Dumbledore being defeated by really dumb plots and completely losing the war against Voldemort, twice, is canon. How is sixteen year old Daphne Greengrass any worse than letting the DEs get away after 1981, up to having Malfoy be more politically powerful than Dumbledore only a decade later? Or missing or failing to deal with: Quirrelmort, Basilisk, Black, Crouch Jr., Umbridge, losing one Order member and almost losing another guarding a prophecy, Draco Malfoy almost killing Katey & Ron, a Vanishing cabinet, etc.?

No. All characters in the Potterverse are incompetent, because the plot demanded it. In fanfiction, you can make any character competent, and then the whole canon story/world falls apart. The trick is to make it interesting.

 

I want to see that so I can rage at it. Dumbledore should expel her and snap her wand at a minimum.

 

Obviously he knew she was going to break in and let her do it anyway as part of his grand plot to do nothing.

 

Nah, its because as a teacher he has to allow opportunities for students to beat him to show how much they've progressed. For example it would be easy to magically enforce a curfew, but by allowing students to break it they develop faster and become good at the skills the teachers aren't supposed to be teaching. Why else do you think pranks keep happening?

He's deliberately only just losing again and again so that the students get better. In the case of Daphne it lets her practice various skills and increases her confidence in burglary to allow her to visit her mother- something he'd let her do anyway. But, he's been in this teaching mindset for so long that he's doing it on the Wizengamot and lets Malfoy and Voldemort win because he still views Lucius and Tom as little boys he has to encourage to win.

Oh, wait, thats bullshit. The authors are just incompetent and shitty.

 

Harry travelling back in time thousands of years and then going to a book store....

 

It reminds me something... Don't forget that since it's been, quite literally, centuries the lousy spare change Harry had on himself is suddenly enough to buy out whole libraries, quidditch teams and fund the construction of Hogwarts. Oh yeah noble titles too. Good ol' gold standard inflation times...

 

Gotta wonder if it was purely imitated, or if it was another effect the Horcrux had on him. According to the scene in DH, Ron was well on the way to being controlled just as his sister was. Would being in the vicinity of another Horcrux affect him enough that he could pull out a single word of Parseltongue if he needed it?

Harry time-traveling. Period. It's not Dr. Who, it's Harry friggen' Potter. Wanna go back a few hours and save Sirius. Fine. Hundreds of years? No, no, and no.

 

I have a lot more problems with Harry going back a few hours to save Sirius than him going back hundreds of years. The problem in the scenario described was the book store. Seriously? A book store? I've never read a good story where Harry goes back to the founders' time, but I really want to.

 

LAAAAAAWL!

"I must do nothing; it is for the greater 'Meh, fuck it.'"

 

Truthfully I'm not sure how a book store in founders era would be completely out of context; they had elaborate indoor plumbing, a book industry isn't so far fetched. An array of auto-quills (the cousin of the quick-quote) would do away with the labor intensive copying before the invention of movable type. And getting accurate information about the world Harry would find himself in would certainly be on the top of the priority list.

On the other hand the time-traveling stories tend to send Harry to his own childhood, where raiding a bookstore sounds a lot more questionable line of action. Especially when the typical priority list tends to look like this: get rid of Dursleys - counteract manipulative Dumbledore - kill Voldemort. All things a hundred and something (or even thirty) year old Harry with a plan and knowledge of things to come should find relatively trivial, and definitely not requiring extensive library research.

The biggest peeve with time travel for me is that Harry seldom seems to have any kind of plan of what he's doing. He does some ridiculously complicated ritual thing involving self sacrifice to get back in time and then stumbles around like a first year... And why would he do that in the first place? If Harry lives to reach hundred and something years, certainly things didn't turn out too bad?

 

Have you ever heard of this Guy? And of course there were chronicles written by Monks with hand and using dicta-quills would be the same but faster.

 

Obviously That Guy didn't live before the invention of movable type, given that he was the inventor of (European) movable type. And sure books existed before him, but not on industrial scale needed to sustain a bookstore. They were expensive, unique luxury products.

 

It'd be more believable if Harry went into a library at a school, or in his own castle, since he's usually royalty anyway. :awesome

 

Another one that bugs me a little bit is when characters discuss everything in terms of stereotypical House traits ("We're Hufflepuffs we have to be loyal, even though keeping our mouths shut will end in the deaths of 20 people", "That is a very Slytherin idea", "Peter Pettigrew actually betrayed the Potters for some convoluted noble reason because Gryffindors are incapable of evil", etc).

