Post little things that annoy you about stories.

For me, I hate stories that try to redeem Petunia but leave Vernon and Dudley the same monsters they are in cannon. I don't mind stories where Dudley decides to stop being a dick to Harry, but I usually can't stand stories where Petunia suddenly gets all maternal. Especially when she's "protecting" Harry from Vernon and Dudley.

Just started reading http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6459372/1/Harry_Potter_Other_Peoples_Magic from the almost recommended thread which prompted me to make this.

 

I'm pretty sure this thread has existed like, at least three times.

 

Victim Harry. There's nothing that pisses me off more. There are several versions of this: unconscious, nightmare screaming Harry; malnourished, fainting Harry; and beaten, covering up broken bones and scars Harry. And I REALLY hate it when all of this is seen from someone else's pov, and only for the sole purpose of having that character wax poetic about how strong and tragic Harry is.

Good god, I hate victim!Harry as a main character. I mean yeah, the kid had a hard life, but the reason you actually empathize with him in the books is because he doesn't bitch about it. He cries like once or twice throughout the entire series, and when that happened I actually got a little choked up, because you realize just how much he's had to endure because you were shown it. But these Victim!Harry stories try to bank on that, but instead of a kid who mans up and gets on with it, they write a character who takes out his laundry list of woes for anyone who'll listen.

I don't want my hero to have to be saved by someone, I want him to do the saving. >:[

/rant.


edit: @Zennith-- but it's always fun to vent about it.

 

Stranger in a Too Familiar Land is a perfect example of the sort of fic ruined by Victim Harry.

I had high hopes for it, but the most recent chapter was so grating...

 

I gots me a million of 'em.

Auror v's Aurora for example.
I guess that means the main one is Author laziness.

 

By victim Harry, you mean pussy!Harry, yes?

"Oh, woe is me, everyone I know and love is dying! I'll now cry and whimper constantly for the next few weeks until I go back to Hogwarts! Boo-hoo!"

Right. :facepalm:

Some of my personal pet peeves are the use of cliches to the extreme (seriously, some stories out there are so terrible in that regard, they can make your eyes bleed), and character perversions - many of which originate from fanon: soul bonds, veela bonds, 'evil Weasleys', Malfoy being just 'misunderstood', etc.

Mary Sue/Gary Su characters are another, as are self-inserts.

"ZOMG, IN HARRYZ THIRD YEAR A NEW GURL COMEZ TO HOGWARTS; WILL DEY FALL IN LOVES?" :facepalm

On the technical side, authors/authoress' who type dialogue like this, without a comma; "I'm sure" Harry said.

On the 'planning' side: people who do not check the Lexicon (or even the wiki) for basic background information, such as Harry being born in Godric's Hollow, and birth-dates, etc.

Another major peeve: "I'LL NOT UPDATE UNTIL I GET XX REVIEWZ!"

My apt response to that would be, "Go die in a fucking fire."

Hm...seems I'm feeling pretty nasty, this morning. :awesome

 

Haha, yeah, that's what set me off.

@Jormungandr: Pretty much all of that.

 

I think my biggest peeve is the 'intro chapters' some 'authors' tack on to the beginning of their story. I don't mind so much if all they're doing is giving and extended summary/author's note thing, but recently I've come across a few that start their stories off by saying, "So yeah, I've decided to change some stuff, LOL. The story starts in fifth year but Cedric is alive and everyone knows Sirius is innocent and the Malfoys and Petunia are nice and everybody's completely different. Enjoy my story and review and don't flame! [End Chapter 1]"

There are not enough words to describe the magnitude of my hate.

 

See, that's another thing that I very much hate! Many people do not seem to understand that even a single change (for example, Cedric surviving at the graveyard rebirth of Voldemort), would cause a ripple effect: they just recycle the same old canon chain of events/crap over and over, with this changed element.

Oh, and the over-usage of characters calling Voldemort odd things, such as 'Mouldy-shorts'...that's another.

 

After Harry gets paired up with random girl. It is almost always Hermione. Every other girl must become a raging slut hungry for Harry's cock. He then nobly turns them down and says his girl is a 100x more beautiful and awesome.

I fucking hate that.

 

1. Harry gets called to Gringotts for Sirius's will or whatever.

2. Harry becomes awesome in two 500 short chapters.

3. Harry randomly starts noticing how sexy other men are.

4. The goblins are actually nice.

5. Constantly calling the blood purists racist. We get it already.

6. Retarded name calling. IE: 'Slimy slytherin', 'Moldyshorts', 'Dung Eaters', etc

7. Badly done swearing. I know it's cannon, but every time I see 'Merlin's pants', I want to call the author a 'retarded walrus's miscarriage'.

8. The Dark Arts are really just misunderstood :facepalm

9. Harry falling in love and doing stupid shit with his date when he had better shit to be doing. I wouldn't go to church for my last girlfriend, and my only excuse was that I'd burst into flames at the threshold. Why the fuck is Harry going to Madame Puddifoot's when he should be preparing for a goddamn war?

Any of the above are likely to make me ragequit a story unless it's completely fucking awesome.

 

Why do so many fic writers feel compelled to have Harry sexually interact with girls in first year or have some sort of harlem which "boosts" his energy...like some sort of retarded pokeman HP level inducing upgrade??

It's just.....wierd.

Hermione should not be giving out blowjobs at the age of 11.

I stumbled onto that part of a fic and promptly ran for the hills.

 

Interesting typo there. Harry's pimping out his friends at age eleven, packing heat in case that frontin' mofo Draco tries to squeeze in on Harry's turf. .

My own petpeeve has got to be a Mary-Sue/Self-Insert. They normally go hand-in-hand. I've read two such fics because they broke the mold, one parodying the idea with a serious concept, the other because they did not intend to become a Mary-Sue.

I think they bother me so much is because I don't want to read someone's dreamy wishlist of how they want to be, while reading a fanfic world I love. Just sets the teeth to cringing.

 

I just mentioned this in a review post but Sirius/Remus calling Harry pup/prongslet and any other inane nicknaming going around drives me up the wall. It actually makes me flinch because I know that 90% of the time I'm about to venture forth into utter crap if I keep reading.

 

Well, just giving him a bunch of sex-slaves would be obvious as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, so you get ridiculous explanations like that.


My personal pet peeve is character-bashing. Fixing all the character flaws of your favorite characters, but exaggerating those of the ones you don't like, is just cheap and a sign of bad writing to me.
Related to this trope.

 

God damn TV Tropes--every time someone references that site, I lose another couple hours of my life!

 

Pet Peeve?

Constant Statute/Statue interchanging wins it. People can write whatever they want, but spelling, punctuation, grammar and legibility should be universal within fanfic, especially when regularly using a term like 'Statute', 'Auror', 'Dumbledore', 'Lucius Malfoy', or any of the other commonly misspelt canon words wherein the misspelling gives the term a totally different meaning. Your readership mostly being 12 is no excuse.

 

Statute/statue is like canon/cannon: it's a word the author has likely never used outside of discussing HP. Some people can only spell the words they knew when they were six years old. I blame public schools.

 

Magical core and magical fatigue. It's magic, why would you need to put silly limits on it? :facepalm
One story I read a while back made Harry carry several wands since they (the wands) apparantly could only fire so many spells before being 'empty' or whatever the reason was >.<.

 

This topic isn't new

But yeah, old threads are old, so go ahead