I'm guilty of writing "sweating bullets" in a Harry Potter fic quite recently. Worse, it was from Snape's POV, as if he would care about guns or even sweat for that matter. I consider myself above the average writer, but I'm not infallible.

 

Just reading some stuff now. FaintingGoat!Harry.

Harry gets a surprise, he faints. He gets another surprise after coming round. He faints. Honestly, in some fics I'm honestly concerned about his blood pressure, it must be perilously low for him to faint with such regularity. The most often happens while surrounded by other, far more annoying, peeves like marriage contracts (I'm betrothed to Narcissa?! /Faints) or inheritance (I have a bajillion Galleons? /Faints) but occasionally it stands on its own. It's still annoying.

Vaguely related is AlwaysInjured!Harry. With this Harry gets greviously injured in every. Single. Fight he enters. It can be a fight against a particularly vindictive kitten, or the personification of Death itself, you can be sure Harry will end up in the hospital wing with scratches, broken bones and magical exhaustion. Sometimes he doesn't even need to get into a fight, he just decides to do something stupid and end up in the hospital wing for no reason at all.

Urgh.

Also, related to AlwaysInjured!Harry is RefusesToBeHealedProperly!Harry. Because he ends up in the hospital wing at the end of every day, he has rather grown to dislike it. To this end we have an entire chapter of the humerous goings on while BadAss!Harry complains about having to sit still for a few hours while Pomfrey makes sure he's not going to die imminently. Generally he'll leave before he's healed, get into another fight, and end up worse than before. Oh joy.

 

Getting flashbacks from when I read Refiner's Fire.

 

Is that the fic where Harry's muggle girlfriend gets killed by DEs? Isn't that fic over a decade old?

 

Getting flashbacks from 1/2 of the fics written by Bobmin.

Yes and yes.

 

Ah, the good old days when clichés weren't yet clichés and fics were thus more enjoyable.

 

THIS, OMG THIS.

DLP, for all of our awesomeness, is relentless when it comes to this. Stereotypically, we're not capable of reading a story where Dumbledore is overtly manipulative, Molly wants to drug Harry up with potions or Ginny has a soul bond with Harry. Granted, no one wants to read the same thing they read ten years ago, and the tools who rewrite these cliches are usually so untalented that they directly rip it out of something they read, but some cliches are so ingrained into our head that we don't even realize they are cliched until someone points it out.

A pet peeve of mine is someone being irate about an insignificant cliche. Marginally-Abusive!Dursley's, for example, is totally canon. Rapist!Vernon, however...

 

Actually Don, speaking as someone who has entered fan fiction reading in 2012, I have to say that I never liked these things which are now considered cliches.

In fact, my fic reading 'adventure' started more with DLP than with FF.net, so perhaps that is the reason, DLP must have spoiled me.

 

I'm mixed about this, most of these cliches Don mentioned, like Xandrel, I never liked, outright hating them. And others, well they get tiring the second time we see them. Why? Because all of them are just writing tools that weak writers use because they can't or won't write why that happens.

"I dislike Dumbledore, should I carefully write why and make you feel the same or at least understand why Harry dislikes him? Nah, bashing is much easier, let's pretend he is Hitler. Wait, not Hitler, because I like HP's Nazi like characters, so I will make him Dick Dastardly."

 

When they do that I wish they'd just say that he suffers from some magical disease. In real life, Harry would have a problem with his Vasovagal response. (Something I just learned about.)

 

Pet peeve: a character being considered a genius or a 'true Slytherin rolleyes' for getting out of a situation by exploiting a loophole even a five-year-old could spot.

 

Very similar - Master of Manipulation (usually Dumbledore, sometimes Voldemort and Lucius) routinely outwitted by not so smart children.

 

I'd love a manipulative Dumbledore. But when his cover is blown by Harry and his Harem by chapter 3 or so, he fails as an antagonist. Ideally, Harry shouldn't know Dumbledore's evil until the final fight.

 

It is very difficult to come up with even vaguely reasonable circumstances where a non-idiot manipulative Dumbledore would lose, though. Manipulative Dumbledore winning doesn't really make for a good story in anything other than a one-shot, and that's been done a few times.

 

This, right here. Non-idiot manipulative Dumbledore is basically Gendo Ikari who doesn't need to rely on his son to save the fucking world. He just needs Harry to die, which he could easily arrange any number of ways. Which is why it only works as a one-shot, because the fanfic would be incredibly short-lived if Dumbledore just put a compulsion on Harry that made him walk into traffic one day.

Death of the host is death of the horcrux, as we are told, and then Dumbledore can just gather up the other horcruxes at his leisure.

