True, but the ways 11 year old Harry is usually smart in bad fanfics would be better suited to a time-traveler!Harry in his younger body when that's not the case.

 

I get why the "fuck yeah America" stuff gets annoying, but I don't see any particular reason why it's any more annoying than "Britain is teh bestest ever" shit I see from Dr Who fans, or any other british based series (like, I don't know, Harry Potter). Since there are places where magic and civilization is far older and would have much more logical reasons to be pre-eminent places of power, like Greece/Rome/Iraq/Central America. Those places can admit to having a longer history of congregating people with sophisticated mathematical system (arithmancy) and abundant natural resources or strong trade flow. Britain is a piddly little island in the northern part of the world, forgive me for not being too impressed with it.

This doesn't mean that Dumbledore can't be the best wizard in the world, or that Hogwarts isn't a prestigious institution because of the staff and the knowledge contrained therein. But just as people don't buy the America-jerk, I don't buy the Britain-jerk.

 

You're right, it's not. I actually don't like Britain (it's the accents, I just can't stand them). I just like to keep the fiction as close to canon as possible. Moving continent (significantly) throws that out the window.

I just don't see a good reason to SIGNIFICANTLY include other regions. Perhaps small parts of Europe that are close by, France isn't too bad when included (that I've seen...) then again, it's generally NOT significant.

 

I'm actually not against HP fanfiction that takes place somewhere else than Britain. Wizards are everywhere, and that offers limitless potential for world building. What I argue for though, is that the region Harry is in must be well crafted. That means both - good sides, and bad sides.

I can't stand it if a story reduces Britain to nothing but a cesspit of incompetent fools, and simultaneously makes the 'new' region out to be some kind of Utopia. Racism, for example, is an issue of humanity as a whole. It isn't restricted to countries like some authors like to make us believe in their stories.

 

I think a lot of the 'American Wizarding World is better than the British Wizarding World' stuff comes not from arrogance or a sense of superiority, but a much simpler and more humble motivation.

Laziness.

Canon HP sends a lot of mixed signals. It tells us that Hogwarts is the best school ever, but it show us a Hogwarts that is a dangerous environment (for adults, let alone children), with teachers who are either shit (Snape, Hagrid, Binns, Trelawney, most DADA profs), or don't know their stuff (most DADA profs), or don't have the best interests of the students as their first priority (Dumbledore, McGonagall, Snape, most DADA profs).

Likewise, it wants to tell us that Wizarding Britain is the best... then shows us Voldemort, a corrupt and ineffectual government crippled by graft and prejudice, where the average citizen is at least mildly bigoted, believes whatever the loudest voice tells them, and can't perform core defense spells... unless they also happen to be death eaters!

Wanting to write a story where Harry seeks the aid or sanctuary of a Wizarding community that has its head on straight (at least in comparison to his native land) is a fairly natural and inevitable reaction to seeing the half-assed war zone in which canon Harry lives.

Now, I'm going to assume that the vast majority of HP fan fic (on FFN, at least) is written in English. Of those English language stories, I'll assume that the majority of the ones not written by Brits, are being written by Americans. Also, I'll make the wild assumption that very few (if any) of the people who write about better alternatives to Magical Britain are British, themselves

This means the vast majority of the people writing about better alternatives to Magical Britain are, in fact, from the United States.

The easiest way to write, in theory, is to write what you know. Given that these people are living in the U.S., it's probably a safe bet that the nation with which they are most familiar is the U.S.A.. Most fan fic writers probably aren't going to put massive amounts of effort into researching another country's culture, slang, and geography (not to mention making sure it is all canon timeline appropriate culture, slang, and geography), when they can just set their superior magical community in their home country.

Some people do go that extra mile, but they're probably also better writers in general, more dedicated to creating a respectable piece of fiction than your typical review-whore, and more than likely have a slower update schedule.

Simple as that. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the motivation for using the U.S.A. as the setting for a better magical community is down to simplicity, ease of implementation, and good old fashioned laziness, rather than any sense of American arrogance or nationalistic pride: A conclusion that is, perhaps, easier to arrive at when one is not suffering a wee bit of dented "Up The British!" pride at the impugning of a fictional version of a magical community in their homeland?

So, in most cases, you can blame those writers for their lack of work ethic (or that most of their stories suck), if you must, but not their "America: Fuck Yeah!" attitude. Some of them do think that way, sure... but some of them are also fourteen-year-old boys.

Rule Britannia.

 

In the case that they're too lazy to go that extra inch (I refuse to believe using a premade world is that hard). Then their stories are worth dodging for me anyway.

I'm sure there are exceptions. But I have enough trouble filtering out the cancer in the genre/areas that tend to contain the better fics.

I swear I actually spend more time scrolling through story summaries trying to get a good story queue going than actually reading them.

 

Hell, have any of you been to magical America? It just might be better. But we'll never know because of that damn Secrecy Act of 1692.

 

Feel free.

It's harder than some things, and easier than others. I won't make excuses for bad writers, though I will say that if you're a non-Brit writing HP fic, then you're already writing about one foreign culture. Sure, it has the same language... sort of, but it's still a different land with different traditions, slang, politics, history, and the list goes on.

If you're sticking to the canon timeline and setting the story during Harry's school years, you're writing about a foreign culture in the eighties and nineties.

If you involve another magical culture (not premade) from a country with which you are not familiar, then you also have to try and familiarize yourself with yet another country's geography, culture, and possibly the intricacies of their military, since a lot of those better-than-Britain stories have a habit of dragging muggle government into the picture... while getting the details right for the eighties and nineties. And they have to create OCs, places of business, a school and faculty, government, and so on, to populate and flesh out this new magical culture.

