Naruto petpeeve: Over-the-top, post-kill scenes. Especially with shouting and rhetorical questions.

 

THIS. This so much.

Even good fanfic authors so often write fucking ridiculous relationships between their kid characters. They always have to be too exclusivist, too friendly to friends and too nasty to rivals, too sure of who is a friend and who is a rival (with everyone else being virtually nonexistent), too unfriendly or indifferent to people from other Houses, sticking with the same people for 7 fucking years (really, how many people you know have had the same best friends throughout their whole adolescence?), all in all too constant and dramatic in their relationships.

As for the matter of assigned seats, it may not matter as much as you think. At Hogwarts kids eat their first dinner and sleep in the same dorm with their Housemates a day before having their first classes. Besides, as they move to different places for different subjects-- for which they have different teachers-- it's unlikely that they'll stay with the same person in all the classes. We know that there are about 10 kids per House per year, and in a class you have kids from the same year from 2 Houses, kids of every House having at least one class with every other House. So, about 20 students. Also, there are 8 core classes (7 if you don't count flying). It's not very likely that they'll get to sit with the same person in any two classes. Kids also prefer friendships with people of the same sex, so even if that happens (but their deskmate is of the opposite sex), their best friend is likely to be someone else.

Also, in canon, I only remember Snape to pair people during potions practice. There might have been more, but only Snape was enough of a dick about it to be memorable. And even then, this was only during practice.

OT: When authors disregard the amount of time for which Muggles and wizards have lived separately (that is, officially 3 centuries, non-officially probably much more) and/or overestimate the amount by which the former culture could have influenced the latter (and how that influence is inextricably related-- proportional, even-- to Muggleborn influence and acceptance). It's my most hated kind of worldbuilding fail.

On a related note, when they underestimate what magic can do for a household, government, villain, what-have-you.

 

Couldn't agree more. I go to a school with about 100 in a year and by second year I was on decent speaking terms with everyone. Hogwarts has about 40 in a year, everyone would get to know each other pretty well by the end.

I hate how it is written as though it would be seen as a betrayal of your house to be friends with someone from another house. Just because you are in the same house doesn't mean that you will automatically be friends with everyone in that house, nor would they be your only friends.

Like when Harry does everything muggle style because he learned such great housekeeping skills from the Dursleys.

 

Me for one. From 11 to 20, my two best friends have remained the same. It is not at all unbelieveable. Overly dramatic yes, too constant, no.

The problem is that we don't see any interaction with anyone other than the "best friends," not that those best friends stay the same.

 

While I wouldn't call it unbelievable, the other way round still seems to happen more often, in my experience. At least, if everybody in your fic does it (not only the main characters), there may be a problem there. And when I said "too constant", I was talking about everything I've listed-- as in, how characters' behaviour towards others, attitudes towards people from other Houses etc. remains the same throughout the story. Dunno, couldn't find a better word for it.

 

Ah, I see. I agree, the fact that it is true of everyone is unbelievable.

 

The most useless motherfuckers on the face of the planet are the ones who put "SlashHet" in their summary. Thanks for nothing. :facepalm

Do these ignorant tits think this is helpful or informative in any way whatsoever?

 

I think it's a fair warning that the writer was inspired by a wet dream more than the source material.

"Welcome to adult fanfiction, where even a somber one-shot will include mind-bendingly inhuman standards of sexual behavior. Today, we've secretly modified our canon-defying gay characterizations to accommodate an inversion of the US porn industry motif of 'all lesbians like dick'."

Bless them for being succinct.

 

I think its a dual warning that the fic contains both het and slash. There are people out there who, for some reason beyond me, refuse to read anything with het pairings. And of course there are people like those here who refuse to read slash. So its a warning for both groups. Certainly it could be better written, but all in all its still a reasonable warning.

 

...

I could make so many poor cracks about those people, it'd be in poor taste to post them.

 

Maybe for people who need to be told that water is wet. In the meantime, it tells you nothing about the main pairing.

 

Tere's such a thing as poor taste on DLP?

 

^Your avatar makes that post even funnier.

 

After reading an atrocious masturbation fantasy on a site which encourages this genre (a bunch of horrible authors who read/critique/inspire/work off each other's masturbation fantasies), I thought the only constructive thing I could do was leave these links as resources for fan fic authors who kinda forgot how children grow. Maybe people on DLP can avoid some loss of suspension of disbelief. From: http://www.who.int/growthref/who2007_height_for_age/en/index.html

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=...ity/growthref/cht_hfa_boys_perc_5_19years.pdf

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=...ty/growthref/cht_hfa_girls_perc_5_19years.pdf

For example, at 14 years of age, average boys and average girls are almost the same height, but the girls have only an inch left to grow while the boys have a lot of growth left to do.

 

Chracter A (Generally Harry) and Character B (Insert future pairing here) meet when they're just cutesy widdle toddlers, and from then on the story is about little children. Every chapter is a new way to show how precocious and yet genius and wonderful they are! All the while making not-so-subtle nods towards what a perfect couple the two will make!


BLERGH!

I refuse to read stories that spend any significant period of time with Harry as less than his Canon-Start age. Unless the focus is on an older cast member until Harry grows a bit. (Ex: Remus, Sirius, Dumbledore, etc etc)

 

Flashback

(insert stuff that author can't figure out how to insert into a story properly)

End Flashback

I always picture the Wayne's World guys whenever this happens. Flashbacks, shown like this, belong in visual mediums: movies, cartoons, etc. not in stories.

I have never read a story that I even half-way liked that had this in it. If you can't figure out how to have your character remember something without using the prompts then don't write the story, because you're an idiot.

I just opened a story where the first two chapters were nothing but back to back Flashback's and then the third chapter was Time Skip-One Year. I mean seriously? WTF?! Is it a time skip from the flashback or from the present... or maybe it's from the future?

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!

 

Ohh, even worse.

Flashback in the middle of a chapter

Cut to a scene that happened thirty minutes before the current one.

End Flashback

 

Flashbacks are fine if short..... The long ones make me rage though. It's pointless exposition.

Authors that don't have any mark to show when they're changing the character perception or scene endings. Those make me mad.

 

Flashbacks, unless done in a sort of way that displays a twist/'revelation' at the end of a convoluted plot, are a major form of 'telling'.

Usually, it's authors who write a story that tells you what's going on, not shows you, that frequently use these.