The books - an introduction

J.K. Rowling has written 7 books starring Harry Potter. They are (in order, so far):
  1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone / Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
  2. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
  3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
  4. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
  5. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
  6. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
  7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Their success is remarkable. Rowling has been compared to Roald Dahl, probably because the books' appeal is not limited to children. All stupid controversy (which seems to plague any popular success) such as the arguments that Harry Potter takes Drugs! and Harry leads children to the occult (see above) can be discounted. The truth is that Harry Potter expands the vocabulary of millions of children, and (even more importantly) gets them reading.

The boy - a quick biography

He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named killed Harry's parents, Lily Potter and James Potter when Harry was just a baby. Harry survived, and bears a faint lightning-shaped scar on his forehead as a reminder - (a scar which hurts whenever danger is near). Harry became famous throughout the quiet, hidden society of Wizards and Witches which dwells in the nooks and crannies of the normal, Muggle world.

Now an orphan and unaware of how special he is, Harry spent the first 10 years of his life living with his Muggle relatives, the Durlseys. Vernon Dursley and Petunia Dursley are Harry's horrible uncle and aunt (Petunia is the sister of Harry's Mum - Lily Potter). He ekes out a horrible existence, living under the stairs. It is made worse by a horrible cousin, Dudley Dursley. Dudley is a fat, pig-like spoiled brat.

On his 11th birthday, (July 31st), Harry is invited to Hogwarts, the famous school of wizardry. Carrying his magic wand, Harry sets off into his new and exciting life.

Comparisons

Comparisons with other works abound.
Harry can also be likened with Luke Skywalker in Star Wars or Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace.
Luke:
  • Evil villain (Lord Voldemort = Darth Vader) in parent 'killing' and the anticipation of a final confrontation.
  • Luke is given his father's lightsabre, Harry is given his father's cloak of invisibility.
  • In a struggle, Vader leaves Luke with one hand missing, Harry gets off lightly with a small scar.
Anakin:
Another comparison would be with Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:
  • A sweet little boy living a horrible life suddenly has exciting new world open up unexpectedly.
  • The juxtaposition of Harry and Dudley is similar to the contrast we see between Charlie Bucket and the other golden ticket winners, particularly Veruca Salt. In both books a poor but well mannered child makes spoiled children look all the more horrid.

In case of correction, update or feedback either send me an owl or /msg me.

Good clean fun for kids...and for adults, too.

Other folks have already noded up decent introductions to the stories overall, so I won't waste time on that. What I would like to note is how tightly-plotted and well-written these books are. Without giving too much away, a name is mentioned offhand in the first or second chapter of the first book--and then never mentioned again in either the first or second book. And yet, the character of that name comes to major prominence in the third book--but only when you go back to that first one do you quite realize it.

The books are full of things like that--foreshadowing, sometimes very specific foreshadowing, abounds. Tantalizing hints and clues are given about things to expect in future books. References are made to events in prior books, casting things that seemed unimportant at the time in a whole new light. Characters turn out to be not what they first seemed, sometimes in astonishing ways.

And let's not forget that they grow in size and complexity as they progress in the series--to the point where Goblet of Fire is 734 pages long, and over two inches thick...a rather intimidating volume--but by the time they get there, kids want to read it.

As for the Fundamentalists who claim that Harry Potter is satanic--well, these are often people who will claim that any fantasy is satanic--even The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, which were written by two of the most renowned Christian writers of our time. Apparently, to these people, the road to Hell is paved with using one's imagination.

In addition to the comparisons mentioned by TallRoo, a few irate comic book afficionados have also noticed some pretty strong similarities between Harry Potter and that other adolescent, British, bespectacled, owl-owning boy who is secretly the most powerful wizard since Merlin: Timothy Hunter.

The first few stories of Tim Hunter, told in the Vertigo series The Books of Magic , appeared in 1991, predating the first Harry Potter book by about 4-5 years.

Draw your own conclusions.

The common name for a phenomenon that has swept the world. Some people say this series of books and now movies is evil. Others have discovered the beauty in it.

Children are reading! Children who refused to ever pick up a book have read four rather large books cover to cover! These children have discovered the joys of learning. As my little sister said "I had to read the Harry Potter books because everyone was talking about them! Guess what! Reading isn't as scary as I thought. It gets easier! Take me to the library so I can find other stuff to read. Please?" I was ecstatic! I had been trying for months and months to get this child to read something, anything. Now you have to say, "Why don't you play Nintendo with your brother for a while." Instead of "Why don't you try reading."

