That, seems really silly. It's sounds like something a Tumblr SJW came up with to critique gendered bathrooms.

 

I'm disgusted.

 

Maybe the author identifies himself as a unisex toilet. I've read stranger things on tumblr.

 

See, when I just read that paragraph at somewhere around 6AM after having been up all night, I was really weirded out and kept thinking what a race of sentient unisex toilets would be like, like what would their culture and art consist of. Farts and literal shit? Cleaning chemicals? I think I spent about a good 20 minutes or so thinking about how they would even develop any kind of technology and how odd it would have to look to fit their own specifications and dimensions.

Not to mention, how would they be even capable of interstellar travel?

Then I came here again, reread your post and realized you were just talking about plain Earth unisex bathrooms.

 

A rather minor one. but when fics seem to associate Veela most closely with France. The Delacour women are French part-veelas, but the writers seem to forget that the creatures themselves are introduced as the Bulgarian team's mascot. And with all of the beasts in the series that are from real legends I wonder about the writer who doesn't do the slightest bit of research(even if looking only for fanon ideas) whose Google Fu can't lead them to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernatural_beings_in_Slavic_folklore#Vila

 

I hate true love types romance arches where female characters (and male ones when that happens) drops all of her (his) defining characteristics, their entire personality, in order to become the Perfect! partner. How, they just Love Human So Much that they would sacrifice anything and everything just to make Human happy.

 

A teen or older Harry calling anyone any variation of "mother" or "father" but his actual parents (unless he was adopted by decent people at a very young age).

Harry spent his entire childhood wishing he had his parents, wondering what they were really like, knowing they would have loved him when the Dursleys did not... and that's in spite of the Dursleys telling him they were drunken layabouts who got themselves killed in a car accident because they were irresponsible drinkers!

From the age of 11 onward, they aren't just the people who gave him life, they're the people who loved him so much that they gave their lives to preserve his, the ones who loved him so much that it kept him alive even in the face of the Killing Curse, when no one else had ever survived it.

Did Harry want a family? Absolutely!
Did Harry want parental figures to care for him and give him affection and, yes, perhaps validation? Sure.
Did Harry want people to take the place of his parents, even just to the extent of calling them "mum" and "dad?" I honestly don't think so: Not at 11, and certainly not by the time Sirius is gone.

I think those titles, if you will, would become symbolic to him and I don't think he'd really want to call anyone else by the names his real parents should have had.

If he'd been adopted by decent people while he was still 15 months old, or maybe even as old as 4 or 5? Sure, he might call them "mom" or "dad," with the caveat that the longer he's been subjected to the Dursleys, the less likely he would be to bother calling anyone those things.

By the time he's in his mid teens, the adults in his life have almost universally fucked him over. The Dursleys' faults are obvious; Dumbledore always did what he thought was right by the world rather than Harry; Lupin fucked Harry over by simply not being there; McGonagall seemed to think voicing her misgivings was a substitute for actually fucking doing something; Sirius fucked up first by prioritizing revenge over Harry's well being, was in no shape to be a parental figure after Azkaban, and then got killed because he was fucking around when he should have been fighting; and the Weasleys had their own army of kids to sort out on top of the fact that Molly would have been way more controlling than she ever had any right to be.

Harry, at 15-16... I just don't see him even wanting an adult taking care of him. On top of the factors in the previous paragraph, he has money, he has more magical skill than many adults, and most of his year is spent at boarding school living in a castle with round the clock access to food, all of which is prepaid. That's money, shelter, food, and education: What else is there?

What does he need a parent for that isn't already being provided for him, aside from affection?

The adults in Harry's life are split between the ones who are totally neutral (most of Earth's populace), the ones who want to kill him, the ones who want to defame him and neutralize his influence, the ones who want to keep him alive for their agenda (Albus, Snape), the ones whose job it is to make sure he stays alive (school staff, Order members), and the ones who just care about his well being (Weasleys, maybe Tonks, and Lupin - though he sure doesn't go overboard to actually show it).

