The overall Harry Potter Years 1-7 story arc

[Owain Taggart]

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!

Kind of sounds like the setup for a Buddy Cop series set in the Wizarding world where a muggle cop and a detective from the Ministry of Magic team up to solve a series of mysteries that happen in both the wizard world and muggle world.

 

[JD]

I would read or watch that.

 

[DonIago]

''Now that is one dead Malfoy.''

Harry Potter and the Bomb of Nuclearity

 

[ichab]

"Success isn't proof of quality" is not an opinion, it's a factual statement.

No its not. Thats an opinion.

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.

Seriously? That is apples and oranges. But if you want to go there, Mcdonalds built their brand in the 50s by delivering good food at a reasonable price in a fraction of the time. If their food sucked, no one would have bothered and they would have went the way of Burger Queen and every other fast food chain that no longer exists.

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.

If you want to believe she is a bad writer, that is your prerogitive. Im not interested in changing anyones opinion. It just isnt based by any measurable that people normally quantify with successful writers.. Bad writers dont sell hundreds of millions of books. Just like bad shows dont score high ratings. One opinion is not the majority.

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

Harry Potter and the Bomb of Nuclearity

Or, though it's not as fatal, HP and the Cho Chang Child Payments...

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

Bad writers dont sell hundreds of millions of books.

Why pick on Shatner?

 

[DonIago]

Just like bad shows dont score high ratings.

Melrose Place has entered the chat.

People do, on occasion, love their garbage. Sometimes because it's garbage and they know it.

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

Melrose Place has entered the chat.

It's got plenty of company.

 

[Set Harth]

People do, on occasion, love their garbage.

 

[DonIago]

I'm not entirely sure whether this is related or not, but I'd like to think it's a good story and I tell it well...perhaps I think too highly of myself...

Years ago, when I was in highschool, I read Mercedes Lackey's The Last Herald-Mage trilogy. It made a massive impression on me, not just because I felt it was well-written, but because they were the first fiction books I'd ever read that featured a gay male protagonist, and one whom I found very relatable. I didn't read those books to death, but I often reread parts of them, for a long time.

Years later I reread them, and was bemused to find that I walked away somewhat cynically feeling that at a few points in the books I felt the protagonist needed to be smacked upside the head and told that it's not a capital crime to just enjoy the moment once in awhile. I also found him just a little whiny, which was perhaps appropriate in the first book where he was a teenager, but felt less appropriate by the time of the third book, set decades later.

In 2013 I had the opportunity to meet Miss Lackey in person, and during a panel I had the opportunity to ask her about this. I was a little surprised (though perhaps I shouldn't have been) to have it affirmed to me that the books were intended for a target audience of roughly the age I was when I first read them...i.e., they weren't really intended to be fiction for adults...and that she herself thought the protagonist was a bit of a drama queen (I don't recall whether she acknowledged writing him this way on purpose).

Just another object example that what we consider objectively good may be skewed by our own paradigm at the time we experience it, and that just because something is popular and/or sells well doesn't necessarily mean it's objectively good overall, though it can be good for a certain audience.

 

[ichab]

Melrose Place has entered the chat.

People do, on occasion, love their garbage. Sometimes because it's garbage and they know it.

One mans trash is another man's treasure.

 

[Takeru]

No its not. Thats an opinion.

No, it is literally not an opinion. Success and quality are two different things and they don't always correlate. Quality does not guarantee success and success is not proof of quality, that's not a controversial statement and pretending it is just my opinion is not a good faith argument.

Did you notice that I did not call your factual statements "opinions" that I can disagree with?

• Rowling is one of the most successful writers of modern times
• Harry Potter is beloved by millions
• The books did lead to wildly successful adaptations in different mediums

I don't disagree with any of that, I just don't agree that those facts say anything about the quality of her writing.

If you want to believe she is a bad writer, that is your prerogitive. Im not interested in changing anyones opinion.

Except you did try that by making the "She sold 600 million books so she can't be a bad writer" argument. But if you don't want to tell me why you think she's good based on her writing that's fine, you don't have to, it doesn't strengthen your position though and quite frankly, it makes me think you can't make an actual argument why she's a good writer.

