Don't forget when Molly feeds Harry love potions so that he can marry Ginny. Then they try to kill him so they can have his money.

Or my personal favourite, when Ginny uses a potion to get pregnant with Harry's child so that he will marry her.

 

A thing for you.

 

Well quite, Weasleys pretending to be nice? Read the goddamn books! Three of them nick a car and drive across the country to break him out of the Dursley's.

And Love Potions annoy me greatly, I think that's on the pet peeve list.

Got one for you - Draco not adoring his father at the beginning. I sure as hell idolised my father until I was 13 and puberty kicked in.

Draco the Daddy hater? I think not.

 

Almost any badfic cliche can be done well by a good writer. I'm reminded of Jim Butcher's story about the origins of Codex Alera in a bet on a writing forum against someone who bet Jim that a good story cannot be written about a lost Roman legion and pokemon. Or something like that.

The canonical Ron, who is stupid, ignorant, insecure, lazy, entitled and who embellished his stories about his and Harry's adventures to an audience and was a pretty fickle friend to Harry and a terrible friend to Hermione, can be turned into his generation's Pettigrew. If only Voldemort's people had a capable agent to nurture Ron's angst about being in Harry's shadow and not getting enough fame, glory, money and girls for being Harry's sidekick, they could turn him bitter enough to really damage Harry in some way. Especially if Ron thought he was just being nasty out of spite but his actions led to people getting killed because he was stupid and ignorant and was close enough to people in the Order to be dangerous but remote enough to not be taught about security.

Of course, the most likely way for Ron to cause damage is to just blurt out secrets in a fit of pique. Very loudly. That does not require any encouragement from the other side.

It's like Hermione betraying the Order because an authority figure asked her to do something. Of course she would do it - he's a teacher! It could be Snape or a random DADA instructor or a DE with polyjuice or something else, but where other people would stop and ask "why do you want me to do that?" canon Hermione really could just trust the "uniform" of an authority figure.

The problem is that all the neat plots require at least some character to be competent and the canon does not provide us with competent characters. The whole thing is just amateur hour, lasting years and costing lives.

 

I very much agree it's possible to turn him evil or by that logic any character evil, joy of fanfiction. It's when it's done without reason.

I'm a prick because I am. That sort of crap.

 

It seems like half my posts these days are to defend Ron. While yes, he occasionally has said or done things that were stupid,ignorant, etc... That is not the defining point of his character, in the end he is a loyal friend who risks his own life for Harry and Hermione several times over. The times when he is jealous and ignorant occur in third and fourth year, before Voldemort is ressurected. By the time Voldemort could have an agent to turn him to the dark side, so to speak, he has grown up.

Those bad cliches can't be done well because the good writers avoid them. They are bad cliches because they are never done well.

There are no competent characters, seriously? How about Snape who acted as a triple agent fooling the best legilimens about, or Mad-Eye Moody who put half the inmates in Azkaban there. Or Albus fucking Dumbledore, who may be possibly misguided but he certainly isn't incompetent.

 

One of my pet peeves are when people use All the King's Men for their chapter titles. It has no meaning whatsoever. I've seen it in Jbern's To Fight the Coming Darkness and in way too many stories to count.

Seriously, what the fuck?

Also, intentionally uncapitalized titles. Fucking retards.

 

I just avoid reading stories with uncapitalised titles. I doubt I'm missing anything good.

 

Well, meaning is relative to the reader. Most people who see that are going to attribute it to Humpty Dumpty, and how "All the King's Horses/And all the King's Men/couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again." So, naturally, they're going to assume that something big is going to happen, will involve some form of destruction, and whatever is destroyed won't be possible to put back together.

It's basically catering to the lowest common denominator, and it also makes me think that you can't come up with your own titles.

Ironically, I use song titles for my chapter titles whenever I write something, so I really can't talk about bad chapter and/or fic titles.

For my own peeves, it's an entire genre. Indy!Harry is, as has been said before, a dead horse. Yes, we get it, Harry got handed an incredibly raw deal, and we didn't like how OotP ended either, but, honestly? I was reading jbern's Lie like 3 years ago, which, in my opinion, says a lot for how old the story is (and, as has been already stated, it hasn't aged well).

Honestly, I don't read much fanfic anymore because I've read so much of it that I can pick up on where a story's going in the first few chapters, or, worse, I can see the cliches coming and they're handled incredibly badly. Manipulative!Dumbledore is, inherently, an interesting idea because it appeals to the anarchist within us all, to that little voice in the back of your head that says "What if this is all just a bunch of bullshit?" whenever you're told something. But, again, it's handled so badly that it instantly turns me off the fic and I simply close the tab.

It's been a while since I've made it more than three chapters into something that I wasn't re-reading, and the only thing I'm still following is Joe's Unfound Door and Timelands.

 

What is this, I don't even . . .

So, pet peeve: when people use words the meaning of which they don't apparently know. Somone ought to let the . . . dare I say, "author," know that quicksilver is mercury, and that the quick in quicksilver has nothing to do with speed, but that its old meaning was alive/moving: quicksilver is silver that moves about because it's a liquid.

 

lol since mercury is/was used in most thermometers, does that mean Voldemort is as fast as a warm summer's day?

 

I'm not sure if this is really a pet peeve of fanfiction or canon or a mix of both...

Anyway when Dobby pops into the Room of Requirement to warn Harry and the DA that Umbitch is coming. Why doesn't anyone ever make them take a stand against her and the Inquisitorial Squad? I mean really the odds of winning is in the DA's favor. It's 3:1 basically in numbers.

Umbridge is always doing that whole 'I'm a fully qualified witch' thing. Well the DA has seven that are or could be of age: Lee, Fred, George, Alicia, Angelina, Katie & Cho. The Toad only has herself plus Warrington, Montague and some unknown sixth year. The fifth years go at each other and DA should still come out on top. Then have Luna, Ginny, Colin & Dennis deal with Filch (every students dream lol).

It might be fun to see that skirmish written. :awesome

 

Because then they'd all get expelled?

Being part of an unauthorised club is one thing, but attacking a professor (who is also a senior Ministry worker and the High Inquisitor) and a bunch of affluent pureblood prefects is a whole other ball game.

If you decided to ignore logic for the sake of fan fiction, then you'd end up with an amazing fight between... a bunch of half trained students? Hardly thrilling stuff, considering a lot of DA members struggled with some of the basics.

 

Well, when you put it that way, I suppose I was just looking at the novelty of it. :facepalm

 

I'm sorry, but this is even worse than the stuff syed comes out with.

 

Effeminate, Feminine Male Protagonists... I have nothing against effeminate people, but when the author goes on and on about Harry's delicate cheek bones, smooth and soft skin, elfin features...

And it's not just for HP fics, just yesterday there was this Naruto fic, some time travel crap. It was talking about Naruto's delicate features which was apparently even more feminine then the Yondaime, etc...

Anyway, I blame Animes/Mangas.

 

Yeah, Harry's appearance being described as "fey" or "faerie" is awful. Rarely occurs outside of slash stories though.

 

Andro: well, someone has to be the bitch in a so-called 'Drarry', yes? It's rarely Malfoy, apparently.

--

High cheekbones or aristrocratic good-looks? Yes.

Fae or adorable? Outside of him being something like Damien, or such a description as being apart of a horror story (to help set the tone of his wrongness) ? No.

 

They can go too far the other way an make him out to be some kind of super butch, male model. Usually accompanied with the phrase "Quidditch toned muscles".

 

Yeah - I always gag when I see some sexually repressed 14 year old's 'fantasy' put onto e-paper.