Harry Potter IS Magic!

While I agree with the above writeups in the fact that Harry Potter does garner virtue by introducing children to the power of reading, I don't believe this argument fully dismisses the "occult" accusations. While I personally don't believe that Harry Potter swings kids torward witchcraft, simply saying that the books are a needed break from Nintendo Co. and vapid TV shows doesn't counter the specific argument that the books makes kids want to sacrifice Rover to the Dark Lord.

Interestingly enough I've noticed that people who accuse the book as being "evil" are simply looking at the setting, not the context on which witchcraft is being used. Harry Potter's world is whimsical and playful! He and his two friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley aren't making pentagrams with salt and channeling evil powers, they are eating chocolate frogs, ingesting Floo powder, and simply being inquisitive, normal children who just happen to play Quidditch and save the world. The good people in the book are presented as moral. Harry Potter and Co. may stir mischief against the school authority, but it is all done in a light-hearted Little Rascals-esque style. Although not a central theme to the book, religion does seem to have a place at Hogwarts: Christmas and Easter are both celebrated (although Jewish holidays have yet to be mentioned).

One theme that permeates all religions, including Christianity, is the idea of good against evil; and both powers being separate entitites. This is also represented in the Harry Potter novels; some wizards, like Albus Dumbledore and the Gryffindor headmistress, Professor McGonagall, are allied with the Ministry of Magic. The Ministry's goal is to enforce the use of magic for good causes and for the betterment of humankind. Others, like Lord Voldemort, are considered evil, and want power to themselves. The "good" people use the powers of the supernatural, but is this necessarily a bad thing? There are many instances of supernatural powers being used by Jesus Christ in the Bible: turning water into wine, raising Lazarus from the dead, and healing the blind aren't exactly every day occurences. Most religious texts are no stranger to phenemonal Might for Right.

Now, if these novels did not have the witchcraft element in them at all, would there even be an issue? Most kids with a healthy dose of common sense would realize that a Nimbus 2000 and a magic wand are not in their future, whereas the theme of good triumphing over evil is universal, and something that relates to the real world. The people who dismiss the novels are not only depriving their child of a wonderful, imaginative experience, but showing that they mistrust their child's ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality. They are also expressing a doubt that their day in, day out influence can overpower that of words on a page. If there is a legitimate concern about the "occult" nature of the book, a good talking-to before the child reads is probably all that is necessary for the child to get the idea and secure any parental qualms.

To all of the Christian fundamentalists, I say "Read the book!" Don't let Jerry Falwell-esque propaganda cloud your better judgement.

JK Rowling, the celebrity children's author, still awaits news of her pending lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed by Nancy Stouffer of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, claims that Rowling plagiarised her book The Legend of Rah and the Muggles published in 1984.

Some of the similarities in the books include the use of the word Muggles, which Stouffer uses to mean little people that help orphans and Rowling uses to mean non-magical people. Also, one of the characters who, in Rowling's book is Harry Potter's mother Lily, in Stouffer's book is the main character's best friend Lilly.

Rowling denies ever seeing Stouffer's book; however, the most notable similarity is in the main characters. Stouffer's Larry Potter and Rowling's Harry Potter are remarkably similar in each novel. It seems unlikely that both novels could have such similar storylines if Rowling never read the older book by Stouffer.

Harry Potter is a heptalogy of novels by J.K. Rowling about a young boy who finds out he's a wizard and has to save the world. The series has a consistent theme of "accepting death" and "finding the power of love", but that's about the only consistent thing about it. The books get longer and longer as the series progresses and the author throws more and more pointless subplots into the mix. The tone of the books varies widely from lighthearted to angsty (the latter being especially prevalent in Order of the Phoenix, which has entire pages of caps lock). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, however -- variance can be a boon to a series, after all, especially one that covers the 11-17 age range of Harry. It makes sense that the books would grow progressively longer and darker as the series wears on, but even so, it does get rather tiring after a while. The story isn't complicated enough to warrant four books of build-up before the antagonist arrives. There's a lot of material here, but most of it seems superfluous.

It's certainly not a bad series of books, but it is greatly overrated. As a series of children's books it does an incredible job. The books' increasing lengths only help to ease children into reading them, and the characters are genuinely likeable. I loved every page of these books when I was ten. But as an adult series, it's a lot less incredible. Still good, but not as good as it's made out to be by some people.

