I feel like this is a justification for not writing karkat's dialogue in all caps, but dear author, here's a secret: if you're writing him talking outloud, he's not actually going to be screaming everything.
This was shared on the PPC Discord and I don't have the context, but: Spoiler: NSFW, A/B/O, psyduck emoji That... Is not how anything works.
*boggle* Compulsive shipping urge is annoyed by trying to include Lil Hal because now there's an odd number of people so I don't know how to fit him in.
A friend of mine is currently complaining about looking for Drarry fic and finding one with the summary (which, incidentally, sounds like it was written by a neural network) ...and tagged "Asexuality, Legilimency, Empathy, War, Muggles." What friend was expecting the tone of this fic to be from that: hurt/comfort about healing after the end of the war and rebuilding and dealing with fallout from the Statue of Secrecy being repealed. What it turned out to be: grimdark AU where the entire Muggle world goes to war with the entire Wizarding World, resulting in World War III, the entire population of wizarding Britain is reduced to hiding in Malfoy Manor because EVERY OTHER PLACE HAS BEEN BOMBED, magic people are forced by the government to wear identifying clothing, and for some ungodly reason Harry decides it's a good idea to tell hostile, wizard-hating Muggle government officials all about the Elder Wand. Also, Harry has magic emotion powers for some reason, and people use lots of weird titles like "Healer Mage Finch-Fletchley." Like, technically none of the tagging or description is wrong, but you could maybe have been a little clearer about the tone, author.
Still doesn't beat the one I heard about in which the summary was about Voldemort "bringing the Golden Trio closer" and carefully neglected to mention that it was a Human Centipede fusion, but yeah, pretty disparate there XD
I wish that person had provided a link. I'd love to know if the writer intentionally left out that salient fact or was just careless.
Given the description, it was probably intended to be a “haha gotcha it’s actually horrifying” I remember that being really popular for a while. Wouldn’t fly in today’s climate tho
Update: due to the abovementioned "Wizards Lose War With Muggles And Are Now Oppressed(TM)" fic, I have been on a tear in Discord chat for most of the last hour about how the author is Bad At Tactics. Author, I realize you wanted flashbacks to huge dramatic gore-soaked battlefields and wizards huddling in bombed-out ruins, but when one side can teleport at will to anywhere in the world and the other side can't do anything to prevent them from doing it, there's gonna stop being battlefields right quick and start being 37 wizards living in a bigger-on-the-inside shack in Siberia 200 miles from the nearest Muggle settlement and spending their free time teleporting into government buildings and [setting records on fire/letting loose a swarm of pixies/causing an electrical surge that fries all the computers/lurking in the bathroom and obliviating random people to make them forget how to do their jobs/making the copier crave human blood/etc.]. Even HP canon recognized that the war against Voldemort was mostly going to be a guerilla war based around Apparating to keep from being found, AND that was with people able to block and track Apparition, not Muggles, AND the numbers were a lot more even than Wizards vs. Muggles would be, AND wizards as a culture have basically no scruples about doing all sorts of horrible and unethical things to Muggles to hide themselves, AND because this happened just after the end of the series, you've already got a crop of wizards who are very versed in guerilla warfare. ...Oh, and other wizards would just put on Muggle clothes and pretend to be Muggles, because there is no way for the Muggles to tell they're magic people if they don't use magic. Even if we accept the author's premise that "spells to hide Wizarding World from Muggles abruptly fail" = "Muggle society immediately aggros into violence so severe that $RandomCanonLocation is clogged with bodies and everywhere gets bombed," it wouldn't mean years of knock-down drag-out lines-of-fighters bombs-flying World War warfare, it'd be like three weeks of horrible violence and then visible wizards just... melting away. And then years of terror and attrition and sabotage and hysteria.
Well, they certainly forgot that they'd just said that wizards could magically repel bullets when they wanted a single Muggle dude with a gun to attack Malfoy Manor so Narcissa could dramatically take a bullet for Draco.
I'm wondering if they copy-pasted it from an origfic or something in a different fandom involving attacks on a non-magical group and added a thin coat of Potter paint over the top.
It’s possible they looked at Rowling’s “in a fight between a wizard and a muggle with a gun, the gun would win” and decided that this would apply across to board to All Things, but the major failings of the wizarding world (as Rowling has established them) all stem from a refusal to adapt to the time and actually update the magic they’ve been using for the last several centuries. If forced into a position where that casual disregard for innovation is no longer tenable, I’d put my money on the wizards, honestly. A magical ward that transfigures anything with lingering traces of gunpowder into a frog would be a good place to start.
Yeah, I haven't actually read the fic, but that's definitely the impression I got from the excerpts my friend was quoting at me. There were way too many detailed references to HP stuff for "reskinned origfic" to seem likely. I'm not sure wizards could necessarily win a war where they're outnumbered like several thousand to one, but they might not ever really lose, either.
Friend also informs me that said fic contained a great deal of REALLY terrible technobabble that tried to claim HP magic works *Terry-Pratchett-quoting voice* because quantum. It apparently contained the phrase "quantum continuum," which are two words that mean literally opposite things.
when a fic mischaracterizes your favorite character so badly that it actually kind of makes you hate the character
Problem similar to my compulsive shipping issue; I planned to kill off the trollcestors who were being antagonists in my planned AU, but now I feel the compulsion to kill the ones on the protagonists' side as well because I hate having an incomplete set. When I'm given neat sets of characters in the manner of Homestuck I feel I have to treat each set as a unit.
