I knw that many of you hv read the books and watched the Harry Potter series. At first, I liked it very much, but later on, it got really boring to the point I had to force myself to watch tthe movies and read the books. I know that I don’t “have” to force myself to do anything, but there was no other way to spend my holidays. One of my friends, who is a Potter fan recommended this series to me and gave me all the movies and books. I finished reading all the movies and also finished reading all the books. At the end, I was really disappointed.
I hate Harry Potter. Now, don’t go saying that I don’t like Harry Potterbecause I am a Twilight fan. To be honest, I never bothered to even check Twilight. So, no, I am not a Twilight fan. I don’t hate or like or dislike Twilight since I never watched or read it before.
Anyway, here’s the reasons why I hate and dislike Harry Potter:-
1- Okay, this occured to me when I reached book 5 of the massive series. I noticed that each and every story ends up with Harry defeating Voldemort easily when he attempts to come back. As shown in the Chamber Of Secrets, Harry defeats Voldemort by stabbing Voldemort’s diary with with a basilisk fang. Harry easily killing the basilisk was tolerable. We all know that Voldemort was the most powerful and dangerous wizard of all time. Then how the heck can Harry defeat Voldemort without struggling or intense battling with Voldemort? This is a huge humiliation for the main antagonist of the series. This showed me that Voldemort is really weak against Harry.
2- As I read the series, I noticed that there was almost no character development. And also the main Protagonist, Harry is not as skilled in spells as Hermione. When it comes to Hermione, she is the best at using spells. Spells are needed to defeat enemies and Hermione seems to be more powerful than Ron and Harry. Hermione is the one who saves Ron and Harry when they are in trouble. It’s almost like without Hermione, they would be doomed. Most of the time, Harry and Ron gets into huge trouble when Hermione is not there with them.
3- Plot holes. The main one I am going to focus on is the time turner. Harry could have killed Voldemort just by using the time turner. Why wasn’t it there when Harry needed it the most? Things like this shouldn’t exist in the series. It damages the plot so much. And it wouldn’t have been fun even if Harry used the time turner to kill Voldemort.
4- Couples. Honestly, I thought that Harry and Hermione would be a couple, but instead, Ron and Hermione became a couple. I was like what the hell? Sometimes Ron treat Hermione very badly and yet she gets together with him. Also, Harry and Hermione seemed to have chemistry. And also they looked damn well together. But when Ginny and Harry became a couple, it was gross. They didn’t even have time to know each other that well.
5- Useless things. Actually, I have spotted only one thing that proves itself to be useless in the plot. That thing is the game of Quidditch. While Quidditch is great game, it proves to be useless to the whole plot. Quidditch is a great, but useless game in Harry Potter.
6- This is the main reason why I hate Harry Potter. The ultimate evil is stopped by love. Just love. Nothing else. Sure, love is powerful, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it can defeat the ultimate evil. Voldemort is shown to be a villain who has never been loved by anyone and he is doomed. It’s almost like, if you are not loved or don’t have any friends, you are doomed. Voldemort was doomed at the very start. Voldemort’s defeat in the night that Harry’s parents died was because of the so called “love”. There wasn’t any kind of magic protecting Harry. In the end it was “love”. Bleh! Bleh! Bleh! Voldemort was defeated by “love” even at the end of the series.
These are the reasons WHY I HATE HARRY POTTER.
Hey, Amir.
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board. I hope you enjoy your stay.
This thread will do better in Cafe Society, our forum for arts and entertainment. I’ll move it over there for you.
Again, welcome!
Jeez, how about a spoiler warning next time?!
I’m far from a Potter expert; read about half the books and seen only a few of the movies. Of the parts I have read/seen Quidditch was the one I had the biggest problem with. The rules are fundamentally flawed and ridiculous.
Quidditch is so obviously a game created by someone that has never played a game in her life. Calvin Ball is more playable!
