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).
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.
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.
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.
Well this kind of got answered in the game of Hogwarts legacy.
I always was curious how they Imbued physical objects with magical properties.
Let’s say, the evanescent cupboards
So these are created as a pair and connected to each other in the sense that whatever you put in one, shows up in the other
It’s basically an actual functional teleporter.
Leaving aside the specific instructions for use, this thing is a massive hack.
So in the games they do sort of explain that you can add magical properties to your clothes by using magical beasts resources.
So maybe the evanescent cupboards are made of one of those beasts that teleport a short distance
Same as the paintings and such
Why are there socioeconomic classes on a society that can literally create or at least multiply any resources at will?
They clearly state in the books that they cannot create resources at will. The resources need to exist first
Clearly you have not been studying for your OWLS. Focus on Gamp’s transfiguration laws
Life, uhh, finds a way.
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.
It is also explained that that particular cloak is immune to charms
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.
Wizards are just built different. In Harry’s case, he comes from a line of wizards that basically stood up to the metaphorical concept of death itself
Shits wack yo
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Additionally there could be games where the snitch is caught within the first minute of the game. Ending it early and everyone can go back home.
For a game theory perspective that’s what every team should be focusing on, instead of faffing about with the clubs.
Isn’t this one actually addressed ? I remember them releasing the snitch after a few minutes but maybe I plugged that obvious hole in the rules myself
I’m not sure, it’s not in the wiki on quidditch, which is frankly more research I planned to do in the subject.
Even so, when it’s in play it makes sense for all players to stop doing what they do and help the seeker out.
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.
Like a hundred or so teenagers of whom a large part went to some regular school and had regular non-wizard friends would suddenly either completely cut off contact as if devoured by a cult or dead or the kids are assumed to just successfully lie about not being fucking magic.
It’s utterly ridiculous. Imagine if it was hidden from the Dursley’s somehow and that Harry spent summers there bullied by Dudley. That he would never snap and tell or do magic?
Or that people like Dudley would keep their mouth shut for their entire lives?
Nah.
Most of the kids didn’t go to Muggle schools or interact with them. Harry’s situation was uncommon.
In Harry’s year, there were 4 Muggleborns (Hermione, Dean, Justin, Sally-Anne) out of 40 students.
That’s 10 percent.
Plus half-wizard families would also have family wondering where their nephew has disappeared to.
Also, does that mean that full wizard kids aren’t in any government register, so that they don’t technically have citizenship, and they just never interact with the world?
It’s utterly ridiculous that there would live two communities on top of each other with so Lucy much blending yet zero communication.
What, pens/pencils don’t work in Hogwarts, or even if they don’t work there, they still do their scribing with comically large feather quill and ink? Quill and ink work, but… fountain pens wouldn’t?
No wizard would be greedy enough to completely abuse the fact that their gold money is an infinite money glitch if you sell it as bullion.
And I remind you, these peoples foremost expert on muggle technology doesn’t know what a rubber duck is for. Can’t he just walk into a library and read a basic book?
One just has to make the massive leap for people’s forgetting about their relatives and what muggle-born / half-wizards might actually want to do. Like you had personality and aspirations at 11. Prolly not moreso than magic schools, but after graduating, are you really gonna go back to a world which doesn’t have pencils and doesn’t allow you to read a dictionary when the first 11 years of your life you loved everything technical.
Is your info from that time now banned? Are you banned from just returning to a muggle life? Or can’t you do magic if you do? Not even around your siblings who all know? (There’s 8 of them btw. 8 muggle siblings you have who aren’t wizards but know about magic.)
And we’re supposed to think shit like that doesn’t happen.
I mean I don’t think that’s a plot hole at all actually. That’s just like how the world works. People change schools. There’s tons of people I knew in one school and then when I moved to another I lost contact with completely. That’s how life works.
As for the dursley’s keeping their mouth shut, there were you know threats involved. At multiple times they’re threatened by a giant who mutilated their child at one point. Plus there’s the whole institutional Threat Level involving being able to make you forget who you are. Also pretty sure Harry does snap a couple times.
Who would believe him? If Dudley or his family started claiming there were wizards out to get them they would go to the Looney bin.
