Please...please tell me that isn't a fic summary?

 

no, that’s an author complaining on reddit how many ideas they have and musing on how… awesome those ideas are.

 

Thank god, that would have taken the cake for worst summary ever!

 

Unnecessary drawn out duels. Even worse when it's obvious that the author thinks it's an epic and dramatic high-point of their story.

Those fights just don't make any sense to me, and I've closed more fics I can count after Harry and Voldemort have a casual fight with banter that ends in a draw. I like my fights short and brutal, with clear objectives and preparation put into them. If a fight is ever a "fair" one, something should have gone horribly wrong somewhere, and the characters should acknowledge that.

 

Long, drawn out fights are the reason I stopped reading shonen manga. Like, I know they're made to entertain twelve year old boys, but holy hell those battles drag on for literal months.

 

Lazy plot devices and tropes. If I see Lord/Heir Harry Whoever-Whatever-3-More-Names, I'm out. Same with "distant relatives", "goblins are nice", "Harry finds..." and basically every "that happened, so now Harry is the strongest/coolest/smartest/richest/most handsome".

Overly abusive Dursleys. I get it, abuse bad, boo-hoo, but caricatures aren't interesting.

Harry/Fleur. The idea of a teenage girl being physically attracted to a boy two years younger is more unbelievable to me than the existance of magic.

"Muggles are the best, purebloods suck" preaching.

Harems, bashing and slash.

 

I have numerous red lines when it comes to fanfiction. Here's one and sorry if it was mentioned before:
Harry being raised by a loving adult and getting spanked at some point.
This screams pedo. I just feel that the author masturbates to this shit.

 

I've never understood this. I mean even in the books Krum is stated to be 18 at the time of the tournament, and he is dating Hermione who is in the same year as Harry. If we can buy an internationally famous Quidditch player wanting to date a much younger bookworm who puts next to no effort into her looks, I think Harry and Fleur should be reasonable. Harry is at least famous in his own right.

It's not even that rare for freshmen in high school to date seniors. I mean it's not common but back when I was in high school there were one or two couples like that every year. It usually ended bad, but so do most relationships in high school. Do people just forget what being that age is like or is it just because Fleur is really attractive? I've just never really understood the age gap issue. I'd say the experience in dating is probably much more of a hurdle.

 

Except he's not a boy two years younger than her, he's a a boy two years younger than her who won the Triwizard tournumnet and is famous for offing a famous dark wizard.

 

That sounds distinctly like Harry's New Home, in which even a 16yo Percy asks Snape to spank him. WTF?

 

Hm, red lines? I don't know, I've read a lot of shit, and usually I'll give something a shot. I've found some gems in otherwise completely infested tropes. I'm also pretty familiar with almost a dozen active fandoms, and a few more inactive ones. With that many stories, there aren't many tropes I completely nope out of.

That being said, the most universal and apparent redline for me is first person. I don't understand it at all because I've read a handful of really good first person books, but if it's a first person fanfic I am out. I close it immediately. Done. No chance. Even great writing and a trope I super enjoy is still getting closed because I fucking hate first person fanfics. I'm picky about first person in general because most authors never develop an actual good first person voice for a character, or really justify the utility of making the story first person imho, but even when the source material was first person (first PJO series, for example), I can't do it. It's almost always really, really obviously badly written, and first person is already so easy to write badly, and my standards for it are much, much higher.

 

An older guy dating an younger girl is nothing new, it's a fact of life that girls mature faster than boys. A two years difference between an older girl and an younger boy, in that age group, may as well be twenty.

He's also a scrawny, socially awkward guy with absolutely zero game.

 

Eh, I don't buy this. My first experience of any kind with a girl happened when I was 14. She was 16. Of course, she wouldn't have wanted to date me, but that might have changed in a hurry if I were rich, famous, and talented.

So was I. Again: 'rich, famous, and talented' changes everything, and Harry wasn't an uber-nerd in canon. He fought dragons. Harry/Fleur might be unlikely, but it's not totally unrealistic.

 

I'm gonna interject with a Pokemon fandom red-line.

