Not sure whether these have been mentioned before, but...

Classifying a Wingardium Leviosa (or another common wizarding household charm) as magick... just because it sounded more 'grand':
I asked once in a review. They told me 'LOLZ IT SEEMED COOL SO I JUST DECIDED TO PUT ALL MAGIC AS MAGICK SAW IT IN ANOTHER FIC'. No kidding. Direct quote. I ran away as quickly as possible afterwards. If words seem strange or different, search it! While Wikipedia is unreliable, there are some cited and true information. Making insensitive/stupid remarks just make people want to kill you. To clarify, 'magick' is a word used by magic(k) practitionniers to classify the manipulation of spiritual, elemental, or natural energies. I know this because a friend came up to me and raged about it.

Bolding the whole story:
When authors decide to put the whole story on bold, italics and/or underline. Obvious reasons.

Typing all caps continuously:
Uncommon in actual narration, thank goodness, but often in titles, summaries, chapter titles, reviews, or review replies.

Stories without plot:
I do chapter-by-chapter planning for all of my fics. If a fic is a spinoff of a cool idea or cliche but has absolutely no climax, no antagonist, or direction, it is almost doomed to fail or be abandoned. If you're good with ideas, start a prompt section. Don't waste your time forcing yourself to write something that you lost interest in ten seconds after coming up with the idea of. Put it up for adoption! Make it into a oneshot/drabble! Easy ways to fix the lame (as in disabled, not the modern slang meaning of non-cool) bunny of a plot into something readable.
PWP's not included (sorta the point -smirks-). Crack fics not included (depends though, some have plots anyway).

Series of a hundred oneshots posted separately on FFN:
Put it into a drabble! This doesn't bother me, per se, but it would make things more convinient. Hint: if you need to put a timeline on your profile for the oneshots, it belongs in one story link.

Mentioned, but I need to emphasise this.
No beta but still not proofreading:
My friends cannot proofread, therefore I am their beta.
I have yet to find a reliable beta, so I proofread constantly. (despite dyslexia, english-as-second-laguage problems, and boredom problems)
Even if I proofread four times before posting, there have been typos found in my stories before.
People might find it boring, but it's a great way to laugh at/learn from your own errors while not losing face ('pends on the person, though. Some people have no shame.). Also good for fixing repetition in adjectives or names and other similar writing style issues.

 

Although all of them have probably been mentioned, here are my biggest pet peeves in HP fan fiction:

1. Ridiculous twinspeak by Fred & George - as in the speaker changes every two or three words. I swear, that if someone tried it in real life, they would get punched, a lot.
2. Blatant self-inserts, especially as Harry's love interest or his twin brother/sister.
3. Making an OC the main character without a warning. There have been a few times where a fic starts as something promising, but then an OC arrives and suddenly he/she is the main character... And it annoys me that I have wasted my time reading that rubbish.
4. Rewrites of the series where the plot is an almost exact copy of what JKR wrote, no matter what changes the author has made in the premise. Some of those authors could probably write an AU where Grindelwald defeated Dumbledore, but Harry has the exact same life, minus Albus.
5. And most of all, the one thing in fan fiction i hate with passion - fics based on a bunch of people reading the Harry Potter series. That simply has to be the most idiotic concept around... And the worst part is that some people actually read those things. And lately it seems that every crappy wannabe author and his cat has started doing it, it has become really difficult to find good fics, when every fifth is one of these idiotic attempts at writing.

And this leads nicely into my rant about an author who has actually accomplished four of my five pet peeves (not the twinspeak). The author is writing a series where Harry Potter has a twin sister Sophie... who also has a matching scar and the reputation of a Killing Curse survivor. How Voldemort might have managed to cast the curse on both of them before being ripped to shreds isn't explained, because if it isn't in canon, it isn't in that fanfic. It is such a blatant copy/paste, that there are numerous times where the typo "HSophie" appears - it seems, the author only highlighted "arry" before deleting and replacing it with "Sophie". And of course the Sophie character is so smart, beautiful and loveable that she quickly pushes Harry into a secondary role! And something that would be funny if it wasn't so utterly idiotic - that author is now actually writing fics where her characters are reading the "books" the author herself wrote...


Now that I've got this all off my chest, I hope I'll sleep a bit easier

 

Ah...pet peeves...I probably have a hundred, if I seriously counted the number of things that will make me stop reading a story. I did discover a new one though.

Prior to the other night, nicknames didn't really bother me all that much. However, I must have read Siri, Jamie, Remy, Har, Hermy, Mione, Ronny, Lillyflower and so on a so forth one too many times. I've decided that I despise author's stupid nicknames for canon characters, especially when the nickname is used as if Harry and Ron have called Hermione 'Mione' since their first year.

 

The idea that magic consists mainly of visualisation/imagination is really annoying me, recently.

Magic is meant to be fucking hard. There has to be a reason so many people can't cast stuff like shield charms. There has to be a reason why wizards like Dumbledore are so rare and so respected. There has to be a reason why ability with magic correlates with intelligence.

