They were edited out.
I like the backstory on Petunia lots, but I wish she had shown more ambiguity when dealing with Harry himself, not just as a representative of magic as freak show stuff. Vernon was free to hate Harry all he liked, having no blood or real family tie to him.
I hadn’t thought of the TriWizard Cup in quite that way, but yes, AD should have seen through it. Of course, the book AD does see through more of it than let’s-knock-HP-up-against-a-glass-cabinet-to-show-strong-emotion-Gambon did… Malleus–I think the closest we get to what you describe is either Slughorn or Snape (or Regulus Black). It doesn’t make much sense that an entire house would be full of Baddies. As Sirius says, the world is not divided into DeathEaters and Good Folk. I think we don’t see the more moderate Slytherins-we only see the ones Harry deals with. I think that Draco turned out decent in the end. YMMV.
Snape’s hatred of Potter was to the point of the unprofessional. I know that part of it was a guise, but I don’t think that was the entirety- I think he really did detest him because he was the son of an old nemesis more than he liked him as the son of a girl he once loved.
Also I thought that his love for Lily should have been explored a bit more. We got that he liked her and maybe had a schoolboy crush on her but the depth of his devotion turned him away from the Death Eaters and into a man so devoted to Dumbledore he was willing to be his murderer.
Especially when you knew they were all going to kiss and make up before it was finished.
Put me down as another Grawp-hater. I would have been quite happy if they’d just ditched that whole subplot. It really brought nothing at all to the story and just wasted time, IMO.
KneadToKnow, um, DOH. Thanks for the correction – yeah, big chunks of the fifth book have clearly disappeared from my memory. Though it’s still true that people are still after him in the sixth and seventh books, and Sirius’s death doesn’t actually seem to have made him shape up in this regard, which… actually makes me think even less of Harry.
Malleus, I totally agree that it would have been nice to have actually seen Slytherin do something positive. (I do really love Slughorn, though – especially his “But some of my best students are Muggleborn!” brand of pure-blood-ism, which I find hilarious.) Here (scroll down a bit) are some amusing suggestions as to how Slytherin could have been portrayed more helpfully…
Well, you’ve got to give Ol’ Voldy credit for one thing: his elaborate supervillain plan mostly worked. He didn’t manage to kill Harry, but his #1 objective at that point was resurrecting himself and he was completely successful in that. He also managed to do it in such a way that, although Harry escaped, he had no proof of what had happened.
Secondly, although I don’t think the business about the goblet-as-portkey was explained very well, it wasn’t a random choice. The Goblet of Fire was already a portkey (it was supposed to transport the winner of the tournament out of the maze), so the false Moody didn’t need to make it a portkey. He just had to tamper with the location. Aside from presumably being easier than creating a whole new portkey, the big advantage to doing it this way would be to get around Hogwarts security. I don’t remember if it was ever explicitly stated that portkeys on and off campus were restricted, but it was stated repeatedly throughout the series that wizards couldn’t just Apparate to Hogwarts. I would think that portkeys were similarly blocked unless there was some special need for them to be on campus, although Rowling would have done better to spell this out.
Voldemort may have had other reasons for not doing things the simplest possible way, although Rowling doesn’t go into this. If he wanted to really strike terror into the hearts of wizards then disrupting the Tri-Wizard Tournament would be better than just quietly killing a little boy. It also would have helped for Voldemort to have a pretty good idea in advance when Harry was going to be appearing, since he did have an evil ritual to set up.
I have a lot of issues with these books but I think my hands-down least favorite thing is how much of the ‘plot’ is just “let’s make Harry Potter as miserable as humanly possible”. Abusive family, horrible childhood in which he had no friends, miserable time at school being picked on by the world’s most obnoxious bully as well as several of his teachers, constantly nearly getting expelled, almost every single ‘parental’ figure he’s ever had dying (usually a horrible death), the list goes on! The Chamber of Secrets is especially bad for this, because 3/4 of the book just appears to be Harry Potter and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad School Year.
Cut all of this emotional manipulation out and you begin to have some fairly good books on your hands. (Fairly good books with continuity errors and excessive reliance on deus ex machina type devices, but fairly good books nonetheless.)
Chimera – you wouldn’t be the first to complain about Rowling’s wordplay and Latin references, but I think she put them in as jokes that adult readers will ‘get’. I couldn’t have been more than 12 when I first read The Prisoner of Azkaban and I had no idea who Romulus and Remus were, what Canis lupus meant, or for that matter that Sirius was the Dog Star. Or that Albus means white, and so on and so forth. My mother on the other hand found all of these things amusing.
It was stated very clearly that portkeys are regulated by the Ministry, and in book 5, when the Order of the Phoenix is helping Harry escape from the Dursleys by broom, Moody (the real Moody) says that to set up an illegal portkey is more risk than it’s worth.