They can also mind wipe people. In Fantastic Beasts Newt obliviates all of New York City with the Thunderbird.
Life’s change and people move on. But people who completely vanish, come back on holidays, can’t say shit (as if they wouldn’t, they definitely do as we know from the characters) so spread the secret.
And this happens for hundreds of people. Every year. For centuries.
And one assumes those kids never return to muggle jobs either. No heir to an industrial fortune who suddenly is born a wizard and vanishes? Security can’t follow them to school. Even if they come to obliviate the private security, since the head of the muggle department at the ministry doesn’t understand what a light bulb is, they’re not going to understand what surveillance cameras are.
So yeah. It just wouldn’t work unless you make that assumption. Suspense of disbelief, sure, but that is the bit that makes zero sense and os covered with utter bullshit logic that doesn’t remotely work.
I assumed that the muggle interaction was a huge part of what the ministry of magic does. They employ a shitload of wizards and Ron’s dad specifically works on Muggle Tech… I assumed he had coworkers that do the same.
In Fantastic Beasts Newt obliviates all of New York City with the Thunderbird.
“Looney bin”
Sounds like you’re really read up on current terminology.
We’re not talking one single person. We’re talking all the muggle-borns or half wizards. There’s dozens every year. And all them magically vanish, never to be seen or heard or when they are, they have no excuse for where they have been. And if someone asks too many questions, suddenly they act like they’ve had a stroke and can’t remember things. But proper journalists have backups.
Do you think none of the muggle-borns would want to show off to their former non-wizard friends, even with “don’t tell anyone”?
You don’t think there’s a single wizard desperate enough to utilise magic to make real world money and that they’d never caught?
NY obliviating? That’s some extra convenient writing considering how obliviating works in the books. (read = shit writing) They even almost hang a lantern on it for that reason, out loud questioning will it even work and them saying “
ofc it’s a deus ex machinawe’ll hope for the best”That movie highlights the kind of shenanigans one slightly awkward but extremely moral and “want to hide the magic” wizard can get into. Even if we imagine the tiny group of people the Ministry has could be able to address some, the head of the Muggle things in the ministry doesn’t know what a lightbulb is. How would they ever understand the nuances of video-surveillance?
Maths study shows conspiracies ‘prone to unravelling’
A few thousand people can’t sustain a conspiracy. There’s 100 000 wizards in the Quidditch finals.
This is genuinely the most glaring and moronic flaw in the whole series and you just got to accept it. Despite there being hundreds or thousands of people like Petunia who were jealous as fuck and know about the existence of magic for sure and just don’t do anything about it. OK. Like if you had a brother who had been invited to Hogwarts, you’d just not even talk or think about magic, ever.
Petunia is even shown to cry to Dumbledore themselves that they want to go as well. Because it’s the natural reaction. All the characters act naturally but the story world couldn’t exist it that behaviour was assumed from other people as well. (Which isn’t hard to understand nowadays vis-a-vis who the author is; “rules for thee but no rules for me”)
“Looney bin”
Sounds like you’re really read up on current terminology.
Why use current terminology when the book was written in the 90s and was set in the 80s/90s?
Idk, to have basic human respect for people with mental disorders?
Do you think when people discuss say, hypothetically Hogwarts having trans people, they use the period terminology? Because having lived in the 90’s, I’d like to see you use that terminology while discussing a hypothetical trans-character in HP.
Considering JK Rowling is a TERF I doubt you’re going to see many trans characters…
Now. And is this JK Rowling with us in the room right now?
No.
And we’re still having a hypothetical discussion about her books, and used the argument “my language would be okay in the 80s and early 90s, so…”
We could have a fanfic with set in the same time. Would you use 90s slurs for trans people if insured this thread was about such a fanfic?
Or you discuss RDR2, do you consider it okay using the n-word?
I have no idea what your talking about to be honest. Sorry if I offended
Bro you’re taking a children’s book, made by an asshole, way too seriously.
I’m upset at someone dismissing the struggles of the mentally ill, not at some silly conversation about HP.
Exactly. This is a silly conversation about HP. That’s my point
Why doesn’t Hagrid, who is the largest of the characters, simply eat Voldemort?
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 -.-
