Okay, wow; I didn't know people were out there writing completely inexcusable grammatical errors. I would take a wild guess about the scar business and say that some people probably thought it wasn't a real scar at any point, that it never bled and then stopped bleeding, but just started as a mark, like from a brand, and Harry just grew up assuming that it was a scar from some piece of metal hitting him in the forehead and then he was just used to calling it a scar. The film shows the cut as hair-thin, so it's sort of believable it would have healed in just a few hours.

 

I don't know what made me click through past entries here, but please. Please. More Haritard Potter stories. I was a decent kid growing up. I tried to be nice, and generally succeeded. Not always. I still would have made fun of someone named Haritard the 'tard.

Edit: Oh lol. It's Haridard. That's worse. Somehow

"How's it going dardo? Have you weighed down that numbus 2000 yet? You're not going to eat the snitch are you? I mean you gave it the 'ol Hogwarts' try in your first match? You wouldn't happen to know where the kitchens are? I have a shiny galleon Pottahh. Pottahh??"

 

Haridard is the fated name of that one version of Harry from the comp fic years ago where the Dursleys actually raised him with love and he turned out like one of them.
https://forums.darklordpotter.net/threads/entry-2.38376/#post-1088868

 

When every character is a quip machine, none of them are.

When every damned line of the text is trying to be quippy, no one reads.

 

Just started reading Harry Potter fanfics again this week, and I've already come across an old cliché I hate: Gringotts having ridiculous legal authority in seemingly all matters.

Emancipating a teenager? Enforcing the last will and testament of wizards? Elevating a child to a lordship and granting ownership of large areas of land? Apparently the goblins can do all that and more, and are quite happy to do so because one random human remembering the name of a single goblin marks him worthy of throwing their full military and economic might behind him.

Just once I want to see an author have a goblin shuffle and cough awkwardly and say something like, "Wizard, this is a bank. If you want to have a legal discussion, you should go to the Ministry."

 

"certain"

I started reading a recced fic on Royal Road. The first sentence:

Certain adds nothing here. Perhaps it indicates that this Sunday is going to be a Sunday of relevance (although, given that's where the story starts, it is of course going to be relevant). Perhaps it indicates that this is not, in fact, the start of the story - the author forgot the prologue that would link this in nicely.

Or perhaps it's just a common wordcount inflation habit that crept in through bad fanfiction.

It drives me up the fucking wall.



I complained about something similar on QQ. A LitRPG piece, and they're had the character say

which is such a weirdly constructed sentence? "Exactly" 104 points away?
Saying "104 away" is already as specific as you could be. Adding the exactly was a squirt of lemon juice to the eye.

 

Also, typing out larger numbers like that is silly. Aren't you only supposed to do that from one to ten?

 

I think it's flexible, so long as you're consistent. It doesn't bother me to see numbers written either way in the text. When it comes to speech, I'd expect to see it written as words, rather than using numerals, but that's a very minor bother at worst.

In a similar manner - seeing someone say "Dr Smith it's nice to see you" rather than "Doctor Smith" used to bother me, but then I saw someone write 'missus' in dialogue and that just doesn't look like a word to me at all. I do get vaguely annoyed when I see (especially in a story with Beauxbaton) someone saying "Mme. Maxime" rather than writing it out, but it's just something I have to live with.

 

Flexible, yeah. I don't know why any text would ever have to say something like 1,100,366 outside of some sci-fi shit, but, come on.

One million one hundred thousand three hundred and sixty six

or

1,100,366

Even with smaller numbers, why would you type seven hundred and twenty one over 721? Brevity might not necessarily be the soul of wit, but it can save some time.

 

Pretty sure I remember being taught it was for values greater than one hundred?

 

One thing that has started to both me is the use of the words 'hols' , when characters means holidays.

Is that a common contraction in the UK? We speak The King's here in Canada, but I've never run across that before.

 

"Pup."
"Cub."
"Pup."
"Cub."
"Pup."
"Cub."
"PUP!"
"CUB!"

"Hi, Harry, I'm Remus Lupin. I know I've barely spoken to you since I became your professor, and my affliction is undoubtedly a large part of why I never tried to contact you during your loveless, friendless, years of hell on Privet Drive, but now I'm going to constantly refer to you with an awkward, infantilizing, term of endearment that not only implies some kind of familial ownership of you, but also explicitly references my hated werewolf nature, which ruined my life and obliquely lead to my friends getting murdered and/or jailed, because they didn't trust me. I know it's weird, uncomfortable, and highly unlikely, but let's just roll with it, 'kay?"

"Well, 'Aunt' Marge just got finished using a metaphor that referred to me as a pup so that she could call my mother, who voluntarily died to keep me alive, a bitch, but, sure, call me 'pup' as much as you want; that won't seem fucked up AT ALL."

I've said it before, but I feel it bears repeating: Fuck that creepy 'pup' and 'cub' nonsense.
As far as I know, the only time in the Harry Potter series that any form of the word "pup" appears, is when Marge calls Harry's mom a bitch, and the only time when a form of "cub" appears, is when Voldemort is menacing the Malfoys and brings up the marriage of Remus and Tonks, asking Draco if he will babysit their "cubs."

So, there are the two great examples of those words in the Harry Potter series: Once as a way to demean any children a werewolf might have, and once as a way to insult Harry as being fundamentally damaged from birth, while blaming his mother for it and calling her a bitch. I realize this shit had plenty of momentum in the fandom, before Deathly Hallows came along, but the Marge thing happened in the third book, and I'm still going to call all of this another example of fan fic writers and their readers eating up garbage without ever stopping to notice the smell.



Edit: Oh, and Remus referring to Harry as part of his "pack" needs flushed down the same toilet as the other two terms. Remus Lupin's defining trait in the series is his near total absence from it, and his attempted absence from the lives of his wife and infant child. Some pack...

I'm not even trying to hate on the character, but the lathering on of these creepy terms of endearment and effusive declarations of brotherhood, from a character who is chiefly defined by absence and abandonment, invites these kinds of harsh observations.

 

@Warlocke

In my fanfic, Sirius is casually abusive and Remus is mostly absent.

 

Everyone knows that Harry's term of endearment from James' friends is Bambi, anyway. Kid's father transformed into a stag. Even more approprietely, he saw/heard his mother die to save him.