Love her or hate her (and my opinions are mixed), I must confess, JK Rowling was a huge influence on why I didn’t become a regular author. No shade on people who get what they paid for, but the young reader crowd is just so gimmicky, and not in a good way, and you see that with a lot of works like Percy Jackson and Twilight (but also predominantly with Rowling’s work). How do you compete in such a no-rules game?
So then let’s talk about one of the cores of the issue. People often have an epiphany when divulging into Harry Potter, and they think “huh, what’s the deal with this if that thing is how it is”. While noting that conflicts in literary analysis don’t always reflect something that doesn’t add up and that it could be a hiccup in details/semantics, the questions themselves don’t go away. And there’s nothing that matches the amount of those having to do with Harry Potter. What example of which strikes you as the most overlooked?
If Rowling herself ever notices that I’m bringing this up, let it be known I do think of her work as a reskinned Brothers Grimm in the universe of The Worst Witch and that I’m collaborating with another author (Samantha Rinne) whose work I would argue deserves Rowling’s prestige if Rowling’s work deserves it. Thanks (and here is where I run for the hills).
There is zero reason for the wizarding world to have social classes. Allow me to explain.
Although food can’t be created with magic, any graduate of Hogwarts can cast the Herbivicus Charm (I think it’s called) or the Greenhouse Charm to grow plants in moments. There’s also a spell that produces fresh, clean water. They have spells that make the insides of things larger than the outside. Spells that clean dishes. Spells that levitate objects and automatically perform rote tasks.
Every wizard or witch is maybe a month or two of moderate work (at the absolute outside) away from having a private pocket kingdom with crops, furniture, fireplace, teleport pad, beds, clothing, swimming pool, pets, cattle, enchanted kitchen, self cleaning floors, and fucking golf course if they want it.
If they can’t create, craft, grow, or summon something, they can buy it with money taken from an entire world of gullible muggles. Sure, dollars and yen are worthless in Diagon Alley, but you can still buy food and an enormous range of physical comforts with it. And if you absolutely have to spend money in a magical store- muggles still have gold. Even at the extortionate exchange rates that I assume the goblins would charge, the process of turning essentially free cash (in exchange for magic tricks or conjured trinkets) into gold and then into goblin coin is basically nothing but profit. A lot of it.
Which brings me back to social stratification. Why are the Malfoys considered a powerful family? Why do people differ to government functionaries and Dumbledore? Why do witches and wizards run businesses or work at all? Social hierarchy is a result of power imbalances, and other than direct, physical force, there are no power imbalances in the wizarding world. They can take your job, but who cares? You don’t actually need one. They can take your home, but who cares? You can make another in a few weeks (and this time the hot tub will go on the balcony instead of in the backyard).
A wizard does not need anything from society or from other wizards.
Dedicated magic government doesn’t have a standing army or even an official police force branch to ensure public safety, and relies on essentially a band of mercenaries to take down Voldemort.
Twice
Also:
For me it’s always the unexplained power nerfing that authors do just to advance the plot.
Harry Potter in the first 3 books was fearless, he literally took on voldemort with his bare hands.
Then when the dumbass plan with the port key cup happens, he just stands there like an idiot as the rat dude kills Cedric and revives Voldemort as if both he and Cedric don’t have wands that allow them to cast spells.
I mean they could have maybe had like 20 wizards camping the graveyard to make escaping impossible, but nah they really tried to make the coward rat guy seem like he was now somehow more capable than all of voldemort’s previously defeated plans combined.
Biggest “plot hole” is that anyone still likes it. Especially now that Joanne is publicly a piece of shit. I was extremely surprised to see so many trans people and allies rush to give a person that hates them money at every opportunity.
Cool, maybe don’t ruin a perfectly good thread though.
Dumbledore is quite sure the Defense Against the Dark Arts job is cursed, at least by the time of HBP. Sooo… why didn’t he figure out how to break the curse?
