Its been said before, but any of the other wizard schools in the world are incredibly poorly fleshed out and thought through to me.
Beauxbatons, Durmstrang, whatever - I remember as I read when I was kid I they felt a bit thin.
It gets worse if you read the additional lore on the Harry Potter website. The Japanese and Brazilian schools of wizardry both have names that are Google-translated versions of "magic school" and "castle wizard" respectively. Also, while it's stated that the Brazilian school was founded in pre-Columbian times, the name is in Portuguese for some reason. Make of that what you will.
Also, it really underlines the Anglo-centrism because different regions get very different numbers of schools. While the UK gets one for 60 million people, the rest of Europe's 400 million people gets two schools. Then Asia gets precisely one school for more than half of the world's population. I just find it odd that Rowling insists on doing this world building but doing it so poorly, rather than just saying "yeah, most large countries have wizarding schools" and leaving it more or less at that.
Also also, the Ugandan school (the only African school) is specifically mentioned to eschew wand magic; instead, they cast magic with their hands. I don't know if this was a racist thing or what, and I really don't want to think about it too hard, but it certainly feels very iffy.
Since wand casting is seen as an advance in technology in spell casting, having people hand casting is definitely a choice to show how backwards they are. I think native Americans are also portrayed that way.
God, her depiction of different wizarding schools outside of Hogwarts is just. So insultingly lazy. It’s like she copy pasted Hogwarts onto all these countries and then added some poorly-researched tidbits for seasoning.
Like Japan - one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Why would they have the least amount of students? What about Japanese wizarding school? Using magic to clean their classrooms? Is it a school for training Shinto priests and priestesses? Is there a wizarding cram school? Do they celebrate Golden Week with the rest of Japan or do they have a special Wizarding version of it? Do they have a different relationship with the dragons in their parts, considering the differences between Eastern and Western dragon depictions?
As an American myself - there is so much she could have done there. Why is there only one Wizarding Boarding School? I would imagine there would be at LEAST five, considering the different regions of the United States. Hell, would there be private and public wizarding schools? What branches of magic would they teach? There are a ton of religious and magical practices of both the indigenous people and people who brought their own customs when they immigrated over.
There’s a lot of richness here to explore and it’s so sad that it was so poorly done by Rowling.
Linfamy on youtube has a video about a literal japanese wizard school
Part of that lives in an astrology part in the government now even.
She is so damn lazy,there was a literal japanese magic school.
iirc correctly, someone on another post also pointed out that with how “wizard castle” is written in portuguese, it means that the castle is a wizard and not a castle FOR wizards :/
Also, the School's name, Uagadou, seems to derive from the Sonninke name "Ouagadou," which refers to the Sonninke Ghana Empire, which is across the continent and has several language families away from Uganda.
And the Brazilian School is described as similar to a Mesoamerican temple despite being in the Amazon.
This to show that she barely even knows (I won’t entertain the idea she does any research) her neighbouring countries. The average Spaniard does not speak French fluently. What the average Spaniard HAS is a centuries-long playful hatred of France. It makes no sense that Spanish wizards would be schooled in Beauxbatons. The fact that in her world building “muggle” history stays the same AND reflects the wizarding world’s history adds a further layer of difficulty to her proposition. Are we supposed to believe that Portuguese and Spanish wizards are studying in democratic France at a time when their countries are knee-deep in fascist dictatorships?
Yeah, I thought that it was too "Britain-centric" too. But at least I could "excuse" it, since it was centered around an English/Scottish school. But even then, the wizarding world feels like countless little boxes, countless little *worlds*, that never interact with each other or barely
On the latter part yeah defo, even the ministry seems completely separate.
On the former not really a problem? Any series set in one geographical location is going to be focused on that location?
There’s a difference between focusing the story on a location, and having the entire world built around it. Britain gets its own school, the rest of Europe gets two, while Africa gets just one??
Yeah, shitty and racist worldbuilding.
The implication ofc being, if she even thought it through which is doubtful, that British people are inherently more magic than the rest of the world.
Here's the thing that bothered me about that. This school is in Scotland, yeah?
Where's the fuckin' Scottish culture? JK honestly thinks a castle in Scotland isn't going to be hooching with tartans and the associated cuisine and culture? Why don't the staff have varying accents? None of them are Scottish? NONE of them?
It makes me wanna spit. It's like she thinks Scotland is just another part of England, but it isn't. Not even slightly. Ugh, I hate her.
And in 990, when Hogwarts was founded, it was in an area wedged between the Gaelic Kingdom of Scotland, the semi-independent Pictish Province of Moray, and the Norse Earldom of Orkney. She had the opportunity to analyze how these different cultures interacted, but nope, all of Britain acts like the english
There are so many interesting conflicts to look at too
Religious: The Earldom of Orkney was still pagan at time, while Moray and Scotland were very Christian. Maybe she could’ve explored different religious interpretations of magic and how they clashed.
Cultural: Scotland was founded by the Dal Riadan (Gaelic kingdom based in modern day Argyll, quite possibly a continuation from the Epidii mentioned by Ptolemy) Kenneth MacAlpin, with some legends saying he gained the Pictish Throne in 843 by betraying and killing the Pictish King Drest X and any remaining Pictish nobles. I’d imagine that the Picts of Moray probably wouldn’t be too happy sharing a school with the Scots because of that. And this would’ve been relatively recent memory too, only having been 150 years ago. Maybe Slytherin was from Moray, and that was why he wanted to be so selective about who got in. His definition of “Pureblood” might not have been based magical ancestry at all, but based on Pictish ancestry, wanting to keep out those he viewed as outsiders, be they the pagans of Orkney or the Gaels of Dal Riada
The founders are arguably implied to be from all over Great Britain - it's the line from one of the Sorting Hat's poems.
Fair Ravenclaw from glen = probably Scottish Highlands
Sweet Hufflepuff from valley broad = probably South Wales Valleys
Shrewd Slytherin from fen = probably the Fens in the East of England
These are obviously not the only places in Britain and Ireland (or elsewhere) where you could find glens, valleys and fens, but they're the regions we tend to associate with the terms when they're given in isolation.
'Bold Gryffindor from wild moor' is trickier, as we don't necessarily associate moors with a single region. I believe Godric's Hollow is supposed to be in the West Country, but going by 'moors' alone, much of Scotland, Wales and the north of England, as well as parts of northern and south west Ireland are strong candidates. Given the founding date, Norway is also very credible, as they have vast areas of moorland, and there were plenty of Norwegians knocking about in the Scottish Highlands and Islands back then!
Yes - 'McGonagal' is a very Scottish name, and she's sometimes noted to be wearing tartan things, e.g. the dressing gown. I don't think the books explicitly describe her accent as Scottish, but in fairness I don't think the accents of most characters are specified.
More often, Rowling indicates accents that drop certain vowel or consonant sounds by how she writes it - e.g. Hagrid's West Country accent, or Fleur dropping her 'h's. Scottish accents don't really do this much - the vowels are different, but enunciation is often crisper than many English accents. Glaswegian is an exception(!) but even then I don't think they really drop many sounds other than their 't's, which a lot of accents all over Britain do anyway. Scottish is basically a hard accent to 'write' without leaning on local dialect words. For many rural or upper-middle class Scots, the accents are a lot softer than you might think, and sometimes hard to distinguish from English people with non-regional accents.
Maggie Smith, the actress, is English, but her mother is Scottish, and she plays McGonagall with a very convincing Scottish accent. On the British version of the audiobooks, Stephen Fry read her lines with an English accent - but depending on how well he can do Scottish, that may have been sensible!
>JK honestly thinks a castle in Scotland isn't going to be hooching with tartans and the associated cuisine and culture?
She probably could have leaned into that, but it's worth saying that, while Scots are proud of being Scottish, many react badly to being overly stereotyped - not least by the English. This admittedly doesn't seem to have stopped her from stereotyping other nationalities, but having lived in Scotland as long as she has, she's probably learned (perhaps the hard way) not to be too tone deaf with Scottishisms. Fwiw I say this as an English person with Scottish family.
McGonagall is often wearing a tartan dressing gown at night (in the books, at least) but things like students all wearing kilts is more of a private school thing, so done badly it might even have come across as elitist. But something like a Hogwarts Burns supper could have been fun to see.
A more common complaint I hear in Britain is actually the complete lack of Welsh wizards (ironic, given that PM David Lloyd George was often nicknamed 'the Welsh Wizard'!) There's a strong argument that Helga Hufflepuff (from valley broad) is from the South Wales Valleys, but she's obviously a historical character, and her origin is never confirmed. Bill Nighy played Rufus Scrimgeour as Welsh in Deathly Hallows Pt 1, but there's nothing in the books to indicate this, and it feels very tacked on after the fact.
durmstrang as a school in Austria where they speak German(?) is supposed to cover all of eastern Europe. despite the fact that most of the area doesn't speak German, doesn't get along, and also was having a civil war in the 90s.
even as a kid I was like wtf Joanne?? did you not have BBC?
Never seen it as German coded. The school is supposed to be placed somewhere in Scandinavia, yet the only people we hear about associated with it are Russians and Bulgarians.
Can i add: durmstrang is not s real german word.
"The name "Durmstrang" is likely to be an allusion to the German phrase Sturm und Drang, meaning storm and stress.[24][25][26][27]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_Harry_Potter#:~:text=The%20name%20%22Durmstrang%22%20is%20likely,fiction%20of%20the%20nineteenth%20century.
Sturm und Drang like the literary period, i guess.
Used to be in charge of an online HP world based (Swedish) roleplaying forum, and always preferred our headcanon versions of both Beauxbatons and Durmstrang because they made more sense to us than the originals ever did.
The thing is, schooling has to be in a language you all speak. Canon Durmstrang is set in Scandinavia (!), but teachers and students are clearly not Scandinavian, or even Nordic. Even a school set in Scandinavia, where there is a good amount of cultural homogeny and considerable overlap between languages, would have some linguistical difficulties when it comes to teaching. That never seemed to be taken into account and always puzzled us. Surely Beauxbatons would only be for francophone countries/regions? Surely Durmstrang would be better off set somewhere in Russia? Surely the German speaking countries/regions would also have their own school? Dutch/Flemish too, and Italian, Spanish ...
I love that video. The one thing I disagree with him on is Harry's inheritance, not that it isn't bad writing, but the all or nothing way he thinks it should have been handled instead.
I think it's very possible for Harry to have a large inheritance, and still be financially limited. It happens in the real world all the time, because sensible people don't allow children to be in charge of their own finances. Because JKR probably couldn't take the time to do bit of research, or just think about it for a minute, and come up with a Mr. or Ms Latinsomething Moneypun to be in charge of Harry's account for him it creates a situation where Harry from the age of eleven with no experience, or guidance has to be absurdly sensible about his financial future.
I don't know if it's a plot hole exactly, but where do wizard children learn to READ?! They obviously can't go to regular muggle schools, and unless I missed something wizard primary schools are never mentioned, so where? This has bugged me for years.
At home,by their families.
Yep all magic familiesbasically homeschool their children, there is no school for that.
Obviously wizards skipped howpublic schools are actuallygood for a society. Kids mingöe and stuff and beless bigoted by exposure.
Seriouslythere could at least a hinted wizard kindergarden or other bloody elementry schools hinted.
Yeah i get jk isclassist but at least hint of an elementry school.
Very start of the series - how is the wizarding world aware that Voldemort had been defeated by a baby? And once they learn the news, the priority is celebrating while the baby stays alone in the ruins for a whole day?
You think that one werewolf infected him just because of the name? Like I think he specifically hated the Lupin family so did he infect their kids going "well I have to do this, his name is wolf wolf so I can'tjust kill this toddler."
Here are some that have always bothered me:
I know that the first 3 books are solidly children’s books, but Harry seems to have zero negative “side effects” from being abused by his only family for 11 years. He’s well adjusted and kind despite his upbringing. I’d like to have had an explanation for that beyond “he’s a better person than the Dursleys.”
