I probably should have guessed that. Thanks world.

BOT: I take pride in having all the HP Books.
I also use them for reference, seeing as many people think james potter was a chaser and lily's best subject was transfiguration.

 

I did the smart thing and read it on my computer If I would have bought it so would it most likley be collecting dust on a shelf somewere.

 

I'm too much of a book whore to let any damage come to any of my books regardless of whether it's shitty or not. I keep all my books on a bookself and leave them there.

Who knows, one day you might be sat at home and a news report comes on.

"Earlier today a first edition, adult, hardback copy of the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sold for a staggering sum of money..."

Why, oh why did I use that bloody book to wipe my cats shitty arse? *slams head off desk, hard.*

erm... yeah, I keep all my books.

 

Oh, I keep it in good shape I just give it a job before it earns me $$$

 

Man, I think Blue deserves a punch... of respect!

It takes great cajones to spout such passionate opinion - most of which I happen to agree with. But before Mid decides to "take care" of business, might I remind him that there is at least one thing you like about HBP (not that I have any idea what that is).

As for me - well, I didn't think it was the best, but honestly, I thought some of the concepts were interesting, and if fanfiction I read doesn't take it into account, then I lose respect for those fanfics if no explanation is given.

I will say this;
some concepts I liked were:
Horcruxes - Yes, I know they've been called a "video game quest". So? Besides, giving Voldie a huge advantage like this makes things more "interesting" for Harry and co.
Blaise is a guy and his mom is a black widow: Although it screws a bit with my enjoyment of Fem!Blaise fics, background on characters, no matter how minor, is nice to see.
Snape's parentage: I thought it was nice to hear about his background.
Slughorn: A flawed but interesting character (obviously IMO).
Scrimgeour: A competent minister?
Romilda Vane: A girl who failed to love potion Harry? It does raise an interesting point about what Ginny might have succesfully done...
Sectumsempra: I just plain liked this spell.

Clearly not everyone will agree with me on these, but hey - it's better than a helluva lot fanfiction out there. I didn't see the Horcrux idea coming, that's for sure.

-J

 

BMM's rant was set off because of my cat shit comment?

*tugs at collar, laughs nervously*

That comment was meant to be taken as a joke. Umm... I would never actually use my copy of HBP to wipe up cat excrement, to be honest. It's actually just sitting on a bookshelf, collecting dust, at the moment. (The only book I've ever used to do anything with the business end of a cat was lining the bottom of a kitty litter tray with pages from a ten-year-old street refedex.)

To be honest, I don't actually hate the book as much as some of the people here. That doesn't mean that I actually enjoyed it either, becuase there were parts of it that just bugged the crap out of me, which I won't go into here. I consider book 4 to be the peek of the series, with books 5 and 6 seeming increasingly forced, almost as if she wrote them because she had to, not because she wanted to.

 

I use some of its pages to test out a marker or pen's ink or even a colour pencil's colour before writing/colouring some project. When I don't have scrap pieces of paper, of course.

I also throw the cover jacket at the spiders crawling on the ceiling.

I don't hate it to the extreme that I would burn it, and I agree with what BMM said, to an extent. JKR, I think, is a good, even amazing author who created an entire, complex world of wizards hidden among the Muggles, but her writing just degraded in HBP. Yes, there are some good things about it, but the bad just overrides them. It's not badly-written fanfiction - there's a lot worse than that, but I've seen better Post-OoTP fanfics. Sure, the authors may borrow her concept and ideas, but they used and manipulated it better than Rowling did with the sixth book. And I wish it isn't cannon.

 

Um, he was.

Draco

 

What you actually mean is: "seeing as many peoplethink James Potter was a seeker"

 

It has to be taken into consideration that the target age range is child - young adult. Not for mature readers who like dark fan fiction. Other than that it wasn't too bad, but not too good either.

I have read better fanfiction than HBP but that caters more to my needs than that of Rowling's target audience.

