Six Pomegranate Seeds: an understated masterpiece
I read the complete Harry Potter fanfic Six Pomegranate Seeds and there's so much I have to say.
In this fic, something goes badly wrong in the battle of hogwarts, unraveling reality, and Hermione is sent backwards in time to fix it. Except she can't go back as herself, so she must reincarnate in the body of a first year pure blood. Daughter of a death eater, of course.
It's a very good fic. While reading the the majority of it, I was thoroughly enjoying it, but I had a reservation. This is one of those fics where the protag with metaknowledge is so scared of changing the timeline that they let all of canon's wrongs proceed more or less on rails. It makes sense, dont get me wrong — the entire conceit hinges on the final battle getting set up the exact same way, and HP's plot is enough of a rube goldberg that there's a tragic cards you don't want to pull from the house.
Which means that ultimately, what a lot of this fic amounts to is Hermione laying endless groundwork and preparation and passing the time, the plot (which, don't get it wrong, there is plot) happens in counterpoint to canon rather than superceding it.
Ultimately though, the result is so profoundly good that it's hard to hold this against it.
(One of the special things about this fic, I realized as I got to the end, is that it's a very rare example of a double identity story that doesn't milk anxiety and tension from threat of discovery and reveal — a character goes undercover, essentially, and just stays there.)
Sidenote, because it's rare enough to bear comment: 6PS is omniscient pov and headhops all the time in dialogue. Shockingly smooth despite this.
One of the things I find so striking about this story is the mastery of pacing. In terms of raw time passage, I've never seen a fic this swift (aside from oneshots in the "collage of moments" style, which definitely have it beat.)
The early years will come and go in just a few chapters each. A month can pass in a sentence. But it runs deeper than that. This fic is *to the point*, efficient in a way I'm not sure I've actually encountered before. No time is wasted detailing how characters move from scene to scene, no padding to soften transitions, it just jumps to the next thing that matters.
There's a particular style to this that I can only parse as like... an analogue of show don't tell applied on such a high level I've only ever seen in one other story. It's kind of eye-opening. Most of the time, you simply show-don't-tell details like what a character is feeling. The common skill is leaving small things implied. In this fic, it feels like entire scenes are left submerged in implication
(The one other fic I've seen do this is Legacy, the threequel to Cenotaph)
The elliptical style of this story leaves it weirdly... chaste. There aren't long conversations (in fact, smalltalk is never detailed — this story is exceptionally willing to describe dialogue without quoting). More than that, so many scenes end on punchy utterances with denouement or reaction. (In general, there's this nice, almost lurching cadence to the way it ends scenes and chapters — rarely cliffhangers of the usual sort.)
Anyway, it has exactly Legacy's sense of restraint, of not indulging. But if anything, it holds back *more*. Legacy often lavished description. 6PS doesn't even do that.
Which isn't to say the prose in this story isn't fucking fantastic. Difficult to overstate how smoothly it flows, how much of a treat reading this fic is.
Like, I think I've noted down dozens of lines from this fic I want to remix/steal, and the dialogue is so damn quotable, especially near the end.
Author has a devil of a vocabulary, though — I myself get compliments for my lexicon and this fic teems with obscurities I've never heard of. It's only matched by how well they slot in, even with the unfamiliarity.
Something that's also quite interesting — though I suppose I can kill the mystery and attribute it to the pacing I've earlier complimented — is that this is a fic that'd undeniably well written — downright literary.
And yet, I binged it. Too many stories I start reading, notice they're well-written, and put them down for good. It's fooled me into thinking good writing is like eating your vegetables. Sometimes it is. But truly great writing is irresistible.
In the end, I dont think it fully sticks the landing. The ending is as wonderfully written as the rest of it, don't get me wrong, and I'm not disappointed. But I am... whelmed.
There's mysteries in this fic — what happened to unravel Hogwarts in the final battle? What's the backstory of the forgotten pureblood witch Hermione reincarnates into?
And we get a lot of gestures in the direction of resolution. Indeed, by the end we basically understand the shape of the answers.
But like, this is that same plotwise show-don't-tell thing biting — the payoff is left half-obscured in implication, and that'll never hit as hard as letting the reader wallow in final satisfaction.
There's a lot of implicated payoff not written in this story — I wanted to read characters reacting to how cool and dark and grand Rosier is, I wanted to relish sympathetically in their reactions to every twist of the plot.
Is any of that necessary? No, so I understand why the story doesn't give that to us.
But yeah. It's a fruit, not a candy.
(I guess in the end... pomegranates don't taste very sweet, do they?)
Oh yeah, almost forgot the conclusion to my essay which makes it quite like the story, in that regard.
Despite how much I enjoyed my time with it...
My final verdict is that on technical merits, it's definitely one of the best stories I've read, but the highs just aren't high enough for it to earn a spot on my favorites. It's very, very close though.
Sometimes being perfect isn't enough to be great.