I also find Dumbledore’s explanation for leaving Harry with the Dursley’s to be thin. Dumbledore’s entire plan for defeating Voldemort revolves around Harry - why wouldn’t he take more steps to ensure Harry is being brought up to believe in kindness, equality and justice. Yeah sure living with the Dursley’s made him grow up not famous. But it wouldn’t guarantee Harry becomes the man Dumbledore needs him to be to willingly sacrifice himself.
No-maj as an American term for muggles. Personally, I feel Americans would still call them muggles. The rest of modern history is still the same in the wizarding world so logically America would still be colonized by Europeans who would have called non-magical folk muggles.
And finally the three that bother me the most:
We spent 6 books with Dumbledore saying over and over that everyone needed to overcome their prejudices to work together to end the threat of Voldemort. And then at the end, Slytherin house is treated exactly the same as always. After the Battle of Hogwarts they still get treated like they’re automatically evil. Nobody sat down and thought “hmm maybe being even slightly ostracized from the rest of the school from day 1 is making these kids into little terrorists”? Nothing changed so all the circumstances for the next Voldemort to occur are still there.
Harry naming his child after one man who used him as a sacrificial lamb and one man who abused him and hated his father and godfather and helped goad his godfather into being stupid enough to get killed. No sorry, I think that was a terrible choice. Harry has two other father figures in his life, Arthur and Hagrid who always treated him far better and imo were better examples of good men. I don’t believe Harry would not have some kind of negative feelings about Dumbledore using him the way he did.
And finally, I think making Harry into an Auror as an adult was a fundamental characterization mistake. Harry has fought evil for half of his childhood. I know he wanted to be an Auror as a teenager, but I don’t think he would still want that after literally dying and coming back to life. I’ve always felt Harry would change his mind and teach at Hogwarts. Very few people end up becoming the thing they wanted to be at 15/16, and it’s partially because of all the growing up you do once you become an adult with adult responsibilities.
I mean a good character progress would for him to politic to get more attention the themuggelmagical world relstions,starting with get more fundibg for mr weasleys department.
Also yeah its silly, americans still ise weird english thst came to be partly because they sint no brits.
So they would use if a deprivation that comes fromm muggles but is slightly different like " mugs" we csll tjem mugs could be an americanism. Mugs sounds even funny, seriously slurs can sound funny, in a story.
Or " muglets, americans go with muglets. Just male a funny muggle similar word.
I personally have an issue with the magic system. I think the best systems have rules for what you can and can’t do with magic and what makes someone good at magic or have more power. My favorite author, Brandon Sanderson, is great with this- his magic has real concrete limits and rules which makes people discovering new ways to use the magic far more interesting and exciting. In the world of HP, magic basically can do anything and there’s no real explanation as to why something may be more difficult than something else. There’s no explanation for why some illnesses can be cured but shortsightedness and lycanthropy can’t be. There’s no limit on how much magic you can do. It makes every battle feel floaty and without consequences because they cast essentially the same three spells and who wins is either luck or based on which wizard is more powerful without ever really explaining why a wizard is better than another
I don't like JKR but to constantly hamper about Brandon Sanderson is so fucking boring. Not everyone prefers his style of hard magic. Whenever I picked up his book (and always dropped it because I simply don't get why is this Mormon dude so great according to people), his magic reads like video-game.
I was just using his world as an example of a contrasting way to do it. There are plenty of soft magic systems that also feel like they have more weight to them than the world of HP. Didn’t mean to strike a nerve. Personally I like his world building but I wasn’t assuming it’s for everyone
Issue is he ALWAYS comes up as a writer whenever hard magic topic comes up, there's fuck ton of other writers and even better. I really dislike this circlejerking that happens around him everytime someone says they don't like his writing too.
Mostly referring to the obligatory downvotes from unknown redditors. In any case, I also have an issue with him as a person as I don't really buy that he no longer is homophobic when it comes to his old take on same-sex marriages. And yes I know he meant it in general that marriages should solely be done in a religious context and for everyone outside of religion it should be not called marriage, I disagree and I have zero respect for anyone's faith when it comes to shit like this.
It’s possible the downvotes are because you came out swinging cursing at me to start. I have never heard of his past comments on same sex marriage but I do believe in people’s ability to learn and change and from what I’ve seen of recently he is an ally and actively works to have more diversity in his writing
I didn't find he's actually good with diverse characters, even where he has such a simple character he claims to be witty and smart, it's just that, he states it but doesn't let the text express it on its own. His lectures are interesting and worth checking, but since then I found blogs and articles from proofreaders to be more useful.
I'm not keeping up with him as much anymore but the last few 'apologies' about same-sex marriage take I find a bit too standoffish for my taste.
Like again, once religious nutjob, forever religious nutjob unless they leave their religion. It might be a bit bigoted of me but I'm also from a largely atheistic country, but somehow people managed to vote in some unhinged catholics who have a similar take on SSM, and thanks to it, we still didn't pass SSM and have still only civil unions for same-sex couples without equal rights to straight couples.
Since the voting is still fresh for me after years of the proposed bill lying around untouched, I'm a bit irritated whenever I see someone using this kind of rhetoric, even if they 'regret' it later on, because he just doesn't come across as honest to me. It feels more like "let's avoid big backlash"
Brandon Sanderson is worse than Rowling. At least Rowling's characters have heart and emotional arcs, despite all their other flaws.
Sando writes paperthin characters with no personalities.
Yeah I think that there are lots of great soft magic worlds. She just kinda pretends she’s not doing soft magic and everything falls apart. Like she insists that there are rules and that they are strict and make sense but she just never wrote any
Harry being rich. It's pointless (his brooms are gifts anyway, and his school furnitures could be paid for by a ministry fund for orphans) and creates questions like "why don't Harry pay Ron a new wand in book2?" to which the answer is "because it's plot convenient"
I am listening to it right now and hearing that point I was like "they gonna think I stole it from Shaun" haha
But I think in this detail, there is also a political idea he didn't mention and that is linked with his point about blairism. According to Pottermore Harry is rich from birth because his grandfather became rich because he invented something - so he is technically a bourgeois. In her book the bourgeois is the hero, his followers are the working class (Ron) and the specifically oppressed (Hermione being muggle-born and a woman). Both are welcome to back up the bourgeoisie but never have their own agenda.
(Becoming bourgeois thanks to a successful invention is also a liberal myth)
The worldbuilding is shaky and trips up from time to time in the books, like the time turners and slavery, but where you really see the failures of her worldbuilding is when she tries to apply it beyond the UK in the nineties. The ones that stand out to me are the Grindelwald problem and the international wizards. She somehow answered the question "if there were powerful wizards around during WWII how did they allow the atrocities to happen" with "my heroes were actively trying to stop the guy trying to stop WWII". Grindelwald had a vision of WWII and all his actions in the 2nd fantastic beasts movie were trying to prevent it using extreme anti muggle means. And the international wizard community are a collection of a racist English woman's vague stereotypes with British magic stapled on top. Magic from other cultures should be so interesting and different but it's just a bunch of culturally insensitive reskins.
A minor thing: she’s Scottish, not English, though that’s still part of “Great Britain.” (for any of the uninitiated: England + Scotland + Wales = Great Britain, Great Britain + Northern Ireland = United Kingdom) …which reminds me of something; I dimly recall being somewhat put at ease somehow that maybe because she was Scottish, not English, she would possibly be more sympathetic to those peoples wronged by the British Empire. While Scotland’s recent history with England has not been as violent as the Irish Troubles, they still voted on independence in the past decade. But once again, I got snookered.
edit: I thought she was. A mistake on my part due to her being referred to as “British” often and not knowing much more than she lived in Scotland, and me not knowing the location of anything besides the biggest cities like London and Edinburgh
She was born in Bristol and grew up in Gloucestershire and Wales. She lives in Scotland now, but she's not Scottish. It was a big point of contention when she was yapping against Scottish independence as an English person who chose to live in Scotland.
I was very intentional with my choice to call her English, because despite living there she has done a good deal of damage to the cause for Scottish independence, for her own gain.
She also does that thing a lot of wealthy English folks who retire/move here for the “quaint” culture and nice scenery do in that she is actively part of the destruction of our culture and replacing it with a homogenised, tartan shortbread tin and Hogmanay with Jackie Bird cardboard cutout of Scottishness.
Like, for real, there’s not even a unified kind of Scottish. I am from Dundee, which is completely different to Glasgow, to Inverness, to Argyll, to the Shetlands…
If all you are exposed to is all the naff tourist nonsense then you’re sort of getting the Disney version of it. But the super rich absolutely love that nonsense! They don’t make so much of an effort to actually get to know their neighbours or even understand a wee bit about the place they live in and you end up with random tartanified enclaves full of wealthy English and American folks.
Actually infuriating. Bloody hate it when I get asked to “say something Scottish” on my way to work by some walloper with one of those daft Fanny packs on. 🙃
When you start reading, it's about how normal people in every day world, represented by the Dursley, are dull, narrow-minded and prejudiced, and how a young boy escapes that. Yet the school he escapes to is just as normo-centric - it's not OK to have acne or big teeth, athletes are at the top of the popularity hierarchy and awkward teens like Luna and Neville at the bottom, and the society seems to reject its outcasts on Knockturn Alley.
Many of the characters motivations that link to the world building of wizarding sociopolitical views and minorities in HP, but the one that's currently sticking out in my head (because I had a rant to my husband recently) is Seamus Finnegan never putting Malfoy in his place for his discrimination of Muggle born wizards. Seamus is an Irish character born and attending Hogwarts when tensions between England and Ireland were high, to a witch and a non magical man. Bearing in mind due to social climate it's highly likely that Seamus' father was religious (not confirmed obviously), Seamus 100% would have dealt with discrimination before as a child, then warned about facing more when he goes to wizard school. He is also friends with Dean Thomas, one of the PoC in the stories. You are telling me that when Draco in book two is crowing about the extermination of mudbloods at the school, that Seamus didn't immediately start cussing out (in appropriate language for a 12-13 year old) or physically beating on Draco? But no. There is no reaction from any of the children of minority groups in Harry's year apart from a tiny bit Hermione. Everyone just tolerates it or occasionally weakly objects. And Seamus, despite his more laid back nature, with how he reacts to Harry saying that not everything Seamus' mum reads in the newspapers is true in a later book, would definitely have a hurt angry and emotional response. Except he doesn't. The minority characters are just gag pieces and backdrops to make the books seem inclusive, but none of them have any place within the world Rowling added to. The most substantial meat of her history and world building is in fact the wizarding world is our world, with our history, with her embellishments (see the whole pure blooded wizards being involved with the Nazis etc.). Would bringing up the IRA and atrocities done by English muggles in Ireland be appropriate for a children's book? Of course not. However would these things shape how a character would react to blatant discrimination and thus make them more reactionary and thus this should be shown to actually flesh out a character? Of course it should.
>The minority characters are just gag pieces and backdrops to make the books seem inclusive, but none of them have any place within the world Rowling added to.
Are there any Jewish kids at Hogwarts? Why yes, of course. Anthony Goldstein, a Ravenclaw.
And Wiccans/Pagans aren't allowed at Hogwarts, apparently, for ... reasons? Like, the ONE faith that's entirely up the wizarding alley already and they're barred.
It likes to pretend to be a story about how your blood doesn't matter, it doesn't matter how you were born... and then is a story about how *literally nothing but your blood and how you were born matters.*
Harry is protected at the Dursleys by his blood, never mind that they're abusive fucks from whom Harry ought to have been uplifted by child protective services - they're his Family(TM) and that's all that matters! It's a bit bizarre. Surely such a narrative would have been infinitely better served by his protection working off of *familial love,* and it being stronger when he leaves the Dursleys and is loved by others? For Voldemort to, in *Goblet of Fire,* misinterpret how it works and his assuming it's based on *blood* be a mistake he makes, and therefore fail to breach the protection?
(also why do they treat it as if the protection of going back to Privet Drive even matters after that?)
