First-person POV doesn't bother me, but I have gotten the impression that there's some negative feeling towards it, not only in HP but in other fandoms too (with the notable exception of fandoms where the source material itself is written in first-person POV, such as Jeeves & Wooster). There may be a bit of a feedback loop: People think no one likes it, so they don't write it, so people rarely see it, so they think no one likes it...
The specific complaints I've heard about it usually center around people's sense that it raises the bar for writing in-character, i.e. if it's the main character speaking directly to the reader, every sentence has to sound like their voice, and supposedly too many writers can't pull it off. Personally I wonder if this is understating the difficulty of writing in close third-person POV, which should be equally consistent in its character voice. Most fic is written in that POV and nobody seems to think it's an insurmountable barrier.
My experience with writing slash and femslash in third-person is that clunkiness can almost always be fixed just by using people's names, which readers hardly ever notice. (But readers do notice epithets like "the blond" and "the shorter man" and "the sexy Slytherin" and a little of that goes a looooong way, with overuse quickly becoming unintentionally hilarious!) However, I did recently write a time travel fic where both characters were the same person, and I did consider using first-person for that one, though I eventually decided on a different solution.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2019-12-28 05:48 pm (UTC)The specific complaints I've heard about it usually center around people's sense that it raises the bar for writing in-character, i.e. if it's the main character speaking directly to the reader, every sentence has to sound like their voice, and supposedly too many writers can't pull it off. Personally I wonder if this is understating the difficulty of writing in close third-person POV, which should be equally consistent in its character voice. Most fic is written in that POV and nobody seems to think it's an insurmountable barrier.
My experience with writing slash and femslash in third-person is that clunkiness can almost always be fixed just by using people's names, which readers hardly ever notice. (But readers do notice epithets like "the blond" and "the shorter man" and "the sexy Slytherin" and a little of that goes a looooong way, with overuse quickly becoming unintentionally hilarious!) However, I did recently write a time travel fic where both characters were the same person, and I did consider using first-person for that one, though I eventually decided on a different solution.