Was Harry Potter Ever Good? | A Harry Potter Video Essay

So to address a few reoccurring responses: A lot of characters who are Black in the films are not distinctly Black in the text until significantly after their film appearances (if ever). Yes, The Worst Witch should have been mentioned. I misinterpreted the Rick Riordan article so I thought he was criticizing Palestine, not supporting it. I should have mentioned Nina's magical powers are basically emotional manipulation and later necromancy The only good Earthsea adaptation is the BBC Radio broadcast. There are a number of YA fantasy series published prior to Harry Potter, but I think Harry Potter's success helped elevate them to a more mainstream status. A rising tide lifts all ships. I'll update this as I notice more responses. Just wanted to clarify that now.

I don't think HP being so UK-centric and focusing on Voldemort only being a threat to the UK and not really addressing the rest of the world is that unusual. A lot of American-centric stories do the same thing with their stories.

As an Argentinian, I remembered I was so confused when I found out that the southamerican school of magic was on Brazil, one of the few countries in Latinamerica where spanish is not the official language. Like, what are the spanish speaking people suppose to do??😂 learn portuguese just to go to school?? That's madness. That was the moment where i realized she didn't know a thing about the world outside England.

There's absolutely no way that Hogwarts would teach that Salazar Slytherin was a bad guy in real life. They'd try to gloss over his fascism, and when they do teach him, they'd call him a "polarizing" figure.

Pro writer here. The fact that kids can project themselves into the book is massive, but also Rowling’s real talent is the ability to write characters (especially bad guys) in such a way that it illicits a strong emotional reaction in the reader. I went to a boarding school and there was one teacher at this school that absolutely everyone was terrified of, even including kids like me who weren’t in his class—and for good reason. Dude was a total asshole who reprimanded me once for not saying “please” to someone else in such a traumatic way that I still have the memory of it to this day. When I read Harry Potter, Snape wasn’t Alan Rickman, Snape was that teacher. Fear of Snape and hatred for Umbrage and love for Hagrid and Dumbledore are something the reader feels on an emotional level with such intensity that it actually drives immersion with the series.

I think Rowling is a much much simpler woman than she believes herself to be, and the flaws in her approach as a storyteller become more and more clear the higher age demographic she tries to write for.

I've been aware of this for years now, but the real contribution I got from Harry Potter is all from fanfiction, from reading stories where people see the problems of the original books and come up with better ways to do things, to deal with problems, to ask questions, to change.

No wonder there’s so much Harry Potter fanfiction. Half of the building blocks aren’t there, or most of them have such clear flaws that people can’t help but want to rebuild it into what they’d want.

Her whole “the status quo is good, ambition is always a red flag” thing goes even further than villainizing people who want more that what they’re given or who don’t meet her beauty standards. Rather, she elevates social station itself into a universal truth. You’re either magic or a muggle (or squib). No muggle can become magic because they don’t have the magic genes. And all muggles we meet - even the sympathetic ones - are presented as stupid, shallow, shortsighted and incurious. GEE, SUBTLE ONE THERE, Granny Jojo. -_-

Animorphs should have been the popular youth series. Don't let the silly morphing covers fool you. Inside the pages of Animorphs you will find an epic war tragedy. The child heroes go through bloody combat, ptsd, psychotic breakdowns, moral failings, and meaningful sacrifices. There are consequences, character growth, and upsets to the status quo. Animorphs!

As a Brazilian guy, Castelobruxo completely baffles me. It's an Aztec-like pyramid hidden in the middle of the Amazon rainforest (where likely no Aztec ever stepped) as if anyone could properly get there, and the school houses Brazilian and other Latin American wizards. Now, what language are the classes in? Most students would speak Spanish. However, the school's name is in Portuguese and it's in Brazil, which would suggest Portuguese. Also caiporas, keep in mind that Caipora is a protector of nature, now protects this man-made building for some reason. All that in what I suppose is one of the lesser offenders.

In the first book, you could see Slytherin house, and Snape’s bullying, from a kid’s perspective. It worked because you experience bullies and scary people as a child. But as the series goes, it turns out that Slytherin actually is evil. Draco Malfoy’s dad is just blatantly a Death Eater and nobody notices.

I want to clarify that there's two primary ideas of magic in fantasy: Hard Magic (explain the rules, keeps consistent) and Soft Magic (strange and unknown, story based). Harry Potter's issue is not that the magic is soft and we want a hard magic. Soft magic can be some of the best fantasy you read, because it relies on the writer's ability to inspire wonder and fear and confusion in you. It wields the confusion to its benefit to set magic aside from science. HP has neither. Her magic is soft when she doesn't want to explain, and harder when she decides to set an arbitrary limitation. She made it up as she went and only detailed the part that she cared about. Example: incantations seemed to be necessary to cast in earlier stories, you had to say the spell usually. But then she realized that she can't write gun-based action scenes off that, so later on people just hurl spells from wands like bullets. No strategy, no specific use of a spell, just blasts like it's fucking D&D and they only learned magic missile. The problem isn't that HP's magic is too soft. It's that it is straight up fucking stupid.

As a Ukrainian I have to say that putting all post-Soviet countries together in one school is wrong for so many reasons. That school is permanently on fire. And, well, that's very much russian colonialism there;-;

I joke (as a former Hp kid) that Harry Potter was only big because Anime wasnt a thing in the West yet. But this video made me realize it was kinda our first real Otaku Culture with Fanfics and everything lol.

"The magic happened, and the magic is gone." That's a great way to sum up how I feel about the series now. It was great while I thought it was great, but I've moved on and find magic in other stories now!

Harry Potter's strength is its aesthetics, not the books themselves. The books don't even matter - the merchandise is.

Even when I was a kid I though it was so dumb that Rowling got away with not explaining how magic works or the history of the magical world by just going “Harry was bored by it so he wasn’t listening”.

In its heyday, there WAS one other thing that allowed kids like us (Granted, I was in high-school when my maternal grandparents introduced me to these books) to immerse ourselves in the power-fantasy of "Higher Education As An Escape-Hatch From Your Normie-Dipshit Upbringing." "Hello. My name is Professor Charles Xavier. Welcome to my School For The Gifted."

Harry Potter was not GOOD. It was FUN, especially if you were in the age group that "grew up" along with the book's characters.