Or put him with Tonks and get nearly the same result.

 

Tonks is another girl that gets butchered when she gets paired with Harry. I don't think I've ever read a fic with that pairing I could go back and reread.

 

Indeed, which is why I said that I prefer these normal girls, not everyone.

It isn't all that different, I agree. But I'm not into redheads.

Daphne? Since when Daphne was not normal? Has fanon poisoned your perception of her? Daphne is just as much a non-character like Lavender Brown. And Lavender actually got a few lines here and there. Daphne doesn't say a single word in the entire series.

 

Parasoul will be sad to hear that.

 

Parasoul is an exception that proves the rule.

She's a princess, a commander of the Black Egrets and has a living umbrella that can fight with her.

The fact that her boobs are a sight to behold also doesn't hurt.

 

Yay. Now we have shipping wars on DLP as well. Just great.

Well, if it has to happen, count me in as the lone voice on DLP supporting Harry/Ginny. I don't give much of a fuck about pairings these days, but it was what got me started into fanfiction. Plus, I always liked Ginny and many of my favorite fanfics are Harry/Ginny.

Xandrel :

Romlida? Yes, I see that working just swimmingly. Harry/Romilda can join RiddleSr/Merope as the truest of true pairings.


Steelbadger :

I'm curious here. Good quality Harry/Hermione actually exists? I'm pretty sure if I make a quantitative analysis of my favorites, I won't come up with any H/Hr at all. And I have over 200 HP stories on my favorites list.

As for Fleur, I'm more or less indifferent. It just seems that too many fics turn into Harry/Fleur out of nowhere these days. Worse, idiot fanboys actually want every good story to turn into a H/F wankfest.

Harry/Fleur is a very specialized pairing. It will not work when they are shoehorned into the relationship because the author needs his Fleur fix. The only time I've seen the relationship done well is in The Lie I've Lived. Even their relationship in Wastelands felt generic and dull, and I never liked Dagger and Rose.

 

Isn't The Lie I've Lived technically James in Harry's body/Fleur?

 

Granted, I've let "Whatever Happened to Bromance" poison my decision to mention her.

But she has black curly hair and that's just nice

 

Name a fic that suddenly turned awful because of Harry/Fleur. I bet you can't.

They were either incredibly stupid and awful to begin with. Or the entire purpose of the fic was to do Harry/Fleur, like all the Veela stories.

 

Technically speaking, the Patil twins and Gabrielle (and, probably, Ginny) are canonically supposed to be hotties, too.

The Patils are said to be the "best-looking" girls in Harry's year, in Goblet of Fire.

Gabrielle, of course, is Fleur's sister, also half veela, and at her sister's wedding she was said to look like "Fleur in miniature," so...

Ginny seems to be popular enough with the boys (Dean Thomas is the one who made the "best-looking" comment about the Patils, before he dated Ginny, so if we trust his taste, Ginny must be fairly pretty) and is agreed to be attractive even by Slytherins who have every reason to just call Ginny a blood traitor and move on (though, when Pansy said it, she was probably just fishing to see if Draco was interested in the redhead).

I just realized that almost half our canon info on attractive HP girls came from Dean Thomas... who was apparently sorted into Gryffinpimp.

On that note, it's worth mentioning that one of the play-by-play comments that got Lee Jordan jumped on by McGonagall was when he singled out Angelina Johnson for being attractive. Given that she also got sucked into the OBHWF, and JKR seemed obsessed with cramming the Wizarding World's best and brightest into that family by the end of the epilogue, one assumes she must be 'worthy' of the unfailingly wonderful Weasleys for some reason... :|

Hehehe.

 

..This is a good point.

Most of those stories just suck altogether. They weren't fantastic fics that immediately dropped dead after the pairing.

 

I didn't say anything about the quality. My favourites list is basically an incomplete list of fics that I spent more than a couple of hours reading.

