Hermione.

 

• Occlumency (and sometimes Legilimency) being ubiquitous enough that many purebloods learn it; if it's a kid politics fic where 11 year old Slytherins talk like Nietzsche and Machiavelli you can assume they've been tutored in the mind arts from the age of 8. In reality it's an obscure form of magic that to date only a handful of canon characters know it.
  
• The Tempus Spell.
• James's parents being Dorea & Charlus (thus making Harry directly related to the Black family) and giving precedence for some Hadrian Remus Potter Black shenanigans.
• Magical Oaths (outside the Unbreakable Vow).
• People have already mentioned the fanon imagining of ancient runes/arithmancy and the fanon concept of wards but it also irks me when authors use meaningless jargon such as "runic arrays" and "ward schemes" and "runic inscriptions" and "boundary lines" and shit to inflate the intelligence, worldbuilding, and credibility of their fics. Chances are they don't even go into what any of those terms mean in the fic.

 

Is A Black Comedy the godfather of this trope? I recall it being somewhat rare before that story all those years ago, but nearly ubiquitous now.

 

I like the idea, but I hate how lazy people are with it. A Black Comedy is about as permissibly "soft" as an author can go, and most authors don't have the skill needed to give the concept sufficient depth.

I've got a story I've been working on for a while (Five or six chapters done, but the first chapter is still mostly unfinished) and I ended up rewriting a chunk of it because I couldn't write my own idea of wards (which I won't pretend are canon) to a degree of detail that made sense.

The big part is that stories make the concept sound really easy, so easy that you wonder why anyone bothers with them because your Indy!Harry pulls the special wards down with ease. I had some ideas on how to make the topic sound really difficult, but it had to be logically consistent and actually make sense in story, at which point is basically consumed said story.

I'm thinking of running with it in another story though, just one dedicated to the concept. The issue though is how do you write it without boring the reader?

 

For me its the flanderization of characters. If I have to read one more spiel about how fucking dumb Ron Weasley is. Or how Tonks cant walk into a room without tripping and breaking 15 objects im gonna lose it.

 

Oh man, this one. Fandom remembers that scene from OOTP where James and his pals hang Snape in the air by his underpants, but forget that Sirius Black was considered Voldemort's right hand (a position which he had apparently occupied in his early 20s, when Voldemort had more senior wizards and witches in his service), including by Dumbledore, who agreed to host a horde of dementors at Hogwarts on the off chance that they would stop Sirius getting to Harry.

 

The idea that anyone who wishes to delve deeper into the 'secrets of magic' or wants to deepen their understanding and knowledge of magic has to study the dark arts.

More generally, the idea that anything of value and/or power has to be related to dark magic or obscure, dark, illegal rituals.

Edit: This reminds me; and it's not solely Harry Potter that does this. The idea that older magic = better magic. A spell or practice being 2000 years old shouldn't make it any better; it should be the opposite.

 

100% Agree. This is one of the biggest turn-offs for me as well, usually in stories that have managed to keep me after the first few chapters (usually I drop most fics like hot coal).

But...While I do generally agree that older magic does not equal better magic, in Harry Potter we do see evidence for that. Flamel made the philosophers' stone how many years ago? From Rowena's diadem and the Room of Requirement to the Deathly Hallows, we see feats of magic that, while thousands of years old, are truly without equal.

Which brings me to another thing I dislike in fics: progress. It's a very mugglish concept that wizards should follow the form of "progress" muggle technology has taken. Some exceptional wizards (like Dumbledore) do make some new discoveries that may reach (be useful to) a wider audience, but generally I expect that magic has reached a kind of plateau in most cases. Yes, ok, we see faster brooms (reminiscent of faster/safer cars) made because there's a sport that benefits from them.

I generally think that most technology-like-progress we see is due to JKR trying to make a relatable world (like the Weasley's being poor) or due to her way of thinking/imagination.

It's honestly much more of a turn-off for me to read a fic that bombards me with stupid "improvements", than seeing old & powerful magic, and I urge anyone writing an AU to really think about what form progress in the wizarding world would take.

 

I also think that "older magic being better" is not necessarily something wrong - the ancient Greeks had a similar "backwards" view of history, and there were periods in human history where knowledge and skills were lost, and people could only look at past monuments and marvel at them. There are plenty of unique old artefacts in the books that seemingly have no modern equivalent. That said, there is constant progress in certain fields magic, Wolfsbane being an important recent addition.

Anyway: Snape being Draco's Godfather. The idea is so ridiculous. Lucius Malfoy won't make a poor, anti-social half-blood into his son's godfather just because they're acquaintances, and if he did, it would certainly be mentioned in the books.

