HARUNA 'OH WELL' CHALLENGE: Since there are too few Harry/Luna stories available, I'm issuing this challenge. Write a story with Harry and Luna as the main characters, and incorporate at least one line of lyrics (more if you can do it) from the Fleetwood Mac song 'Oh Well' somewhere in the dialog. Preferably it should meet all the criteria of my C2, "The Very Best of Luna and Harry".

Hi, I'm an adult male Harry Potter fan. I also like well written HP fanfiction. That means I like most of the characters to act recognizably like canon, so I don't read Harry shipped with males or Harry shipped with Pansy Parkinson or Bellatrix Lestrange or even Molly Weasley.

I think the best stories ship Harry with Luna. I like that Luna is soft, sweet, humorous, innocent, blonde and feminine, but still smart, strong and independent in her own way. I like that she brings out the best in Harry without nagging him or criticizing him. She understands him, anticipates his thoughts and needs and knows him better than he knows himself. I like that it says good things about Harry that he’s willing to overlook her oddness and see her inner beauty rather than just settle for the convenient ‘best-friend’s-little-sister/fan-girl/Mary Sue’ that ‘everyone’ (KOFF JKR KOFF) wants him to have (Ginny). I like that she's smart (perhaps too smart for others to understand) yet avoids being a mere unthinking, regurgitating bookworm like Hermione. I like that Luna doesn’t need a hero to ‘save’ her, even if she’s in a difficult situation. She’s somehow able to transcend the cruelty of her situation with an imperturbable personality that always leaves her in control of herself, to the discombobulation of whoever is trying to upset her. I like that she innocently tends to makes everybody uncomfortable; yet Harry chooses to overlook anything that might make him uncomfortable in order to value and respect his friend.

Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough Harry/Luna stories out there. Sadly, there’s only one other canon female mature enough yet with enough of a sense of humor to ship with an angst-ridden teenage male (Harry), and that is Tonks. So I’m a Harry/Tonks fan as well.

Another good Hufflepuff ship is Harry with Susan Bones. I like those stories mostly because Susan has a powerful aunt who could use some more on-page exposure, and she’s got a best friend (Hannah Abbott) that ships nicely with Harry’s friend Neville.

Shipping Harry with a neutral Slytherin like Daphne Greengrass usually makes for a good story because it gives him a powerful ally who knows the pureblood power structure, and Harry can use all of those he can get.

I sometimes read a story listed as Harry/Hermione or Harry/Ginny, but if the female is too much like canon Hermione or Ginny I skip over the shippy parts. In truth, I don’t like canon Hermione as a person or as a character. She constantly threatens to overpower the story (which is supposed to be about Harry saving the world, and her being one of at least two sidekicks). She detracts from Harry and even more from Ron by taking away their incentive to learn good study habits, or even how to find books in the library. She is immature (Cries all day in the bathroom over one remark she could have ignored? What’s up with that?) and yet acts superior by criticizing the boys for their immaturity. In other words, I disagree with JKR that Harry ‘needs’ her, he needs her like a hole in the head. Harry’d be much better off with Dobby taking care of his ‘needs’. By the time I read DH, I was hoping JKR saw fit to finally AK her, but no such luck! Where’s JKR’s warped sense of justice when you need it?

Snarry and Severitus stories usually aren’t well enough written to be worth reading, with a few notable exceptions. The problem is canon Snape is too nasty a character to be truly ambiguous like JKR probably intended him to be. I prefer HP fanfiction that tortures him, kills him, burns his body, scatters his ashes in an unmarked field, and then plows the ground and floods it! Snape is such a nasty character he makes Dumbledore and McGonagall look evil and stupid just for tolerating his abuses. In the real world there are very few people who lead organizations explicitly dedicated to unrestrained malice, so Voldemort is no more than a boggart, a mere fairy tale ogre personifying our irrational fears. True evil in the real world is done by people in positions of authority in organizations dedicated to good purposes who subvert them by abusing their power, in other words: Snape is real evil, and the blind eyes of Dumbledore and McGonagall make them complicit.