YMMV / The Ariana Black Series

• Angst Dissonance: The reader is supposed to feel bad for Ariana, especially in the first year, when she has a secret to keep from her friends and is scared of losing them because of it. When it turns out her secret is that she is related to Sirius and that she has been repeatedly bullied or thrown out of schools because of this (no matter how unrealistic that last part is), the reader is left to wonder why this was such a problem. The fact that she whined about it on an almost constant basis, definitely didn't help. And then there's the amount of Wangst it turned into.
• Angst? What Angst?: Sirius is disturbingly chipper for a man who spent twelve years locked up in prison with happiness-sucking demons over a crime he didn't commit. He instead spends his time bouncing around, playing pranks on Lupin and spoiling Ariana.
• Damsel Scrappy: You could make a drinking game out of the multiple times Ariana gets kidnapped and needs to be rescued.
• Fan Nickname: The sporkers on Das Sporking have christened Ariana as 'Airhead' and given fitting names for the horrible OOC canon characters. Such as 'Hairy Potter', 'Don Weasley' and 'Devil Shortbottom'.
• Funny Moments:
  • A bit of bad wording in an early fight scene indicates that Neville attacked Ron rather than Crabbe and Goyle, for some reason.
  • Thanks to a spelling error, Neville unbuckles Ariana's clit.
• Narm: Malfoy attempted to rape Ariana in her fourth year. While it's supposed to be a horrible scene, the bad writing makes it sound like Malfoy has about five arms in different places at once and Ariana is bent forward over her table, while her upper body is twisted by 180°, so that it faces Malfoy. Less squicky rape, more hilarious anatomy fails.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Ron himself is a bit dumber, but mostly spared. No, Draco gets hit with this worst, being turned from a relatively ineffectual jerk who eventually realized he wasn't cut out for the big leagues, to a pedophilic near-rapist.
  • Lucius Malfoy is even worse, to the point where he acts like more of the Big Bad than Voldemort does.
• Squick:
  • Draco Malfoy lusting after and attempting to molest/rape a first-year.
  • The fact that she has a consensual relationship with fifteen-year-old Neville is pretty messed-up too, especially when Neville becomes a teacher and still dates Ariana - which is given the A-Okay by Dumbledore because they got together before Neville become her teacher.
  • The fact that Ariana and Ginny perform basically a striptease to her bathing suit when she's 14 years old. All while being drunk and it excusing that (also Ginny wasn't even drunk, her excuse was she just wanted to "do something crazy".
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • Ariana just sort of tells Ron that he's in love with Hermione (and blackmails him into telling her), even though the two had no real romantic interaction prior to this. (They went to a dance together, but that's basically a throwaway line.) Harry's attraction to Ginny has slightly more build-up, but still starts mostly just with Harry making vaguely lecherous comments about her.
  • Don't forget Ariana and Neville, who are madly in love because the authors says they are.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Ariana's mother, Tabitha. In the spin-off oneshot, Tabby Cat, all she does is visit Sirius in Azkaban to rant at him. The reader is allegedly supposed to sympathize with her, but the way she complains about how being his sister has made her life a "living hell" even though he has it much worse than she does doesn't make her too pitiable. It doesn't help that her choice of words implies she abandoned him without question the moment she found out he might have been responsible for the Potters', Pettigrew's, and the Muggles' deaths, never mind that he was her brother she had apparently loved, making her look like a Fair-Weather Friend.
  • Worse, she had basically disowned him before that: they were best friends as children, but when he went off to Hogwarts and she turned out to be a Squib she basically cut him out of her life. Sirius himself tries to put a sympathetic spin on his, saying she was "hurt" to realize she had no magic, but the fact is she spent the last decade of her life blaming her innocent brother for her situation.
  • This seems to be hereditary, because we're supposed to feel bad for Ariana for being bullied in both her previous schools (which would logically only happen if she told someone she was related to Sirius) and because Maria picks on her, yet Ariana's the one who constantly abuses her powers against Maria, never gets punished for physically and magically attacking or insulting her and always blames her reactions on Maria for "provoking her".
• The Un-Twist: That rat Ariana talks to in her second year, which seems to understand her speech? Yes, that is Wormtail. Try to contain your surprise.
• Wangst: Dear lord, yes!
  • Especially prevalent in the first year where Ariana has a dramatic and terrible secret that she makes extremely obvious she has, then whines and bitches when people ask her what's wrong and dramatically flounces off to the roof to pout about it.
  • In one of the later years, Ariana and Maria get into a fight (which Ariana starts - Maria was taunting her but Ariana turned it into a physical altercation.) When Ariana is summoned to McGonagall's office, she starts whining and crying about how hard it is to deal with Maria's bullying. Even worse, McGonagall doesn't punish Ariana, even though she did to Harry for attacking Malfoy after Malfoy insulted Harry's dead parents.
  • Snape gets into this when Ariana starts "sensing" his emotions with her Empath powers and he starts whining about how everybody hates him and nobody liked him until Ariana came along, which is how the author chooses to explain why he was so mean to Ariana - because he hates all Gryffindors for being mean to him. Yes, really.

---