The "Pureblood Look". Which is essentially the "Black Family Look". No, I'm not talking about the "Blank Face" that purebloods (except the ones in canon) seem to be so highly trained to don. Every so often I read a fic where a character remarks that another character, usually thought to be a muggleborn, "looks pureblood", and I really can't understand where the authors get this, because the purebloods in canon had widely differing looks, and many of them were described with not very complimentary terms - so looking "pureblood" can't really mean "good looking", like it is often used. There are even fics where Harry undergoes a transformation that makes him look "more pureblood". No shit, his father was pureblood, and he looks just like him.

 

Maybe it's something like the french makeup during the 18th century. Being magical and rich means not doing manual labor which suggests, that the whiteness of your skin could be something to brag about. People would use magic to imitate the rich and acquire then common "Pureblood Look".

 

Except the story isn't set in the 18th century, and being pale isn't exclusive to purebloods. Also, Blaise was described as dark-skinned, and his behavior suggested he's pureblood.

 

That's why I said 'like' people in 18th century france.

Wearing robes is not exclusive to wizards either, just ask the KKK(only their grand wizard wears red I believe). That doesn't mean wizards don't wear robes.

The paleness could have a magical quality to it. I'm making assumptions based on what you wrote, I don't know which fanfic you are talking about. I have never encountered that trope before.

I was refering to pureblood looks, not pureblood behavior.

 

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11419305/1/The-Apprentice

Read the first section of this and you will know true dissatisfaction. The author explains absolutely nothing.

 

I think I'd like to own a pet Peeves. I think we'd have a lot of fun together.

...But on topic, I really hate it when authors turn Umbridge into a Voldemort supporter/Death Eater ally, just to give her a bigger role as a villain. Not only do I have to deal with more Umbridge, but it kinda goes against a pretty big point in canon.

So you also know they didn't read the books. I just don't understand how somebody can read that passage...and then decide to make every character they don't like (see also) a Death Eather. I guess it kinda relates back to the desire to see people as wholly good or wholly evil, with clearly defined lines separating them, but it still pisses me off when I see it.

 

Umbridge presided over trials of suspected muggle-borns, where they were dragged around by dementors after she had found them guilty of 'stealing magic'.

She might not have been a card-carrying Death Eater, but I can't imagine she would have seriously objected (in theory) to being one. The torture afterwards might have been offputting though.

EDIT

Your point is valid - it's annoying when writers split the world into Harry&Co vs Death Eaters feat. Voldemort. But Umbridge is one of (in my opinion) the worst possible examples for this, as I said above.
Interestingly, I've only really encountered this in Harry Potter stories, not in any of the other fandoms I brose (MLP, 40K, Dresden, Marvel, DC, Pokemon), but it could well be because there isn't normally a ideologically different villain.

 

Yeah, that's fair. I always saw Umbridge as being driven more by ambition than by ideology, but she does seem to have a pretty big objection to muggles/muggleborns, and also people join the Death Eaters for all kinds of reasons. I guess that, in her case, I'm probably more annoyed that they find her such a compelling character that they have to give her villain cred than I am that they've misrepresented canon.

 

Dolores Jane Umbridge was the eldest child and only daughter of Orford Umbridge, a wizard, and Ellen Cracknell, a Muggle, who also had a Squib son. Dolores’s parents were unhappily married, and Dolores secretly despised both of them: Orford for his lack of ambition (he had never been promoted, and worked in the Department of Magical Maintenance at the Ministry of Magic), and her mother, Ellen, for her flightiness, untidiness, and Muggle lineage. Both Orford and his daughter blamed Ellen for Dolores's brother's lack of magical ability, with the result that when Dolores was fifteen, the family split down the middle, Orford and Dolores remaining together, and Ellen vanishing back into the Muggle world with her son. Dolores never saw her mother or brother again, never spoke of either of them, and henceforth pretended to all she met that she was a pure-blood.

