Megan Danvers

Hi, again, readers! Today, I thought we’d go over something that confuses me: the popularity of Harry Potter. I watched the movies before I read the books and I actually enjoyed the movies. But once I got to the books I was blown away and not in the good sense. What blew me away was how atrocious and unrealistic it was.

I’m not talking about the magic being unrealistic; though it does have its own issues. I’m talking about character stuff. For instance, Harry was raised and treated like a slave by the Dursleys yet outside of Chamber of Secrets he shows little to no concern for the enslavement of house elves and seems as indifferent to it as everyone but Hermione. For starters, the fact that Hermione is the only one who finds literal slavery appalling is ridiculously bad and unrealistic. But to add the fact that the main character shows virtually no issue with it despite his own treatment at home is astoundingly preposterous.

Another unrealistic thing is the fact that almost every book mentioned at least one instance of the kids wanting to hurt or attempting to hurt a cat. These are children as young as 11. I don’t know if you remember being an 11 year old and honestly I don’t but I would never have wished harm on a cat, nor can I think of anyone of that age being capable of such a thought unless they had something seriously wrong with them. These are kids. Kids find animals, especially fluffy cats and dogs and other pets, cute and want to pet them endlessly. When I read the first Harry Potter book and saw these 11 year olds wanting to hurt Filch’s cat my immediate thought was “Has JK Rowling ever met a child?”.

But it’s not just the implausibility of these that have me wracking my brain trying to make sense of this. No. Another thing is that despite everything I’d read online about how Ron is the heart of the group and Hermione is a bit colder while Harry is snarky and funny, I saw none of that in the pages. Ron seemed like a jerk. He insulted Hermione frequently. Hermione seemed to be the more empathetic one in the group as she was able to translate the emotions of other characters like Cho for the boys, at which point they questioned her sanity. And Harry didn’t seem nearly as funny as everyone made him out to be. To be quite honest, there were times in the books were I’d be reading and have to reread certain lines of dialogue because I couldn’t keep track of which of the trio was speaking at any given time because to me they all had almost the exact same voice.

Another issue that struck me was the fact that the pacing was slow and often full of filler. This rang especially true in later books when they got longer. It took me several months just to force myself through the behemoth that was Order of the Phoenix, both for how atrocious I found it and how extraordinarily long it was despite not focusing on the main plot as much as it could have. The movies cut out all the parts that weren’t needed to the story, the Quidditch games, the classes that held no plot relevance, etc. This, I realized, was why I liked the movies. They didn’t force me to slog through hundreds of pages of nothing relevant.

By the time I got to Order of the Phoenix and I’d read something about Neville getting on the train with his plant or something along those lines I remembered instantly, “Oh right, Neville had a plant that happened to be the dorm password this year” and my immediate thought was “Was this supposed to be relevant? It seems like such a trivial and unimportant detail”. Stories should be concise. They should have their little details matter toward something important such as plot or character. Neville having a plant that happened to be the Gryffindor password mattered toward neither. Maybe—maybe you could argue that it informed the reader about Neville’s love of plants and herbology but there were better ways to do that then a couple throw away lines at the beginning and end of the novel.

Say it with me people, “If a story doesn’t need a hundred pages of games, irrelevant details, and downtime then it should not be included in the manuscript”.

Then we come to plot holes. The biggest plot hole that comes to mind is when Harry shook Quirrel’s hand in Diagon Alley at the beginning of the book but then his touch caused Quirrel to melt at the end of Sorcerer’s Stone. JK Rowling claims to be a plotter. How does a plotter wind up with a plot hole regarding the very nature by which her villain is defeated in the final act of the book? More importantly, how did nobody catch this in editing? Why was this in the final draft?

Another thing that worked better in the movie was the time travel in Prisoner of Azkaban. That had been my favorite of the moves for that very plot aspect alone as the way Hermione lures the trio out of Hagrid’s shack before Buckbeak’s execution by throwing a rock made perfect sense to me. It added to the fact that Harry cast the Patronus in the end and further cemented the idea that Time Turners cannot be used to change the past and thus helped alleviate the question as to why the Ministry didn’t just go back in time to prevent Voldemort from ever rising to power because with this display of time travel it is proven that any attempts to stop what has already happened would inadvertently end with that very thing coming to fruition.

I already said I hated Order of the Phoenix and it was by far my least favorite. So much so that I didn’t even bother to read past it once I finished that book. A major issue I had with it was Harry getting annoyed with Cho for grieving and just being an all-around dick in book 5. You can say he was traumatized all you want but there were better ways to write trauma then making Harry seem like he was purely angry. I mean trauma isn’t just anger. It’s anger and pain and sadness and I saw none of the latter while reading.

The rest of my issues were pretty minor. Namely, the fact that Rowling insisted on describing every awkward or otherwise long pause as a “pregnant pause”. *Shudders*. Seriously that phrase is like my version of people who get squicked out by hearing the word moist.

But yeah, given the above issues with plot holes, pacing, unrealistic character traits, the way it basically screamed “slavery is good actually and anyone who tries to free slaves is a weirdo who should be shunned”, and how easy it was to confuse characters while reading, it has always baffled me that this series is the most popular book series of all time. Like it is objectively bad for the plot holes and pacing alone. I cannot fathom how this series ever got published or why it grew into the level of popularity that it did. I’m sure for a lot of people it’s nostalgia from when they were kids reading it, but I can’t even picture myself having liked this as a kid. This is arguably the series I hate the most out of all the books I have read.

So yeah, that’s about it for my thoughts on Harry Potter. Hope you found this thought-provoking. Peace out, readers!