The business of wizards’ great ignorance about the Muggle world and its workings, has always been a bit of a niggle for me. Only a bit – I love the general absurd concept of two different societies sharing the planet, in parallel, but overwhelmingly in ignorance / incomprehension of each other. I’m mostly able to swallow the more extreme implausibilities – flying in the face of even mad-alternative-world sense – for the sake of the pure comedy gold of the “two societies” situation. To be honest, I find Rowling’s world-building more fun, than the IMO rather hackneyed plot and character-interplay of the books.
Particularly; Arthur Weasley – the enthusiast for things Muggle, whose job is supposed to be bridging the gap between Muggle and wizarding gear-and-equipment – being so ignorant as he is, about the workings of such gear-and-equipment, does tend to stick in my throat (though I try to “let it go by”). For heaven’s sake, what would stop Arthur and his colleagues from going out and acquiring Muggle books about science / technology / engineering – starting if need be, with simple “how it works” books for kids? (I raised that point once, on a Potter fan board – one answer that I got, was that the Weasleys are so poor that they wouldn’t be able to afford even second-hand books from and by “the others”. Way-out-there enthusiasts of all kinds, can get most wildly inventive in supporting what they want to think about the object of their enthusiasm.)
Quidditch isn’t nearly as bad as it’s made out to be. There are two problems usually highlighted, and neither one of them is a real problem.
First is that the Seeker matters too much, and everyone else not enough. This was a problem for most of the games we saw, but that’s just because the Seeker we were focusing on was a much better player than most of his teammates or opponents. If the Seeker is really good for his level (as Harry is), then he’s probably going to catch the Snitch before the other players rack up the points. In a professional match, though, the Snitch is much harder to catch, and there are a lot more Quaffle points, such that it’s possible (as we saw) for the Seeker who catches the Snitch to still lose the game. And that was even a relatively short game, for a professional match: We’re told of some that have lasted days. Think of how many scores must have been made in that time!
Second, there’s the issue that there’s an extra zero on all of the scores: The game would be exactly the same if the Quaffle-goals were worth 1 point each and the Snitch was 15. And yes, that is illogical, but it’s illogical in a realistic way. Really, is it any worse than a sport where the scoring goes love-15-30-40-60? Because we Muggles do play a sport that’s scored that way.
Luna was a character that resonated with me the most and i always hoped for her to play a bigger role. Though maybe part of the reason she interested me as a character was that she usually wasn’t in the limelight. (kind of like how Tom Bombadil is interesting partly because of how little we know about him).
Also, Ron & Hermione… they have highschool sweethearts that are divorced by the time they are 23 written all over them.
I’ve always rationalised this, thusly: as with Muggle railways, there are trains equivalent to the Hogwarts Express which run at beginning and end of term between Hogsmeade, and other big cities in the British Isles, besides London. Rowling does not go into this, not wishing to drown her readers in peripheral info not needed re the plot. Harry, Hermione and Ron all live in London / southern England, as do a fair number of other Hogwarts scholars whom we see travelling on the H.E. from / to Kings Cross; so the focus is on the train which does the run from / to Kings Cross.
And likewise, perhaps, Luna’s bonkers non-sport-focused commentary on a Quidditch match.
I tend to think: with only four character-based Houses, there are probably many people who are extremely-borderline cases: as cited with Harry – Gryffindor or Slytherin? The Hat maybe had the same degree of pondering and indecision in respect of Ron and Hermione; as often, Rowling does not recount those episodes – if she included everything, and didn’t frequently leave it to the reader to draw their own inferences, each book of the seven would run to a four-figure number of pages.
That does seem cruel. It would have been better if Hagrid explained to Harry that wizards had tried repeatedly through the ages to help muggles. But every attempt to bring magical solutions to muggle problems backfired terribly. A violation of natural law, perhaps.
I always felt that Ron hating Harry for most of GoF seemed a real stretch and the reason for the fight was way out of Ron’s character. I never understood why Ron had such a hard time believing Harry didn’t put his name in the cup and why he would get so pissy about it.
And I thought Harry should have ended up with Luna.
I read Snape as treating Harry Potter poorly as a cover for his double-agent role. Even all the way back in Book One, he’s ingratiating himself to Draco Malfoy for a reason.
His hatred for James Potter certainly helped though.
That said, ‘petty teacher’ is hardly an unusual creature. Children’s books are filled with petty adults who have no business being around children. The real ‘petty teacher’ is of course Dolores Umbridge.