Being able to retain a skilled teacher would be pretty compelling. Is Dumbledore really so inferior to Voldemort in regard to curses that he couldn’t remove it? Or, if not, couldn’t he have created a new position with a new name, and new classes to go along with it? Call it Protection From the Dark Arts or Magical Defense or something.
Why are there socioeconomic classes on a society that can literally create or at least multiply any resources at will?
Life, uhh, finds a way.
There’s no fucking way that a kid raised from infancy like Harry was, in a abusive hateful household that treated him like dirt, would have enough strength of character to pull shit like the “Give it here, Malfoy” scene after having been out of the Dursley household for less than a couple weeks. Think about how the Dursleys would have reacted every time young Harry tried to stand up for himself. It would have been nonstop physical and mental abuse, all aimed at making him more subservient. It would take a miracle for a kid like that to be even vaguely functional as a person, and he certainly wouldn’t have the ability to stand up for himself, let alone others.
You’re not entirely wrong but I was a complete misfit and the black sheep of my family. I resisted their attempts to conform and homogenize me.
I think I took a lot of inspiration from the stories I had access to from books, tv, film, and video games.
Harry could read so I wonder if he also had access to books with inspiration characters. Also, what was his school life like?
I think having literal magic powers is the key difference. Though I do think he would just end up becoming the bully more realistically.
I mean… He does. Hes a huge bully.
Harry’s character is larger-than-life strong, but that’s fictional heroes for you.
This one can actually be known, since you’re just talking about human nature. I do think it’s possible to come out of the situation strong willed. He’d need other strong parental figures, such as teachers. It would also require a great amount of resilience, and would no doubt leave with a fair share of mental health issues. But you could totally be emboldened even after a traumatic upbringing like that.
Yeah it’s actually a weak criticism. Such strength of character is rare but there are still many examples in real life. Oprah Winfrey and Drew Barrymore come to my mind right away.
Oprah’s strength of character gave us dr oz and dr Phil. She’s a con artist not a hero.
The spell system is wack, which opens up all sorts of plot holes. Want Harry’s invisibility cloak? Accio invisibility cloak! Boom, Harry’s visible and you’ve got his cloak. I doubt that Rowling ever played D&D.
This one is kind of accounted for. It’s implied there are protections that can be put in place to prevent it from being summoned with Accio.
I always cringe with the 7th book, where the trio is hiding and searching for horkruxes, and for some weird reason they don’t have enough food and are constantly hungry. From the reading perspective I understand, that the hunger is a device to generate conflict and make their time hard to endure, but it always baffles me.
- It is mentioned, that Hermione pulled out all her muggle savings, so why didn’t she think about going to a supermarket and buying all the conserved food (cans and such) she can before they got on the run? She even mentions, that food can be multiplicated, just not created out of nothing.
- When they are hiding they sometimes get to a store or supermarket. But that only brings food for like a few days max. Why not more?
- And when there where too many dementors in an area to get more food, why not going really far away. We know Hermione was at least one time in France with her parents. Why not going there? Probably the war-like situation was not spread over the complete world that seriously. At least we are not hearing any of that in the books (JKR probably didn’t even thing much about international things when writing this)
Doesn’t Hermione also have a basically infinite bag of holding? It really doesn’t make sense
She does! She could have emptied multiple supermarkets, but nah, who needs food if you have books to read. Everytime I really doubt, that Hermione wouldn’t think of stocking food in her bag. So much conflict, so easily preventible…
Irrational soft magic system - anything can happen for any reason, so the story doesn’t matter at all.
I don’t know if it’s a plot hole per se, but when do they learn maths and science? If they’ at Hogwarts for 7 years, and they only learn magic, when exactly do they learn the usual subjects? Are they just stupid because they don’t learn them?
Isn’t there a class named ‘Arithmancy’? I always assumed it’s math for wizardkind.
I just had a look about it and it doesn’t seem to really be much maths. It seems that it’s more about magic in numbers rather than actual maths. I only glanced at it so maybe I’m wrong.
They don’t. That’s all considered Muggle stuff that they don’t need to know because they can just magic their way through life.
