It's consistently called "a Pensieve", which would be kinda weird if it was unique, but otherwise I quite agree. Authors that make them common almost never seem to think about all of the really obvious implications that would have... and stories where five-galleon Pensieves from the luggage shop in Diagon Alley are handled realistically are usually even worse.

 

Hmmm...are you sure that it's always called "a Pensieve"? I'm quite sure you're right about it's first appearance, but after that I"m not so certain, and I didn't bring my Harry Potter books to college with me, so I can't check. That said, I'm dead certain I wouldn't want to have to deal with the implications of a world where Pensieves are a Knut a dozen if I were writing a story. There's so many potential applications for such things that it'd be a nightmare to sort them all out. You'd need a fucking checklist of plot elements that won't work because a Pensieve would instantly resolve them. Ugh.

 

Like Time-Turners, amirite?

 

Not quite as bad as that. You pretty much have to pretend that Hermione getting a Time-Turner to take extra classes didn't happen to avoid having your entire story be about 〜wacky adventures with time travel〜.

 

Wasn't that what Temperal Beacon was about, before it turned in to a shitty H/Hr?

 

Maybe the first chapter or two. It certainly wasn't by the end of the introduction.

The main thing that annoyed me about Temporal Beacon was that it never actually did much of anything with its gimmick. I wanted to read about Harry save scumming his way through a TWT that he was utterly unqualified for before finally becoming a badass after dying a few dozen times... and instead I got a story where the Beacon was just a fairly irrelevant bit of backstory that could easily have been cut entirely.

A story specifically about cheap and everyday Pensieves that tries to accurately depict what such a world would be like could be pretty interesting.

 

Uggh.. Probably my biggest pet peeve in Harry Potter fanfiction is Slash. Not because I am homophobic. I am openly gay. It is not even the fact that most writers are preteen girls who can't understand basic facts about biology (there is no such thing as anal hymens). It is not even the fact that they will often write one character as a women, unintentially.

It is the fact that nearly all the slash pairings are damn stupid. Here are some of the more common pairings that I have seen.

HP/DM- They hate each other. There is no sexual tension between them, just hate.

HP/SS- Same as above but the age difference makes it really creepy

HP/LV- You don't fuck the person who killed your parents

FW/GW- You don't fuck your twin, you just don't

HP/RW- Even assuming the wizarding world wass not homophobic, it would take years for Ron to realise he was gay. He is an sexually repressed idiot.

SB/RL- Actually see no problem here

SS/SB- They have both tried to kill each other. That is not the basis of a healthy relationship

SS/DM- Severus is not a pedophile

DM/RW- You don't fuck someone who insults your family unless you hate your family. They both love their family.

SB/HP- Sirius, like snape, is also not a pedophile.

Nearly every single slash pairiing makes no sense. It is not like where in Naruto, where the editors make sure there is a certain amount of yaoi bait to feed the hungry yaoi fangirls who buy the magazine. JKR gives the fangirls very little to work with. I really don't get why so much slash gets written for this.

 

Slash writers will write brother-brother pairings, see Supernatural. JKR writing one sentence of "Draco/Snape/Voldemort sneered/looked arrogant" is enough for them to justify any slash pairing.

There is no redemption for them.

 

You know nothing, YouKnowNothingJonSnow!

I just really had to say that.

Whaaaaat? Okay, I guess the fact that I don't read slash saved me from ever hearing this one.

Forget how these dummies seem to think shit-babies could ever be a thing -I suppose they would just scream 'Magic!' when confronted with that question- but anal hymens? FFS, there are people out there who deny the existence of hymens at all, full stop (clearly a clinically insane reaction to the phallocentric buzzword rape culture buzzword virginity obsessed buzzword Madonna/whore complex buzzword premarital...), and this anal hymen stuff would either make their fucking day, or cause them to rage so hard that they'd black out.

The mind boggles. Why, the impact of an especially heinous bout of constipation on a person's marriageability must be considerable. Makes you wonder why you don't see more wizards eating lots of fiber. Where are all the fics where a sobbing Draco tries to prove his anal purity and then sobs at how he lost his virginity to a hard shit brought on by an ill thought out meal of muggle fast food... This is a new nadir in the deep, deeeeep annals of fanfic stupidity.

This and the pinched nerve in my neck are making it impossible to think straight... and, apparently, are causing all my posts to veer scatological. :facepalm

Yes.
God, yes.

