Gold shit may smell bad but its still made of gold.

 

You have a way with words that just makes me swoon Bill.

 

Don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but I automatically exit out of story that contains an eleven year old Harry working out. No. That doesn't happen. Eleven year olds don't work out or worry about building muscle. I can almost accept Harry doing Karate or something of that ilk (though that never leads to a very promising story), but not one where he goes on morning jogs and lifts weights at eight years old.

 

Lifting weights pre-puberty isn't even very effective, and when done without competent adult supervision mostly just results in lots of injuries.

Anyone who writes a story which involves children becoming badasses from a few hours a week of martial arts training has clearly never actually watched a kids' martial arts class. The preteen classes are usually somewhere between adorable and hilarious.

 

I remember when I was 8 years old and going to a karate class.

It was nothing like what they describe. It was mostly older students kicking us younger ones around or lining up and doing punches blocks vs.

You need to at least 10 years to be anything close to badass. Uninterrupted one at that.

 

I've never seen an 11 year old kid exercising or lifting weights unless their parents were health nuts or the kid was involved in athletics.

My daughter joined one of the better local USA-swimming sanctioned clubs at 9, and they didn't start doing any training outside of the pool until she hit the 11-12 division. Then, it got a lot more serious.

 

Effective/normal or not, though, you probably would feel more motivated to lifts weights, run faster, or learn martial arts, when your fat, boxing enthusiast, cousin and his friends are chasing you and beating your ass in every other day.

Right?



True story, I accidentally slipped an 's' into "beating". "Beasting your ass..."

 

If my fat, boxing enthusiast cousin was beasting my ass at 11, I'd go a lot further than lifting weights.

 

Well, Vernon is a walrus, Dudley a pig, and Petunia a horse. Pretty beastly, yes?

 

Does that make Harry a road runner, and Voldemort a coyote?

Meep Meep.

 

More like a cat and mouse; Tom and Jerry for example.

Or should I say... Tom and Harry.

Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck



Edit:

Had to.

 

"Bumbles", "Voldy", or any name along those lines.

I just saw an e-mail reply (automated) from the Caer Azkaban group, and someone on there wrote something along the lines of, "But we're shown in canon that Bumbles doesn't understand morality, ethics, and privacy."

Aside from the fact that the idiot has no idea about the canon!Dumbledore as a whole...

"[...]Bumbles[...]"

 

Here's a pet peeve of mine I haven't heard discussed before: when an author titles their chapters "Chapter 1 - Blah Blah Blah", "Chapter 2 - etc.", but the first chapter of their story is simply titled "Prologue". So in reality, when you're reading the story on FFN, chapter 1 is actually chapter 2, and 2 is actually 3. And when you scroll through the list of chapters, everything is wrong.

It's just me being OCD, but it drives me fucking nuts.

 

"Bumbles" and many other stupid things in fics are all a result of echo chamber culture. A bunch of mediocre people converge around a single better-than-average person and engage in a circlejerk. They develop fads, fashions, whole mini-cultures where everyone repeats the same thing and everyone is sure the whole world agrees with them because they have never heard anything different. Living in a remote village without modern media is like that. Watching Fox News is like that. Spending a lot of time on a single mailing list/forum is like that.

The thousands of bad fics all imitating each other are a product of this social flaw. But many of the stupid tropes grew around a kernel of truth. Voldemort is a stupid name for a wannabe Emperor of Britain (tomorrow, the World!). Dumbledore did fail to achieve results while leading the resistance against Voldemort both times Voldemort tried to take over. Especially during the fourteen year long hiatus, when Dumbledore had the upper hand, he not only failed to capitalize on that temporary victory to achieve a full victory but he gave ground and enabled Voldemort's second rise to go much more smoothly than the first. Many Bothans died for nothing.

Same thing about the character flaws. All the characters are deeply flawed, so there is enough blame to go around. Harry was self sacrificing and powerful, but completely failed to be a proper fantasy hero. Ron was a pretty terrible sidekick. Hermione was stuck up and exasperated at the boys' immaturity, but suddenly not smart if the plot required it. All three had crippling low self esteem issues. The twins were casually cruel. Ginny is characterized as a third twin with boobs and the romance in canon was handled worse than in many bad fics. All the adults were extremely useless, way beyond the point where suspension of disbelief fails. Many times, evil triumphed because good was dumb. Add JKR's innumerous world building failures (pun intended). The urge to fix canon is, I think, very strong in anyone who has read the books.

 

Tl;dr
Also slash of any type but more specifically of the "James is not my dad Snape is, Snape come stick your meat rod up my poopy hole!!!!!" variety.


God I feel dirty writing that. Uuuuuuggggggh

 

I can not stop pairings that aren't canon. Unless the story is absolutely brilliant, it ruins the entire experience for me.

 

A prologue is different from a first chapter in terms of content and connection to the rest of the story (e.g. events taking place way before the main plot). Just sayin'. Not that the term isn't widely misused by FFN "authors" who believe it'd look cooler if they called their first chapter a prologue.

Granted, it messes a bit with the FFN chapter numbering system.

 

Kudos to you for being a typical DLP member.

That being said, grow the fuck up.

 

Sure his age isn't 13, and not his post count?

 

This may be hard for you to hear, but Dumbledore is, in fact, not god. What probably happened was it somehow got out what happened at Godric's Hollow, and while Dumbledore was trying to figure out if it was true, and oh yeah, where to out this spectacularly famous orphan so that he would be safe from harm, everyone spread the word and was so relieved (because Voldemort was so scary that people were afraid to mention him by name, remember. That's like boogeyman to a 4 year old level of fear) that they went out and partied, spread the word and had a good time thinking they were safe.

A couple years later Dumbledore has a suspicion (with no proof mind you mind you) that Voldemort still may be alive. Even if he had wanted to do something at this point, all of Voldemort's followers had been either sent to prison or legally acquitted of any wrong doing, so he had no legal way of "capitalizing on the war's hiatus", and it seems he only turned to vigilanteism when he had no other option. No one wanted Voldemort to be back or even have the potential to come back, so no one would want to help Dumbledore stop something they wouldn't want to believe could happen anyway.