Anyone else hate Harry Potter?

Discussion in 'Discussion of Published Works' started by Stephen1974, Jun 25, 2017.

  1. The Dapper Hooligan

    The Dapper Hooligan (V) ( ;,,;) (v) Contributor

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    Maybe not, but I know plenty of priests that haven't read the books of Judith, Tobit, Baruch or Maccabees (1&2).

    Writers aren't out there, like priests, to entice people to change their lives for the better because of some old books. We're out there to create books that inspire people to change their better because they want to. I'm not saying that you should dismiss books out of hand because you don't think you'll like them, because even bad books can give good advice on writing. I didn't read Twilight because it promised too entertain me, I read it because it was a decent study on Experiential Identification in literature. Read it if you enjoy it, read it if you want to learn from it, don't read it simply because it's there because relative to our time on earth there is nearly an infinite number of books out there. And as the Bible says:

     
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  2. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    Yeah made it 100 pages into book five, and gave up.
    Harry was too much of a whiny bitch for me.
    (Haven't bothered to finish the books after that)

    Now that somebody mentioned it. Harry did
    get an awful lot of help for being the worlds
    'badass' chosen one.

    Harry may have been a bit bland, but the writing
    in general was done well.

    To be honest I don't like "The Chosen One" stories.
    As an adult they are highly predictable and we know
    from the beginning exactly how it will end. So in a
    way it really dulls out the danger of things that happen to
    them along the way, because we know they aren't going
    to be killed off.
    Unless your Jesus, then it you go out hardcore. :p

    Twilight and its bastard love child 50 Shades, I Loathe.
    The latter for many reasons, and the former because
    I think it is written just as bad as its bastard prodigy.

    I don't hate HP, I just lost interest.

    Here let me give you an HP fan-fi that will make you laugh and cringe.
    Why, because I love you, and friends share weird things with friends.:supergrin:

     
    Last edited: Jul 31, 2017
  3. animagus_kitty

    animagus_kitty Senior Member

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    Sharing My Immortal. How rude. You ought to be banned, I find this offensive :p

    I get the 'Harry's a jerk' thing, really I do. But...this indicates that you don't quite understand Harry's 'chosen one' status. He wasn't Chosen because he was special; he was special because he was chosen. And that specialness didn't really make him...special, it just made him a lot harder to kill if your name was Voldemort. He wasn't smarter, or prettier, or better at magical sports because he was the chosen one.
    That's...actually kind of the point of the books, I thought, was that he spends the whole time telling people he's not any better than they are, and he'd have died three times his first year without Hermione and Ron. >_>
    *gets off soapbox*

    Anyone calling Harry 'badass' is probably suffering from a fundamental misunderstanding, if you ask me. Except maybe parts of the last book, and Book 6 snark.
     
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  4. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    Heres a plot thought - write a chosen one story then subvert the genre by killing the chosen one about half way through so that his friends have to muddle through without him to victory

    imagine the shock factor if Luke goes to "use the force" and gets blown out of the trench by a tie fighter, leaving Han and Chewie to destroy the deathstar and save the day.... or on point for this thread Harry gets killed midway through the last book and Hermione has to step up :D
     
  5. Tenderiser

    Tenderiser Not a man or BayView

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    The sixth book is really good IMO - possibly my favourite. Seventh not so good but still better than the fifth.

    Mind you, genital crabs are probably more fun than the fifth.
     
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  6. Fernando.C

    Fernando.C Contributor Contributor

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    Huge Harry Potter fan here. I never found Harry irritating as a character. A little bland? yeah maybe but not irritating. Now almost every supporting character in the books is more interesting than Harry himself, that's true but personally I never had any problem with him, he worked well enough for me as a protagonist. Then again I'm hardly objective when it comes to Harry Potter. :D

    Yeah I'm with you on this one, the Snape fan club gets annoying sometimes. Don't get me wrong I thing he's a brilliantly written character with lots of depth but he was as you put it a 'a mentally stunted bully'.

    He ruined his friendship with Lily by hanging out with the wrong crowd and calling her a mudblood to top it off. He became a fucking Death Eater and only quit after Voldemort killed Lily which he was partially responsible for btw. Then he spent the next seventeen years taking his guilt and pain out on innocent students and he was needlessly cruel to Harry all because he reminded him of how badly he'd screwed up. His sacrifice at the end doesn't erase all the wrong that he did, brave though it was.

    I'm as big a HP fan as they come but I couldn't disagree with you more. Reading Harry Potter or any other book no matter how iconic or classic isn't a requirement for being a writer or being a member of this forum. All you need is a passion for telling stories.

    Agree with everything there. This is one of the reasons I love Harry Potter as a series so much. It's really not a cliche chosen one story. At the end of the day it comes down to choices which is one of the themes of the books.
    The fact that Harry is chosen in the first place is because Voldemort himself 'chose' him in a way. If he hadn't acted on the partly-overheard prophecy he wouldn't have created his biggest enemy. And Harry didn't commit himself to defeating Voldemort just because he was chosen, he did so because it was the right thing to do and he probably would've done that anyway. The prophecy didn't matter all that much at the end. Harry and Dumbledore have a conversation about this very thing at the end of book 5 I think, I love that conversation.

