Okay, wow; I didn't know people were out there writing completely inexcusable grammatical errors. I would take a wild guess about the scar business and say that some people probably thought it wasn't a real scar at any point, that it never bled and then stopped bleeding, but just started as a mark, like from a brand, and Harry just grew up assuming that it was a scar from some piece of metal hitting him in the forehead and then he was just used to calling it a scar. The film shows the cut as hair-thin, so it's sort of believable it would have healed in just a few hours.

 

I don't know what made me click through past entries here, but please. Please. More Haritard Potter stories. I was a decent kid growing up. I tried to be nice, and generally succeeded. Not always. I still would have made fun of someone named Haritard the 'tard.

Edit: Oh lol. It's Haridard. That's worse. Somehow

"How's it going dardo? Have you weighed down that numbus 2000 yet? You're not going to eat the snitch are you? I mean you gave it the 'ol Hogwarts' try in your first match? You wouldn't happen to know where the kitchens are? I have a shiny galleon Pottahh. Pottahh??"

 

Haridard is the fated name of that one version of Harry from the comp fic years ago where the Dursleys actually raised him with love and he turned out like one of them.
https://forums.darklordpotter.net/threads/entry-2.38376/#post-1088868

 

When every character is a quip machine, none of them are.

When every damned line of the text is trying to be quippy, no one reads.

 

Just started reading Harry Potter fanfics again this week, and I've already come across an old cliché I hate: Gringotts having ridiculous legal authority in seemingly all matters.

Emancipating a teenager? Enforcing the last will and testament of wizards? Elevating a child to a lordship and granting ownership of large areas of land? Apparently the goblins can do all that and more, and are quite happy to do so because one random human remembering the name of a single goblin marks him worthy of throwing their full military and economic might behind him.

Just once I want to see an author have a goblin shuffle and cough awkwardly and say something like, "Wizard, this is a bank. If you want to have a legal discussion, you should go to the Ministry."

 

"certain"

I started reading a recced fic on Royal Road. The first sentence:

Certain adds nothing here. Perhaps it indicates that this Sunday is going to be a Sunday of relevance (although, given that's where the story starts, it is of course going to be relevant). Perhaps it indicates that this is not, in fact, the start of the story - the author forgot the prologue that would link this in nicely.

Or perhaps it's just a common wordcount inflation habit that crept in through bad fanfiction.

It drives me up the fucking wall.



I complained about something similar on QQ. A LitRPG piece, and they're had the character say

which is such a weirdly constructed sentence? "Exactly" 104 points away?
Saying "104 away" is already as specific as you could be. Adding the exactly was a squirt of lemon juice to the eye.

 

Also, typing out larger numbers like that is silly. Aren't you only supposed to do that from one to ten?

 

I think it's flexible, so long as you're consistent. It doesn't bother me to see numbers written either way in the text. When it comes to speech, I'd expect to see it written as words, rather than using numerals, but that's a very minor bother at worst.

In a similar manner - seeing someone say "Dr Smith it's nice to see you" rather than "Doctor Smith" used to bother me, but then I saw someone write 'missus' in dialogue and that just doesn't look like a word to me at all. I do get vaguely annoyed when I see (especially in a story with Beauxbaton) someone saying "Mme. Maxime" rather than writing it out, but it's just something I have to live with.

 

Flexible, yeah. I don't know why any text would ever have to say something like 1,100,366 outside of some sci-fi shit, but, come on.

One million one hundred thousand three hundred and sixty six

or

1,100,366

Even with smaller numbers, why would you type seven hundred and twenty one over 721? Brevity might not necessarily be the soul of wit, but it can save some time.

 

Pretty sure I remember being taught it was for values greater than one hundred?

 

One thing that has started to both me is the use of the words 'hols' , when characters means holidays.

Is that a common contraction in the UK? We speak The King's here in Canada, but I've never run across that before.

 

"Pup."
"Cub."
"Pup."
"Cub."
"Pup."
"Cub."
"PUP!"
"CUB!"

"Hi, Harry, I'm Remus Lupin. I know I've barely spoken to you since I became your professor, and my affliction is undoubtedly a large part of why I never tried to contact you during your loveless, friendless, years of hell on Privet Drive, but now I'm going to constantly refer to you with an awkward, infantilizing, term of endearment that not only implies some kind of familial ownership of you, but also explicitly references my hated werewolf nature, which ruined my life and obliquely lead to my friends getting murdered and/or jailed, because they didn't trust me. I know it's weird, uncomfortable, and highly unlikely, but let's just roll with it, 'kay?"

"Well, 'Aunt' Marge just got finished using a metaphor that referred to me as a pup so that she could call my mother, who voluntarily died to keep me alive, a bitch, but, sure, call me 'pup' as much as you want; that won't seem fucked up AT ALL."

I've said it before, but I feel it bears repeating: Fuck that creepy 'pup' and 'cub' nonsense.
As far as I know, the only time in the Harry Potter series that any form of the word "pup" appears, is when Marge calls Harry's mom a bitch, and the only time when a form of "cub" appears, is when Voldemort is menacing the Malfoys and brings up the marriage of Remus and Tonks, asking Draco if he will babysit their "cubs."

So, there are the two great examples of those words in the Harry Potter series: Once as a way to demean any children a werewolf might have, and once as a way to insult Harry as being fundamentally damaged from birth, while blaming his mother for it and calling her a bitch. I realize this shit had plenty of momentum in the fandom, before Deathly Hallows came along, but the Marge thing happened in the third book, and I'm still going to call all of this another example of fan fic writers and their readers eating up garbage without ever stopping to notice the smell.



