He rolls to detect facetiousness, gets a 1. I even ended my post by declaring it silly; I don't think anyone here believes this conviction=confiscation thing makes any sense, we were just having fun.

 

Since the thousandth time it was done for no other purpose than to produce some poorly-conceived conflict.

I'm not criticizing you. I'm agreeing with FA that it's a stupid idea and a shared Pet Peeve. That is the point of this thread, bro.

 

I think a better question should be 'when has cannon stopped someone making a good and interesting premise of plot twist in fanfiction?'

 

Depends on your definition of good, but I see your point and agree with it.

 

I think a better question would be, 'How anyone could read this thread and still use the word "cannon" when what they actually mean is "canon"?'

 

The problem with canon/cannon is that even though I'm personally aware of the problem and now am trying to keep myself from entering extra n's, the word still looks alright to whatever supplementary spell-check is being performed automatically and thus it's easy to miss it.

But I do try to double check it now. ;D

I really hate to make mistakes that I know are mistakes - a pet peeve of my life.

---

Bringing this remark to be more in tune with the thread, I found something that is more annoying than an author's note in the middle of the fic.

Authors note in the middle of the text that asks the reader to check the spelling for the author; misspelling a word one could check, in, say HPL, or with Google in a minute. Have seen this two or three times now, I think. Genius.
Never mind the other bullshit in the quote. It's a really bad fic I stopped reading after skimming two very short chapters - the note stood out for me the most.

 

When I see this sort of thing, I tend to assume one of four things happened.

1. The author left that for their beta, and the beta failed to remove it; then, the author posted it, assuming it was fixed.
2. The author left that for their beta, but the beta couldn't be reached and so they went ahead and posted the chapter, unedited, and didn't remove the notes.
3. The beta left a note for the author, but the author failed to read through the chapter after getting it back from the beta.
4. The author left the note for their own benefit as a reminder, but forgot to go back and check it.

I'd really like to think that authors aren't so stinking lazy that they'd leave that in there, hoping that their readers will fix it for them. Sadly, humanity disappoints me in this way on a regular basis.


The thing that makes this doubly sad is that (if the author left it for the readers) it's probably not so the readers can correct them and the author can go back and fix it, it's probably just a way for the author to shrug and say, "I'm juuust smart enough to know this is probably misspelled, but I'm too lazy to check, and I'll be damned if I'll go back and correct it if you actually educate me on what I did wrong; this is strictly to let you know that I know, as if that absolves me of my ignorance and laziness. By the way, if you DO correct me, my mindless zombie fans will flame you in reviews. Ta!" :|

 

You missed one.

5. Has no concept of how to use the "review" tab in MS Word, the "record and display change" function in LibreOffice, or the like in other software.

 

Does your MS Word have "Veritaserum" in its spell check dictionary? You could add it, I guess, but that would involve knowing the correct spelling to begin with, so that's no good. I'm not trying to defend this writer or anything, but in this particular context I don't see how spell checking software would help.

 

There a lists made for this purpose. You just have to insert it.

 

There are these things called Books where you can find the correct spelling. Or perhaps this little known thing called the Internet where you can Google the correct spelling.

One misspelling can be called a typo. Misspelling the same word a number of times is called laziness.

 

Don't forget Wikionary, Heather.

 

Ok, I might be alone in this, but my Pet Peeves is the whole "Harry is so weak" thing. You know "Snape invented Spells while in School, Pettigrew was an Animagus, what did Harry have? NOTHING".

First Year, he miracously becomes the best Seeker in the whole School, without any training whatsoever.
Second Year, he's one out of two Parselmouths in all of Britain.
Third Year, he manages a Patronus.
You see a pattern yet? Yea, in the first few years Harry quite literally got abilities no one else had.

Also, there's a quote from Hermione, saying Krum said Harry knew more then he himself did, and Krum was in his seventh year in Durmstrang. The quotes from OotP, when she convinces Harry to teach the DA.
So Harry is really, really good at DaDA and a great Teacher on top of everything. And he got out of his Traumas relatively unscathed.