Compare and contrast Prof. Snape’s behavior (in the Prisoner of Azkaban movie) when Lupin turns into a werewolf. Snape is protective of the three kids. On the flip side, when Umbridge and Harry and Hermione are confronted by Centaurs, Umbridge steps behind Harry and Hermione.
I agree with your point that Molly went from witchmom to badass in too short a time frame. A few lines of background, referring to the old-school battle days, would have tied up that loose end neatly, I think. “Oh yeah, back in the day your mom was quite the badass warrior. She kicked ass and took names and this one time…” One story told to the children around the dinner table would take care of that.
Which brings me to Ginny. It is mentioned, somewhere, that Ginny is the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, which makes her particularly powerful. She gets a very few name drops to address how powerful she’s becoming because of this 7th daughter/7th daughter legacy. So why wouldn’t she make the perfect ally for Ron, Hermione, and Harry and wouldn’t that have balanced out the gender thing and given each character a love interest?
Also, I think Harry didn’t show interest in Ginny until A) She was old enough to be shown interest in and B) Someone else had shown interest, therefore reinforcing the point that she is of dateable age and desireable.
The main thing that bothers the crap out of me from the movies: That stupid Marauder’s Map that Lupin gave back to Harry, without any explanation about where it came from, who made it, or who the fab four were. It was explained in great detail in the book, but Lupin did the “mischief managed” spell without any context – without that reveal, Lupin logically has no way of knowing how the map works, like Snape couldn’t get it to work. We know why Lupin knows if you read the book, but if you didn’t… plot hole! I understand the director said he wanted to save that plot point for the next movie, but different directors did the next movies and this plot hole was never addressed – and it’s relevant to other plot developments later on.
This. Everyone wants to see the characters pair up, but realistically a bunch of them, probably most, are going to end up with people they met after the events of the books. Luna’s ending up with “some random dude” she didn’t go to school with but who shares her interests is so much more sensible than having her pick from the Hogwarts crowd.
Really? OK then. I mean we play a British tune to graduate to here so I just thought they did. Thank you for clearing that up for me. Of course, in the HP world, High School seems to the end of formal education. They go off to professional careers after leaving Hogwarts.
In early books exclamations are made like “merlin’s beard!” The school has winter break. Later books, I believe they actually change this to Christmas Break and they most definitely start exclamations like “Jesus!” or “Oh my God!”
There is definite shift.
Now I only read the books once, and I have no intention of reading them again. So don’t ask me to quote chapter and verse. As a casual reader, I picked up on that.
On this point, note: Fred and George had been using that map regularly before they handed it over, yet they never bothered to comment on the fact that it would have shown that their brother had been sleeping with a man named Peter Pettigrew for two years.
I think Arthur Weasley isn’t really supposed to know much about Muggle technology. He’s supposed to just fix the problems caused in the wizarding world and get on with it. He is interested in light bulbs and “fellytones” and “please-men” but he hasn’t got anybody to explain it to him. The fact that he can talk to Harry and Hermione and get some answers helps, but there is a LOT to explain and there isn’t time. I think Rowling got a little cute with this stuff in the earlier books and then couldn’t follow through.
Remember the wizarding world has a LONG history of being targeted by the Muggle world, and they are vastly outnumbered by Muggles. It seems like you have to choose a side – Harry has nothing to lose, but Hermione seems to abandon her parents to rejoin her friends in the wizarding world pretty easily. Even Squibs like the caretaker guy identifies with the wizarding world because that’s what he grew up in. Ron refers to a Squib relative who became an accountant but he knows nothing about him – nobody in the family kept in touch with him or he with them.
And I think once Ron grew up a little bit and stopped being a sulky teenager, he and Hermione were just fine. Maybe Hermione is the sort of only child who wants somebody who will adore her and let her be mostly in charge all the time. I never saw her and Harry as anything more than good lifelong friends. They don’t have the right dynamic to be sweethearts. I think there are a lot of H/H 'shippers out there who identify with Hermione.
I didn’t like how Rowling seemed to be gearing up to have Slytherin show some depth, but then she bails out. The Sorting Hat song in the fourth or fifth books seemed to have a “unite or fall” theme. The introduction of Professor Slughorn in Book 6 showed that the only requirement for a Slytherin was ambition, not being an asshole. Then, everything is in place to have all four houses unite to defeat Voldemort and the Death Eaters, but instead we get the entire Slytherin house escorted off the grounds because one of them wanted to turn Harry over to the Voldemort.
Why would we assume that oddballs like Luna and Neville marry anybody?
Fred and George are always together and they are kind of chaotic; I assume they don’t really spend a lot of time looking at the Map, and when they do, why would they be watching their brother sleeping? They’d be looking for Dumbledore or Snape or some pretty girl or something.
