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orangerfulSo, this has been bugging me for awhile. I blame Tumblr. There are way too many SUPER SRS gifs of Harry Potter on tumblr and they annoy me because, and I know this will probably get my burned in effegy, but:
The Harry Potter series is not that great.
I blame the movies for creating the illusion of character growth and development. I want to find a group of people somewhere and use them as a control group because I think that, while the first 3 books are good, the series as a whole is pretty weak. BUT since we started watching the movies before the books were done, and since we got to see the principle cast (Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint) grow from little kids into adults as each film went on, it made us believe that the characters were growing. They were not - the actors were growing and maturing and becoming better at their craft, but really Harry and Co. don't do much in the way of character development for the whole series.
One of the biggest problems is that each book is actually the same and I felt this was made even more obvious with the movies. I can only rewatch the first three in the series because after that the books and movies just get unbearably LONG and DULL because Rowling felt it was necessary to follow the school year pattern in EVERY BOOK. Even if the plot would have moved better without it. Any action and discovery has to wait until the end of the school year because they can't solve the mystery or have a showdown mid-term. This isn't as big of an issue in the first three books because they are short and the stories movie a lot quicker. But I felt like the stories in 4-7 have a lot of moments where Rowling is treading water, trying to just get us to summer time so that Harry can discover the villain and win the day. Again.
(Every HP book/movie: End of summer blues/back to hogwarts yay life is so much better/new random professor introduced, snape looks mad/go to classes for first semester, odd things happen/weird things happen but then it's Xmas so break!/Xmas Break, Harry explores alone, discovers something/Classes resume, Harry tells Ron & Hermione his discovery/talk to Hagrid/QUIDDITCH MATCH/Ignore Dumbledore's advice and/or warning/Exams coming up, panic/Malfoy does something dickish/passed exams/quick solve the mystery/BATTLE!/Dumbledore lecture/back to abusive foster family.)
Let's talk about Alan Rickman. Casting him in ANY role makes that role 10 times more interesting. I don't think I cared about Snape one bit when I first read the books (pre-movie). I figured he wasn't to be trusted, he would the one character to always give Harry trouble, which is pretty standard for a children's series. But when Alan Rickman was cast in the role...well, CLEARLY there was more to Snape than we knew, why would they cast Rickman?? I'm not saying that Rowling didn't know what she was doing with Snape the whole time, but I don't think the audience (especially the adult fans) would have been nearly as interested in the movies if Rickman had not been Snape.
And Daniel Radcliffe. Here is a kid we saw grow from a child actor we had only barely seen on BBC to a renaissance man who can not only pull off a screen performance but can also perform classical theater AND a broadway musical (singing AND dancing) with no problems. I think it's hard to seperate his personal growth from that of Harry Potter because they are practically intertwined. It creates the illusion of Harry growing because Daniel has been pushing himself all these years. Harry is NOT Daniel BUT Daniel has grown so much as an actor that it appears Harry is growing. He didn't. He just got better representation on screen.
I could totally hang out with Daniel. Harry, on the other hand, is totally average. I mean, he doesn't even DO any extra-curricular activities at Hogwarts except for Quidditch - so he's a jock. Yeah, not my type. Daniel, on the other hand...call me a cougar because RAWR.
I'm starting to come to terms with the ending of the series, which I still don't like but I realized I'm not British. Again, after seeing the movie, watching Voldemort's followers goosestepping through the ministry of magic as they talked about the perfect wizarding race, it was hard to deny that Voldemort = Hitler and Death Eaters = SS and all the baddies are just Nazis. So, if I think of Slytherin house as a part of Germany, rather than a bunch of evil children, I can understand why their punishment was not swift. I mean, after WWII, you couldn't exactly punish ALL of Germany -- many of them were just going along due to fear of what the consequences of fighting back would be.
Anyway, I'm not saying Harry Potter is BAD. It's a quality series for children. But, in the end, Rowling missed too many opportunities to make it great. When Book 5 came out, it reflected our post-9/11 world, with Umbridge cracking down on freedoms and controlling what students could do. Now maybe this works just as well into the WWII metaphor, but it wasn't written in the 1940s, it was published in the 2000s and JK didn't seem to realize that the world was changing her writing because she seemed to forget that darker place she went to in Order of the Phoenix. Books 4-7 could have been so much stronger if she had just paid attention to where it was naturally leading. Instead, I felt like she had an idea in her head and she was determined to have that be the ending, but she resisted the more organic growth that could have emerged.
