Harry Potter and why its world building is so boring? - Avada Kedavra vs M16

[Executive Petrel]

>the wizard government (ministry of magic) is basically a totalitarian all-seeing surveillance state that imposes permanent supervision on any and all magic cast by wizards anywhere, at any time

y didnt they get hagrid arrested after what he did to fluffy?

 

[XANA]

I think the world in HP is boring because it's rarely expounded upon, unless there's a plot contrivance/convenience that needs to be done. I'm going to be ignoring what Rowling mentions in her tweets, because the world building she tries to do on Twitter is retarded.

The main magical places that are mentioned or visited is Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley, the Weasley house, and the Ministry of Magic. Being that the entire series is from the POV of a bunch of school children, it would make sense that Hogwarts will be the center stage of the story. However, the world of the Potter books doesn't feel very lived-in. You just don't get the sense that there's anything that really defines the wizarding life outside of school, or wizard Hitler.

You have wizard sportsball and the wizard tournament that happens in the 4th book, but that's about it for wizard culture. You don't see if wizards have regional differences (outside of the glimpse you see from the 3 other schools that visit Hogwarts in book 4), different religions (or they have religions/dieties that are different from those worshipped by non-wizards), or different views of life. Wizards have villages outside of Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley, but the one we see Harry and Hermione traipse through on their McGuffin quest in book 7 doesn't have defining features. Every group is just flat cutouts. Slytherins aren't anything more than super evil people who rub their hands together and plot, Ravenclaws are nerds, Hufflepuffs are fatasses, and Griffindors are reckless idiots.

I don't think the lack of lore is the problem. It's that there's not a lot of mystery in the book for people to speculate on. The focus in the book is so narrow-minded that there's not a lot of room for the reader to imagine. Despite there being a lot of magic, there's not a lot of supernatural elements present that shape the course of the books' events.

There's no fantasy. You have dragons, but the only place they're mentioned is when Hagrid raises one, and the dragons guarding the bank vaults. They just exist; there's no backstory or rhyme/reason to their being. They're just there for the sake of the story.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

It's funny, these stories are often cherished by the woke but the "power" in these YA fantasies always has the main character inherit being "the chosen one" because they need a (M/G)ary Sue stand-in for themselves or some aspect of themselves that's special in a way that nobody else can easily obtain. Which usually is due to heritage or bloodline, which starts to sound very familiar somehow...

To be fair, Harry Potter dodges that because Harry's only the chosen one because Voldemort decided to kill his parents. Any baby with magical powers could have been the chosen one if Voldemort killed their parents right in front of them, the books even say one of Harry's friends could have been that.

A lot of YA books don't have this though since they are ripping off classic tropes of Western literature while espousing their desire to deconstruct Western civilization.

 

[NerdShamer]

There's no fantasy. You have dragons, but the only place they're mentioned is when Hagrid raises one, and the dragons guarding the bank vaults. They just exist; there's no backstory or rhyme/reason to their being. They're just there for the sake of the story.

There's an handful of other magical creatures; but most of those mainly exists for comedy and the occasional set piece. Only thing that managed to stay relevant was the fucking centaurs. The dementors became an fucking joke. And the spiders were mainly there for the shock value (and as an historian in one scene)

 

[Safir]

He was gay from the beginning. He's fucking flamboyant in book 1. Old style british bugger, he was described short of speaking polari.

Idunno, context matters. There are a lot of poofters (wokes say "queer-coded characters") in children's media (Willy Wonka, Wizard of Oz, many Disney villains) and in the Harry Potter books (Lockhart, Flitwick, Xenophilius, Slutborn, Nick the ghost; Pettigrew and Fenrir Greyback are chomos, Fenrir literally loves giving children magical AIDS). In the books, all wizards wear robes for every occasion; movie costume designers used more normal clothes so Dumbledore stands out there. Some of the male characters have fruity traits, but have you seen the females (Sybil fucking Trelawney)? Adults simply behave stupidly in the books because tee hee funny, there's background retard radiation permeating everything. "Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test", fuck me sideways.

