Besides Harry Potter being a giant Gary Stu, there are other things that always annoyed me about the stories and its fandom and anti-fandom, two unfortunate components of any larger fanbase.
HP fandom, like Twilight fandom, puts their favourite series up there with real literature such as Pride And Prejudice, Lord Of The Rings, the Narnia books or even the Oz series.
Yeah, right. HP is pretty forgettable in comparison.
Antis hate for reasons that are just as stupid as the fans who go crazy over it.
"Harry Potter is just a children's book! You shouldn't be reading that past the age of 12!"
This has got to be the most narrow-minded and erroneous reason of all.
If they believe it's wrong for adults to enjoy something that's meant for kids or at least, all ages, then they shouldn't mind if all of a sudden the government stepped in and banned them from ever watching re-runs of TV shows they grew up with, because those shows were kid-friendly.
HP may have started out as a series for children, but it certainly wasn't a kiddy book any more by the end of the fourth book. Certainly not when you factor in the first huge bombshell of a political agenda Rowling waited to strategically reveal once the books were all written and had become huge best sellers. And she was only getting warmed up. A kids' book? Not any more.
Then there are the shippers, including the Ginny-haters who didn't actually hate most of the series, only the ending, furious that Ron and Harry were married off to Hermione and Ginny? Why? Well, some of these people wanted Harry and Hermione to be together. Others wanted the ending to be open, with Harry or Ron to be single, so they could continue writing Mary Sue fanfics about themselves marrying or shacking up with the HP characters.
Then there are the Voldi lovers. The ones who are mad because Voldemort "never closed the deal" and failed at everything.
Excuse me? Hardly! Okay, if he actually had closed the deal and killed Harry Potter, he would've been the main character instead of Harry Potter. It wouldn't have made sense to put Harry's name in the titles of each book then.
He certainly succeeded in killing people who got in his way, and possessed and used others - some of them certainly against their will, just because he wanted to kill Harry Potter. That was his one goal in life. To kill Harry Potter and steal his soul. How stupid. Revolting and pathetic or what? Voldemort definitely had it in him to use and abuse, yes, violate anyone for his own sick gratification and to achieve the ends he wanted. If the series had originally been marketed to adults only, you can bet your boots all the ugly details would've been spelled out Shades Of Grey style.
This whole business about Voldy trying to steal Harry's soul was boring and just not my thing to begin with. Soul-snatching makes about as much sense as vegetarian sparkling vampires. Uh, last I checked, blood wasn't vegetation. Your soul is you, and you can't be someone else because then you wouldn't be you, they would. The whole thing sounds too demonic anyway.
Or if those antis aren't actually Voldy-lovers, they hate Gary Potter Stu so much that they'd rather Voldemort had done him in.
The oaf was such a disgusting, twisted old wind-bag that I was utterly sick of him by the end of the first book, was ready to burn him in effigy by the third book, and he just kept on and on, whinging, grasping, demanding, scheming, and yammering on and on until he finally screwed himself over with the wrong wand to end his worthless life - at the very end of the whole freaking seven-book series! If he had kicked it at the end of the first book, that would've made room for a new villain with a different agenda in the next, and so on.
The characters are as cliche as the Twilight characters are angst out, drippy saps or big time jerks. There are plenty of those in HP as well.
racism, elitism, bigotry - the wizards were prejudiced against normal human beings, and they bestowed on them the unlikely and very ridiculous sounding term of 'Muggles'. Those who were half normal and half wizard were called 'mudbloods' Hard to get into a book and spend time on characters who use such baby-talk terms and would look down their noses at you if they were real.
The house elves, oh, what simpering, stupid, pitiful little creatures, on the bottom wrung of the ladder, and for the most part, they seemed complacent about that. Their appearance doesn't occur until the fourth book, exposing the abysmal extent to which the wizarding world, and Hogwarts in particular as far from egalitarian. All that "mud-blood" name-calling and similar might have been chalked up to typical schoolyard bullying, and stupid one-upmanship stuff among the adult wizards, and that was bad enough. But slavery at Hogwarts? That was a whole new level of not cool.
