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1. Y'all may remember the issues I'd had with my guildleader and the various problems: him preferring to tease my boyfriend rather than listen to what I had to say, telling me that he had "half a dozen" high-end characters of my exact class, but obviously not having a clue what the class was capable of.
Well, either he flipped his lid, went off his meds, or something; he kicked our two RL friends from the guild for "causing drama" (while they were offline moving, no less) and had a hissy fit about it. Meanwhile, he hadn't been around at all himself and had kicked more than one person for asking him to come play with the guild and "insinuating he wasn't doing his job."
So, something like 80% of the guild left, and re-formed as a new guild under a different guildleader. The new guildleader has done a decent job of recruiting, setting up guild message boards, and having a TeamSpeak server set up; all in all, I'd say the new guildleader is about four times better than the last one, AND he takes suggestions.
The funny part? The new guildleader is 14 years old.
I neglected to save the title/link to this story, and due to the hot moderately kinky gay sex therein, am not about to search for it from work, but I read a really awesome fanfic a few days ago and have been thinking about it a bit. Oh, there are spoilers for book 6 in the story, although it doesn't entirely follow the events of the canon.
ETA: The story is Learning Life Over on fanfiction.net, by Meander Later; it's rated M as in Mature.
In the fic, Harry is in his mid-20's working as an Auror. His entire life consists of working, barely eating, and barely sleeping; he looks terrible and is so near burnout that he's emotionally numb. The reason for this is explained early on: he doesn't have any family left. Voldemort tried to make him give up by destroying the Burrow in front of him, with all the Weasleys, Hermione, and Remus inside. He has no one in his life who cares about him at all, so he's busily working himself to death.
Draco Malfoy still lives in his ancestral home along with his mother, who keeps encouraging him to marry and have children for the family line. However, Draco has a raging crush on Harry, and has him watched for several months to try to discover why he's treating himself the way he does; finally, in desperation, Draco kidnaps Harry. He covers his tracks by using a golem to fake "injured and comatose Harry" and whisks Harry away to his house, where he uses logic and reasoning to show Harry that he's not doing anyone any good by overworking himself-- that he makes mistakes, works more slowly as time goes on, and that if he keeps pushing his limits he's likely to lose control of his emotions and magic and hurt innocent people by accident.
I don't much like reading fanfic where one of the characters has a serious mental or physical illness. It's not that I dislike those sorts of plots; when I was a kid, I read books by Lurlene McDaniel, who writes sappy stories about teenaged girls who have cancer and such. McDaniel does a decent job of balancing out the "I'm afraid to die" with "I'm afraid I'll be bald and no one will kiss me." She's also very matter-of-fact about the treatments involved. I wouldn't have a problem with giving her books to a teenager, even if they had a friend who had cancer.
On the other hand, most fanfic writers don't seem to do any actual reading on the diseases they inflict on their characters, other than basing them on "this one guy I read about in my friend's LJ" or something. Usually, they'll cure the afflicted character at the last minute by using magic-- but it's unbelievable from the start, because all the characters treat whatever the disease is as a death sentence, even if in real life it's not invariably fatal. (Say, cancer. People live through it in real life, after all.) It's all maximal angst and minimal knowledge, and my disbelief only suspends so far.
This story, however, is fairly decent; Draco doesn't "magically cure" Harry, he gets him to agree to see a therapist, who works with Harry to help him choose reasonable goals for his emotional health. Harry isn't stupid about it; when he realizes that he's not doing well, he actually helps in the process of making himself better. The catch, of course, is that he feels needed as an Auror, and that he thinks he ought to return to his job.
Draco tells Harry repeatedly that his job is bad for him, that if he goes back to it he'll fall back into the same patterns, and that no one there is looking out for him-- Harry's response is that he needs to do the work because it needs to be done by someone. Draco points out that they have an entire department full of competent people who manage to do the rest of the work when Harry's not there, and that they're happy to take advantage of his "saving people obsession" to slack off and let him pull most of the weight.
This really resonated for me because of the way I feel about my job a lot-- it needs to be done, and I'm glad to do it, and sometimes I feel that I get asked to do things because
I also liked the other characters in the story; even though Harry is written as friendless and out of touch with everyone, he makes an effort to contact several of his old classmates and invite them to dinner, which they attend. Also, Draco takes Harry out to a few social events with his friends, and those are well-written also.
As a side note, I very much like that Pansy Parkinson's mother is described as being not at all pretty*, but the author avoids the usual cliché, where a character is described as "so nice/friendly/outgoing that [the other characters] hardly notice that they're not beautiful"-- except, of course, that the author just told you how funny-looking they were! Mrs. Parkinson is, instead, so busy being a patron of the arts that her looks are irrelevant to her.
I should write a personal rating scale for fanfic. I think I'll get to that next.
*I'd say "homely" here, except that I mean it in the AmE way, not the BE way (where it seems to mean more "girl next door"-- not beautiful, but not unattractive-- sort of "comfortably nice-looking").
