Ok, I've just realised a new one. This may seem unbelievably petty but...

Warped Passage of Time

This happens in a lot of otherwise ok fics. What I'm referring to are occasions when, for example, 'Harry stared at them for a few minutes'. A few minutes, really? Man, that must have been uncomfortable. I used to put this down as a brainfart when meaning to write 'moments' but it seems to be repeated so often!

Another example is when a short conversation that took me all of a minute to read apparently took the associated characters more than an hour to have. This sticks out to me most when they're going somewhere or doing something while talking and somehow manage their task in moments. I realise it would probably get boring to recount their entire conversation, but if that's the case then don't bring attention to the warped passage of time. It's actually not important how long the conversation lasted.

Vaguely associated with this is another that I find passingly vexing:

Stare Into Space While I Infodump

In this one the author seems to believe that the characters actions need to be accounted for in the time that you're reading about their thoughts. They do this by having them 'zone-out' or 'stare into space'. Once the lengthy discourse on their mental state is completed they have to be roused from this state by someone waving a hand in front of their face or otherwise 'interrupting their musing'.

Musings are fine, interrupting them is fine. But people can process emotions subconsciously without having to devote 100% of their mental faculties to the task, thus leaving them incapable of continuing a conversation.

I've seen fics where Harry seems to zone out completely once in every single conversation he has, because apparently he has to be doing something while you're reading the lengthy explanation of his mental state. No. No he doesn't. The reader is not bound within the same temporal frame as the characters. The reader can assess the character's feelings in a moment without the character having to consciously catalogue them themselves.

You probably didn't even notice these. Now you will.

 

I dislike Draco being described as a "Slytherin Prince". Nobody in real life would call another teenager a "Prince", unless he/she really is a royal. Besides, he don't really get a true indication that Malfoy controls Slytherin. We only see him assert any real influence on Crabbe & Goyle, and characters like Zabini and Nott seem more on parity with him.

 

I never really saw Malfoy of being capable of controlling anyone beyond Crabbe and Goyle. I mean, he's this whiny little kid whose first recourse is to yell out "When my father hears about this..." at any given time.

 

That's more fanon than canon. It happens a couple times in canon and that's it, but not to that much of a degree where every confrontation he brings up his father, you have fanon to thank for that.

 

This. It always annoys me in a classroom setting. The DADA professor comes in, they have a short class discussion and then the bell rings. Would it be so hard to add a couple of lines describing how they used the rest of the time to do X?

 

My peeves are numerous and include magical trunks, the "solution to everything" trip to Diagon Alley/Knockturn Alley, character bashing (especially of Ginny and Ron, where the author calls the former a "Knockturn Alley whore" and the latter a coward with a small penis), Severitus, and Portraits of knowledgeable, "mentor" family members.

 

Personal current pet peeve? The main character always being right. Whenever they make an assumption, it turns out to be true. I'd love a fic almost instantly if Harry came up with a plan to leave the Dursleys using magic using an adults wand because of it not having the trace (an assumption he could make), and it backfiring because he was wrong. The main characters in fics that I've read recently have all seemingly never heard of the idea of a person being wrong.

 

What about Snape?

 

What about him? If you're on about the books themselves, they didn't fall into that trap. I'm on about fanfiction, Harry assuming something random about, lets say, Charms, and Flitwick is hugely impressed by it. The subject and adult can change, but it's similar in and of itself whenever I see it. His powers of deduction are off the scale in some fanfictions, the books were quite good with it.

 

Harry using his powers of deduction would be fine, most fics just give him authorial knowledge without even a hint of how he came to that conclusion.

 

I've read a few fics over the years that had "anti-"cliffhangers, and each one rankled with me like an unreplaced Glade plug-in.

Ending on a cliffhanger that isn't. Not telling the audience what "it" is, or why this "something" should be so shocking. This can work in books where all you have to do it turn the page, but in fanfic that gets updated chapter by chapter (sometimes with weeks between each), it makes me wonder why they even bothered including it.

The other being where the cliffhanger is resolved at or near the beginning of the next chapter and it never affects the rest of the chapter. What really is the point?

 

You mean like every series shown on tv? They all do that. Oh no, character X is hanging on the edge of a cliff. Find out next week if he survives. Next episode: 10 seconds in, someone pulls him up.

 

Magical cores.

I've no idea why, but the whole thing just rubs me wrong.

 

Magical cores make for easy storytelling, I guess. I personally don't like it when magical talent is in any way quantifiable, but it allows an author to easily to "prove" that one character, such as Harry, is just better than another, such as Dumbledore.

Also, if Harry's magic is just so much better in these stories, then how did it so easily get limited to average strength?

 

Quantifiable magic, as in actually having a percentage or some random digit number which determines how powerful one is going to be.... that's just stupid. Because then you have to find some reasonable explanation as to why some people are stronger and why some are not... basically it would become somewhat similar to the blood purity shebang.

Might as well introduce Midichlorians... or would those be Merlinorians?

Oh and another new pet peeve, just acquired an hour ago: the pairing of Lily and Snape. It's the most ghastliest thing since discovering Harry/Draco/Snape (amongst other appropriately abominable nightmare-inducing couplings) when I first started reading HP fanfics.

 

Why are some people able to become great concert pianists while other people still suck no matter how much they practice?

Talent is a real thing.

 

Magical cores have nothing to do with talent. They are arbitrarily assigned POWAH LEVULS to characters. And they're bullshit.

Magical cores are just a way for authors to insert Naruto mechanics into HP. Which doesn't work at all. Chakra is Chakra, Magic is Magic, don't mix the two.

 

Besides, a concert pianist's talent is a coming together of likely thousands of different factors related to their genetics, developmental biology, and psychology influenced by experience.

Further, piano playing is a complex artform with many aspects, and different people will have different levels of talent with different aspects (depending on the above factors).

There is no such thing as a simple "piano talent" value that can be read from a person like a RPG attribute.

Edit: my thoughts on why magical cores are bad storytelling:
https://forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?p=658372#post658372

 

I would have to agree with a lot of that. I was just looking for a simple analogy.

I think there are probably a shitload of things that go into making an effective wizard. I'm just not willing to dismiss "power" and "natural talent" as two of those things. They're two factors out of probably fifteen.

I hate the "Harry is a 115 on the Merlin Scale" shit just as much as most (well, DLP) people.

 

That's the Myrdin Emrys/Emrydian scale, you silly mud- muggfriend.