Harry Potter is awful and you suck for liking it.

[Guest]

I was making a post about Quidditch over in a topic in General and it kind of spilled over into other aspects of Harry Potter, and since this forum hasn't had a topic about the series in months, I thought I'd come here to post.

 

Now, I should make something clear before I proceed: contrary to what the title says, I liked the books when I was a kid. They were a fun fantasy romp, and I enjoyed them. Looking back on them afterward, though, it's very clear just how much was wrong with the series, which really makes me wonder why this is probably the most popular series ever when only nerds have even heard of the brilliant A Song of Ice and Fire (though hopefully its televised adaptation will help to fix that). Some problems only became clear in hindsight, but others I noticed even when I was little, like this first one:

 

Quidditch is a really stupid sport.

 

The problem is that, since Harry is a Mary Sue fantasy persona, he needs to have the single most important role on the team that lets him win the whole match single-handedly. In order to make this possible, Rowling made the game hideously broken by making the Snitch worth so many points that whoever catches it pretty much autowins. This means that the rest of the team (the Keeper and Chasers, as well as anything the Beaters do other than attack the opposing Seeker) is entirely worthless, which pretty much defeats the purpose of it being a team sport.

 

It's like having a baseball game, except off on the sidelines one player from each team meets to play a game of chess, and whoever wins the game of chess earns an extra twelve runs for their team. And this is a special chess variant that makes draws impossible. Technically, it is possible for the rest of the team to decide the game, but that really won't happen unless one team is completely incompetent.

 

It's particularly awkward because Rowling tries so hard in the Goblet of Fire to convince us that the Quaffle really does matter by having Ireland win even though Krum got the Snitch, but for Romania's Chaser/Keeper team to do so badly, there are really only three possibilities:

 

1) Romania is completely incompetent and got to the World Cup purely based on Krum's awesomeness despite the rest of their team being awful. This proves my point that the rest of the team is irrelevant, since they were able to become one of the top two teams in the world despite having only one half-decent player.

 

2) Ireland is so amazingly good that the second-best team in the world is absolute putty in their hands. Or, more likely, Ireland is cheating. The former seems unlikely, and the latter implies that the system is laughably easy to break and all the officials involved are either corrupt or stupid.

 

3) There is no in-universe reason; Rowling just wanted desperately to prove that the Quaffle mattered and didn't spend a second thinking about what this result would imply about the world she was supposed to be trying to build.

 

None of these possibilities does anything to refute my point.

 

Now, I have heard diehard fans try to justify it by saying that the Quidditch system takes into account total number of points scored, so while the Chasers and Keeper don't matter for winning individual games, they do matter for overall tournament ranking. And, to be fair, we do see this being important in Hogwarts' own House Cup. The problem is that the House Cup is a flat round-robin, highest total wins setup, whereas the professional World Cup, by virtue of having a final, clearly has some sort of single elimination mechanic that once again renders the Keeper and Chasers irrelevant; as long as you can qualify for the playoffs, all you need is a good Seeker.

 

tl;dr: Quidditch is a 1v1 sport with twelve other spectators who for some reason are on the field.

 

But since we're arguing over the quality of the Harry Potter series as a whole here, let's address some other issues with the world:

 

Deus Ex Machina

 

For those not familiar with the term, go read a book, but since I know you won't, I may as well explain that deus ex machina (Greek for "God from the machine") refers to a problem being solved not by the characters taking logical actions to overcome obstacles but instead by the sudden intervention of some outside force that resolves the plot for them. For more information, refer to your friendly neighborhood Wikipedia or TVTropes.

 

Now, the backstory begins with Harry being saved by his mother's love, which doesn't seem to be how magic normally works and which lets him survive an unstoppable killing curse through no action of his own, but we'll allow that because he's an infant at that point. So let's skip ahead to the end of the first book, once he's had a year of schooling and has decided he's ready to confront the villain and generally be heroic.

 

Harry gets owned. Badly. And he deserves it. He marches into the room with the villain with no plan whatsoever and clearly having a much lower power-level than his opponent, so to the surprise of absolutely nobody, he doesn't even really put up a fight. So, the villain has Harry at his mercy... but suddenly, Harry's hands can magically melt his face off, and as Harry falls unconscious, Dumbledore swoops in to clean everything up.

 

Um, what.

 

The problem here is that Harry didn't earn that victory at all. HE had no plan, no skills, and was only saved by a sudden power-up with no foreshadowing and precious little logic behind it. But hey, he's only been at Hogwarts a year; surely he'll improve with time, right?

 

Fast-forward to second-year, when Harry and Ron decide to do more heroic adventuring into the Forbidden Forest to meet a giant spider. Once again, they go in with no plan and far weaker than their massive opponent, and once again, they are completely overpowered. but then, suddenly, an enchanted car not seen since the beginning of the book (and which has received no maintenance for months) appears to rescue them despite having no motivation to do so (what with them being responsible for crashing it) and no real reason to show up now at all. Well, okay, we can forgive Harry here; it's not the end of the book yet, so he still has time to improve.