    The sixth book is my favorite too. It always pisses me off that Half blood Prince is so underrated. It's such a great book, we get so much insight into Voldemort and his background and I love everything to do with Dumbledore in that book. It's just great from start to finish.

    The fifth book is my least favorite one too and the least reread. Not because I think it's a bad book, it's not. Actually I think it's very well-written but between that bitch Umbridge and
    Sirius's death
    it's just hard to get through.
     
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  7. Shadowfax

    Shadowfax Contributor Contributor

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    Many times told I him to check the setting to self-destruct was off.
     
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  8. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    PussyPrison.jpg


    Oh come on, they kinda built him up. He was popular and well known in the
    wizarding world.
    The Prophecy that told everyone he was going to save the day.
    Lots of help. From lots of people.
    He leads Dumbledores Army.
    Lives in denial, while having moments of doing things above spellgrade.
    Breaks the rules constantly, gets slap on the wrist.
    Defeats a wizard who is known to kill people without thought, who is way
    more powerful.

    Not trying to paint the story badly, but there is a fair amount of plot demands
    that drag the story forward. From people giving him advice on what to do,
    before he goes off to do it. To people giving him items that just so happen
    to make things easier on him.

    And you lack a sense of humor.:p

    @Tenderiser From what I understand the 6th book is many peoples favorite
    of the series. :)
    I might give it a read some time, but I will probably skip whats left of 5 and 7.
     
  9. Stephen1974

    Stephen1974 Active Member

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    The 1st book aside, which is excellent. I think the 7th book is the best. Least amount of whiny potter, and darker than the films.
     
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  10. Simpson17866

    Simpson17866 Contributor Contributor

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    Have you read the Mashable article about how "The Harry Potter series is actually one long story about PTSD"?

    From what I've read about PTSD, I thought that every point the article brought up was spot-on:
    There's a reason many survivors, myself included, prefer not to discuss the details of their trauma: They don’t want to be identified by it. When strangers know about your trauma, life gets weird.

    When strangers know about your trauma and it involves a dark wizard killing your family while you inexplicably survived, life gets weirder still — especially if those strangers start identifying you as "the boy who lived."

    This, of course, is what happens to Harry in the first book in the series, Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone.

    Harry is already working at an emotional deficit. His abusive foster family, the Dursleys, have left him with the scars of long-term emotional and physical abuse, rendering him malnourished in every possible sense of the word. He doesn't trust authority; he's never had friends before.

    Then he gets his letter to Hogwarts, and suddenly, everyone who sees his scar — the physical marker of his trauma — treats him differently. They mean well, but they also ask him probing questions; they touch him without permission; they take his photograph and call him names. They think they know his life because they know what he’s been through.

    This is a trauma survivor's nightmare. Imagine if everyone you met knew all about the worst thing that ever happened to you. That’s what Harry Potter’s life is like, all the time, once Hogwarts summons him.

    It's almost enough to make you want to hide in a cupboard under the Dursleys' stairs.
    Let’s move away from Harry for a moment to look at his friend (and later girlfriend) Ginny Weasley. In Book 2, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Ginny befriends a sentient diary controlled by Very Dark Magic. It possesses Ginny, making her hurt people.

    After she’s rescued, Ginny is terrified she'll get in trouble. Let that sink in: her body has been invaded, her free will dismantled, and her power used to harm people she cares about, and she thinks she's the one in trouble.

    Ginny’s fear is not unfamiliar to survivors of prolonged emotional abuse. It’s easy to anticipate and internalize blame for trauma and abuse, even if nobody explicitly says the words "it's your fault". You expect them to blame you, and to get ahead of the pain that will cause, you blame yourself.
    In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, we meet perhaps the most traumatic characters in the entire series. We speak, of course, about dementors. These dark creatures force Harry to relive the moment his parents died.

    In real life, flashbacks can be anywhere from little (a scar hurting) to big (a screaming, crying blackout). The dementors trigger the latter in Harry.

    The book also introduces boggarts: creatures that take the form of whatever their victims fear most. Harry’s boggart takes the form of a dementor, meaning Harry is most afraid of fear itself.

    From the perspective of a survivor, this has another, sharper facet: the fear of being forced to relive your trauma. Part of trauma survival — and part of Harry’s arc in Book 3 — is learning to manage not just the fear that the Awful Thing will happen again, but fear of having to remember it for the rest of your life.
    [​IMG]
    Few survivors of serious trauma will read the excerpt above — from Book 4, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, page 707 — and find it far-fetched that an authority figure would prefer to deny a problem rather than face terrible things happening in their jurisdiction.

    If Harry’s story of Voldemort’s return is true, then Cornelius Fudge must risk his own security and comfort. He is required by his position as Minister of Magic to fight those who would inflict the same trauma on others.