 

I was hoping that HBP would be more like sib-ff's The Awakening Power. I mean, we all knew that it was going to be H/G anyways, so why not have Harry learn how to kick some ass in the meantime. I thought that sib's story was the most realistic representation of what HBP would be like, and then she comes out with Harry sitting on his ass doing nothing the whole story. It wasn't so much that I disliked it, but that I had such high hopes for the story, and she destroyed them. She's still amazingly original, IMO, but I'm rather wary of expecting Book 7 to be good because of HBP.

 

Writing good fan fiction is just as hard as writing original fiction.

Writing good fan fiction is just as hard as writing original fiction.

I think the following quote sums up my reasoning adequetly.

From: http://www.trickster.org/symposium/symp166.htm

 

I can't be arsed to trudge through that whole thing but writing original fiction is a lot harder than writing fanfiction. Because:

1. You've got to completely create the situation, setting etc.

2. You've got to completely create characters the reader can identify with. Look at the problems 91% of fandom have with creating OCs.

3. You've got to create the plot from scratch.

I'm finding it fucking hard writing a Post-Hoggy where there's no set rouine (Harry teaching/ being in lessons at Hogwarts) AND I've got 2 brilliant people helping me. Original fiction, I imagine, takes hard work and patience whereas making a good fanfiction really isn't that hard in comparison.

 

Alright, I knew when I posted that I was going to receive a lot of hate for it, and I know that you're all entitled to your own opinions. Do whatever the fuck you want with the book, I wouldn't stop you even if I could. Think whatever you want to think about the book. The main point of my post was that disrespecting an authors work gets on my nerves and that you don't always get what you want, deal with it.

F77 - First of all, if you're going to argue with me, maybe you should write something of your own. And if you're going use somebody else's rant, you should probably make sure it is a good counter argument.

Sure they presented a good case for why writing good fanfiction is hard, but they glossed over the writing of your own original fiction. And that definitely doesn't prove that writing fanfiction is nearly as difficult as writing something original.

Oh yeah, so fucking hard right? Since when has it been difficult to bend the way that magic is used to your own will? People screw with the political and economical sides aspects of the books all the time. Little fangirls with no experience writing whatsoever can make up believable explanations of how and why things work in the books. Do you find it difficult? Somehow that's not too hard for me to believe based on your posts.

The possibilites are endless, enough said. This is illustrated easily by the sheer amount of fanfiction there is. Sure a lot of it generally doesn't deviate from the norm but collectively you should be able to see that, if you put your mind to it, you can come up with an original plot without too much trouble.

Good writing is not measured by how much your story conforms with that of the popular audience. Do you consider the average fluff filled slash fic good writing? From what I've seen while browsing FFN, they get a shitload more reviews than any of the stories I consider to be good. As I said earlier, you don't write for a specific audience, you hopefully write to tell a story.

It seems pretty easy to please the readers to me... since when are Harry, Draco, Snape, Remus, and Sirius sex gods? When to we see Harry acting romantic in the stories? Hell, since when has he gone on killing rampages? (I personally like the last one more than the others)

Uh huh... yeah... A scene is only as important as you make it to your story. You can write about Harry destroying the Horcruxes, you can write a story in which Harry discovers that he'd like to run Ginnny over with a bulldozer, you can write a story in which whatever the fuck you want to happen, happens. Just because it isn't a part of canon doesn't make it irrelevant to the ending. Hell, by the end of a fanfiction a large number of significant events have usually occurred. A simple example would be Harry deciding to go independent... wow, was that really so difficult?

The writer of this rant also forgot to mention many of the harder aspects of writing your own stuff. I'm of the opinion that they may be a bit biased towards fanfiction because their original writing doesn't go anywhere.

When you write your own story, you have to adhere to a set of rules, you have to be able to explain the changes that your characters go through, you have to make the story interesting, and you have to do much more without hundreds of readers encouraging you along the way. And if you get published you have to face the real critics, not the little kids who cream their pants just because you wrote a new chapter featuring their favorite storybook characters in it. This rant was designed to make people who write fanfiction more confident in their abilities, not to actually gauge the difficulty of writing fanfiction.