 

So, what does happen in the climax? Our heroes, having learned that Lockhart knows nothing of value and has no skills other than betraying heroes and wiping their memories, decide to take Lockhart with them to confront the final boss... for some reason. To their great surprise, Lockhart betrays our heroes and prepares to wipe their memories. Fortunately, as our hero, Harry springs into action and is able to save the da- wait, no, my mistake, Lockhart just stupids himself into oblivion. Well, he wasn't the real villain, so all that matters is that Harry defeat the actual opponent properly, so let's take a look at that.

 

Harry wanders into the underground lair containing the supervillain and his incredibly powerful monster, hopelessly underpowered compared to his foe and with no allies or plans prepared. You know, the same as in the climax of the first book. Fortunately, he's able to defeat the villain when... a phoenix appears out of nowhere, and cures him of poison, and hands him a hat somehow containing a sword, and carries him out of the otherwise inescapable dungeon, and what is this i dont even

 

This is a good example of how something can be a Chekhov's Gun and still be a Deus Ex Machina. Yes, we saw Fawkes in Dumbledore's study earlier, and yes, we heard Dumbledore describe its ability to cure poison, carry heavy weights, and survive being killed. And that would have been fine if Harry had remembered this conversation and gone up to fetch Fawkes to bring with him to the final battle. But that's not how it happened: Harry charged in blindly like an idiot, and the author decided to intervene by sending Fawkes down to save him from a well-deserved death. (Of course, it also contains an excellent example of how a Deus Ex Machina is especially painful if it is entirely unforeshadowed and comes absolutely out of nowhere - suddenly, out of nowhere, former sorting hats can conjure giant swords?)

 

Prisoner of Azkaban is my personal favourite book in the series, and making this list actually helps me see why: it's the book in which Harry actually fights his own battle. Having learned that he is weak against Dementors, he goes out of his way to train to fight them so he'll be able to defeat them in the future, and in the end it is our heroes' plan that saves Sirius and Buckbeak. There is quite a Deus Ex Machina in the form of the time-turner, but a) at least it was set up well in advance that Hermione had it in her possession, and b) it's still ultimately Harry who saves the day, just three-hours-later-Harry rather than current-Harry. Sure, he still initially rushes into a dangerous situation with no plan and loses, and the time-travel element is a major plot hole given how useful that would be in circumstances other than taking more classes, but Harry's still taken an important step forward toward being a proactive hero.

 

Pity Goblet of Fire reverses all that.

 

This year, Harry is a complete screw-up who can't even get through the standard tournament challenges without the villain, the Tenth Doctor, holding his hand and rigging the game in his favor every step of the way. Going into the final trial that he knows has to be a giant trap, Harry marches blindly in with no plan and hopelessly outmatched by his opponents. (Sensing a pattern here?) Fortunately, he's saved by a combination of two factors: first, Voldemort is a colossal moron who refuses to let his followers help him kill Harry, and second, apparently nobody ever bothered to mention that when twin wands are used against each other they create a giant reverse-magic glowing web thing that suspends the battle and lets Harry escape because the ghosts of his parents are popping up what the frak am I even reading!? Oh, and then the mole reveals himself for no good reason like an idiot, so Harry is able to easily defeat him. And by Harry, I mean Dumbledore, because there's no way Harry would do anything competent on his own.

 

On to book five, in which... Harry out of spite refuses to learn the necessary skill as instructed, falls right into Voldemort's trap even after Hermione explicitly tells him it's a trap, walks into said trap once again outmatched (six kids against all the Death Eaters?) and with no plan in particular, and is saved only when the Order and Dumbledore appear. And his stupidity still gets his godfather killed. Nice going, moron. Why are you our protagonist exactly?

 

Well, by book six, Harry is sixteen, a very standard coming of age year. He's old enough to drive, to get a proper job, to consent, to get married, to drop out of school, and to generally be treated like an adult. So, having passed his Sweet Sixteen, let's see how Harry has grown into his role in the climax of this book: Dumbledore holds his hand through dungeon of doom, disarming all the traps for him. He gives Harry only two instructions - "don't touch the water" and "fire kills zombies" - both of which Harry ignores, which would have gotten them both killed if Dumbledore hadn't luckily recovered quickly enough to use fire himself because his idiot student couldn't do anything right. They return to Hogwarts, where a battle is raging, and Harry spends the battle... stunned and unable to move, watching events unfold in front of him but taking no action. OUR HERO!

 

Well, it's book seven, it's the end of the series, Harry is officially of age in-universe, his mentor is out of the picture, and it's time for war. So let's see what our glorious hero does.