While I think that can be explained away with the idea that the magic is so OP they don’t actually need to know science. To use the Rowlings own tidbit as an example, why bother with toilets when you can simply magic away your shit.
And that also leads to what IMO is the biggest plot point nobody really thinks about. That there’s a secret society of magic users who almost exclusively use magic, and the “muggle” society has no idea of its existence.
Think about all the things we’ve discovered. Electromagnetism is pretty much magic, we figured that out. Atoms are pretty much magic, not only did we figure out atoms we figured out what atoms consist of. Einstein predicted black holes, something so out there that even Einstein doubted his prediction, we later discovered and modeled it. We can literally come up with absolutely insane ideas and then come up with ways to prove or disprove those ideas. There’s no chance we wouldn’t figure out the existence of magic and a secret society if we saw glimpses of something that makes us go “hmm, that’s interesting”.
You could argue that they use magic to hide magic from us, but they’d have to know about what we are doing to make sure we don’t accidentally stumble into discovering magic. But Arthur Weasley makes it pretty clear wizards don’t understand how our world works. They don’t know what we’re doing so their secret society is literally at the mercy of us not just noticing it.
So the secret of society pretty much exists on the premise that we’re too stupid to figure out Magic, but smart enough to create the society we have.
Not defending anything in particular. But at least in the books themselves it is explicit that magic is not a thing to figure out. You’re either born capable of accessing magic or you aren’t. A muggle can’t reason their way into acquiring magic. The book’s entire universe is based on the divide between those forced to exist within the confines of natural laws (muggles) and those capable of bending and breaking said rules to basically achieve whatever (wizards).
I’m fine with that. I’m not saying we should be able to “aquire” magic. I’m saying we’re somehow incapable of even acknowledging its existence. If muggles can’t perceive magic then what’s the point of keeping it a secret.
Obviously that’s not true because not only could Dursleys see magic but it was used on them, thus magic is observable and muggles would be trying to harness it because they wouldn’t know they can’t.
So it also somewhat makes sense why they’d have a secret society. But to keep it a secret you need know what the muggles are up to so they wouldn’t discover your secret. You need something like an intelligence agency to keep track of muggles and intervene if they get close to the secret.
But you don’t know how the muggle world works, so you don’t know what the muggles are doing which means you can’t intervene if they start to discover magic. If you can’t prevent them from discovering magic why haven’t they discovered magic?
That agency exists. It was Ron’s dad entire job description.
That’s exactly my point. It was his job to know and he barely knew anything. If there was someone trying to verify the existence of magic Ron’s dad wouldn’t be able to do anything about it because he wouldn’t even understand what that person is doing.
I think it is sort of like the CIA, just because they have power it out rules any need for reason. They just obliviate everyone indiscriminately.
I think like the vast majority of them are just dumb and some are like savants. Everyone other than like a couple people in the book are just copying magic routinely. Only Snape and a few other characters are cooking up any new magic theory.
That would explain a lot of the nonsense in their society
Not really a plot hole, but a missed opportunity. Dumbledore’s Phoenix could have shown up to help Snape - putting Harry in a mindfuck state as he would know both that Snape killed him and that Snape was loyal to him.
The plot has already being discussed at length. I want to talk about quidditch.
Quick recap, in quidditch, scoring goals scores 10 or 20 points, catching the snitch scores 150 points, and ends the game. This effectively means that the only way a team can catch the snitch and lose is if they are over 150 points behind.
As a result of this, logically the seaker should not attempt to catch the snitch if the score is this unfavourable, meaning the game is always decided by the seaker, and nothing anyone else is doing remotely matters. Remember also we see the audience is rarely able to see what the seeker is doing from the stands.
Now you may say “what about the world cup in book 4, Krumm catches the snitch and still loses”. This can only be attributed to Krumm got mad at his team, or maybe bored, otherwise he should just wait and see if his team can score a goal or two. If the other team’s seaker catches the snitch you lose anyway, so why even try until it’s going to win you the game? Maybe he was showing off to Hermione.