Out of those people, the Weasleys are the only ones likely to be inclined to try being parents to Harry or at least show him affection and/or validation and, frankly, Harry's already reaping the benefits of their affection without having to be under the yoke of Molly's overbearing control issues and inability to let go.

So we've established that, at this point in his life, he doesn't need parents as providers, he's been burned by most adults anyway, none of these people are going to give him more protection than they already do, and the only people willing to offer emotional support are already giving as much as they're inclined to.

And I believe he'd hold his parents in high enough esteem that he wouldn't want to call anyone else "mum" and "dad," even casually, much less formally. I think "mother" and "Father" mean too much to him to give them out as token titles. So that's zero reasons to call anyone those things, and at least a few good reasons why he might actively want to avoid doing it.

I think he'd say, "I had parents. They loved me, provided for me, and in the end they made the ultimate sacrifice -gave me everything they had or would ever have- to ensure I could live. They did not get to live. They didn't get to raise their son. The very least I can do is leave them the honor of those titles. So, not to be rude, Molly, but I cannot call you 'mum.' / Not that I don't appreciate the offer, *fiancée's parents*, but I'm not going to be calling you 'mum' and 'dad.'"

It just drives me up a wall when someone tells a 15 and older Harry, "Call me dad/mum." and he just does it, happy as a pig in slop, without so much as a flinch, a brow crease, a tightness in the eyes, or something to indicate he's at least a tiny bit hesitant about it, because maybe the notion of a parent -shit, I don't know- holds a kind of deeper meaning for him than it would for a lot of people, since he was orphaned when his parents performed perhaps the greatest act of love a parent ever could for their child.

It bugs me even more when Harry up and voluntarily starts calling someone that out of nowhere, without any prompting. And the older he is, the more it irritates me, because he's way past needing so much as an ersatz parent, even on a purely emotional level, and he's old enough to have the juice to say, "No, and here's why you don't get to give me shit for my stance -which is quite well-reasoned, thank you very much- if you indeed try to do that."

I'm guessing that this is usually another example of people writing something and approaching it as general fiction using HP characters' names, rather than Harry Potter fiction using the HP characters' backgrounds. Stop to think about the mindset and motivations of the characters for whom you are writing.

tl/dr: By 15, Harry doesn't even need a real parent, much less an ersatz one with none of the responsibilities, who honorarily gets James or Lily's title 'just for the hell of it,' so I simply don't see him playing along with anyone who wants him to call them 'mum' or 'dad.'

Yup. Same for magical pets that Harry either buys or finds in an egg/stasis in his vault, except that there's even less (canon) justification to include them. They all but never end up contributing to the plot in any substantive way; they're just there to say, "Look at all my impossibly cool shit that I have zero use for because I'm so rich, but paradoxically can only obtain because I'm so rich."

It's wasted words written by teenagers with fantasies of wealth, power, and popularity.

I believe it was for situations such as this that the phrase, "the exception that proves the rule" was coined.

Which is okay, except that he should have been an orangutan.

But my polling data says that One-million-two-hundred-ten-thousand-three-hundred-forty-five people disagree. :awesome

Bizarre author idiosyncrasies which jar the reader out of the story are a peeve in any fandom.

Sometimes it's something that makes the reader say, "Well, clearly this is something the author is interested in. Weird."

Like if they had three different stories where they went out of their way to shoehorn a scene into the plot where someone pees on someone else to treat a jellyfish sting, you might be justified in thinking they're trying to satisfy a mild water-sports kink... and once you notice it you can't stop applying that knowledge to the rest of the story.

"Hmm, did Ron just go to the bathroom at the end of this scene for no reason, or is this somehow related to this writer's embarrassingly obvious fetish?"

"Oh, this guy's got a new story out? Wonder how long it will be until Harry is pissing on someone's jellyfish sting. The author does realize what is needed here is actual medical attention, right? Or that there are undoubtedly better treatments involving magic?"