 

Well, he starts by... rejecting Lupin's offer of help, because having a fourth party member and an actual grown-up ally is apparently not useful. Then he comes up with a plan to infiltrate the Ministry... but forgets to come up with a plan to get back out. And he spent a month on this brilliant "plan". Then he wanders around in the woods for months with no plan, which makes Ron give up and leave because even by Ron's standards Harry is incompetent. He says Voldemort's name after finding out that doing so is Very Bad, and it's only because the author intervenes to stop him from saying it for no convincing in-universe reason (after spending the rest of the series saying it without qualm) that he hadn't tripped the taboo sooner. Fortunately, their incometent jailer lets them out and Dobby appears to sacrifice himself to save them, so they're able to plan a raid on the bank (with most of the planning done by their goblin ally that they plan to betray), only to completely fail in their betrayal and lose the one thing that can destroy the Horcruxes. Luckily, Crabbe decides to help them with a spell that backfires and destroys the next Horcrux for them (Hermione knew of this spell that had never been mentioned before in the series but decided against using it because it was dangerous, whereas having an immortal evil Hitler-inspired super-wizard overlord ruling the country is apparently pretty safe). Then Harry dies, but is able to unexpectedly come back to life because, um, the author saves him (it's due to no plan of his own, certainly). Then he one-shots Voldemort without a fight - because he had a plan, which is something, I suppose, but the plan was stupid and nonsensical and contradicted the established rules of wand ownership and relied on Voldemort being an idiot and attacking with the wrong wand even after this plan was explained.

 

Even in the last book, Harry doesn't fight his own battles (and indeed actively turns away help); other characters and the Author's Divine Hand need to intervene to save him. He never grows out of being saved by Deus Ex Machina.

 

Harry is Everyman Jesus?

 

A big reason for all of this, and a problem underlying much of the series, is that Harry is supposed to fulfill two roles simultaneously. First, he is supposed to be an Everyman, an ordinary student protagonist that any reader can relate to and even project themselves onto. Second, he is supposed to be the Chosen One, the hero who saves the world from the ultimate evil every May and acts as the resident Christ figure.

 

Now, combining these roles is not impossible. If you're on YCM, you probably know that this is pretty much standard for anime, and fans of the excellent Buffy the Vampire Slayer will recognize that this is Buffy's role right down to the "every May" part. However, making these two contrasting aspects fit into a single character does take effort to do well, and Harry Potter... does it badly.

 

First, Harry doesn't want to be a hero. He doesn't think like a hero. A telling decision comes late in the series, at the start of the sixth book, when he must choose between two extracurricular activities: he can train the other students to defend themselves in the coming war against Evil Magician Hitler, or he can play the world's most broken sport. Now, any hero, or even anyone with the least perspective on life, would choose the former. But Harry chooses the latter, because Rowling wants him to be a relateable ordinary high school student, and Rowling prioritizes that over making his actions make sense and making him a strong character. Now, Buffy also started out doing stuff like that and needed to learn to focus on her important Slaying... but that whole character arc happened in the first season (only half as long as the others), whereas Harry is still like this after five years. Buffy grows into her role as a hero, but Harry never does.

 

But it's not just that example. Harry is consistently a lazy and incompetent student. Outside of going out of his way to learn the Patronus in Prisoner of Azkaban, he never does anything proactive to acquire important skills despite knowing that he is destined to fight the Dark Lord. In school, he coasts and cheats through his classes, never putting in any real effort unless he knows in advance a specific reason for learning a specific spell (like Accio in Goblet of Fire) - and even then, as with Occlumency, he might still not take it seriously. He's not proactive like a proper hero, going out hunting vampires each night; he's reactive, charging into danger when it's already upon him but otherwise content to waste time sleeping in class without even bothering to pester Slughorn for a memory. In contrast, while Buffy never does learn to magically sense the presence of vampires, she spends lots of time training and patrolling to protect Sunnydale and become a better Slayer. Harry needs to be relateable, and to do that, he can't seem to be "better" than the average reader - and so he comes off as incompetent.

 

Because Harry needs to be relateable, he also isn't allowed to do anything at all morally ambiguous, nor is he allowed to suffer realistic trauma regarding the massive abuse he received as a child. Sure, he can do some teenage angsting, he can throw tantrums, but when it comes right down to it, he needs to appear as a pure white-hat, and he can't suffer serious psychological scars.

 

Consider this progression of events: Harry spends his childhood with no friends and abused by his foster family that hates him. Yet even on the train to Hogwarts, he has no trouble opening up to people and, as evidenced by his first interaction with Malfoy, already believes in the Power of Friendship. Um, what? Okay, it's for kids, but even causing the death of the only person who really loved him five books later doesn't really impact his personality (indeed, he angsts LESS after that), and that's after the series supposedly grew up.

 

As for Harry being contractually white-hatted, consider this: In Book 1, Harry burns off the villain's face with his bare hands. In Book 2, Harry duels a massive death-gazing snake with a sword. In Book 3, Harry swears he will kill the man who betrayed his father. In Book 4, Harry learns the Killing Curse and other aggressive spells and confronts the Evil Wizard Hitler who killed his parents and ruined his life, and so the spell he uses is... Expelliarmus?