However, I see it over and over when Harry Potter is brought up, from both sides, that the "Dumbledore is gay" was a woke retcon, and both sides are angry. Anti-wokes are angry that he was turned gay and consider it the big bang of the diversity trend, wokes are angry that he hadn't been gay from the beginning. Now we won't know for sure if he's always been a butt pirate unless Rowling's drafts surface, but I will stand by a weaker claim of "the tale grew in the telling".

The Weasleys are incredibly dysfunctional, I have more of a beef with Freorge and Gred, who I think are annoying delinquentes, and Arthur, whom I think Lucius Malfoy had a point about: He's incompetent at best and corrupt at worst.

He's pretty much comic relief, he also allows us an insight into the wizarding world that neither Harry nor Hermione have for purposes of worldbuilding but also occasionally plot-relevant.

Frorge and Gred, Percy the yuppie and the parents have some character to them, even if they're terrible. Ron has none and he's one of the leads. Hermione should've been a bookish Weasley, teased by her older brothers Fred and George (they don't realize she's younger and a girl). She already is a walking encyclopedia of wizard history despite her muggle background, a pureblood-Hermione could also be a source of information on wizard daily life when needed (and Rowling is bad at daily life, see: wizards shitting themselves, so the less wizard daily life is there outside of school, the better). She'd be diligent and patient when supplying historical facts but Harry's lack of common knowledge would sometimes skip her mind. The one to make connections between disparate wizard facts would be Harry himself, as protagonist and audience stand-in.

Draco Malfoy filled the Saskue-sized gap in the female readers heart.

Draco is a coward, a pussy, and inconsequential. His ultimate role in the story is "see, even this pussy has a mother who loves him". Sasuke (from cultural osmosis, I haven't seen Naruto) is a Chosen One's sidekick who resents being a sidekick. I'd have liked Harry to have a

• competent
• bad boy
• rival
• who's good at magic,
• breaks school rules to show off and gets away with it
  • (whereas Harry breaks school rules to fight Voldemort and help his friends and suffers the consequences),
• occasionally does something for his own purposes that helps the good guys (fights a villain on the loose, talks back to a shitty teacher, steals a valuable book from the library and the heroes know what's missing, puts Harry in detention where he makes a friend),
• and eventually sides with them and is an asset to them
  • (and brings other Slytherins over so they wouldn't be Hitler Youth).

Someone fangirls would be justified in wanting to fuck. Harry Potter would defeat him in books 1 and 2 at least (to please young readers) but eventually will have to choose between school bullshit and saving his friends (like he did in the actual books IIRC), and not-Draco would have some character growth of his own. For there to be a good ending and a reconciliation, Harry Potter has to unite Hogwarts for the battle of Hogwarts.

On one hand, the magical community is severely inbreeded, classist, with an ineffectual, corrupt government and mudbloods are suggested to enrich it and actually prevent it from actually disappearing. The magical community elites are suggested to be rabidly, irrationally scared of muggles.

On the other hand, muggles are represented by Little Whinging, Surrey and the Dursleys, Rowling jab at the white british middle class: Vain, mean-spirited, hypocritical, insincere, shallow, judgemental and intolerant, and they're, of course, all bullies and racists towards muslims and niggers and faggots the magical community and get deranged at any instance of magic (see the former Prime Minister).

I'd say both wizards and normies are justified in being scared of technology and magic respectively. Getting a brush with magic would fuck up a lot of people, finding out there's a secret magical society that they can't tell anyone about, who commit crimes against humans and mindrape them, would fuck them up even harder. If the existence of wizards is ever revealed, muggles will want to subject wizards to restrictions, to compensate for muggles' inability to interact with magic.

Wizards on the other hand might have an understanding that muggle technology scales really well, develops really fast, and is not tied to specific people. There's a RL church doctrine that all supernatural power comes from either God (through prayer) or the devil. Niggers in Africa still murder witches for dick theft. Having formed a divergent civilization, wizards don't want to become accountable to muggles, they don't want to pay muggle taxes, be forced to fight in muggle wars, or be judged in muggle courts by muggle juries. Also, while the magical abilities of purebloods, halfbloods and muggleborn wizards aren't different, children of a wizard-muggle couple often have no magical ability, thus wizards are justified in banning association with muggles and keeping their women away from muggle dick.