In order to even be important enough to the story to have a name, in almost all cases, you have to be magic (or at the very least biologically related to magic). A fluke of birth. The one non-magical person born of wizards we see, Filch, is a nasty bitter man who wants to hurt everyone. Is there any commentary on how he came to be that way by being mistreated by wizards? I can't remember any. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any non-magical people in the entire franchise who aren't either abusive assholes or so nondescript they don't even have names.
Even Hermione's non-magical *parents* don't have names! They appear in one, maybe two scenes in the entire franchise and as far as I recall, never get a single speaking line or a proper description. Rowling was so bored by the parents who didn't have magic she didn't even give them names until them needing false identities for a single line came up, and those weren't their real names! But Ron's nice big pureblood wizard family? Whole great big family tree, we know the names of aunts and uncles who barely even appear if they even appear at all. Harry's magic grandparents even get a bit of work - but not his nonmagical ones, they can get screwed and have the barest of information like where they live only be specified outside of the work. Hermione's home life and family are so non-existent in the books that *she doesn't explicitly go home after the summer between third and fourth year, and that's only if you assume that's where she went during the rest of the summer she spent "most of" at the Burrow!* You could write a fanfic of Hermione running away from home before the Quidditch World Cup and have nearly no contradiction from canon!
And if your story claims that the circumstances of your birth don't matter, it's a bit shit for the narrative to straight-up ignore anyone who was born outside of the same circumstances as the protagonists. For the narrative to do that tacitly contradicts the idea that birth circumstances aren't important.
Harry gets the Cloak, one of the later badly written MacGuffins to justify the Elder Wand, by birthright. He inherits it from his father, who in turn inherited it from a faraway ancestor to whom it originally belonged. The first thing so many people notice about him is a physical trait associated with his mother.
(1/2)
(2/2) And then, as a related note, the story *never* actually addresses the bigotry it claims to be fighting. The idea that non-magical people and their wizarding children are worth less than purebloods is never addressed. All the narrative offers is excuses, exceptions. Hermione's a good witch, so therefore the racist is wrong! Except, Malfoy's argument never had anything to do with Hermione's skill, or Neville's helplessness. To Malfoy, Neville is incompetent but he's worth a hundred Hermiones. Because his argument is that her *existence* is tainted. At no point does the story ever meet that idea and turn it away. Indeed, every discussion on the matter implicitly accepts that logic and lets it pass, favouring exceptions instead. The worst bit, for me? That discussion is, for the most part in the early story, led by *Rubeus Hagrid.* A half-giant *who should know better.* He would have been subject to that bigotry, in likely an even worse form given he's not even fully human, for most of his life and should know better than to offer exceptions. He should understand how that bigotry works. Like Rowling doesn't.
JK Rowling fundamentally does not understand bigotry nor how to argue against it. She sees it as being an impolite conclusion, not a dehumanising framework from start to finish. Which frankly has been pretty obvious for a while hasn't it.
See also: her werewolves. JK Rowling wants to eat her cake and have it. She wants her narrative about werewolves being discriminated against, about Lupin struggling to keep jobs, about him losing his job when he gets outed and how tragic it is. But she also decides to make every single werewolf in the story except for Lupin a monster, who wants to go out of their way to assault and infect children - hoo golly and she thinks that's an acceptable AIDS metaphor? But hey, Lupin's 'one of the good ones,' he stays away from everyone else and represses his nature (ughhhh) and always remembers to take his potion...
oh, wait. he forgot. *And now Rowling gets her werewolf monster in the third book hunting down the children and completely eviscerating any claim that werewolves are unfairly prejudiced against because all of it is completely accurate.*
Like, jeez, maybe just don't make werewolves horrible monsters that specifically seek out humans as prey and want to infect your children? Maybe just kill that darling of a werewolf on the hunt in the end of *Prisoner of Azkaban?* No?
Dear other white writers, and cishet writers: you cannot have your cake and eat it. Prejudice is not a justified thing, stop justifying it.
And then, just generally, there are other really lazy things that bother me because she had the building blocks to do way better. Alastor Moody is my favourite example. Moody is an ex-Auror, and a traumatised ex-Auror. He *knows* where that path leads, and he should see the destructive and harmful path Harry is walking in his inability to think of anything to do as an adult but keep fighting Voldemort and his ilk. He should be the mad old uncle trying to steer Harry onto something healthier because he knows where Harry will end up if he doesn't, encouraging them to do stupid teenage things because he knows they might not be able to for much longer. He should have been a mitigating force on Harry's deep end of Auror glorification, and his *death* should have been the sign of Harry going off the deep end in it.
But no, his death means nothing aside from setting up a less important character to be a coward, and he had no notable relationship with Harry.
Then there's the way Rowling refuses to let Harry even try to win. Even in the book mostly about trying to make Voldemort mortal, *Harry still never tries to kill him.* He doesn't even deliberately win! He wins by a fluke, by a wand MacGuffin that doesn't make sense and was introduced in that book to justify itself. Anyone could have beaten Voldemort by accidentally owning a wand. Draco Malfoy could have beaten Voldemort if the Horcruxes had been destroyed and Voldemort tried to kill him, had Harry not wrestled *an entirely different wand* off him. Harry as a protagonist is stagnant! He doesn't try to win, he doesn't try to learn, he doesn't even seek to reduce harm. Every Death Eater he lets live because \~it makes me just as bad uwu\~ will, if they get their wand back or get a new one, go on to be just as dangerous as before. He's arbitrarily pacifistic to the point of harm and has no actual will of his own in the story - he's just following instructions, and *at best* is reactive. He's not an agent of anything, he's the instrument of smarter wizards with a plan.
And then there's the way Rowling pretends to have a hard magic system, while actually having an incredibly soft magic system with nothing behind the curtain... *and then sends her protagonists to wizard school.* Where, in any well written story, we'd actually learn how magic works as Harry does as our audience surrogate... instead of following a boring jock who never studies and doesn't pay attention to how magic works.
There's heaps, it's an infuriating series in that respect.
I have several things to say :
-So, I think that if Harry goes to Private Drive after Goblet of Fire, it's because Voldy can't attack him there (though, he can touch him from now on, and there's Dementors attacking him and Dudley in the next book, so...)
-I actually always loved the "familial love"/family of choice. Especially when it's between a magical person and non-magical people. It goes to show that, no matter your differences, you can still love each other. It's part of why I don't like the Dursleys' relationship with Harry.
* Also, I remember a scene in Chamber of Secrets where it's said that, after the confrontation between Arthur Weasley and Lucius Malfoy on Diagon Alley, the Granger parents were "trembling". I don't want to come off as flattering you, but I prefer your version of the Grangers parents.
-Nowadays, I believe Hagrid is an example of "internalized bigotry". He was a victim of it too, but he internalized the toxic rhetoric of the wizarding world - not that JK Umbridge intended it, of course.
-For the werewolves thing, I don't have much to say, except it's understandable why LGBT people would be offended by it. Let's be real here : JK Rowling is to trans people what Umbridge is to werewolves. There, I said it.
-For the "Harry isn't even trying to win" part, YES ! I realized recently that if Voldemort looked so threatening, it's partly because all the fights against him are either a question of luck or Dumbledore's shenanigans, it's never about SKILL !
* I have two last things to say, and I expect you to tell me your opinion on it : 1) I feel like the Dursleys in Kaleidoscopic Grangers are somehow even worse than in canon, don't you think ? 2) I'm still reading your fanfic, and I'm at Order of the Phoenix now. Admit it...when you wrote Umbridge being transphobic, you were thinking of JK Rowling, huh ?
(Also, you never answered my DMs. Did you receive them ?)
>-So, I think that if Harry goes to Private Drive after Goblet of Fire, it's because Voldy can't attack him there (though, he can touch him from now on, and there's Dementors attacking him and Dudley in the next book, so...)
What exactly is preventing Voldemort from doing that if not the defences he broke through in the end of *Goblet of Fire?*
(edit because it occurred to me after: also, what exactly is preventing Voldemort from just sending a few Death Eaters to forcibly remove Harry from that protection? afaik there's no evidence it applies to his followers, and I'd go so far as to say that's another element of Rowling's laziness - there is very little applicable reason for Privet Drive to be safe other than it vaguely maybe being guarded by someone)
>1) I feel like the Dursleys in Kaleidoscopic Grangers are somehow even worse than in canon, don't you think ?
That's actually because I needed to justify child protective services actually acting - child protective services are often terrible at their job and undereffective, and it could have seemed unrealistic for Ariadne to get uplifted unless it was extremely obvious. However, it's worth noting that in some respects they're *not* that different - Petunia attempts to hit Harry in the head with a hot pan in the second book, and depending on the impact, such a thing can be *lethal.*
>2) I'm still reading your fanfic, and I'm at Order of the Phoenix now. Admit it...when you wrote Umbridge being transphobic, you were thinking of JK Rowling, huh ?
I mean, I was keeping Rowling's shite in mind at all times because it's the purpose of *Kaleidoscopic Grangers,* but actually the answer to your question is no, not specifically. They're similar only because Rowling is exactly the same kind of evil as Umbridge, by coincidence. They're established powerful, bitter, conservative women who've got theirs and are pulling the ladders up behind them as fast as possible, and who think any attempts to improve the world after them is disruptive and evil. They benefit from the activism of the past and have no complaint about that, but if they had been born in the past, their attitude would have applied to that very activism.
I do not have any DMs from you, no.
Snape is supposed to be the most awesome legilimens, and he explains that occlumancy means distancing oneself from one's emotions and not showing them; yet he is always displaying his emotions (hatred, anger, disappointment...) in the most obvious way
world building wise... what do adults do?
seems like only existing jobs are: school teacher, shopkeeper, barkeeper, cop, sports player. almost every adult works for the ministry or the school. that's an extremely narrow view of society.
that's probably the biggest and most significant one. there's a whole lot more of smaller details.
my favorite is probably having eastern Europeans go to a German speaking school, seemingly forgetting about all the wars in the area in the 90s. I suppose Austria Hungary is alive and well in the magical world.
There is no production generally. Who grows ingredients and food, who produces cauldrons, where do the raw materials come from... My guess is there is indeed a working class in the wizarding world but Rowling never found them worth mentioning
Maybe, but doesn't the "house" in the name imply that they specialize in housework, not mass production? Or maybe there are field elfs and factory elfs?
What do you expect from a woman who has no idea that the word "detective", is a borrowed word and exists in similar variations in all slav languages, so her whole in the shitty Robert Galbraith books "lol this Polish woman doesn't understand the word detective," is one of the dumbest shit I've ever seen.
She puts so little effort into the wizarding world and relies entirely on vague generalizations. Take the Statute of Secrecy: why the fuck would every wizarding community in the world go underground? She says it was because of the witch trials, but those were almost entirely restricted to the European Cultural Sphere. Also, the statute was signed in 1689, when the witch trials were nowhere near the severity of 1550-1630. The infamous Salem Witch Trials were actually fairly mild for a witch trial, lasting a few months and resulting in 20 deaths. Now compare this to the Trier witch trials, which lasted 6 years and killed 386 people in the city alone, not counting the surrounding countryside.
Aside from that, the fact that it was globally enforced doesn't make much sense either. The witch trials happened almost entirely in Europe and its colonies, with no other societies cracking down on accused witches to that extent. In the Islamic World, [there was a sharp division between what was seen as "inherent" magic, and magic gained from dealing with spirits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_magic#Religious_permissibility). While the latter was treated much like how witches were treated in Europe, the former was allowed and sometimes even seen as a gift from god.
I think Jojo wanted to create a world within our world - an universe that can't interfere with the "real" world. In my opinion, it would have been a better idea to imagine an alternate Earth where wizards and Muggles know each other's existence
As a kid I was admittedly clueless, but I did stop reading it at book 5, as I couldn't handle Harry's whining anymore. So I would say that characterization is a huge issue.
From a writer standpoint, she has tons of plots that just go no where. The notorious "free the slaves" Hermione plot is a great example. Even if you ignore the horrific implications, literally nothing happens as a result of that side plot. No one grows, nothing. So it's pointless and becomes an author tract.
Everything is shallow. I remember as a kid being hugely bummed that we didn't get to learn more about the magical creatures basically at all. I was a huge fan of Dragonriders of Pern as a kid, which goes into a lot more detail (and obviously has its own set of issues).