 

Even when he's an adult, he still acts like this. Deathly Hallows begins with Harry endangering himself and his friends (and getting Hedwig killed) by using Expelliarmus instead of Stupify or some other more aggressive spell, which lets the Death Eaters identify him as the real Harry because only the real Harry would be that stupid. His justification is that he doesn't want to kill and stunning is de facto killing when you're flying, but a) Expelliarmus has been shown to cause knockback in the past, so that could easily kill them too, and b) They're Magic!Nazis and you're at war.

 

Returning to the Buffy analogies, you'll recall that Buffy does not kill humans, even when doing so seems useful or even necessary. However, this is consistent with her personality; there's a Slayer code against killing humans; she's consistent about it (only even considering killing a human while under the influence of mind-altering magic); she has traumatic experiences in high school when she is involved in or thinks she committed the killing of a human; and it's explicitly addressed in the story that her role as a hero holds her to higher moral standards, and the efficiency of those standards are called into question. ("She could have killed me." "No, she couldn’t. Never. And sooner or later [bad stuff will happen as a result]. Buffy even knows that... and still she couldn't take a human life. She's a hero, you see. She's not like us." "What do you mean, 'us'?").

 

With Harry, however, it's not clear why he suddenly gets an aversion to killing. His moral standards aren't consistent, either; a year before using Expelliarmus on the broomsticks, he uses the Cruciatus Curse, and very soon after the broomstick scene, he uses the Imperius Curse, two dark spells considered just as bad as the Killing Curse. He bounces back and forth between what he's morally allowed to use, and while the Cruciatus Curse is portrayed as a one-time emotional overreaction (that for some reason fails because he wasn't hating enough, even though he seemed pretty hating to me), the morality of the Imperius Curse use is never seriosuly considered.

 

It's all okay because he goes back to using Expelliarmus again for the finale, which brings us to the next problem: Rowling seriously jumps through hoops in order to make sure Harry never kills anyhow. In the final battle between Harry and Voldemort, Harry still uses Expelliarmus. Of course, Harry has to win and Voldemort has to die, so Rowling creates a convoluted explanation for why Voldemort's attack backfires and kills him that really doesn't make sense given what we know about the rules of the universe. And Harry knows this will happen - he attacks expecting to successfully kill Voldemort, but because he says Expelliarmus instead of Avada Kedavra to achieve the exact same effect, we can still sympathize with him. Rowling goes to a lot of effort to make Harry kill Voldemort without making Harry a killer, and the contrivance involved is quite jarring.

 

It doesn't even work on a thematic level. As anyone who recognizes the phrase "Summers blood" will know, Buffy sometimes suffered from plots with poor explanations, but they at least worked very well thematically and fit with the show's overall themes and ideas. In Harry Potter, Harry is repeatedly stated to be better than Voldemort because he uses Love where Voldemort uses Hate (not that Harry really demonstrates much love - friendship, maybe, and a bit of lust toward Ginny and Cho or whoever the heroine of your current fanfic is, but not love), but in their final confrontation, Harry wins not because his Love beats Voldemort's Hate but instead because only he was able to go through Rowling's absurd mental gymnastics to figure out how the basic mechanics of wand ownership work.

 

I've heard a lot of people say that the Harry Potter series got significantly worse after Goblet of Fire, and I think that a large part of the problem is that the threat escalation from "Something sinister is going on" to "An evil overlord is alive and plotting to kill us all" makes it harder and harder to accept Harry's continued insistence on being an ordinary high school student instead of stepping into his role as a hero.

 

The Deus Ex Machinas factor into Harry's failure to grow into a true hero. Harry needs to be able to win, but he can't be too good or else he'll stop being an ordinary high school student. Because of this, Deus Ex Machinas are employed to hand him victories. Also, another handy way to have a hero win without effort is to have a villain defeat themselves by being stupid, and this shows in full force in Harry Potter. Lockhart blows his own brains out; Diary!Riddle sits back and laughs instead of finishing Harry off; Barty Crouch Jr.'s plan is unnecessarily convoluted, and he reveals himself as a villain for no reason; the Evil!Ministry lets Harry escape easily even though he has no escape plan; ditto Malfoy Manor after Harry breaks the taboo; and then there's Voldemort.

 

But before I address Voldemort, I want to wrap up the extended Buffy comparisons with a simple question: Buffy is our protagonist where Xander is not because Buffy has Slayer powers; what sets Harry apart from the others to qualify him to be our hero? Sure, there's a scar on his forehead, but after the first book it doesn't do anything useful; most of the rest of the cast is more competent than he is, and Neville grows much better as a character and develops into a far better hero. The one explanation offered is that he's brave, but his constant charging headfirst into autolose situations without any sort of thought or plan isn't bravery, it's stupidity, and it only works because the author constantly intervenes on his behalf. When he insists to the proto-DA that he's not really as good as he seems and he's just gotten lucky a lot, he's not being modest, he's being honest: the only reason he's not dead is that Rowling has held his hand every step of the way.

 

Voldemort

 

The Law of Bruce, coined by Bruce Willis, says that any story with heroes and villains can only be as smart as the intelligence of its biggest villain, and as the lead villain, Voldemort is a colossal moron. He goes along with Barty Crouch Jr.'s unnecessarily complicated plan; he makes the pieces of his soul very obvious and thus easy to find and destroy; he tells his minions not to kill Harry when they easily have the chance; he attacks Harry in their final battle even after Harry has explained why his attack will backfire.