I started reading the books after after my stepdughter had read them all. She was very excited that I planned to read them, and my doing so made her happy. Discussing the story and who her favorite characters were, etc. with her was fun. Also, I thought they were pretty good. For those reasons I don’t share your hate. But fuck that Snape asshole.
There were people around here hating on Harry Potter before Twilight was even a sparkle (heh) in Stephenie Meyer’s eye, and quite possibly before you were born, so I don’t think there’s much danger of that.
Not in each and every story. Voldemort is completely absent from the 3rd book. I wasn’t crazy about the later books in the series and may be misremembering the details, but IIRC in the 5th book Harry is basically useless against Voldemort and Dumbledore has to save him, and at the end of the 6th book Harry is up against Voldemort’s agents rather than Voldemort himself and is again unable to do much to even slow them down.
In the 3rd book we learn that a Time Turner can be used to allow someone to be in two places at once, but it doesn’t seem like they can be used to change the past. They apparently allow for 12 Monkeys style time travel, where anything the time traveler does in the past had always already happened.
All Time Turners were rendered unusable in the 5th book, so that’s why no one even tried to use them after that point.
I know “that’s kind of the point” isn’t always a great comeback when someone doesn’t like something, but… that’s kind of the point. Harry Potter is sort of based on the idea that evil is inherently weak, self-serving, cowardly, and petty. Voldemort is strong, but ultimately stands alone and his ultimate downfall is his obsession with achieving his own perfection and immortality at the expense of those around him. Hence him accidentally making an eighth horcrux, ruining the perfect magical seven.
This whole theme is most evident with Dolores Umbridge, who isn’t anything spectacular magic-wise, but nonetheless causes some of the biggest damage to the students and school in the series. (Not physical damage, of course, but paranoia, morale, and so on).
Even then, Voldemort isn’t even present (except maybe tangentially) in a couple of books, like 3, and in Half Blood Prince Harry fails pretty damn hard against the guy.
Along with your first point, you’re really hung up on magic being the important thing in this series. But it’s not, as you mention later, it’s “love”, or relationships and friendship in general. Hermione is important because she’s their friend and, yes, she fills a huge gap in their team as far as magical talent and prowess goes.
In fact, it’s not even a secret that Harry is mediocre at best as magic, your revelation isn’t startling in the least. The series mentions this. Explicitly. All the time. With characters like Snape openly wondering how the hell the mythical “boy who lived” is so staggeringly mediocre.
Harry has strength of will, and dogged determination, but he also has friends he can rely on. This is why a big part of the 7th book is them passing off the horcrux to each other, it’s meant to show that they need each other to accomplish the task. Even if Harry is important, it’s not just his fight.
As for no character development, there certainly is. For one, Hermione becomes far less of an abrasive know-it-all as she grows up. Harry has a lot of struggles with being his own person vs being famous in a world he’s never heard of that he continually works through over the series. Not to mention growing up to protect the Dursleys rather than just letting them get hurt in the final war.
Yeah, even fans point this out. The best you’re gonna get is the same reasoning for why the giant eagles don’t just fly Frodo to Mt. Doom. “Then there’d be no story.” (Fake edit: As Lamia mentions, they were disabled in the 5th book, but even so, they probably shouldn’t have been written in in the first place).
I mean, they knew each other okay. Ginny was Harry’s best friend’s little sister. He’s spent significant amounts of time with Ron’s family. Yeah, they weren’t super well acquainted, but he got a crush and went for it. This happens all the time in real life and is not the least bit unbelievable, let alone gross. It’s not even particularly narratively unsatisfying; if anything, it’s a bit too convenient that he happens to end up as literal family with his two BFFs.
As for Ron/Hermione, a lot of people have problems with them, and yeah, very early in the series it seemed like they she have been setting up Harry/Hermione. But I don’t really have major complaints myself. I felt like most of the romantic relationships were surprisingly and bafflingly superfluous for a book where relationships, friendships and love are so integral to the entire narrative.
