I'm also a sucker for Power of Friendship/Power of Love-fueled victories. And magical girls. And magical girls kicking the bad guy's ass with the power of friendship.

You aren't alone in (your reasons for) hating Umbridge, Snape, and Malfoy's guts. That's one of Rowling's biggest strengths, I think; writing both large- and small-scale villainy well.

But then again, we're all very like-minded people here.

I hate stories that are in-your-face political or moral. Don't care who it's coming from, I hate Captain Planet just as much as I hate BibleMan. Or, well, I don't really show my hate for these things in a straightforward manner; I think it could be more described as "loving to hate" them. For instance, I love to make fun of Captain Planet. This is also the case with anything that's poorly written, hence why I can't stop churning out joke Mary Sues and badficcer avatars for the next Badfic Games. So yeah, love and hate rolled into one.

-Twistey

But there are still things I like. Anything new and original is high on the list, as are plot twists I can’t predict.

Top of the list of things I hate are plot holes and inconsistencies. I have a habit of spotting them. I don’t think I found any in Harry Potter yet, but most others have at least one minor inconsistency. It’s the big ones that are the worst...

Quite high on it is when a series doesn’t know when to stop. There’s very few things more annoying than every single plot point being resolved, the bad guys are dead, and then they make a sequel.

If II keep going any longer this will turn into a rant, so I’ll stop there.

For example, I really like the stuff produced by Botnik studios with its predictive text algorithm. Similarly, I also like things made with multiple levels of machine translation.

Here's a relevant link:

http://botnik.org/studios.html

I mean, I don't want to see it; I'm just morbidly curious.

Along the same lines, one of my favorite things is when it seems like our heroes can't win and they don't see any way out but they keep going because it's right/it's who they are/if they give in the bad guys can do something awful/someone needs to stand up and say no. That scene at the end of Return of the Jedi where Luke almost gives into the Dark Side and then he doesn't and looks the Emperor in the face and says "I am a Jedi, like my father before me"? I get shivers every time. It's horribly cliché,but that doesn't mean it's bad.

As for things I don't like, love triangles. They're not inherently bad, I guess, but I just vastly don't care and when stories get hung up on them I feel like my time is being wasted. Some people might like them, but they're not for me.