Is this a joke or are you really being that sniffy?

 

...Full of rotting human flesh?

Anyway, there's this expression I frequently notice both in fanfiction and generally in the fandom: "hide in the muggle world".

As in, Bad Guys take control of the Ministry, and Hermione "goes back to the muggle world" where supposedly no one will find or hurt her.

I just don't get what it means. It's not like there's a physical "magical world" (apart from a few small locations) that's separated from the "muggle world". Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it implied that most wizards and witches live inconspicuously among muggles, and only venture to places like Diagon Alley occasionally for business? How exactly does "hiding in the muggle world" different from simply living among muggles? It's seriously annoying because, some authors seem to think that having Harry hiding in the "muggle world" necessitates that he cut all ties with magicals.

 

It has been said many, many, many times but if you switch up your/you're in the first few sentences, then I won't read your fic no matter what.

 

When an author doesn't know when to stop. There are so many stories like this; it begins with one interesting idea: Harry Potter absorbing Voldemort's knowledge; or Harry Potter becoming the Master of Death; or Harry Potter learning of his Metamorphmagus abilities and proficiency for wandless magic.

They take one interesting idea, and then instead of writing Harry Potter reaching his full potential as a Wizards and whatever new abilities he has acquired, they keep adding more: Harry Potters is now a super delicious Heir of Jesus Christ, he has an Ice-Dragon-Phoenix, he has a gagillion galleons etc.

It's annoying.

 

I don't have problem with it being done once. It's such a easy mistake to make, and, such an easy mistake to overlook when you're editing your own material.

Make it too often, however, or compound it with other mistakes, and I'm right there with you.

 

So I tried giving Enveloped in the Darkness a read (it's pretty weak btw), and encountered a scene that contained two things I hadn't yet realized were peeves of mine.

Basically, Harry grows up in an orphanage where he's abused and now he's like a flawless Slytherin and totally the incarnation of young Tom Riddle. This in itself isn't so bad, you can work with it. So, his letter comes, he learns of the magical world and all that, and then McGonagall takes him to Diagon Alley. Here comes the part that pisses me off. I would think that a 'cunning', abused, and antisocial boy like him would be quite guarded around strange new people, but nope. Harry has to tell literally everyone he meets, from Cedric Diggory to the Goblin teller and Draco Malfoy, that he had been raised in an orphanage with horrible Muggles and only learned about magic that morning. He actually does it like two seconds after meeting them - complete random strangers - and without much pressure, even though he was upset earlier about his ignorance.

So here's my first peeve. A version of Harry that's supposed to be all dark and smart and Slytherin, just yelling his weaknesses out to the world, disregarding all the years in the orphanage where he learned to hate and distrust people. For fucks sake, at least try to keep some continuity and sense of character. Yeah, I know that Slytherins aren't really all that cunning, but he just seems to do stupid shit without thinking, even more than in canon.

My second peeve is that when Draco Malfoy hears this, he's all shocked and appalled, and quickly offers to have his father fix things up and invites him to stay with him at his manor. This is really the point I stopped reading. I've seen this plot in several other fics (just yesterday I finally tried Hit The Ground Running, which had a similar plot), and I always cringe at this. I just get creeped out whenever I read about Lucius Malfoy getting his slippery claws all over an 11 year old orphan in an attempt to manipulate him or get him on their side or whatever it is that Malfoys do. Sometimes he's even presented as fatherly, which really makes me puke in my mouth a little. Please stop this overused, horrible plot.

At that point I decided to nope the fuck out, but entered the last chapter just because I was curious, and skimmed over it to see if the author actually took the plot somewhere interesting. Nope, nope, nope.

 

I suppose it comes down to subtlety being all-too-easy to overlook, let alone convey properly. A lot of stories on FFN are fix-it fics, and the premise of Hit the Ground Running allows itself to that element quite easily, so authors often become consumed by trying to show everyone "how it should have been done" and end up beating their readers over the head with it.

