I’m only now reading the series, being halfway through GoF…
And this is what’s bothering me - the integration between Muggle world and Magic World.
It seems that Wizards live in the muggle world for the most part, with only certain places being totally hidden (platform 9 3/4, Diagon Alley) - so how about simple things like Local property taxes - wouldn’t they need to be paid?
And while “Magic” might make the Weazley house appear normal, how about the neighbours - surely they would notice a family with like 6 kids that don’t appear to go to school? Wouldn’t this also come to the notice of the authorities?
I agree, although I think introducing the concept of horcruxes so late was an even bigger problem. When it was revealed that Tom Riddle’s diary from Book 2 was a horcrux then I was hoping that it would turn out that several others had also been destroyed already, but no. Harry & Co. had to spend a good chunk of the final book tracking them down, and it turned into kind of a boring slog.
I think you have to some extent answered your own criticism here. While Snape really did dislike Harry and I can believe that some of his actions were motivated by pure spite, it was also vitally important that he keep up his cover and maintain a good relationship with Lucius Malfoy and other Death Eaters.
I got the same impression from the books, and was similarly surprised when Lupin married Tonks. I didn’t expect there to be an out gay couple in the series, but I’d assumed they’d both continue to be bachelors and that their relationship would be left at least somewhat open to interpretation. There were a few minor things in the books that made me think of them as a couple. For instance, they give Harry a Christmas present together in one of the books.
The Weasley kids do go to school. They’re not hanging around on the streets while other local kids are in class, they’re off at boarding school for the entire academic year.
That Harry is somehow off the hook when he uses an Unforgivable Curse. There are a few points in Rowling’s oeuvre where she changes the terms and allows something she identified as a moral evil slide because the good guy did it.
Actually, she had wanted to introduce Horcruxes in Book 2 and delayed that. Plus Dumbledore had destroyed one of the Horcruxes, and lost a hand in the bargain.
Well for me it was how popular the entire series was. Really, they aren’t that great of series and, for me, they sure went downhill quickly.
Somethings that particularly bothered include, but are not limited to;
Quidditch, Terrible game all around.
I was always a bit uncomfortable with Gringots
Dobby
There is no ‘graduation ceremony’ for a seven year school?
The sudden change to include Christianity in the school in the later books.
That stupid clock of the Weasley’s that never really paid off.
House Elves in general.
One particular thing that really pissed me off was in GoF. Harry is warned by someone and then Harry sits there thinking, “could someone be trying to kill me?”
Can you be any stupider? Someone tried to kill you when you were a baby. Then in your first year at Hogwarts, someone tried to kill you. Second Year? Someone tried to kill you. Third year? That year was fine, no wait, someone tried to kill you. Fourth year? YES! SOMEONE IS TRYING TO KILL YOU!
I don’t recall which book, (four or five) but I recall a ‘sentence’ that wasn’t a sentence. It didn’t have a noun and a verb. It was a strung together series of clauses that got past the editors.
I don’t want to hear Rowling say anymore on the subject.
I agree, I always thought that Quidditch sounded like a terrible team sport. When you come right down to it, the seeker is the only player who matters. The others are just there to provide action.
It sounds like a terrible spectator sport too. AFAICT the match can be over almost immediately if the snitch is caught quickly (I believe one match ends in just over three seconds).
How pissed off would you be if you’d been gearing up for weeks for the big match, and it’s all over before your arse has barely warmed your seat?
I suppose you could draw a parallel with boxing where the bout could be over with the first punch, but I can’t think of any team sport where you could miss the whole match while you were struggling to open a particularly recalcitrant bag of sweets.
Maybe they are; and are sworn to secrecy …
Re Quidditch in general: I’ve always had the feeling that Rowling is a non-sports-fan, in fact a disliker of sports – and has had fun inventing, in Quidditch, a completely insane, wildly complicated, and overall impractical sport; which nonetheless has large numbers of fanatical devotees, and “learned scholars” about its intricacies.
This is because it is not set in America. People do not “graduate” from high school in Britain, or have any other special ceremony. (Probably not in most of the rest of the world either.) Your cultural bias is showing.
I have to agree, with the complaint that the Deathly Hallows are introduced, without any real foreshadowing, far too late. (Together with the whole associated backstory about Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindlewald.) More than that, though, the whole ending seemed incredibly rushed, bringing in a whole set of new plot points in the last couple of chapters, and this after Deathly Hallows had dragged like anything in the middle, with very little happening for ages as Harry and Hermione (and sometimes Ron) had their long camping holiday.
Also, killing off Fred, one was it George (I can’t tell them apart, so I can’t remember), at the end was just vicariously cruel. If she felt she had to kill someone to show that things were serious, even a Weasley, I could accept it, but killing just one of the twins and letting the other live was just vicious.
I will second (or third, or fourteenth) the point about the Deathly Hallows - they came out of nowhere. The Horcrux thing wasn’t too inconsistent but the whole Hallows backstory just seems like a late retcon in itself.
