Harry Potter is awful and you suck for liking it.

[Guest]

Oh, no, Crab Helmet was impolite to people! That's a thing that never happens!

[Guest Chaos Pudding]

I really wish I cared enough to write a semi-serious counterargument to every one of your points, but I honestly don't. It would have been fun, though.

[Guest]

Ah, Pudding, are you active again now? Or just stopping by?

[Guest Chaos Pudding]

Semi-sorta active? Like if I see something that needs modding I'll mod it. But I'm not really into the community because I don't play the TCG anymore, and lording over the TCG section was all that brought me joy from this site.

[Guest]

Cool. I abandoned TCG a long time ago too; does the TCG section still have any of us left to keep the morons in check?

[evilfusion]

Pika's still a TCG mod. And I monitor it in the loosest sense of the word.

[Guest -Noel-]

Pika's still a TCG mod. And I monitor it in the loosest sense of the word.

 

Nah, you're doing a very nice job.

 

...but you should have let the YCM Legends reach 100 pages >:

 

Anyways, I never took too much time to look deeper on the Harry Potter story, but I throughoutly enjoyed reading the first book.

[Oh My Anubis!]

I completely and utterly agree with absolutely everything you said (please don't tell my cousins, they are fan girls.)

 

However, somehow, someway, even with all of these obvious flaws, Harry Potter has poked and prodded and weezled into my heart anyway.

[~Hero of Sky~Link]

Positively the most logical thing that type of person would say.....

[Guest]

Hark! The TVTropes forums are watching us! Hi, TVTropes!

 

@ Tam H 70: Yes, I am aware of Methods of Rationality. Unfortunately, it is pretty much unreadable because as far as I can tell the author has never interacted with a human being before. It has some neat ideas, like the Pioneer plaque, but ten-year-old spergy Harry's dialogue makes me want to gouge my own eyes out. (Still, at least three of your fellow tropers have enough sense to realize Methods of Rationality sucks. Maybe there's still some hope for your site after al- wait, no, you're a literary analysis site that thinks Lolita is pro-pedophile, you're irredeemable.)

 

@ moocow 1452: The point isn't "Oh no, they didn't construct the entire world in a way that stands up to spergy analysis, that's terrible!" It's children's fantasy; I don't expect the world's structure to stand up to that much scrutiny. The point is "If you're not going to do anything re: relations with magical species, bigotry in the wizarding world, cooperation between the houses, etc, then why bring it up? You're actively drawing our attention to something that doesn't make sense and goes nowhere, which actively violates our passive suspension of disbelief," and "Why is this the one series with ridiculously mainstream appeal"?

Edited April 24, 2012 by Crab Helmet

[Tentacruel]

Well it's pretty obvious that J.K. Rowling fails at creating a coherent universe, but I suppose she's still not a terrible author. She obviously just didn't give a sh** about continuity. Oh well. It's junk food-literature anyway.

[Hydra of Ages]

How have I not commented in this topic before? I've read through it at least twice, I know that much at least.

 

As far as children's fantasy goes, Harry Potter falls pretty flat. I highly doubt I'd ever be able to give it an objective criticism, given it was possibly the first fantasy novel I've ever read, but it's obvious that Rowling had a bunch of ideas and no clue what to actually do with them. Heck, the third book alone (which I will agree was the best) casually introduced time travel, then failed to ever bring it up again. Despite time travel being, well, time travel. There are few problems conceivable by a mortal mind that can't be solved by the ability to go back and fix your mistakes retroactively, especially since the book isn't entirely clear how the laws of time actually apply in this setting.

 

You also reminded me that while Order of the Phoenix is the largest book, it also fails spectacularly to have anything of note accomplished within it.

 

Probably the most disappointing thing, however, is that the plot elements that seem to set up certain themes never actually get resolved; the Houses never actually reconcile their differences, Voldemort and Harry's parallels are never important, the tension between the Wizards/Muggles never gets resolved despite almost every book touching on it, etc. It's sad, because even one of those plotlets grown would have led to a more satisfying conclusion than whatever it was that we got. In the end, what was the actual message of the book? What did Harry actually learn from his defeat of Voldemort? How is the world around him different or better in any way? As far as I can tell, Harry Potter ends with the Wizarding World in the exact same state as at the beginning of the first book, the only difference being that Voldemort is actually dead rather than just mostly dead this time. That would be excusable if the characters had undergone any growth, but unfortunately, they haven't; nothing more than you would expect from normal children that age, at any rate.

[Shradow]

Hi TVTropes!

 

OT: It's entertaining as a whole, but not much else. There are much more interesting stories out there.

[Doc.]

Still a better wtitten book than Twilight.

[Hydra of Ages]

Still a better wtitten book than Twilight.

 

This is a category that includes nearly every published work that is neither Twilight nor racist propaganda.

