the first book, this and Draco's interest in the Gryffindor life give us plenty of character work. Another good idea of the fic comes from removing many of the pony's powers while they're in the HP world. This fixes many of the major problems from The Gate and On the Implications of Parallel Worlds. It's a shame that most of the powers have gone to the human cast - Draco can turn invisible, Hailey can cast 4th year spells, and Hermionie has Pinkie powers and seeming super knowledge - but it's a big step forward for the author. Note that I didn't say that I'm not saying that the fic is good: I'm saying that it's improved on the earlier versions in some ways.
1/2
I think the biggest problem with the fic is its lack of conflict. In The Gate, we had an arc (and therefore a conflict) every three or so chapters and On the Implications of Parallel Worlds had extremely long arcs that dived deep in to one particular conflict. The Accidental Invasion, on the other hand, struggles to raise its own conflicts for a variety of reasons. I think the key issue is that, unlike the previous two fics, Hailey is both the viewpoint character and far too powerful. Hailey, being the protagonist of both Harry Potter and this fic, is central to the conflict of most plots. When you make her too powerful, lots of canon's plots can't happen. The author's notes largely admit to this, usually when talking about Prisoner of Azkaban. Those plots that do happen are resolved so quickly or prematurely that you don't even get the joy of reading a stomp fic. Canon's minor conflicts are resolved by Hailey not sharing Harry's disadvantages (e.g. Sirius is met early {and offscreen? I couldn't find it} and it's one of those fics where Harry's tainted soul is the reason for the Dudsleys hating him) and its major conflicts are resolved by her special powers. It's rather easy to call Hailey a Sue; Life goes too well for her and the bad things that do happen don't impact her. As for the non-canon plots of the earlier versions of this fic, the major ones seemingly never happen. You'd think that Draco's arc would cause big conflicts like it did in The Gate, but it just doesn't happen. Similarly, I can't recall any issues arising from thousands of foreigners entering Hogwarts. All in all, it makes much of the fic easily forgettable and gives the impression of extremely fast pacing.
My conclusion on the fic so far is that it's a pretty unremarkable Sue fic. Of the fics in its lineage, The Boy Who Disappeared and The Gate were far more enjoyable because you could enjoy the sheer insanity. I know that I said some very bad things about On the Implications of Parallel Worlds, but at least I'll remember its arcs. For this fic, the lack of conflict and quick pacing means that I may well not remember anything at all.
2/2
In my last comment on this fic, I said that I was only on chapter 43 of 79. That turned out to be a very good place to pause and review. Somewhere early in the block between chapters 45 and 60, the author's notes start talking about how the writing is shit and they're re-working their style. Chapter 50's author's note repeats this complaint, as do some later ones, and chapter 54 is utter shit. Then, shortly after chapter 55, the author actually fucking delivers. The massive difference in writing quality blew me away and the fic almost became recommendable.
It's not long before the improvements become hit and miss. In truth, I'm not sure what changed. However, there's one clear improvement that happen to agree with what I said in my earlier review: Somewhere around chapter 70, we leave Hailey's POV. This immensely improves the fic. I'll still not say it's good, but the improvement is big enough that I'm sad to see the fic go. Chapter 78 reveals that Voldemort is trans and cursed his dick off. This was so well done that I felt that reading the entire fic became worth it. The author thinks otherwise, as indicated by their author's notes and FimFic comments. In the their eyes, the fic is either dead or in need of retcons or in-place re-writes. As for my thoughts on the fic, it's clearly showing potential and I'd gladly read more, but the (hit and miss) gold that comes after chapter 55 is hardly worth the journey there. I'm looking forward to Hailey Potter 5.0. If we can get a good mix of The Gate's insanity and the author's improved writing style, we'd have genuinely good fics. By the way, chapter 80 of The Accidental Invasion is only on Patreon.
Six additional chapters were released after my review. They are clearly the final death of the fic. Some it is clearly intended to dump what the author had already written and much of chapter 82 is spent laughing at the absurdities of the fic itself.
These new chapters do a good job of proving what I already believed about the fic. As I've often said about fics that make Harry (or in this case, Hailey) overpowered, once you're a few years in and every major faction has swore loyalty to you, you can resolve most of your plots with little more than politics. Aside from explaining new power-ups, most of which I'm sure are just dumping whatever the author got from their Discord friends, I think that legitimately every scene that includes Hailey is her defeating her problems with just politics. It's said that you should write about the most interesting part of a character's life. Hailey's scenes are in total violation of this. Near godhood is boring.
In contrast, Fleur's scenes are far better. Exploring her new powers and how they have changed her life is dramatically more interesting than anything that Hailey has to offer (what else would you expect from a TFTG author?). Changing the viewpoint character was one of the author's best decisions. I'd love to read more of the author's work if they kept it like this.