LOL.

And now, an actual peeve. This is specific to HP/BtVS xovers.

Slayers being flat out immune to magic. I've now seen this bs in 7 or 8 stories, even though it blatantly violates BtVS canon.

 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

It does kind of tend to baffle my mind how people ever actually write these crossovers in the first place, just makes you wonder what goes through their mind when they start thinking "Yeah, Harry would totally be the shit in Inuyasha/Batman or any other myriad possibilities for crossover.

Mind you, I'm not against crossovers, it's more of fic-to-fic evaluation on my part, and I do try to be unbiased. Unless it's involving something that I don't like, naturally.

I'm a reasonable man, or so I'd like to think, with biases and prejudices just like anyone else, but holy hell, I'm afraid I've developed some form of allergy towards obscenely good/benevolent Snape or Draco (though that is far rarer in comparison) in fanfics.

I don't know why. I mean, I rather liked the AU Snape from "World in Pieces", but that was sort of alright, because he was not the Snape that Harry knew, the original never changed and that was alright.

And another thing.... Albus Severus Potter.

I will never, ever understand what Rowling was thinking when she wrote that down. Well, both that and James Sirius Potter and Lily Luna Potter. Why didn't the kids get their own names that don't simply drag a bit down with the memories of those that passed on way before they were even born? I could understand if their middle names were James, Sirius and Lily, but not as their first names, that's just terribly unfair to the kids, in my opinion.

And the Albus Severus is horrific on such a scale, it'd probably best to invent your own time-travel machine and just hold the parents at gun/wand-point and order them to make a sensible name for the kid, of which neither will involve an old, manipulative, no matter how benevolent, grandfather figure or a bitter man who really only wanted to see the daddy's eyes because they wanted to have one last mental wank at seeing their unrequited love's eyes.

Note, I might be slightly opposed to the horrible naming of the kids in the epilogue. And the epilogue in general. Hugo? Rose? It just seems like a long time ago that the series had rather wizard/witch-specific names which didn't sound all that muggle. I guess it's just the kid in me, wanting stuff to continue being different even when they're all grown up and settled down.

 

Amelia, Susan, Hannah, Daphne, Tracey, Vincent, Gregory, Dean, Seamus, Arthur, Molly, William, Charles, Fred, George, Ronald.

I'm sure I missed some.

 

I can't think of any names that are unique to HP, 99% of names in canon are real names, no matter how obscure. The only two I think might be unique that I have never heard of before would be Marvolo and Xenophilius, not sure where they come from. Marvolo was probably just made up to fit an anagram, and I've never heard of Xenophilius before.

 

It's not a name, but it's clearly a word with sense: a person who loves things that are different.

 

Nymphadora

Kennilworthy

Bartemius

Kingsley

Aberforth

Emeric

Adalbert

Phyllida

I'm not suggesting these can't be meaningful derivations, but I've never seen them as names before reading the books. It's part of her unique charm as a writer.

 

Kingsley, Emeric, Adalbert and Phyllida are all real names. I'm pretty sure the others you listed aren't though.

 

I always liked the greek influences in some names like Hestia, Artemisia or Dedalus.

The Black family names influenced by stars, constellations and galaxies are also pretty cool.

Man, isn't it a whole lot better if you have a wizard character named Ares or Luna rather than Bob or Jack? Makes the setting more magical in my opinion.

 

I never meant to imply that Rowling invented completely unique names, merely that they were different than the usual sort, which I liked.

As for the Black family, not all of them got named for celestial objects and clusters, did they? There was Narcissa who married a Malfoy and then there was Dorea who married a Potter. Unless I'm completely wrong and those are abbreviations of constellation names somewhere in the world or something like that.

 

Well I didn't say all of them were, but most of them are.

I have the sudden urge to make a worldfilter which changes all the muggle names of wizards into more magical sounding ones. Just to see how it would read.

 

I don't know about Dorea, but Narcissus is a constellation.

 

Hmm, I grabbed the following from one of the HP wikis, but it's been pointed out that they aren't always reliable for accurate information.

 

Just look at this list of Greek myth figures, don't they seem awesome for wizard and witch names? And these are besides the main gods like Zeus or Poseidon.

Hyperion, Iapetus, Coeus, Crius, Cronus, Mnemosyne, Oceanus, Phoebe, Rhea, Tethys, Theia, Themis, Asteria (Astoria?), Astraeus, Atlas, Aura, Dione, Eos, Epimetheus, Eurybia, Eurynome, Helios, Clymene, Lelantos, Leto, Menoetius, Metis, Ophion, Pallas, Perses, Prometheus, Selene, Styx.

And there's more!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_mythological_figures

 

That said, the way a simple name like Harry Potter rolls off the tongue is just . . . hard to replicate. I honestly think some of the book's success has to do with how memorable and rhythmically pleasing just the name 'Harry Potter' is. It sticks in your mind, and is a legitimately sound poetical device, with its iambic construction.

 

Barry Trotter was a nice book as well. Pretty funny too.

In fact, I own all three.

 

Trotter, eh? Any chance he's related to Del Boy and Rodney?

Now that would be a blast for a crossover.

 

Pet peeve:

Miscommunication for the sake of drama.

Every time a plotpoint could have been easily resolved if only character X arrived a second earlier/later, asked for clarification instead of assuming what someone else meant, asked/given obviously important information or wasn't interrupted in a conversation I add a strike.

If the same plotpoint isn't resolved after three strikes, I'm out.

Champion of this has to be 'The Fifth Element'. It takes about 500k words and dozens of strikes before Harry and Hermione finally get together.

 

Yes, this is incredibly annoying.

 

Does that have anything to do with Luc Besson's film or is it just aptly named as such because of Dumbledore's claim that the 'power he knows not' is love?

 

Nothing to do with the film, but can't remember if it was love and I have no inclination of reading it again.