 

Voldemort is just too strong to fight on his own merits because he would win too easily. He's one of the strongest wizards in existence and is opposed by a bunch of meddling kids with no special skills. He can make himself invincible as long as specific objects are not magically destroyed, which would make him absolutely impossible to defeat if he decided to make, say, a random pebble (or, as one fanfic suggested, the Pioneer Plaque - have fun fetching it from outside the solar system) into a horcrux. He has a legion of followers. He is willing to use the most powerful spells to control, torture, and kill people. He eventually takes over the government and gains even more power as a result.

 

He's just too strong to be fought fairly, which means the author needs to throw in a massive handicap to stop him from insantly winning. One handicap is to give Harry an endless series of Deus Ex Machinas to save him, but another his to make Voldemort not use his obscene power to its full effectiveness by making him incredibly stupid. But making the big villain so stupid just demeans the story as a whole.

 

A lot of his strengths are merely informed to have taken place offscreen. We're told that Voldemort planned the Sirius Trap from Order of the Phoenix, but this scheming ability doesn't mesh with the stupidity he displays every time we can actually see him. We're told that Voldemort seemed innocent and charming as a student, but whenever we see him he comes across as a caricature of a mustache-twirling villain; even when we see him as a child in Dumbledore's pensive, he's a sinister, obviously evil creepy child. Sure, he fools Slughorn, but only because Slughorn is also an idiot; asking detailed questions about ultra-secret ultra-dark magic should have tripped some mental alarms.

 

The story blames some of his failings on his pride, but even that varies, and while it might have made sense at first, his assurance that he can defeat Harry single-handedly should have wavered after his sixth defeat. And what's the point of having an evil army and evil government at your disposal if you're going to insist on doing everything personally?

 

Of course, though Voldemort and Harry are the primary protagonist and antagonist, they're hardly the only characters I take issue with. And since we're on the topic of idiots, let's go on to...

 

Ron

 

Why was Ron in this series?

 

The last time I remember him being of any use was at the end of the first book, when a chess game appears beneath the trap door as a contrived excuse to give him an excuse to be useful - sort of like how Justice League has a disproportionate number of crimes occur in places where talking to fish is useful to make Aquaman look a bit less laughably underpowered next to Superman and Green Lantern. After that, he sits around moping about how he's not as strong and cool and useful as Harry.

 

He often provides emotional support, but he's also prone to turn against Harry, such as when he runs with an Idiot Ball and thinks Harry cheated in Goblet of Fire, or when he abandoned the group in Deathly Hallows. More often, it's Harry trying to support him to make him feel less insecure - and, given that being best friends with the Chosen One is one of the sources of his insecurities, frequently failing. He can help on the sidelines, but in the end Harry ends up going into the climax of each book without him - the only real exception is book five, and even then Ron is with four other sidekicks, and is the only one to get his brains eaten.

 

Even Dumbledore recognizes how useless Ron was, as evidenced by his final gifts to the core trio. Harry receives one of the three most powerful artifacts in the universe; Hermione receives a key to learning about said artifacts; and Ron receives a thing that lets him rejoin the group after abandoning them.

 

Ron's ultimately just there because Harry needs a male friend in comparison to whom he can appear favorably.

 

The Female Characters

 

The Weasley family consists of six brothers and a single little sister. This is a nice microcosm of the series as a whole.

 

Though Rowling is female (a fact that she deliberately hid on the cover by giving only her first and middle initials), the series was written with a male audience in mind, and so most of the characters of importance tend to be male while female characters take a backseat. The leader of every significant faction is invariably male, and though several of them hace female second-in-commands (Hermione to Harry, McGonagall to Dumbledore, Belatrix to Voldemort, etc), the leadership and the majority are both going to be male (The Order has, what, three female members? Tonks, McGonagall, and Mrs. Weasley?). Even in more narrow groups, the male characters tend to have more effect; for example, in Gryffindor's Quidditch team, Oliver Wood receives far more characterization and focus than his female replacement, whose name I can't even remember.

 

Female characters also tend to have a much weaker effect on the story than males, frequently being nothing more than love interests. This is obvious when considering minor female characters like Lavender Brown, but it even applies to the more important female characters. For example, in the flashbacks to the previous generation's time at Hogwarts, we see very little of Lily's character; her role is primarily as an influence on and motivation for James Potter and Severus Snape. The past isn't about Lily; it's about Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. Meanwhile, in the present, Ginny is supposed to be an accomplished fighter who is very skilled with the "Bat-Bogey Hex" (whatever that is), but though we're told that she's good at fighting, that all happens offscreen, so all we see of her is as a damsel and later as a love interest for Harry. Funny, if she's supposed to be so good at fighting, why couldn't she go with Harry, Ron, and Hermione in Deathly Hallows?

