Easily digestible does not mean well written
Ok, here is my critical overview of one of the most popular book series of recent times. Let me make clear straight from the beginning that I have nothing against the way Rowling writes. They are a very enjoyable read, I cannot deny that, but this review is not going to be about the structure of the writing as it is about its presentation. And the first thing everybody must understand is that these books are easily digestible. This doesn’t automatically make them great, or well written. It only makes them easy to read and understand.
Getting darker does not mean more mature
There is not a single idea in them which is hard to find anywhere else. The characters are archetypes, the magic system is bland, the coexistence of two different worlds has no effort put into it, and the plot is mostly straightforward. For all I care The Lord of the Rings are the best fantasy books of English literature and the reason not that many people red or love them as they did with Harry Potter, is because it takes more effort from the reader to finish them. The words are more uncommon, the descriptions are way longer, and the story cannot be summed up in three lines.
Schools once more
But that’s not what the typical reader wants these days. Yeah, just throw a school full of rebellious children and you are done. Just the fact there is a school in the story, automatically makes most of the plot to write itself. Why bother to think of an excuse for adventure in a wide world, when you can just have a school where the characters need to go to every year, and conveniently something happens there each time. Just the amount of pages it takes to show the characters getting to the school and doing the exact same activities every year, means that most of the plot in every book is spent on rehashing the exact same events in the exact same location.
Very typical
Any claims of the sort “It gets better with every book” is only your inner fanboy clouding your judgment. Of course and you will say that if you keep reading the books. They do get darker and more mature with time, and they do continue previous plot lines that were left open, but this does not make them more mature. In fact, the story is built in such a way that makes it impossible to be mature. To its core, it is a standard teen fantasy empowerment story which follows every stereotype you can think of. It is not any different from a typical fighting shonen or a typical light novel, which manipulates the emotions of the audience with simple characters and overblown drama. I mean, come on, if you need to describe Harry Potter, what more can you call him other than an orphan with no distinct personality, mistreated by one dimensional evil foster parents, who one day learns that he is special, and he goes to a magical place, where he becomes a hero with the power of plot convenience? Can’t get any cornier, can it? Just because it works so well, does not magically fix all the problems it has in terms of consistency. And boy, does it have problems with its consistency.
Even stereotypes need to be used properly
I can deal with stereotypes and I can accept overused plots as long as the story is written in a way that is not insulting my intelligence. And that’s the problem with young adult stories, fighting shonen, and light novels, they constantly do that. Ok Harry, you are the standard cookie cutter protagonist, who is constantly victimized as means to make the audience feel sorry for you. Why is everybody treating you like a war hero when you didn’t do anything?
Misdirected fame
No matter where he goes, everybody keeps being amazed at the mentioning of his name because he survived Voltemort’s attack as a baby which somehow killed the lord of evil. That makes the magic spell that killed Voltemort awesome, not him. And he wasn’t the one who made it, only the one who is unknowingly its carrier. Everybody should be saying “Hey look, it’s that awesome magic spell that resides in that boy.” Or better yet, they should be making heroes out of the people who created the spell; more specifically, his parents. At which case, everybody should be saying “Hey look, it’s the son of those heroes whose magic killed the lord of all evil.”
Double standards for the protagonist
Harry’s name doesn’t deserve anything, since he was just a baby at the time. How the hell do you make a legend out of a baby who did nothing, and not out of its parents, who did everything? These are obvious double standards used for making the protagonist both a victim and a hero with no actual effort from his part. Not only it’s undeserved, it’s also boring.
Objectification of roles
This is yet another reason I do not like children as protagonists in fantasy stories. They are too young to have done anything or to deserve any fame. The authors are constantly trying to make them seem special by giving them amazing powers they have no control over, or making them the offspring of super important people, and then treat them as if they are those powers or those parents, instead of simply the carriers of those powers or the children of those people. This is why Frodo is a much better character; because he is not treated as the one ring, he is treated as the ringbearer. When a story objectifies its characters to a point where they are defined by powers, names, or the role they serve, instead of personality and ideals, then I don’t give a shit about the story.
Favoritism regardless of outcome
The second thing that gets to me is how Harry keeps being rewarded for being disobedient. There are so many rules and restrictions in that magic school he goes to, he breaks every single one of them, and instead of being punished, he was constantly getting magic items, and was taken to places where he learns more things that he shouldn’t, and was given more points for his team. Meaning, he wins no matter what he does and the book promotes disrespect to authority by making the authority disrespecting itself. And of course all the students kept cheering for him to continue doing that because adults are always wrong in such stories and the protagonist is a walking empowerment fantasy.