"Okay, one of the ingredients in that potion is fresh urine, and so we had to endure a scene where Hermione has to enlist Ginny's help to collect it? God dammit, is this weirdo even trying to hide it anymore? For fuck's sake, enough with the pissing, can we get back to the goddamned plot? I give up."*

Other times it's just something that makes you stop reading and think, "I saw this before in their last story!" Either way, it takes you out of the moment.

If you're reading a Jeconais story, you can be sure that at some point (or multiple points... each chapter) teenage Harry is going to reveal dance skills on par with a lifelong professional dancer, and then possibly flirt with a (full-grown, adult) man, just to show how confident and comfortable he is with his masculinity, even though he's totally straight... and probably jailbait for someone that old.

I'm similarly annoyed by authors who have very idiosyncratic lines of dialogue which show up, nearly verbatim, in everything they write.

I think you meant, "I'm triggered." :fire

 

I really love your rants, don't ever stop.

 

Warlocke is the best writer on DLP, it's just that he never writes stories, so we have to be content with what we get.

 

Maybe we should start a youtube video series featuring dramatic readings of his rants.

 

Especially dumb Crossovers. You know, the kind that require convoluted circumstances for the Crossover part to actually happen, usually involves either Harry getting raised by someone from the other Universe because "grrr, thoz Dursleys are evul!" (from Darth Revan to Captain Jack Sparrow) or simply justifying something like Sherlock banging Snape, and Harry still going to Hogwarts for no real reason whatsoever (whether because he's already learning reality-bending stuff or he lives really far away/in another time/in another dimension).

 

"Right turn, Clyde." Let's see if anyone gets the reference.

Being ripped limb from limb by an orangutan is probably just as bad as being gnawed on by a tiger.

 

I've never actually watched the Any Which Way... movies but I definitely get the reference.

Probably slower, though.

I wrote a scene once where Ron's animagus form turns out to be a chimpanzee, and when he turns back to human after his first transformation, he's jealous of his friend's/friends' form(s) and upset that he's "some dumb old monkey."

Then he notices Hermione has backed herself into a corner, wand at the ready and looking horrified. She then starts rattling off statistics and accounts of chimp owners/handlers who have been savagely mauled (and sometimes partially eaten) by chimpanzees. Thus, they scare the shit out of her (as they should any sane person, she says).

It kind of makes Ron feel better.

 

In all fairness to Sirius, had he been a little less concerned with Harry's feelings towards him in POA Voldemort May have never risen. But I agree with the mother/father bit it's honestly creepy.

 

OC's. More specifically, OC's that don't seem to fit into the story's theme. Like a peasant in Game of Thrones being extremely happy and familiar with his lord, they might be well-written, but they don't fit the theme.

Or like a random muggleborn wizard fitting in perfectly in Slytherin, or someone like Draco Malfoy not having any trouble in Gryffindor while still being themselves. It just doesn't fit.

 

Works for me

 

Why does every writer seem to think Neville is a fucking turtle.

 

Because they are unconsciously expressing their rage at canon Harry using poor Neville as a medium.

 

Shipping him with Luna, whose Patronus is a hare, creates a classic 'opposites attract' scenario of the tortoise and the hare.

Mind you, I made his animagus form an elk but that was mostly so someone could say "Whoa, Nev- nice rack!"

 

I have what I shall call a metapeeve.

The old trope of everyone mocks protaganist, protagonist fucks off, everyone realizes how great protagonist was and wishes protagonist returns as everything has gone to shit.

Nothing surprising here, I'm sure many of us hate it. But what I've found recently is if the story and writing is otherwise good I can tolerate it... But ONLY if the author is female and the protagonist male.

Its the obvious whiny teenager writing a wish fulfillment that bothers me more than the shitty plot device. Once I can divorce the two, I can at least give it a chance to move beyond and tell a story.

So yeh, to echo Warlocke - when author's own nonsense breaks the fourth wall, it's trouble.