Edit: Oh, and Remus referring to Harry as part of his "pack" needs flushed down the same toilet as the other two terms. Remus Lupin's defining trait in the series is his near total absence from it, and his attempted absence from the lives of his wife and infant child. Some pack...

I'm not even trying to hate on the character, but the lathering on of these creepy terms of endearment and effusive declarations of brotherhood, from a character who is chiefly defined by absence and abandonment, invites these kinds of harsh observations.

 

@Warlocke

In my fanfic, Sirius is casually abusive and Remus is mostly absent.

 

Everyone knows that Harry's term of endearment from James' friends is Bambi, anyway. Kid's father transformed into a stag. Even more approprietely, he saw/heard his mother die to save him.

 

Popped up for me this evening, searching for a new Time Travel story to read:

Time travel. Canon Faithful.

I’m sorry, but no it better effing not be. What in the hell are you doing wasting 50, 60, 100+ thousand words on just to copy the damn books for? Also, if I see anything about “preserving the timeline”. Ugh. Gross. No. You went back in time. There shouldn’t be but the barest hints of the original timeline, and only those things that would have happened regardless.

But . . . but muh future knowledge! Yeah. Your future knowledge in the specific is rapidly going to be worthless. But your future knowledge in the broad scale is going to remain relevant from beginning to end. Whether Ron bent down and tied his shoe on Tuesday like he did in the original is unimportant. But your action’s won’t change the fact that V made 6 horcruxes and you know where they are.

I ain’t reading this just to re-read the books. If I wanted that, I’d just re-read the books. I’m reading this to see how you FIX the books, saving lives and eliminating the threat.

Time travel. Canon Faithful. OR Preserving the Timeline earns you a Phil Collins shining a light on you while singing “In the Air Tonight” in front of everyone/10.

 

Characters deliberately underperforming in class to make themselves seem more like their younger selves is another thing that really irritates me when I see it. Teachers generally aren't suspicious of bright students, and they don't find intelligence and over achievement problematic. Any grown adult who went back in time and sat through primary school classes as if they were a child would be a masochist and an idiot.

 

To say nothing of the fact that it takes about a hundred, very detailed, very astute, steps requiring months of close observation to go from 'This student is exceptionally bright' to 'This student is actually their adult future self transported back to do something.'

No one at Hogwarts, not a student, not a professor, not a politician, has ever shown that level of logical thought. Not DD, not Hermione, not Lily, not LV.

 

There are a lot of fix-it fics out there where everything goes swimmingly. Where Voldemort doesn't adapt or anything like that.

Anything out there where the time traveler fails miserably because they, naturally, don't remember enough of the tiny details that lead to the grand picture, and vastly overestimate what they do know?

That's one of the biggest quibbles I have with time travel fics. Most people in those are far too sure of what they could do, and what they remember that actually happened, if they were thrust back in time. Like sure, Harry could destroy all of the horcruxes.

Then what? I know Voldemort is arrogant, and that causes him to make mistakes, but there should be a limit to this, I think. He's by no means a stupid person. He's almost as far from it as you can get.

I guess you could go back far enough to where he's a shade, but not far enough to where he still has a body, and you destroy all of them so he has no anchors left, but then you're telling a boring story. Which is a worse sin than telling a bad story.

 

Or the fact that an adult is trapped in a body of an 11 year old... in a freaking boarding school.

Pre-teens are some of the worst years to experience, now think of being an adult surrounded by them and everyone thinks you are one of them. It would be enough to make you go insane. I don't get how any timetraveler can befriend their classmates with such an age gap. Worse, you likely wouldn't be able to stand your old friends as they haven't matured or grown at all.

It would be a fucking nightmare, tbh. This is why if I ever had woken up in HP body at age 11, I'd be going straight to Dumbledore. Fuck trying to live an 11 year old boy's life with a dark lord after him.

 

I think 'Canon faithful' is an immediate red flag only if the story happens in canon time, and this has less to do with 'preserving the timeline' being stupid and more with the fact that canon-rehash in general is the worst plot idea in fanfiction. It doesn't matter if the setting is "tiny divergence that the author tells you will butterfly down the line", "AU!Harry is a dragon raised on Pluto", or "50-year-old Harry goes back to 1st year", reading canon-rehash is going to be boring shit in any case.

Now, think Harry going back to founders time. Whether he tries to remove Salazar from the equation or tries to follow events as they happened in canon can both lead to interesting stories I think (for those interested in medieval fiction, at least). Same for Marauders era, 'canon-faithful' in that case simply means it's a kind of missing moment from canon, except the 'moment' can span several years. It's just recounting the 1st Voldemort war with Harry there to see it.

As for 'preserving the timeline', it's only stupid if Harry decides to go back. But if someone else sent him without asking, or if it was a freak accident or something, then I think him prioritising going back to his time is a valid motivation. And then, Harry not wanting to destroy the universe in the meantime, or whatever Hermione and Dumbledore warned him off about changing the past, is also a valid decision. He respects their opinions on magic. There should be some temptation to change things, obviously, because he's human, but it being the exception rather than the rule isn't a red flag imo.
As for ways of making a story interesting even with him trying not to have a lasting influence, then first a reminder of Book 3 where he did do something that just turned out to be a part of his original past that he didn't know, so he doesn't think hiding under his Cloak 24/7 is the way to go. Then you play in the gaps of what he knows (once again, the story not being canon era helps), what he remembers wrong, and people he knows maybe having changed before he met them.

tl;dr, It's perfectly possible to write a Canon-faithful story where Harry actively tries to keep events as they happened in his past (at least mostly). Just not the usual canon era Peggy Sue.