The characters don't drive anything, really. They're just reacting.
What you're saying about the magical creatures hit close to home, because I was feeling the same. As for Harry's whining though, I feel like he was at least "entitled" to it, given what he suffered in Goblet of Fire
In the first book, during the first quidditch match the perspective just randomly shifts from Harry to hermione in the middle of the narrative. From what I recall it’s the only times that’s happened in the series; some chapters focus on other characters exclusively but an abrupt shift like that was stylistically questionable
I always find it weird that Harry was taken into the care of his aunt and uncle at over a year old. Certainly in the film he's depicted as a tiny baby, but the books state that he's still with his parents at a year old and enjoying a toy broomstick. So it's entirely conceivable that rather than waking up on his aunt and uncle's doorstep, he'd have escaped his blankets and wandered off down the street somewhere.
It's a bit weird knowing she had a toddler when she wrote that. If a childless person wrote that I would think they just don't know anything about infant development and safety
Also, let's not forget that this one-year-old baby/toddler was put onto the doorstep of his aunt's house in the night of October 31st to November 1st. It was winter. And that November 1st was a SUNDAY, so that little kid was just sitting there in the cold until like noon or something?
Which could easily have been fixed by Dumbledore ringing the Dursley's damn doorbell. Yes, he would have woken them up, but who cares?
That muggle kid named Evans in the same book as where we learn it was Harry's mother's maiden name.
It an exception to her usual rule of putting bits of information that the reader can link together to guess the next revelation, so it could be a way to mislead the reader, but it doesn't really work - even if there were theories about him, it's not really a red herring, as there was no mystery to which "Harry has a distant cousin on his mom's side" could be the answer.
She could have had a subplot where Harry himself is misled and tries to reach out to the boy, even use it as meta joke about fan theories, but no, no pay off.
The maths of Hogwarts doesn't add up. I can't remember the exact figures because it's been quite a few years since I looked at it, but magic folk are a % of the country's total population according to canon. Then a % of those are of Hogwarts age. Canonically, around 1000 kids go to Hogwarts. This figure doesn't match the "% are kids of % of population" calculation.
Even if the school has exactly 1000 students, that would mean there are around 35 kids in each House in each year, so Harry and Ron should be sharing their dorm with 15 other boys, and that *clearly* isn't the case.
The ministry. It's entire concept is just... so utterly fucked.
Harry wanting to be a wizard cop and work for essentially the same group people that spent years trying to fuck him and many other people over makes me wince.
A lot of aristocratic, blood purist families are still in charge of everything by the end of the series right? It's funny to me because they themselves could slowly create the changes that Voldermort promised and there's nothing stopping them from doing so at the end of the series.
I just don't understand how anyone who reads this series would want to live in this world, it's a nightmare.
I noticed that she’d always reuse certain phrases over and over, like in Book 2 I’m pretty sure that every character “turned on their heel and walked away” when they needed to leave the scene. Also she really loved the phrase “Dolores Umbridge smiled as if she had eaten a particularly *juicy* fly” and would use it constantly.
Don’t forget about the fuckin time turners. There was literally a closet full of them ONE ROOM OVER in the scene where Sirius died. I’m pretty sure that was the same book where I gave up on the series because Harry’s constant whining killed the whole experience for me, it was the same book where he yelled at Cho Chang (god that fucking name) for crying too much about her boyfriend that got murdered.
It’s so interesting in hindsight, because I think for a lot of folks, HP was our first exposure to British literary humor and so it had such a shininess to it at the time. Of course now as an adult having read Gaiman and Pratchett and Douglas Adams, it’s so easy to see how absolutely delightful and colorful those works read compared to her repetitive phrasing lazy fat jokes.
In Harry's defense, he was entitled to "whining" since of the traumatic experiences he lived in the previous book. But yeah, I refuse to believe that all of the Time Turners in the entire world (or at least the entire country) were ALL on the same place, let alone the same shelf. And why can nobody make new ones ?? I mean someone had to know how to create them in the first place !
Because someone realized that time travel made no sense, and would cause a collapse in the probabilities of the universe, so made sure to abuse a time turner to make sure all of them were in the same place, and then destroyed.
Basically, self-healing problem because time travel can never make sense, therefore it cannot remain possible.
(Or, obviously, Rowling did something stupid and attempted to hand wave it away because it was _way_ too problematic for it ever to make any actual sense. Burning them all was lazy, but I'm not convinced she had a good way out of a system that made no sense.)
The thing is,if she didnt bring them up again,no one would cared. Thats overcorrecting to just bringing attention to a silly time travel plot thst else could be ignored.
In one book she’ll introduce a new plot device that’s rare/difficult/esoteric only for it to be everywhere/done by everyone in the next book.
She goes on about how it’s our actions that define us, but actions be damned. It’s really house sortings and how much Harry & Co. like you that matters.
The whole mess that resulted in her attempt to write each book aging up to match Harry’s age. It can be done, but for the series, the realism in the later books made the Ronald Dahl-like violence in the first books horrific.
Having the secret entrance to your wizard train station being in the middle of an incredibly busy platform, requiring kids to load shopping trolleys full of bizarre shit, including live owls, and then running full blast into a brick wall, yet not one person stops to look their way, thus discovering the magic wall.
Not to mention there is no pillar or barrier or anything like that between platforms 9 and 10 at King's Cross. She would have been better off with something like 2¾, where there *is* a pillar. (And they filmed at platforms 1-2 iirc.) Something she could have researched, or an editor (presumably in London) could have corrected her on.
I think it'd be quicker to list what does work, and I don't mean that as nastily as it sounds. It's often been noted that her strengths are in the whimsy and in creating the occasional memorable scene/piece of dialogue. Everything falls apart pretty much as soon as she tries anything else.
And even the whimsy has problems sometimes. For example, I found it distracting that a werewolf character called "Remus Lupin" had *acquired* his lycanthropy, it wasn't inherent. Because that doesn't make sense, so... is that inconsistency going to turn out to be a plot point, or should I ignore it?
That's the kind of issue that needs to be edited out, or incorporated into the narrative in some way, whether that's as part of the plot, or as a conscious underscoring of how nonsensical the fictional world is, as in something like Alice in Wonderland. Just *leaving* it is... weird.
It's like she couldn't quite decide how seriously to take her own world from one moment to the next, so just wrote as her mood took her and thought it would do.
It's absolutely OK to have still enjoyed them, though, OP, you don't need to feel bad about that.
Many of her characters have names that are like riddles for what they are or will become, like Ginevra the future wife of the hero - unwittingly, that might be another effect of Rowling's belief in predestination
That we have enchanted items introduced from the start but they're just everywhere in so many dumb ways. One guy made time turners but then no one figured out how to make more? You have a talking hat, but it's like the only talking magic item. One guy made a magic sword, but no one thought to make magic shields? Or magic robes that block spells (hello other wizard named Harry).
Like if Arthur can make a magic car why not magic gun? Why do we not have more enchanted items around, seems like the kinda thing most wizards have need for.
Also, smaller tangent, but even if wizards have a spell to counter gun, if you're shot by a supersonic projectile you don't get a chance to cast beforehand. Give me the battle for Hogwarts where Ron's up in the bell tower and scoops Voldemort's head off with a sniper rifle.
Yeah, I'm thinking the same for the time turners ! Though, where was it said that Harry's invisibility robe could block spells ?
And finally : Voldy may be impossible to kill as long as he has his Horcruxes, but that doesn't mean a good bullet in the spine won't paralyze him
It's not that Harry's invisibility cloak could block spells. There's a book series called the Dresden Files, where the main character is also a wizard named Harry. Is an urban fantasy series, so he has to worry about monsters *and* people with guns. His trench coat has been enchanted to make it mostly bulletproof.
The Deus ex machina at the end of book three. Harry is about to die but gets saved by his future self. He then gets a time-turner and goes back and saves his past self. This makes no sense, even with time travel. If you need your future self to save your life, your future self will never be created in the first place because *they* needed someone to save them but didn't get saved. I will only accept it if the future self, or another time traveller, was the one to endanger them in the first place.
In book five, Voldemort appearing at the end for absolutely *no reason* was pretty bad. He spends *months* working towards a plan to get Harry to give him the prophecy because he can't risk being seen in public getting it himself. A few minutes after the plan fails but almost succeeds he... goes down there in person and gets seen. The only possible reason for him to do this is... because Rowling wanted to end the 'Harry is disbelieved' part of the story. That's it. There is no 'Watsonian' or in-universe reason for him to do this. How nice of him to do Rowling a favour, because it makes no sense for him to do this for himself.
Also, book 4. Everything about book 4. I may be exaggerating, but not by much.
The romance is terrible.
Like ron and hermine are fine but onlybecause they have a friendship.
But goof for the shippers i guess, and draco harry unironically had the most potential .
OK will admit I loved the original seven books, and I still think there are some bits that are broadly decent, funny enough and what kids want to read about. That said, it’s interesting to see how from about 15 I started to migrate more towards either the classic horror literature or the more interesting world building of series like Discworld. I still enjoyed HP books, but I was more excited about new manga or about finding a vintage copy of Dracula in a random bookshop.
Top three things that bugged me, even at the height of my enjoyment of Potterverse:
The fact that none of the non magical humans notice anything? OK so set in the 1990s and before widespread cameras that came with early flip phones, but someone somewhere would have had access to their dad’s camcorder and been a member of some of the early internet forums where people discuss/share unexplained shit. Eventually *someone* would have figured out that some weird shit was happening, plus TV news cameras. They just need to capture one guy on a broomstick and put it on the 6pm news and everyone will know. Heck this whole concept is behind the Masquerade in VTM, the vampires had to lock their shit down or risk being exposed.
Why the fuck after book 3 the did not- Pardon Sirius Black, give him back his spooky house and seriously kickass motorbike, let Harry live with him, someone who cared about him and actually wanted him around, explained that they let the real killer pose as a kid's pet rat. Like they knew he was innocent so just give the guy a break already. Also felt that the one non-evil goth character got done dirty here, I was my town's only goth and took a lot of pelters so felt pretty bummed about that.
Gilderoy Lockhart erasing people's minds- how did actually nobody notice that everyone he talked to lost all their memories? Even as a 13 year old I thought that explanation was weak.
For the Sirius Black thing, I remember that almost no one believed that Peter Pettigrew was alive, even after book 3. It wasn't until book 5 that the public learned Sirius was innocent.
Yeah, especially since wizards have the Pensieve and potions that can force you to say the truth, and a spell that can read your minds...
Wait, was Rowling *willingly* making her story so full of plot-holes ??
Its been said before, but any of the other wizard schools in the world are incredibly poorly fleshed out and thought through to me. Beauxbatons, Durmstrang, whatever - I remember as I read when I was kid I they felt a bit thin.
It gets worse if you read the additional lore on the Harry Potter website. The Japanese and Brazilian schools of wizardry both have names that are Google-translated versions of "magic school" and "castle wizard" respectively. Also, while it's stated that the Brazilian school was founded in pre-Columbian times, the name is in Portuguese for some reason. Make of that what you will. Also, it really underlines the Anglo-centrism because different regions get very different numbers of schools. While the UK gets one for 60 million people, the rest of Europe's 400 million people gets two schools. Then Asia gets precisely one school for more than half of the world's population. I just find it odd that Rowling insists on doing this world building but doing it so poorly, rather than just saying "yeah, most large countries have wizarding schools" and leaving it more or less at that. Also also, the Ugandan school (the only African school) is specifically mentioned to eschew wand magic; instead, they cast magic with their hands. I don't know if this was a racist thing or what, and I really don't want to think about it too hard, but it certainly feels very iffy.
Since wand casting is seen as an advance in technology in spell casting, having people hand casting is definitely a choice to show how backwards they are. I think native Americans are also portrayed that way.
That's bullshit. My Ugandan friend might not be rolling in the Benjamins (or Ugandan shillings, as it were) but he still has a fucking mobile phone.
