Harry Potter: Classic Or Dud?

truth tho, i've thought about other ways to approach this and haven't really been able to come up with much

approach what, the overall series? oh, i think there would have been multiple approaches that would have been more interesting. focusing on ron as the central character, for example, with him having to balance friendship with, and jealousies of, harry (the "chosen one"). or making harry struggle instead of being a superhero, with him having to overcome feelings of inadequacy about being -- or even objectively failing in being -- the "chosen one."

not having them argue about the same thing (jealousy/mistrust of each other) in the middle of books 2-5 would actually have been an improvement, so tbh I disagree there daniel

i guess i didn't pay enough attention about the series. i still think ron would be a more interesting central character than dull-as-dishwater harry.

movie prob acting as an influence there

Neither books 5 or 6 have a particularly strong central mcguffin to focus the plot, so as a result feel somewhat like meandering backstory infodumps.

movie prob acting as an influence there

i'm sure it was. i can't read.

annoy fosters, get stolen away to hogwarts, new teachers are shit, grave danger reveal, harry unpopular cos of potter issues dumbledore senile enough, happy to let it work itself out, hagrid's a bit dim somwhere, omg snogs, the obviously evil adults were the bad guys, ok tho defeated them with the one spell we learnt this year, ere's a bit about voldemort, exams passed and quidditch one, several billion pounds please

your summary reads like billy joel's we didn't start the fire

he's a constant influence

he can't read, either.

not gettin the reference tbh

Would've been great to see Ron play more a role of being central character than Harry - that he'd have an actual character arc! Harry basically starts off with the courage of a lion from book 1 to 7, and seems to possess this purely because of genetics or the fact that he clearly is the book's namesake/protagonist and entirely discounting the fact that the kid had no social contact for the first 10 years or so of his life secluded to the life of a closet beneath the stairs.

That his perception of reality - magic exists! science is wrong! there are two worlds, completely unaware of each other!- at the age of 10 was given radical change and the eventual encounter with a society of people actively trying to murder him seemed due process for at least a scene/chapter in which Harry has a nervous breakdown. But this never really seemed to be given thought and it largely irked me that Harry adopts so well - I felt there couldn't been so much greater a sense of connection with him had he displayed actual emotions in day to day life versus when he becomes a teenager, whereas he's hugely annoying but ultimately identifiable at the least.

reading these for the 1st time

i liked the 1st book quite a bit & its probably insufferable to whine about world-building & narrative arcs & w/e but theres a real sense of diminishing returns by the end of the fourth. the biggest problem is that the first book is really funny & each book is less so, until long streches of the 4th are this sort of dour slog.

http://www.youtube.com/JKRowlingAnnounces

people who slag off HP remind me of people who slag off the beatles - i have the strong suspicion they're being contrarian, pretentious, hipper-than-thou types just for the sake of looking cool. if you didn't even try reading a single one of the books cause "everyone else loves it so it must suck" you're missing out. to extend the beatles analogy - yeah, there was a bit of filler in maybe half the beatles albums, but hell one person's filler is another person's favorite deep cut, and there's more than enough brilliance in any given album to make it worth your time to check it out. so: some of the books are better than the others, and i guess there might be a clunky moment or two here and there if you want to get all lit crit and look for them, but basically the books are all awesome and fun and well worth a read.

as for the movies, you can argue they occasionally suffer from having to condense Xhundred pages into 2 hours and 15 minutes, but frankly i think they did an great job of getting to the heart of the material and turning it into good cinema each and every time. whichever one is your most/least favorite, they're all clearly quality - there's good chemistry between the leads, excellent character actors abound, the sets and costumes are fantastic, they clearly didn't skimp on the writing just to blow the whole budget on 10 minutes of cgi splosions, etc etc

ps. fuckin classic, obv

"You're what?" Snape hissed out between clenched teeth.

"I'm pregnant, Sev," Harry repeated patiently, sitting down on a nearby chair.

"B-but how could this have happened?" Severus sputtered, all thoughts of the tests he'd been grading flying from his mind.

A twinkle in his eye, Harry said, "Well, when two people love each other very much..."

"I *know* that part, Potter. What I meant was, how could *you* be pregnant? You're a man."