We also know for certain that this happens very rarely, as the odds given to the twins by Ludo Bagman are very high, leading to a big payout. Therefore quidditch is entirely decided by something that happens well out of sight of the audience, and would be terrible to watch or play.
As an aside, the rules around catching the snitch leading to a draw are never mentioned, but I assume they have some penalty shootout system
It made me irrationally mad that every significant character in the books was a seeker. Like Rowling’s shorthand for a worthy adversary or ally was just they play seeker. Harry, Draco, Cedric, Cho, Ginny, Krum, Charlie, Regulus. I know we get to know other members of the Gryfindor team, but aside from that everyone of note is so impressive because they were a seeker.
Quick recap, in quidditch, scoring goals scores 10 or 20 points, catching the snitch scores 150 points
Idk how canon this is, but I remember a quidditch computer game I used to play (on Windows XP) where usually when you scored your team would get the ball through the hoops multiple times in rapid succession, so scoring like 5 times in a row. Like if in basketball, if your team caught the ball after making a hoop you could pass it back and shoot again. That at least makes the point value of the snitch less egregious. Everything else you mentioned is very true though.
I think I remember that, Quidditch world cup? It was like a special move for Slytherin in the training chapter.
Quidditch is a game designed solely for Harry Potter to be special. And it shows
It was actually designed specifically to piss off sports fans because the scoring is illogical.
Why doesn’t Hagrid, who is the largest of the characters, simply eat Voldemort?
Well, we’ll have to ignore the gaping plot-induced stupidity on display by practically everyone throughout the entire story, because without it the books would have been quite short. So setting that aside, because I’m sure it’s been trampled to death already.
The complete unwillingness for the wizarding world to utilize even basic Muggle technologies and knowledge is absolutely baffling. It’s insinuated that they don’t need Muggle things because they can substitute them with magic which is “equivalent.” This is self-evidently hokum.
These idiots still write with quills, read by candlelight, don’t use the Internet, and despite having literal magic at their disposal their communication systems (such as they are) are laughably inferior to common Muggle ones even in the context of the time period in which the story is supposedly set. Come on. Owls?
Magic users demonstrate basically no understanding of science and are all demonstrably the worse off for it, still having a nearly medieval understanding of how the world works, and rely on magic as a crutch to weakly compensate. This even when it’s obvious to an outside observer that a basic piece of mundane knowledge or technology would be not only easier and significantly less dangerous than whatever the fuck their homegrown solution is, but also more effective. This is treated in supplementary works by Rowling as if it’s a point of pride by wizards and witches who deliberately eschew anything of Muggle origin – even if this means going to great lengths to shoot themselves in the foot simply to maintain that attitude of aloofness, which only serves to underscore the sheer stupidity apparently heavily ingrained into magical culture.
The fact that neither Harry nor none of the other Muggleborn kids are puzzled by this, nor why they apparently deliberately fail to bring so much as a common yellow #2 pencil with them from the mundane world out of sheer habit makes zero sense. (And yes, this is touched upon in the already recommended Methods of Rationality.)
Magical consumer goods are also seriously customer hostile. Who the fuck thought even half of those things were a desirable marketable product? Is there an evil wizard version of Willy Wonka lurking around someplace? Think of all the pocket change a Muggleborn lad could make by bringing a case of jelly beans with him to school to sell to his classmates where you don’t have a one in twenty chance of one of them tasting like earwax. Or chocolates that can’t hop away from you when you aren’t looking. I mean, for fuck’s sake.
And following from the above, everyone is so concerned about the damage to the karma done by the unforgivable spells, or whatever, which is supposedly why nobody goes to all-out war with the Death Eaters. But then no one gets the brain cells together to realize that Voldemort and especially his goons are surely vulnerable to conventional weapons. All anyone has to do is camp in a corner with a shotgun and then call out they-who-must-not-be-named, enticing them to appear to simply get Swiss Cheesed before having clue one what’s going on. Maybe Voldy can’t be truly killed by any form of physical harm, but the entire premise of the story begins with the observation that he can be put to considerable inconvenience, putting him down for quite some time, and thus buy the protagonists plenty of time to figure out his stupid riddles and find all his horcruxes. Then simply drive over whatever’s left of him with a steamroller.