As I took a look at my favourites list I was reminded that Harry/Ariana is featured in a fic and I smiled. I love fanfiction. I also remember a Harry/Merope fic from ages ago that I kinda want to go and find again...

I agree completely about Harry/Fleur being a specialized pairing. I feel it has to be part of the core of a fic if it's going to be featured. Of all the 'common' pairings it suffers most when tacked on without thought.

 

Perhaps I should clarify. When I said the fic suddenly became Harry/Fleur, I meant that it would go like this -- Fleur meets Harry in his fourth year for the TWT, dismisses him initially, Harry does something to earn her 'respect' and less than a month later out of pretty much nowhere they are together and everything is sunshine and butterflies.

I have read this so many times in the last few years it has become a cliche on par with Veela bonds, which were of course never any good to begin with. I remember disliking it when I read it recently in 'Champion'. I was supremely annoyed when Hogwarts Battle School seemed to be going that way as well.

Steelbadger :

That's another problem, isn't it? Harry/Fleur is something that works only in small dozes -- it doesn't work in just any story like HG or H/Parvati or something similar would work, and there are only so many specialized Harry/Fleur fics I can read without getting tired of entire stories being focused on it. There aren't many places where Harry can meet Fleur either, so it mostly happens during the TWT, at which stage their ages are incompatible and where it has been done too many times for it to be any fun.

Warlocke :

Hah. I remember 'Dean thomas : Sex God' in some fanfic I read recently. I will edit back with the quote if I can find it.

EDIT : Got it.

EDIT 2 :

BTT :

Heh, looks like I was too late. But you left out the mention of 'Dean Thomas : International Sex Symbol'. So, I win.

 

Way ahead of you, mate. I think you're talking about An Interview With Justin Finch-Fletchley, chapter 2.
The bit with Ginny Weasley. Quoting:

EDIT: damn, ninja'd when I wanted to ninja.

 

Youve been out-ninja'd

 

That might be a weird one...?

Too much action.

Now, I love a good action scene. Or two, even, but I need time to breathe, man. I'm not saying that action should be interspersed with flashbacks to tea parties or whatever, but just giving the characters themselves a little space between the events is enough. Calm the atmosphere down and then jump back in.
Writing action can be really tricky because it's something that lends itself much better much to a visual medium like a film, than text. There are only so many ways you can dress up "Harry cast the Stunning Spell and the opponent fell down". Engaging a reader in an action scene that will be exhilarating and have a healthy pace is hard with just words.

If there's too much of it, it starts to blend together and I start skipping paragraphs.

Some action is good. Entire long chapters worth of action, bad.

I'm looking at you, Kwan. I enjoy HBS, but damn, it can get tedious sometimes.

*looking intensifies*

 

They would probably be less of a thing if the action in fanfics resembled the scenes in canon, that is, short and intense... though I'm really not one to talk.

There's also the perception that a dozen duels per chapter is unavoidable if one writes, say, an "Auror fic". If it were Hit Wizards, that would make more sense, but don't Aurors do a huge amount of investigative work in-between those skirmishes?

And then there's the paperwork... getting plot-bunnies for DMLE water-fountain chat...

 

Just putting out there, 99% of Ginny hate is retarded and was started by either HP/HW or HP/DM shippers jealous they didn't get their OTP.

 

I disagree, most of it is because of how forced it felt after she got no scene time for 4.5 books and how she approached Mary Sue status.

Though I'll admit to being slightly miffed that HHr didn't happen.

 

You are right, but if you think about it, Gabrielle is a little girl, so you can't really characterize her as hot in most fics. The Patils and Ginny are the good looking girls, so I'd call them better than average but I don't think they're hotties.

More importantly, they might even be hotties, but Fleur is not just a hottie, she's awesome. She's powerful, smart, somewhat haughty and all around awesome. What's not to like?

---------- Post automerged at 00:13 ---------- Previous post was at 00:12 ----------

I was referring to fanon Daphne itself, since she's barely mentioned in canon. The point was that her appeal in fanon is because she's not portrayed as a normal girl.