What I really want to write about, however, is the series of film adaptations. Released over the span of a decade from 2001 to 2011, the Harry Potter film series is one of the largest Hollywood undertakings ever conceived. They even use the same actors for the main characters throughout the entire series, allowing them to start as child actors in the first movie and slowly age over the course of the movies. That's pretty damn impressive from a business standpoint and an artistic standpoint.

But as is inevitable for something as huge as Harry Potter, there were some difficulties. Different directors graced the movies, bringing distinct styles that didn't always mesh with other directors'; different things were cut from each film, often causing the continuity to go haywire; and of course, differing filmmaking trends across the decade caused the series to just... change.

Despite these things, the movies are pretty highly-rated by most critics. So are the movies actually good? How do they hold up now that they've all been released? I'll break them down individually.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Released in 2001, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (or Sorcerer's Stone in the United States) is the first film in the series. I saw it when I was ten, and I was psyched as I entered the theatre. Two and a half hours later, I left feeling vastly disappointed. I was sad that they left so much material from the book out of the movie! That was when I was ten, though; looking back, this is actually a great film. The biggest thing to hold it back is that it didn't leave enough material from the book out of the movie.

The director, Chris Columbus, has been criticized for making Harry's introduction too "kid-friendly", something that can't really be denied. The film has an underlying optimism as we see it through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy, and this stops it from becoming truly frightening even when the tone does grow more serious during the third act. You never feel like Harry is in genuine danger because the film reinforces an attitude that says, "The good guys win." When Harry faces Quirrel in front of the Mirror of Erised, you can't expect him to die. There's no tension.

The director made a very faithful adaptation of the novel, but that's a bad thing in this instance; when put on the screen, it ends up being more faithful to the word than the actual meaning. The book contains the same problem I outlined above, but it's more forgivable because it was marketed as a children's book. (That isn't really an excuse, but it's an explanation.) The film was a fresh start, and it could have changed things to make the beginning more in tune with the later installments -- and try to aim it at a more intelligent audience. It could have been much more powerful if it could have preserved Harry's naivety while giving a more adult perspective on it. That's the difference between a children's movie and a family movie.

The best example of this that I can think of is the character of Ed Wood in Tim Burton's biopic about him. It's not exactly the same thing, but Wood's character is similar to what I think could be applied here. Wood is blind to how bad his movies are, while the other characters talk behind his back about how terrible a filmmaker he is. We see him crack a few times during the movie, just enough to see that those people are right and get us to believe that his films are awful, but also know that he wants very much to be a filmmaker. After he meets with Orson Welles, Wood is encouraged to try his best to make a great movie despite accepting that his previous attempts have been terrible.

This characterization could have been applied to Harry, though it would take more effort. Most people who watch Ed Wood are already familiar with the real Wood's work, so they're ready to believe that he's really a bad filmmaker. You're working from scratch with Harry, so it would probably be harder to get this message across. Still, I think it would have worked. Harry doesn't think he's in any danger, but other characters do, and the audience needs to know that they're right. This is a hard idea to explain, but I hope you get what I mean. There was a huge missed opportunity in this movie that would have made it much, much better.

That doesn't make it a bad movie by any means. Columbus made a great film that, in my opinion, is every bit as strong as the novel it's based on. My only qualm is that it could have been stronger.

(By the way, the American poster for this film was painted by Drew Struzan, the same guy who did the Star Wars and Indiana Jones posters. I'm really disappointed that Warner Bros didn't hire him to make posters for all the Harry Potter films. He's a true Hollywood legend. Now... back to the review.)

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Chamber of Secrets was my favourite book when I was younger, so I was even more excited to see this movie than I had been about the first one. I was a bit smarter by the time this came out and understood more that films are a different medium from books. This time I didn't expect an exact 1:1 translation to the screen, and I enjoyed the movie much more. I feel pretty much the same about the movie nowadays.

It's funny how Philosopher's Stone suffered for being too heavy on the book, while Chamber of Secrets is even more faithful to the material and doesn't fall into the same problems nearly as much. As people close to Harry are being petrified by the basilisk, Harry takes the situation much more seriously than he seemed to in the first movie. Since Columbus's movies are all 100% from Harry's view, this works out to almost the same thing as I suggested for the first movie. Harry is still pretty cool-headed about the whole ordeal, but he's not completely brainless like he was the first time around. This is good character development. Harry is less naive now.

The real show-stopper here is the climax, which is way better than the first movie. Christian Coulson does a great job as Tom Riddle, really capturing the spirit of Voldemort's younger self. He makes for a much more threatening villain than Quirrel did, especially due to the gigantic basilisk he has at his command. Unfortunately Coulson doesn't return to portray Riddle in later films, which is a real shame. I would have liked to see him do a less insane take on Voldemort in Half-Blood Prince.