[Vairocana]

This is a category that includes nearly every published work that is neither Twilight nor racist propaganda.

 

Hey, don't knock racist propoganda until you've tried it. Birth of a Nation is considered a great work of cinema.

 

Also, I love this thread. It is a good thread.

[~ P O L A R I S ~]

Birth of a Nation is considered a great work of cinema.

 

If you're going to go about using such a silly appeal to authority in lieu of an argument then at least state who the authority in question is.

 

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

 

IIRC, Harry was eleven at that point and didn't expect Voldemort to be down there.

 

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.

 

What makes his being useless a problem though? It's not exactly unrealistic for people to have friends that they don't intend to take advantage of. Or at least I hope not anyways, that'd be pretty grim.

 

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

 

Characters defined by weakness are generally meant to be endearing and/or to provide comic relief through their blunders.

 

the series was written with a male audience in mind

 

And yet there are more female fans.

 

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.

 

The gender distribution within school cliques tend to be comprised solely of-or at least dominated by-one gender. As unfortunate as it is, people-children and adolescents in particular-tend to inherently be more alienated by members of the opposite sex than of their own. As far as Lily's insignificance goes, given that the entire series revolves around her miraculous self-sacrifice of love and the resultant powers Harry inherits that produce the Deus Ex Machinas needed to thwart Voldemort, she strikes me as rather important.

 

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? [etc]

 

Harry isn't supposed to be a mastermind, especially not at the ages of 11-13. He's just an awkward, self-deprecating and courageous little boy plagued by an awful childhood who continues to be confronted with grandiose dire circumstances. We're not supposed to venerate him for mental badassery as per L or Light Yagami, that doesn't mean he's a failed protagonist. We're supposed to pity him and hope things work out for him. There are other considerations to be taken into account in critiquing a character than power level.

 

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

 

How are you managing to get yourself into so many Harry Potter arguments IRL and why is it that you continue to do so?

[Doc.]

Even Snape said something about "Mediocre magic" in the 7th book during a flashback.

Still, Harry Potter=Mary Sue.

This coming from a guy who has every HP game, book and movie.

[Guest]

IIRC, Harry was eleven at that point and didn't expect Voldemort to be down there.

 

He thought Snape would be down there, and knew some sort of villain was present based on the dead troll guardian. Whether or not the villain happened to be Magic Hitler, he's still a professor at the school and you're still a first-year; trying to take him on single-handedly is a recipe for disaster.

 

As for being 11, notice how in that section I end pretty much each line with "Oh, well, Harry's only age X, we can make allowances for that, let's see if he's gotten any better by age X+1"? It's not just at age 11 that Harry does the charge-in-to-unwinnable-situation-at-last-second-with-no-plan thing.

 

What makes his being useless a problem though? It's not exactly unrealistic for people to have friends that they don't intend to take advantage of. Or at least I hope not anyways, that'd be pretty grim.

Often, especially in the later books, Ron feels like he's sort of just... there, and Rowling is just coming up with ways to keep him occupied. Like his relationship in book six or him vanishing for part of book seven. It's padding that leads to hundreds of pages passing with nothing actually happening.

 

And yet there are more female fans.

 

I said nothing to the contrary.

 

The gender distribution within school cliques tend to be comprised solely of-or at least dominated by-one gender. As unfortunate as it is, people-children and adolescents in particular-tend to inherently be more alienated by members of the opposite sex than of their own.

 

Which would make sense if the flashbacks were Rowling's autobiographical memoirs of her time as a male schoolchild. But... they aren't. Nothing is forcing the narrative away from Lily; Rowling just decides she isn't important.

 

As far as Lily's insignificance goes, given that the entire series revolves around her miraculous self-sacrifice of love and the resultant powers Harry inherits that produce the Deus Ex Machinas needed to thwart Voldemort, she strikes me as rather important.

 

Her existence is important to the plot; she is not important as a character. There is an important difference.

 

Harry isn't supposed to be a mastermind, especially not at the ages of 11-13. He's just an awkward, self-deprecating and courageous little boy plagued by an awful childhood who continues to be confronted with grandiose dire circumstances. We're not supposed to venerate him for mental badassery as per L or Light Yagami, that doesn't mean he's a failed protagonist. We're supposed to pity him and hope things work out for him. There are other considerations to be taken into account in critiquing a character than power level.

 

It's not about power level. Harry's burning-hands-of-love from the first book count as part of his power level; strength and weakness aren't the issue. The issue is Harry's whole attitude. He knows Evil Wizard Hitler is on the march. He knows he's the chosen one who needs to stop him. But it's not that he's too weak to do so; it's that he doesn't even try. Even though he's being taught magic that may save his life, he practically sleeps through his classes. When presented with even a simple task, like solving the egg or learning occlumency or getting Slughorn's memory, he can't be bothered to put in any effort. Given a choice between playing Quidditch and running his self-defense class to prepare the other students for the coming war, he chooses to play stupid!basketball despite the supervillain's armies already being on the march. The whole world is at stake and he just won't even try until the very last second - and even then, any plan beyond "charge in alone now" requires too much concentration for him.