I mean, he never got scared or simply froze when confronted with Voldemort. Imagine a twelve year old boy, confronted with a Teenage Hitler, who points a gun at him and says "I'm going to kill you". Taunting is _not_ a natural reaction.

To a more practical Pet Peeves of mine, training arcs. The "were going to have to train hard" thing. I mean, Voldemort doesn't even do anything while Harrys busy training. They just go shopping, start to train.
Then suddenly Harry and everybody in his little group get's perfect scores in School, becomes Animagi, learns obscure Spells, Occlumency ... (Priorities anyone ?)

If there were a magical button called "train" which transforms Harry to Super!Harry, it would be used way more often.

Also, childhood Trauma. Ron's only mean and thoughtless and lazy because he has so many siblings he feels underappreciated. Hermione is only so pushy and a know-it-all because she never had friends and thinks she needs to "prove her worth".

Draco didn't actually mean all the stuff he said abouit Mudbloods, he just repeated what his father said because of all the Pressure that comes with being the heir of the Malfoy name and some obscure Pureblood rituals.
Luna isn't actually interested and mythical (fictional) creatures, she just flees from a reality where her mother is dead and she herself bullied.

They just need a hug. Then just about every character will become the same tolerant, gentle, caring Person. Can't you just let them be? Explaining every personal flaw, every attitude with Trauma is just lame.
It's also very disrespectful, implying they can't deal with reality, or have any individuality whatsoever.

I had another rant on the "Dumbledore manipulated me for the greater Good, so now I'm going to run off to Voldemort who totally didn't start a war, killed my parents and preached genozide. He's also totally not a psychopatic Massmurder" thing, but I suppose I'd better stop here.

 

Or just being wrong. https://forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?t=22270

 

I think that would be labeled under misspelling the word every time.

 

True - though I'm shamed to admit I've done that a few times.:facepalm

 

So, I finally realized one thing that makes me immediately drop fics, no matter how interested I am in them:

Any kind of shitfuckery with Voldemort's name. He's the Dark Lord, the person people, ten fucking years after his death, were still afraid to talk about - Hagrid was FRIGHTENED to say his name to Harry!

So any of this "Moldyshorts", "Dark Lord Lamedemort" or other juvenile names, said by the characters is ridiculous. More then half of them are deathly afraid of the "Dork Lord", even the people Harry does convince to say the name stutter half the time while doing it!

God, sometimes fanfiction makes me so frustrated.

 

I think the reason for this is because the Voldemort the writers are familiar with isn't the one who earned the right not to be spoken of by name, and what they do see (in canon, to be clear) is a whole lot less impressive. Canon Voldemort is just hard to be scared of if you aren't yourself a character. Of course, if a writer does his job halfway right he'll be fixing that, but all too often he doesn't, and even if he does, that still won't instill the same respect and fear that his characters (should) have. Long story short, I'd say this tendency is the result of a writer not immersing himself sufficiently into his characters' perspectives. It should go without saying that that's a necessity of good writing.

 

No, I'd say it's more a result of people seeing it in a story that was moderately popular about five years ago and deciding that including such original and hilarious jokes will make their stories popular too.

 

Well, they still wouldn't do it if they considered how OOC it almost always is to have people making such lameass quips. You're probably right, though; I doubt most of these writers even think about what these jokes say about the characters who mindlessly spew them. Of course, I've seen these lines in the writings of far more talented people than your usual FFN hack - Bungle was full of them, to give one example - and there, I think the problem is the failure to put oneself in a character's shoes that I mentioned above.

On another note, am I the only one who's sick to death of Pensieves everywhere? We know of, at maximum, two such objects in canon, and that assumes that Snape has one of his own, and he didn't just borrow Dumbledore's for a bit. If this isn't the case, then we know of exactly one, and it wouldn't be the first time Dumbledore had something one of a kind (Phoenix, Deluminator, etc.). Sure, it'd be a useful thing for wizards to have around, but, well, it just feels cheap to have something that, well, mystical all over the place. I'd love to see more stories where the Pensieve in Dumbledore's office is the only one of its kind. It just feels more special that way.