Some people answered you in posts 48 & 50. All the time turners were destroyed during the fight in the Ministry of Magic at the end of book 5. The one where Harry & co. are trying to retrieve the prophecy, and all sorts of wacky things happen in the MoM cellars.
Damn I’m sorry all. Need to pay closer attention.
Thanks for the answers!
if i remember properly, the time turner destruction thing happened when the guy fell into a bell jar containing a rose. his head kept going from baby to adult over and over. the time turning stuff was in that room.
That’s probably the statement that needs to be repeated over, and over, and over when picking apart the Harry Potter books.
They’re meant to primarily appeal to (I’m guessing) 7-12 year olds. So what’s appealing, scary, funny, whimsical or scandalous to one of them may or may not be to a grown adult. Same goes for plot holes, continuity, etc…
But sitting there and nit-picking Rowling using the same yardsticks that one might pick at Tolkien, George R. R. Martin, or even Terry Brooks isn’t quite fair. It’s the flip side of hearing a little kid bitch about how “12 Angry Men” is boring and stupid because all they do is talk in that movie, and they hardly even leave that one room.
I don’t think you do remember properly about the bell jar contents: it was a hummingbird that kept on hatching from its egg and maturing and returning to the egg and re-hatching and…
But how interesting that your memory seems to have linked the “aging cycle” bell jar in the Ministry of Magic Department of Mysteries in Harry Potter with the rose under the glass cloche in Beauty and the Beast! 
Speaking of Quidditch, do any of the people who play it IRL do so unironically?
Yup. I post this without comment.
argh! now i’m gonna have to re read harry potter! i kinda remember reading that part and thinking “huh”, like beauty and the beast; hence the linking.
after a bit of poking around, the time turners ended up falling and unfalling in an endless loop, according to harry potter wiki.
As many have said in some form or other - the reason you hate Harry Potter is that you had a quick look to see what the fuss was about, found the books were quite readable, and then tried to apply adult logical literature-appreciation to them.
Just enjoy them for what they are. Fun kids books about spooky bad guys and noble teenage heroes who are smarter than the adults. With convenient magic thrown in.
Harry Potter is an excellent series. It ignited the imaginations of millions of children and made them excited to read. As stories they are decent swords and sorcery for children. However, as with superhero comics, some of the powers can’t be dwelled on too seriously with regards to consistency.
It always bothered me that Dobby was freed because Harry tricked Lucius into giving Dobby clothing. Sure, it’s a great moment, but contract law in the Potterverse must be really broken.
It’s both. I have my copy handy, and there’s a jar with a hummingbird that endlessly hatches and re-hatches in one of the rooms in the Department of Mysteries. But when they’re escaping, they knock down the shelves containing the jars and one of the Death Eaters has his head fall into one, where his head continually shrinks to a baby’s head and then grows back to its adult size and goes back again, over and over again. The jars are full of time.
How can they take it seriously when the one defining characteristic of the game is that the point & golden doohickey system is a bunch of unfun bullshit solely meant to let Harry Potter be the sole winner of a team-based game ?
Of course it is. Harry was forced to compete in the Triwizard tournament, even though he didn’t put his own name in the Goblet, because it was a “binding magical contract”.
As a Quidditch player in college I can tell you I absolutely played it unironically, and so did everyone I competed against.
The thing most people don’t realize about IRL Quidditch is that as long as it’s not hitting the head or below-the-belt, you can do pretty much anything to the other player to take them down. Moving picks, shoulder tackles, spears…hell I was straight-up suplexed one time practically.
The physicality of the game was so much fun to me, and it’s a majority of the reason why people play/love it.
I could almost get behind behind you on this, except for carrying those sticks between your legs everywhere. Come on, man.
Anecdote tangent: for the tournament described in the linked article, some out-of-town teams were looking for local people to host them, and one posted on the board of the ultimate frisbee league I play in. They were subject to some (mostly) good-natured ribbing. And one person commented, “finally a group of athletes that even ultimate players can heckle.”
That’s kind of a surprise. I wasn’t a fan of the Hermione/Ron relationship, but it made sense within the context of the story for her to choose Ron. For on thing, a relationship with Harry meant choosing to live in the Harryverse, where everything was always about him - essentially dating the Harry Knowles of the Potter books.
Second, more than once the books made clear that Hermione and Harry, being Muggle-bred, saw a great deal of appeal in the Weasely home life, surrounded by magic and family, as they were both essentially only children. Ron was their gateway to acceptance in the wizarding world.
Lastly, it continued the theme in the books that powerful, competent witches married down. Mrs. Weasely was known to be a more powerful wizard than her husband, and was proven more powerful than Voldemort’s most powerful henchwoman, Bellatrix. I can’t recall a couple in the books where it isn’t made clear the woman is a superior wizard to her partner, with all the truly competent/powerful males being lifelong bachelors like Voldemort and Dumbledore. Brilliant Hermione keeping house for a befuddled Ron would be true to form.
More annoying, for me, was dropping Cho for Ginnie, which was apparently done due to reader backlash. Cho seemed intrigued by a fellow student, where we met Ginnie as someone with a crush on someone famous who then saved her life; basically hero worship.
I don’t think this is a fair comment. There’s no reason that children wouldn’t enjoy a book in which the rules of Quidditch made sense. For that matter, there’s no reason why children can’t and don’t notice that the rules of Quidditch don’t make sense, which lessens the experience.
I think the OP is unnecessarily and in some cases unjustifiedly critical. But there’s no reason HP should just get a free pass against all criticism because it’s written for children.
How did you guys handle the Snitch/Seeker situation? Is what’s described in the article above standard or typical - Snitch is hanging from a guy’s shorts, doesn’t even appear for 18 minutes, and catching it is only worth 30, not 150?
Here’s my take on that:
True plot holes, inconsistencies, things that don’t make sense, etc. are weaknesses in any book (or movie), whether it’s for children or adults. They may not be fatal weaknesses if the book has enough else going for it, but they are weaknesses.
But an author isn’t obligated to explain everything in detail. If there exist, or could exist, reasonable explanations for the things that don’t seem to make sense, resolutions to plot holes, it’s not (or at least not always) a weakness if the author leaves out that background in the interest of simplicity, even if that annoys some readers who want to analyze and understand everything. This isn’t entirely a children’s-vs-adults’ issue, but simplicity is a particular virtue in works for children.