I will abstain from getting into the specifics of wizard society and muggle relations (apart from highly isolated real-world questions like "can a masquerade exist" or "is magic hereditary" or "why didn't muggles go extinct") because wizards mindraping normies and stealing and grooming their children -- and it's the good guys doing it, pureblood supremacists wouldn't have bothered! -- justifies total wizard death. (Another reason why it's good for Hermione to be a Weasley instead.) In light of this it doesn't matter whether the current Minister for Magic is honest or corrupt or retarded. Total wizard death.

I think Harry Potter is a classic masculine story, with a classic masculine protagonist and, in many ways, is reflective of Jo's, let's say, complicated relationship with men. Jo is an old school feminist

(I may be compensating for my own femaleness here)
Harry Potter is saved by his mother's love at birth and in the first book. A mother's love is the greatest power in the world!11!!! While this is true (insert bell curve meme), and songs and stories have been written about mothers' (and wives') love, Rowling is firmly on the retard end of the bell curve, she goes about it in an insultingly autistic way, beating the reader over the head with it, having Dumbledore expound on it, integrating Mother's Love into her magic system with Redactum Skullus and the Bat-Bogey Curse, and figuring out its radius of effect. This is unmasculine cringe that appeals to liberal mothers looking for books to teach their midwit elementary-grade sons Very Important Lessons.

And it never ends, every year Harry goes back to the Dursleys because mother's luuuuurve and the book has to explain it. Famous shonen centering around love like Fullmetal Alchemist (two brothers try to resurrect mom, fail, get cursed, fight magic Nazis; female author) or Galaxy Express 999 (boy's mom gets murdered by robots and he goes to space hell with a sterile fallen angel waifu; male author), none of them have it as an actual superpower. When Padme Amidala of Star Wars prequels died of a broken heart, everyone thought it was ridiculous, because while people do die of a broken heart, this has no place in a boys' story.

"You are protected, in short, by your ability to love! The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort's! In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your heart's desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord Voldemort, and not immortality or riches. Harry, have you any idea how few wizards could have seen what you saw in that mirror?"
-- Dumbledore in book 6, via the Harry Potter wiki

gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay

There's no fantasy. You have dragons, but the only place they're mentioned is when Hagrid raises one, and the dragons guarding the bank vaults. They just exist; there's no backstory or rhyme/reason to their being. They're just there for the sake of the story.

There are dragons in the tournament in book 4. I don't see it as a fault that a lot of magical creatures only feature in "filler episodes" in a book about a magical school. Most of the creatures have IRL pedigrees. Dragons aren't special, just like pixies and mandrakes and boggarts aren't special, they're rare animals. (Do you know anything about e.g. snow leopards except that Liz Fong Jones wants to rape one?) If you want moar creature kahntent, a natural place for it is videogames, where quests, minigames, crafting and spell collection are built around magical creatures.
Going through the beast / being / spirit lists, I remember these from the books, with some role in the plot:

• dragons
• unicorn
• troll
• phoenix
• thestrals (invisible winged horses)
• griffin hippogriff
• centaurs
• werewolves
• ghosts
  • poltergeist
• dementors
• giants
• house niggers
• Jews

There's an handful of other magical creatures; but most of those mainly exists for comedy and the occasional set piece. Only thing that managed to stay relevant was the fucking centaurs.

House niggers and Jews are more relevant. Centaurs are just rapey Indians on a reservation, any other rapey race on whose conceptual space Rowling hadn't infringed could have been used. (Horses aren't well-adapted to forests, which is why the Mongols rolled over the steppes but got bogged down in Europe.)
Jews run the whole wizard economy and are inspired by Norse Svartalfar (black elfs) -- thus Jews and human dealings with them are a part of the setting where magic stops being haha funny and is on the verge of becoming serious and epic and tragic, despite their goofy looks.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

Lockhart, Flitwick, Xenophilius, Slutborn, Nick the ghost; Pettigrew and Fenrir Greyback are chomos, Fenrir literally loves giving children magical AIDS

Some of the male characters have fruity traits

Well, that's just being british, dear. Everyone in bongland is 'queer-coded' to non bongs, those damn sissy englishmen inflicted their effeminacy on Scotland and that's the prime reason why the huge separatist sentiment.

