The Last War

The Last War by Lady of Pale Emerald Fires picks up the Potter Verse after everyone has left school. Ron and Hermione are married, and so are Harry and Ginny. But all isn't well...

Also available in MSTed form: Part I and Part II. ^{[dead link]}

---

Tropes used in The Last War include:

• All There in the Manual: A lot of the author's ideas about the Ron/Hermione relationship seem to come from this editorial, though it's never credited.
• Author Appeal: Hermione laments not getting the chance to see Yo Yo Ma play Bach.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Harry and Hermione are sparkly and pretty! Everyone else, Ron and Ginny in particular, less so.
• Chickification: Hermione suffers a horrendous case of this in Chapter 1.
• Contemplate Our Navels: Most of the first chapter.
• Deus Angst Machina: To the point of Angst Dissonance and Narm.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: One of Hermione's complaints about the wizarding world is how it dresses women in robes to conceal their natural beauty, no matter that wizards' and witches' robes differ only in style rather than function. The parallel with the gender politics of the burqa is obvious.
• Domestic Abuse: Happens to Hermione.
  • Also, to Ginny. But Harry is a HERO when he beats her
• Double Standard: Of course it's fine for Harry and Hermione to cheat on their evil spouses. If either of them do it, though, Burn the Witch
• Expy: The yacht crew Harry hires? Wizarding version of The A-Team.
• Fantastic Racism: Ginny seems, for no good reason, to have picked up a lot of the local version of Fantastic Racism, slagging off Muggle-born wizards willy-nilly.
• Fat Bastard: The narration lingers on Ginny's weight gain rather too much.
• For the Evulz: We never get any idea as to why Ron behaves the way he does, unless we read the column that seems to have inspired the fic.
• Get Out!: Harry to Ginny.

Harry: "Get out. I don't love you anymore and I don't want you anymore. Get out of my house."

• Gratuitous French: "Chateau (sic) de Noir" anyone?
• Happily Ever After: What, to nobody's surprise, Harry and Hermione are implied to do.
• Hurt/Comfort Fic: Of a kind.
• Karmic Death: Ron. After breaking Hugo's bird's neck and tossing it into the fireplace and beating Hermione, he gets magically beated, has his neck broken, and is turned into a piece of wood and burned.
• Kick the Dog: Ron kills a little bird that his son Hugo was taking care of.
• Lampshade Hanging: "In a sense, he felt like he had been expecting her – as if he had cleared Ginny out of the way to make room in the house for Hermione." This is exactly what has happened.
• Let's Wait a While: Harry and Hermione decide to put off consummating their love until things settle down. Since it appears to be a Dead Fic, this doesn't happen and we're left with an M-rated romance with no sex.
• No Woman's Land
• Non-Indicative Name: The only war in this fic is the one between the author and canon.
• Out of Character: Most egregiously, Harry wishes he'd never learned about the wizarding world. So you'd rather have stayed with your abusive relatives and never met the great love of your life then?
• Purple Prose: The author lapses into this on occasion. At one point, Hermione's love for Harry is hilariously described as being "like golden water".
• Remembered I Could Fly: It takes Hermione over a decade, but she does.
• Series Continuity Error: At least twice. First we have the declaration that a wizard always gets custody of the children in a divorce, only to have Ginny threaten to sue for custody of the children when faced with her own divorce. We also have the designer dress Harry bought Ginny, which is later described as incredibly Stripperiffic, but even later still Harry thinks about the injustice of the wizarding world, including that women are forced to wear robes to hide their natural beauty (see Does This Remind You of Anything? above).
• Song Fic: See Ear Worm.
• Stay in the Kitchen: The first chapter takes this Up to Eleven, quite literally as it takes place entirely in Hermione's kitchen. See Chickification.
• Stealth Parody: Possibly.
• Stealth Pun: Whether this was intentional nobody knows, but: "live in Harmony", really?
• Straw Misogynist: The entire wizarding world appears to be populated by these. In example, Ginny is the ONLY one to blame when she and Harry are unhappy in their married life, and we're supposed to be happy when he physically assaults her!
  • What's odd is that the author contradicts her own canon, at one point, when she's talking about why Hermione doesn't simply leave Ron at the beginning of the Fic: Because in the Wizarding World, the men always get the children in the divorce because the courts are partial toward men. A mere chapter later, when Harry enters the scene, Ginny threatens to sue for custody of the children when Harry threatens a divorce.
• Taking the Kids: Ginny tries this, but Harry prevents her from doing so.
• Transplanted Character Fic: Begins as one, until Hermione realises that she's actually supposed to be a Badass witch and kills evil!Ron.
• Un-Equal Rites: Witches and wizards are said to be possessed of different kinds of magic (and of course the former is suppressed) but we're not actually shown any evidence of this.