God, I could write a whole seven-tome rant novel, about all the annoying cliches HP fics are full of. But that would be a rather poor reading material.
So lets skip that hour long part and just write the conclusion
- All kind of superpowers, bazilisk blood, heir of Slytherin/Gryffindor/Merlin stuff. Basically stories where Harry gets all kinds of mythical powers, which he then ends up using to ridicule everyone, and use in the dumbest of ways.
- Someone-or-other-takes-care-of-harry-and-fix-everything fics. Be it Snape, Dumbledor or Sirius Black, I have yet to see a fic like that which would make a compelling read. It's just basically fixing all the problems, using genre-savvy-omnipotence.
- The Stations of the Canon. All those fics that try to make all type of little or major changes, that could result in interesting story, but then the author goes to great and often ridiculous lenths to make yet more changes so that everything ends up going like in the canon.
The Arithmancer comes to mind from the stuff I've been reading lately.
Well for the first two the idea alone isn't bad of itself. I wouldn't mind to read a story, where Harry actually has a good reason to end up with some potentially great power, the power has some drawbacks, or at least requires a lot of effort to control, and is used smartly to actually even out the field of a conflict with Voldemort. One of the main reasons I can't come up with a good story for a HP fic is that the only reason I can imagine for harry living past his first year in Hogwarts is that Voldemort is not interested in fighting him.
Someone taking care of Harry fic seems a bit harder to do right. Unless you go for family drama plots. But that's not really up my alley.
Ah it seems it turned into a rant anyway. Sorry about that