Lack of security
The third thing that gets to me is the complete lack of security everywhere in the magical world. They keep saying it is super protected and yet it gets easily breached all the time. Just in the first book three ten year olds accidentally find the entrance to the place the philosopher’s stone is kept because the staircases in that place work in any way the plot wants them to work. Why allow a dangerous thing such as randomly rearranged staircases in a school? What if someone falls off or is taken to places he shouldn’t go to? Holy crap, the school itself promotes the very things the rules are against. And you can hardly call them defenses; they are more like puzzles and games easy enough for children to solve. Furthermore, the teachers were so kind, they even left tips, so all possible thieves can figure out how to pass every test. Because that’s how defenses work. You have a safe, and you let the robbers find the combination if they are good at math.
No logic
And do you know the funniest thing about these challenges? They didn’t even need to exist. If they were there so only the worthy ones can get to the philosopher’s stone, then they served no purpose because an evil wizard managed to pass them all. Also, because of some convoluted excuse, if you want the philosopher’s stone, you can’t get it. If you don’t want the philosopher’s stone, then it appears out of nowhere in your pocket. Meaning, anyone who passes the challenges so he can get to it, won’t get it, and anyone who is not interested in it, wouldn’t bother to pass the challenges, so he wouldn’t even be there to forcefully get it. So why did they exist in the first place? I didn’t even understand how Harry managed to get the stone when he was clearly there to get it before the evil wizard does. And don’t tell me he was there to defeat the evil wizard because he had no means of doing that.
Lazy infodumping
Something inexcusable at this point is how the evil wizard spends about 50 pages in revealing his evil plan to Harry, instead of simply grabbing the stone and running away. He had no reason to do that; it was just Rowling having no idea of how to show us what he was doing all this time. Like, you know, with internal monologues? Or a flashback? Do you know how lazy and immersion breaking that scene was? A lot.
Cheap showdown
And do you know what is even worse than that? Having to suffer 50 pages of boredom only to be given an anticlimactic final battle, where Harry defeats the evil wizard by not doing anything. I am not kidding you, the wizard touched him and the exact same asspull magic that killed Voltemort, does the same to him. Trying to explain it as the power of love that makes his dead mom returning from the afterlife to protect him doesn’t make it sound any better. This is clearly low effort plot armor. If it’s so effective, why doesn’t everybody use the same spell on themselves? And by the way, this magic works in any way the author wants it to work. If an evil wizard touches you, the magic kills him. If your foster parents beat you up and force you to live in the storage under the staircase, nope, nothing happens. Oh, and I might as well point out that Voltemort’s spirit was also there, and he knew about the spell since that is what killed him. What does he order his evil wizard to do? To touch Harry. The lord of all evil is a retard who never learns from his mistakes.
Nonsense epilogue
Even the epilogue was nonsense. From the teachers who keep infodumping things to Harry which are otherwise top secret he has no reason to know of, to rewarding his team with points for breaking any rule imaginable and jeopardizing everything. By the way, this felt like a low effort cover up. It’s like they gave sweets to the children and told them to stay quiet, so the rest of the world won’t realize how incompetent their defenses were, or how they were too blind to see an evil wizard going after the stone.
Sitting duck
After that, they send him back home to his awful foster parents who hate him and mistreat him all the time for being special, since that is what you do to the legendary hero for his un-existing heroic deeds. Listen, I am willing to buy the excuse of how they were keeping his existence a secret up until now, and that this is why they never paid a visit to his home up until now. But his existence is no longer a secret, so why are you sending him back there? If any other wizards want to kill him, they know where to find him. They can use a bomb or something; it doesn’t need to be magic related.
Unused potential
Why aren’t you taking him to a wizard’s family so you can learn more about the magic that can kill evil so easily? And take his bitch of a stepmom with you if she is supposed to be the battery that recharges the spell. Or better yet, why don’t you have him touch every wizard in the ministry? If he is evil, he will go poof and the world will be safe. Why don’t you do anything when you have the ultimate power to kill evil right in front of you? And why the hell are you not doing anything with the philosopher’s stone? It’s the ultimate source of immortality and is never mentioned again. What’s the point of hiding or destroying it, if you never planned to use it? This is all bullshit.
Nothing works
Don’t any of you dare say I am nitpicking or I am overthinking stuff. This is what the book is telling you. Everything about it is a mess. The magic aspect makes the conflict boring and unimaginative, since instead of tactics or effort, everything is miraculously working out fine without the hero having to do anything about it. The normal aspect is also pretty crappy, since all we see from so called normal people, is stereotypical evil foster parents and adults being constantly stupid and blinded to the magical things that are constantly happening around them.
Awful messages
All you are left with is a protagonist who is essentially a checklist of overused stereotypes, and vitriolic moral messages for the audience to turn into disobedient assholes. Break all the rules kids, this is what Harry did and saved the day by doing nothing. You will be rewarded instead of punished. It’s the exact same bullshit that made Twilight, Hunger Games, Naruto, and any other overrated piece of shit title so famous. You expect me to say good things about it? I was reading the Neverending Story when I was 12; an actually good fantasy book, so to hell with you and your awful taste.
