Yeah, I get that. Pet peeve and all.

But it also makes sense from a character perspective. Characters like Hermione and Harry are ostensibly coming from our own world, so you would expect Hermione to flip a shit about this at some point. (It's one reason that I look more kindly on The Methods of Rationality than most of DLP.) Obviously, I want to read five thousand stories about Hermione angsting about wonky science about as much as I want to read another story where Harry inherits 999,999,999 galleons and discovers that his animagus form is a magical lolcat. It makes more sense to me to subtly correct the most egregious examples of canon stupidity than to ignore them entirely.

 

I put this down to a combinations of two things. 1 is an extrapolation of canon, and 1 is canon. Firstly I like to think that wizards and witches are a bit tougher than muggles. It explains a lot about their culture. So they could go through a battle and come out alive with injuries that would have killed you or me. Second, healing spells. We obviously know they exist from canon, and whilst we don't have an accurate gauge of how powerful or effective they are, if every person who goes into battle knows a couple of generic 'seal that wound' 'stop that blood flowing' 'wake up unconscious person' healing type spells, then many many more people will survive the battle than other wise.

 

I always got the impression that "bolts of light" wasn't literal - it just meant colored bolts of magic traveling at some finite (visible) speed. Of course, not all spells seem to work like that, but most curses do.

 

The spells give off light, but aren't light themselves. They are magic, not light. The only spell that moves at the speed of light is 'Lumos' because that is a spell that makes light.

 

I don't mind the dodging of spells too much, so long as it is presented sensibly, and not as the be all and end all of defensive tactics. I remember there was a phase of indi!Harry fics where he as apparently the only person who had ever thought of dodging a spell rather than casting a shield, and it meant he was guaranteed to win any fight he was in.

 

I don't mind dodging, as long as it's not overused and not just a lame excuse to have Harry work out, get buff, and start doing Jedi style acrobatics in the middle of duels. It's even worse, mentioned above, when the author makes it seem like no one has ever thought of moving out of the fucking way. That kind of retardedness makes me instantly stop reading a fic.

 

People writing non-English conversations. If I see a huge block of French, Romanian, or Bulgarian, I'm going to hit the X. It shouldn't be up to the reader to translate what characters are saying. One or two sentences, if the words are similarish, are fine. But whole paragraphs?

Or when the author writes the conversation in another language, then puts the English translation in brackets at the end of each line. Really? What's the point of doing this - is it just to make you look smarter, as if it is, it failed.

Final foreign language thing that irks me is when the author writes English, but italicized, to be another language; and then sticks in phrases native to that language anyways. I saw one of these yesterday, and went along the lines of "Oh Harry my love, we're meant to be together, mon cherie".
Ignoring the crappy words, we have French within French. Franception!


I think it just boils down to nearly nobody can actually pull having anyone not speak English, unless they actually think about it. And most ff.net authors are incapable of that level of thought.

 

Amen to that. There's a GoF fic I really liked except for that part. All the author really needed was to say that two characters conversed quickly in [Bulgarian/French/etc.] and that should've done it easily.

Worse, too often authors don't know the language they're writing (using Babel Fish or whatever instead) and readers who do will catch on.

 

Another peeve that just really hit me in the face yesterday evening. I was reading the Grey Maiden series and just closed the page part way through number 4. I hate it when authors cause the majority of conversations between Harry and his closest friends to consist of almost nothing but "Its too dangerous Harry", "How can you treat it as nothing Harry", "But your life is in danger Harry", "You're an idiot Harry, how dare you keep anything about anything from us".

More often than not, and certainly in the case of Grey Maiden, its the female characters who are apparently close friends of his that do this. Whilst I'm willing to believe that a fair number of fanfiction writers are anti-social losers, it irks me majorly when they seem to believe its perfectly normal for a persons supposed best friends to do nothing but berate and belittle them, their abilities and their decisions. People like that don't remain friends...

 

A huge peeve of mine is overdone House rivalry. Harry and Draco hate each other's guts in canon, and a good deal of wizards are a bit suspicious of Slytherins, knowing that their House tends to produce Dark wizards more than any other House. That's all there is to it, folks. No insulting random people you barely know simply because they've been Sorted in a certain House. Hating on an entire House happens at most at Quidditch matches. Writers who overdo House rivalry strike me as the sort of people who've never really watched groups of kids interact, or were oblivious to those social dynamics back in school.

On a related note, the All Slytherins Are Sociopaths cliche. No, they aren't. While most do have a mean streak, the status of Complete Monster is reserved for a select few. Slughorn, while otherwise a complete suck-up, was overall a nice enough person. Snape might have been a complete bastard, but at least his heart was in the right place. Even Draco was far from the big bad Death Eater image he wanted to project.

Also, carelessly written action scenes, especially when they're peppered all over the fic. They're supposed to make you read the next line with baited breath; I don't want to see completely predictable exchanges of hexes and curses (more so when even Death Eaters' repertoire of spells only includes the Unforgivables, Stunners, Protego, Expelliarmus, Reducto and... that's about it).

The prophecy. That's it, the prophecy. It was a bad plot device to start with, but fanfiction blew it out of proportion. There are few things I hate reading more than Harry going all "omg omg what to do, I gotta be the one to kill Voldemort-- ah yes, better start training". No, dunderhead, no 16 year old boy in his right mind would even imagine he had a chance at taking on the most powerful wizard alive in a one-on-one duel, training or no training-- if you've written Voldemort well, that is (protip: JKR didn't). Conversely, ObsessedWithHarry!Voldemort annoys me just as much. A properly characterized Voldemort is supposed to be confident enough in his abilities to know that said 16 year old boy doesn't stand a chance against him, and would instead focus on more rewarding pursuits like taking over the wizarding world. In other words, in my ideal fic both characters would recognize Trelawney for the fraud she is, Harry's personal war against Voldemort would have a different motivation, and no deus ex machina would be used to achieve his goal, Harry's triumph being instead due to a combination of competence, cunning and luck.

The saddest thing is that everything I've listed shows up even in otherwise good fics. These (and others) are part of the reason for which the list of fics I'd rate 5/5 is so short.

 

So Harry knows he'll have to face Voldemort one day and before that his minions will be trying to kill him and instead of preparing himself for it you'd prefer it that he did nothing? You must love canon.

 

People who are born animagus.

 

^this. I hate writers who make Harry a multi-animagus because they're too lazy to pick one form. Don't you think if there was such a thing, it would've been documented at least once?

 

Its never said in canon that they don't exist...its just not said that it isn't.

 

... Did you even read the rest of my post?

Look, I have nothing against powerful!Harry (I actually like that in moderation), but I'm really not interested in seeing him sinking into prophecy-induced angst and spending the next 30 chapters boring readers with his training sessions, before the completely predicable final encounter. I just prefer their antagonism to develop in a more natural, subtle way, and for Harry's success to not be mainly due to the aforementioned 30 chapters' worth of training. Furthermore, if fear of Voldemort is Harry's sole motivation for getting more powerful, don't expect me to be interested in reading more about that Harry. Not my kind of hero.

 

I find it annoying when Hermione is referred to as 'Mione. This nickname is never used in Canon.

 

Isn't it? Pretty sure Ron calls her that at times.

 

Overdone, but I don't really mind that.

'Specially if it's a good Hermione/Harry pairing fic'.

 

I've actually stopped reading stories because of that. I don't even really know why I hate it so much, but I do. I remember not even caring about it at first.

It rarely is the only annoying thing of a fic though. I suppose it works as a kind of warning about what kind of story it'll be.

 

Anyone ever encountered something like this before?

This is possibly the most irritating thing ever.