    That’s a scary prospect, and it's easy to understand why Fudge would rather insist that nothing happened. It’s harder to understand when this happening to you in the immediate aftermath of trauma — but then, what is fiction for, if not to help us come to this kind of understanding?
    Every so often a friend will ask me what it feels like as a trauma survivor when you get triggered. To explain better, I should just carry around Book 5, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

    In chapter 1, a post-traumatic Harry exhibits all these symptoms:

    • He hears a loud bang and immediately prepares to fight.
    • He recovers, and shifts rapidly into a feeling of isolation, wondering if his friends care about him.
    • He cycles through self-doubt — did he actually hear a bang at all? Is he overreacting?
    • He distracts himself by instigating a fight with his bigger, tougher cousin.
    That’s what it’s like. It's going from heart-pounding fear to loneliness to self-doubt to anger to outrage, all within a few minutes.

    After it is over, I'm left asking: what just happened? Why am I angry? Do I even have a right to feel this way? Why can’t I just get over it?
    In Book 5, Harry takes occlumency lessons with Professor Snape in order to build up his mental defenses against Voldemort. The sessions leave Harry exhausted, emotionally vulnerable — and susceptible to the very mental intrusions the lessons should prevent.

    This is a fantastic description of trauma therapy. It's like breaking bones in order to reset them; the pain is immense, and you hope that when you have recovered from the treatment the result is less painful than before.

    But it's not always effective. Sometimes the therapy just doesn't help.

    In book 6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, we discover that occlumency training hasn't fixed Harry's problem. He keeps hoping that on the other side of the suffering, things might be better.

    In fact, he is even more vulnerable than he was before — it’s easier than ever for Voldemort to get into his head, influencing his thoughts and actions.

    For many people, trauma therapy works brilliantly. But the processes involved in that therapy are taxing, and it can be hard to even imagine that reopening wounds and exposing vulnerabilities could possibly lead to healing.
    Throughout Harry Potter’s pre-Hogwarts childhood, he lives with an abusive family, the Dursleys. Via Hogwarts, he finds a surrogate family in the Weasleys, who themselves experience significant trauma throughout the books. The way they handle it starkly contrasts to how Harry handles his own:
    [​IMG]
    [George Weasley, upon learning he’s lost an ear. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, p. 74]
    [​IMG]
    [Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p. 501]

    When the Weasleys endure trauma, they recover in ways that reflect and strengthen their support network. A subplot throughout the books is how Harry learns to let the Weasleys support him, too.

    In Book 5, he’s constantly trying to hide his pain and fear; but in Book 7, he talks to his best friend Ron about it whenever he can.
    He learns — as many trauma survivors learn — to lean on others when he can’t carry the weight of trauma alone.

    By the epilogue of Book 7, he’s not “all better”. The people who died are still dead, and he still has the same scar he started with. But he’s living a better, fuller, happier life, because of the support from people who love him. And that’s a pretty damn good finish to a series about trauma.
     
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  11. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    Yeah, that totally, totally works.

    This is the second time in a week that I've wondered about an author's childhood--the first time was about A Wrinkle in Time, which I am now interpreting as being not about It but about a dysfunctional parent.
     
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  12. Simpson17866

    Simpson17866 Contributor Contributor

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    Interesting.

    I'll have to re-read that :)
     
  13. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    It's a post that I wrote for That Thread after it closed. Since it's not open again, I'm going to contrarily post an excerpt of the non-posted-post here. Since a movie is about to come out, I'll wrap it in a spoiler.

    The bits of the "cloven pine" bit in A Wrinkle in Time are:

    - Magic lady gave girl glasses. Girl doesn't know what they're good for.
    - Girl finds the father that she's been missing and longing for.
    - He's trapped in a transparent tube. He's blind and he can't escape. He's been there for years.
    - Girl can't get in, shouts to him, pounds on the tube.
    - Girl remembers glasses.
    - With glasses on, girl can enter tube and have tearful reunion with father.
    - Father still can't see, can't get out.
    - Girl gives glasses to father.
    - Father puts them on, can see, can get out.
    - Father picks girl up and they leave tube together.

    Yeah, whatever, right?

    But I saw a theater performance of A Wrinkle in Time, and SEEING it, rather than reading about it, was different. It made me think of the way that a child of a dysfunctional parent (Which emphatically includes me--I got two! Yay parent lottery!), a parent trapped in their own issues, desperately wants to rescue that parent. The parent is blind to reality, they're trapped, their kids can't truly touch them or rescue them, they're present but not present.

    And there's almost nothing that the child wants more than to rescue the parent, to bring them to the real world. Except what they want even more is for the roles to flip back to what they should have been, for the parent to BE the parent so that the child can be the child, for the parent to be the rescuer.

    And that's what happens in that scene. The child hands the gift of reality (sight) and freedom to the parent, and the parent uses it to rescue the child as well as themselves. The child gave them the gift, and then got to relinquish responsibility and fall back to being a child.

    It's hard to explain how utterly perfect that particular wish-fulfillment scenario is. I suspect that it's a part of why some people who read that book in childhood are so ferociously loyal to it, and why others are, "Huh? What's all the fuss about?" And maybe there's something similar about the ferocious loyalty, versus "Huh?", about Harry Potter.
     
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  14. Simpson17866

    Simpson17866 Contributor Contributor

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    ... I'm crying just reading your summary :)
     
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