Hermione should've been a bookish Weasley, teased by her older brothers Fred and George (they don't realize she's younger and a girl). She already is a walking encyclopedia of wizard history despite her muggle background, a pureblood-Hermione could also be a source of information on wizard daily life when needed (and Rowling is bad at daily life, see: wizards shitting themselves, so the less wizard daily life is there outside of school, the better). She'd be diligent and patient when supplying historical facts but Harry's lack of common knowledge would sometimes skip her mind. The one to make connections between disparate wizard facts would be Harry himself, as protagonist and audience stand-in.

Yeah, you have a point here. But I think Ron was meant to be Harry's bro in a way Hermione could never be. If Ron never existed, a lot of bedroom talk that is plot-relevant would have been more difficult. Also, Hermione being a pureblood would prevent having a close-home account of muh discriminashun.

Sasuke (from cultural osmosis, I haven't seen Naruto) is a Chosen One's sidekick who resents being a sidekick.

Sasuke was Frank Grimes. He was a boy whose life sucked immensely, he worked hard to be the best just for peanuts, and he was for all intents and purposes overshadowed by an annoying, lazy brat who happened to be the story's protagonist so he did the only sensible thing he could do: become a villain.

Centaurs are just rapey Indians on a reservation

It's odd that such an autistic race as depicted in the HP series turns out to be so rapey-rapey

 

[Johan Schmidt]

It makes perfect sense. Magic is a technology that needs a civilization to put it to use. Mages don't just fart lightning and win. Look at the IRL, whites and some azns are clearly better adapted to computer sorcery than negroes who are largely unable to understand conditionals, but negroes did survive through the millennia when there was no computer sorcery, and they're outbreeding computer sorcerers so far.

Except that wizards are also physically superior to us, don't seem to even really die of old age, don't get sick like we do, and can do magic as children that lets them survive things that would normally kill us. Like Neville bouncing when dropped as a baby from the roof, or Harry teleporting away from Dudley.

The black plague killed something absurd like 150 million people stone dead, and it wouldn't have even touched wizards. Unless they have stupidly short fertility windows, they should have had no issue out breeding us normies. Especially as they remain perfectly fine and dandy up into their hundreds of years of age. Dumbledore was 150 years old when he croaked, and that dude was manhandling people. We can die from a mild cough past the age of 60. They have their own diseases sure, but compared to ours? They're just kind of looney toon esque rather than lethal.

Someone mentioned before that wizards are clueless. Objectively, they aren't; we are. We have retarded ideas like 'conservation of energy' and 'chemistry', and other equally dumb notions. Wizards have proven that these things don't work the way we think they work. From a pure 'what can they do' side of things, wizards blow us out the water. They live disease free, they can teleport, make matter from nothing, live far past our expected lifespan, make accurate predictions of the future years in advance, create entirely new sentient species from nothing, time travel, create spaces that are larger inside than they are outside; upload their minds, and create perpetual motion. They have demonstrable evidence of an afterlife and the soul. You strip away the dumb look of their technology, and it's closer to the Federation, than it is to us.

The characters that are cluelessly stupid, are people like Arthur Weasley - Who created an invisible, flying, sentient AI controlled super car in his shed one weekend - and Xeno Lovegood, a man who I think is actually insane. The Wizarding PM just outright controls the schedule of the British PM; and American President, and inserted an agent so perfectly into his cabinet that the PM was unaware until he informed of the mans identity. A town was erased by giants, and the BBC ran a report about how it was a tornado instead. That isn't the sort of thing a society of mongs gets done. They wear robes and have retarded names, but so did the Ancients from Stargate.

