To be fair though, it doesn't take up any space in the summary on Ao3. I don't mind if they want to add horrific amounts of tags, because I'm not going to read through them anyway, and they don't inconvenience me either.

 

They inconvenience when you try to search things because it brings up false positives.

 

Have you ever found something readable on Ao3?

 

Island of Fire by Esama

 

The Very secret Diary by Arabella.

Anything by esama (especially Sisyphus).

Some of Copperbadge's stuff.

Many stories on fanfiction.net are also posted on AO3: On the Way to Greatness, The Changeling, Strangers at Drakeshaugh, Stunning Shifts etc.

Then quite a bit of stuff outside the HP fandom, though I don't read much of those.

 

AO3's tag system is the double-edgiest of double-edged swords... with a live cattle prod wrapped in barbed wire for a handle.

And their search system can be rather clunky, in my experience.

Never underestimate the passion of a shipper.

 

I've tried searching for Dark Harry fics on AO3. More than half the results were Draco slash.

Anyway.

Cooking. Unless Harry poisons the Dursleys' food with an Organ-Liquefying Potion, I don't want any reference to it. Harry isn't a great cook. He fried bacon for the Dursleys and hated doing it. Even if he does suddenly develop an interest in the culinary arts, I have no wish to waste my time reading about how he prepares the perfect omelette. House-Elves exist for a reason. Particularly loathsome is the "Harry is a great cook so he's good at potions" trope. Cut that shit out, please.

 

Now I want a HPxShokugeki no Soma cross-over.

 

Harry Potter x Hannibal crossover.

Cooking would be involved.

 

Harry finds himself in Spain in 218BC, joins with the Carthaginians because the Romans are 'manipulative old men' etc etc.

Pairing would be Harry/Sophonisba, obviously.

Dunno where the cooking comes into it though.

 

I admit, I walked right into that one.

 

Or worse, the relationships that they planned to mention in chapter 20 of a story that only made it to five. If there's more than a handful of characters listed and the story isn't like 500k words it seems safe to assume that most of them will never actually appear or are even be mentioned.

 

My peeve is authors using every different description of a character they can think of to avoid referring to them by name when describing their actions. Instead of Harry waving his wand as he duels with the Death Eaters it's 'the raven-haired Gryffindor' or whatever other tripe they can think of. It's thesaurus-dumping for character names and is used for the same reason and with the same result: trying to avoid repetition but instead make the story unreadable.

It seems to be even worse in Naruto fics to the point where I've occasionally had to reread a few paragraphs to check that another character hasn't suddenly jumped into the action.

 

Lily/Snape.

Lily/Sirius.

Snape being a complete and total victim of the Marauders' bullying, instead of their rival.

 

Snape's beef with Sirius being treated as unwarranted.

 

"If you find the idea so abhorrent, stop reading."

Someone actually said that when I pointed out how reading a Fic involving Snape being a Discount-Littlefinger and Lily thinking it's a good idea to marry him is kind of dumb. I backed it up with some legitimate points, but someone actually said that.

At times, I truly wish alternatehistory.com can see the Light of the Dark Lord Potter, as I did, and come out anew with disgust at the nonsense of FanFiction and lack of legitimate critiques.

 

The AO3 search engine is useless. The authors label every thing that happen in their stories and make it impossible to find anything good. Harry stubs his toe in chapter 3? Better label it injured!Harry then. Not to mention there's no 'without' option. I gave up reading Supernatural fics on AO3 because it was impossible to find any good ones that dont have incest.

---•----•–---•---–•—–—•

• When an author isn't smart enough to write a genius character so all they do is make everyone around said character a dumbass so they look smart in comparison.

• When the protagonist is too stupid to live and is an idiot and consistently makes horrible decisions, and its cousin plot induced stupidity, when a usually smart character makes an characteristically dumb decision to further the plot.

 

"-" as a prefix allows you to filter out tags/keywords

 

The sad thing is that both of those are prevalent in canon.

Peeve... when Harry starts dating a girl from Slytherin, and Ron goes completely psychotic about it, shouting shit like "she's evil, mate!" even if he doesn't know her. I'm... pretty sure Ron isn't that prejudiced in canon. Of course, most stories just use this as an excuse to remove Ron from Harry's circle, usually replacing him with Neville. (isn't it sad when an entire character is basically compressed into "Pure-Blood friend replacement #1"?)

 

Yeah, although it could worse, reminds me of the HP and the New Dark Lord trainwreck: http://lordjeram.tumblr.com/post/93183303824/this-fanfic-is-sexist-and-terrible