 

How are you managing to get yourself into so many Harry Potter arguments IRL and why is it that you continue to do so?

 

One hour-long discussion a year for a few years is enough; this is actually a pretty bare-bones thread really.

[Vairocana]

If you're going to go about using such a silly appeal to authority in lieu of an argument then at least state who the authority in question is.

 

Released in 1915, The Birth of a Nation has been credited as groundbreaking among its contemporaries for its innovative application of the medium of film. The content of the work, however, has received widespread criticism for its blatantly racist and fantastical depictions of scenes that are presented onscreen as if in documentary form. Film critic Roger Ebert writes, "Certainly The Birth of a Nation (1915) presents a challenge for modern audiences. Unaccustomed to silent films and uninterested in film history, they find it quaint and not to their taste. Those evolved enough to understand what they are looking at find the early and wartime scenes brilliant, but cringe during the postwar and Reconstruction scenes, which are racist in the ham-handed way of an old minstrel show or a vile comic pamphlet."

 

DW Griffith might have been a bigot, but he was a masterful director, pioneering many of the standards of modern cinema (such as cross cutting narrative).

[Hydra of Ages]

Hey, don't knock racist propoganda until you've tried it. Birth of a Nation is considered a great work of cinema.

 

Also, I love this thread. It is a good thread.

 

Exceptions exist to every rule, it seems. That said, despite its relevance to film history, I'm not sure I could stomach three hours of American history as described by the Klu Klux Klan.

 

Back onto Harry Potter. Strangely enough, it seems that as the books increased in size, less content of actual relevance was contained in them... with the exception of the final book, which introduced all elements of the resolution with little to no connection to information established in previous instalments.

[Tentacruel]

I have to agree, and Harry's sheer stubbornness to do everything as badly as possible seems on increase. "Nope, sorry, we have to do this dangerous mission with only the three main characters, to ensure that the only way we can win is via Deus Ex Machina."

[Vairocana]

This just showed up on my tumblr:

ok im really super mad about hp and i have to finish a calc bc problem set and shower and get dressed in the next 20 minutes i cant do all of those things so lemme just get this out there

• jkr is not a feminist writer
  
  
• jkr is not a feminist writer
  
  
• jkr is not a feminist writer
  
  
• jkr slut-shames and shames girls for being interested in “girly” things (lavender)
  
  
• jkr presents a dichotomy between “good women” and “bad women” (hermione’s bookishness and respectable prudery vs. lavender’s girly-girl sexuality, mrs weasley’s motherliness vs. bellatrix’s lack of offspring and sexual attraction to voldemort)
  
  
• which is an INHERENTLY ANTIFEMINIST ACT
  
  
• ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU FRAME IT IN TERMS OF FEMALE SEXUALITY? WOW
  
  
• jkr blames girls for their eating disorders (this was on her website at one point so it’s not textual but i feel we should note it)
  
  
• jkr then says that she is fat-positive while every overweight character in her books is mean, nasty, and shrewish (with the exception of mrs. weasley who is described as “plump and motherly”)
  
  
• jkr writes outing narratives (remus lupin - bookish shy teacher with a secret that’s revealed to the school and then causes him to lose his job) but maintains the textual straightness of even her only queer character - dumbledore’s queerness is not stated in-text and is thus not actually canonical)
  
  
• jkr has one textually disabled girl character and her entire purpose is to get abused and raped and be written as “dangerous and out of control” b/c of her brain problems to motivate dumbledore… (thanks for this one cat!)
  
  
• also i feel like i should address jkr’s positioning of luna as “crazy” and “that weird girl” when luna has suffered abuse from her housemates for her entire school career and showed up at school traumatized and proceeded to be ostracised wow how is that an ok thing to do
  
  
• jkr has never acknowledged the possibility of queer female characters
  
  
• EDIT: jkr “punished” umbridge for her actions in book five by sending her off to be gang-raped by centaurs
  
  
• jkr is the f***ing worst
  
  
• seriously
  
  
• if you idolize hp i do not want to know you
  
  

[~ P O L A R I S ~]

He thought Snape would be down there, and knew some sort of villain was present based on the dead troll guardian. Whether or not the villain happened to be Magic Hitler, he's still a professor at the school and you're still a first-year; trying to take him on single-handedly is a recipe for disaster.

