I just happened upon another peeve. Pluralization using apostrophes. Da fuck?

The worst part of it is that apostrophes are typically used properly elsewhere, but they pluralize words using apostrophes too. Dursley's rather than Dursleys. House's rather than houses. Spell's rather than spells. And the list goes on.

I find this seriously annoying. Unless English isn't the author's first language, these mistakes shouldn't be there. If they are, they shouldn't be seen every other sentence.

 

That's a pet peeve of mine as well. However, it's also one I understand because it's a mistake I used to commit. For me, at least, it came from the idea that a word so unique would look strange with a normal plural s. So, I thought I needed to break the pluralization from the reg. word. It took me a while to realize it was wrong because I was creating possessives that way.

 

I know this isn't funny. I really do. But for some obscure reason I just couldn't help but be amused by this.

It happens to me sometimes too. I write words sometimes and they look so strange I think I misspelt them. Then it turns out that I spelt them right.

I can understand occasional mistakes too, and I'll even give a bit of leeway whenever I happen upon such mistakes. If it happens repetitively though, I tend to just close the tab with the story and be done with it. My reaction may seem disproportionate, but it's just one of those things that irrationally irritate me.

 

Something that's been getting to me lately is a lack of proportionality with the points system. I mean, Rowling is a little guilty of this herself, what with Snape only deducting a point at a time in his first lesson, but later escalating to five or ten, but still, so many fics have him or Umbridge or whoever taking away fifty for minor infractions, when even they showed a little more perspective than that in canon. It's minor since nobody needed to care about House points after GOF or so, but still, people should try a little harder here.

 

Fics that are pretty good, maybe even rank in your Top Fics... but the Author also wrote exceptionally bad ones, to the point where it makes you question how good that other one even was.

 

Only if the bad ones came after or alongside the good ones. Even after is okay in some cases, such as the author states up front something along the lines of "I'm writing this as a guilty pleasure with tropes and cliches I enjoy for some stupid reason."

 

I think what I've genuinely come to hate the most about fanfiction, Harry Potter fanfiction at that, is how the setting itself can be ignored in favor of making something happen or some sort of circumstances coming about.

Often times, you see this in the sense that something can't be done, no matter what, and never mind that there's reality-changing magic available to the characters of HP that could/should probably be able to make it happen.

Other times, it's just common sense and the like missing completely from the story.

The most grievous offense I find is the one that takes completely canon premise/circumstances/background and then alter one of the characters from that point on.

The most stupid one I recently came across, by complete accident, was how somehow after the war Draco Malfoy framed Harry and everyone (barring his friends and family, of course) totally believed it even though it made no sense whatsoever.

Another absolutely retarded one was a Harry, post-GOF, who cowered before Dudley. I mean, what? The boy who faced off against wraiths, basilisks, the Tri-Wizard Tournament and a resurrected Voldemort on top of everything else as well, being afraid of his fat muggle cousin? Why? That makes no sense.

 

Damn, I have a headache trying to understand this post, but I think I got through most of it.

As to your last paragraph, you're way off base. Have you not seen 200 hundred pound men run away screaming from a harmless spider? You're expecting pure logic to exist in the human condition. It doesn't.

A better approach is narrative logic. In the fic, did the author write an AU Harry that cowered before Dudley when he was younger? If so, then according to Narrative Logic, he might or might not do so again depending on character development and story telling. Does Harry have any other irrational fears? Does he still refuse to discuss his past with anyone? All of those can be storytelling clues that in Narrative Logic, make his cowering before Dudley absolutely acceptable, and perhaps even necessary depending on how the fic plays out. The fact that he's faced Voldemort and a dozen other things does not matter if the central issue between him and Dudley isn't dealt with in the fic.

 

Fair enough.

No, this was pretty much everything canon up to that point and while it has been a while since I read the books, I seem to recall Harry being a cheeky little cunt from time to time, especially when it came to the Dursleys. That's why it made little sense to have him in this weird take on OotP timeline of events cowering from Dudley.

It just seems so minor and meaningless to worry about the Dursleys, when you compare them to actual threats in the story. It felt like unnecessary angst/drama was being added just for the sake of it being there.

 

Fair enough then.

I don't find Harry cowering a big deal if it's set up right. The human mind is such that the minor and meaningless can be terrifying given proper conditioning.

As for the adding angst/drama just for the sake of adding it, yeah, that is absolutely annoying.

 

A few pet peeves of mine.

• Hot springs scenes in persona fanfics.
• Kyubi, specifically, female Kyubi crying in Naruto.
• The night of the sealing of the Kyubi being shown.
• Mobs beating up Naruto.
• The Wave Arc.
• Naruto Namikaze, instead of Uzumaki.
• The prevalence of alt-power in Worm fanfiction.
• Daphne described as an ice queen.
• Violent tsunderes.
• People in MoL threads complaining that Zorian isn't a horny teenager.
• Summaries beginning with What if x was changed?
• Emily being paired with the outsider in Dishonored fanfiction.
• The Wisdom stat in gamer fanfics.
• Time skips and flashbacks.
• The main character being harem protagonist dense.
• High School DxD fanfics almost always having a harem pairing.
• High School DxD fanfics having a main girl in a harem.
• Having the main character being in Rias' Peerage.
• Nosebleeds.
• Fanfics having translations as a footnote.

Huh, didn't expect to have a list of twenty things. Not sure if all of these count as pet peeves though and it should be noted that most of these have an exception where I actually like it.

 

Adult authority figures saying shit like "Anyway, ...". Dumbledore especially. "Anyway, my boy..."

Go fuck yourself. Also "anyways", which is wrong coming from anyone, ever.

 

Dumbledore calling Harry "my boy" has long since become a peeve for me. It always accompanies manipulative!Dumbles, or those stories that try trading on our expectation of that cliche and are almost as bad in the end.

 

Hmm, I don't mind this so much if it doesn't accompany manipulative!dumbledore. Mostly because I find manipulative!dumbledore to be a shitty cliche that is never done properly. In fact, I think that cliche is my biggest pet peeve in the fandom. I haven't seen a story that did it well.

 

Probably the one that did it best was A Cadmean Victory, simply because it subverted it by having Dumbledore be exactly the same, and the manipulation was a creation of Harry's paranoia. So the best example is sort of not an example at all, basically.

But the phrase is just too entangled in those associations, plus it just doesn't sound right. Dumbledore should just say "Harry" and that's it.

 

When a character says another character is like a brother/sister to them. It annoys me when professional authors do it and fanfic writers are even worse. Basically, an extremely clumsy way of telling readers that X and Y characters won't be getting together.

 

This is especially annoying in HP fiction, and it stems from Harry's comment to reassure Ron in DH. Now whenever you read a fic where Harry is hanging out with Ron the author ends up popping out this comment.

 

There's an incest joke in here somewhere...

 

"Clark, if you're about to say I'm like a sister to you, I swear I'm going back to Lex."

That was from Superman: The Animated Series from the mid-90's, to give an idea of how long that line has been insufferably trite.

 

Just this once I wouldn't mind if there was.