Stupidity, loneliness, wish fulfillment, a tenuous connection to reality, loneliness, and loneliness.

 

I understand how that leads to terrible Harry/OFC, or Sirius/OFC, Remus/OFC, Bill/OFC, or Voldemort/OFC, for the kind of women who become pen pals with prisoners from death row. But how does it lead to Harry/Draco or Harry/Snape?

 

Physically recoiled in shock and horror.

Pet peeve...these days, it's authors who don't seem to be able to comprehend the difference in ability between certain wizards. I know it's something that can be written into an AU and is as such dependent on the background, but people like Pettigrew cannot hope to stand against someone like Dumbledore, no matter how many faceless mooks they have with them.

 

Your pet peeve is slash?

Man... No one's mentioned that one before.

Seriously, bro?

Horny Lonely teenage girls fantasize about guys going at it for the same reason horny lonely teenage guys fantasize about girls going at it.

It's not rocket science.

 

I get where you're coming from, but I don't think the other end of the spectrum is any better. On that end, you've got Aurors and Death Eaters dying by the hundreds in some random army-on-army clash that the Wizarding World couldn't sustain even once, never mind several such events. Not to say it's good when Dumbledore dies to minor characters (though to be honest the only example of that I'm familiar with is TFTCD, and that fic's old news), but I would say that as far as this continuum is concerned, I'd err on the side of individual characters being worth something, even if they're "just" Aurors or "just" Death Eaters.

 

But I would never fantasize about Hermione/Millicent Bulstrode, or Hermione/Bellatrix. I can understand Tonks/Fleur. The problem with slash is not the gayness, it's the stupidity.

 

And yet there are slews of both these pairings littering the fandom.

Why?

Because unpleasant/unattractive females in romance fics are almost always treated to the fanon brush (i.e. they are repainted into more desirable versions of themselves). Busty button-nosed Pansy is practically more common than her fugly canon counterpart.

Slash is no different. If you can find a non-crack HP/SS slash-fic featuring a butt-ugly Snape, I'll be immensely surprised.

 

I think the Bellatrix pairings, a lot of the time, can be attributed to the author wanting a character that is 'dark and dangerous' and maybe even a bit of a dominatrix, because all of that equals 'sexy'... and somehow being an evil, racist, lunatic never factors in much on the un-sexy side of their math.

Her popularity may have been given a bit of a push when she was introduced in the movies as portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter (it certainly couldn't hurt - while the fashion critics are never going to be kind to her, there is a small army of people who think she even looked good as a monkey). Bellatrix was already pretty popular (as rare-pairs go) for the kind of fics she 'stars' in, though. In other words, I'm guessing Bellatrix's fanfic approval rating, so to speak, wasn't given nearly as massive a boost by the movies as, say, Neville was, post-DH part 2, or Snape was when it was announced he'd be portrayed by Rickman.

As far as Bellatrix/Hermione, specifically: I have to assume that some people (gals, particularly, since they seem much more keen on that pairing than guys), saw the scene in DH2 with Bellatrix pinning Hermione to the floor, faces mere inches apart, both of them breathless... with Hermione sobbing while the woman carved racial slurs into her, and interpreted the imagery as sexy.

:|

'Cause, you know, clearly that scene was all about barely restrained sexual tension (hur hur Hr/R) and not at all a Nazi analogue inscribing a tattoo onto the arm of a tearful prisoner whom she saw as lower than dirt.

Still, it took neither a seer nor a genius (just an ounce of familiarity with the fandom) to know, the minute one watched that scene, that it was going to be mined for all of the girl-on-girl, sadomasochistic, domination, kink that could be even remotely squeezed out of it.

I don't even want to talk about the explosion of Hr/Fenrir and Hr/Scabior that followed DH. Though, I will say it was like deja vu, considering the way Hr/Barty Crouch Jr. came out of fucking nowhere after Doctor Who played him in GoF, except that the other three pairings seem mainly prompted by kink, whereas the latter is.... well, it's Doctor Who inspiring the one-handed writing, there.

I'd also venture that in many cases there's some twisted logic people are laboring under that says, "They hate each other, so, clearly, it's love!" that drives Hr/Bellatrix, as well as Dramione, Drarry, et cetera.

With logic like that, it's easy to see why Hermione/Ron sits so very well with so many people: They're a match made in heaven, by comparison.

This is true, some of the time... especially when Pansy is written by a guy, and paired with one.