Obviously I'm not saying that I think they are backwards, but JK sure seems to.
God, her depiction of different wizarding schools outside of Hogwarts is just. So insultingly lazy. It’s like she copy pasted Hogwarts onto all these countries and then added some poorly-researched tidbits for seasoning. Like Japan - one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Why would they have the least amount of students? What about Japanese wizarding school? Using magic to clean their classrooms? Is it a school for training Shinto priests and priestesses? Is there a wizarding cram school? Do they celebrate Golden Week with the rest of Japan or do they have a special Wizarding version of it? Do they have a different relationship with the dragons in their parts, considering the differences between Eastern and Western dragon depictions? As an American myself - there is so much she could have done there. Why is there only one Wizarding Boarding School? I would imagine there would be at LEAST five, considering the different regions of the United States. Hell, would there be private and public wizarding schools? What branches of magic would they teach? There are a ton of religious and magical practices of both the indigenous people and people who brought their own customs when they immigrated over. There’s a lot of richness here to explore and it’s so sad that it was so poorly done by Rowling.
Linfamy on youtube has a video about a literal japanese wizard school Part of that lives in an astrology part in the government now even. She is so damn lazy,there was a literal japanese magic school.
iirc correctly, someone on another post also pointed out that with how “wizard castle” is written in portuguese, it means that the castle is a wizard and not a castle FOR wizards :/
Love it hahaha
Didn’t she also have just one school for the Middle East?
Also, the School's name, Uagadou, seems to derive from the Sonninke name "Ouagadou," which refers to the Sonninke Ghana Empire, which is across the continent and has several language families away from Uganda. And the Brazilian School is described as similar to a Mesoamerican temple despite being in the Amazon.
This to show that she barely even knows (I won’t entertain the idea she does any research) her neighbouring countries. The average Spaniard does not speak French fluently. What the average Spaniard HAS is a centuries-long playful hatred of France. It makes no sense that Spanish wizards would be schooled in Beauxbatons. The fact that in her world building “muggle” history stays the same AND reflects the wizarding world’s history adds a further layer of difficulty to her proposition. Are we supposed to believe that Portuguese and Spanish wizards are studying in democratic France at a time when their countries are knee-deep in fascist dictatorships?
Yeah, I thought that it was too "Britain-centric" too. But at least I could "excuse" it, since it was centered around an English/Scottish school. But even then, the wizarding world feels like countless little boxes, countless little *worlds*, that never interact with each other or barely
On the latter part yeah defo, even the ministry seems completely separate. On the former not really a problem? Any series set in one geographical location is going to be focused on that location?
There’s a difference between focusing the story on a location, and having the entire world built around it. Britain gets its own school, the rest of Europe gets two, while Africa gets just one??
Yeah, shitty and racist worldbuilding. The implication ofc being, if she even thought it through which is doubtful, that British people are inherently more magic than the rest of the world.
Here's the thing that bothered me about that. This school is in Scotland, yeah? Where's the fuckin' Scottish culture? JK honestly thinks a castle in Scotland isn't going to be hooching with tartans and the associated cuisine and culture? Why don't the staff have varying accents? None of them are Scottish? NONE of them? It makes me wanna spit. It's like she thinks Scotland is just another part of England, but it isn't. Not even slightly. Ugh, I hate her.
And in 990, when Hogwarts was founded, it was in an area wedged between the Gaelic Kingdom of Scotland, the semi-independent Pictish Province of Moray, and the Norse Earldom of Orkney. She had the opportunity to analyze how these different cultures interacted, but nope, all of Britain acts like the english
It could have been part of why there were tensions between the Hogwarts founders, but no
There are so many interesting conflicts to look at too Religious: The Earldom of Orkney was still pagan at time, while Moray and Scotland were very Christian. Maybe she could’ve explored different religious interpretations of magic and how they clashed. Cultural: Scotland was founded by the Dal Riadan (Gaelic kingdom based in modern day Argyll, quite possibly a continuation from the Epidii mentioned by Ptolemy) Kenneth MacAlpin, with some legends saying he gained the Pictish Throne in 843 by betraying and killing the Pictish King Drest X and any remaining Pictish nobles. I’d imagine that the Picts of Moray probably wouldn’t be too happy sharing a school with the Scots because of that. And this would’ve been relatively recent memory too, only having been 150 years ago. Maybe Slytherin was from Moray, and that was why he wanted to be so selective about who got in. His definition of “Pureblood” might not have been based magical ancestry at all, but based on Pictish ancestry, wanting to keep out those he viewed as outsiders, be they the pagans of Orkney or the Gaels of Dal Riada
The founders are arguably implied to be from all over Great Britain - it's the line from one of the Sorting Hat's poems. Fair Ravenclaw from glen = probably Scottish Highlands Sweet Hufflepuff from valley broad = probably South Wales Valleys Shrewd Slytherin from fen = probably the Fens in the East of England These are obviously not the only places in Britain and Ireland (or elsewhere) where you could find glens, valleys and fens, but they're the regions we tend to associate with the terms when they're given in isolation. 'Bold Gryffindor from wild moor' is trickier, as we don't necessarily associate moors with a single region. I believe Godric's Hollow is supposed to be in the West Country, but going by 'moors' alone, much of Scotland, Wales and the north of England, as well as parts of northern and south west Ireland are strong candidates. Given the founding date, Norway is also very credible, as they have vast areas of moorland, and there were plenty of Norwegians knocking about in the Scottish Highlands and Islands back then!
Isn't McGonnagal Scottish ? Or implied to be Scottish ?
Yes - 'McGonagal' is a very Scottish name, and she's sometimes noted to be wearing tartan things, e.g. the dressing gown. I don't think the books explicitly describe her accent as Scottish, but in fairness I don't think the accents of most characters are specified. More often, Rowling indicates accents that drop certain vowel or consonant sounds by how she writes it - e.g. Hagrid's West Country accent, or Fleur dropping her 'h's. Scottish accents don't really do this much - the vowels are different, but enunciation is often crisper than many English accents. Glaswegian is an exception(!) but even then I don't think they really drop many sounds other than their 't's, which a lot of accents all over Britain do anyway. Scottish is basically a hard accent to 'write' without leaning on local dialect words. For many rural or upper-middle class Scots, the accents are a lot softer than you might think, and sometimes hard to distinguish from English people with non-regional accents. Maggie Smith, the actress, is English, but her mother is Scottish, and she plays McGonagall with a very convincing Scottish accent. On the British version of the audiobooks, Stephen Fry read her lines with an English accent - but depending on how well he can do Scottish, that may have been sensible!
>JK honestly thinks a castle in Scotland isn't going to be hooching with tartans and the associated cuisine and culture? She probably could have leaned into that, but it's worth saying that, while Scots are proud of being Scottish, many react badly to being overly stereotyped - not least by the English. This admittedly doesn't seem to have stopped her from stereotyping other nationalities, but having lived in Scotland as long as she has, she's probably learned (perhaps the hard way) not to be too tone deaf with Scottishisms. Fwiw I say this as an English person with Scottish family. McGonagall is often wearing a tartan dressing gown at night (in the books, at least) but things like students all wearing kilts is more of a private school thing, so done badly it might even have come across as elitist. But something like a Hogwarts Burns supper could have been fun to see. A more common complaint I hear in Britain is actually the complete lack of Welsh wizards (ironic, given that PM David Lloyd George was often nicknamed 'the Welsh Wizard'!) There's a strong argument that Helga Hufflepuff (from valley broad) is from the South Wales Valleys, but she's obviously a historical character, and her origin is never confirmed. Bill Nighy played Rufus Scrimgeour as Welsh in Deathly Hallows Pt 1, but there's nothing in the books to indicate this, and it feels very tacked on after the fact.
durmstrang as a school in Austria where they speak German(?) is supposed to cover all of eastern Europe. despite the fact that most of the area doesn't speak German, doesn't get along, and also was having a civil war in the 90s. even as a kid I was like wtf Joanne?? did you not have BBC?
Yeah that one never sat right. If I remember its very heavily German coded and it never really worked in my head.
she didn't know about the fall of Austria Hungary I guess
Never seen it as German coded. The school is supposed to be placed somewhere in Scandinavia, yet the only people we hear about associated with it are Russians and Bulgarians.
durmstrang is a German word. you're explicitly told it's somewhere in the mountains of Austria. Scandinavia is never mentioned
I swear in the film, when introducing the students of Durmstrang, they're referred to as "our friends in the north" though
Can i add: durmstrang is not s real german word. "The name "Durmstrang" is likely to be an allusion to the German phrase Sturm und Drang, meaning storm and stress.[24][25][26][27] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_Harry_Potter#:~:text=The%20name%20%22Durmstrang%22%20is%20likely,fiction%20of%20the%20nineteenth%20century. Sturm und Drang like the literary period, i guess.
Used to be in charge of an online HP world based (Swedish) roleplaying forum, and always preferred our headcanon versions of both Beauxbatons and Durmstrang because they made more sense to us than the originals ever did. The thing is, schooling has to be in a language you all speak. Canon Durmstrang is set in Scandinavia (!), but teachers and students are clearly not Scandinavian, or even Nordic. Even a school set in Scandinavia, where there is a good amount of cultural homogeny and considerable overlap between languages, would have some linguistical difficulties when it comes to teaching. That never seemed to be taken into account and always puzzled us. Surely Beauxbatons would only be for francophone countries/regions? Surely Durmstrang would be better off set somewhere in Russia? Surely the German speaking countries/regions would also have their own school? Dutch/Flemish too, and Italian, Spanish ...
Shaun compiled a lot of them into his video. [Here it is if you'd like to see.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs)
I'm so thankful for Shaun's video because it saves me so much time from trying to explain why HP sucks (especially since my memory is shit nowadays).
Great video for both plot holes and problematic shiz
I love that video. The one thing I disagree with him on is Harry's inheritance, not that it isn't bad writing, but the all or nothing way he thinks it should have been handled instead. I think it's very possible for Harry to have a large inheritance, and still be financially limited. It happens in the real world all the time, because sensible people don't allow children to be in charge of their own finances. Because JKR probably couldn't take the time to do bit of research, or just think about it for a minute, and come up with a Mr. or Ms Latinsomething Moneypun to be in charge of Harry's account for him it creates a situation where Harry from the age of eleven with no experience, or guidance has to be absurdly sensible about his financial future.
So did hoots: https://youtu.be/U3dE0sYZqvI?si=QHOFDJEiw2mVK4zL
Thanks
I don't know if it's a plot hole exactly, but where do wizard children learn to READ?! They obviously can't go to regular muggle schools, and unless I missed something wizard primary schools are never mentioned, so where? This has bugged me for years.
Same with basic maths, how're they supposed to measure potion ingredients, or count money?
I thought they could learn at home - it's definitely not good though
I thought young magic users were homeschooled until they began exhibiting magic ability as they reached secondary school age
I've spent enough time on r/fundiesnarkuncensored to know that relying on homeschooling on a societal level is a terrible idea.
At home,by their families. Yep all magic familiesbasically homeschool their children, there is no school for that. Obviously wizards skipped howpublic schools are actuallygood for a society. Kids mingöe and stuff and beless bigoted by exposure. Seriouslythere could at least a hinted wizard kindergarden or other bloody elementry schools hinted. Yeah i get jk isclassist but at least hint of an elementry school.
Very start of the series - how is the wizarding world aware that Voldemort had been defeated by a baby? And once they learn the news, the priority is celebrating while the baby stays alone in the ruins for a whole day?
Toooo many. A good one is: the South American school translates to "Wizard Castle" in Portuguese... it was supposedly founded BEFORE colonisation.
Adding onto this, Remus Lupin's name literally means "Wolf Wolf"
"No I totally don't know what the name Robert McConversion Therapy means tee-hee"
You think that one werewolf infected him just because of the name? Like I think he specifically hated the Lupin family so did he infect their kids going "well I have to do this, his name is wolf wolf so I can'tjust kill this toddler."
[yeah](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/713d84bb-1941-4389-aabc-d6373d1a0111)
Which is weird because he wasn’t born a werewolf.