I don't have many things to complain about for Chamber of Secrets. It's a solid film. It still could have used a bit of my suggestion from the first movie, but it's much less glaring this time. The only real problem is that it looks very different from the other movies (in terms of cinematography), but you can't blame Columbus for that.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, the third installment in the Harry Potter series saw a huge shift in the direction of the series, which I found pretty unsettling. Cuarón clearly takes a different approach to the series than Columbus did, emphasizing the fantastic visuals and art direction over the more bland environments of the first two films. This is to the film's credit, of course: the art direction in Prisoner of Azkaban is incredible. The dementors are amazing, the hypogriffs are amazing, the willow is amazing, and... the general theme I'm working here is "amazing". This is a beautiful movie. Unfortunately, visuals alone can't carry a film.

Cuarón does a great job with immersion and atmosphere, but he leaves out far too many integral plot details. Harry Potter fans like to whine about every tiny little cut that the film adaptations make, which has always gotten on my nerves, but this is one huge exception. There's too much story cut out of this movie, and I really can't think of a reason why. The source material for this one was a bit longer than Chamber, but the movie is a bit shorter. Adding these details back in could have made the film the same length at most, and probably still a bit shorter. Why the cuts?

The detail I'm talking about primarily is Lupin's talk with Harry to explain what the Marauder's Map is and why it exists. This is completely omitted from the movie, which makes the Marauder's Map come across as an inexplicable plot device -- powers as the plot demands. The relationship between Harry and Lupin in general is downplayed too much as far as I'm concerned, but this scene is the most jarring. It didn't need to be cut! WHY?!

Another sore spot in the film is Radcliffe's crying scene in Hogsmeade. I like Radcliffe, but he did a really bad job on this scene. It's... pretty embarrassing. I won't linger on it though, since he was a child actor and these were his first films. To his credit, he does a way better job at crying in subsequent movies, so don't worry about it. Cut Daniel a break.

Other than the story cuts, this movie is pretty good. I like how it kind of glosses over the Shrieking Shack scene to focus its "climax music" on Harry's encounter with the dementors by the lake. It makes the whole Shack scene into a false climax, which is pretty clever actually. Cuarón did a good job, but I was glad to see him go. The story is a little bit more important to me than the visuals, and I really hoped that a director would come along who could mix the brilliant art and story into one perfect Potter movie. I hoped, but then...

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

...Mike Newell signed on for the fourth movie. And I don't like it. The only good thing I can say about Goblet of Fire as a whole is that it doesn't screw up the story. The story points are hit with precision, if not grace. Very few characters get any real development, and the entire movie jumps around at lightning speed. It gives me motion sickness.

The art direction is still pretty good, though it's hurt by the atrocious pacing. Many of the sets are creative and beautiful, but most of it isn't on screen long enough for you to appreciate it like you could with Cuarón's work. There are a few exceptions: the ball in particular stands out as memorable, and the entire graveyard scene with Voldemort is chilling. If the whole movie could have been as well-paced as these scenes, it would have been much better off -- however, the movie is two hours and forty minutes long. That's pretty damn long... but it should have been longer.

In my opinion, Goblet of Fire is the last novel in the series to truly feel edited. Very little of the material in the first four books is unnecessary, which is surprising given the length of Goblet of Fire. After this book, the series started to include more and more subplots that I found unimportant to the core story and background. Trimming the last three books liberally would be required -- and welcome -- but the first four just needed to be left alone. Undoubtedly they needed to be changed in some ways, but not to the extent of the later films. Goblet of Fire should have been obscenely long -- it really needed to be. As it is, the lightning pace renders the film boring. Pretty-looking, but boring.

The real icing on the cake is the director's horrendous fumbling of Dumbledore's character. When this movie came out, I heard a lot of insults towards Michael Gambon, with people assuming that it was his fault that Dumbledore was a total moron in this film. Gambon's excellent performance in every other Potter movie proves it, though: Newell can't direct Dumbledore to save his life. None of the other characters were that bad, but then again, it's hard to tell most of the time because the movie cuts so damn much.