It’s meant to build the world, not everything has to directly affect the main plot. It’s also meant to sort of draw a semi-comedic parallel between Hogwarts and the whole “football hooligan” culture of a lot of British boarding schools. It’s also used as a relatively easy way to build relationships between characters while allowing for exciting action scenes.
It was kind of trite, but it fits extremely well with the entire series. It didn’t come out of nowhere. My only problem is how on the nose she was with it, but, ultimately, even without Dumbledore coming out and saying it so plainly, Voldemort would have been defeated by love and friendship.
But overall, it ties into your first point a great deal: evil is petty, weak, cowardly, and self-serving. It may appear powerful and scary, and those who perpetuate it can be capable of some great and terrible things, but ultimately, it fails to stand in the face of something as unremarkable and benign as a parent’s desire to protect their child.
Again, the series was a little too on the nose about it, but ultimately it’s the same sort of idea as Lord of the Rings where evil is defeated by the smallest, most unremarkable creature. It’s a common theme in fantasy and is even a trend in old fairy tales: that the villain has power, wealth, lackeys, and so on, but in the end something humble and small is much greater.
Harry Potter has a ton of problems (for one, the epilogue is way, way too neat and tidy), but I feel like these are largely a lot of surface-level nitpicks.
Well, to be fair here, the series was written for children.
Even though Dopers are the smartest people in the world and we all learned to read in the womb, we’ve had threads here before where people admitted to having missed or misunderstood elements of books they read as kids. If a children’s author wants to make sure that most of their target audience will get the point, they have to be pretty obvious about it. Even more obvious than, say, C.S. Lewis was about the Christian elements in The Chronicles of Narnia, something plenty of young readers (including me!) totally failed to pick up on until they were older.
I liked the Harry Potter series a lot.
I liked that Harry wasn’t some all powerful chosen one wizard and was more the common man who got a lot of lucky breaks and a lot of support from those around him to survive.
While Hermoine with Harry seemed ideal it was too obvious and would have been boring. A kid power couple? No thanks. I’ve known plenty of smart good looking girls who were attracted to the goofy or chubby guys.
I thought the movies were fantastic in the way that the characters actually got older through the series and older in real life. If they had attempted to make all 7 at one time like a mini-series and nobody got older it just wouldn’t work. Their physical aging and acting talents improving matched the movie progression beautifully.
Quidditch was just an interesting addition to the Potter universe. It made the universe larger and gave it more character.
If I had one complaint about the series it would have been what seemed like an unneccessarily convoluted plan by Voldemort in the Goblet of Fire just to get Harry to touch a port key. Seems like a much easier plan would be to send Harry an anonymous gift box with an old shoe in it.
J. K. Rowling now thinks that the Hermione/Ron relationship was a mistake:
Amir Gaul, I don’t think that the Harry Potter series is bad, but I think it’s overrated. A few years ago I prepared a list of children’s fantasy series (all originally written in English over the past 160 years, since I’m not a expert on books in other languages or any further back than that) which I would recommend, since I know a bunch of kids who have read the Harry Potter books. There are now 33 series on this list. The Harry Potter series is no better than most of these books and is not as good as many of them.
That was what I came here to say… I don’t hate the books, but I’m kind of dubious about their world-shaking success. There are a lot of other books in the same overall genre that really are better.
Still, pfah, how do you argue with the market? What sells, sells.
Elementary school librarian here. It doesn’t appeal to me, but kids read it. Case closed.
Interesting–I’d love to see that list. Do you have it handy?
I also think Potter is way overrated, but that said, it’s not all that bad. There’s plenty of worse stuff out there, and Rowling does a few things well, like the fractal worldbuilding of hers, in which each book reveals in great detail an aspect of her world that I’d barely even wondered about before.
Was the plan actually by Voldemort? IIRC while Voldemort needed Harry to be in the right place at the right time, it didn’t seem like he micromanaged the details. But whether the plan was his or his henchman’s, there’s a long and glorious tradition of villains with unnecessarily convoluted plans, and for once such a plan did largely work out for the villain.
