The overall Harry Potter Years 1-7 story arc

[Gaith]

Even a self declared muggle fan like Arthur Weasley barely understands anything. He never thought about reading muggle newspapers, or novels or got to London and watch a play or sit in a cafe or whatever.

It makes no sense.

The consequence of making your whole fictional world revolve around a middle/high school, with the Hogwarts headmaster being much more powerful and historically important than the Minister of Magic, is that said fictional world becomes fundamentally childish and silly. Which leads directly to stuff like the plot of Secrets of Dumbledore, in which the international wizarding leadership election is decided by... a ritual involving a hedgehog.

If they truly loved to serve humans, if that made them truly happy and they saw it as the perfect way of living there'd be no need to magically bind them to a family and forcing them to do their bidding. That this is done is proof that they are indeed enslaved and brainwashed.

Rowling could have just said that the elves working at Hogwarts are fairly paid employees, and left it at that. Making a whole civil rights subplot out of them was a truly baffling and unneeded choice; it'll be... uh, interesting to see what the series makes of it now that "We can't fit that into our movie runtime, sorry!" won't be an excuse for deleting it.

I don't think I realized just how poor the worldbuilding was until JKR posted a magical history of the United States online before the first Fantastic Beasts film. She showed absolutely no understanding of the native peoples, the size of North America, or American history from colonial days onward.

I do feel some sympathy for Rowling here, in that she was in a lose-lose position on this particular issue. Establishing that Britain is the only country in the world with a wizarding society would have been awkward, and invited critical readings of ethnocentrism, but establishing that the world is full of similarly developed magical communities required her to do a lot of culturally sensitive worldbuilding she clearly wasn't interested in, and brought up all sorts of tricky questions as to why such other communities tolerated Voldy's takeover of wizarding Britain - twice. She probably should have just taken the former tack, and accepted the ensuing criticism as the cost of doing business.

 

[Anwar]

One more example? Why do the Hogwarts houses exist? Some people say for organizational reasons because it makes to divide the grades into smaller subgroups and sure, that makes sense on some level.
But why divide them by personality trades and marking the Slytherins kid as the assholes three quarters of the school immediately hates out of principle?

Because to appeal to kids, there had to be a "Bad" group of kids at the school easily identifiable. Like the Cobra Kai kids from Karate Kid, although even the original movies gave them nuance to show they weren't all bad guys and Kreese was the real source of it.

The problem is, Rowling refused to give Slytherin that nuance.

She's really not a very good writer and was very lucky people fell in love with Potter before the cracks in the world and story became obvious.

Rowling was so unimaginative that she used the exact same setup twice in the last book, the trio uses polyjuice potion to assume other people's indentities and infiltrate Gringott's/the ministry of magic to retrieve and destroy the cup/locket. Losing one of those subplots wouldn't hurt the story at all, it all could have been restructured and simplified.

The last book? She repeated the whole "Everyone is suspicious of Harry" plot at least twice. First in Chamber of Secrets and then again in OOTP.

And then there's that nonsense about how the Ministry trying to ignore Voldemort being back was an analogy for "Appeasement" to Nazis in WW2. The situations were nothing alike.

 

[Owain Taggart]

She's really not a very good writer and was very lucky people fell in love with Potter before the cracks in the world and story became obvious.

Yeah, I do agree. In fact, I feel like writing to a lower level hid that fact somewhat, because when she moved over to her adult books, ie Casual Vacancy, her Strike mysteries, it was way more obvious. Her Strike mysteries while they had some moments, were largely awful stuff that felt like they were written in a way to purposefully be shocking and prove that she could write something other than children's fantasy. They were just so gory and the opposite of comforting.

 

[ichab]

And people like the muggle hating elitist Malfoys drag their precious son through a city of millions of muggles to a muggle train station to board a muggle method of transport shared with half- and mudbloods because ... ???

For the same reason that rich parents make their kids board public school busses?

It's not about holding on to traditions it's that wizards seem to be almost completely oblivious about how the muggle world works despite also clearly having contact with muggles enough to fall in love with and marry them.
Even a self declared muggle fan like Arthur Weasley barely understands anything. He never thought about reading muggle newspapers, or novels or got to London and watch a play or sit in a cafe or whatever.

It makes no sense.

Pure bloods don't give a flying hoot about muggles and avoid them whenever possible. People like Arthur might be fascinated with muggles, but are also maybe a little too busy living their daily lives to go watch a play. Between working long hours and a family(how many kids did they have again?), there isn't much time to do anything else.

Okay, so one match out of how many? The fact remains that with catching the snitch being worth 150 points the only way it will not be game deciding is if one team is completely outclassed. It's not a well balanced game if one member on each team is the only one who matters hon it comes to winning or losing 95% of the time.
The game only ending when the snitch is caught makes it even more important, let's say teams are roughly equally strong and for the duration of the game the lead switches, sometimes team A leads by 10 or 20 points, then team B and back to team A, after about 30 minutes of this why should the audience keep watching? It would be obvious pretty fast that nothing happening actually matters as far as the outcome of the game is concerned.

