Except when a 'fight' is nothing more than a few lines of:

"Stupify!"
"Expaliarmus!"
"Mulitplicus stupefy!"

That's usually a good sign the author doesn't know how to write, well, much of anything at all.

 

True, but stories where they do some trash talk while "dueling" or reminiscent are worse.

 

This is just a lame fight to begin with.

 

I just found a Harry/Daphne story that's actually titled Harry Potter and the Ice Queen.

Christ.

 

Yeah, there is, though I can't remember it's name. From what I remember, it ended up being a Slash, Male Harem story...

 

What a surprise.

 

It's only fair, there should be actual ice involved.

 

^ If someone with a brain wrote this story, I would read the shit out of it.

 

Yes. Yes yes yes - this has been pissing me off since even before I started reading fanfiction. Nowadays it doesn't so much rile me up as make me wonder what the hell the writer sees; it's not as if the words look alike or that I would expect a regular person to have never seen the word 'defiantly' used /correctly/.

 

I think what happens is that someone tries to spell "definitely" as "definately" and the spell check then suggests "defiantly", which the writer accepts without reflection.

 

This.

And also the fact that many people turn on the auto-correct feature of whatever software they're writing with and then forget about it, trusting the feature to read their minds.

 

I think the core of what makes this so annoying (aside from the way one person says it and a veritable swarm of fans mindlessly parrot it because the vapid dicks have no ideas of their own) is that it implies a level of... respect, not to mention a collective conferral of the title to the person in question by their peers; like everyone agrees that Daphne is "The Ice Queen" and this is, for some reason, a title of both importance and grandeur.

Much like it makes me retch when I read someone referring to Draco as "The Prince of Slytherin" or some similar bullshit appellation.

When, really, these things should convey a proper disdain. Draco thinks he's the Prince, sure, but if anyone else calls him that, it should be clear that what they mean is that he's a self important little shit, and that by calling him a prince, they're really just being ironic, and saying that his true importance is inversely proportional to that of any insincere title they're bestowing upon him.

By that same token, "Ice Queen" should either mean "uppity bitch" or "so socially/emotionally backward that they closed themselves off from their peers, rather than attempt to engage with them." Or, in other words, "The Ayanami".

How that is taken as a title of pseudo respect, rather than an epithet sneered by catty girls and snickered by callous boys is mystifying to me.

The closest I've ever come to referencing the dreaded Ice Queen: I have Pansy referring to Tracey Davis as a "frosty, uptight, bitch" in something. It's definitely not taken as a title, nor respectful in any way, and certainly not something on which the community at large suddenly came to some unspoken consensus. :|

Sure, Voldemort is "He Who Must Not Be Named" and Harry is "The Boy Who Lived" and, later, "The Chosen One", but those are for some pretty significant reasons... and Harry still thinks they're ridiculous. Not everyone needs a stupid friggin' title.

 

I do dislike Draco being referred to as a 'Prince' of anything, and especially dislike when stories refer to the dynamics of first year students as anything remotely important or noticeable by the house or population of students at large. I get very annoyed when stories refer to seventh years cowering before the 'might' of an ickle firstie's daddy complex.

Seriously. People write as if Lucius Malfoy is God, and Draco is the next coming of Merlin the way displeasing him suddenly becomes a reason for complete shunning by the entire Slytherin population.

 

If a word from an ickle 1st year to his daddy might result in your family disappearing, you'd be wise to exercise some caution.

Unfortunately, this isn't what happens in canon, so Draco just comes off as a arrogant little fuck whose threats to invoke daddy's wrath are complete and utter bullshit, yet people unrealistically cower.

If JKR wanted a credible rival for Harry inside of Hogwarts, she should have given Draco some teeth. As it was, he came across as some kind of unholy mutant offspring of the Marx brothers and The Three Stooges. The only thing he ever pulled off successfully was getting some of the Deatheaters into Hogwarts, and if canon!Harry possessed had any brains, he would have offed Malfoy the next time he laid eyes on him.

 

Yeah, but canon!Harry had a lot of Dumbledore in him. With the exception of the Dark Lord and Death Eaters that were actively shooting curses at him, Harry was a pacifist. He usually only attacked once somebody else was in danger or he was very, very angry (shooting ineffective spells at Snape post Dumbledore's death).

Feel free to contradict. i may be misremembering. Still, he would never have tracked down Draco.

 

He successfully cast a Cruciatus on a deatheater who had only spit on McG. I really don't think he should have had a problem whacking the guy who let the deatheaters into Hogwarts, ultimately resulting in, as far as Harry could tell at that point, AD's death.

And this is leaving aside a few Imperius curses that were used earlier. By the time the Trio came back to Hogwarts, a lot of the luster had worn off

 

yeah, but that was a long time post this incident. I dunno. I just don't see it being a priority, especially not given that Snape actually fired that shot. If he took the time to go after anybody, it would have been hunting Snape down before he was installed as Headmaster. He may have grown the backbone searching for Horcruxes, but that was a whole year away from civilized society, hiding in the woods and eating random wood barks. He didn't have it in him at the DoM RIGHT AFTER Sirius died...

 

I'm not saying he would hunt anybody down. Especially just after the end of HBP.

I'm saying that when he ran into Malfoy again at the RoR, and Malfoy was still obviously trying to impede Harry and help Voldemort, Harry should have just AK'd him.

Harry was obviously getting pretty close to the edge mentally, what with the whole 'spit on her and and I torture your ass' thing, so I could see him unloading on Malfoy.

 

There? Yeah I'm surprised he didn't try and off Malfoy. Moreover I'm surprised that he went so far as to 'save' them when it was Malfoy's henchman that caused all the trouble to begin with.

Edit: Well, not ALL the trouble, but enough.

 

The biggest problem I had with that whole scene was Ron 'Death to All Slytherins' Weasley not laying into Harry for saving the idiots

And a peeve: Any fic where Harry apologizes to AD for trashing his office. I hit the red X anytime I see that shit.