I know I'm going a little heavy on the criticism here, but I really dislike this movie. It's a stain on the series. The movies could have recovered from their inconsistent direction if there had been a director in charge who could have mixed Azkaban's art with Chamber's story -- the first three films could have just been Harry growing up. It would have been a bit silly still, but no more bad than the books were at the beginning. This movie ruined that.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Thankfully, Newell didn't return to direct another Potter movie. The new director, David Yates, is officially my hero. This film is awesome! It mixes Cuarón's art direction with Columbus's general story direction, with some of Newell's "chill factor" (the only thing he really contributed). Yates also knows when to cut and when to add -- Order of the Phoenix is a long book that drags frequently, but the movie is far from it. It moves at a healthy pace similar to Azkaban's, but doesn't make all the huge cuts that Cuarón did. It tells the story and the background details that give the story context. The only problem I have with the story is how downplayed Kreacher is -- he was actually going to be cut entirely before Rowling stepped in and stated that he had to be included. Kreacher does appear, but only very briefly; given his large role in the last two books, I think he should have had more screentime. That's a minor gripe, though.

The best thing about Yates's direction is that he doesn't try to distance himself from the directors that preceded him. He includes many of the little quirks that each director brought to the series, which helps to tie them together. It's still obvious that the directors keep changing, but Yates's efforts help to alleviate some of that. He makes an admirable attempt to fix the mistakes made so far, without making many of his own. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, just think of the different scene transitions that each director did. Columbus's soft cuts, Newell's hard cuts, and Cuarón's fancy transitions are all present in this movie. Filmmaking is a visual medium, and details like these are more important than they seem.)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I had high expectations for this movie after the previous one, and I'm happy to say that it not only met those expectations, it actually exceeded them. With Half-Blood Prince, David Yates proved once again that he is the man. It's as good to the story as it is to the eyes, adapting the core story elements of its novel into a form more suitable for a visual medium. It feels like a perfect continuation from Order of the Phoenix, which is to be expected given the director, but also, incredibly, manages to come across as the logical maturation of Prisoner of Azkaban.

I complained that Alfonso Cuarón cut too much story from Azkaban to make way for its visuals, but this film makes me reflect on his job more fondly. Something about the vague mystery of Malfoy in this film makes me remember the vague mystery of Sirius Black in that one. It also helps that this film contains several crying scenes, the Marauder's Map, and a false climax -- all things that Prisoner of Azkaban had. And since the first two films transition with relative grace into the third one, this almost makes all of the movies transition into each other. Newell's horrendous attempt at Goblet of Fire and the bland art direction from Columbus are the only things holding the Potter series back from seeming, in my eyes, thematically consistent.

There isn't a lot else that I can say about Half-Blood Prince. As long as you're not one of those fans that wants an exact 1:1 videobook of the novel, you'll love this movie. It's funny, interesting, and emotional, just like a Harry Potter movie should be. It's great to note that Radcliffe has improved immeasurably since his crying scene in Prisoner of Azkaban: he does a perfect job in this one. Michael Gambon does another great job as Dumbledore, proving once again that his performance in the fourth movie is entirely Mike Newell's fault.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Technically the seventh and final book in the series is actually two movies, but they aren't paced like two separate movies so I'll count them together. I've heard people moan that splitting the final book into two parts was just a marketing ploy, and while I'm sure dollar signs were spinning in some executives' eyes when the idea was greenlit, I still support the decision. In a perfect world, Goblet of Fire could have been split into two parts instead of this movie, but in the absence of a perfect world we'll just have to make do.

Splitting the source material into two films means that the final confrontation against Voldemort and the Death Eaters is allowed to span roughly five hours instead of the usual two and half, and this means that the story can linger and pace itself a little bit better. For a series as massive and epic as Harry Potter, a suitably huge conclusion would be needed to cap it off -- and for the most part, Yates succeeded once again. Part 1 is a leisurely first act that draws you back into the characters and setting quite effectively, with plenty of action creeping into the second act just to keep the viewers on their toes, then Part 2 is for the most part just a super-extended third act. And while my gut instinct for a situation like that would be to criticize Part 2 for stretching out what's traditionally supposed to be punchy and to the point... I can't deny that the enormous climax of Deathly Hallows just works.

That's not to say that the two films are masterpieces. Being made in 2011 amongst the craze of pointless CGI and superhero movies, it seems like the post-production visual effects team decided to be lazy and just reuse some PlayStation 3 graphics instead of doing actual work. For $250 000 000, don't tell me they couldn't have made the effects look better than that. Half of the movie feels like a video game cutscene, Attack of the Clones style. But then, I'm really biased against CGI in general. I've always held up the other Potter films as my example of CGI done well (you either use it sparingly or have enough dough to make it look flawless), but Deathly Hallows hangs a big asterisk over my example, and that just annoys me.