 

The only major exceptions are Luna Lovegood, who is plot-irrelevant comic relief instead of plot-irrelevant background filler or love interest, and Hermione Granger, who is actually a legitimate main character.

 

But I can complain about more than just characters! I can complain about inanimate objects too!

 

Chekhov's Guns

 

A Chekhov's Gun is an object that appears early on but becomes important later; the phrase is named for Chekhov, who said that if a gun hangs on the wall in the first act, it must be fired in the third. However, you will notice that Chekhov did not say that if a gun hangs on the wall in the first act, it must be revealed to be a cunningly-disguised hybrid of a potato slicer and an iPod in the third and used to prepare dinner while playing Ziggy Stardust.

 

Rowling loves Chekhov's Guns. She loves introducing background elements and making them important later in the story. However, she isn't always good at making their eventual function correspond to their initial form at all.

 

I've touched on one of these earlier. Chamber of Secrets introduces the old Sorting Hat in Dumbledore's office, and sure enough, it becomes important later. But it doesn't become important by doing anything a Sorting Hat has ever been shown to do before - it doesn't read minds, it doesn't judge character, and it doesn't even sing. Instead, it... produces a sword. Contrast this with Fawkes, who is introduced as being able to lift heavy objects and cure poison with its tears, and whose role in the climax is to lift heavy objects and cure poison with its tears. You can see the difference between these Chekhov's Guns; one does exactly what we know it's able to do, while the other suddenly produces new unforeshadowed abilities that have nothing to do with what it is.

 

Another good example is the Deluminator. In the first book, it's introduced as a device that can put out lights and later put them back on again. In the last book, it's used... to make Ron hear Harry and Hermione's voices and be dragged around the country with them whenever they teleport. The new use is completely unrelated to the form and function it had when it was introduced.

 

There are other Chekhov's Guns that aren't quite so obnoxious, but still don't work that well because we never knew what they were supposed to do in the first place. In the classic example of a gun sitting on the wall, we don't know who will use the gun or on whom, but we do know one thing: guns are used to shoot people. And in a well-done example, that's how a Chekhov's Gun will work: we won't know the circumstances of its use, but we will have some general idea of its effect. But in Harry Potter, a lot of Chekhov's Guns - like the Horcrux Locket that first appeared in the fifth book as a piece of clutter in the House of Black, or the necklace in Knockturn Alley that showed up way back in the second book - don't have the same impact because, being based on magic, we are given no idea in advance of what sort of magical abilities they may have, if any. It would be like if Chekhov told us "There was a THINGYMAJIG on the wall!" and in the third act said "And then Pavel picked up the THINGYMAJIG, which was in fact a gun!" That's not clever; that's just silly.

 

Rowling knows that good authors use Chekhov's Guns, and she makes an effort to use them herself, but she doesn't always seem to be able to do them at all well.

 

But we started on the subject of Quidditch, so let's end on the same underlying problem:

 

World-Building

 

This is not a story about the wizarding world. This story is about Harry sitting around while the Deus Ex Machinas defeat Voldemort for him defeating Voldemort. The setting is there for the convenience of the plot; it is not designed to actually be consistent and logical.

 

I've already touched on some of the issues above. Quidditch isn't there to be a serious sport; it's there to be a venue for Harry to show off his awesomeness. The time-turner is there so Rowling can have a generic time-travel plot; the actual implications of having time-travel in the setting and how useful it would be are completely ignored. These elements are casually introduced without any real thought given to how they impact the universe.

 

Here's a question: Why do wizards go to work and have jobs? Can they not just conjure whatever food, housing, or money they require? The very last book mentions that it is impossible to conjure food, but why? And we know it is possible to conjure other objects and to transfigure other objects into (presumably edible) animals; how exactly does this rule work? It would have been possible to justify this in the style of Star Trek's Federation - "we work to better ourselves!" - but Rowling doesn't bother to do anything interesting like that. She just wants to have a perfectly ordinary economy despite the setting that differs so heavily from our world, and doesn't bother to think through what maintaining such a system would entail; at best, we get one half-baked hand-wave explanation to part of one objection, and this explanation is weak, vague, and easily overridden.

 

Rowling just isn't interested in building a cohesive, interesting fantasy world like a good SF&F author. She just wants a Like Our World But MAGICAL! setting in which our hero can have a simple battle of A Good Guy Versus A Bad Guy.

 

Let's have a look at wizard society as a whole. The government is paranoid, withholding information from its citizens. The wizards are proud, too high and mighty to even consider using Muggle technology (even though even Rowling admits that any wizard loses to a Muggle with a shotgun). The society has widespread racism, both against other sentient life like the centaurs and against other wizards with the wrong parents. Wizards hold slaves in the form of house elves. And Voldemort's group reveals that there is a sizable Neo-Nazi faction in their society - which, if Slytherin House's position in Hogwarts is any indication, makes up almost a quarter of the wizards int he country.