However, there are stories featuring Millicent where she is described as being overweight, and/or not being especially attractive. And, this seems often to be done specifically out of the motivation that 'Fat girls need love, too.' or 'You don't have to be a Fleur Delacour or a Ginny Weasley to find love.'

I've found that, with stories such as those, it's almost always a female writer at the keys. One could speculate that's because body image is an important issue to those authors, and perhaps something they've had to deal with personally. It's also possible that the average male is simply too shallow to go the 'true beauty is found within' route and would rather write the character as being drop dead gorgeous - seeing as no gender has the market cornered on wish-fulfillment fic, and it's very likely that the writer identifies strongly with his lead male and isn't about to pair him with anything less than a solid '10'.

Millicent stories are so very few and far between that I believe the number of stories where she is portrayed as 'conventionally unattractive', despite being the main character, vastly outweigh (no pun intended, truly) the ones where she's been given a fanon makeover.

Many of the former also happen to be femslash, for whatever reason; to wax scientific for a moment: I would say the sample size is too small to draw a definitive conclusion, there, so I won't be proposing any theories.

 

A couple of months ago I asked Firephoenix8 in PM why she liked to write stories with HP/LV/TMR pairing (The Black Heir, Vindico Atrum, Twist of Fate). We exchanged a few PM, given that she's an argie too. She basically told me that she preferred HP/LV over Harry/Terry Boot for example because it made the relationship more complex and interesting. But she was honest enough, when I expressed the inner conflict there (given that LV murdered his family) and couldn't give me a better answer than “I like it”.

 

I'm not sure why you posted that, Henry Persico. Are you trying to mock her for her lack of reasons for enjoying a pairing? Or for only writing what she, herself enjoys? Neither point makes any real sense for you to make.

How often will you write something that you yourself dislike? Nonjon, for example, does mostly comedies, because he enjoys writing comedys. And, what's more, this is a pairing, not a genre. Pairings, in my opinion, are like music. Everyone likes different songs, but there are some songs (and pairings) that are more popular, which are also considered terrible by other people, such as the work of One Direction and JLS. Very popluar, however you are not going to find a huge range of fans of them, because they are popular with young-teenage girls.

Some pairings also become increadibly popular for a short amount of time (e.g. Hr/Scabior after DH), which are similar to the likes of Gangnam Style. Popular for a while, before people stop liking it anywhere near as much as before.

The majority of DLP dislikes pairings like Drarry and HP/LV. But there is a sizable portion of the populus who likes it, despite how nonsensical it is to us. Similar to liking Pop/Rock. And if we are asked why we like an odd pairing, or song, such as HP/DG, our answers will eventually come down to "because we like it". So if you are critisising her for her "simple" reason for liking a pairing, you are critisising most everyone in fanfiction, including preety much everyone on here.

Just so it's clear, this is me wondering why you posted that, as I didn't see what point you were trying to make. If said point was not one of the two I mentioned at the start, can you please clarify what your point was? I really do not understand.

Obligatory pet peeve: The wallet that can contain any amount of gold the holder wishes, while weightless, that spills out thousands of galleons when tipped upside down on a table. Usually used in conjucjugation with Trunks and The Magical Shopping Spree.

If I worked selling Ferraris, and someone paid me by chucking ten sacks full of thousands of 20 pense peices, I'd tell them to leave and come back when they had easily countable money. I wouldn't trawl through the ten sacks, and count the money in each of them after giving him the car.

 

The only fic I can remember reading where the hero (whoever it may be) has slept with Millicent, was one in which she was part troll. Her parents/grandparents being part of some French breeding program that didn't keep going.

And Hermione whined about it - she was the one crying "Oh, but she's so ugly!"

But I can't remember what story that was.



Apart from that, where Harry sleeping with her despite her ugliness was a plot point, I can't recall any that have featured Protagonist/UglyGirl.

 

I think you could make the argument that this is canon; Fudge gives Harry his Triwizard prize money in a single sack. Think about that - a thousand gold coins the size of fucking hubcaps, all stuffed into one simple bag. I'm pretty sure Harry could fit the bag in his pocket, too. I certainly don't think Rowling expected us to picture Harry dragging a huge sack of gold behind him, at any rate. Of course, most stories don't have Harry really needing zillions of galleons, so they have less excuse to do this than GOF does.

By the way, you've mangled the word 'conjunction' almost beyond recognition.