I agreed with you until I took a look at your summary:

Come on?

You get the Right or Easy platitude and a piece of information that this takes place after the war. Except neither of those things tell you anything or convince you to click on the link. A story's timeline isn't itself an interesting feature.

I wrote this in the Best Summaries thread. It's very simple, what's more likely to indicate a good story: a good summary or a bad summary?

Sometimes I'll read short 1,000 word entries in the WBA even if they don't have summaries. I'm not going to rub it into people's faces and post "I'm not reading this until you put a summary" because it's incredibly anal.

But no way am I throwing away my time for something 10,000 words long if the summary is just vague, cookiecutter doggerel. Even if I have that kind of time (somedays I do), I'll just find a story that, at the very least, the author shows me he wants me to read it.

 

Ouch. You cut me real deep there, Andro. <shrug>

As I said in the PM and at the start of the fic when I posted it here - it was for me and as a present to DLP on my 1000th post. I only thought to post it to FFN after it was well-received here, and I frankly could not care less if it's read by ten or ten thousand of the retards at FFN. If I wanted readers and reviews I could always swap the pairing to Harry/Draco or, hell, Harry/Ollivander and it'd be swamped with glowing praise.

The point is that I *like* that summary. It's vague because the motivations are somewhat vague, and I didn't want it pigeon-holed or pre-judged by pairing or category. It's complete and under 10k words, and if *that* puts people off, well fuck them.

 

I ultimately want people searching for good stories, whether they be guys here or FFnet people I don't know, to find those good stories. The thought they might pass over something fantastic like Moksha irks me, that's all. It doesn't matter. Speaking of which, I will read it today.

But stiiiill. You could just write one of those narrative summaries that's intriguing without pigeon-holing or announcing the pairing. Reference the novel savannah setting, there's always ways to make a summary interesting without giving up stuff on the story. The reasons you cited don't actually have anything to do with good summaries. Bah, I'll stop being hung up on this.

 

Yeah, I'll shut up as well, especially if you'll read my story. [oh irony, thy name is Portus]

You make good points, though... <grumble grumble>

 

Hey wasn't ther a limit how big a topic can became? This topic has gotten quite big.

 

He's right guys - size isn't everything.

:awesome

 

No summary means no reading for me, it's that simple. I'm not going to waste my time trying to find out what the story is about, only to find that it's intended to be a crappy crackfic or a romance. I don't expect the summary to be a work of art, but I do expect it to be there and guess what, summarize the story. It's just a few words, so the lack of a summary shows author's utter lack of respect for the reader and doesn't bode well for the story.

 

Yeah, well it's probably because hair is one of the easiest things to describe. Though I agree that seeing the 'greasy haired git' every page is annoying as hell -_-

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As long as it says something, I'll read it.

 

The thing with The Hair, is that for a lot of character in HP it's pretty much their definition attribute. Rowling put a lot of emphasis on hair. Not that this means we should forgive bad writers for following her example, but it's not a game changer for me until it becomes REALLY blatant and overused.

 

It's not that hard to understand. In fics like those, the author wants to 'fix' either Harry, Snape, or whoever to make them 'better'. They're taking everything they perceive as flawed (like Hermione's bushy hair) and mending it to show how their version of the character is better than canon's.

--

Pet Peeve: When authors give a random bunch of people a 'mystical-sounding' group name to build intrigue. I remember once seeing Hermione, Neville, and someone else being dubbed as the 'Dark Edens' or something or the other. Going through the the first page on FFnet, I can already see the 'Hogwarts Charmed Ones.' -__-

 

Interestingly enough, I never considered Hermione's bushy hair to be a negative attribute. My best female friend has somewhat bushy hair and I always rather liked it...

But I agree with you essentially, it is a fixation on fixing what they perceive as less than perfect about character X.

 

Yeah, I have curly hair and it can get bushy/fluffy sometimes. I don't view it in a negative light, just saying that some authors do.

 

Lmao, Dark Edens? Really? Hmm, not the worst name out there. Not to mention it's better then when a character constantly calls the order of the phoenix the order of kfc or something. Though some names are just stupid. Oh! I have a pet peeve I forgot. When someone creates an OC character and they make these really random or terrible names just so that that character can have a name similar to a canon character.

As for the hair issue, maybe people are trying to make the characters like their movie counterparts. They've got an image in their head and book Harry or book Hermione just doesn't measure up for them. Or maybe they're just weird like that.

 

Really? I don't think I've seen that before, but I don't doubt it. I have seen OCs named after famous people, and characters from other books, though.

 

Yeah, there was one I saw with a girl sibling who lived who was named something that was similar to Harry. If I remember what story it was I'll look and see but it was close to Harrietta, only weirder.

 

What I can't stand is having the OC live a strangely identical life to Harry so she could be the only one that understands him.

I was reading this story just a few days ago about Harry meeting a muggleborn named a variation of the name Lily who's wand was just as special as his, who's mother died on Halloween as well, who yada yada... you get my point. I did finish the thing just to see if it was a twin!fic or a Harry-from-a-different-dimension!fic and it turned out to be neither. The very intelligent explanation was that coincidences do happen.:facepalm I'm not going to comment because I didn't write a flame so this would probably turn into a rant.

 

New pets peeve: New experiences but no changes for Harry!

Exemple: Even after having lived a different life than canon, the Mirror of the Erised always, ALWAYS, show Harry his family. Fuck, in most fic Harry doesn't even THINK about it, he his there, saying that his friends changed his life and whatever and then BAM§ Potter's Family.

But the thing that annoyed me first in the books, and now in pretty much every fanfic is Harry's Patronus. We have a canon evidence that a Patronus can change. So why didn't it Patronus change between Kid-hiding-behind-his-father and Angtsy-Teen-Hiding-behind-Dumbledore?

And why doesn't it change in fanfiction when Harry had to go back in time after a bloody war, or after becoming minister of magic or whatever?

 

He just doesn't know the change of losing people he loves while being an overly emotional woman. Also your words have issues.

 

It's because the average author isn't even creative at all. It's why you see thousands upon thousands of slash stories. It's basically the "same shit, different toilet" theme. They all just wanna write the same shit, but it still comes out of their asses and floats inside the same collective, unused toilet bowl that hasn't been flushed for 10 years.

I wonder if these "slash writers" even grow up to be anything useful in life, or they probably grow up to be fucking dumbasses in life that have no common sense just as the average human being. Bet you $50 that hardly any of them grow up to be a good member of society, seeing as most slash authors have zero common sense.

 

Harry's patronus didn't change because for the most part he was still the same person. The stag represents things like nobility which comes from his saving people thing. Harry was still a good, and noble person at the end so there was no reason for it to change. It takes a big change in personality for it to change, Tonks went from the happy, bubbly girl to the crying depressed girl, Harry never went through personality changes that big.

As for why fanfic writers don't change it, it's because none of them have ever thought of it before. It's not something that I would have considered before, and I bet it has never crossed the mind of most writers.