 

[Time 4 Guillotines]

Harry Potter sucks because it's a children's series and it only got popular because it was the 90's and it was the first fantasy epic specifically targeted towards tweens. For many children it was the first time they really heard of dragons and trolls, so they were hooked.
Schools bought up copies by the truckload, as did parents for the simple fact that their kids were requesting books instead of toys and vidya.
People get the warm and fuzzies about it because nostalgia and an autistic inability to let go of childhood interests or at least contextualize them with an adult mind.
This corner of the Internet helps keep it alive because it's somehow an epic win to continue forking over money to a gay rights supporting, race mix advocating, refugee welcoming, bitter old Bong who happens to not like men in dresses pooping in her presence. Because giving money to a shitty liberal with one good opinion is how we're going to win the culture war. Because consuming the "right" product is an easier way to reep all the "fight the power" dopamine without actually doing anything that matters to anyone but some billionaire hack author.
It's ultimately the exact same soy as comics or Nintendo, just a different package.

 

[skykiii]

Slugworth (Slytherin) helped the good guys a little willingly, after accidentally helping the bad guy a lot more.

Okay, I can't be the only person who read the name "Slugworth" and wondered what the hell Willy Wonka's business rival has to do with Harry Potter. Or is this just a really common name in the UK?

 

[teriyakiburns]

Okay, I can't be the only person who read the name "Slugworth" and wondered what the hell Willy Wonka's business rival has to do with Harry Potter.

In a thread about how uncreative Rowling's worldbuilding is, you're surprised that she would re-use the name of a villain from a book she almost certainly read as a child?

 

[NerdShamer]

Or is this just a really common name in the UK?

I just read that as her running out of stereotypical wizard names. Only one that I've seen that could have possibly be "British" was the Blacks, which is about as generic as you can get.

And speaking of uncreative names, nothing can top Xenophilius Lovegood

 

[skykiii]

In a thread about how uncreative Rowling's worldbuilding is, you're surprised that she would re-use the name of a villain from a book she almost certainly read as a child?

Good point.

......

I myself never got past book four. When I read them, the series was only four books long. By the time book five came out, I had lost interest. Reading this thread mostly just to see if anyone summarizes books five, six, and seven.

I know some of the major things (including that one major spoiler that was meme'd on Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series).

I recently re-read the first book, and I think its enjoyable in a "little kid book" way, the same way something like Goosebumps is. But I have the feeling if I went thru the rest I would agree with most takes... its kind of the same problem as what me and others have been saying about superhero comics lately: the minute you take them too seriously, they get opened up to additional scrutiny which makes them instead come off as retarded.

 

[NerdShamer]

Reading this thread mostly just to see if anyone summarizes books five, six, and seven.

Basically, Voldermort starts becoming more overt, has his cronies (indirectly) take over the Ministry of Magic, there's plenty of his cultists openly terrorizing people based on their heritage, Harry has to destroy 7 or 8 relics that is giving Voldermort his immortality over the course of the last two books. It ends with an epic battle at Hogwarts with an handful of kids dying. Certain characters get married and have kids, which serves no purpose but to piss off the shippers.

The end.

 

[skykiii]

Harry has to destroy 7 or 8 relics that is giving Voldermort his immortality over the course of the last two books.

Wait, Voldemort is the Ender Dragon?

Thank you all!
Now I get it!
Harry Potter is basically an Isekai anime without the badass stuff or cute girls.

Eh heheh..... I've known plenty of creepy people who would disagree with that bolded part....

By the way... every time I read a page of this topic and move on to the next, I always find I have two notifications. Always EXACTLY two, no more no less. And this was before I even posted in this topic (and no, its not a glitch, as they're always genuine updates about something.... its just, always two whnever I turn a page.... is some celestial force trying to tell me something?)

EDIT: Spell broken. On page seven I got three notifications... on page eight I only had one. (or does the fact that this still averages out to two per page mean I'm not out of the woods yet?)

 

[skykiii]

Given that Stephen King references Harry Potter in the Dark Tower series, I'll bet that Stephen King wouldn't refer to Rowling in that way.

Also... Stephen King himself is a shit writer.

It's hardly surprising that the Harry Potter fandom became a hotspot for early woke as the books themselves were proto-woke as outlined above.

Didn't one of the books even have a subplot about Hermione trying to raise awareness of House Elf slavery?

.......

And read this entire topic. A brief note about that apparent notification curse.. on the last page, two notifications once again.

