I've posted before summarizing, briefly, why Harry Potter is terrible. Essentially, it is this: she took a kids-book fairytale world and slowly moved it in to the realm of adult speculative fiction. Plot elements that existed for no other reason than to entertain and light up the imagination now were expected to conform to some kind of sense, so some kind of sensical explanation was fabricated post-hoc, and those explanations fail to explain. Partly they fail because the explanations don't really make sense if looked at, but they primarily fail because characters in earlier books behave as though they are entirely unaware of the way that their own universe is supposed to work.
Total Jerk |