Alright lag fixed. Sorry for the bother random internet people.

 

Re: eyes - you're correct about the books, but to be fair to fanfics that do this, it was used at least in the GoF movie.

 

Dumbledore knowing about the Harrycrux from the start.

Honestly, I could probably classify most subtropes of evil Dumbledore as pet peeves of mine but that one in particular makes me irrational.

Evil Dumbledore in itself I don't really mind. He has certainly carried out actions utterly inexcusable for a man working with children. Just make it believable.

Dumbledore is no mustache twirler.

Bonus content!

"Good" Umbridge. I've only been subjected to it once but I never want to see it again.

 

I know it's somewhat in character

but come on lol with some of these stories. Harry performs some fucking magic that nobody has ever seen before, and he's like "oh good golly gosh, me??? I didn't do that!? Aww shucks, couldn't be me. I'm too modest. Look how modest I am! I'm so modest! I refuse to take credit for this!!?"

The Black's Resurgence is an author most to blame for this these days.

I fucking hate it so much. Canon Harry was proud of his patronus charm. He was proud of his ability to defend against the dark arts.

He wanted to be the one to kill the Dark Lord. He told Dumbledore this much in Order of the Phoenix

 

I've only read one TBR story and I liked it, but I also had the feeling afterwards that if you've read one, you've read them all, so I didn't bother with further ones.

 

They're almost all always the same, and yeah, I read em and enjoy em too. Absurdly powerful Harry, eventually overpowering all enemies. Always. And one of the worst... tropes?

I don't need to see Voldemort or Grindelwald's (from Roses Bloom story) plans all of the time. I don't need to see the enemy making plans in every chapter. I don't need to see Voldemort every chapter reminiscing on his enemy Harry Potter, and how "it's only a matter of time, I am Voldemort." And that's how they always are. It's Harry's enemies either monologuing, or showing up with their followers maintaining about how it's all in control and Harry will fall in the end Because Duh.. Almost every single latter goddamn chapter in The Roses Bloom Again had Grindelwald. And they all had The Serpent or Harry being the enemy. And they all had references to where he would obviously defeat him. Literally. And I almost literally mean literally.

The less I see, or the less obvious their appearances are, the better.

That's one thing JKR got right. The Dark Lord directly showed up once in the opening book. Kind of showed up as a memory in book 2. Didn't at all in the 3rd. Had one of the magnum opuses (opusi?) in book 4. Then just the ministry in book 5, not at all in book 6, and his ignoble death in 7.

It was beautiful

 

The harm that ASOIAF and Worm did to fanfic by making switching PoV and interludes frequent will take generations to heal.

It's our hole in the ozone layer.

*Edit*

I've lost count of the amount of fics I've dropped due to interlude/PoV/PHO chapters. The latest was Scaling Up (Worm, Taylor becomes a DnD dragon) - interludes are about every 5-8 chapters, and are a recap of the entire story so far from another character, and then a slight flashforward.

 

Apropos of nothing, what specifically do we all not like about switching perspectives and having interludes? I get the problem with recap chapters.

 

It's not necessarily switching perspectives or interludes that are a problem. I guess the problem is more that they can be the final straw in an otherwise mediocre work.

They can be done really well, to help provide information that the MC doesn't have, or to see the wider impact of their actions. By itself, that's a good thing, and adds to the world.

But a writer who is only just skirting competency will fuck it up - you'll have a week's worth of effort spent on "MC is so cool!" or an effective dream sequence, rather than on actual story... And the fic you've been reading is now tainted and harder to read because of it.

I suppose, like a lot of pet peeves, it's only a major problem when the writer isn't as good as they wish. Which sounds meaner than I meant.

 

The worst offenders of multi pov is when the next pov goes back in time so they are just writing the same scene from another pov.

 

You know, I actually really like this idea. I think the reason it sucks is because we don't ever get a DD POV chapter or two where he agonizes over knowing he's going to have to send Harry to his death. Or him keeping an eye on Harry to ensure that there's no trace of LV influencing.

Seriously, the Mirror of Erised scene when DD surprises Harry hits a lot different if you think that DD has been following Harry to ensure that he doesn't have another Tom Riddle on his hands.

 

I do hate how the apostrophe is so often used to incorrectly pluralize words.

 

I've never seen that. People just put 's on the end of words instead of s?

 

Yes. Frequently.

 

It’s a perfectly fine way to pluralize that way in Dutch most of the time. Maybe other languages do it too and it carries over?

 

I don't use ś, ż, ź, ą, ę or ń when I write in English.

 

And I use 's correctly in both languages. Good for us.

 

Who even talks about plurality in these's day's!?

 

Yeeeeeeessssssssss. This drives me nuts; I simply cannot stand it.
--

And in the latest episode of The Same Old Song 'n' Dance...

I hate how people will write about the night Harry's parents were killed, and describe Harry as having a curse scar. No. No, he does not have a curse scar he has a curse wound. He was literally just wounded, how can he possibly have a scar already? No one was there to heal it. He didn't heal it, himself, with accidental magic. McGonagall even observes that he has a "cut," when Hagrid delivers him to Privet Drive. And, true, Dumbledore immediately follows that up with the word "scar," but he's speaking about the wound in the future tense. "He'll (he will) have that scar forever."

Scar: A mark remaining (as on the skin) after injured tissue has healed.

I'd love to blame it on people having read the phrase "curse scar" a million times, in descriptions of Harry, and just automatically writing that into their own descriptions of freshly-wounded Harry, in his crib, in the middle of his blasted nursery, but I can't, because I've seen people using the word "scar" for a wound that was literally just created, in many other contexts, which have nothing to do with that Halloween, or Harry's forehead.

Spoiler

Which leads me to revisit my complaints about people describing how pus is spewing/leaking/running out of freshly-made wounds. Pus, partially consisting of dead white blood cells and toxins, is caused when a body is fighting an infection; even if someone were hit with a curse that instantly caused an infection, pus wouldn't form until the body had a chance to start fighting it.

--

I am so tired of how it seems no one can write the word "shock" without tacking on "and awe." The inclusion is probably appropriate about one percent of the times it's used. Can no one figure out how to string a handful of words together anymore, without resorting to just mindlessly parroting phrases they've heard before. Do they even consider things like relevancy?

 

@Warlocke you are my spirit animal.