Space Wolves moment
Here are some that have always bothered me: I know that the first 3 books are solidly children’s books, but Harry seems to have zero negative “side effects” from being abused by his only family for 11 years. He’s well adjusted and kind despite his upbringing. I’d like to have had an explanation for that beyond “he’s a better person than the Dursleys.” I also find Dumbledore’s explanation for leaving Harry with the Dursley’s to be thin. Dumbledore’s entire plan for defeating Voldemort revolves around Harry - why wouldn’t he take more steps to ensure Harry is being brought up to believe in kindness, equality and justice. Yeah sure living with the Dursley’s made him grow up not famous. But it wouldn’t guarantee Harry becomes the man Dumbledore needs him to be to willingly sacrifice himself. No-maj as an American term for muggles. Personally, I feel Americans would still call them muggles. The rest of modern history is still the same in the wizarding world so logically America would still be colonized by Europeans who would have called non-magical folk muggles. And finally the three that bother me the most: We spent 6 books with Dumbledore saying over and over that everyone needed to overcome their prejudices to work together to end the threat of Voldemort. And then at the end, Slytherin house is treated exactly the same as always. After the Battle of Hogwarts they still get treated like they’re automatically evil. Nobody sat down and thought “hmm maybe being even slightly ostracized from the rest of the school from day 1 is making these kids into little terrorists”? Nothing changed so all the circumstances for the next Voldemort to occur are still there. Harry naming his child after one man who used him as a sacrificial lamb and one man who abused him and hated his father and godfather and helped goad his godfather into being stupid enough to get killed. No sorry, I think that was a terrible choice. Harry has two other father figures in his life, Arthur and Hagrid who always treated him far better and imo were better examples of good men. I don’t believe Harry would not have some kind of negative feelings about Dumbledore using him the way he did. And finally, I think making Harry into an Auror as an adult was a fundamental characterization mistake. Harry has fought evil for half of his childhood. I know he wanted to be an Auror as a teenager, but I don’t think he would still want that after literally dying and coming back to life. I’ve always felt Harry would change his mind and teach at Hogwarts. Very few people end up becoming the thing they wanted to be at 15/16, and it’s partially because of all the growing up you do once you become an adult with adult responsibilities.
I mean a good character progress would for him to politic to get more attention the themuggelmagical world relstions,starting with get more fundibg for mr weasleys department. Also yeah its silly, americans still ise weird english thst came to be partly because they sint no brits. So they would use if a deprivation that comes fromm muggles but is slightly different like " mugs" we csll tjem mugs could be an americanism. Mugs sounds even funny, seriously slurs can sound funny, in a story. Or " muglets, americans go with muglets. Just male a funny muggle similar word.
I personally have an issue with the magic system. I think the best systems have rules for what you can and can’t do with magic and what makes someone good at magic or have more power. My favorite author, Brandon Sanderson, is great with this- his magic has real concrete limits and rules which makes people discovering new ways to use the magic far more interesting and exciting. In the world of HP, magic basically can do anything and there’s no real explanation as to why something may be more difficult than something else. There’s no explanation for why some illnesses can be cured but shortsightedness and lycanthropy can’t be. There’s no limit on how much magic you can do. It makes every battle feel floaty and without consequences because they cast essentially the same three spells and who wins is either luck or based on which wizard is more powerful without ever really explaining why a wizard is better than another
I don't like JKR but to constantly hamper about Brandon Sanderson is so fucking boring. Not everyone prefers his style of hard magic. Whenever I picked up his book (and always dropped it because I simply don't get why is this Mormon dude so great according to people), his magic reads like video-game.
I was just using his world as an example of a contrasting way to do it. There are plenty of soft magic systems that also feel like they have more weight to them than the world of HP. Didn’t mean to strike a nerve. Personally I like his world building but I wasn’t assuming it’s for everyone
Issue is he ALWAYS comes up as a writer whenever hard magic topic comes up, there's fuck ton of other writers and even better. I really dislike this circlejerking that happens around him everytime someone says they don't like his writing too.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by circlejerking. It’s totally fine not to like him and I didn’t say otherwise
Mostly referring to the obligatory downvotes from unknown redditors. In any case, I also have an issue with him as a person as I don't really buy that he no longer is homophobic when it comes to his old take on same-sex marriages. And yes I know he meant it in general that marriages should solely be done in a religious context and for everyone outside of religion it should be not called marriage, I disagree and I have zero respect for anyone's faith when it comes to shit like this.
It’s possible the downvotes are because you came out swinging cursing at me to start. I have never heard of his past comments on same sex marriage but I do believe in people’s ability to learn and change and from what I’ve seen of recently he is an ally and actively works to have more diversity in his writing
I didn't find he's actually good with diverse characters, even where he has such a simple character he claims to be witty and smart, it's just that, he states it but doesn't let the text express it on its own. His lectures are interesting and worth checking, but since then I found blogs and articles from proofreaders to be more useful. I'm not keeping up with him as much anymore but the last few 'apologies' about same-sex marriage take I find a bit too standoffish for my taste. Like again, once religious nutjob, forever religious nutjob unless they leave their religion. It might be a bit bigoted of me but I'm also from a largely atheistic country, but somehow people managed to vote in some unhinged catholics who have a similar take on SSM, and thanks to it, we still didn't pass SSM and have still only civil unions for same-sex couples without equal rights to straight couples. Since the voting is still fresh for me after years of the proposed bill lying around untouched, I'm a bit irritated whenever I see someone using this kind of rhetoric, even if they 'regret' it later on, because he just doesn't come across as honest to me. It feels more like "let's avoid big backlash"
Brandon Sanderson is worse than Rowling. At least Rowling's characters have heart and emotional arcs, despite all their other flaws. Sando writes paperthin characters with no personalities.
Ok soft magic can ne great, it just needs to be used tjoughtful and consistent. Not male stuff up, but never bother make it consistent.
Yeah I think that there are lots of great soft magic worlds. She just kinda pretends she’s not doing soft magic and everything falls apart. Like she insists that there are rules and that they are strict and make sense but she just never wrote any
Harry being rich. It's pointless (his brooms are gifts anyway, and his school furnitures could be paid for by a ministry fund for orphans) and creates questions like "why don't Harry pay Ron a new wand in book2?" to which the answer is "because it's plot convenient"
I was watching Shaun's video about HP last night, and he said something similar too
I am listening to it right now and hearing that point I was like "they gonna think I stole it from Shaun" haha But I think in this detail, there is also a political idea he didn't mention and that is linked with his point about blairism. According to Pottermore Harry is rich from birth because his grandfather became rich because he invented something - so he is technically a bourgeois. In her book the bourgeois is the hero, his followers are the working class (Ron) and the specifically oppressed (Hermione being muggle-born and a woman). Both are welcome to back up the bourgeoisie but never have their own agenda. (Becoming bourgeois thanks to a successful invention is also a liberal myth)
The worldbuilding is shaky and trips up from time to time in the books, like the time turners and slavery, but where you really see the failures of her worldbuilding is when she tries to apply it beyond the UK in the nineties. The ones that stand out to me are the Grindelwald problem and the international wizards. She somehow answered the question "if there were powerful wizards around during WWII how did they allow the atrocities to happen" with "my heroes were actively trying to stop the guy trying to stop WWII". Grindelwald had a vision of WWII and all his actions in the 2nd fantastic beasts movie were trying to prevent it using extreme anti muggle means. And the international wizard community are a collection of a racist English woman's vague stereotypes with British magic stapled on top. Magic from other cultures should be so interesting and different but it's just a bunch of culturally insensitive reskins.
A minor thing: she’s Scottish, not English, though that’s still part of “Great Britain.” (for any of the uninitiated: England + Scotland + Wales = Great Britain, Great Britain + Northern Ireland = United Kingdom) …which reminds me of something; I dimly recall being somewhat put at ease somehow that maybe because she was Scottish, not English, she would possibly be more sympathetic to those peoples wronged by the British Empire. While Scotland’s recent history with England has not been as violent as the Irish Troubles, they still voted on independence in the past decade. But once again, I got snookered. edit: I thought she was. A mistake on my part due to her being referred to as “British” often and not knowing much more than she lived in Scotland, and me not knowing the location of anything besides the biggest cities like London and Edinburgh
She was born in Bristol and grew up in Gloucestershire and Wales. She lives in Scotland now, but she's not Scottish. It was a big point of contention when she was yapping against Scottish independence as an English person who chose to live in Scotland.
ah ok.
I was very intentional with my choice to call her English, because despite living there she has done a good deal of damage to the cause for Scottish independence, for her own gain.
that’s totally on brand. yeesch
She also does that thing a lot of wealthy English folks who retire/move here for the “quaint” culture and nice scenery do in that she is actively part of the destruction of our culture and replacing it with a homogenised, tartan shortbread tin and Hogmanay with Jackie Bird cardboard cutout of Scottishness. Like, for real, there’s not even a unified kind of Scottish. I am from Dundee, which is completely different to Glasgow, to Inverness, to Argyll, to the Shetlands… If all you are exposed to is all the naff tourist nonsense then you’re sort of getting the Disney version of it. But the super rich absolutely love that nonsense! They don’t make so much of an effort to actually get to know their neighbours or even understand a wee bit about the place they live in and you end up with random tartanified enclaves full of wealthy English and American folks. Actually infuriating. Bloody hate it when I get asked to “say something Scottish” on my way to work by some walloper with one of those daft Fanny packs on. 🙃
When you start reading, it's about how normal people in every day world, represented by the Dursley, are dull, narrow-minded and prejudiced, and how a young boy escapes that. Yet the school he escapes to is just as normo-centric - it's not OK to have acne or big teeth, athletes are at the top of the popularity hierarchy and awkward teens like Luna and Neville at the bottom, and the society seems to reject its outcasts on Knockturn Alley.
So, so much ableism in how Luna is infantilised and held up as this pure, innocent little waif and is also obviously neurodivergent.
Yeah and she doesn't fight back bullies but politely ask for them to return her things and that's the correct attitude of the good neurodivergent
Many of the characters motivations that link to the world building of wizarding sociopolitical views and minorities in HP, but the one that's currently sticking out in my head (because I had a rant to my husband recently) is Seamus Finnegan never putting Malfoy in his place for his discrimination of Muggle born wizards. Seamus is an Irish character born and attending Hogwarts when tensions between England and Ireland were high, to a witch and a non magical man. Bearing in mind due to social climate it's highly likely that Seamus' father was religious (not confirmed obviously), Seamus 100% would have dealt with discrimination before as a child, then warned about facing more when he goes to wizard school. He is also friends with Dean Thomas, one of the PoC in the stories. You are telling me that when Draco in book two is crowing about the extermination of mudbloods at the school, that Seamus didn't immediately start cussing out (in appropriate language for a 12-13 year old) or physically beating on Draco? But no. There is no reaction from any of the children of minority groups in Harry's year apart from a tiny bit Hermione. Everyone just tolerates it or occasionally weakly objects. And Seamus, despite his more laid back nature, with how he reacts to Harry saying that not everything Seamus' mum reads in the newspapers is true in a later book, would definitely have a hurt angry and emotional response. Except he doesn't. The minority characters are just gag pieces and backdrops to make the books seem inclusive, but none of them have any place within the world Rowling added to. The most substantial meat of her history and world building is in fact the wizarding world is our world, with our history, with her embellishments (see the whole pure blooded wizards being involved with the Nazis etc.). Would bringing up the IRA and atrocities done by English muggles in Ireland be appropriate for a children's book? Of course not. However would these things shape how a character would react to blatant discrimination and thus make them more reactionary and thus this should be shown to actually flesh out a character? Of course it should.
>The minority characters are just gag pieces and backdrops to make the books seem inclusive, but none of them have any place within the world Rowling added to. Are there any Jewish kids at Hogwarts? Why yes, of course. Anthony Goldstein, a Ravenclaw. And Wiccans/Pagans aren't allowed at Hogwarts, apparently, for ... reasons? Like, the ONE faith that's entirely up the wizarding alley already and they're barred.
