Review Detail of 123r97 in A Bend in Time

I should start with saying that this story is very difficult to review. For the first 450ish chapters, it's 5-star worthy and amazing, easily being one of the best HP ff I've ever read. Which makes it all the more disappointing that by chapter 600 it's just degraded to the point of well-written garbage. It's a shame to see such a great author become worse at writing over time rather than better. It's getting by on 3.8 stars only because it's a dead corpse riding on the back of a fantastic foundation. I'll try to avoid spoilers and just give general comments and gripes with character designs rather than mentioning anything specific. For the first 450 chapters of the series It's probably one of the best harry potter FF I've ever read, the characters are well-researched, the backgrounds make sense, the interactions feel real with individual personalities and actions along with dashes of mystery and some drama. If that's all that was currently out I'd have given the story 5 stars in basically everything. Around chapter 450 though the author seemed to have hit a rut.. they just copied the original main plot (the subplots still fine though for a bit) making characters inconsistent or utterly betraying all their characteristics until that point in order to force certain extremely stupid events to occur just to make an already lazy plot work. Which is fine, just mediocre, I'd be mildly annoyed but still like the series if that was all. But then it just keeps getting worse and worse... by chapter 600 there are poorly thrown-together plot threads that feel rushed and serve little purpose besides overcomplicating things and shock value. The characters themselves become flat, losing all the personality that made them unique in the beginning, Heck, I'm pretty sure if the characters in the story just talked with each other instead of refusing to tell each other anything like a group of grade schoolers gossiping about a secret the story would have been finished by now. The same character has made the same epiphany 3 times within 100 chapters and had the same freaked-out reaction each time, acting as if they figured it all out for the first time all over again. I'm half expecting them to have the same revelation again at some point. The actual plot also just stops making any amount of sense, new powers and mcguffins keep popping up for no real reason, the mc will have a problem and spontaneously decide to start reading a random book on a shelf and suddenly find the answer to their problem (but refuse to tell or ask anyone for help despite having access to 3 world-class wizards 2 of which she trusts with her life). The author also seems to have a really weird male superiority complex. Now, this is odd because the mc is female and the author at least claims to be female. I don't mean male political power or anything about males thinking they are higher than females. Those can get a pass because of purebloods and such, it makes sense for the setting. What doesn't make sense is seemingly magic itself is so much stronger for males than females that any female might as well just snap their wand if they want to compete in their version of HP. Despite the mc getting McGuffin after McGuffin and power up after power up even at the expense of her own health and has gone on the record to be told she is containing so much power it's starting to affect her because of the cost of such strength for her body. She is then repeatedly told that she is weaker, dumber and just worse than another character in nearly every way and is then trounced by them when they've done literally nothing besides be a guy going to school with 0 McGuffins, powerups or sacrifices. Heck, some of her power-ups are even turned into weaknesses and she's told 'all power comes at a price but he gets it for free because he's a male'. It's so bizarre to see just how pathetic they make the mc just to make the other character seem better despite them doing basically nothing for 600 chapters. The mc went from this fantastic feisty little ball of paranoid witch into... well a bit of a mess that's still magically weaker than a completely normal 7th year male for some reason despite getting so many McGuffins and power-ups which means her normal strength must have been truly pathetic. There's a female that's at one point almost r*ped and she just acts like its another day after, they don't report it or anything she even acts like it wasn't that big of a deal being more annoyed that her friends were trying to look out for her than the boys attempting it. She's not even shell-shocked or anything she just acts like an NPC with no personality reading off scripted lines even making jokes and calling someone that helped her rude for not offering to walk them back yet making no comment about the boys. I just don't understand why the author turned such a fantastic story into this.