Clueless MC

being a fan of very capable main characters, I’m astounded how often prompts and ideas on hpff reddit venerate a response like “That’s a great idea and have him be completely clueless about his power/love/relationship lol”

 

A little bit of exercise turning the protagonist (and love interest) into a superhuman. Indy!Harry stories use this frequently right at the beginning, where Harry decides to go jogging every morning and somehow becomes a physical powerhouse. If a little bit of exercise is all it takes then you'd think a lot of others would have achieved it. Gryffindors and Ravenclaws live in towers for most of their adolescence so they're getting plenty of exercise every day just to get down to the ground floor for breakfast while lugging around their bags full of books and school supplies.

I've read enough fics where that reason is used to justify why Harry and Hermione have the bodies of athletes at the age of fourteen/fifteen. Apparently Ron and Ginny, who do the exact same thing every day, don't get super fit and muscular like them. Crazy how that works.

 

Yeah, never got the appeal of that, and it's super popular in non-fanfic too.

 

It plays to the wish-fulfilment nature of that sort of fanfiction. What if I, the reader, also have this power and love but just don't know it? It probably also appeals to people who like knowing what's going on before the characters do. "Oh Harry, if only you could see how much Mrs Weasley pines for you, you silly fool!"

 

Unless it's the purposeful cluelessness as an adult you attain in order to give people outs in social situations.

But that's almost never the case in those stories.

At the same time I get it. As someone who hates having his personal space invaded without forewarning it took me a while to get it.

 

Any mention of "popping the P" in nope sends me into a fit of irrational rage.

 

Not a phrase I've ever come across, in fanfic or elsewhere. What does it mean that it makes you irate?

 

Just try to say 'nope' as obnoxiously as possible in an American accent and you'll hear it.

It's mainly seen in over the top indie Harry fics where they're trying to write him as a sarcastic little shit.

Edit: related - what drives me up the wall is when characters make jokes that rely on 'Harry' being mistaken for 'Hairy', which... No. Dear God. Suddenly I'm forced to picture all the characters speaking with American events.

 

I see it everywhere in fanfic. It's annoying... approaching soul bond levels of annoying, and probably used just as often.

 

Just reading a new fic for the first time in a couple of weeks, and first new fic that wasn't from the DLP review board in quite a long time. Reminded me of a major pet peeve - badly written accents. You don't need to actually write in the accent for most folk, you can just say what their accent is and let the reader fill in the blanks. And if you're going to write in the accent, first of all make sure you write it accurately and secondly make sure that what you've written is actually comprehensible to the reader.

This rant is brought to you by a character whose accent was described by the author as "an Ayrshire lilt" which is then written as heavily mangled English by someone who has clearly got no familiarity with the Scottish accent and has just decided to mix and match their letters and punctuation.

 

Do you actually imagine the characters speaking in an accent when you read that though?

 

No. I don't imagine any accents or anything. In fact, I don't even really imagine a different speaking v oice for anyone now that I think about it.

 

To some extent - more so I take a mention of an accent to inform how other characters will be perceiving the person who is speaking. Which is relevant and useful for a reader to know - having to struggle through misplaced apostrophes and missing letters to work out what someone is saying is not useful.

 

To expand on this, I dislike whenever the main character is a moron.

I can understand Harry not knowing everything immediately because he was raised by muggles.

But him not knowing various everyday things about the Wizarding world several years into his Hogwarts education is annoying.

But wait, that's canon.

 

A pet peeve of mine, which throws me right out of immersion:

Okay, so you call people something based on their hair color. That's- tolerable. Then, you call Naruto 'the fishcake', or Ichigo from Bleach 'the strawberry' or something like that. Gaahhh!!

 

I think it can be useful to have your main character have a level of ignorance that mimics that of your audience, so that you can use them as an audience surrogate to do world building without just doing badly written info dumps. The problem comes when you have that level of ignorance in the main character and then do nothing to remedy it. As you say, similar to canon where Harry doesn't seem very interested to learn about this new world that he's a part of, that his dead parents were part of, etc.

 

Sometimes it's absurd. I find it hard to believe that Harry would learn about the existence of Floo Powder in his second year instead of earlier. There are many other examples too.

Or with Naruto. Damn he's dumb.

 

Honestly if any fanfic made Naruto even close to as ignorant as Canon Naruto was, I'd probably drop it immediately. Like I could never take a Naruto fanfiction MC seriously, if they didn't know what chakra was despite being a genin for months. I don't know how I tolerated it in Canon.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Naruto episode where someone had to explain to him what punching and kicking is.

 

How to properly punch, maybe. What punching is, nope.