IMHO the real problem with that plot was that a big chunk of the book was spent chasing a red herring, one that Harry himself didn’t particularly care about. Had he wanted to be in the competition I think it would have been more effective when he discovered that “winning” wasn’t what he expected.
I hated a book once so I stopped reading it, thinking about it or writing about it. Just sayin’.
What genre is that? I assume you’d say (children’s) fantasy, which they certainly are, but that’s not the only genre they fall into: they’re also school stories, and to some extent mysteries, which may help to explain their popularity. (I know at least one adult fan of the books who, in general, doesn’t much like fantasy but does love mysteries.)
True, there are other books that are better, in various ways—more original, more flawless, more profound, more beautifully written, etc. But it makes perfect sense to me that the Harry Potter books are as popular as they are. They’re fun to read, with plenty of humor and suspense and warmth. They depict a world that kids (and adults) would love to inhabit, but with enough danger and conflict and pain to keep the stories interesting. They’re relatively easy to read and follow: they don’t place great demands on the reader, though they do get more complex and mature as the series progresses. And they have enough detail to stand up to re-reading.
Left Hand of Dorkness, here are just the series, since I don’t want to waste space giving the titles of all the books in each of these series:
Lewis Carroll – The Alice books
L. M. Boston – The Green Knowe series
Lloyd Alexander – The Chronicles of Prydain
C. S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia
John Bellairs and Brad Strickland – The Lewis Barnavelt series
Madeleine L’Engle – The Time Quintet
L. Frank Baum – The Oz books
Edith Nesbit – The Psammead series
Edith Nesbit – The House of Arden series
Ursula K. Le Guin – The Earthsea books
Ursula K. Le Guin – The Annals of the Western Shore
Daniel Pinkwater – The Snarkout Boys books
Daniel Pinkwater – The Ancient Epic series
Daniel Pinkwater – The Mrs. Noodlekugel series
Susan Cooper – The Dark Is Rising series
Diane Duane – The Young Wizards books
Roald Dahl – The Charlie books
Joan Aiken – The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series
Diane Wynne Jones – The Chronicles of Chrestomanci
Diana Wynne Jones – The Castle series
Eoin Colfer – The Artemis Fowl series
Jonathan Stroud – The Bartimaeus books
Lois Lowry – The Giver quartet
Alan Garner – The Colin and Susan books
George MacDonald – The Princess Irene books
Terry Pratchett – The Tiffany Aching books
Mary Norton – The Borrowers series
Carol Kendall – The Minnipin books
Ysabeau S. Wilce – The Flora Fyrdraaca/Califa books
Beatrix Potter – The 23 Tales
J. P. Martin – The Uncle series
David Levithan – The A books
J. K. Rowling – The Harry Potter books
There is a fundamental diffeence between Potter and Tolkien. Potter was written for the child’s mind, and Tolkein for adults. It’s a question of the maturity of the literature.
Sadly, the movie adaptations of both of them were made for children. If you are a child, then go for it and take all you can from them. But I am an adult, and I see no reason (except curiosity) to read Potter. Nor to watch either of the film adaptations.
I read Lord of the Rings. Twice. The second time outloud to my eight-y-o. We both adored it, because Tolkein speaks to all ages. My son listened to the reading of Toliein with his eyes shut, and came away with an imagery a thousand times richer than could have been displayed to him on an HD screen. And an appreciation for great literary mastery.
And I often do the opposite. It can be very valuable to engage a work that you hate. You can learn more about how other people think You can perhaps learn about things you missed.
You can examine your own views more closely. You can reach an understanding about yourself, another person, society as a whole, a literary genre, or the work itself.
Maybe you will still hate it. But that doesn’t mean that you are wasting your own or someone else’s time by engaging in it.
Indeed, talking about or thinking about something you don’t like can be more revealing than talking about things you like.
This whole “if you don’t like it, just don’t watch it/read it/talk about it” meme is a very troubling one and one I think is akin to thread-shitting.