Personally, I suspect Fleur would have some acknowledgment of her veela heritage, for a simple reason: she openly uses a wand made from her own grandmother's veela hair. Veela hair, isn't a common ingredient (at least in England) and Ollivander called it "unflexible," but either she or her family made the explicit choice to use a veela wand provided by her grandmother. Maybe she doesn't pay that much attention to it, maybe she takes pride in it, but claiming she completely ignores her veela heritage seems a bit much.

With that said, if a Fic wants to discuss Fleur's veela heritage, they should try to do a good job with it. You know, and not just turn it into an excuse for her to hook up with Harry.

 

Why would you even bring something up in a story, if it didn't lead to Harry hooking up with someone?

That's just... weird and inefficient.

If Harry's mowing the Dursleys' lawn on page 1, by the end of the story there should be a passage that reads, "...and she found lawn care really sexy, so he got laid."

Writing 101, really. It's like Chekhov's Gun, except the gun is a penis.

 

And that's fine, but even there, she is dealing with her culture . . . and that's my point. While it isn't written in the original seven books that she dealt with such issues, it really isn't necessary for it to be written in the books because it's just not part of the story arc from Harry's perspective. Too many take that to mean it's anti-canon as in, either it's canon or its wrong. (I'm speaking in general terms here and am not directing "too many" at anyone is this thread). I prefer the terms canon-compliant and canon-plus. To me, the former means whatever is introduced can easily fit into the world built by JKR without any subsequent building by a fanfic author. The latter means something is introduced that takes further building, but still remains true to the foundations in canon. I just don't see how Fleur having any concern about her Veela heritage isn't canon compliant (That last sentence is directed at those I've been in conversation with in this thread).

 

It still doesn't make it canon. That's where I believe Taure's pet peeves for it comes from. It's not explicitly stated in canon, so he doesn't agree when people think it is. Of course, maybe he has another argument as to why he doesn't like it.

 

@Warlocke is like that drunken uncle with too much worldly experience that shows up at Christmas dinner while you were a teenager. When it's just family, it's hilarious. When outside guests are invited . . . well, you don't invite outside guests in case he shows up to dispense his wisdom in ways only he can.
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By that token, none of fanfiction is canon. So, what is there left to write? Again, that's why it doesn't make sense. If canon is so narrowly defined and that definition is applied to fanfiction, it negates fanfiction.

However, we should probably end this here (or at least after your next post) because we're starting to derail the thread).

 

You're right, original aspects in fanfiction are not canon. At best they are canon-compliant as you suggested. At times, canon-plus. Fleur caring about her heritage is canon-compliant, but not canon. She might care about it, she might not. That's all I have been trying to say.

 

Am I the only one paying attention to the fact Fleur uses a wand explicitly made from her grandmother's veela hair? While we don't know whose idea it was to use that kind of wand (Fleur or her family), or how she actually feels about it, we still know she uses it. And it's not like some big secret, she very openly told Ollivander, in a room where the other Champions and a few other people (including possibly Rita Skeeter, although I forgot who was actually there at the time). I'd say that makes Fleur having some feelings/interest in her veela heritage Canon, even if we don't know what the relationship actually is.

 

What if she just liked her grandma? It was from her, wasn't it? If it was just veela hair from an unkown person I'd say you're undoubtedly right. But as it stands, she never shows interest in veela culture again, not even in her wedding, where one might expect some custom. Nope, it's all wizarding culture, expect from that one veela hair that comes from her grandmother. (Personally, I'd say it's just a convenient thing so the author has an excuse to tell us Fleur is a quarter veela.)

 

At least it means that Fleur very much openly accepts that she has Veela heritage, and my reading of that line is that she is even proud of that heritage.

I read that almost as a brag, or a challenge for someone to say something against veela, not as something someone not interested in their heritage would say.

So yes, I think that the discussion of Fleur's Veela heritage and what it means for her should definitely come up in any story that features her in any larger role than in canon. And really, we know nothing of "veela culture", so we have no idea how that even could show up in canon.

 

Veela culture is to adopt their husband's marital customs. Her grandmother would have been proud. Ironically, I originally wrote martial customs, which I think her grandmother would have also been proud of, seeing as Fleur married ass-kicking half-werewolf curse-breaker Bill.

 

Hey, Mods,

Can we separate the last dozen or so posts into another thread? I want to keep responding because I'm enjoying the discussion, but don't want to keep hijacking this thread.

 

Naa, wasn't that important to bug 'em. I figured one of them would be around soon enough.

 

I can't remember if I've said it before, but this stuff annoys the shit out of me every time I see it in a fic (which is painfully often).

Especially the treatment of women as some 1:1 of Victorian or Game-of-Thrones-medieval-pastiche women. Anything from second-class citizens to slaves in all but name. Stuff like people going around calling themselves Ancient and Noble Totes Awesome Supremo Lords of the (Magic House Head) Rings or whatever I can grit my teeth and deal with because it could kinda make sense in a magical society (despite being utterly at odds with canon), but the whole idea that somehow women in the wizarding world have far fewer rights than their muggle contemporaries is painfully dumb. It takes some impressive logical contortions to reconcile the idea even remotely with what we see in the books, and doesn't make any sense in a society where the physical strength advantage of men has been almost irrelevant for thousands of years. Magic is the ultimate equalizer, the core of wizarding civilization, the only relevant form of combat, and neither gender is shown to have any significant advantage over the other in performing it. Unless clear reasons are introduced (they never are), it makes 0 sense for 50% of the population—universally armed with a deadly weapon and equivalent training to the other 50%—to happily sit around being treated like chattel for centuries.

I think a lot of writers are either too lazy to think things through or utterly unable to think creatively and write a society that is simultaneously ahead, behind, and off somewhere to the side of the muggle version. Or they've read so much bad fanfic they've been infected by a brain parasite.

 

Honestly, I think this sums up a massive issue with FanFics and the Fandom. So many of them have read FanFics for so long, they've come to treat a lot of FanFic tropes as Canonical facts. It doesn't matter if a quick read of the actual Books can prove nearly all of it wrong. They just Know there really is that special room for the Head Boy and Girl, goblins will swear their undying loyalty to the first schmuck that says please, and Daphne Greengrass is a total Ice Queen. You just have to read in between the lines.

 

As far as other peeves go, I've come to regard almost any use of the word "née" as a very bad sign.

I think I've seen it used semi-sensibly in a grand total of one fic, where it was only used in one scene, in a formal legal document where specifying that an individual married into a given family was actually relevant.

 

Found another pet peeve: Getting homophones/almost-homophones wrong.

As far as grammar and word choice issues go, this is probably one of the most frequent, but also one of the most avoidable kinds of mistake. I can overlook the occasional "your/you're", but, weirdly, this kind of error becomes especially bothersome to me when it involves words that are not as commonly used or don't even belong to the same category of words, like sense/since.

 

I am puzzled by the existence of this thread.

"There is only fanfiction and those too weak to read it" is the DLP logo, right?

Extrapolating,

"There is no good or evil[fanfiction], there is only power[fanfiction] and those too weak to read it".

On a more serious note I agree with most of you. My personal pet peeve is fem!Harry being badass and seducing various characters(even Voldemort or OtherUniverse!Harry).

I see no reason for fem!Harry to do better in the same circumstances of the male version.

Some of the fem!HP fanfic I hear have good world building too...

 

Reading fanfic takes great power, but reading shit fanfic is something only the most wretched fandom-dwellers inflict upon themselves. DLP is also about quality and 99% of fanfic is shit.