"I am quite aware of that fact, Severus," Harry returned drolly. "But surely you must realize that while I *am* a man, I am also a wizard. A very powerful wizard, in fact, and sometimes very powerful wizards use their magic unconsciously. Remember how I beat Voldemort? He cast the killing curse, and even though I was almost unconscious, and didn't have my wand, I still managed to reflect it so it hit him instead?"

Snape looked at him skeptically. "So you're saying that unconsciously you *wanted* to get pregnant? For Merlin's sake, *why*?!"

Blushing Harry said, "Well, it was after we'd gone to see Ron and 'Mione's new twins. I was thinking that you'd make such a good father, and when you pounced me that evening, I must've focused in on that."

Severus looked surprised at Harry's words -- him, a good father? -- but thought for a moment about their situation.

"Well," he said finally. "I suppose it could happen. But in all cases where male pregnancy has happened, it was a planned event. It had to be, because both parties had to use their magic to make it happen..." He trailed off, his face draining of all color, as he realized what he was implying.

Harry grinned. "I guess it was meant to happen, then."

Severus was at a loss. "But I don't understand -- neither of us knew what the other was thinking, and without joint focus, it *still* shouldn't have happened..."

"Since both of us are powerful wizards, maybe we didn't need to know in order to focus," Harry suggested. "I'm more concerned about the numbers."

"Numbers?" Severus asked, floundering for understanding.

Taking a deep breath, Harry broached the topic cautiously. "Well, we each have at least twice as much magic as most Wizards, and we'd gone to see the twins that evening...and I'm definitely showing more than normal for not being even three months pregnant. My larger stomach was the first clue I had that I *was* pregnant."

"You think we're having twins?" Severus squeaked.

Harry nodded. "I'm not sure, though. But it's possible."

"Oh, wonderful," Severus snarked. "I never planned on us having children to begin with, and now you tell me we're most likely having *two*?"

"Well, Sev, as you pointed out, it takes two to make this spell work. You can't blame all of this on me," Harry said, voice hard.

Sighing, Severus put his head in his hands and said, "I know. But I wish I could."

"Whyever would you want to do that?" Harry demanded, exasperated.

Directing a glare at his husband, Severus said, "Because if I recall, your dog-father still doesn't even know we're married. How in the world are you planning to explain *this* to him?"

Harry gulped. "I-I hadn't thought of that."

Nodding, Severus said, "I thought not."

Practically hyperventilating, Harry summed their situation up in two words: "Oh, shit."

lol, and eeewwwww.

did you make that up yourself, or repost it from some terrifyingly creepy potterforum?

transcribed an actual overheard conversation between Snape and Harry Potter

hmmm. if you're trying to make harry potter fans look creepy and weird, it's kinda backfiring. if you're a homosexual fanboy who's just that into it, well done! someone somewhere is probably rubbing one out to your fanfic RIGHT NOW

awesome!

anything i can do to bring happiness to others.

damn, i was trying to think of something snarky to reply with but that last line just kinda took the wind out of my sails.

starting w/ the movies now for time purposes, going to the books next...these are fun

so I'm about halfway through reading the first book to my daughter (she loves it) and... it's kind of boring? It feels very formulaic in the sense that for every normal thing in the "muggles" world there's an equivalent in the magic world that is the same, but with magic! They don't have football, they have quidditch etc. There seems to be some attempts at Roald Dahl-style wackiness but it's wholly lacking in both strangeness and nastiness, which were key to Dahl's appeal.

Not really looking forward to 9,000 more pages of this

I only read the first four aaaaages ago but the first was definitely the most boring and they definitely got better. But, yes, Rowling's whole thing (and probably the key to HP's enormous success) is throwing every cliched magical/fantasy element into the same pot. It's fairly LCD but, to the extent that you're able to shut your critical faculties pretty much all the way down, also fun.

And if you're generally unaware of the overall plot, prepare for things to get way, way darker starting around book four.

every cliched magical/fantasy element into the same pot

yeah this is definitely my feeling. oh look there's a nerd beset by adversity but the nerd is really actually very special! and get this, he's an orphan! and he has mysterious magical benefactors! oh you don't say

preferred reading Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang tbh

dud

rowling has a pretty terrible sense of humor, i can't really think of a genuinely funny or witty moment in the whole series.

harry's awful relatives do seem like a nod to dahl, except that dahl would have made them sincerely nasty and monstrous and scary, not just bumbling fools.

yes exactly! Dahl would have included some unusual, disgusting details, something to make them grotesque

to be fair rowling did hit upon the vivid idea of making them fat

Also, setting the entire sixth book in a magical candy factory strikes me as somewhat Dahl-esque.

