death to capslock

In my opinion, Harry is a character who can be written convincingly as gay, straight, or bisexual. I've noticed, however, that I tend to dislike fan fiction that features Harry in a heterosexual pairing. For a long time, I believed that this was simply because I just generally prefer to read slash romance stories. But after reading several Severus/Hermione fics that I thought were absolutely wonderful, I decided to take a closer look at my distaste for straight!Harry fics.*

I realized that my aversion to these stories has less to do with Harry being in a het pairing and more to do with how these stories tend to treat certain other important characters. More specifically, I really dislike how Ron, Draco, and Severus are treated in many of these stories. ( Read more... )

*To be clear, I'm referring mainly to fics where Harry's relationship with a girl (or sometimes multiple girls) is a major part of the story, not stories where Harry happens to get a girlfriend along the way.