 

How much of this is seriously addressed over the course of the story? How much of it changes? How many of these issues are resolved? Sure, Voldemort was defeated, but his followers live on. There's no indication that the government will become less paranoid and isolationist - as Fudge's replacement proved, deposing one corrupt regime doesn't guarantee that the new one will be any better. During the course of the books, the "good" wizards seem less effective than Voldemort at making ties to magical creatures. And the issue of whether enslaving House Elves is wrong or not is never given any serious debate or resolution - Hermione's attempts to help them are played for laughs, and that's all we see of the topic.

 

This particular crisis may have been averted, but the wizard society is still as corrupt as ever, and there's no reason to think that another dark wizard won't follow Voldemort just as Voldemort followed Grindelwald. Harry has failed to effect any real change on the decadent society in which he lives.

 

Even the issues that Rowling emphasizes seem to lead to particularly little change. Sure, there's the House Elves, which get a lot of focus from S.P.E.W., but she gives more serious focus to the Houses, with constant reminders that the Houses need to put aside their differences and stand together in the coming battle - and, in particular, Gryffindor must reconcile with Slytherin. In the end, though, only three Houses of students defend Hogwarts in the final battle; not a single Slytherin student remains to protect the school. Slytherin is ultimately proved not to merely be the House of Ambition. Instead, it is what it had seemed to be all along: House Black-Hat. Slughorn is a decent example of how Slytherin could have developed, but he is one semi-decent person from a House whose members are otherwise pure villains. Rowling wants to tell us that these groups need to work together, but in the end she decides that the last one really is evil to the core and leaves it out. Way to defeat your own point, Rowling.

 

In the end, though, that's not what we're meant to focus on, because Rowling really doesn't care about the world she's supposed to be designing. All that matters is Harry versus Voldemort, and that's all the readers are expected to pay attention to.

 

The battle's done, and we kinda won, so we'll sound our victory cheer. But where do we go from here?

Edited August 9, 2011 by Crab Helmet

[Dwarven King]

You have way to much time on your hands dude. -_-

[Guest]

This is pretty much a summary of things I've said in IRL arguments over the last few years.

[Dwarven King]

Again...to much time dude. Then again, I'm no better. I actually read the whole thing. :<

[Spoon]

Yes, Quiditch is an utterly stupid game.

Yes, Harry Potter is a dumbass.

Yes, the Story is a mess.

Even what you said about the female characters made sense, never noticed it actually.

 

But still, Harry Potter is a good book. Why? Because it sold over 500 million copies! It got people who never even touched a book before into reading! That doesn't make it's story or characters well conceived, but it makes the world a better place, because by God, more people should read books.

You, as someone who obviously reads a lot and thinks about the things you read, should be grateful that this book was written, not because of the content, but because it's just there. I think no other book had that much of an impact on the youth of today and their reading behaviours.

 

Just my 2 cents, your points are all still valid, it's just that you shouldn't hate the book for existing, it did something good :P

[Aesirson]

I've always had the opinion that Quidditch is REALLY stupid. Why would the Seeker even try to catch the Snitch if his team was behind with 150+ points?

 

And all of your other points are also valid. I'm disappointed at my self for never questioning the ending of the first book. Still, I love the books and they are the reason that I started reading books at all.

[DARKPLANT RISING]

THIS is what I needed. I've always thought the book was meh, but since everyone loved it, I was unable to really go all hate on it.

 

Now, the argument's won. Oh thank you. You're amazing.

[Guest]

But still, Harry Potter is a good book. Why? Because it sold over 500 million copies!

That makes it a financially successful book. If we're measuring quality in terms of sales figures, Twilight is one of the best books ever.

 

It got people who never even touched a book before into reading! That doesn't make it's story or characters well conceived, but it makes the world a better place, because by God, more people should read books.

You, as someone who obviously reads a lot and thinks about the things you read, should be grateful that this book was written, not because of the content, but because it's just there. I think no other book had that much of an impact on the youth of today and their reading behaviours.

 

Just my 2 cents, your points are all still valid, it's just that you shouldn't hate the book for existing, it did something good :P

That makes it at best a useful book. As I said, I'm focusing on the negatives here because everyone else has already taken care of the positives, and I did enjoy the books as a kid. But the story still just isn't that good.

 

Why would the Seeker even try to catch the Snitch if his team was behind with 150+ points?

There really is no reason; they try to hand-wave it in the World Cup as Krum doing it because he thought the opponents' lead was insurmountable (even though it was small enough that any half-decent Chaser team could have gotten them within 140 of the opponents, which suggests that even Krum knew he was running a one-man team), but would you really want to surrender unnecessarily in the middle of the World Cup?

 

The sheer unlikelihood of this raises another question that I don't remember being addressed in the books: given how unlikely it is that a team would get the Snitch and still lose, why would Fred and George bet their entire life-savings on this outcome? I think I kind of assumed at the time that they had used Omnoculars on fast-forward to see the end of the match before it started, but I don't remember anything of the sort being implied, and that just opens up a million other questions about why this perfectly-accurate form of divination wouldn't be widely used in all aspects of life, especially by gamblers. Were Fred and George just really stupid and really lucky (read: helped by the author) with their bet?