Which is what keeps the series from being great.
The Harry Potter series is not that great.
I blame the movies for creating the illusion of character growth and development. I want to find a group of people somewhere and use them as a control group because I think that, while the first 3 books are good, the series as a whole is pretty weak. BUT since we started watching the movies before the books were done, and since we got to see the principle cast (Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint) grow from little kids into adults as each film went on, it made us believe that the characters were growing. They were not - the actors were growing and maturing and becoming better at their craft, but really Harry and Co. don't do much in the way of character development for the whole series.
One of the biggest problems is that each book is actually the same and I felt this was made even more obvious with the movies. I can only rewatch the first three in the series because after that the books and movies just get unbearably LONG and DULL because Rowling felt it was necessary to follow the school year pattern in EVERY BOOK. Even if the plot would have moved better without it. Any action and discovery has to wait until the end of the school year because they can't solve the mystery or have a showdown mid-term. This isn't as big of an issue in the first three books because they are short and the stories movie a lot quicker. But I felt like the stories in 4-7 have a lot of moments where Rowling is treading water, trying to just get us to summer time so that Harry can discover the villain and win the day. Again.
(Every HP book/movie: End of summer blues/back to hogwarts yay life is so much better/new random professor introduced, snape looks mad/go to classes for first semester, odd things happen/weird things happen but then it's Xmas so break!/Xmas Break, Harry explores alone, discovers something/Classes resume, Harry tells Ron & Hermione his discovery/talk to Hagrid/QUIDDITCH MATCH/Ignore Dumbledore's advice and/or warning/Exams coming up, panic/Malfoy does something dickish/passed exams/quick solve the mystery/BATTLE!/Dumbledore lecture/back to abusive foster family.)
Let's talk about Alan Rickman. Casting him in ANY role makes that role 10 times more interesting. I don't think I cared about Snape one bit when I first read the books (pre-movie). I figured he wasn't to be trusted, he would the one character to always give Harry trouble, which is pretty standard for a children's series. But when Alan Rickman was cast in the role...well, CLEARLY there was more to Snape than we knew, why would they cast Rickman?? I'm not saying that Rowling didn't know what she was doing with Snape the whole time, but I don't think the audience (especially the adult fans) would have been nearly as interested in the movies if Rickman had not been Snape.
And Daniel Radcliffe. Here is a kid we saw grow from a child actor we had only barely seen on BBC to a renaissance man who can not only pull off a screen performance but can also perform classical theater AND a broadway musical (singing AND dancing) with no problems. I think it's hard to seperate his personal growth from that of Harry Potter because they are practically intertwined. It creates the illusion of Harry growing because Daniel has been pushing himself all these years. Harry is NOT Daniel BUT Daniel has grown so much as an actor that it appears Harry is growing. He didn't. He just got better representation on screen.
I could totally hang out with Daniel. Harry, on the other hand, is totally average. I mean, he doesn't even DO any extra-curricular activities at Hogwarts except for Quidditch - so he's a jock. Yeah, not my type. Daniel, on the other hand...call me a cougar because RAWR.
I'm starting to come to terms with the ending of the series, which I still don't like but I realized I'm not British. Again, after seeing the movie, watching Voldemort's followers goosestepping through the ministry of magic as they talked about the perfect wizarding race, it was hard to deny that Voldemort = Hitler and Death Eaters = SS and all the baddies are just Nazis. So, if I think of Slytherin house as a part of Germany, rather than a bunch of evil children, I can understand why their punishment was not swift. I mean, after WWII, you couldn't exactly punish ALL of Germany -- many of them were just going along due to fear of what the consequences of fighting back would be.
Anyway, I'm not saying Harry Potter is BAD. It's a quality series for children. But, in the end, Rowling missed too many opportunities to make it great. When Book 5 came out, it reflected our post-9/11 world, with Umbridge cracking down on freedoms and controlling what students could do. Now maybe this works just as well into the WWII metaphor, but it wasn't written in the 1940s, it was published in the 2000s and JK didn't seem to realize that the world was changing her writing because she seemed to forget that darker place she went to in Order of the Phoenix. Books 4-7 could have been so much stronger if she had just paid attention to where it was naturally leading. Instead, I felt like she had an idea in her head and she was determined to have that be the ending, but she resisted the more organic growth that could have emerged.