This is understandable in dialog between students, but comes off as ridiculous when people 50 years out of school talk/think like this. The Blacks treating Gryffindor-Sirius like a leper is canon, but he was a shit disturber before that. Not to mention Gryffindor-Peter is a huge pussy, Hufflepuff-Zacharias is a belligerent prick, Ravenclaw-Luna is a few fries short of a Happy Meal, and Slytherin-Crabbe/Goyle are lazy sycophant morons. It's a major point in the series that blood and House affiliations mean nothing, and treating Hogwarts Houses as a definitive personality guide and lifelong point of reference just seems off.

Hopefully that made some sense...

 

I feel the same way about people who write stories where Harry or (especially) Hermione turns out to be a pureblood, and suddenly that means they're better.

This is especially heinous when it's Hermione and the fact that she's revealed to be a pureblood suddenly makes it okay to date Draco... as though her only issue with him was that, as a mudblood, she wasn't good enough, rather than things like the fact that he was a cruel, vindictive, callow, racist and generally all around odious and mean-spirited dick who, even as a second year, cackled with glee at the thought of 'mudbloods' like Hermione being picked off at random like vermin.

Hello, didn't these people miss where JKR wrote on every other page of every book for the entire fucking series that blood purity should be a complete non-issue and being a pureblood did NOT make you better than anyone else?

Then again, considering the kind of shit stories these people write, is it any wonder that they're so shallow and moronic that they completely missed the fucking point of the series? Their protagonist is all, "Death Eaters and racism are bad, m'kaaaay? But, Merlin, I fucking love being part of the master race!"

Real nice...

Even if they don't come out and say, "So and so is better now because he/she is a pureblood.", they still make it painfully obvious that they think being a pureblood is just plain better than being one of the 'mud people', because they usually stick it in a list of other supposed upgrades.

"Well," Griphook said, "It turns out that you're a descendant of Merlin, Morgan Le Fay, Circe, all four founders, Hecate, and Christ Almighty. Also, according to this utterly convenient readout, you're a metamorphmagus, a cocktopus animagus, a natural Legilimens/Occlumens, a baconmancer, and, if we remove these control rods that are binding your magical nuclear core, your power level will be over 9000! Also, it turns out that your mudblood whore of a mother was actually a pureblood from a family too unimportant to notice, so we only thought she was a filthy sub-creature, instead of the angelic pureblood whose farts smell like the finest jojoba shampoo, that she so clearly is, in retrospect. Doesn't it feel good to be one of the chosen people? Why, despite my race being hated and oppressed by your race, I feel the sudden urge to lick your arsehole, because I can quite clearly see the sun shining out of it."

So, you know... hooray purebloods! :facepalm

 

I would read the shit out of a story where Harry, or anyone, is a baconmancer.

 

I'm not sure what's worse, that, or Harry's cliched trip to the bank were he finds the same - and within a couple weeks (and usually a powerup by bouncing on a Veela), he's able to take on "Moldewort."

The last fic I read, as a matter of fact, had this list: Magical line: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Peverell Potter Dracon. Gifts; Natural Occlumens/Legilmens, Natural Multimagus, Natural Metamorph, Parseltongue, Temperal Distortion,
Physical Ability Modification, Dracomagus, Very Strong Light Magic, Strong Neutral Magic, Weak Dark Magic, Teleporting, Veela Magic.

Shame - since I enjoyed the Goblin/Dwarf war idea in the fic.

 

Harry defeating Voldemort in his fifth or sixth year. This is done partilularly in stupid romance fics where the author wants to assure the reader that all is fine.
So they leave a quick note that "Oh, by the way, Harry defeated Voldemort a few months ago. Let's move along to the smut."

 

You said "smut". If the story is PWP, then you can't complain about the plot. If it's supposed to be a serious take on romance, the author needs to budget more than a single line for dealing with Voldemort, but it is possible to do that off-screen and make the story about the troubles of dating when you're a celebrity in a tiny fucked up society.

 

There's a difference between something having a smut scene in it and being PWP. It's perfectly possible for there to be smut scenes in a proper romance, or any type of fic.