These idiots still write with quills, read by candlelight…
And it’s worth noting—the items they use are still technology! Muggle technology, presumably. They just decided not to advance past a medieval technology level, which is presumably the last time they were actually more advanced than non-magical people.
I think there’s a bit in the first book where Harry says his parents were shot, and Hagrid laughs and says no muggle gun could have killed them.
But like, why not? It’s never explained. I’m sure if they survived being shot, magic medicine would sort them out pretty quickly. But there’s no reassign to think a gun couldn’t kill them. Wizards struggle to react fast enough to block spell s most of the time, and bullets seem to move faster than that.
I think the hardest part would be successfully ambushing Voldy, but no reason to think a gun wouldn’t fuck him up if you can hit him.
I can’t remember if it’s mentioned in the books, but I think the idea is that Muggle technology stops working in the presence of magic. Guns would jam, electronics would brick, etc.
Granted, this raises the question of where do you draw the line? For example, the magical world has countless exploding substances. What if they took some, stuffed it down a long metal tube, insterted a small metal object in front of it, then set fire to the explosive stuff from the back end? That’s basically a gun or cannon, and it’s hard to argue that it’s technologically complex.
Aside from the very much sung “why didn’t they use the time turner then”, there’s a bunch of “Why didn’t they stop Voldemort then” that could be inserted at various points of the story; when you consider that:
1- Albus had a spy within the death eaters in the person if Severus Snape.
2- In “the Order of the Phoenix”, while Voldy could take Albus 1 on 1, he retreated when more people arrived, implying they could gang up on him.
3- Sure they couldn’t kill him without the horcruxes, but another important plot point is that they have a magical prison, staffed with creatures that absorb your life force. Sure, Azkaban seems like a joke considering the number of prisoners breaking out of it… But in the case of Sirius he could escape transformed as a dog because they didn’t know he was an animagus and hadn’t taken the relevant measures, and the rest were broken out from outside. Certainly, they could hold Voldy with the right measures. Albus was monitoring Voldemort and the death eaters activity the whole time. In the first book/movie, he even had him within his school, unknowingly sure, but he knew Voldemort was likely to try and get his hands on the philosopher’s stone, and was just like “don’t worry, it’s well protected”, not even trying to set up an ambush, or to pursue Voldemort once he knows he was there.
To be fair: With Dumbledoors measures with the mirror of erised they had kind of a trap. The philosophers stone obviously hidden behind some challenges, that are not really that strong, so an attacker would think the last one would also be easy. But there you only got the stonen if you didn’t want to use itn ruling out people with nefarious intentions (Dumbledoor didn’t know about Voldy in Quirrel at that time). To bad some first graders thought they needed to safe the stone. Quirrel would have been still thereuwhen Dumbledoor arrived, but Harry gave him and Voldy the opportunity to get the stone from him instead from the mirror. A bit of captain hindsight here. He maybe should have thought of that. Or maybe it is understandable that he didn’t foresee Harry fucking Potter
Yeah, but that’s only really a trap is there’s a way to keep him from escaping. Voldemort escaped pretty easily; had Harry not been there, he could’ve tried for some time, figured out the trick and then just left to re-evaluate his options.
While not explicitly stated, it’s possible that that’s actually what he did: If he’d figured out Harry, Ron and Hermione had been snooping around and had found the room with Fluffy, Quirrel might’ve willingly dropped hints so that they’d check, let the music play longer than he needed to so that they’d know someone was trying to take the stone and he could lure them all the way down.
Point taken - it really doesn’t seem thought through by Dumby. But I think its funny, that Harry is basically ruining Dumbledoors plan of protecting the stone, because he cannot stop being a hero. Yeah, thanks Harry for “saving” the stone from Voldemort -.-
