Volume Two is finished.
The author didn't think it turned out all that well. I'd wanted to write a different kind of Lockhart, since I was getting tired of seeing him portrayed as a useless clown.
But the results clearly weren't great. I failed to plant a lot of the foreshadowing I'd intended, so the story felt especially messy and ended up fizzling out. I even lost some subscribers.
In the end, I became the clown myself. Sob, sob.
Let me explain my thought process.
I've always felt that Lockhart, while not a top-tier Warlock, couldn't have been especially weak either. He should at least have been around average.
After all, he stole so many stories, which meant he must have successfully ambushed quite a few Warlocks.
Even if all those people were specialists who could only fight certain Dark creatures, those creatures were still dangerous.
So they should at least have had basic vigilance, especially since, going by the few details in the original, some of them lived far from Wizarding society and spent long periods living alone.
Warlocks like that definitely wouldn't lack vigilance.
So was Lockhart, who had never failed after all those attempts, really weak? Maybe he wasn't especially strong, but he definitely wasn't especially weak, either.
And his memory magic definitely wasn't bad. The original only said he used Obliviate, but don't forget that one of the Warlocks had saved an entire village.
That meant more than one person had witnessed what happened, so it would have been easy for others to verify his story.
Lockhart received the Order of Merlin and was also a member of the Order of Anti-Dark Magic, so both organizations would surely have done a basic investigation.
Lockhart claimed he'd saved that village. Surely the villagers would have remembered him,