Well, besides the self insertion Mary Sue putting down her phantasy of carrying Harry Potter's baby, Harry in this story is also a Gary Stu of epic proportions. All the characters in this "Gary+Mary train 14..18 year old kids to fight a secret war while at school under Dumbledore's thumb" are just bland and boring. I never cared about anybody of them.
There were a few good scenes in it, especially the fate of Narcissa, but ultimately it always felt contrived and convoluted because the writer's idea of a logical setting with interesting characters is mutual exclusive to mine.

But let's rejoice, a followup to the story will have twice as many Mary and Gary Sues with a Kung-Fu Phoenix baby.:facepalm

 

This reminded me of this.:awesome

 

Ah, yes, the infamous 'break her neck and then feed her to the acromantula' scene.

Good times.

 

Character bashing. Definitely character bashing. I cannot stand how some authors take out their dislike of a character by making them utterly horrible/stupid; unfortunately, many fics on FF.net take this approach, especially with the Weasleys, Dumbledore, Hermione, what have you. Even if you hate a character, I don't see why treating them horribly is the best thing to do. Anyone can trash a character they hate; it's a good writer who can take a character they hate and write them in a good fashion regardless.

 

This.

The most popular one seems to be Ron Weasley as well.

 

Browsing fics this evening and was reminded of this particular peeve.

Harry as the DADA teacher while still a student. Quite possibly the single stupidest plot idea ever perpetrated on the fandom.

 

What about phoenix!Hedwig?

 

Whoah, I've never read that one. ^

 

Have you never read HP & the Power of Time? It's a classic - it basically gave birth to all of the indy!Harry cliches in existence.

 

And quite possibly this abomination......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBM58wYXh7A

 

Jesus Christ. :facepalm

 

Snakes! Why'd it have to be snakes?

 

Skimming through, i can't believe that multi-chapter shopping binges in Diagon alley arn't mentioned.. the Trunks are...

All paid for of course, by harry's massive - world economy ruining wealth, and his new Gringotts credit card;
* that may or may not have been invented by Harry inside the bank and
* that may or may not been seen by muggles as a random, awesome credit card from Barclays.

Which of course he does, while waiting for his custom wand to be crafted by Olivander's only rival, in Knockturn Alley.

 

Getting a wand with either the Trace or with it being made of less 'traditional' materials in the more murky parts of Knockturn I could understand, but only if it was written very well and actually thought out: having Harry go to a 'one stop shop for all things dark!' in Knockturn, when it was just another shopping area with a somewhat seedier rep' in canon is damn right annoying to read, and just sheer lazyness on the part of the author/authoress.

And I agree with you on the multi-chapter shopping sprees: why the fuck would I want to know what Harry decided to splurge on in the underwear section, for example?

 

First, a reference: Mmm, the BadFic Grab Bag. Lazy writing at its worst.

It's like some kind of truncated, HP-specific, TV Tropes list, back before I knew there was such a site. Brings a tear to my eye...

On to the peeve...


Marauders.

That's it, Marauders.

What some (read virtually all) people don't realize is there are NO Marauders in Harry Potter. James and his friends are only referred to as the Marauders once. By Ron. In 'Half-Baked Plot.'

And it's worth noting that A: Ron wasn't exactly an expert on those four people, B: Even Sirius only says that they signed the map with their nicknames, not that there was a 'group' of any kind whose name was on the map, and C: This single citation only happened after fans had been calling them that, out of laziness/lack of imagination, for ages... Take that for what you will.

The map is the "Marauder's Map" not the "Marauders' Map." It is a map for people who maraud, to facilitate the act of marauding. It's like if they had made something called the Castle Explorer's Map, it would not necessarily mean that he and his friends called themselves the Castle Explorers.

I'd like to think that if the map didn't reply to people using the four teens' nicknames, people wouldn't make such an enormous fucking deal out of this... but I somehow doubt it.

Instead, we have to endure Marauders-this and Marauders-that, and "Marauders' Era" fic, which is just the bane of my fucking existence. That period of time was not the golden era of Hogwarts, it was a time when war was being waged outside castle walls, recruiting was going on inside, and James, with his three pals, used their cleverness and spare time to act like tools.

At least two of them grew out of this phase, and one upped the ante by becoming a villain and a literal tool.

Ignoring all of that, why is it that so many stories have everyone and their brother knowing about "The Marauders" as though what they were up to were common knowledge?

"Fresh pickled," mother fucker; and don't you forget it.

And, yet, people tend to couch their discussion of (their dislike of) such things, in terms of 'plot device X should never, ever be done.'

What if it were ridiculously written and well thought out?

Sigh. One of these days... You know, out of all my piles of words, the story with one of the better chances of being posted is basically a piss take at HP fandom, that either scornfully avoids these clichés, or rides them to their outrageous, yet logical, extreme.

The scene where Harry gets a second wand and selects the materials for it is one of the more blatant examples of the latter.

Are we talking about Harry, or Fem!Harry. :awesome

 

I still can't stop laughing my ass off at this.

Seriously, the edited little scene where Snape was eating beside Indy in the Great Hall cracked me up.

 

Female!Harry (Er, wouldn't she have a floral name or something, then? Something Lily Potter? Ya know, keeping it in tradition with her mother/aunts' names?)...hmm...then I'd be interested.

(Does Victoria's Secret have a witch branch?)

 

The fact that apparently 50% of all HP fanfic authors cannot differentiate between the name of a spell and its incantation. I'm so tired of reading things along the lines of "Hit him with a Stupefy, Harry!", "Yeah, I know the Avada Kedavra spell", etc. you get the picture. I could come up with a billion examples of this, and even a quick 10-20 minute scan of the first 25 fics on the first page of ff.net would probably provide a shit ton of this type of error. But of course, I'm lazy and don't feel like putting the effort into finding specific examples.

It's a fucking stunning spell/charm (is "stunner" canon btw?) and the Killing Curse you lazy bastards. For some reason this just really bugs me; most likely due to the fact that even an idiot should be able to differentiate between a spell and its incantation. It tells me that the author is either a gaping cunt of an idiot, that he/she didn't bother to do some basic research (hint:http://www.hp-lexicon.org/magic/spells/spells_s.html), didn't bother to put a modicum amount of effort into the story, or that the author is too lazy to do a simple reread of his/her chapters (or have a good beta do it) to catch such errors before they decide to go and update it on ff.net or whatever site they posted it to.

It's pretty fucking simple people. I have no idea why this is so ubiquitous.

 

I see your point, though I'd note that in real life folks do this kind of language extension all the time, most often with brand-name items that have become so common as to become their own words. Ever emailed something after you googled it? Perhaps you may even have fedexed a package somewhere. Or velcroed something. Or used a zipper or a thermos--or shot heroin, for that matter. All are real life equivalents of "Crucioing" someone to insensibility and would likely raise as many eyebrows in the magical community as using "coke" to refer to a generic soft drink among Californians.

 

Incantations are not brand names. These words have a certain degree of power associated with them. Folks would quickly learn to properly describe spells after starting a discussion of the Crucio curse and forgetting their wand is in their back pocket.