I swear to god m8. When you have a trainer talking to his pokemon we don't need anime style, "Infernape! nape! nape! Infern! Ape!" They're fucking monsters! Give us growls and grunts, emotive flame releases and draconic tempers!

Sizes are also a... let's make it an orange line. They don't cause me to immediately dip out, but it helps. It's one of the best parts of the Triumvirate universe. A trained dragonite standing 40 feet tall with a wingspan eclipsing that. Tyranitar and Nidoking and Aggron being 12 feet tall, the latter sloughing off stealth rocks and spikes with every step, the former bleeding darkness with every chomp. Nidoking secreting toxic spikes and sludge bombs with every attack... Garchomp being 30 feet from snout to tail diving and swimming through sand, creating earthquakes and stone edges with every breach. Fully evolved pokemon need to be monsters of unsurpassed power and fury. If you can't control them, it's not an issue of losing a pokemon battle because it loafs around, it's an issue of it eating you.

I may or may not be on the wrong thread.

 

I don't understand why are you guys sharing your "experiences" with me like I'm your shrink or something. Yes, it's possible. Yes, it could happen. Could someone write it in the right way? Probably, but there is no way I'm gonna dig through a pile of trash only on the possibility of maybe finding something worth my while.

 

Meh, I don't think it's as unlikely as all that. Older male/younger female relationships in high school were certainly much more common than the reverse, but older female/younger male relationships did happen. Also, while relative mental/emotional/physical development level makes a difference, I don't think it was the be-all, end-all. Social acceptability was a much bigger factor, imo. For male Seniors, getting with a freshman girl was considered neutral, at worst, and sometimes downright positive depending on his friend group's opinions. In addition, female freshman definitely saw snagging a senior for a boyfriend as a positive.

With the reverse scenario, while male freshmen definitely encouraged each other to go for the senior girls, among those older girls, it was treated like getting with a younger guy was basically an admission that you weren't good enough for guys your own age (or more commonly by that point, college-age guys).

Because of this uneven social pressure, not a lot of experimenting went on between the younger guys/older girls, so I really couldn't say how common that kind of relationship would be in an environment where the girls contend with weaker pressures against it/less access to adult males (since Hogwarts is a boarding school). I think it would be unusual, but not unheard of for a Harry/Fleur age gap situation to occur. The stability of such a relationship, on the other hand, is difficult to figure because it depends too heavily on the particular quirks and characters of the people involved.

 

You claimed a girl dating a guy two years younger than her was less believable than magic existing. Why do you think people would possibly want to share examples of it happening? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say because it isn't super rare even among people who aren't famous, and people were trying to point out that your claim was not based in reality.

Though this does lead me to something that is very close to a red line for me and that's Harry and Fleur's relationship going too smoothly. I don't think the age difference is a big deal in them getting together, but the experience difference in dating should definitely be a big deal once the honeymoon phase of the relationship wears off. Actually, that goes for most any relationship Harry gets in.

 

To me.

Maybe, for someone as "based into really" as you seem to be, it should've occured to you that I also have my fair share of experience in the matter, if I make a point to avoid it even in fiction. Perhaps, even more so than the people, who keep repeating "well, it happens, if the guy's famous, but it's not that common, but still could happen, but it doesn't really work, but it's possible, but not realistic, but I've seen it" and expecting... what, exactly? To blow my mind with the sudden truth that teenagers fuck? To help reach revelation and make me begin reading trash romances? Or maybe just to point out how wrong I am, because I said something negative about their favourite pairing? Oh, well, we might never know...

 

I think for Pokemon, my red line is when they attempt to make fanfic based on the anime, and then insert game-only terminology, or worse, terminology that only exists out of universe and makes literally no sense in-story. Two terms stand out in particular: starters, and psuedo-legendaries. The former makes no sense because while there are a fixed set of Pokemon professors hand out to the PC in these games, most trainers don't get their Pokemon from famous professors, so it implies a regularity that's only common among protagonists in a role-playing game. And the latter I don't care for much in general, but absolutely makes no sense to say even in-game, much less in the anime world.