What, you mean people don't say conjucjugation where you come from?

 

Galleons are not now and never have been the size of hubcaps. The idea they are is frankly ludicrous, and a pet peeve of mine. Galleons are coins people carry around in their pockets (see the DA coins in 5th year). Hubcaps are 12 inch plus discs. They cover a good portion of a car tire!

Ignoring the possibility that Mr. Roberts (the muggle who made the hubcaps statement in GOF) was exaggerating for effect, a much more likely explanation is that the hubcap sized coins were some form of foreign currency. It was the World Cup after all. This explanation makes sense and doesn't require us to ignore almost ever other use galleons in the series.

 

It's still too many coins to fit into an ordinary bag. As for the hubcap thing, I was always a little skeptical of that, but I remember reading somewhere that the hubcaps being compared would be smaller than...geez, I suppose that still sounds stupid. Regardless, my original point stands. If you can fit a thousand galleons into a handheld bag, you can probably stuff even more in there. A good writer should probably refrain from abusing extra dimensional storage as a matter of principle. Lord knows stupid things can be done with that if you think about it too hard.

 

If galleons are roughly the size/weight of US quarters then a bag of 1000 would only be 10-15 pounds, which would be a little awkward to hold in one hand but not at all unreasonable.

 

The "magic shopping spree" doesn't bother me too much in comedies, since the potential uses of all the magic dimension-bending crap can be pretty funny if done right. I remember a specific humor fic where Vernon had almost succeeded in "stamping the magic" out of Harry but

Spoiler

he ended up defeating Voldemort through creative use of crappy magical trinkets, since nobody believed the great HP could be an almost-squib

.

I also remember one fic where Harry set up a magic tent in his room at the Dursleys' house, it was kind of neat without being completely ridiculous. Makes more sense than having Dumbledore or McGonagall transfigure his room into a self-contained mansion with portals to Hogwarts, the Ministry and Diagon Alley at any rate. :facepalm
Hell, it grates on my nerves when anyone uses transfiguration to make their house look like fucking Windsor Castle. It just seems like most of the wizards competent enough to do it couldn't be arsed about material things.

Also making Durmstrang the "evil school" is pretty stupid. Potentially having a class about the Dark Arts and an asshole as Headmaster != turning out an army of Hitler Youth. Same with Beauxbatons being full of Veela though I don't see that one quite as often.

 

Galleons? This works I think;



Not that big really.

 

Yeah, well, I've always pictured Galleons as being quite a bit bigger from quarters. I dunno, maybe an inch and a half, two inches diameter? It's also worth keeping in mind that day-to-day shopping doesn't seem to be all that Galleon-intensive. A mug of butterbeer apparently only costs two sickles, and while part of that's going to be because it was the Hog's Head where we got that figure, I don't think the Three Broomsticks could justify charging that much more. So the way I see it is that Galleons stretch quite a ways.

 

Actually, this is an incredibly common thing that happens with Hermione in particular. Let's face it, Hermione is not described as conventionally attractive in the books. Unfortunately, Emma Watson is undeniably attractive, and thus we get the beautiful, georgeous Hermione Granger in fanfic rather than the truthful girl-next-door type of person she is.

I think I can count the number of stories I've read that ever addressed it on like two fingers tops. Maybe.

It's a pet peeve of mine as a Hermione fan that stories don't even try to depict her true to the books.

 

Every time somebody mentions girl next door.Dammit.

 

She's hardly the only one. Alan Rickman's Snape hardly needs mentioning, and I doubt Sirius in the books would look anywhere near as good as he does while Gary Oldman's playing him. You know, this actually has me wondering how many FFN writers have actually read the books, as opposed to just watching the movies. I'm guessing there's some small subset who've done just that.

 

deleted on account of fail.

 

I'd say there's quite a large number like this. I know a lot of people who are fans of the movies but have never touched one of the books. It would explain why some stories use scenes that were never in the books and treat them like canon, a personal pet peeve of mine.

 

Even at two or three times the size you're still within the range of a big ol' sack'o'money that can be carried by a person.

In any case, using math in the context of HP is nearly always a futile effort, since no matter what you do the numbers will never make any sense.

 

Two pet peeves I have on the sorting scene.

1) Having the Sorting Hat sing the exact same song even though you've changed the stories circumstances greatly.

This one just gets me that I've seen the song so many times that I just skip over it now by default. It's not a crowd pleaser, it's never been a crowd pleaser, it's just taking up space.

2) Author ends the chapter as Harry is about to get sorted.

Because seven out of ten times he's still Gryffindor, the other three times are split between Ravenclaw and Slytherin, and every one in a million fic you'll get a Hufflepuff Harry. There's just no suspense.

 

Huh. Just because Harry's circumstances change doesn't mean that the hat needs to change it's song. The world doesn't revolve around HARRY Bloody POTTER.

My Pet Peeves is the fact that when the Wizengamot Lords are portrayed, the entire factions are made up just by the families known to be in Harry's year. Other families mysteriously vanish or have little influence.

 

I'm not saying they need to change the song, I'm saying that if they aren't going to make it different than it should be omitted, using a line like "The Sorting hat broke into a glorious song, praising the qualities of each house." Saves time, saves space, and gets the point across as most Authors already mention the houses and things about them in their stories prior to the song.

One of my Peeves about the Wizengamot is how Authors divide them into factions that involve light or dark. Whether it be conservative or radical, no one would ever identify their faction as dark. Not only is it political suicide to call your faction dark, it's just bad press.

 

My biggest pet peeve is one that I suspect is shared by many others here, pop culture references, and I don't really mean throwaway lines about how a character is dressed or things along those lines. I'm talking about when Authors feel the need to insert whatever song or movie they're in love with at the time into to their story, half the time forgetting that the song or movie hadn't yet been released during the time frame of the story.

 

Something I've become more and more annoyed with lately is when Harry makes these random awkward speeches. For example when a random person refuses to say Voldemort, which is followed by Harry making a 20 sentence long speech describing Tom Riddle and his parents, blood status, when he went to school, length, weight, and what kind of chocolate he likes best. All this ends with the other people watching him stunned by his almighty words and swearing never to use any other name than Tom ever again. Same thing goes for speeches about "Why Slytherin is a cool house" and "This is how magic really works". The last one usually shows itself when Harry has his first lesson of the year.

 

Harrison Potter.

WTF? Just for the hell of it, I took a look at the corporate address book at work, which has 20,000 employees and covers literally every continent.

I found 16 'Harold's, 1 'Harrison' and 1 'Harris'.

Is 'Harrison' some kind of fangirl thing?

 

It's an attempt to elongate Harry's name and, presumably, make it seem more noble. Harold, in my opinion, is far more likely, but Harrison sounds old, and we are talking about a community where people are named things like Draco, Sirius, Lucius, Orion, etc. on such a basis that these names are not considered odd.