Small point but . . .
When Hermione thinks that the bad guys can get into Sirius’ (now Harry’s) house because one rode on her coattails (literally), why not call Kreatcher and ask him if strangers have been traipsing around the house?
Too many to count. Quiddich in general seemed rather stupid and I saw no point to doing anything other than trying to catch the snitch.
And I agree that the house points were so arbitrary.
But I also think that they books are aimed at children and I’m willing to bet that in their world many things that adults do seem equally arbitrary. (Heck, even in my world, management’s rules often seem pretty freaking arbitrary.)
I am a simple man and I find that if I examine books too closely, they are no longer as fun.
I find the whole masquerade aspect to be pretty inadequately justified. I know Jo is trying to make it seem like our world and all that, but what she said is really the best she could come up with? Look, I can buy Halloweentown’s “yeah… we tried that once, the whole persecution thing was pretty bad.” But “people would want magical solutions to their problems” is what you’re going with?
Didn’t anyone ever bother to ask “well… why the hell not?” Not even Arthur? He’s played around with Muggle inventions enough that surely he realizes that it’s not like Muggles don’t have anything to offer the magical world in exchange. You give them bone regrowing serum, we give you sniper rifles for your little Death Eater problem. Not to mention that the Muggle world has Chemists out the arse, with all that potion knowledge and putting the heads together of both the alchemists and the chemists I’m sure we could get some pretty stunning breakthroughs on both sides of the table.
It’s not the masquerade itself, I mean, plenty of stories have worked well with it, it’s just that she seemed to write down the first reason that came to her mind and that reason just ended up being fairly hole filled.
The final chapter of the final book where we discover
all the kids have married their highschool sweethearts the second they left Hogwarts and had babies and lived happily evah aftah!!![/spoiler]was a disappointment. [spoiler]I’d have liked to have known more about their careers, and to have seen them do more interesting and exciting things than just pair up and start breeding right away.
I’m disappointed they’re splitting the book into two movies because my best recollection of the book is that at least 50% of it was unnecessary. There’s a little excitement, then they stay at that house for way too long. Then they break into that government office, then they camp FOREVER. Then a snake bites them, then they camp some more. Then they go to Hogwarts and the book ends. Did I miss anything major?
Kudos to them for wanting to make a few hundred million extra off the franchise. I just hope they find a better way to drag it out than Rowling did.
I thought the most annoying part of the epilogue was that Harry says something to suggest he was either not in close contact with his godson or didn`t see him regularly. That werewolf and his wife died, Harry was his godfather - how could he not be like a father to him? He was still a teenager so I can understand someone else adopting the kid and raising him but the book suggested they weren’t even close.
Yeah, I like Hagrid, but I always like him a little less when he’s too involved with the plot.
I also agree that there needed to be at least a few good Slytherins. And some bad people from other houses. Seriously, if ALL Slytherins are bad, then why have that house at all? The lone exception seems to be Slughorn, and he’s not exactly a pillar of bravery & goodness, either.
I still love the books, though - IMO, the good parts do outnumber the bad/inconsistent ones by a huge margin.
Everyone is welcome to be irritated by whatever they choose, but this is a place where I think it really is worth remembering that the Harry Potter stories are, essentially, fairy tales.
In Harry Potter the witches and wizards also didn’t like Muggles trying to burn them at the stake all the time. They usually escaped (since they did have real magic), but it was a hassle. Harry has to write an essay on this subject in one of the early books. In the last book we also learn that Dumbledore’s young sister was brutally attacked by Muggle boys who saw her using magic.
*Maybe you missed this, but the senselessness of bigotry is one of the major themes of the series. Wizards look down on Muggles, to the extent that even wizards born to Muggle families face discrimination. Mixed marriages are controversial. At the extreme end Grindelwald had wanted Muggles to be basically slaves to wizards and Voldemort and the Death Eaters are in favor of the genocide of Muggles and Muggle-born wizards, but even moderate wizards think that they are naturally superior to Muggles. Dumbledore is considered something of a radical for his tolerant attitude toward Muggles and the Muggle-born. Very few wizards would be willing to admit that Muggles had anything to offer them, no matter what the evidence to the contrary might be. They also don’t like to admit that Muggles could, if they wanted, be a serious threat to wizards.
If Muggles knew about wizards then there would no doubt be plenty of Muggles who’d be pestering the wizards for magical help, but that is far from the only reason for the maskerade. It’s just the reason that makes most wizards feel the best about themselves. Throughout the series wizard culture in general is depicted as being very insular and resistant to change, with even the highest ranking wizard politicians taking a head-in-the-sand approach to major problems.
