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Well, folks, here it is - my long-promised magnum opus of Harry Potter criticism, that I've been sitting on (and had largely forgotten about) for two or so months. Ideally, for maximum Internet impact, the following text would be recorded, and set to footage of the films described - but since I doubt I'd ever actually do that, here's the plain ol' basic "script", as it were. Hope you all enjoy!
While not without certain ominous flaws, the first four Harry Potter novels were fun and inventive kids' books that promised to build to an overall grand, seven-part epic. But, starting with Year Five, the series took a disastrous stumble from which it never recovered, thus making the series as a whole a noble but ultimately failed effort. The following essay will explain why.
But first, a brief disclaimer: because this is a video essay, I'll be using footage from the movies to make my points. I consider this to be entirely valid because, owing to the movies' remarkable fidelity to their source material, they contain nearly all the books' larger storytelling missteps and failures. So, no, I don't want to hear anyone whine that the movies "don't really represent” the books just because they had Neville and not Dobby tell Harry about gillyweed, or some minor crap like that. If you want to see a movie that really gets its source wrong, watch The Golden Compass, which isn't a bad movie on its own terms, but definitely fails to convey much of Philip Pullman's subtext and drastically alters the narrative, as well. Say what you like about what details the Potter movies condensed, tweaked along the edges or just plain left out; the fact remains that nearly all the books' key story points and themes made it through the adaptation process more or less intact. For this reason, I'll be referring to franchise's installments as Year this or Year that, unless a given element is specific to its particular book or movie.
So, without further ado, let's dive into just how the Harry Potter series lost its magic:
1. After Year Four, Harry's world shrinks.
In every Year leading up to Five, J.K. Rowling's Wizard World got bigger, more detailed, and more interesting. The first Year, of course, introduced us to the story, from Hogwarts to Diagon Alley and the Forbidden Forest. The second Year mostly focused on Hogwarts itself, though by showing us the Chamber of Secrets and a glimpse of the young Voldemort that pretty much told us everything we ever needed to know about him (he's the sole direct descendant of the uber-evil Slytherin, and was pretty much always evil himself), we still got a deeper sense of the surrounding world. The third Year extended our heroes' paths to Hogsmeade, told us lots about Azkaban and the Dementors that haunt it, and fleshed out the backstory of Harry's family history. And then the fourth Year blew things way open by introducing the student bodies of two foreign schools, showing us a Quidditch world cup, and finally bringing Lord Voldemort himself back in the flesh. Now that the big villain was restored to life, one might have expected Harry's surroundings to keep expanding.
Alas, not only does this utterly fail happen, the world around our heroes then shrinks for the duration of the series. While Dumbledore urged international anti-evil cooperation in his big speech at the end of the fourth Year, we never really hear about those other schools again, much less whether there are any other magical societies of note. The fifth Year does finally shows us the Ministry of Magic, the governmental head of Wizarding Britain, but it's frankly a giant letdown. For a spectacular location, it'd obviously be nearly impossible to top Hogwarts itself, but Rowling didn't even try, giving us a mere underground bunker-complex beneath London. The most power magical people in the world couldn't have found a bit of a more impressive headquarters than a big-ass basement under one of Muggledom's most colorful cities? And things get worse from there, with much of the fifth and sixth years delving far deeper into Voldemort's past and childhood than was ever necessary (turns out he was pretty much evil from birth), and, when the trio finally does leave Hogwarts, instead of, say, going abroad, to recruit help from other societies, they dick around in a series of forests before going back to the Ministry, back to school, and ultimately back to Platform 9 ¾. Remember how far Frodo and Sam ended up from the Shire, and how epic and terrifying it felt to have gotten there? Yeah. We just don't get that here.
2. Why Exactly is Voldemort So Powerful?
The question of the source of Voldemort's strength is one of the main weaknesses in Rowling's overall narrative. Many grand coming-of-age stories begin with the hero growing up in an overlooked part of a much larger, scarier world where the bad guys are in charge: think of Luke Skywalker growing up in the shadow of the Galactic Empire, the Hobbits living in blissful ignorance of Sauron's massive armies, or Lyra Belacqua never dreaming what horrors are being done to children just like her outside the Oxford walls. Harry, on the other hand, enters a Wizarding Britain that's doing remarkably well: there's no wars, no mention of rising Hogwarts tuition fees, and even allegedly poor families such as the Weasleys have pretty kick-ass houses and lives. Their world is a great place to live, which is important in terms of giving the first years their much-loved whimsy, and their sense of a good state of affairs worth defending.