[Guest Cursed Reaction]

I've always enjoyed the book but I agree that, at times, it's poorly thought out.

 

I applaud you on finding the faults in the book. Especially on Quidditch and Ron. I've never really understood why Ron was in the book. They could have easily placed in a slightly more useful male character.

[Guest]

Something else I forgot to mention regarding the female characters: with the exception of Hermione, the female second-in-command of each faction is never actually the second-most important member of that faction. McGonagall is supposed to be Dumbledore's right hand, but what does she actually do of importance compared to his other agents, especially Snape? Bellatrix Lestrange is supposed to be Voldemort's right hand, but she's never his most important minion in any one book; that honor has gone to Quirrell, Lucius Malfoy, Wormtail, Barty Crouch Jr., and Draco Malfoy, all of whom are male. Even when they do have an allegedly important role, they still take a backseat to the male characters.

[Guest Cursed Reaction]

...So the female characters simply have the illusion of authority when they don't?

 

Awkward.

[Guest]

I suppose that even though she's working for the Ministry instead of Voldemort, Dolores Umbridge is the main non-Voldemort antagonist of the fifth book, so maybe that counts for something? At least as Fudge's second-in-command she actually had as much impact on the story as that role would imply, though since I'm cynical, I'm going to guess that's because there was never time to give Fudge a third-in-command, so she pretty much took that position by default due to the total absence of competition.

[Legend Zero]

Oh Crab, how we've all missed you. <3

 

I noticed a few of these things which is why I never read the last 2 books.

[六兆年と一夜物語]

Is it bad if I imagined this entire article was narrated by Ben "Yahtzee" Crosshaw?

[Niv-Mizzet]

Hey! I like Ron! Otherwise, all your points are genuine, and I agree, but I still like the series.

[Dwarven King]

I would just like to point out that I became a HP fan before the media took hold. Just saying.

[AsianGuy1137]

Ooh, nice. Now do one for Percy Jackson, Twilight, or any other form of media with massive popularity.

[Grunt Issun]

Who says that she thinks those books are bad?

[Guest]

Twilight doesn't need one of these because it's not super-loved like Harry Potter. It has an obsessive fanbase but an equally strong and obsessive hatedom already, and that hatedom has already documented its flaws far better than I ever could - especially since I have never read a single page of the series and only know what I know about it by listening to said hatedom. Harry Potter really doesn't have much of a hatedom, and what little it has isn't nearly as strong as Twilight's.

 

And I don't know Percy Jackson at all.

 

The problem with Ron is that he has no skills whatsoever. He doesn't have any useful abilities like Hermione's intelligence; he doesn't have any particularly strong personality traits like extreme loyalty or willpower that could come in handy; and he's not even adorkable, badass, or sexy like Rory from Doctor Who. His one function is to make Harry look good by comparison and to occasionally give some exposition about the wizarding world that Harry didn't grow up with.

[Ohmic Rand]

which really makes me wonder why this is probably the most popular series ever when only nerds have even heard of the brilliant A Song of Ice and Fire

 

because adult situations

[Manjoume Thunder]

It's particularly awkward because Rowling tries so hard in the Goblet of Fire to convince us that the Quaffle really does matter by having Ireland win even though Krum got the Snitch, but for Romania's Chaser/Keeper team to do so badly, there are really only three possibilities:

 

Oh, come one.

We have one good sports team (albeit fictional) and you think it's Romanian.

[Guest]

 

Oh, come one.

We have one good sports team (albeit fictional) and you think it's Romanian.

Yeah, I realized after I wrote this that Krum plays for Bulgaria, not Romania. I didn't bother changing it because I really couldn't care less about them (and I really don't think you want to be associated by a team that is so obviously awful that they can't win even with the Snitch's broken power).

[Ieyasu Tokugawa]

The problem with Ron is that he has no skills whatsoever. He doesn't have any useful abilities like Hermione's intelligence; he doesn't have any particularly strong personality traits like extreme loyalty or willpower that could come in handy; and he's not even adorkable, badass, or sexy like Rory from Doctor Who. His one function is to make Harry look good by comparison and to occasionally give some exposition about the wizarding world that Harry didn't grow up with.

You forgot his chess playing skills :3

 

Yeah I have no other counters d:

[EmperorNiro]

High Five! XD

[evilfusion]

Wow.

 

That was extremely well written and covers almost all the main flaws of the series. Despite that, the series is still good in my eyes, but it's not perfection. It's got its shares of flaws, weaknesses, never really noticed all the Deus Ex Machinas, but the ending of Deathly Hallows was anti-climax incarnate.

 

Actually, Deathly Hallows introduced so many damn new concepts that were barely, if ever, mentioned in previous books and SUDDENLY drive the entire plot resolution...it's just terrible. The whole wand ownership and the very concept of the Deathly Hallows themselves are ridiculously introduced.

 

Doesn't really change that the series is one of the most famous and popular and beloved series of the generation, but you speak the truth regarding the flaws. I can only expect that Rowling got better as a writer as she wrote the series, but the methods she took in some aspects were imperfect.