Which is what keeps the series from being great.
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-15 09:02 pm (UTC)Also, I think I agree with you for most of this. It was all really great when I was just getting into it, mainly because it was new and exciting but... am I ever going to reread it all? Probably not. I realized with the last movie that I am just not that crazy about it anymore, and you hit some of the reasons why here. The whole ending just felt a bit lackluster to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-15 09:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-16 11:37 pm (UTC)I once heard someone (forget who) quoted as saying what the HP books have is "a high ratio of cool stuff per page"--Mirror of Erised, wands, dragons, etc. It's fast-paced, the characters are ones most people can identify with, and Rowling's writing style is pretty good (compare to ::gag-choke:: the Twilight series.) And a lot of fandom is what fans have done with the series--dressing up, creating HP-themed rock groups, fanfic, etc, etc. Much like the original Star Trek, though that had a bit of character development and some really good writing, depending on the episode.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-01 03:30 pm (UTC)I think you're right, for a middle grade/YA series, the books were pretty good. Great, even. But when you're an adult you notice the flaws. I re-read PoA, and... there's even flaws in structure; characters just end up being somewhere different with no preamble, there's really strange wording at times, and so forth. Also, the Slytherin thing was always strange to me. I think that's one of the things that does keep the books in "middle grade" territory - because it's a drastic version of how in more general kids' books, the kids who wear a lot of makeup and are into cheerleading or sports are always evil and shoplift and stuff. At twenty-five, you realize how dumb that is, even at seventeen you side-eye it a bit, but when you're eleven it's totally believable.
I think the biggest flaw in the series, though, is that it was a restrictive POV. I had the same issue with The Hunger Games, actually. I think the Housing issue was actually supposed to be way less simplistic than "Slytherins are meanie poopy heads", but we only get Harry's POV, and Harry apparently thinks that way even as he enters his teen years. But the other thing I just realized is that while there's actually three main characters (the trio are basically a single unit), we never really get their stories except from Harry's perspective. While Harry has surrogate family, he's still charging into battle with most of his family (including surrogates like Sirius, and Dumbledore to some extent) either long deceased or indifferent; Hermione had to modify her parents' memories so a, they wouldn't be in danger, and b, if she died, they wouldn't miss her. Holy shit. That's a whole chapter we could've been given. Or Ron, who has parents and six siblings - including a little sister, because while in adulthood they'll basically be the same age, when you're seventeen, one year is still a wider gap. He didn't even get to say goodbye to her, reassure her he'd be careful. But we don't get that. Instead we get told Ron's insecurities, which is still an important subplot (or maybe I just love Ron), but that's... all we've got. Harry tells us Ron's worried about his sister and feels insecure, and that Hermione had to wipe her parents' memories. A truly great novel, I think, would delve into those things a little further.
It's also clear JKR wrote things as she went - we fans love to point out the little things she foreshadowed, and I do think some of it's rather brilliant, but she also made up characters Harry would've known about before. He seriously only hears of Rita Skeeter his fourth year when she's important, even though he's been reading the Prophet for four, and a flashback suggests Rita was writing during the first wizarding war? Little things like that also bugged me.
... so yeah, I still love the books, but I really side-eye people who say they're the best ever because honestly, they're not.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-06-02 01:03 am (UTC)I think one of the reasons I ended up loving Hunger Games was that it didn't shy away from a messy ending, which I felt Harry Potter did.
I would really like, maybe 20-30 years from now, for someone to LotR-Peter-Jackson the Harry Potter books and make an epic mini-series, and by that I mean go in and FIX the little things that didn't quite work. Give Ron and Hermione more screen time. Maybe, like the Hunger Games movies did, take the opportunity to add a few scenes that couldn't happen in the books because of the POV and strengthen the story.
Yeah, I totally enjoyed the books but to me they are not the best thing ever. But they ARE a great stepping stone into a larger world of reading and for a lot of kids that come into the library, they are the book to brag about "Well, I've read all the Harry Potters" and once they say that, I know what to give them...which is usually Gregor the Overlander, which I think is just as good...maybe better? with a more realistic ending (but it's suzanne collins again so yeah)