So, that's two foreign cultures (four, if you spend time in both the muggle and magical worlds, with the latter being significantly different from the former), during a time period that is 1.5 to 2.5 decades removed from our own.

It may not be difficult, per se, but it is certainly time-consuming - much more so than simply writing what you know. Not everyone has that kind of time to devote to fic writing.

Even fewer have the motivation to keep writing, if they're spending too much of their time and effort on it.

 

I don't think that you're really writing about British culture though, but Wizarding culture, which is established in the book. You can expand on it, sure, but the floor plan is there. Perhaps it's because I'm not British, but I don't see that much that I identify as "British" in the Wizarding world. Except the massive amounts of tea they drink and the language they speak.

 

:|

I'm not sure what to say about that... Except, maybe, "Welcome to Part of The Problem Inc.. Your new desk, nameplate, and I.D. tag are waiting for you over there."

I guess if you're phoning-in the central culture of the series, then you probably wouldn't consider adding a second one to the mix to be very hard. Makes perfect sense.

 

Ok so that post didn't really make sense to me. So now I feel stupid, and the following is potentially unrelated but felt I should add it to my post above.

When I say "Wizarding culture" I don't mean to imply that all wizards are the same across the continents. Just that in canon we are almost only exposed to the culture in Britain (thus the only Wizarding culture we really know IS British), how hard can it be to copy that into your own story rather than try and adapt it to personal experience?

EDIT: Ok wait, I think there may be some confusion. I was under the assumption you were saying it's easier for people not British to write a story about Harry in America where they are forced to create a new everything. When I think it's muuuch easier to play in the sandboxes of Hogwarts, Diagon Alley, The Ministry, Hogsmede, all the little places introduced in the series. Surely making all those up again (and different) is harder right?

But now I feel like you were talking more about behaviour and culture. My bad.

 

When in confusion, use examples, particularly ones from your own embarrassing experience. Thus, my mistakes in the past writing HP fan fiction.

• Harry wearing bloomers.

• A character putting on a pair of pants and walking out the door.

• (almost mistake, but checked first) Harry joking around calling his girlfriend a bint (thinking that it was the equivalent of "wench" said while laughing).

• Flipping someone off (two fingers, not one, though from what I gather, it's not as prominent anymore).

Then, there's the usual cultural screw ups that you read from people who either don't know better, or don't care.

• Harry was pissed.

• He gave her a love tap on the fanny as he walked by.

• Excuse me/pardon me.

• Bloody hell, bloody Brits say bloody all the bloody time. Bloody right they do—happens most often when trying to get across that you ARE writing in a different culture, and don't know much about the culture in order to use anything else.

• England/Britain/Great Britain/UK: have one name for the bloody country and bloody-well be done with it.

• Pounds, stones, quarters, grams, etc. Confusing which system to use at the right time is pretty easy for a non-Brit.

Thus, a lot harder than you expect to copy it into your own story.

 

The British Isles?

 

Really? I thought the British used that expression.

I'm really confused right now. That's not used by the British either?

Allso bollocks. I like to mix them up with "fuck".

That's surprising. Seems to me like the non-metric system isn't that hard to grasp on a fundamental level, even if it is royally fucked up.

 

Brit here. I don't use 'pissed' so often, and I suspect it would've been even less prevalent in the nineties. We say excuse me/pardon me an extortionate amount, so I don't know what that's about. With the metric/imperial: Scrubb was referring to our peculiar tendancy to mix the two systems in day to day life. For example, miles for long distances but cm for short ones, or stones for a person's weight but grams/kilograms for everything else. It can get quite confusing.

Also, whoever it was that thought we don't tip - we do, it's just not as mandatory as in the US, from what I've heard. Traditionially it's 10%, but in cafes most people wouldn't bother, and definitely not in ice cream parlours or pubs (unless you knew/fancied the bartender).

 

This is actually news to me. Is it new?

 

For being drunk, or for being mad? They may even use it both ways, but when an American says, "I'm pissed," even in a bar, they do NOT mean drunk. England? I'd understand it as being drunk.

In reference to excuse me/pardon me. From what I've learned, there are certain times to use certain terms, and times when one term is not appropriate, but the other one is. That may be a little outdated now, but I've found a few references, for instance, that say "excuse me" is more specific to things like belching and farting, while Pardon me is more general. Of course, that may end up being either regional, or not as true anymore. In comparison, Americans usually use "excuse me" for just about everything, and see "pardon me" as a synonym that isn't used as much.

.

Doc. Whooves is right, that's exactly what I meant.

 

There's a lot of grammar peaves, but at the moment it seems that no-one understands peaked vs piqued.

Specifically, having your curiosity peaked and having your curiosity piqued.

To have your curiosity piqued (the spelling of the common phrase) means that the thing aroused your interest. It generated some amount of curiosity, though it need not be excessive or all encompassing. It was a bit interesting and worth further study. It suggests a further interest in the subject.

Having your curiosity peaked (the common and wrong spelling of the phrase) would mean that your interest in the subject has reached its highest point thus, from now on, your interest can only diminish. This is not the meaning intended by most writers.

Also, to pique interest should not be confused with the meaning 'a fit of pique' which uses a completely different definition of pique (pride or egotism).

Sometimes I love the English language.

 

Glorious irony.

 

Though the term and the idiom have a different tone in modern writing, I think the source of the expression is the same- pique means to aggravate or rile, as it's derived from the French for 'poke'.

If you've riled a person's interest or curiosity, it's an aggravation of a different sort, but still a matter of stirring that person's mental stew... as you have in this case, for my attention.