 

[DonIago]

One mans trash is another man's treasure.

Which doesn't make it objectively good quality.

 

[ichab]

Which doesn't make it objectively good quality.

And who decides what is and isnt good quality?

 

[ichab]

No, it is literally not an opinion.

Yes, it literally is.

"So and so is a bad writer" or " the quality of her writing is bad" is an opinion. "So and so is a good writer" is also an opinion. However, backing up your opinion with actual numbers makes the opinion far stronger than "I didn't like it."

Did you notice that I did not call your factual statements "opinions" that I can disagree with?

• Rowling is one of the most successful writers of modern times
• Harry Potter is beloved by millions
• The books did lead to wildly successful adaptations in different mediums

I don't disagree with any of that, I just don't agree that those facts say anything about the quality of her writing.

And that's more than fair. Do you have any numbers or anything of any kind backing your claim that she is a bad writer other than " I didn't understand this or that"?

Except you did try that by making the "She sold 600 million books so she can't be a bad writer" argument. But if you don't want to tell me why you think she's good based on her writing that's fine, you don't have to, it doesn't strengthen your position though and quite frankly, it makes me think you can't make an actual argument why she's a good writer.

I literally replied to every single nit pick you made, which you have continued to ignore. You can nit pick the logic in fantasy to death because the genre by itself is illogical. But when hundreds of millions of people are buying the writers books, that means a vast number of people have a far different opinion of the quality of her writing than you do.

I don't like Avatar. I think the entire franchise is a piece of Shite. However, I am clearly in the minority on that opinion. Hundreds of millions of people think the quality of those movies is superb. And that's fine. Not every book or movie is meant to satisfy me.

 

[Gaith]

Soooooooo, getting back on track... I'm curious if anyone else expected or hoped that other nations' magical societies would play a larger role in the seven-year-story? As I recall, when Deathly Hallows came out, there was a fair amount of grumbling about the extended camping trip that made up a fair amount of the book's narrative and page count. Would anyone else here have preferred a visit to Beauxbatons and/or Dumstrang, or somewhere else, than what we got? Offhand, I can't think of any important new location the last two Years (books or movies) introduced other than the horcrux zombie cave and the grave of Harry's parents, and I'm not sure the latter even qualifies as "important."

As for the location of the final battle... I'm of two minds. On the one hand, I can't help feeling that having it be in Hogwarts was a boring and lazy choice that prevented the overall story from being an epic, because an epic fundamentally involves a long journey to a far-off place, with Mount Doom and the third Death Star being classic examples. What's more, having the ultimate battle of good vs. evil be decided at a children's school feels just plain silly. That said, Hogwarts is the center of the overall story, so I'm not sure where else it could have taken place. (Certainly not the dull and underwhelming underground Ministry of Magic!)

Maybe if the last year or two had built up to Voldy reclaiming, say, the hidden/lost castle of Camelot as the final step in his grand plan, that could have made a fitting site. Heck, doing so could have paid off the in-universe introduction of the historical wizard Merlin, from Harry's first train ride to Hogwarts.

"Camelot" by Alan Lee

 

[Set Harth]

the third Death Star

oh no...

 

[DonIago]

To me the biggest problem is that Voldy is established as an existential threat to wizarding society, and yet it's unclear that any wizards outside of those in the UK even particularly took notice of him.

Were the wizards in the US aware of him? And if so, why didn't they do a damn thing to help?

 

[theenglish]

When I first read the books, I thought that a lot of the details that were included were meant to be satire. You had the soccer hooligans or football hooligans at the Quidditch matches, you had the fascist posters at the ministry of magic, and you had the efforts of Hermione to free the enslaved minions at Hogwarts is a commentary on white liberals who believe they knew what was best for those who were considered minorities. You also had the Wizards not understanding what the common non-magical people did with their lives and I thought that was a commentary on the rich elites of our own society. In subsequent years, after having learned more about Rawlings own worldview, I've come to question my initial understanding of those parts of the novels.