An accomplished witch, Dolores joined the Ministry of Magic directly after she left Hogwarts, taking a job as a lowly intern in the Improper Use of Magic Office. Even at seventeen, Dolores was judgemental, prejudiced and sadistic, although her conscientious attitude, her saccharine manner towards her superiors, and the ruthlessness and stealth with which she took credit for other people's work soon gained her advancement. Before she was thirty, Dolores had been promoted to Head of the office, and it was but a short step from there to ever more senior positions in the management of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. By this time, she had persuaded her father to take early retirement, and by making him a small financial allowance, she ensured that he dropped quietly out of sight. Whenever she was asked (usually by workmates who did not like her) 'are you related to that Umbridge who used to mop the floors here?' she would smile her sweetest, laugh, and deny any connection whatsoever, claiming that her deceased father had been a distinguished member of the Wizengamot. Nasty things tended to happen to people who asked about Orford, or anything that Dolores did not like talking about, and people who wanted to remain on her good side pretended to believe her version of her ancestry.

In spite of her best efforts to secure the affections of one of her superiors (she never cared particularly which of them it was, but knew that her own status and security would be advanced with a powerful husband), Dolores never succeeded in marrying. While they valued her hard work and ambition, those who got to know her best found it difficult to like her very much. After a glass of sweet sherry, Dolores was always prone to spout very uncharitable views, and even those who were anti-Muggle found themselves shocked by some of Dolores's suggestions, behind closed doors, of the treatment that the non-magical community deserved.

As she grew older and harder, and rose higher within the Ministry, Dolores's taste in little girlish accessories grew more and more pronounced; her office became a place of frills and furbelows, and she liked anything decorated with kittens (though found the real thing inconveniently messy). As the Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge became increasingly anxious and paranoid that Albus Dumbledore had ambitions to supersede him, Dolores managed to claw her way to the very heart of power, by stoking both Fudge's vanity and his fears, and presenting herself as one of the few he could trust.

Dolores's appointment as Inquisitor at Hogwarts gave full scope, for the first time in her life, for her prejudices and her cruelty. She had not enjoyed her time at school, where she had been overlooked for all positions of responsibility, and she relished the chance to return and wield power over those who had not (as she saw it) given her her due.

Dolores has what amounts to a phobia of beings that are not quite, or wholly, human. Her distaste for the half-giant Hagrid, and her terror of centaurs, reveal a terror of the unknown and the wild. She is an immensely controlling person, and all who challenge her authority and world-view must, in her opinion, be punished. She actively enjoys subjugating and humiliating others, and except in their declared allegiances, there is little to choose between her and Bellatrix Lestrange.

Dolores's time at Hogwarts ended disastrously, because she overreached the remit Fudge had given her, stepping outside the bounds of her own authority, carried away with a fanatical sense of self-purpose. Shaken but unrepentant after a catastrophic end to her Hogwarts career, she returned to a Ministry which had been plunged into turmoil due to the return of Lord Voldemort.

In the change of regimes that followed Fudge's forced resignation, Dolores was able to slip back into her former position at the Ministry. The new Minister, Rufus Scrimgeour, had more immediate problems pressing in on him than Dolores Umbridge. Scrimgeour was later punished for this oversight, because the fact that the Ministry had never punished Dolores for her many abuses of power seemed to Harry Potter to reveal both its complacency and its carelessness. Harry considered Dolores's continuing employment, and the lack of any repercussions for her behaviour at Hogwarts, a sign of the Ministry's essential corruption, and refused to cooperate with the new Minister because of it (Dolores is the only person, other than Lord Voldemort, to leave a permanent physical scar on Harry, having forced him to cut the words 'I must not tell lies' on the back of his own hand during detention).

Dolores was soon enjoying life at the Ministry more than ever. When the Ministry was taken over by the puppet Minister Pius Thicknesse, and infiltrated by the Dark Lord's followers, Dolores was in her true element at last. Correctly judged, by senior Death Eaters, to have much more in common with them than she ever had with Albus Dumbledore, she not only retained her post but was given extra authority, becoming Head of the Muggle-born Registration Commission, which was in effect a kangaroo court that imprisoned all Muggle-borns on the basis that they had ‘stolen’ their wands and their magic.

It was as she sat in judgement of another innocent woman that Harry Potter finally attacked Dolores in the very heart of the Ministry, and stole from her the Horcrux she had unwittingly been wearing.

With the fall of Lord Voldemort, Dolores Umbridge was put on trial for her enthusiastic co-operation with his regime, and convicted of the torture, imprisonment and deaths of several people (some of the innocent Muggle-borns she sentenced to Azkaban did not survive their ordeal).