What about the game where a snitch is never caught?

If they truly loved to serve humans, if that made them truly happy and they saw it as the perfect way of living there'd be no need to magically bind them to a family and forcing them to do their bidding. That this is done is proof that they are indeed enslaved and brainwashed.

None of which matters. They are happy with their way of life and don't want it changed. To use a Star Trek term "Prime directive."

One more example? Why do the Hogwarts houses exist? Some people say for organizational reasons because it makes to divide the grades into smaller subgroups and sure, that makes sense on some level.
But why divide them by personality trades and marking the Slytherins kid as the assholes three quarters of the school immediately hates out of principle? Very early on we are told that there has never been an evil wizard who didn't come from Slytherin (which turns out to not be true but it is the narrative). So why on earth do they take children from already mostly not great families together, toss them into the "evil" house and make other kids avoid the Slytherin kids when being separated from the influence of their families would be the perfect opportunity to kids from death eater families interact with other kids and learn that maybe what their parents have told them isn't true?
Just throw the sorting hat into some closet and sort the kids randomly.

No one makes the children avoid the Slytherin Kids. Not sure where you are getting that from.

She's really not a very good writer and was very lucky people fell in love with Potter before the cracks in the world and story became obvious.

I'm sorry, but someone who has sold 600 million books can't be classified as not very good. If her writing isn't your jam, that's fair.

 

[Gaith]

Pure bloods don't give a flying hoot about muggles and avoid them whenever possible.

Except for the pure bloods that want to genocide muggles...

And that's not even getting into the moral question of what right wizards have to deliberately erase and/or rewrite muggles' memories whenever they witness something magical. (Hint: they have none.)

(And that's not even getting into the moral question of what right do wizards have to not arrest and remove dictators from office, which they could effortlessly do. Dumbledore could have prevented millions of Holocaust deaths before breakfast by whisking Hitler into the courtyard of Buckingham Palace on the day Germany declared war on Britain, if not before.)

 

[Allyn Gibson]

And people like the muggle hating elitist Malfoys drag their precious son through a city of millions of muggles to a muggle train station to board a muggle method of transport shared with half- and mudbloods because ... ???

The Hogwarts Express as an option is perfectly fine but it's not initially presented as an option but simply as the way for students to get to Hogwarts.

It's not about holding on to traditions it's that wizards seem to be almost completely oblivious about how the muggle world works despite also clearly having contact with muggles enough to fall in love with and marry them.
Even a self declared muggle fan like Arthur Weasley barely understands anything. He never thought about reading muggle newspapers, or novels or got to London and watch a play or sit in a cafe or whatever.

It makes no sense.

Rowling tries to have it both ways -- the wizarding world is both in our world and not. Things like Diagon Alley and Platform 9 3/4 suggest a world outside the muggle perception of reality, kind of like Brigadoon or the realm of the Fae. And the Weasleys would make more sense if they lived entirely in that world, except they don't because the Weasley kids all go to the train station in the same way as Harry does, by traveling through the Muggle world. Then I think about what the Hogwarts Express actually travels on, and I realize I cannot imagine the wizards and the elves and the gnomes and all that actually building a separate railway; the platform might be magic, but the track? It's track other trains in Britain run on. There may be spells at the Hogsmeade station to keep muggles from noticing, but otherwise, it's nothing special.

It occurs to me that by the 1980s, the United States was turning Keyhole-11 spy satellites on Hogwarts and the other wizarding schools just as much as they were turning them on Soviet military bases. And I'd be willing to bet the wizards had no idea. If a Muggle fan like Arthur couldn't imagine what Muggle life was like, it simply would not occur to anyone, even the Ministry of Magic, that the Muggle-world could spy on them from orbit like that. There would be CIA analysts looking at the spy sat photos of the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts and trying to piece together what the hell had happened. Voldemort probably had an extensive file in the CIA archives.

The question I now have. Had Dumbledore's Army lost to Voldemort, does PM Tony Blair have a nuke dropped on Hogwarts to eliminate Voldemort? The Ministry of Magic clearly is not part of the British government; the Minister doesn't sit in Parliament and isn't a member of the Cabinet. (Looking at the list of Ministers, they don't change when the British government changed, which they should. I can't see Hermione, as Minister of Magic, being part of Boris Johnson's government in 2019.) I wonder if MI-6 has agents keeping tabs on a potentially hostile governmental hostile within the UK's own borders. They'd have to.

I am applying more worldbuilding thought on these issues than I suspect Rowling ever did.

 

[Set Harth]

(And that's not even getting into the moral question of what right do wizards have to not arrest and remove dictators from office, which they could effortlessly do. Dumbledore could have prevented millions of Holocaust deaths before breakfast by whisking Hitler into the courtyard of Buckingham Palace on the day Germany declared war on Britain, if not before.)