 

As for being 11, notice how in that section I end pretty much each line with "Oh, well, Harry's only age X, we can make allowances for that, let's see if he's gotten any better by age X+1"? It's not just at age 11 that Harry does the charge-in-to-unwinnable-situation-at-last-second-with-no-plan thing.

 

I think there's a reason that Harry is rewarded in spite of his faults of being lazy and disorganized in addition to his "anger and occasional arrogance" as Rowling puts it. His lackluster sense of priority wasn't so critical as to prevent him from devoting a great deal of his time hunting down Horcruxes and whatnot, so although he probably could've done more, he didn't exactly charge in at the last second with no idea what was going on. Rather, he knew enough of what was going on to intentionally trade off his life in charging in at the last second so that Voldemort would ultimately be defeated. He didn't expect to survive. His survival was a means for Rowling to demonstrate that Harry deserves to be rewarded for his faith, humility, and good intent so that our kids can follow his example while not beating themselves up about being lazy, disorganized, angry and occasionally arrogant as such flaws aren't enough to prevent ultimately achieving success.

 

Having him survive was a way for Rowling to give readers a sense of his virtues being practical. Assuming as I am that Rowling is indeed trying to sell faith, humility, and good intent using Harry as a model, it only makes sense that she'd also give him the faults he had so that she could emphasize his virtues by having him survive in practicing them in spite of his faults.

 

Often, especially in the later books, Ron feels like he's sort of just... there, and Rowling is just coming up with ways to keep him occupied. Like his relationship in book six or him vanishing for part of book seven. It's padding that leads to hundreds of pages passing with nothing actually happening.

 

As strained as Rowling's attempts might be to keep Ron relevant, it feels as though his absence from the series would be more problematic than his presence. A team consisting solely of Harry and Hermione couldn't have the same dynamic. It'd be awfully difficult having them go through all that they would without making it into a romance which would change the whole focus of the series. Throwing Ron into the mix gives us three two-person to consider as opposed to one, diffusing the intensity. Ron also provides a nice contrast with Hermione in that while she invests more of her energy in knowledge while being insufferable, Ron doesn't know a great deal but is perfectly amiable and helps reinforce a sense of camaraderie among the trio. Granted, there could've been a third character more complex and interesting than Ron, but being complex and interesting is Harry's job. Ron, if nothing else, lightens things up considerably.

 

DW Griffith might have been a bigot, but he was a masterful director, pioneering many of the standards of modern cinema (such as cross cutting narrative).

 

People close their eyes and ears to racist propaganda so that the consequences for society inflicted by its message as can be observed throughout history cannot be repeated, and that's the way it should be. The intrinsic beauty of the technique used in a story cannot have us overlook the faults in the message it is used to reinforce when that message is as unacceptable as racism. We should therefore be able to knock The Birth of a Nation to kingdom come without trying knowing its message to be racist.

[Hydra of Ages]

This just showed up on my tumblr:

 

To a certain extent, I give JKR a little lenience here. There are very few mainstream novels around that conform to all (or even most) standards of proper feminism, and going out of your way to sate all of them can be a maddening task, especially if you don't have a in-depth knowledge of feminism before hand. Patriarchy is so ingrained into our society that it's almost impossible not fall into even a few traps if you're not constructing an entirely fictional society with different societal rules than exist in real-life.

 

That said, it's no excuse, especially for some of the examples mentioned in the list. Dumbledore's sexuality was pertinent to the narrative only to clarify his relationship with another (relatively minor) character, so I'm not terribly bugged about her never actually stating it... but Umbridge's karmic punishment and Lavender's treatment are problematic, to say the least.

 

That said,

 

also i feel like i should address jkr’s positioning of luna as “crazy” and “that weird girl” when luna has suffered abuse from her housemates for her entire school career and showed up at school traumatized and proceeded to be ostracised wow how is that an ok thing to do

 

...When, exactly, did this happen? I'm not doubting it, I'm just at a loss as to what the writer is referring to here.

 

People close their eyes and ears to racist propaganda so that the consequences for society inflicted by its message as can be observed throughout history cannot be repeated, and that's the way it should be. The intrinsic beauty of the technique used in a story cannot have us overlook the faults in the message it is used to reinforce when that message is as unacceptable as racism. We should therefore be able to knock The Birth of a Nation to kingdom come without trying knowing its message to be racist.

 

This is flagrantly incorrect. We frequently and regularly look past the moral flaws of creative works, especially those created in the past, in order to examine them solely based on technical or artistic merit; many of Shakespeare's works, for example, would be considered hideously misogynist if they were printed today. Canadian propaganda during World War II was instrumental in creating their national identity and Canadian environmental pride. Even the Bible itself contains implications that are at least controversial in modern society, if not outright rejected, yet is still respected as the centerpiece of a number of religions. Merit isn't a simple binary value; humans are capable of appreciating the skill involved in creating a work without approving of the message of the piece.