Ha, just read a common Weasley-bash fic. You'll find all you need for three lifetimes in the first chapter.

Same here, always found it weird when I heard teachers in some schools called their students by surname.

 

Strange, maybe it's a private school thing. I could have sworn I was told that by someone. Maybe it's something from my mum's generation. She grew up in the UK so I might have heard it from her.

Does anyone remember what they used in HP canon? Malfoy was always Malfoy, Hermione was initially Granger. Any others referred to as such?

 

I went to a British state school and we did use surnames, but it was usually in a jokey way with friends, especially if you had a common or similar name to someone else. There were a handful of students known only by their surnames, but I can't figure out why. Certain teachers also used our surnames when telling us off or trying to catch our attention.

In canon, Harry seems to use surnames for people he doesn't know very well or doesn't like. I don't remember Hermione being Granger, but we do see Lupin become Remus in DH.

 

I believe Ron referred to her as Granger before the troll incident. I think it was "Granger is insufferable".

 

This R.O.B. shit that's been going around for a long time now, infecting fanfiction from a certain website. I'm tired of this shit. It's dumb, and it's stupid, and it's dumb.

Writers have gotten so gorram lazy that they don't even try to justify their insipid, bullshit plots anymore. They just shrug their shoulders and go, "God did it."

Lazy. LAZY! At least if you're going to have a being with god-like powers DO something with it. Someone needs to do a Dr. Manhattan style deconstruction of these R.O.B.'s, and they need to do it quick. I might actually enjoy that.

It doesn't help that this bullshit is usually coupled along with an SI. Shit's so stupid.

 

Do you mean AH or SB/SV?

 

It's probably obvious but what exactly is R.O.B?

 

Random Omnipotent Being

 

I thought it meant Real Onion Bagles. On a more serious note though is this a book where talking about?

 

It's a lazy non-literary shortcut that some use to justify their basic plot premise.

E.g. Harry Potter transported to XX other fictional universe (GoT, Bleach, Naruto, Whatever) or time-travels back to whenever.

How does Harry get there? A Random Omnipotent Being did it, now lets go on with the story.

Normally when someone writes a story they'd include the set-up chapter where some random phenomenon would be the catalyst for the change, purely as the 'mechanic' to loosely justify what happens.

For example, a common Harry Potter Time-travel set-up device tends to be "During the Department of Mysteries brawl, a mis-aimed Killing Curse hits a timeturner/artifact, the explosion results in a temporal doohicky and Harry is now in the 1970's so he can sex up his teenage mother and become his own father."

Use of Random Omnipotent Being tend to be out-of-story/meta-fiction explanations that the writer states upfront because they cannot be bothered writing the tedious transition chapter. Very few stories actually have R.O.B in the narrative text, but instead have it in the authors preface.

However, as a corollary to this point I can recall a number of utterly terrible (Usually H/Hr fixit shipfics) where Harry dies, goes to some ethereal plane where 'Fate' tells him he was meant to get together with Hermione instead of Ginny and that the Weasleys & Dumbledore are manipulating him, but because he's 'Fate's' favourite, he gets one last chance and gets sent back in time to when he was 10 or something. So in that respect stating pre-story that 'R.O.B did it' can be used to avoid terrible writing, but on the other hand if you can't think of a way to not make it appear contrived/terrible then you should probably work on your writing/plotting.

R.O.B is also pretty common in Self-Insert fanfiction. Why is the SI in X fictional universe? Because R.O.B did it. Now lets get on with the actual story.

R.O.B is a staple of Spacebattles fanfiction.

 

I don't really read on AH, so SB/SV.

 

Does R.O.B only apply to fanon created omnipotent beings like "Fate" and "Death"? What about canon ones like Living Tribunal, Professor Paradox or God from Supernatural? Do those fall under R.O.B?

 

Generally, ROB is Random, not by name, but by just generally being random. Mostly they aren't named, hence being referred to as ROB.

People "wake up" in whatever universe they wind up in and usually say, "Dammit ROB!"

Or if asked how they got there they say, "ROB."

They don't really care what his name is or what pantheon he comes from.

 

The difference between fanon created R.O.B.s, and ones that exist in canon is that the ones in canon are usually handled by those that know how to write a story. I don't really know the things you mentioned that well (DC>Marvel and all that), but when God-like figures appear in fiction, they're usually there for a purpose beyond a lazy plot device.

Dr. Manhattan was used to explore the very concept of a god, and to deconstruct the role of a superhuman in stories. Q, in Star Trek, allowed for the exploration of various moral and philosophical quandaries.

In fanfiction, that isn't a thing. They'll just show up in the first chapter, and say, "I'm bored so you're going to another dimension herpderp insert sci-fi reference here."

At which point the SI will go, "Oh no! A random omnipotent being!" Then they'll get shoved into their favorite universe, and never think about it again.

There's no sense of existential dread. They just found out that God exists, and has the mindset of a bored toddler, and no SI has ever paused and gone, "Wait, hold on a second. That's pretty fucking insane."

The problem also, as others pointed out, shows up in HP fanfiction. Harry will die, meet Fate, and Fate will chide Harry for falling for Dumbledore's manipulations, and not boning Hermione and Luna. I think the worst part about that is that Harry always acts like a doormat, and just accepts said petulant complaints after all the shit he's gone through.

 

SPEW gets quickly out of hand and becomes a Revolutionary Party, carrying behind it a United Front between House Elves, Squibs and Muggleborns. Dobby and Filch are it's leaders.

Sounds cracky, but Im really considering writing it off.

 

Writing it off is probably for the best, yes.

 

The opposite is actually a pet peeve of mine. When the author tries to portray Hermione as ignorant and SPEW as something negative. I'm really starting to get annoyed whenever I see people "explain" to Hermione that the life of an elf is somehow linked to being a slave for their mastet.

Most of the time these "explanations" seem to conveniently ignore Dobby.

 

Or Dobby has secretly bonded to Harry to stay alive.

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Authors who fail to reconcile two closely aligned universes in crossovers. Case in point, I just found a Buffy/Underworld crossover where there are two completely different and in no way related vampire species who have never heard of each other before.

It would have taken pretty much no effort for the author to merge each world seamlessly but they couldn't even be bothered to do that. Instead I was treated to a chapter where Buffy and Selene discuss the differences between "their" vampires.

 

Timetravel fics where Harry gets into verbal 'battles' with old classmates and 'wins'. I mean, ok, maybe a confrontation is unavoidable, but could the author at least try to pretend what we're witnessing isn't a complete non issue or just plain sad. Adult Harry 'winning' a verbal confrontation with a 14 year old is not impressive.

 

AO3 community and their dumb tags. I mean, how many variations of the word "porn" do I need exclude to see the effect? And what "sassy is sassy" is supposed to be?
Tags could be really useful, but people instead write some random shit in there.
Even now I see things like "get in the van losers", "vine is people too", "sit down shut up and strap in", "you can't possibly think this has a happy ending", "murderers do not make good boyfriends", "oh fuck yeah this is happening", "at least he laughs more in this", "can't these guys just use cellphones?".
I just wonder - is there any way to exclude general stupidity?