There's also a serious problem with the subplot distribution. For whatever reason, either the screenwriter or the director decided to put all that negative stuff about Dumbledore that was in the book into Part 1 -- but then didn't actually follow up on it satisfactorily in Part 2. Unlike in the book, Deathly Hallows doesn't redeem Dumbledore, and his winking smile to Harry when we do get to see him one last time just sort of makes him look like a prick. What was that about? The majority of the story was done quite well in Deathly Hallows, and it's not like they didn't have enough running time to expound on everything they wanted. The humanization of Dumbledore is pretty important to the series's themes, but if they wanted to cut it so badly, they could have at least cut all of it.

With the Harry Potter series, I can't help but be a little bit sour -- it's so close to being great! David Yates deserves a trophy for his efforts, but no one could ever have undone Goblet of Fire. However, I do think Yates could have incorporated some of that childish optimism from the first two movies into Deathly Hallows, and that would have helped tie up another loose end. The terrible epilogue from the Deathly Hallows book was included in the film anyway, so he could have made it look like Philosopher's Stone, then leave out the cheesy fanfic names to stop it from being too cheesy. That would have worked.

Alas, it just wasn't to be.

I wrote at the beginning of this review that the story of Harry Potter doesn't need four books of build-up before the antagonist arrives, and I wrote later that the material in the first four books seemed more necessary that the last three. This may seem like a contradiction, but it isn't really. Very little of the material prior to Voldemort's return is relevant to the fact that he hasn't returned, meaning that it could just as easily be covered in the last three books. I feel like the series would be much better if the exposition to nonsense ratio was more balanced (i.e., put more nonsense at the beginning and more exposition at the end).

In conclusion, the films aren't any much better than the books, but it's not like the books were bad anyway. The increasing lengths and complexity of story structures make the Harry Potter books a great introduction to novels; the varying directors and moods of the Harry Potter movies make them a great introduction to films. Are they great? Not really. But they're fun. If you haven't watched them yet, you should check them out.

Is a series of novels by a hack writer who was in the right place at the right time and now everyone of my generation (i.e. millennials) wanks themselves silly over, to the point at which they actually make Quidditch into a real sport and ask the author to magically overturn the Brexit referendum. They are also massively overrated.

Executive Summary

Trustafarian Jesus saves the world.

And in a bit more detail?

Do I really have to? Can't I just get on with the iconoclasm already?

Since it's you, alright then.

Harry Potter is a teenage wizard whose parents died in mysterious circumstances and has a lightning shaped scar on his forehead from the attempted murder of his parents by Voldemort, the greatest evil wizard the world has ever seen. Apparently the power of deus ex machina, sorry, motherly love, cause Voldemort's death spell to backfire and kill him, but his spirit is seeking revenge against "the boy who lived." Harry, however, is sent to live with the Dursleys, an obviously middle class and Tory voting and Brexiteering suburban family in Surrey, who abuse him by beating him like a red headed stepchild and sending him to live under the stairs. Yes, Virginia, we're only ay chapter one of the first book and already we're fending off an army of strawmen that makes me think I've really upset Worzel Gummidge. However, none of this matters because Harry Potter is SPESHUL. He is, by accident of birth, the heir to a fortune in magical gold coins and has a place at a magical school and there he meets his two best friends, Ron, a slightly thick kid whose sole purpose is to asspat Harry for the rest of the series, and Hermione, who is the bossy know it all girl.

Harry then proceeds to get into countless scrapes and adventures usually as a result of his own foolishness and stupidity and then gets bailed out by the powers that be because he's SPESHUL. Often these incidents are riddled with plot holes. There is an overarching plot involving Harry growing up and Voldemort, a villain whose entire motivation is little more than "for the evulz," seeking revenge on him. Because Voldemort was lacking in imagination enough to simply smother Harry with a pillow when he murdered his parents rather than blast him with a spell that is acknowledged as being quite difficult to do and which, despite in the text as being stated as being a totally unavoidable death spell, is actually quite easily circumventable.

Where Harry Potter falls down the most, though, is that it is so fricking morally unambiguous, and revels in it, but then denies its own black and white nature. The entire moral compass of the series basically revolves around Harry, who is the boring indestructible hero who gets new powers as the plot demands and is saved by a constant stream of deus ex machinae. For instance, in the fifth book we are introduced to a minor villain called Dolores Umbridge who is allegedly on the side of "the good guys" but is still an unpleasant person, what with her basically appointing herself the Inquisition. Aha, you might think. Moral ambiguity maybe. Good is not nice and all that, hm? Oh no. Even though one of the actual good guys tells Harry that not everyone who's a nasty piece of work is a Death Eater (one of Voldemort's cronies), by the seventh book she's on the side of Voldemort anyhow. Oh, and that's after Hermione, who is definitely one of the good guys, arranges for her to be gang-raped by centaurs as a punishment for her villainy. Which, of course, nobody calls her out on as disproportionate retribution because Hermione is a friend of Harry "Trustafarian Jesus" Potter and therefore can do no wrong.