Ah, yes. The right to not do something. It seems we won't even be allowed that much.

 

[JD]

While I loved the books, I have to admit, I've always found the relationship between The Wizarding World and the muggle world strange. She has all of wizards living in our world, and possibly in some cases even living in the same towns and neighborhoods as muggles, but at the same time they know nothing about them. Even if they choose to do things their own way, and follow their ow traditions, you'd think they'd still at least be aware of how thing work with muggles just by living around them and in the same world.
At least with things like The Dresden Files, the supernatural character exist fully within the everyday world, just with all of the supernatural stuff happening in secret.
I have to wonder if The Wizarding World stuff might have worked better if it were an Oz or Narnia style portal fantasy with The Wizarding World a totally separate world from The Muggle World.

 

[Anwar]

I'm sorry, but someone who has sold 600 million books can't be classified as not very good. If her writing isn't your jam, that's fair.

Tell that to Stephanie Meyer and EL James.

 

[Takeru]

I'm sorry, but someone who has sold 600 million books can't be classified as not very good. If her writing isn't your jam, that's fair.

Success is not proof of quality.

 

[ichab]

Success is not proof of quality.

That level of success? Yes it does. We aren't talking one or two successful books. It was seven. If she was not that good of a writer as you claim, then the series would have never made it that far. It would have certainly never spawned movies, spinoffs, theme parks, games and a T.V series. Plus there is the millions of children who actually took an interest in reading because of those books. Bad writers don't accomplish that.

I get that you don't like the books. That's fine. But the things you are trying to poke holes in could be done in any book or series that deals in fantasy. Fantasy by its very nature makes no logical sense.

 

[D Man]

There would be CIA analysts looking at the spy sat photos of the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts and trying to piece together what the hell had happened. Voldemort probably had an extensive file in the CIA archives.

I love this! But then again I'm a sucker for spy stories with analysts furiously typing away as the lead analyst paces in front of the the big monitor in the front of the room showing a blurry photo of Tom M. Riddle and a map of Great Britain. Do you have an agent, because CIA vs Wizards is going to make you rich!

 

[Gaith]

I have to wonder if The Wizarding World stuff might have worked better if it were an Oz or Narnia style portal fantasy with The Wizarding World a totally separate world from The Muggle World.

I always thought the natural end of the series would be Voldy trying to eradicate all muggles, à la Magneto in X2, and that that, along with Harry and Hermione's prodding, would result in the wizarding world finally revealing itself to humanity, much like Neo promises to do at the end of The Matrix. Granted, that would pretty well wreck the series' whole flavor from that point forward, but, hey, that's what prequels are for. And, as Patrick Willems argues, there's value to be found in letting stories (and even whole franchises) end:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[DonIago]

That level of success? Yes it does. We aren't talking one or two successful books. It was seven. If she was not that good of a writer as you claim, then the series would have never made it that far. It would have certainly never spawned movies, spinoffs, theme parks, games and a T.V series. Plus there is the millions of children who actually took an interest in reading because of those books. Bad writers don't accomplish that.

I get that you don't like the books. That's fine. But the things you are trying to poke holes in could be done in any book or series that deals in fantasy. Fantasy by its very nature makes no logical sense.

Are you saying it's impossible for objectively low-quality things to be popular?

 

[Gaith]

^ I tried reading a James Patterson book once. It was torture.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I love this! But then again I'm a sucker for spy stories with analysts furiously typing away as the lead analyst paces in front of the the big monitor in the front of the room showing a blurry photo of Tom M. Riddle and a map of Great Britain. Do you have an agent, because CIA vs Wizards is going to make you rich!

I was kinda imagining Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan with James Earl Jones as Admiral Greer going over the spy sat footage of Hogwarts.

 

[Takeru]

That level of success? Yes it does. We aren't talking one or two successful books. It was seven. If she was not that good of a writer as you claim, then the series would have never made it that far. It would have certainly never spawned movies, spinoffs, theme parks, games and a T.V series. Plus there is the millions of children who actually took an interest in reading because of those books. Bad writers don't accomplish that.

I get that you don't like the books. That's fine. But the things you are trying to poke holes in could be done in any book or series that deals in fantasy. Fantasy by its very nature makes no logical sense.

"Success isn't proof of quality" is not an opinion, it's a factual statement. Or do you also want to argue that McDonald's sells good food because they are among the most successful restaurant chains in the world.

If you want to make an argument why she's good please do, I'm willing to listen. So far you have only told me why I'm wrong that she's bad but that's not the same thing.

 

[Set Harth]

Or do you also want to argue that McDonald's sells good food because they are among the most successful restaurant chains in the world.

They were good back in the day, that's how they built the brand. Of course a lot depends on the franchisee, comes down to local management, et cetera.

 

[DonIago]

I was kinda imagining Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan with James Earl Jones as Admiral Greer going over the spy sat footage of Hogwarts.

"Take them out."

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

"Take them out."

''Now that is one dead Malfoy.''