 

It'd work with an AU. For example, Deus Ex (something in the Department of Mysteries explodes or so), rips Harry out of time and space and places him in an alternate universe, right in front of a scene that clearly shows Dumbledore's evil and Voldemorts a freedom fighter. The AUs so similar to canon that Harry never realizes he's in an AU. After a long drawn out struggle, Harry and Tom managed to beat Dumbledore, but just before Dumbledore's beaten, he casts an ancient curse on Harry, Harry doesn't manage to dodge in time and ...

Lands right where he came from, in the department of mysteries in his home verse. Except Harry doesn't know he was travelling through worlds, he just thinks Dumbledore send him back in time. So he immediately sabotages Dumbledore and proposes an alliance to Voldemort.

---

Alternatively, Evil!Dumbledore (+ Grindelwald) come invade from a different verse. I also had an idea where Grindelwald had Orochimaru style immortality, he could jump into anothers body and essentially replace their soul. He did that to Dumbledore - why take over the world when you can take over the one already ruling it? And plans to do the same to Harry. His long term plan is to create bigger and badder bads, so the hero who beats them will gain more influence, and he'll bodyjack the hero.

 

Of the top of my head, I recall two fics with a great manipulative villain that was actually not revealed close to the beginning. Spoilers follow.

Spoiler

Obviously, one of them is one of DLP's finest works imo, Renegade Cause. I honestly never suspected Nathan Cassane of working with Voldemort and for such selfish, personal reasons, too. He only cared about bringing his family back. I thought he was a great character and a great villain.

The second is a much older fic, I think now you can only find it in a massive PDF combining all of the author's fanfic works. Underwater Light by Maya. The thing that will repulse most people is the fact that it's HP/DM slash, but the good thing is that it's not 13-year-old-fangirl type of slash and it's not all over the place. There is actually character development there that makes sense, there is action, humor, but the story's biggest selling point is the main conflict. You literally don't find out until the very last chapters that Dumbledore was in league with Voldemort and that mystery has a very satisfying resolution. Honestly, one of my favorite HP fanfiction works.

 

I've come to a conclusion. It may be rather blanketing and harsh, but I can't off the top of my head remember any fic with this kind of 'key' at the start that wasn't either shit or simply bland and cliché-ridden. It's been added to my list of 'Early Warning Factors':

RED WARNINGS
These pretty much flag up a fic as 'this is almost certainly terrible and/or I won't get past the second chapter'.

• The summary includes the word 'heritage'.
• The summary includes the word 'manipulation' or 'manipulative'.
• The summary includes the phrase 'battered and abused'.
• The summary in any way references a made up 'extended' name for any character. Examples: Hadrian James Potter or Lilian (or Lilith) Evans.
• The summary contains reference to a double-barreled or more name for Harry Potter-Black-Gryffindor-Peverell.
• The summary includes the word 'slash' (or, even worse, MPREG).

YELLOW WARNINGS
These are lesser warnings but should be heeded, generally speaking if more than one of these is present then I'm probably not going to get more than a few thousand words in before walking away in frustraction and disgust.

• The summary contains the word 'bashing'.
• The summary a 'slash' pairing.
• The summary contains the word 'Soul Bond' or 'Soul Mate'
• The summary contains some variation on 'betrayed by his friends'
• The fic is in any way related the SilverAegis' Harry Potter and the New Lives fic.
• The summary references a Ron/Hermione pairing.
• The aforementioned language key.
• Harry ending up in Gringotts in the first chapter.
• The story starts with a completely-out-of-the-blue letter completely laying out the plot of all the books.
• Any reference to a Harem or Harry/Many

GREEN WARNINGS
These are the opposite, these can overcome the presence of yellow, or even red warnings in my deperate need to see these fics. Generally this means I get even MORE annoyed.

• Any reference to Harry/Fleur.
• Any reference to Harry/Tonks.
• Any reference to timetravel or dimensional travel.
• Any crossover with Star Wars, LotR or Marvel.

Some might seem out of place, for example; why is slash a red flag when slash pairings are only a yellow flag? Basically, any summary which declares itself as SLASH has slash as the focus. It is possible for a fic to be good and include slash, but it's never important enough to be written in block caps in the summary.

Why Ron/Hermione? Just just don't like the pairing.

Harry/Fleur is what I might call my fly-to-a-buglight pairing. 'I can't help it, it's so beautifARRRGH'.

Time and dimensional travel are my guilty pleasures, I just find them so much more interesting than another canon rehash.

I must admit that my willingness to grant something of a 'free pass' to HP/LotR crossovers has led me into many a terribad Harry/Legolas slash fic (why is 80% of the genre Harry/Legolas?) but my desperation knows no bounds. I think I've read three ok HP/LotR fics. This makes me sad. HP/Marvel is similar, fangirls seem to just love Harry/Loki.

 

Because Harry/ButchBeardedMidgetNamedGimli doesn't appeal to fangirly slash tendencies.

 

Maybe not, but throw in Don E's drunk Katie Bell, and now we have the makings of a fantastic love triangle.