snorkackcatcher | Unpopular Fandom Opinions Meme

Yes, I finally got around to doing something for this, very late. I suspect a number of these are genuinely unpopular. Oh well.

1. Voldemort and the gang are mostly perfectly reasonable, well-written villains.
Not all villains come in a thousand subtle shades of grey. A villain who doesn't can still be perfectly plausible and well-written. Voldemort is a complete psychopath and acts that way. When he appears onstage he tends to be cold and callous and therefore genuinely chilling. Giving him a w00by past with McGonagall or Grindelwald, or for that matter a w00by present with anyone you like, makes him less interesting as a villain, not more.

Similarly, the DEs are, to quote Dumbledore, 'a motley collection, a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking some shared glory, and the thuggish, gravitating towards a leader who could show them more refined forms of cruelty'. True believers such as Bella are rare among their ranks. Most of them in the first and last of those categories don't have any great subtlety about them, and that's entirely in accordance with the way such gang members would be in real life. The ambitious types such as Lucius may play a more subtle game, and have families and outside interests, but this mere fact does not make them less villainous.

2. Fenrir Greyback is an exception to the above.
For some reason Greyback seems to escape criticism as an unrealistic, clichéd villain. Well he may be a realistic psycho but his sole appearance onstage is Cliché City -- I don't think he actually twirled his moustache or tied any maidens to railway lines, but he did practically everything else from the Handbook of Melodrama, including let blood drip down his chin from his sharpened teeth. Presumably he gets a pass because he's a werewolf, and werewolves are Teh Kewl.

3. Death Eaters are not sexy.
Losers, slippery gits, and thugs (see #1 above) are not sex on legs. All right, Lucius Malfoy may have some charisma but a lot of it comes from ~~the portrayal by Jason Isaacs~~ his background and deep pockets in the books, and a lot more of it comes from fans projecting suave super-competence onto him. Now admittedly, I'm not the type to be turned on by the thought of a blond aristocrat with a pimp cane, but I can't really fanboy Bella either, even though ~~Helena Bonham Carter is hawt~~ her pre-Azkaban physical description of a tall, strikingly good-looking brunette is very much a type I go for. Because, you know, the whole fanatical child-torturing psychopath thing she's got going is kinda offputting.

4. Detailed technical descriptions by themselves do not effective smut make.
Writing sexual scenes that are genuinely hot is an art. Not everyone who tries has acquired it. Reasons vary, but generally speaking, if you could take the scene and change the characters and it would read much the same, you're writing stuff by the numbers -- and that's usually a quality killer. Give them some textual foreplay. Show what's going on between their ears, not just between their legs. Let's see their feelings, not just the state of the dangly bits and orifices currently in use. Put some new spin on the old ceremony (apologies L.Cohen). In short, give me some reason to actually give a damn what the protagonists are getting up to.

5. Slash is probably worse than het or gen on average.
Yes, I said worse, not merely 'not necessarily edgier and better' -- actually worse, because it has more ways to be ludicrously OOC, and writers seem to seek out those ways like homing beacons. All right, any shippy stuff offers a fanfic author lots of exciting opportunities to write characters OOC, but slash offers them special bonus chances.

For example, a fic in which a passing Hermione calls on Arthur in his shed, and five minutes later they're having rough sex against the wall, would be tacky and dreadfully OOC, because neither party is the type to casually cheat on their partner with a potential in-law, even if they found them attractive. A fic in which a passing Harry calls on Arthur in his shed, and five minutes later they're having rough sex against the wall, would be tacky and even more OOC, because not only is the cheating unlikely, so is the attraction itself, as there's pretty strong evidence from the books that they fancy the opposite sex rather than their own.

Now you can argue that the whole point of slash originally was to play these OOC games in order to do postmodern things to a text. Or you can argue that canon be damned, I want to get hawt men (or women, but it's usually men) together just because it's hawt. Fine. You can indeed do either of these things and I have no problem if you don't pretend you're doing something else, but please don't claim it's amazingly well-written stuff in the more general sense of being consistent and plausible. Because, you know, it ain't.

6. Adverbs are GOOD.
Yes, I actually approve of the way JKR makes free use of them in dialogue ('X said somethingly'), and I don't care if they irk the purists (which is so much fun, as Half Man Half Biscuit put it cheekily). They serve a very useful function as a substitute for the additional clues to meaning provided by tone-of-voice in actual speech. And do you really think the generally proposed alternatives are better?

(1) avoid 'said' and use other speech words instead -- this tends to be obvious and therefore hugely distracting
(2) give no stylistic clues at all -- this reads like a transcript and forces the reader to guess the significance (if any) of what you're on about (sorry, 'supply their own interpretation')
(3) rewrite the dialogue to make the meaning clearer -- fine in theory but you often end up with dialogue that doesn't sound like anything anyone would actually say

Nah. Certainly you want to mix up the styles a bit, but adverbs as dialogue workhorses are a Good Thing.

7. 'Muggle' is not an all-purpose descriptor.
Far too many writers seem to think that tacking the word 'Muggle' in front of every object that isn't actually enchanted is a good way to make dialogue sound more 'wizarding', even when said objects are entirely normal in either world. Thus 'Muggle shirt' or 'Muggle coffee' or even (Heaven help us) 'Muggle toast'.