If all it took to cast magic well was imagining things happening then everyone would be Dumbledore. I hate it so much when Harry comes along is like "yeah, I just visualise the effect" and people gape at him like he's a fucking genius. Not only is it a retarded idea in the first place, if it were the case then Harry would be far from the first person to think of it.

Magic takes work and skill. You need knowledge. Academic ability is the most reliable indicator of ability with a wand. There's no such thing as a person who is rubbish at theory but skilled with a wand. People can't just wave their wand and wish for something and then it happens - or if they can, this is the highest level of magic that can only be mastered after going through every prior stage of spellcasting until incantations and wandmovements become subconscious. There's no skipping the hard work and going straight to the "wave wand with focused intent and watch the world change" stage.

 

By Taure ^

I very much agree with your view.

The problem with this point of view is Lord Voldemort as a child. His grasp of certain fields of magic such as legilimency and compulsions seems to rival that of grownups. We have to assume that it was purely will based considering his lack of formal training.

If so, then forcefully willing magic to do the wizard's bidding is possible or young Tom Riddle's capabilities were a fluke. I would rather go with the latter. Otherwise no wizard or witch would survive their teenage years.

 

Well, Tom Riddle was a prodigy. Just because he learnt those skills independently doesn't mean they only involved wishing for it. It's possible that he discovered/created the theory behind legilimency independently, simply through using it a lot and practising and discovering how it works for himself.

As for his other magic, I've always thought of it as a kind of extension of the accidental magic all magical children experience. Lily Potter did something similar.

 

Perhaps that is so. But what about Harry casting the Cruciatus and Imperius? He never had any training in the Dark Arts. JKR has given too many examples that one can argue was purely will based magic.

I'm just going to assume that such magics are the exception and not the rule and unless mentioned, the wizard knew the theory

I have no answer as to how Lily was jumping so high off swings.

 

Uh, the Cruciatus and Imperius?

He said that he can make people do things and hurt them. That doesn't mean he's using the Unforgivables.

 

^ That was 11 year old Tom Riddle.

I was talking about Harry casting the Imperius and the Cruciatus with no training in the Dark Arts.

 

You are talking about the "Dark Arts" as though they are somehow separate from other magic and inherently different. Dark Magic is still magic, and the distinction made in the Harry Potter books between "Light" and "Dark" seems more analogous to our own moral arguments, rather than being two distinct and unconnnected branches of magic.

I'd refer you to Taure's Magical Theory essay, where he outlines the idea.

Canonically speaking of course.

I don't mind the idea of the "Dark Arts" being something different in fanfiction, but the evidence isn't there in canon.

 

Well, there is some evidence that the magic is different in itself. We know that injuries caused by Dark magic cannot be healed in the same way as regular magic. They either resist it completely or leave scarring. Unless you have a good counter-curse like Snape did for Malfoy.

The point that I was trying to make in the essay you mentioned was that wizards use the phrase Dark Arts in a number of different ways, and that perhaps it's best understood as an imprecise colloquial expression which maps onto and blurs several different, possibly unrelated, phenomena, much like the word "emotion".

 

I just had the worst rage ever at the screen. I was trying to read one of those shitty Harry in Azkaban stories to see if they had any good ideas, and forcing myself to read through the occasional bad spelling.

However, I suddenly realised I'd been trolled when I read

How on earth can anyone fuck up so badly? Its physically painful to my eyes, but I know its my own fault for reading this shit.

 

This actually reminds me of another pet peeve, the idea that the Order and the Death Eaters have some sort of Inner Circle. It's just a really annoying example of how fanon spreads until people feel they must include it in every story. There is no reason to create some sort of hierarchy within these groups that never existed in canon. Yes there were some people who were trusted more than others but they were never organised like that, and yet people seem to think it is canon.

 

To be fair...

However:

 

To be fair, I can imagine the Death Eaters being organised in a more heirarchical manner, with there being unnamed, low-ranking Death Eaters (like the ones in Hogsmeade in late DH) and then Voldemort's 'trusted' Death Eaters (such as Bellatrix).

And yeah, what Taure said.

 

Hmm, it seems Taure has canoned me. Although I stand my point that it is overdone in that the Death Eaters get turned into some sort of formal army. And the point still stands about the Order.

 

You've got a point. It is generally very overdone in fanfiction. The only decent fic I can think of where I've seen a proper DE heirarchy to the extent of an army is Traitorous.

 

On topic though, another pet peeve is when someone writes 'thru' as opposed to 'through'.

Even if the writing is stellar (which is rarely is), and the plot excellent (which it usually isn't), I smack that red button so hard, it doesn't let anybody read the piece of shit.

 

"Filler" chapters.

Either make the effort to post a proper, polished chapter, or don't post at all.

These 500 word 'updates' on FFn truly piss me off.

 

I disagree if it's just a matter of academic abilities then anybody with knowledge and effort could reach a level like Dumbledore and Voldemort. That would make it a matter of how much money you can throw at the problem to pay for the books and the will to train. Then the question would be why should highly trained Aurors fear Voldemort or highly respect Dumbledore. There must be some power level and/or talent involved as a deciding factor.

I think there should be the 4 elements involved.

knowledge effort/skill talent/intuition power