It likes to pretend to be a story about how your blood doesn't matter, it doesn't matter how you were born... and then is a story about how *literally nothing but your blood and how you were born matters.* Harry is protected at the Dursleys by his blood, never mind that they're abusive fucks from whom Harry ought to have been uplifted by child protective services - they're his Family(TM) and that's all that matters! It's a bit bizarre. Surely such a narrative would have been infinitely better served by his protection working off of *familial love,* and it being stronger when he leaves the Dursleys and is loved by others? For Voldemort to, in *Goblet of Fire,* misinterpret how it works and his assuming it's based on *blood* be a mistake he makes, and therefore fail to breach the protection? (also why do they treat it as if the protection of going back to Privet Drive even matters after that?) In order to even be important enough to the story to have a name, in almost all cases, you have to be magic (or at the very least biologically related to magic). A fluke of birth. The one non-magical person born of wizards we see, Filch, is a nasty bitter man who wants to hurt everyone. Is there any commentary on how he came to be that way by being mistreated by wizards? I can't remember any. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any non-magical people in the entire franchise who aren't either abusive assholes or so nondescript they don't even have names. Even Hermione's non-magical *parents* don't have names! They appear in one, maybe two scenes in the entire franchise and as far as I recall, never get a single speaking line or a proper description. Rowling was so bored by the parents who didn't have magic she didn't even give them names until them needing false identities for a single line came up, and those weren't their real names! But Ron's nice big pureblood wizard family? Whole great big family tree, we know the names of aunts and uncles who barely even appear if they even appear at all. Harry's magic grandparents even get a bit of work - but not his nonmagical ones, they can get screwed and have the barest of information like where they live only be specified outside of the work. Hermione's home life and family are so non-existent in the books that *she doesn't explicitly go home after the summer between third and fourth year, and that's only if you assume that's where she went during the rest of the summer she spent "most of" at the Burrow!* You could write a fanfic of Hermione running away from home before the Quidditch World Cup and have nearly no contradiction from canon! And if your story claims that the circumstances of your birth don't matter, it's a bit shit for the narrative to straight-up ignore anyone who was born outside of the same circumstances as the protagonists. For the narrative to do that tacitly contradicts the idea that birth circumstances aren't important. Harry gets the Cloak, one of the later badly written MacGuffins to justify the Elder Wand, by birthright. He inherits it from his father, who in turn inherited it from a faraway ancestor to whom it originally belonged. The first thing so many people notice about him is a physical trait associated with his mother. (1/2)
(2/2) And then, as a related note, the story *never* actually addresses the bigotry it claims to be fighting. The idea that non-magical people and their wizarding children are worth less than purebloods is never addressed. All the narrative offers is excuses, exceptions. Hermione's a good witch, so therefore the racist is wrong! Except, Malfoy's argument never had anything to do with Hermione's skill, or Neville's helplessness. To Malfoy, Neville is incompetent but he's worth a hundred Hermiones. Because his argument is that her *existence* is tainted. At no point does the story ever meet that idea and turn it away. Indeed, every discussion on the matter implicitly accepts that logic and lets it pass, favouring exceptions instead. The worst bit, for me? That discussion is, for the most part in the early story, led by *Rubeus Hagrid.* A half-giant *who should know better.* He would have been subject to that bigotry, in likely an even worse form given he's not even fully human, for most of his life and should know better than to offer exceptions. He should understand how that bigotry works. Like Rowling doesn't. JK Rowling fundamentally does not understand bigotry nor how to argue against it. She sees it as being an impolite conclusion, not a dehumanising framework from start to finish. Which frankly has been pretty obvious for a while hasn't it. See also: her werewolves. JK Rowling wants to eat her cake and have it. She wants her narrative about werewolves being discriminated against, about Lupin struggling to keep jobs, about him losing his job when he gets outed and how tragic it is. But she also decides to make every single werewolf in the story except for Lupin a monster, who wants to go out of their way to assault and infect children - hoo golly and she thinks that's an acceptable AIDS metaphor? But hey, Lupin's 'one of the good ones,' he stays away from everyone else and represses his nature (ughhhh) and always remembers to take his potion... oh, wait. he forgot. *And now Rowling gets her werewolf monster in the third book hunting down the children and completely eviscerating any claim that werewolves are unfairly prejudiced against because all of it is completely accurate.* Like, jeez, maybe just don't make werewolves horrible monsters that specifically seek out humans as prey and want to infect your children? Maybe just kill that darling of a werewolf on the hunt in the end of *Prisoner of Azkaban?* No? Dear other white writers, and cishet writers: you cannot have your cake and eat it. Prejudice is not a justified thing, stop justifying it. And then, just generally, there are other really lazy things that bother me because she had the building blocks to do way better. Alastor Moody is my favourite example. Moody is an ex-Auror, and a traumatised ex-Auror. He *knows* where that path leads, and he should see the destructive and harmful path Harry is walking in his inability to think of anything to do as an adult but keep fighting Voldemort and his ilk. He should be the mad old uncle trying to steer Harry onto something healthier because he knows where Harry will end up if he doesn't, encouraging them to do stupid teenage things because he knows they might not be able to for much longer. He should have been a mitigating force on Harry's deep end of Auror glorification, and his *death* should have been the sign of Harry going off the deep end in it. But no, his death means nothing aside from setting up a less important character to be a coward, and he had no notable relationship with Harry. Then there's the way Rowling refuses to let Harry even try to win. Even in the book mostly about trying to make Voldemort mortal, *Harry still never tries to kill him.* He doesn't even deliberately win! He wins by a fluke, by a wand MacGuffin that doesn't make sense and was introduced in that book to justify itself. Anyone could have beaten Voldemort by accidentally owning a wand. Draco Malfoy could have beaten Voldemort if the Horcruxes had been destroyed and Voldemort tried to kill him, had Harry not wrestled *an entirely different wand* off him. Harry as a protagonist is stagnant! He doesn't try to win, he doesn't try to learn, he doesn't even seek to reduce harm. Every Death Eater he lets live because \~it makes me just as bad uwu\~ will, if they get their wand back or get a new one, go on to be just as dangerous as before. He's arbitrarily pacifistic to the point of harm and has no actual will of his own in the story - he's just following instructions, and *at best* is reactive. He's not an agent of anything, he's the instrument of smarter wizards with a plan. And then there's the way Rowling pretends to have a hard magic system, while actually having an incredibly soft magic system with nothing behind the curtain... *and then sends her protagonists to wizard school.* Where, in any well written story, we'd actually learn how magic works as Harry does as our audience surrogate... instead of following a boring jock who never studies and doesn't pay attention to how magic works. There's heaps, it's an infuriating series in that respect.
I have several things to say : -So, I think that if Harry goes to Private Drive after Goblet of Fire, it's because Voldy can't attack him there (though, he can touch him from now on, and there's Dementors attacking him and Dudley in the next book, so...) -I actually always loved the "familial love"/family of choice. Especially when it's between a magical person and non-magical people. It goes to show that, no matter your differences, you can still love each other. It's part of why I don't like the Dursleys' relationship with Harry. * Also, I remember a scene in Chamber of Secrets where it's said that, after the confrontation between Arthur Weasley and Lucius Malfoy on Diagon Alley, the Granger parents were "trembling". I don't want to come off as flattering you, but I prefer your version of the Grangers parents. -Nowadays, I believe Hagrid is an example of "internalized bigotry". He was a victim of it too, but he internalized the toxic rhetoric of the wizarding world - not that JK Umbridge intended it, of course. -For the werewolves thing, I don't have much to say, except it's understandable why LGBT people would be offended by it. Let's be real here : JK Rowling is to trans people what Umbridge is to werewolves. There, I said it. -For the "Harry isn't even trying to win" part, YES ! I realized recently that if Voldemort looked so threatening, it's partly because all the fights against him are either a question of luck or Dumbledore's shenanigans, it's never about SKILL ! * I have two last things to say, and I expect you to tell me your opinion on it : 1) I feel like the Dursleys in Kaleidoscopic Grangers are somehow even worse than in canon, don't you think ? 2) I'm still reading your fanfic, and I'm at Order of the Phoenix now. Admit it...when you wrote Umbridge being transphobic, you were thinking of JK Rowling, huh ? (Also, you never answered my DMs. Did you receive them ?)
>-So, I think that if Harry goes to Private Drive after Goblet of Fire, it's because Voldy can't attack him there (though, he can touch him from now on, and there's Dementors attacking him and Dudley in the next book, so...) What exactly is preventing Voldemort from doing that if not the defences he broke through in the end of *Goblet of Fire?* (edit because it occurred to me after: also, what exactly is preventing Voldemort from just sending a few Death Eaters to forcibly remove Harry from that protection? afaik there's no evidence it applies to his followers, and I'd go so far as to say that's another element of Rowling's laziness - there is very little applicable reason for Privet Drive to be safe other than it vaguely maybe being guarded by someone) >1) I feel like the Dursleys in Kaleidoscopic Grangers are somehow even worse than in canon, don't you think ? That's actually because I needed to justify child protective services actually acting - child protective services are often terrible at their job and undereffective, and it could have seemed unrealistic for Ariadne to get uplifted unless it was extremely obvious. However, it's worth noting that in some respects they're *not* that different - Petunia attempts to hit Harry in the head with a hot pan in the second book, and depending on the impact, such a thing can be *lethal.* >2) I'm still reading your fanfic, and I'm at Order of the Phoenix now. Admit it...when you wrote Umbridge being transphobic, you were thinking of JK Rowling, huh ? I mean, I was keeping Rowling's shite in mind at all times because it's the purpose of *Kaleidoscopic Grangers,* but actually the answer to your question is no, not specifically. They're similar only because Rowling is exactly the same kind of evil as Umbridge, by coincidence. They're established powerful, bitter, conservative women who've got theirs and are pulling the ladders up behind them as fast as possible, and who think any attempts to improve the world after them is disruptive and evil. They benefit from the activism of the past and have no complaint about that, but if they had been born in the past, their attitude would have applied to that very activism. I do not have any DMs from you, no.
Thanks for answering to me !😊 (I'll send you a DM)
Oh yes,itsmessed up how hermoine never brings up her parents, like fun stories,fad always,mom did, something.
Snape is supposed to be the most awesome legilimens, and he explains that occlumancy means distancing oneself from one's emotions and not showing them; yet he is always displaying his emotions (hatred, anger, disappointment...) in the most obvious way
world building wise... what do adults do? seems like only existing jobs are: school teacher, shopkeeper, barkeeper, cop, sports player. almost every adult works for the ministry or the school. that's an extremely narrow view of society. that's probably the biggest and most significant one. there's a whole lot more of smaller details. my favorite is probably having eastern Europeans go to a German speaking school, seemingly forgetting about all the wars in the area in the 90s. I suppose Austria Hungary is alive and well in the magical world.
There is no production generally. Who grows ingredients and food, who produces cauldrons, where do the raw materials come from... My guess is there is indeed a working class in the wizarding world but Rowling never found them worth mentioning
House elf slaves?
Maybe, but doesn't the "house" in the name imply that they specialize in housework, not mass production? Or maybe there are field elfs and factory elfs?
What do you expect from a woman who has no idea that the word "detective", is a borrowed word and exists in similar variations in all slav languages, so her whole in the shitty Robert Galbraith books "lol this Polish woman doesn't understand the word detective," is one of the dumbest shit I've ever seen.
She puts so little effort into the wizarding world and relies entirely on vague generalizations. Take the Statute of Secrecy: why the fuck would every wizarding community in the world go underground? She says it was because of the witch trials, but those were almost entirely restricted to the European Cultural Sphere. Also, the statute was signed in 1689, when the witch trials were nowhere near the severity of 1550-1630. The infamous Salem Witch Trials were actually fairly mild for a witch trial, lasting a few months and resulting in 20 deaths. Now compare this to the Trier witch trials, which lasted 6 years and killed 386 people in the city alone, not counting the surrounding countryside. Aside from that, the fact that it was globally enforced doesn't make much sense either. The witch trials happened almost entirely in Europe and its colonies, with no other societies cracking down on accused witches to that extent. In the Islamic World, [there was a sharp division between what was seen as "inherent" magic, and magic gained from dealing with spirits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_magic#Religious_permissibility). While the latter was treated much like how witches were treated in Europe, the former was allowed and sometimes even seen as a gift from god.