The characters in the books don't generally habitually prepend 'Muggle' to the names of objects in this way. If they want to refer to firearms, they'd normally just say 'firearms' (or more likely, 'firelegs') not 'Muggle firearms', because wizards don't use firearms. The exceptions come when they do have something comparable, hence they do say 'Muggle post' as opposed to 'owl post'. Overuse of 'Muggle X' gives the impression that the writer is self-flagellating and is extremely silly. Just. Stop. It. Now.

8. Pairings are not the sole topic of interest for a fic.
Classifying stories by their pairings -- and especially listing them in lieu of some kind of actual summary of what the fic is about -- has a number of effects, most of them unfortunate. Firstly, it reinforces the outside impression that all fanfics are nothing but romance novel mush or porn, and in either case of no general interest. Secondly, it encourages them to actually be nothing but romance novel mush or porn, as writers compete to come up with ever more bizarre pairings and situations. Thirdly, it crowds out the huge number of other stories any decent canon should be able to provide -- certainly as far as HP goes there are myriad possibilities. Wouldn't it be nice to see fics classified by the storyline or genre for a change?

9. Hermione is not Miss Prissy.
That was Rita's term for her, and hey, we know how accurate she is. But a lot of fans and fanfic writers -- and not just Harmonians, you get this from R/Hr partisans as well -- seem to think of Miss Granger as a complete prude, appalled by any mentions of lasciviousness, prone to correcting Ron every few minutes for such foul language as 'damn' and 'bloody', and someone who would never have really kissed that horrible Viktor Krum.

Okay, let's go to the tape, shall we? This is a girl who always talks with Harry about his love life in an entirely matter-of-fact manner, and apparently did the same for Ginny. She positively beams when they snog in front of the entire common room. She dates an 18-year-old Quidditch superstar at the age of 15, and yes it's quite clear from GoF that they were meeting up more often than just the Yule Ball. She makes the first move to ask out Ron when Slughorn issues his party invitations, and then quite cold-bloodedly selects and then asks out the boy most annoying to him for a date when things blow up between them. Once during PoA she says 'Ron!' in shock at what he calls Snape, but otherwise doesn't habitually criticise either him or Harry for their language, and herself is quite happy to refer to Pansy as a 'cow'. Oh yes, and she's literally ROTFL at Ginny's ~~dick size~~ Pygmy Puff tattoo joke at Ron's expense.

In short, although she gives the impression of being a 'long-term sort of girl' (as with her creator on whom she's loosely based), she seems generally to have a well-adjusted, practical attitude towards relationships -- well, except when it comes to the boy she really wants snogging anyone who isn't her. I think that's understandable. :) TotallyUptight!Hermione would seem to be the result of fans projecting their own prudishness onto her, and is just as silly as the alternative 'HoMione' characterisation.

10. HBP was not as good as OotP.
It's been over a year now and initial impressions have had time to be modified, but ... regardless, HBP still feels noticeably weaker than its predecessor, which remains by some distance the best of JKR's writing so far. The general impression is of a book that needed tighter editing. It may suffer slightly from its role as a 'Part One' to Book 7, but even so, it has flaws.

For a start, it could do with being about 50-100 pages longer; scenes which would have flowed in OotP seem truncated in HBP, and many of the large cast of new and promising characters and plotlines from OotP get insufficient screentime here. The running plot is flashback-heavy and not really as effective, feeling rather 'choppy'. There are a number of ... well, 'continuity errors' may not be quite the right term, but definitely 'things that don't seem to square with earlier information'. That Tonks red herring subplot feels odd even in retrospect because it's overdone: her behaviour, presumably required to suggest imposture or Imperius, still stands out awkwardly even when you know the explanation (in fact R/T stories sometimes seem to be trying to explain away the text in an effort to make it less so). And the writing in the scenes in which Harry realises what he needs to do contains several rather clunky bits.

That doesn't mean that HBP was bad -- it wasn't, it's still a good read with many excellent bits -- but compared to OotP in which the writing seemed generally 'smoother' and scenes felt as if they were the right length, it's a step down in quality.

Lyrics: While I'm here -- the last one was Bruce Springsteen's Brilliant Disguise, as spotted by

modestyrabnott and

a_t_rain. Another to be going on with:

I said a hip, a hop, the hippie, the hippie
To the hip hip hop, a you don't stop
The rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie
To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat (1970s)

(A not unimportant track. Bonus points if you happen to know which UK #1 hit of the current decade made reference to it in the chorus!)

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tree_and_leaf

You know, I think I agree with almost all of these (and thank God there are people out there who think 3).

I haven't read enough bad shippy fics to be able to comment on 5, but it makes sense (though I have read some good slash on ocassion). The trouble is that with a lot of people, the switch that turns them on also seems to function as a critical-thought bypass.

I don't mind the flashbacks in HBP - and the Pensieve device is clever, but I would certainly agree that it's too short. I'm suspending final judgement until 7 comes out, but at any rater it's possible to say that it doesn't work as well as OOTP as a book in its own right, regardless of how it functions in the series as a whole.

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