I'm half way through the fourth - reading the whole thing out aloud to my children - still a fuck of a lot to go. First book completely failed to grab me and I more or less felt the same as Οὖτις. Kind of got more into it since then and think she improved a lot as a writer/storyteller after that. It still bugs me that she just HAS to put adjectives on everything. There's no "he picked up the envelope", it's "he carefully picked up the limp, brown envelope". The books would be 20% shorter without all that. The children love everything about it and that's what's important. The fanatical adult fandom still bemuses me though even that seems really low key now the whole thing's over.

my favorite thing in the whole series (that i've seen -- i was just the right age for the bandwagon when it first started rolling but stopped reading at book 5; i still haven't seen the last two movies) is the time machine hermione uses to overschedule her classes. there's some wit in that i think. even if it is just another iteration of the mundane-uses-for-magic joke shakey identifies, the discrepancy between the potential of this technology and the use to which it's actually put is simultaneously so big and (to certain kids) so relatable it's one of my favorite YA ideas. in fact in general the third book is the best thing to come out of the empire, wizard people dear reader aside; you might enjoy it a lil more, shakes, when its time inevitably comes. btw, wow do a lot of women my age feel strongly about this franchise.

It still bugs me that she just HAS to put adjectives on everything. There's no "he picked up the envelope", it's "he carefully picked up the limp, brown envelope".

iirc the cliche-per-page rate (that snobbiest of metrics) is pretty monstrously high in these. a lot of adjective-noun readymades.

don't want to get specific bcz spoilers, but in retrospect the one-dimensional portrayal of voldemort is prob the most disappointing thing about the series for me. you get so much info about him -- entire books, it feels like, are dedicated to the quest for background knowledge about him -- and it never really pays off, he never really becomes interesting or complex or even really that scary, he's ultimately not much more than a plot device. (compare this to, say, the white witch in narnia, who is absolutely terrifying in a very specific, memorable way.)

god this book is a slog. ok I wasn't expecting the drinking-unicorn's-blood bit but still

Do they slit the unicorn's throat to get the blood?

it's voldemort afaict

some kind of vampire thing

it's voldemort afaict

sure, sure, blame voldemort. that's Rowling's answer to everything innit?

Not exactly - after all one quarter of the school is given over to training asshole wizards!

i never quite understood why they didn't just abolish that house

For me the worst inconsistency is that Quidditch sounds like a really shitty sport - apart from the pointlessness of all of the scoring and various balls when only the snitch matters, it's all about having the best broom - like if the player with the most expensive boots was always the centre-forward. And what kind of sport cancels a match because one player has a sore arm but not when there's a goddam hurricane blowing and a bunch of evil ghosts invading the pitch?

iirc when I read it the thing that made no sense at all was the magic system. You concentrate and say some quasi-Latin words and spells happen. And every so often someone invents a new spell and now if you say those quasi-Latin words you can cast it. There's no idea of harnessing supernatural forces just a cosmic rulebook that some authority (who is never mentioned in any capacity) keeps updated.

spoilers: a hall of fame moment, and by moment i mean 800-page book, is when, iirc, voldemort replaces one of harry's confidants and mentors, with whom he is often alone and vulnerable, with an evil voldemort-loyal doppelgänger totally indistinguishable from the real person; then decides against having this guy hit harry over the head, lock him in the trunk of a car, and take him up to the manor at Evilshire in favor of rigging an enormous media-drenched international sporting event from beginning to end so that harry potter, who at plan's inception is not actually qualified to compete, may not only battle but defeat the world's most promising wizarding students in a series of matches of wits and magical power, whereupon he will be presented with a trophy that has been replaced with an identical-looking trophy that is actually a teleportation gate up the road to Evilshire. goldfinger was more chillingly pragmatic.

yeah but because ancient magical laws

Quidditch is the worst thing about HP yeah