Case in point: we all know that Harry's childhood wasn't ideal, but apparently some of us just couldn't get over the fact that it was a children's story and that's how quite a few fairy tales start. FFN, unfortunately, provides an outlet for that outrage, however ridiculous.

 

You have no idea just how much I despise this. Every single story, it seems like the authors give in to the temptation to project themselves onto the story; in this case, it's the author projecting their inability to keep secrets.

I hate it, beyond imagination, even, when a Time-Traveling Harry, Dimension-Traveling Harry, or any other particular situation where he has extremely sensitive knowledge, and he just goes about telling people.

Keep the secret, tell no one, and be smart.

I remember reading a Naruto fanfiction that made fun of this, and when the Hokage found out he was a time-traveler, they absorbed all his memories, and then killed him.

 

Poor Harry. It seems that, no matter how many upgrades and super-powers he gets, he just can't avoid being a bitch.

 

I don't know, I mean, even Canon Harry wasn't dumb enough to go around telling people personal information.

 

This gave me flashbacks to some similar type of fic I got suckered into several years ago, with Harry being indoctrinated into Pureblood culture via the Malfoys. Around about the time Harry was being encouraged to join Draco for ballet lessons my inner primate began to bark and pound the chest, as if to say, 'Back away! This is not my kind of creepy!'

 

I despise the "Harry dies, but The Fates decide to send him to the past!"

I mean, just how non-creative must one be to basically use a plot device that is nothing more than an allegory for the author's desire?

Yes, the "Fates" have decided you must go to the past and defeat Voldemort before Remus, Sirius, and Fred die! Never mind that fact that by sending you to the past, we are effectively killings all the millions of people who have been born since then! Oh, but don't worry, this is a mary sue story, so nothing goes wrong, and all those millions of people will killed, will be miraculously reborn, despite the fact that by sending you to the past, we are changing the future, and most of the couples won't even be the same.

 

Read The Lesser Sadness, then say that again.

 

A very interesting story, only 20,000 words, and yet...

That is how it should be done. All power should come at a price.

 

conformation/confirmation

--

Tracey Davies -OR- Roger Davis
It's Tracey Davis -or- Roger Davies.

What really gets me about this one is that Tracey isn't mentioned in the books AT ALL, so unless you read about her in another piece of fan fiction by another author who is also too incomprehensibly lazy to check the spelling of proper names, you probably found out about her from JKR's own class list... where her name is spelled correctly. It's one of the clearest names on the list!

There ought to be a laziness threshold for submitting fan fic to any given site.
--

When people reuse the names of main/supporting characters.

I realize the world is absolutely full of people with the same first name. Hell, it's been established (here) that there are multiple people, in Ohio alone, who have the same full name I do. But when you're in control of the story, why would you make things more confusing to read by, say, adding another Arthur to a Harry Potter story: Or worse, adding another Arthur who is also another Ministry employee?

I especially dislike when the name being reused is employed in an inappropriate fashion. Inappropriate how? Like, for instance, Harry naming one of his sons Peter. Really? Why would Harry give a son the same name as the man who betrayed his parents to certain death (his positively 'Stockholmian' choice of baby names in the epilogue notwithstanding)? There's a whole slew of names that could be used for such a thing, even if you restrict yourself to traditional British ones, and you choose Peter?

It's like they didn't stop and think for a single second about what they were doing. This is yet another situation that falls under my category of "This implies you don't care much about the story you're writing, so why should I care about it either?"

And, of course, the more unusual a name it is, the more glaring its reuse is going to be. In the case of reusing surnames, it will invariably turn out the OC has no relation to the canon character whose name they share... the author wasn't making a decision to flesh out canon in such a fashion, they just didn't have sufficient brain power to fabricate their own name.

 

But Tom Peter Potter had such nice ring to it, you mean I really can't?

 

Well, it's certainly better than Albus Severus.

 

I find the Evens/Evans thing to be more annoying.

 

I think The Lesser Sadness gets away with it because it's directly a trope subversion, so you get a sort of gleeful little kick out of it all backfiring horribly.