Crappy writing <3
this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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To be fair (while much of the writing is definitely shitty) they wanted to keep him in the school non-stop at this point because the people out to get him were becoming more prevalent and his enemies more powerful. So the intention to keep him safe.
But she probably could have directly said that. Most of the problems in the book could have been solved or entirely avoided if Harry would have listened to what he was told by Dumbledore and others
IIRC McGonagall does say something similar in the book. The movie just leaves it out. Harry asks if she could sign it, and she says something along the lines that she can't, because she's not his guardian, and she also wouldn't anyway because she doesn't think he should leave the grounds.
Honestly, it goes with the poor writing that she says it too. She really hammers in the point that he's supposed to be scared of Black, because she doesn't trust the reader to remember it for the twist I guess.
If Harry wasn't a self entitled prick there would be no books.
Lmao truly though. I read these books again when I was much older and was just consistently pissed off at him lol. I know he was a kid but holy hell lol. He got a lot of people unnecessarily killed even
I know shes a bigot and hates trans people, but i do think people are overlooking the fact that this was a kids series. This wasnt meant to be read and deconstructed and analyzed by adults.
When I read the books as a kid I really enjoyed the world. Some things made me pause or think, but for the most part it was a fun adventure. When I read it again in college, I couldn't get through the first or second book because of how poor I found the writing.
But again, it is a children's book. I dont reread Famous Five or Noddy anymore either. I used to love the Redwall series, but when I went back to read a couple last year I found I couldn't get into it as much as I did when I was 10.
Are they the best books or even the best kids books in the world? Definitely not. Is she a brilliant writer? Definitely not. But were the stories engaging and fun and did they give a lot of children an intro to reading and fantasy? 100%. They became popular because even kids who hated reading enjoyed these stories. She might be a miserable awful person now but that doesnt change what these books did for a lot of good people too.
Great teachers are constantly, and exponentially victims of overbearing administration. School administrators tailor to the worst, most immature parents who (I hope) don't realize they are causing a situation where kids can run rampant and completely ignore their education. We do that because the school administrators aren't there because they like kids or see the value of education. They are there because they have a high paid job that they don't really need to work at if they can placate a small handful of very vocal parents and mostly keep up on paperwork and meetings. Those parents are going to figure out just how shitty they've been when their children get to college... College does not have to give a fuck. We've known this for a while. We keep removing rights from the teachers so that administrators don't have to deal with any harsh situations. That might be specific to Ontario but honestly the sheer amount of people working in education here while people in need get denied access to the MANY programs we have makes me think like they're just ignoring us and then bragging about having summers off and going home at 3pm.
I am not being harsh toward teachers. Quite the opposite. It's those involved in education that have little to no experience in it that are clinging to cushy administrative jobs that I take big issue with.
What was her problem? She was badly-written.
"the ones I spied for weeks"
Words hard, apparently.
Genuine question from a non native English speaker here: what's wrong?
They left out the word "on" and the best that m137 has to contribute to the conversation is someone did a typo.
We would usually say "the ones I spied on". English is the only language I've ever spoken and although it sounds weird to not include the word "on", I really dont see why its necessary either.
Because "spied for," and "spied with" are both options.
"I spied them" is a legitimate sentence, but it doesn't mean covert surveillance in that sentence, only to have seen then, generally through some difficulty.
It's supposed to be "the ones I spied on for weeks".
"only reason the doom is not doomed"
he am good word man
I can empathize.
I'm a native speaker and sometimes even my words refuse to English right.
I think that's just how British brain rot wording works. They all talk this way. Read some of their news paper headlines.
unlike those American headlines
It wasn't an American who wrote "Foot Heads Arms Body."
Those last two are definitely intentional.
This implies that the students are insured in some way and that the legal system of the wizard world recognizes the same legal guardians of the muggle world AND that wizardy insurance companies are okay with students learning dangerous spells that can result in serious injury without guardian's explicit permission, but does not approve of field trips to safe villages without explicit permission. Or that the crazy, racist, homophobic and transphobic J. k is also dumb.
100% this. The Dursleys have zero clue what's happening there, and everyone knows they don't care. These kids get into mortal danger every year and they don't tell the Durselys about that.
Meaning that Rowling probably got screwed out of a field trip when she was 9 because of a lost permission slip, and this is her resentment embodied.
She didn't want to undermine parental rights for, you know, reasons.
I did wonder why they needed permission from the people forced to let him go in the first place
In all seriousness, this is what happens when you write novels without doing any world-building and just put down whatever seems "fun". The are sooooo many things in that series that make no sense once they are superceded by later plot devices. Rowling didn't think any of it through ahead of time and gave almost no thought to internal consistency with previous content when she wrote new things.
It's honestly a terrible series in most regards and it's kind of disappointing how popular it became.
Also she a trans-hating bigot. Fuck J.K. Rowling. Can't forget that part whenever discussing her or her work.
Yeah. There's a fan-fic I read recently (also the only HP fan fic I've read) called "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," which is set in an alternate universe in which Harry is raised by perfectly pleasant folks with an understanding of the scientific method, and arrives in the wizarding world and immediately starts deconstructing all the bizarre nonsense going on there. It's very well done, but it's really hard to recommend precisely because it does refer back to a ton of the stuff that's developed in the books, so I had to keep looking up stuff I didn't recall, and I don't really want to devote brain space to that stuff. (Some of the "rationality" stuff has aged a little bit poorly through the replication crisis, too, though I'm a bit more forgiving of that since it talks so much about updating your beliefs.)
But for anyone who did read the books back when and was frustrated at times by the characters behaving so irrationally, it's kinda cathartic in that way. For those who are interested: https://github.com/rrthomas/hpmor
By an author who is also crazy and problematic, though in a very different way than Rowling.
Oh, I didn't know about that, but it isn't hugely surprising.
I guess I should have mentioned this, but there's a lot of stuff in the book that kinda seems like coded libertarian stuff, and it even flirts with pro-authoritarian stuff. It's not a book I would recommend to kids or deeply uncritical people. That's part of why this thread seemed like a safer place to mention it.
This is what I tend to say to people about Harry Potter as a series. It was the first series like it to become popular, and that's its only merit. Overall it's very tame and bland, but it got lucky and became popular. I didn't like it because it was too same-y. After book 3 or so, I don't care about Harry Potter anymore. Explore someone else that's more ordinary. It makes a much better setting for derivative works, which to me as someone who writes textbooks of lore for RPGs is more important than just making a series sell well.
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The doom is not doomed.
Awesome guitar riff starts in the background
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