The Deathly Hallows: I figured it was some combination of Rowling couldn’t find any way to plug it into an earlier book and she wanted to surprise us with something new in the last book, give us our money’s worth, right? Maybe?
Broomsticks with seatbelts? Again, the wizarding world is very isolated and witches and wizards are not exactly subject to the limitations of physics the way Muggles are. They can jump out of a window and Disapparate and not be hurt. I like the way the wizarding world is very casual about personal safety, probably partly because they can heal almost anything (let’s re-grow all the bones in your arm in one night) and probably because they just have a culture with an expectation that life is rough and tumble and all you can do is to be careful and use your magic to protect yourself. Stuff Happens, you know? People can hide under a Cloak of Invisibility, people can deceive you with Polyjuice Potion, people can drug you with a Love Potion (although how often would this kind of thing happen, anyway? Most people wouldn’t have the knowledge or skill or means.).
Why shouldn’t sweet, mild-mannered Molly Weasley turn all Mama Grizzly when her child is threatened? I like the idea that kids never think their parents can actually DO anything, but if you threaten my child I will not hesitate to kill you.
My Harry Potter Thing That Bugs Me is no university! No mention anywhere of any post-Hogwarts education. Where did great wizards and witches like Dumbledore and Voldemort and Hermione continue their educations? They all seem to be self-taught.
Boggles the mind.
I don’t even want to think about Hagrid’s parents and how that worked. Not just the sex stuff, but true giants are portrayed as almost monsters or animals, hardly sentient creatures. How could you marry somebody like that?
I suspect the no chapel thing is that in the wizarding world, it is accepted that there is no God. Somebody here suggested that Jesus was a “rogue wizard” who interacted with Muggles and it was completely misinterpreted and it was a huge disaster, centuries before they finally put it into law that We Do Not Interact With or Reveal Ourselves to Muggles. Never again!
I do really love the series, so my issues are coming from a place of affection. I have read the entire thread, and some of my points are building on things others have already mentioned.
it doesn’t even make sense for the wizards to be so ignorant of the Muggle world. They could clear up tons of stuff by just talking to people like Hermione and Dean Thomas. Or Collin Creevey. Or Lily Potter. Or Dirk Cresswell. They aren’t THAT rare. They certainly purge a lot of them.
– I always thought that too much of the plot was a repeat of Harry, Ron, and Hermione having falling outs or misunderstandings about the exact same crap in every book.
– it would have been better had we seen more good and bad behavior from each of the houses – perhaps the traits being taken to extremes, instead of having Slytherin always be the baddies. You’d think that someone as amazing as Dumbledore, even in the course of simply running the school (nevermind the return of Voldemort), would have picked up on the pattern and addressed it. As oft wears hats said, I think Rowling tried to gear this up late in the game, but it wasn’t very effective.
I actually don’t believe that Rowling had the whole thing carefully planned the whole way through, but I wouldn’t call her a liar to her face. If it was all planned out, that makes the choice to reveal things through long info-dump conversations in subsequent books all that much worse.
Quidditch is a problem, since from the first book it looked like a game designed to make the seeker always the hero. Even having to wait until your team was close enough in points for catching the snitch to mean a win put all the glory in the seeker’s corner.
I felt that by the end, Rowling found the story she wanted to tell was a poor fit for the charmingly silly world she had set up. I don’t recall any new cutesy stuff in the last two books. But it seemed to me like the audience growing up on the books as they were coming out would have had the books themselves maturing on them as they approached adulthood. Kids approaching them now, who can read them all in the space of a month would not enjoy the same parallel. Still, toward the end, it did read more like the kind of serious young adult sci-fi/fantasy that I’ve always complained about Harry Potter not being.
The horcruxes don’t bother me, even hearing about them late, because the whole series had been a bunch of backwards looking info-dumps tying up loose ends, so this was merely a culmination of that. Also, I play D&D where this kind of thing is a familiar concept. Creatures called Liches create phylacteries that hold their actual essences, so you can’t kill them unless you find the damned things. What bugged me was that I was sure for a while that it would turn out that there had been one per year at Hogwarts.
What has been bothering me is wondering what the hell happens to Slytherin after the Battle of Hogwarts. Do they still have a place in the school? If so, anybody who gets sorted into Slytherin now bears the Mark of Cain. Severus Snape’s painting mentions something about remembering the role that Slytherin house played, but what more is there to that than Snape’s secret activities and that one other teacher? The story really needed for some students from Slytherin to prove their worth in standing against the darkness.