This is Rowling's character bio of Umbridge. In fanfiction she is usually written as being fat, dumb, and ugly however she's actually fat, ugly and pretty smart. I wouldn't mind seeing a fic where she was actually portrayed properly.

 

I will make it happen. Believe in me!

 

I believe in you my man. I really do.

 

Lately I have developed a severe dislike for the "House elves die if they are freed." cliche.

I thought about it a bit and my dislike of it is threefold.

1) It's ofthen used as a cheap way to show Hermione in a foolish light and that's just lazy. First of all one of Hermione's central character traits is her love of information, she consumes it at every opportunity. If the freeing was lethal it would have come up somewhere. Also she was not well liked at Hogwarts and someone would have just pointed that out to annoy her.

2)Now I know that this site is firmly on the wizard side of the "muggle vs. wizard" thing and I honestly agree, but this just seems as a way to handwave away the one true criticism of the Wizarding world we have. It also feels like an overzealous reactionary response to all the stupid "why didn't harry just use a glock" type of fics.

3)Dobby didn't die. Winky didn't die. It's just so obvious that freed elves don't die and authors usually have to go to great lenghts just to explain their continued state of not being dead. Stealth bindings, Dobby being extra special little snowflake etc.

I just wished that when an author does not wish to deal with the difficult topic of slavery and their casts ambivalence towards it they would just ignore the plot point. Yes there would be a bunch of reviews screaming about how your third year fic missed it, but that's what the AU shield is for.

 

A proper "Fuck yeah, wizards are awesome!" fic wouldn't even need to whitewash away the negative parts of the magical world. Making wizards have the exact same mores as muggles actually has the exact opposite effect, as that would only happen if they spent most of their lives in muggle society and didn't spend enough time as a distinct community to develop their own values.

If your story is about what's supposed to be a foreign culture and the reader never feels even the slightest bit of values dissonance then you've probably just written your own culture with funny clothes.

 

While I also dislike that, Dobby and Winky both work at Hogwarts now. Well, one of them does at least.

 

Sirius Black's animagus form is not a motherfucking Grim, it's just a big, black, dog.

• His form is never, ever, referred to as being a Grim, in the books. Neither Sirius, nor Remus, ever say that's his form.
• There's no such thing as "a Grim" anyway, because Grim isn't a breed of animal, magical (like dragons) or otherwise, it's a singular entity: THE Grim.
• Even in the Wizarding World, The Grim is considered a mythical figure of ill omen. Saying Sirius Black's animagus form is "a Grim" is like saying he's an Easter Bunny, Charon the Ferryman*, or Mother Nature animagus.

Having a stupid or superstitious wizard momentarily mistake Sirius for The Grim is fine, in the right context, but Sirius shouldn't present himself as a Grim Animagus, and neither should the author.

That shit is dumb, dumb, dumb!



*Ironically, the books did turn Cerberus into a breed of animal instead of a singular entity, mythical or real; still, they did not do the same with The Grim.

 

Singing. Under no circumstance is it ok for Harry or any other character to whip out a guitar and start singing "I won't give up" or any other sappy ass romance song. I will immediately drop the fic If that happens. And enough with sparkly ass eyes that entrap the womanly souls in them. I get it, he's got pretty green eyes...

 

Yep this is unforgivable. The only song that should make an appearance is the sorting hat's song. And to be honest I tend to skip over that.

 

Any time anyone says or does something remotely clever, they're showing their "Slytherin side" or some such bullshit.

 

As an addendum to the one above, any time some 12 year old acts like they are a master manipulator and schemer. Extra points if their schemes are so banal in reality that you aren't really sure whether it is a parody of not.

 

A major one for me is some authority figure, or Hermione (this is a peeve in and among itself. I don't think canon Hermione ever commented on someones' language) chastising a first or second year for saying crap or damn, or something else totally innocuous. I've even read fics where an early year Harry said, "dang or butt," and some shit authority figure, or more usually Hermione, goes, "LANGUAGE, HARRY!"

It's really bad. It's implying that the only acceptable word for a human being's butt is rear end. Or rear. Or bottom.

A second year would be a 7th grader in the US. A 7th grader being called off for saying crap shits on my immersion so far I get a hernia.