 

There is such a thing as magical progress. The Wolfsbane Potion, for example, was invented after Lupin was in Hogwarts. The Nimbus 2000 was an amazing broom that blew the others out of the water... until the 2001 came out the next year... and the Firebolt two years later. Luna's mother died when she was experimenting with spells, implying that spell creation/discovery was a thing. Snape invented a handful of spells during his time at school, as well.

I'd say that there is magical progress, but it's a lot less pronounced than we see in Muggle societies. We are constantly making our technology just a little bit better, more efficient, etc. But the saying goes, "necessity is the mother of invention," and with most learned witches and wizards being relatively self-sufficient compared to Muggles (mostly only needing to purchase food and luxury goods, as far as I can tell), there just isn't much a need to create a better lumos spell.

That being said, the occasional bit of fanon where some character completely revolutionizes society or a field of magic with this one simple trick, or where as has been stated there is some forgotten dark magic or ritual to obtain ultimate power are definitely regrettable. I can see some things being kept secret or falling out of favor and therefore forgotten, but I wouldn't imagine that they are often all that great. Things that are useful tend to stick around; I'd think things that are forgotten are done so because they were unnecessarily difficult to use in comparison to something else.

 

I’d call James Bond-style womanizing Sirius a guilty pleasure of mine. Which now kind of makes me wish Sean Connery could have played him, come to think of it.

 

As I said recently in another thread, the Wizengamot as the legislative branch of Wizarding Britain. If it had anywhere close to the importance fanon ascribes to it, we'd have seen and heard a whole lot more out of the Wizengamot than we got in GOF and OOTP.

 

Cursed Child.

 

Honestly anything that detracts from the very unique type of magic in Harry Potter. There's something about it that is inscrutable, charming, weird, effortless that is ruined by a lot of fanon.

Magical Cores for one i detest. Same goes for any unit of magic.
Any kind of "rational" take on magic is an instant turn off.

"Can a protego stop a bullet?" Who Gives a shit? If you have a gun firing at a wizard in a harry potter fanfic you've taken a massive wrong turn somewhere.

 

That Harry must have PTSD and be super angsty and need a lot of comforting because he was abused by the Dursleys. Especially if their treatment is exaggerated.

Can't read anything with this.

 

One route to "Old Magic = Good Magic" could be explained through, is using Survivorship bias.

Think of 80s music. Think how amazing some of the greats are - Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Queen... All still played today. Except, all the ones that were released that AREN'T played today. They were shit, or just not as good, and they've been forgotten.

Or kitchen appliances - some people say that the old ones were built to last. And the ones that are still in use definitely would have been. But the cheap ones weren't, they've just been discarded, so people forget about them.

The magic of the "Old Times" might have been perfectly acceptable, if, in general, not as good as current magic. They just so happened to have an absolute banger of a curse that's super simple to use. It's still about the best way to break somebody's arms. And 200 years later, someone else made a pretty nifty potion, and it's still the cheapest way of regrowing broken arms.... But the rest of that potioneers discoveries are all pretty useless, and we've got better, now that the world is smaller.

 

You have to temper it. Ancient Magicks™ need to walk a fine, fine line. 99% of all ancient hexes/curses/charms would probably be able to be dispelled by the general counter-spell finite incantatem. That remaining 1%, however, are probably ball busters. But finding that diamond in the rough should be a complete bitch.

The Dark Lord might have found some. Albus might know them as well.

BUT, Voldemort developing his own novel curses is, to me, always more interesting. What better way to ensure ignorance in his foes?

But, at the same time, mastery of known magic beyond his foes is just as interesting. IMO, it's more fun that the Dark Lord can cast known curses and such so perfectly that the known counter-curse doesn't matter much.

 

So I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Abandonment trope that is pervasive in WBWL fics. That it's somehow widely accepted that parents would willingly abandon one child because they weren't the prophecy child or that someone says that a baby less than one is a squib so it's relatively accepted is just atrocious.

The Dursley's being abusive to the point that Harry is seriously traumatised instead of the caricature it is.

 

I dont have a problem with certain exceptional wizards in the past accomplishing certain things that are impressive no matter the Era. As in people in the Dumbledore/Grindelwald/Voldemort bracket of power and genius.

But I dislike it, if the knowledge of magic itself is considered more powerful/advanced in the past.

As in I see the general level of magical education/knowledge as a constantly improving over time, with new magical theories, spells, enchanted items and potion constantly being advanced to higher levels and more being discovered/invented.

Take brooms for example, I'd be okay if there was a broom invented by a prodigous broom designer in the 15th century, that is on a level much higher than any commerically avaiable one before and after it.

But the general knowledge of how to craft brooms, has been constantly advanced since then and has progressively getting better. And perhaps if that old broom maker had lived in more recent time he would have created an even better one.

Like I dont think it is a coincidence that the three most powerful wizards in history all lived in the 20th century. It's a simple case of three people of the highest levels having access to the most advanced magical knoweldge.