It's actually a common thing among zoomers, even on a platform with no censorship, or in real life.

 

Real life? Like what? They say "fuck", but drop their voice when they do? Ffs

 

Irl, they'll self censor by saying 'unalive' and 'corn'. I think they just don't swear as much in common speech. It's all the kid friendly content shaping the way they talk.

 

I hate dream sequences/visions. This one is based on experience not principle, but I've found them lazy and/or superfluous too often, to the point where it's poisoned the well. Want to move the plot along without having to work hard to justify the progression? Just throw a vision in there. Want to build atmosphere without it really being part of the mainline story? Dream sequence. It can be reliving better times, or a nightmare to crank up tension. You don't have to get two characters in a room together to precipitate an interaction, just throw whatever together whenever and it's only as real as is convenient. Unless the intention is to blur the lines of reality I don't have much use for the device. Especially in writing, it's a bit more forgivable in visual media where spectacle weighs more heavily.

On a even more petty note, y/n or xreader style stories. Man, I swear the reader inserts in my day had more dignity. It's never been my thing and is thus none of my business, but it's just so linguistically ugly. I'll take the adventures of Ebony Darkness Dementia Whatever over those of y/n ("your name" for the blissfully ignorant) any day.

To take a break from being a hater (while still being a malcontent), I fucking love ao3's tagging system. It's only as useful as people in fandom make it collaboratively, with a side of individual judgement on the author's part, but it's a great tool. It's actually shit at eliminating those reader insert stories I hate, but that's a matter of linguistic norms. I get stuck filtering out "every popular character" x reader, and a variety of similar tags, but if everyone could just abide by a unifying genre tag it would work great. I've seen it work great in a lot of cases, especially for specific AUs that become popular, and yes incredibly specific shipping stuff since there's such an appetite for that. Admittedly less helpful when you want something less popular, with fewer "buzzwords" so to speak. The whole thing relies on the experience and judgment of the community, and it's definitely not perfect, but I've never seen a better system used at scale.

 

Duelling being normalized as the evident conclusion to learning magic. It's gotten to the point where you can tell the authors are so high on the fandom they don't even question that of course there's a duelling club in Hogwarts and of course their Triwizard Tournament finale is a duelling fest and of course Harry is an excellent duellist because that's what it means to be a competent Wizard.
It just comes naturally now because we've been doing this for decades. But really, no, it doesn't make sense.
Aurors are a small, specialised percentage of the population. Duelling as a sport is just that, a sport. Most Witches and Wizard will never actually fight for their lives, that's the point of having a society.

Not that I dislike stories for being duelling and fight heavy. I just wish it weren't like that.

 

I recently finished a fic where Harry went from understandably pissed off that the average person was just rolling over and accepting everything while Voldemort was working on taking over the world, and he lamented the fact that so few people were combat ready, at all, but by the end of it he decided he would never seek the power to mandate that everyone would have to be trained and instructed to be an effective fighting force because that just could never be his responsibility; if the country or the world went to the dogs in the future, then there was no stopping it.

 

If everyone in the real world was trained and equipped with firearms, would there be no wars?
If the Magical citizens are not trained to be combat-ready that also means the potential for combat-ready insurgents is low. Someone with political ambitions like Voldemort would have to train his troops.
When insurgent train themselves, then citizens can also form militias and do the same.
Not to mention the actual government which is actually training professionals that should be much more competent than the aforementioned citizens, whichever sides they're on.
Basically, it makes no difference regarding who will succeed. It just increases the potential for violence to spark.

 

In essence, yes. The characters who stood by him were the people who saw that he was doing the right thing and they made themselves ready. That was why he backed off from his earlier position; the problem was really one of moral decay and not of a lack of educational standards. The situation could have been resolved cleanly, legally, and through all the proper channels if people had cared enough to try, and he and his friends were simply the first to care enough, and that was when it was already far too late to avoid bloodshed and unrest. I was not referencing this story to disagree with your original point. I just notice that it's a common thread in more violent stories to blame the sheeple for not being trained, not being the duelist that a witch or wizard must be, when really the problem is that they don't give a damn and never did, and this story came around to that conclusion.

 

It's not really comparable. Firearm is a purely offensive item regular citizen has no reason to carry.

Regular wizard, however, has the wand always on them, and had at least five years of defence in school. "Throw couple of defense jinxes, a shield, and then run" is much better than "panic", and is easier to achieve systematically without having the whole society being "combat ready", and giving a potential insurgent ready made soldiers.

Really, a basic defence for wizards is much closer to fire drills than muggle militia , IMO.

 

No. They'll swear like sailors, regardless of their surroundings. Hell, I live in a dumbshit redneck town and they'll say the N-word as loud as they please regardless of their surroundings.

But they do literally change porn to corn and suicide to unalive. Watching the brainrot would be fascinating if it weren't utterly horrifying.

 

Runes as spells/Runic arrays - "array" always makes me think of math, and if you're going to add math to magic there are way more interesting things to do than what always amounts to writing spells down. Often, this trope ends up dragging down wand-based magic with it by tying concepts like permanence and enchantment to runes instead of leaving those as part of advanced/well-cast spells.

Bait-and-switch on story concepts - when there's an interesting premise or unique element to a story but 90% of the writing is focused on other things.
Example: Katabasis by unreliable_narrator (ttps://archiveofourown.org/works/54344110/chapters/137642710) which seems like an interesting story where Harry comes to terms with immortality in the context of a fusion of the HP and Percy Jackson settings, but instead has focused on Eighth Year Hogwarts stuff.

Harry-never-got-his-prescription-updated - Harry goes to a healer and they find out that in addition to all the abuse everyone was ignoring, Harry's prescription hasn't been updated since forever and now he needs new glasses.
Harry was a Seeker in Quidditch, he did exactly two things: find the Golden Snitch and catch it. He wasn't finding the tiny golden ball by listening for it, or by waiting for the other person to find it then racing them, he was using his eyeballs to pinpoint that tiny golden ball. Given his success, his glasses were perfectly fine.

Muggle weapons, especially melee weapons - anything muggle weaponry can do, magic should also be able to do. And more. This is especially bad with swords - what's the purpose to being able to stab and slash from two feet away when you can do it from 50? Tied to this is the concept of "Without that wand, you're useless. Better learn how to use a sword/dagger/gun!" Except the same thought never seems to get applied to the weapon. Or "If someone gets in close, what are you going to do, huh?" and instead of working on spells for that situation, the obvious answer is to learn melee weaponry.

Wizarding nobility - just don't. Especially if you're dragging 11-year-olds into it.