On the one hand, Voldemort did kill her personally in canon, so probably she would have noticed that Pius Thicknesse is under Imperius. Maybe she could have been more effective than Rufus Scrimgeour.

On the other hand, she was head of the DMLE during Fudge's term, and the ministry was crazy corrupt and ineffective. While we do not know how good she was at dealing with petty thieves like Mundungus Fletcher, we know she failed at dealing with high status criminals - either she was pro-status quo, or she was as corrupt as the rest of them, or she failed at getting the political power necessary to effect change. Like with Dumbledore, we do not have a satisfactory in-universe explanation for the failure/incompetence, we only have the Doylist explanation that Wizarding Britain had to be a failed state for plot reasons, and so every character in position to do something to prevent it had to fail.

All fix-it stories select (a least) one of the infinite number of points at which catastrophe could have been averted and change it from canon, thus leading to a better outcome. Bones surviving, becoming Minister and using emergency power to go after the Death Eaters is certainly a viable and logical way to do it. In a universe that wasn't contorted into insanity by the requirement that a teenager had to save the world without any adult help, something similar would have happened naturally - after Dumbledore's fuckups and/or death, someone like Bones would have been the leader of the anti-Voldemort side of the civil war.

 

And not a single fuck would be given about reading that book, most aptly titled Amelia Bones and the Endless Debates Between a Bunch of Hand-Wringing Grownups Which Lead Harry Potter to Throw Up His Hands and Leave This Dreary Shithole.

 

In one story Amelia Bones was portrayed as a dirty racist because she was biased against a group of people who for most of her life indiscriminately killed people in horrific ways.

Thats right, she hated mimes. No, wait, she hated werewolves, and threatened to fire or arrest Tonks because of her relationship with Wolfy McWolf the Wolf. I quite liked the fact that she was stuck in her ways and wasn't the perfect option to become the new Minister.

 

Ah, yes, I remember that...

It was almost shocking, since she's nearly always portrayed as either a paragon of virtue, rendered ineffective by a bureaucracy that has tied her hands; or as another sudden and typically off-screen death, designed to prove that Voldemort is a dangerous foe, rather than a paper tiger who will eventually be neutered and defeated by a student of middling ability, once said youth manages to finally pull his prick out of his baker's dozen or so of girlfriends for five whole and consecutive minutes.




Not that I'm saying that's always a bad thing...

 

I've just realized that I subconsciously stop reading fics that have either the words "Magical Core" or "Notice-Me-Not" in them.
Like, immediately when they appear, I stop reading and close the page.

Now, this may seem like no big deal, but the fact that I've been doing this subconsciously seems a little strange to me.

Huh.

 

I don't see any problem with the idea, myself.

 

I used to do this, but recently I've been re-reading some of my favourite older fics. And I realized that an awful lot of them have ideas like this in it, and yet are still awesome. For example, Browncoat, Green Eyes by nonjon is in my top three fics ever, and it throws around ideas like super occlumency and magical cores, but it still works in that story.

 

Parseltonuge.

I mean, seriously. "Parseltonuge"

I'm looking at you, theSanti

 

Words are hard.

 

One thing thats been frustrating me recently is authors having "real" Slytherins being sorted into Gryffindor or Hufflepuff because "no true Slytherin would be so obvious" or some bullshit like that.

It's the Sorting Hat. As in the Hat Sorts the students. Not the Choosing Hat where the students Choose the House.

 

Not to mention the fact that these Real Slytherins are eleven fucking years old, and they're snookering a Sorting Hat that's been doing this shit for 1000+ years :facepalm

 

When I see at the top of a story:

'..' - Speech
*...* - Parseltongue
'Telepathy'

This is annoying. If you can't make us understand in-story that the speech is not in normal english, then there is a problem.

 

The weird part is that half the time one or more of them will not even be used.

 

Yep, even worse when it is there in every single chapter. Doing it at the first is annoying and unnecessary but acceptable(or more like quickly forgotten).

 

While I do broadly agree with you, don't underestimate the stupidity of some readers, even if you do make it obvious.

 

Another thing that brings my piss to a boil is when I see authors mugglefy (if that's even a word) wizard things.

For example, I saw Harry ask Sirius in one fic: "How about we firecall Wizard Pizza?"

The fuck? Can't the Magical Britain stay Magical? Do people have to add muggle bullshit to the mix?

This is worse when they bring muggle technology like cellphones or (I swear) television to Hogwarts.

 

Well, how else will the Purebloods(TM) watch Star Wars on DVD and be amazed by what the muggles can do? This is just one step before organizing outings to the movies so the aforementioned purebloods can watch Armageddon or something...

 

It'd be funnier if the Purebloods really got into the crappy or more racist movies.

"Wow, this Triumph of the Will is great! That Muggle Hitler had some great ideas, huh? Maybe he was secretly a Wizard."

"Wow, Fat Slags really speaks to me!"

"Roland Emmerich is my new god!"

 

I imagine that wizarding tastes would be completely different. So what we see as horror films would be like comedies for them. And action movies would be horror films.

 

Or be utterly appalled at the racism and sexism, which are far more muggle foibles than wizard ones. They can then leave with their absolute belief in wizard superiority re-enforced.

Really, wizards who buy into to blood supremacy should have plenty of 'Wizards are better because...' factoids on standby. It's not as if you need a deep understanding of muggle culture to spout off a few 'facts' you read a few years back.

"Muggles! Better? Did you know its legal for a muggle to rape his wife?" That even true as long as it's said before 23 October 1991, when the House of Lords abolished the marital rape exemption in R v R.



On the pet peeve front, I'm more than slightly annoyed at the way the fandom seems to have constructed the idea of a vast Pureblood, blood purist elite lording it over the wizards world. And also the way it seems to have combined being a pureblood and being a blood purists to a degree not even hinted at in canon.

It's like they've listened to the likes of Malfoy and Voldemort yammering on and seemingly bought into almost everything they say, save for deciding their conclusions are wrong. To use a real world example; it's like listening to a White Supremacist talk about the imminent race war and deciding that, while racism is of course wrong, war is going to break out any minute all the same.

Going by what we see in canon, most of the wizarding world are just people. Like similar 'isms' in real life, they don't care about blood purism enough to get worked up about it, save for a general idea that it is wrong and not something you admit to in public.