So, my own thoughts about Harry Potter....

Like I said, I find it fun in the same way Scooby Doo or something is fun.

That said, there is one issue I always had, even when I first read it... that being that for as "wondrous and magical" as the Wizarding World is supposed to be, a lot of it actually seems kinda either boring or stupid.

Take the magic itself: most magic works little different than a machine. You say the words and point your wand and a thing happens. Except for when Rowling wants to have one of those anime moments where the world bends because of someone's sheer will or determination and suddenly Harry can conjure an angelic stag from nowhere.

But then the rest of the time its shit that seemingly only exists just to be cool and whimsical, like the stairways in Hogwarts that move, or how pictures are alive so when you're reading an article the face shot can just wander off (which itself begs so many questions I'm surprised nobody is asking).

Then there's the stupid shit, like every-flavor beans.... which can literally be any flavor, even absolutely gross ones. Dumbledore at least points out he prefers muggle candy because with that, you get exactly what you pay for, but I'm shocked anyone at all would buy every-flavor jellybeans for any reason other than pranking their friends.

And that's kind of the thing.... as a fantasy, for me HP really didn't have a lot to latch onto. Really, like others said, most of the fun of the first four books was the "magical Nancy Drew" mystery aspect.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

Didn't one of the books even have a subplot about Hermione trying to raise awareness of House Elf slavery?

Yes, oh fucking yes!

And she was absolutely obnoxious and thoroughly mocked by everyone, from Harry and Ron to the elves themselves who wanted her to fuck off and mind her own business because they were, if not happy, at least moderately comfortable with their predicament and she was creating a lot of trouble for them.

She even went full terrorist hiding socks everywhere so that they would find them and get freed, to the despair of a lot of elves who were not used to, nor wanted, freedom and who didn't know what to do with their lives as free elves.

It was hilariously dark and something that could have come out of Rick and Morty's early seasons.

JKR said it was a comment on misguided activism.

Troons love to bring this up as proof of JKRs being a racist nigger hater.

Then there's the stupid shit, like every-flavor beans.... which can literally be any flavor, even absolutely gross ones.

Yeah, that was Homer Simpson levels of stupidity lol

 

[NerdShamer]

Didn't one of the books even have a subplot about Hermione trying to raise awareness of House Elf slavery?

I think it was the third one or so. And it was fucking hilarious

 

[Gorillion others]

I know there's a lot to complain about, like making Snape a major character and if he actually WAS evil or not (which should've been resolved in the first book, where despite being an asshole he helped save Harry's ass from the actual bad guy), and the whole concept of a corrupt and ineffective bureaucracy that Harry wants to join and work with but gives him nothing but shit the entire series, but we already have a whole thread for that.

Reason for this being that "TORIES BAAAAD. LABUR GUUUUUD!" Brits are weird like that.

 

[Gorillion others]

I've read a bit of it and couldn't stand it. The bizarre and obvious author self-insert constantly undermines himself by being a smug jackass to almost everyone.

This is egregiously common in HP fanfics. Harry becomes the equivalent of Duke Nukem who gets mad bitches while talking shit to everybody he (the author) doesn't like, and struts around like he's God's gift to this green gay Earth.

I'm being serious here. The other commonly used cliche is when Harry changes his name, and he practically insists until he's red in the face that THAT'S HIS NAME, AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT. Another meta (read; retarded) cliche is that Harry apparently has books of him written, and then he gets mad that he doesn't get royalties, or that people would have the absolute gall to write about poor, abused Harry and how much people have made a fiction of him. It's supposed to be jab at how Rowling "trivialized" abuse, not realizing that deep down, Rowling is just as much of a boomer as the boomers she claims to despise.

I've skimmed through a total of ten of these kinds, and there's more. Much more that I have too much self-respect to bother finding.

 

[Vecr]

This is egregiously common in HP fanfics. Harry becomes the equivalent of Duke Nukem who gets mad bitches while talking shit to everybody he (the author) doesn't like, and struts around like he's God's gift to this green gay Earth.

People wrote more of these? Did anyone manage to out-Eliezer Eliezer?