Speaking of Hermione, in the same book, she secretly sets a magical trap by which anyone who betrays Harry and his "resistance" to the regime of Dolores Umbridge is scarred for life with "SNEAK" across their face. This is said to be a permanent affliction. It is no so different from the punishment used by Voldemort, the big bad, for betraying him, but it's okay because Hermione's one of the good guys. S'there.

Harry also gets many exceptions made for him. In the first novel, the rules on participation in the (brain dead, but we'll come on to that later) wizard sport of Quidditch and the age limit for same are bent to make way for him because of his "natural talent." In the second novel he breaks rules with gay abandon but blind eyes are turned in just as gay abandon. In the fourth novel he benefits from a third party trying to frame him by having him entered into a deadly tournament as part of a plot by the Big Bad to have him killed off gruesomely (which fails thanks to more dei ex machina) and everyone else just goes with it even though the ENTIRE PLOT OF THE FREAKING NOVEL could have been averted by simply discarding Harry's entry into said tournament by reason of eligibility. In the fifth novel he acts like a little bitch constantly and resorts to throwing tantrums constantly, which gets him into more hot water, but excuses are made for him and dei ex machina take place. All because he's the fucking designated hero and therefore can do no wrong.

I've been mentioning dei ex machina a lot here. Let's list some of them, shall we? Yes, let's.

  • Harry is saved from certain death by basilisk poison by having a phoenix cry on him, even though the ability of said phoenix to do this was never mentioned before.
  • Harry is saved from certain death by death spell fired from extremely powerful wand by the sheer coincidence of having his wand be made of similar materials and the existence of a previously unmentioned and most likely ass-pulled law of thaumaturgy that never appears before or since.
  • Harry is saved from certain death RIGHT AT THE OUTSET by dint of motherly love being one of an increasing number of exceptions to a certain death spell, which NOBODY ELSE benefits from, ever, in the series. Actually, by the last book it is possible to avoid an Avada Kedavra (said spell of certain death) by taking cover, but more on that later.
  • Harry becomes mega super great Quidditch player because he gets the best broom paid for out of his trust fund. Actually, a lot of Harry's problems are solved by his trust fund, of which this is only one.
  • Harry is able to save the day because one of his friends is given a FUCKING TIME MACHINE TO SOLVE CLASS CONFLICTS. Why didn't they just time-travel back to the days when Tom Riddle, who would become Voldemort the big bad, was a child and run him over or dump a toaster into his bath or something? Bang. Entire plot solved. Fucking hell. This, incidentally, is why you don't put time travel in fiction lightly.
  • All the time Dumbledore bursts in and shouts, "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!" saves Harry from himself.
  • Harry pulling a sword out of a hat which has never held a sword before or since.
  • Everything to do with the Deathly Hallows.

Yes, that's a lot of dei ex machina. It also leads me to another list, and that is a list of failures of imagination by characters which could have solved vast portions of the plot. This is probably because J. K. Rowling herself lacked imagination or the ability to proofread and benefitted from the protection from editors that authors of her popularity seem to have, and an inability to make the laws of magic in Harry Potter internally consistent.

  • Magical combat seems to play out like either a duel or sniping from cover. In an early book, when challenged to a duel, Ron tells Harry that if it doesn't work, Harry should just punch his opponent and run. This pragmatism is sorely missing from the rest of the series. In book seven when the bad guys have the good guys cornered behind a statue and are sniping at each other with death spells, none of them think to, say, cast a giant fireball into the ceiling to collapse it on them, to animate the statue and have it crush the good guys to death, to summon mirror images of themselves and charge, or even to summon animate fire in the form of beasts to burn them to death, which they have previously done to Harry in another scene and therefore can do it. Or they could cast Sectumsempra (a spell which basically allows you to cut things up at a distance) or other force-type spells to demolish their cover.
  • Certain spells are "dark" and not used by nice people. The distinction is totally arbitrary. Transfiguration is not considered "dark" in general yet turning someone into a fish while they are on land and having them suffocate is probably an effective and horrifying murder method. Yet the aforementioned cutting at a distance spell, which could have legitimate uses in, say, construction or engineering, is "dark" and not allowed. That's like saying that a power drill is evil but chloroform is not.

