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).
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would owl post even exist when you have magic? Clearly just ambiance. Makes no sense.
How many millions of muggle deaths are on the hands of wizards who could have trivially healed them but didn’t? Why does no one seem to care about that? Especially the muggle borns.
Maybe the owls are a thing of the past for legal correspondence. Kind of like how we still get mail with the internet and some places still use fax for certain things.
The biggest plot hole is how new spells are even made. It seems all spells are pre-existing and they just study how to do them, not the “science” behind how they work.
We get no doses of “wizarding science” showing wizards testing theories for new spells and throughout the books whether you even need a wand or to say a spell out loud seems to be always in flux based on what is useful to the plot.
In other words the world has no internal consistency. There are not firmly set rules to the world of Harry Potter.
She literally made it up as she went along so it all gets pretty confused and stupid pretty fast.
It seems all spells are pre-existing and they just study how to do them, not the “science” behind how they work.
One of the many reasons why Ursula K. Le Guin’s universes are much more interesting
I remember seeing a YouTube video, talking about all the inconsistencies and “broken mechanics” introduced on HP books, and how they are always resolved two books after, because when a book was published the next one was already going so she had to usa the next one to solve wharever problems fan had found.
Interesting. Link to video?
I see you and I’m gonna try to pass you.
Wait, is that the Driving Crooner?
You might really enjoy reading HPMOR. It’s the best fanfic I’ve ever read. Technically it’s the only fanfic I’ve ever read, but it’s great.
Try five chapters and you’ll live it or give up.
What’s it about?
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It’s a rewrite of book one, but Petunia was disgusted by Vernon, and married a professor of philosophy, IIRC.
Small scale: The lack of constant mean pranks. You can’t tell me that shitbag kids aren’t polyjuicing everyone into dogs and donkeys 20 times a day, and thats the PG version. Ain’t no way dudes aren’t making their dicks 30 feet long for fun.
Large Scale: Wizarding culture is tremendously trite, shallow, and terrible. They are the worst of humanity with super powers, all because of …genetics? It’s still super privledge eugenics at the end of the day, and Voldemort is just making daylight decisions about everything that the non-DeathEaters blithly comply with every single day.
I don’t get it. I haven’t read the books, only seen the movies, but as far as I could tell, there’s absolutely nothing special about Harry. He gets swept along, and he has himself no particular virtue to be extolled.
That’s literally what makes it a fucking Tory wet dream. This gets missed on a lot of American readers.
A uniquely special boy (gotta be a boy, this ain’t for girls!) from birth, he did nothing to achieve that specialness. Somehow, despite being an orphan, he is actually absurdly rich. Everyone knows of him even though he has done exactly nothing himself to justify it. He is somehow destined for greatness despite being a fucking fumbling, middling wizard. He will be the “hero” by banishing “evil” from the world because everything is in black and white and evil people are always evil and good people are always good and never the twain shall meet. There are never broken people who make mistakes, no, just good or evil.
A boy after Boris Johnson’s own heart.
I actually never got the impression he was rich from the movies. All Hagrid really says is “You dinne think they’d leave ya with nothing?” And they show a pile of coins.
To a child with almost nothing but some school expenses who lived on handmedowns, he might feel rich but he didn’t rush out and replace his broom himself when it broke each time.
His parents also weren’t old or particularly famous outside their role in Voldy’s death, so I don’t know where the richest could have come from outside his Father’s family.
And the first thing he does with that money is buying all the candy and treats on the train, so none of the other kids can have any, even though he’ll have to throw away 95%
Also… Does Gringots do interest? I assume not because it’s literally a vault.
This is why I prefer Star Trek over Star Wars. Characters in Star Trek, by and large, work their asses off for what they think is right.
Star Wars, you are born a Lord or a peasant and basically accept your lot.
This is a good read that talks about it https://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_main/