I have to hand it to Hermione Granger for trying to put and end to their inequality, and who knows, maybe they would've grown in strength of character if that scheme had been successful. Maybe. it failed because of Dumbledore's indifference, and partly because of Hermione's own lack of thought for a campaign slogan. "S P E W" Not even her friends could take that seriously. What is anyone really going to remember, "SPEW" or "Society for the Protection of Elf Welfare"? Come on, this turned out to be a childish joke.
What an insult to elves.
Hermione was rather annoying anyway, just because she was incredibly nerdy, to the point of simply too much, and no other girl in school came close to matching her intelligence. It was mostly Hermione and the boys making up the rest of the main company.
The beginning of the first book started out cliche. The Potters having some sort of stigma of a family secret which turned out to be magic, and because of it, everybody in the Dursley house treated Harry like he was some sort of stinkbug.
The Dursleys, especially dudley - dudley dursley, really? What kind of corny name is that? And he's not only a spoiled brat, he's a very fat spoiled brat who never amounts to anything in all through the series, he's just there as padding in the "Everybody hates Harry" subplot. It would've been much more interesting if he looked average. Too much of a pretty boy would've only served to pump up the Harry-hate thing further, because then Dudley and the other Dursleys would've went on about how handsome Dudley was while Harry was ugly.
Rubius Hagrid - ugh, the name just burns. Before I realized Hagrid had a first name, I had thought Hagrid was his first name, and it made me cringe. It sounds like a hag named Ingrid, which isn't exactly princess-like, but still way too female sounding. The name Rubius isn't much better. It sounds altogether too much like 'Ruby" with a little 'us' stuck on the end. Even Reuben Hendrix would've been much much better.
So many names sounded nearly the same. Hagrid, Hogwarts, Hedwig. Too much of the 'hgw' and 'hgr' thing going on there.
Dumbledor… Oh, really? And he's the head of the whole Hogwarts scene. How to take a character with that name seriously? And he turned out to be a huge disappointment anyway.
Snape - what to say about Snape?
I liked him as an antagonist, not to be confused with an all out twisted sack of mold villain like Voldie. Snape's continual sniping at Harry Potter, and the student body being generally rather afraid of him was great. But he was meaner toward Harry, and the reason why was eventually revealed, and man, what a let-down!"
He was like that because of a freaking love triangle! A cruddy, mundane love triangle that ended up making Harry Potter's dead parents look sort of bad, or at least, slightly unsympathetic. See, back in the olden days when Snape was a teen, he fell hard for Lily, who threw him over for James Potter, and thus Harry Potter came into being and that was why Snape hated him so much.
That's it.
Oh, really? Lily and James met a horrible end, trying to save their baby from that slavvering moldering piece of crap Voldemort, Harry suffered, subconciously missing them all his life, and they had to get tarnished as jerks to give Snape an excuse to be a miserable teacher who had a bias against this kid because of being thwarted in a crush years earlier? Right, swell...Yeah, that sucked. The big agenda reveal made it all suck enough to turn me off HP forever.
Conclusion, Harry Potter sucks.
And it just never goes away...
As late as 2016 and 2017, Voldy suddenly went from "cool badarse" to villain as leftist HP fandom made lame attempts at comparing him to Donald Trump.
Well Voldy has never been cool as far as I'm concerned, and regrettably flawed as Trump is, he doesn't go around trying to steal souls and has not killed anyone.
The only good thing I ever got out of HP? Recipes for butter beer! And that's more than I usually get out of a disappointing reading experience. The idea of a butterscotch vanilla drink is extremely appealing to me. There was no butter beer recipe written out in the books as far as I can remember, people have come up with recipes based on descriptions or their own idea of what butter beer might be like.
I'm not the sort of elf who can get drunk on it. The same can't be said for the HP house elves. Hah! Such weaklings!
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Harry Potter And The Twilight Hunger Games
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