Really like Highwaymen so far. My reactions:

1) I really hope it gets finished
2) If it stays this well written all the way through, someday the writer should file the serial numbers off and try to submit as general fantasy.

While I was on the tv merch site I took a look at the calendar for next year and there's maybe a couple new photos. Some have been used in previous calendars, and I haven't been doing this long!

So I ordered the fan club calendar, which had no preview pics. Wish me luck.

Isn't Highwaymen evocative, Typo? It's by one of the authors of Pie Without Plot, which is very well written. I have no idea how much of the magic is canonical HP (I only recognise the floo pretty much), but it feels like grown-up angst in the same world.

I kind sped read HP, and never reread, so I can't answer as to authenticity of magic. I think this crossover reflects the spirit of both HP and SPN. The darkness in Highwayman is faithful to the darkness that always lurked behind a layer of gingerbread in HP. Often a very thin layer of gingerbread. In the later books almost non-existent. The characters are very faithful in spirit to the angst of SPN. Not only a good story, but so far well told - high quality prose, sometimes poetic, but never letting literary cleverness get in the way of the story.

Even though things got dire in HP, it was still always the kids who'd had butter beers and freeing house elves was the most serious thing in their life for a time. The SPN verse to me had 4 years of that, and frankly, the Dursleys never really hit me where it counted--that was stock "the fake parents were so horrible to me, but I have a great destiny" fantasy fodder, and she never made it human.

But, enh, that's pretty unimportant to the story at hand. It works as an SPN AU very well, and at first blush as an HP fusion, and I'm interested to see chapter 4 in a way I'm not usually. Plot developments!

On the polar opposite, I'm sticking it out for a while with a fic that makes no sense. Her timelines are fuzzy, she confuses her "never before" with her "as usual" and her idea of poetic seems to be this:

Dean had grown into a strikingly radiant human. He looked as any adult human would, just ten times more exotic. With lightly tanned skin that never ended and feral like green eyes that put even the greenest leaf on the most healthy tree in his forest to shame. Dean had sandy dirty blind hair that Castiel would cut with a sharp jagged hand rock to keep it short as he did with his own.

It's a compelling train wreck of "you know that makes no sense...clearly you don't, huh..." proportions, and I can't look away.

I might be unkind enough to send the author a suggestion that she write in her native language and find someone fluent in both that and English to translate for her. Assuming that she's not already doing so and using Babelfish as the aforementioned translator.

If she thinks people are cutting their hair with a rock and that there's a food you can give a two year old that slows their development enough to make them appear like a six month old at age three--language fluency is not their biggest problem.

"We've been together here for just over a year exactly. This will be our first winter..." Is this set in King's Landing????

No, English isn't her enemy here.

eta: dropped my favourite tumblr because she stressed that her tumblr is a John hateblog, and that he's the worst character period on the show. I just...I can't. You don't have to love him, but WORST??? Will you look at the people on the show?

And it does bother me when people say Mary has zero culpability for making a demon deal. She was a hunter, and not an idiot. She thought she could handle the price? No, she made a mistake. But she made a deal. You can't take away the blame without taking away agency.

I agree that in the early HP the gingerbread was pretty thick. But Voldemort was always a pretty horffic threat, and more to the point the magical society was not painted as all that wonderful - authoritarian turning easily to totalitarianism in the face of threats. Muggles non-citizens, and even within magical community pretty rigid class system. I'll agree that in early, maybe even through mid books strong overlay of gingerbread. But by end gingerbread was almost gone. The "happy ending" was happy for our heroes & sheroes, and better for everybody than Voldemort winning, but the system that Voldemort was simply taking to extremes was still in place. So I'd say that HP had a lot of dark underpinnings. It just was not told in a dark manner because it was meant for children. As you say little to do with story - other than I think the SPN like darkness of the world building was always in HP, just buried, and only implicitly there - not part of the Rowling style.

I don't know if Rowling every wants to write an adult novel set in the HP universe but I suspect if she did it would be very dark and maybe even somewhat angsty.

I felt the show has implied that Dean is scared of dogs since he got killed by one, right? That's not me making up subtle headcanon? I'm surprised (er, not) by how many stories install dogs and cats in the home without acknowledging either fear or allergies. But then I saw a comment that Dean shouldn't have gone up to the dog in Mystery Spot because he was afraid of them. Er, he did because he wasn't? Yet?

But I just skimmed over a really long "Sam doesn't get nice things" that finished with "Sam is the one worried about Dean's drinking." I'm not sure I'd call out a guy unconcerned with 50 a week for being all AlAnon or anything.

They really made fun of it in Yellow Fever," but there was that moment in "My Heart Will Go On," where he was very wary of someone's pet German Shepherd, so I'm taking it as an intentional callback.

But in My Heart Will Go On, weren't they avoiding all possible hazards because of Fate or something? I remember them having to cross the courtyard where the guys were juggling knives and fire or whatever.

I never really got the sense that Dean is afraid of dogs. Certainly not before Mystery Spot. And even after, I always had the impression he was more irritated by them (and by Sam's obvious adoration of them) than afraid of them at all.