Likewise, Molly Weasley’s sudden launch into the limelight as Warrior Mother didn’t really work for me - she goes from mild-mannered housewife to battling Bellatrix in the big climax with no real path from A to B. I would have preferred to see a duel with Bellatrix and Neville’s gran, which would have been more consistent with the character and would have given some closure to Neville’s family’s story (I actually thought of fan-writing the scene but what’s the point? In short: In revenge for what happened to her family Gran Crucios the bejeezus out of Bellatrix until B falls backwards down the staircase and breaks her neck. Later the Ministry decides that while Gran has committed a major crime they opt to hold off prosecuting her until they work through the backlog of Death Eaters on the assumption that she’ll die of old age before they get to her. Which is also consistent with the Ministry’s cavalier attitude to law enforcement.)
On another point, Harry treats Ginny badly throughout the books even after they’re a couple, constantly pushing her to the sidelines whenever she tries to join in or assert herself. I know Harry has bigger fish to fry but he’s still a jerk.
Does everyone travel to Hogwarts from London? Are there no wizard kids anywhere else in the country?
One thing that confused me about the Hogwarts staff - are they all required to be single? None of them seem to have any family at all, not even Neville when he joins the staff.
And speaking of which, Rowling’s notes on what happens to them all afterwards are ludicrous. Harry and Ron become Aurors. Harry is Ron’s boss, leaving Ron once again playing second fiddle to Harry for the rest of his life. What happened to his brief moment in the sun as a star Quidditch Keeper? You’d have thought Ron deserved at least a go as Keeper for his endlessly-mentioned Chudley Cannons, finally getting a little glory that didn’t involve Harry’s coattails. And although Harry mentions that he wants to be an Auror, even the decaying corpse of Anton Chekov can see that Rowling spent seven books setting him up to become the first DADA teacher at Hogwarts to last more than a year. I realize that this would ruin the last scene of the last book but even so, that was just stupid.
And as for Hermione - a lawyer? Why not a freaking doctor? Again, it’s all in the damn books! If ever there was someone destined to find a better anti-lycanthropy potion it was her - she’s got “researcher” written all over her and personal reasons to focus on that. Her parents were even dentists!
But part of Harry’s problem, and ultimate salvation, was lack of killer instinct. He fights to disarm, not kill. That scene helps to foreshadow the final fight scene. Ultimately, it was Harry’s inherent goodness (and offer of redemption) that allowed him to beat Voldemort. He shot to disarm, and Voldemort’s own killing curse rebounded to kill him.
Of course, from a strategic perspective, it was a pretty stupid way to go get Harry.
I read somewhere that Rowling said (or wrote) that she regretted inventing Quiddich because as it turned out, she got really tired of writing those scenes. Which explained to me she had Ron’s great Quiddich victory off camera, so to speak, while Harry and Hermoine were off doing something else. Still, I think it was a good thing for the story for it’s original target audience, who I figure were children the same ages as the trio.
How many folks here read the books for the first time as adults when they first came out? I suspect most of the first adults who read them were either parents or teachers of children the ages that were targeted by JK. I think the novels should be assessed as childrens’s/juvenile fiction and not as adult fiction.
The problem with that is that the last two books especially are not children’s books at all. Indeed after POA (ane evn during it) the books took on a much more adult theme.
It struck a jarring note with me in the first book, when Hagrid tells Harry that wizards conceal their existence from Muggles because “They’d want magical solutions to their problems!”
Well, why not?
Here in Muggle society, Mr. Hagrid, we have people called “professionals” – doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects, engineers – people who, through a combination of talent and education and experience, are qualified to solve certain problems. Professionals are well-paid and respected. If you were to come out of hiding, “wizard” would become simply one more respected, well-paid profession.
The Harry Potter phenomenon happened when I was an adult. I read the books and enjoyed them but did not think they were all that and I am certainly not a fan. A lot of stuff bothered me about the books, including a lot of stuff mentioned above.
One thing not yet mentioned–it never seemed right to me that Ron and Hermione were in Gryffindor. Ron is, to me, the quintessential Hufflepuff and Hermione the exemplar Ravenclaw. I liked that the Hat couldn’t decide if Harry belonged in Gryffindor or Slytherin but did not like that he had no Slytherin allies for at least the bulk of the books.
An awful lot of the books just did not seem well-thought-through to me.
The Quidditch league seems to use club football rules – in the season the ultimate point differential between all played games matters. This means that you could have lost by 20,000 points through the rest of the league, but as long as you stall catching the Snitch long enough and have impeccable defense for the last game, if you score enough to bring yourself from -20,000 to better than the highest ranked team’s aggregate score, you win the cup.
This still largely makes the Seeker the most important position, because now it’s their job to aid the Bludgers in delaying the catching of the Snitch.
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