But then this is J. K. Rowling and the access media don't care. When she wrote other books under a pseudonym, they were panned for being shite but immediately she was unmasked as the author of these turd-tomes they all of a sudden wanked themselves blind over it. Spare me. She could have made the last one called Harry Potter and the Invasion of the Mutant Space Bats of Doom and people would still have bought it. She could have written the phrase "you daft cunts will buy anything" 50,000 times in one book and people would still have bought it because, after around book 5 or so, she was merely going through the motions and it shows. And the fans don't care because they are the worst type of consoomers out there. In fact, once Harry Potter became popular it became increasingly clear that she was writing solely for the CONSOOME PRODUCT, THEN GET EXCITED FOR NEXT PRODUCT market. The films are guilty of this as well, what with the last one being split into two instalments entirely so Warner Bros could double-dip their brain-dead target market, and the shitty fanfic stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and the expansion of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them from a text referred to in the book into a film series, and then the inevitable wokewashing whereby she decides all of a sudden that Dumbledore is gay despite there being zero clues to this in the text, and that Hermione is black despite her being specifically described as brown haired with freckles and pale skin, and so on and so forth. But then, she hasn't been relevant since 2008 so, gotta keep flogging that dead horse, right?

Harry Potter is also responsible for some of the worst excesses of fandom. That My Immortal was indecisively a parody or serious is testament to the hordes of shitty fanfic that it spawned. You can tell Harry Potter fans at a distance. They are invariably in their early to mid thirties (i.e. my age) and brag on social media (which was a mistake) about how they have been "adulting" and how they wish they had got a Hogwarts acceptance letter. They think that public figures they don't like (usually Donald Trump) are akin to Voldemort. They don't read anything else. The men have hipster / soy beards (overly bushy, waxed moustache tips, the sort of beard that is the mullet of the 2010s) and the women tend to be goddess sized and make shitty vlogs wherein they go on about how it's an UHMAYZING BOOOOOK. They consoome product rabidly. They end up working for "news" websites that spew clickbait and listicles (i.e. Buzzfeed, HuffPost, Vice, etc.) and think this makes them JURNALIZTS (it doesn't.) They claim that Harry Potter is the best thing ever and totally meaningful and politically relevant (it's not, it's about how a trustafarian Jesus analog saves everyone from themselves by dint of his Mary Sue powers and designated hero status) but deride Star Wars as movies about space wizards for children (the Original Trilogy at least had way more meaningful and honest content than HP could ever dream of, though I'll grant that the Prequel Trilogy was iffy and the Sequel Trilogy was worse than blood on the toilet paper).

But back to what's at hand. The worst thing, though, about Harry Potter, is the one-dimensionalness of the characters. The only character with any moral ambiguity is Snape, the alchemy / "Potions" master, who is basically J. K. Rowling working out her frustration at how she never understood science in general and chemistry in particular (she actually admitted this). Everyone else is a fucking cardboard cut-out. Hermione? Brains and social conscience! Ron? Doesn't really have a character! Harry? Designated Hero! Malfoy? Stereotypical snobbish school bully who OF COURSE joins the big bad. His mates Crabbe and Goyle? Brainless thugs because OF COURSE they are. Dumbledore? Basically Gandalf except without the motivation to actually do anything relevant to the plot! Everyone in House Gryffindor (Harry's house)? All the cool kids! Everyone in House Slytherin (Malfoy's house)? Designated villains and mooks for the big bad later on! Everyone in the other houses? Redshirts! COME ON. Subtlety, thy name is not J. K. Rowling.

Oh yes. I almost forgot. The final confrontation with the big bad lasts all of half a page. After four books just to introduce him and three books to set it up. Deary me.

"Ah, but Hazelnut, it is aimed at kids!" I hear you sneer. Doesn't matter. Alice in Wonderland was aimed at kids but that has a lot of honest content and meaning to it (albeit about either mathematics or drugs, depending on who you ask). Just because something's aimed at kids doesn't mean it's immune from criticism. The "space wizards for children" defence is hollow and deserves to be called out for same because it assumes that you can feed children any old shit or, worse, that you should. Sorry, but Harry Potter might be aimed at kids but it's still a crock of overrated, rancid, poorly written (J. K. Rowling's fetish for adverbs has to be seen to be believed), shite. It is the Marvel Cinematic Universe of literature.

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