So I've been doing a lot of comfort reading lately

[conuly]

for some reason that's been something I really needed to do, and also it turns out that my go-to comfort reading is still (or again?) Harry Potter fanfic. Well, it is what it is.

Anyway, here I am, casually glancing at the newest things posted at Ao3, and I catch one with an author's note saying that they wrote it in response to the shortage of time travel fix-it Drarry fics and -

well, first of all, given the amount of new HP fics that are posted every single hour, I'm fairly certain that there's no shortage of anything except Hufflepuff!Draco (I checked), but also, in particular I think there must be a ton of time travel fix-it Drarry, like, isn't that practically its own subgenre? (New random request: Hufflepuff!Draco time travel fix-it, with or without Drarry, but he's not the time traveler. One of the Weasleys or whoever made a quick sojourn for no purpose other than to prank him and it stuck. In the process, people seriously interrogate the toxic nature of the house structure of Hogwarts. This can either be combined with or separate from: Severus and Remus and/or Sirius team up to save Harry from the Dursleys, shenanigans ensue, people have feelings)

Anyway anyway, all this has reminded me of my various pet peeves, such as:

wolves don't work that way, why would humans

Hermione doesn't read fiction, and there's no way she and Draco are bonding over their shared love of Jane Austen, and they don't really map onto Pride and Prejudice anyway even if you squint

the Weasleys are already bad parents, you don't have to exaggerate it, that's like saying that what they do in canon isn't bad enough

ditto on Dumbledore being manipulative as hell

the Evans parents definitely favored Lily, and can we at least acknowledge that?

what did I just say about the wolves!?

please stop indenting your paragraphs, half of them are only three lines long

snakes don't blink, I don't care what JKR has to think about it

can we just elide over why there's no period-typical queerphobia in this fic? I don't need or want an infodump about how accepting the wizarding world is, I'm pretty sure they're not. Even if they weren't generally backwards, they're an isolated minority group with serious fascist tendencies, they definitely trend pro-natalist, and that means no gay stuff if it slows down the babymaking. But if you don't bring it up, I don't have to think about it, I can just be like "cool, so they're boyfriends"

either deal with house elves and/or goblins or don't, but don't try to make me happy with the status quo

wolves, guys, wolves - that's not how they work. That's not how anything works

this crossover doesn't work either

there are probably jobs in the wizarding world other than auror, healer, teacher, politician, and barista/barkeep

there's probably a middle ground between "anybody with any Death Eater connections at all, no matter how trivial, is spat on for life" and "lol, a golden key opens all the doors, all is forgiven!!!!"

given the resurgence of the right wing in the real world, it is depressingly likely that it's resurgent in the wizarding world too, and I don't want fic about that but I don't not want fic about that either, if you get what I mean

no, dogs and (probably) werewolves also don't work that way, can we not

there is no world in which Narcissa is an unproblematically loving and doting parent and Lucius is beating his son left and right and 100% abusive at all times, like, at best she's still enabling, and I kinda think they're all going to have to come to terms with that

likewise, I can see Hermione/Draco, but I just don't think she's cozying up to his parents

Comments

[larryhammer]

... okay, now I want to read a good, long Hufflepuff!Draco fic. Darn it.

[sixbeforelunch]

the Weasleys are already bad parents, you don't have to exaggerate it, that's like saying that what they do in canon isn't bad enough

I don't read HP, but you just articulated something that I didn't even realize I felt about stories that take a canonically crappy person and make them worse. Like, just to take one example that I saw recently, X was already a neglectful parent. Why turn them into an absolute monster to write an abuse recovery story when you could instead dig into the damage that neglect can do and acknowledge that kids don't need to be beaten to be hurt?

[conuly]

You and me both.

There was one I was into, and then the author updated and was all "I'm not interested in this more, sorry" and - well, thanks for telling us, I guess?

[conuly]

Why turn them into an absolute monster to write an abuse recovery story when you could instead dig into the damage that neglect can do and acknowledge that kids don't need to be beaten to be hurt?

Seriously!

Also: you don't heal trauma just by leaving your abusive family, it still follows you around like an annoying smell

[larryhammer]

I guess ...

[conuly]

Obvs we can't force her to be interested, but I wish she still was, that's all.

[malada]

I'm sorry, but when I saw "HP fic" the first thing that popped into my head was HP Lovecraft.

I'll just leave you with that thought.

-m

[conuly]

Speaking of problematic creators. But at least he doesn't go on social media!

[jessie_c]

Stipulating Sturgeon's Law, there's a fair few good trans girl Harry stories, suitable for spiting Lady TERFamore in the best way possible.

One of the better (and longer) ones is Kaleidoscopic Grangers It starts off slowly.

There are rather more trans boy Harry fics available for your TERF-defying pleasure.

[conuly]

You know, I finally figured out why I never quite can get into trans Harry fics, and it's that I'm sure it's actually Dudley who's trans, and what're the odds that you have two trans kids in the same family?

[jessie_c]

Both of those have been done, in fact. Trans Dudley and trans siblings (paired with good Dursleys to make it really difficult for the Canon purists).
I'm personally not all that thrilled with the second story; its writing is somewhat amateurish, but YMMV.

[conuly]

I try to be generous about amateurish writing because, well, everybody starts off as a beginner and they don't get better without going through a lot of crap writing.

LOL, just last month I was reading through old posts at Mythcreants and there was a comment from somebody saying that the showcased published writing being critiqued was worse than a 15 year old, after all, they're 15, here's a sample of their writing, they aren't that bad - and then a new comment, a year later, from the same commenter going "Oh, god, what I posted last year was crap!"

But I actually cannot take serious orthography issues like terrible grasp of punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. Like, just run freaking spellcheck at the very least. I don't say anything, because I don't know their lives, but I can't read that sort of thing.

[jessie_c]

I can't read that sort of thing
Thus the Sturgeon's Law comment above.