/end rant

Edit:

Oh really, it seems that it's gotten to you as well... I'd really like to see what you'd write in an original story. If your plot ideas for fanfiction are any indication, I doubt that it would be a best seller.

 

Remarkably easy. In fact, I was just discussing that with IP a few minutes ago and my eact words were 'as long as it looks shiny, virtually no-one will notice' (that what you're writing is completely crap, that is). However the same can't be said for the real world of fiction. You won't get "shippers" kissing your arse all the time because YOU HAVE NO SHIPPERS. JK herself was turned down by countless publishers before being accepted and her book was a great start - a million times better than any 1st Year Harry (rip-off) I've ever read...

Werd. Nicely put.

 

Writing fan-fiction and real fiction is uncomparable in its complexity. Original fiction requires much more originality and planning than even the best FF.

I won't even talk about pre-existing setting raising the quality of your work. If George Lucas had tried to make an entirely new SF trioligy with the plot of SW episodes 1-3, he would've been ridiculed at each step, probably not even finding a studio ready to finace that crap. Just by placing it in the Star Wars setting earned him a much higher approval rating and legions of fans swallowing that shit like candy.

Same thing is with fanfiction. Even the worst FF crap still has HP in its basis, pulling it up at least a little bit. Original fiction piece of crap is just that - a piece of crap and nothing more.

 

BlueMagikMarker: Well said. Very well said, Matey.

Okay, folks...

Disregarding all bullshit arguments, there is one argument that cannot be discredited:

HBP is a fucking book.


Now, perhaps it makes you feel like a man, perhaps it just a way of getting your anger out...but wiping catshit and propping up stools etc with a book is the most retarded idea I've ever heard. What the fuck? Its a book...do you wipe catshit with other books that you disliked? I should hope not, but with the quality of some of your 'w0w, thIs iS wHat I dO wItH mY HBp!' posts...I am forced to accept the fact that idiots exist.

Sure, you might not have liked it. Personally, I thought it was utter trash. Did I eat my book/flush it/use it as a wank rag/wipe my ass or some other inane thing? No.

The fact of the matter is that you paid MONEY for it. Only a fucking idiot would mistreat something they paid money for, but hated. Perhaps you've never heard of a pawnshop, or someone else who is interested in reading a used book.

You paid 20 fucking Dollars for it...sell the book to someone else. Make some of your money back...if you really felt that strongly about it, then getting some of the money back would be great for you. It would make your loss much easier to bear.

Enthusiasm is great and all...but for fuck's sake.


Now, I'll take a moment to consider f77's post.

...

You fucking idiot. Admins, I congratulate you for banning him.

 

Which is why I keep it around -- with a different book jacket on it. Cuts down on my losses without me having to go to the hassle of returning it. Plus if I am ever dumb enough to try and go through it again, I can always just take out my copy of "The Collected Works of Immanuel Kant"

The irony there is simply amazing,

Kant: To Be is To Do

Rowling: Oooohhh I totally agree in like Books 1-5... But I'm gonna make a teensie widdle change in book 6 kthx bye.

Kant: *See's Tom Riddle's (Voldemort's) Character in Book 6* *realizes she has just completely undermined what she was trying to say on the subject of choice* *rolls over in grave*

Rowling: Oopsie -- but guess what, I'm gonna tell you all the ending to Book 7 by blatantly hinting at it in all my interviews

Entire Fandom: Tolkein never put us through this shit.

Age + Experience always beats Youth and Enthusiasm... Unless of course your JFK and your opponent is Richard Nixon.

Agreed... But I can't believe you actually wasted a moment of your time... This is the guy who said we should follow a law because it exists.

 

Did the admins just get tired of his boundless stupidity and ban him? Or did he do something that overstepped the line...