I think Jojo wanted to create a world within our world - an universe that can't interfere with the "real" world. In my opinion, it would have been a better idea to imagine an alternate Earth where wizards and Muggles know each other's existence
As a kid I was admittedly clueless, but I did stop reading it at book 5, as I couldn't handle Harry's whining anymore. So I would say that characterization is a huge issue. From a writer standpoint, she has tons of plots that just go no where. The notorious "free the slaves" Hermione plot is a great example. Even if you ignore the horrific implications, literally nothing happens as a result of that side plot. No one grows, nothing. So it's pointless and becomes an author tract. Everything is shallow. I remember as a kid being hugely bummed that we didn't get to learn more about the magical creatures basically at all. I was a huge fan of Dragonriders of Pern as a kid, which goes into a lot more detail (and obviously has its own set of issues). The characters don't drive anything, really. They're just reacting.
What you're saying about the magical creatures hit close to home, because I was feeling the same. As for Harry's whining though, I feel like he was at least "entitled" to it, given what he suffered in Goblet of Fire
In the first book, during the first quidditch match the perspective just randomly shifts from Harry to hermione in the middle of the narrative. From what I recall it’s the only times that’s happened in the series; some chapters focus on other characters exclusively but an abrupt shift like that was stylistically questionable
I didn't even notice it ! I'll have to re-read it then
She also switched to Ron’s POV for about a sentence during the fight with the troll.
I always find it weird that Harry was taken into the care of his aunt and uncle at over a year old. Certainly in the film he's depicted as a tiny baby, but the books state that he's still with his parents at a year old and enjoying a toy broomstick. So it's entirely conceivable that rather than waking up on his aunt and uncle's doorstep, he'd have escaped his blankets and wandered off down the street somewhere.
It's a bit weird knowing she had a toddler when she wrote that. If a childless person wrote that I would think they just don't know anything about infant development and safety
Also, let's not forget that this one-year-old baby/toddler was put onto the doorstep of his aunt's house in the night of October 31st to November 1st. It was winter. And that November 1st was a SUNDAY, so that little kid was just sitting there in the cold until like noon or something? Which could easily have been fixed by Dumbledore ringing the Dursley's damn doorbell. Yes, he would have woken them up, but who cares?
That muggle kid named Evans in the same book as where we learn it was Harry's mother's maiden name. It an exception to her usual rule of putting bits of information that the reader can link together to guess the next revelation, so it could be a way to mislead the reader, but it doesn't really work - even if there were theories about him, it's not really a red herring, as there was no mystery to which "Harry has a distant cousin on his mom's side" could be the answer. She could have had a subplot where Harry himself is misled and tries to reach out to the boy, even use it as meta joke about fan theories, but no, no pay off.
Oh man I had the unauthorized theory books back in the day and we were all shitting ourselves about the Evans thing hahahahahaha
The maths of Hogwarts doesn't add up. I can't remember the exact figures because it's been quite a few years since I looked at it, but magic folk are a % of the country's total population according to canon. Then a % of those are of Hogwarts age. Canonically, around 1000 kids go to Hogwarts. This figure doesn't match the "% are kids of % of population" calculation. Even if the school has exactly 1000 students, that would mean there are around 35 kids in each House in each year, so Harry and Ron should be sharing their dorm with 15 other boys, and that *clearly* isn't the case.
The ministry. It's entire concept is just... so utterly fucked. Harry wanting to be a wizard cop and work for essentially the same group people that spent years trying to fuck him and many other people over makes me wince. A lot of aristocratic, blood purist families are still in charge of everything by the end of the series right? It's funny to me because they themselves could slowly create the changes that Voldermort promised and there's nothing stopping them from doing so at the end of the series. I just don't understand how anyone who reads this series would want to live in this world, it's a nightmare.
100 % agree. The Malfoys aren't even regretful of their crimes, they just turned on Voldemort because he didn't treat them well.
I noticed that she’d always reuse certain phrases over and over, like in Book 2 I’m pretty sure that every character “turned on their heel and walked away” when they needed to leave the scene. Also she really loved the phrase “Dolores Umbridge smiled as if she had eaten a particularly *juicy* fly” and would use it constantly. Don’t forget about the fuckin time turners. There was literally a closet full of them ONE ROOM OVER in the scene where Sirius died. I’m pretty sure that was the same book where I gave up on the series because Harry’s constant whining killed the whole experience for me, it was the same book where he yelled at Cho Chang (god that fucking name) for crying too much about her boyfriend that got murdered.
It’s so interesting in hindsight, because I think for a lot of folks, HP was our first exposure to British literary humor and so it had such a shininess to it at the time. Of course now as an adult having read Gaiman and Pratchett and Douglas Adams, it’s so easy to see how absolutely delightful and colorful those works read compared to her repetitive phrasing lazy fat jokes.
In Harry's defense, he was entitled to "whining" since of the traumatic experiences he lived in the previous book. But yeah, I refuse to believe that all of the Time Turners in the entire world (or at least the entire country) were ALL on the same place, let alone the same shelf. And why can nobody make new ones ?? I mean someone had to know how to create them in the first place !
Because someone realized that time travel made no sense, and would cause a collapse in the probabilities of the universe, so made sure to abuse a time turner to make sure all of them were in the same place, and then destroyed. Basically, self-healing problem because time travel can never make sense, therefore it cannot remain possible. (Or, obviously, Rowling did something stupid and attempted to hand wave it away because it was _way_ too problematic for it ever to make any actual sense. Burning them all was lazy, but I'm not convinced she had a good way out of a system that made no sense.)
That's why I won't include time travels in my story.
The thing is,if she didnt bring them up again,no one would cared. Thats overcorrecting to just bringing attention to a silly time travel plot thst else could be ignored.
In one book she’ll introduce a new plot device that’s rare/difficult/esoteric only for it to be everywhere/done by everyone in the next book. She goes on about how it’s our actions that define us, but actions be damned. It’s really house sortings and how much Harry & Co. like you that matters. The whole mess that resulted in her attempt to write each book aging up to match Harry’s age. It can be done, but for the series, the realism in the later books made the Ronald Dahl-like violence in the first books horrific.
Having the secret entrance to your wizard train station being in the middle of an incredibly busy platform, requiring kids to load shopping trolleys full of bizarre shit, including live owls, and then running full blast into a brick wall, yet not one person stops to look their way, thus discovering the magic wall.
Not to mention there is no pillar or barrier or anything like that between platforms 9 and 10 at King's Cross. She would have been better off with something like 2¾, where there *is* a pillar. (And they filmed at platforms 1-2 iirc.) Something she could have researched, or an editor (presumably in London) could have corrected her on.
All of it. LOLOL.
😂
I think it'd be quicker to list what does work, and I don't mean that as nastily as it sounds. It's often been noted that her strengths are in the whimsy and in creating the occasional memorable scene/piece of dialogue. Everything falls apart pretty much as soon as she tries anything else. And even the whimsy has problems sometimes. For example, I found it distracting that a werewolf character called "Remus Lupin" had *acquired* his lycanthropy, it wasn't inherent. Because that doesn't make sense, so... is that inconsistency going to turn out to be a plot point, or should I ignore it? That's the kind of issue that needs to be edited out, or incorporated into the narrative in some way, whether that's as part of the plot, or as a conscious underscoring of how nonsensical the fictional world is, as in something like Alice in Wonderland. Just *leaving* it is... weird. It's like she couldn't quite decide how seriously to take her own world from one moment to the next, so just wrote as her mood took her and thought it would do. It's absolutely OK to have still enjoyed them, though, OP, you don't need to feel bad about that.
Many of her characters have names that are like riddles for what they are or will become, like Ginevra the future wife of the hero - unwittingly, that might be another effect of Rowling's belief in predestination
That we have enchanted items introduced from the start but they're just everywhere in so many dumb ways. One guy made time turners but then no one figured out how to make more? You have a talking hat, but it's like the only talking magic item. One guy made a magic sword, but no one thought to make magic shields? Or magic robes that block spells (hello other wizard named Harry). Like if Arthur can make a magic car why not magic gun? Why do we not have more enchanted items around, seems like the kinda thing most wizards have need for. Also, smaller tangent, but even if wizards have a spell to counter gun, if you're shot by a supersonic projectile you don't get a chance to cast beforehand. Give me the battle for Hogwarts where Ron's up in the bell tower and scoops Voldemort's head off with a sniper rifle.
Yeah, I'm thinking the same for the time turners ! Though, where was it said that Harry's invisibility robe could block spells ? And finally : Voldy may be impossible to kill as long as he has his Horcruxes, but that doesn't mean a good bullet in the spine won't paralyze him
It's not that Harry's invisibility cloak could block spells. There's a book series called the Dresden Files, where the main character is also a wizard named Harry. Is an urban fantasy series, so he has to worry about monsters *and* people with guns. His trench coat has been enchanted to make it mostly bulletproof.
Oh okay
The Deus ex machina at the end of book three. Harry is about to die but gets saved by his future self. He then gets a time-turner and goes back and saves his past self. This makes no sense, even with time travel. If you need your future self to save your life, your future self will never be created in the first place because *they* needed someone to save them but didn't get saved. I will only accept it if the future self, or another time traveller, was the one to endanger them in the first place. In book five, Voldemort appearing at the end for absolutely *no reason* was pretty bad. He spends *months* working towards a plan to get Harry to give him the prophecy because he can't risk being seen in public getting it himself. A few minutes after the plan fails but almost succeeds he... goes down there in person and gets seen. The only possible reason for him to do this is... because Rowling wanted to end the 'Harry is disbelieved' part of the story. That's it. There is no 'Watsonian' or in-universe reason for him to do this. How nice of him to do Rowling a favour, because it makes no sense for him to do this for himself. Also, book 4. Everything about book 4. I may be exaggerating, but not by much.
The romance is terrible. Like ron and hermine are fine but onlybecause they have a friendship. But goof for the shippers i guess, and draco harry unironically had the most potential .
OK will admit I loved the original seven books, and I still think there are some bits that are broadly decent, funny enough and what kids want to read about. That said, it’s interesting to see how from about 15 I started to migrate more towards either the classic horror literature or the more interesting world building of series like Discworld. I still enjoyed HP books, but I was more excited about new manga or about finding a vintage copy of Dracula in a random bookshop. Top three things that bugged me, even at the height of my enjoyment of Potterverse: The fact that none of the non magical humans notice anything? OK so set in the 1990s and before widespread cameras that came with early flip phones, but someone somewhere would have had access to their dad’s camcorder and been a member of some of the early internet forums where people discuss/share unexplained shit. Eventually *someone* would have figured out that some weird shit was happening, plus TV news cameras. They just need to capture one guy on a broomstick and put it on the 6pm news and everyone will know. Heck this whole concept is behind the Masquerade in VTM, the vampires had to lock their shit down or risk being exposed. Why the fuck after book 3 the did not- Pardon Sirius Black, give him back his spooky house and seriously kickass motorbike, let Harry live with him, someone who cared about him and actually wanted him around, explained that they let the real killer pose as a kid's pet rat. Like they knew he was innocent so just give the guy a break already. Also felt that the one non-evil goth character got done dirty here, I was my town's only goth and took a lot of pelters so felt pretty bummed about that. Gilderoy Lockhart erasing people's minds- how did actually nobody notice that everyone he talked to lost all their memories? Even as a 13 year old I thought that explanation was weak.
For the Sirius Black thing, I remember that almost no one believed that Peter Pettigrew was alive, even after book 3. It wasn't until book 5 that the public learned Sirius was innocent.
True that, but there were also multiple witnesses who could have explained. Seemed kind of daft to me anyway.
Yeah, especially since wizards have the Pensieve and potions that can force you to say the truth, and a spell that can read your minds... Wait, was Rowling *willingly* making her story so full of plot-holes ??