The trouble is, therefore, that while Voldemort is undeniably one bad, bad dude, it's unclear just why everyone's so afraid of him. Sure, he's powerful, but even though he's secretly invincible right up 'til the end, he's still afraid of being captured: why else did he run away from Dumbledore and the others at the end of Year Five, rather than just killing everyone outright? And how are he and his thugs able to just take over the entire Ministry of Magic, and thus also Hogwarts and the rest of Wizarding Britain, without causing an immediate and open civil war?
Sure, we see glimpses of giants and Dementors helping him out, and the books make a few more vague references to stuff along those lines, but it still doesn't explain why a national or even international police force doesn't take him out the moment he comes out of hiding. JK Rowling could easily have fixed this by having him ally with an entire other, twisted magical society – say, Russians, or, even better, Germans, since the Death Eaters are basically Nazi stand-ins anyway – but since the story is technically set in the present day, that might have offended some countries, and thus dented book and ticket sales there. And we wouldn't want that, now, would we?
3. Just What Are the Stakes, Anyway?
But this failure to internationalize the story also creates another problem, which is that we never really know what the stakes are. Sure, we're given to understand that if Voldemort wins, a few good guys will be murdered and Hogwarts admissions standards will become more restrictive, but while undeniably bad, that wouldn't exactly be the end of the world. Does Voldemort intend on genociding the entire worldwide nonmagical population? Now that'd be a scary threat, but it would also force the saga to extend its scope beyond a bunch of British forests and fields, in that Rowling would have to tell us how other countries' magical societies feel about all these goings-on. (And I know those these other societies do exist, because I've read that Quidditch Through the Ages spin-off book. But maybe other countries are only really worth discussing in the context of sports?)
4. The Diminution of Ron and Hermione (Due to an Excessive Fixation on Backstory)
By providing Harry with two sharply contrasting sidekicks – one an easygoing guy from a magical family, the other a highly motivated gal with no prior connections to the Wizarding World – Rowling balanced Harry's audience-surrogate blandness with supporting personalities who reacted to plot developments in different and engaging ways. But, as the series progressed, it became less and less interested in the development of its three leads, and more and more focused on backstory: Which friend of Harry's parents betrayed them to Voldemort? Who told young Voldemort of the secret lore of horcruxes? Was young Voldemort always evil? (Answer: yes.) Who wrote that book of nasty spells and called himself the “Half-Blood Prince”? Has Snape been a good guy this whole time? Is it because he got a crush on Harry's mom decades ago? Where did Voldemort hide his horcruxes? Who was the “RAB” who destroyed the one from the lake? Who's been in possession of the Elder Wand all this time? Was Voldemort always evil? (Spoiler Alert: Yes. Yes, he was.) Just how many horcruxes did Voldemort make? Why did Dumbledore and his brother stop speaking to each other? Finally – and, believe it or not, this actually turns out to be a major set-up for the climactic battle – how does the ghost of one of Hogwarts' founders feel about a piece of jewellery her mother once owned?
Make no mistake: fictional backstories are indeed crucial to establishing emotional tones and maintaining a coherent sense of overall continuity. But Years Five through Seven are so fixated on slowly revealing who once did what when, thus granting this or that unsuspecting character a hidden advantage or hindrance, that they end up overshadowing the present-day plot, to the detriment of our heroes. This isn't a huge liability for Harry, whose blandness is more or less unaffected, but it definitely works against, Ron and especially Hermione. Sam got to carry Frodo up Mount Doom, and Han, Leia, and Lando took out the second Death Star; compared to that, the Potter sidekicks' climactic destruction of a horcrux in the face of, uh, water feels like a glorified footnote. Hermione and He-Ginny deserved better.
5. At the End of All Things, a Failure of Imagination
Finally, we come to the ending itself. Great endings can end with a celebration, an understated note of finality, a sense that more adventures await, or any number of alternatives. But the one thing great endings can't do is leave us with the sense that little has been learned or accomplished, and that's exactly what the conclusion of The Deathly Hallows imparts. Sure, Voldemort has died, and Harry and Company have finally attained what we can only assume are peaceful, quiet lives in Wizarding Britain. But isn't this pretty much what would have happened if Voldemort had been finally and totally killed when he tried to murder the infant Harry? For all the hardship he's gone through, the Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi is a very different, wiser man that he would have been if R2-D2 had never shown him that message. Frodo is so scarred by the War of the Ring that while he returns home, he can never regain the peace of mind he once knew. Even Marty McFly, who just wanted to play his guitar and sing, winds up learning valuable lessons about controlling his temper, and his future is forever changed for the better as a result. Now, we can pretty safely assume that after the Death Eaters have been ousted from power, Harry, Hermione and He-Ginny make up their lost school year and graduate from Hogwarts, but what else? Through seven increasingly long Years, we've seen them learn all sorts of magical minutia and face all kinds of challenges, but apart from Hermione's interest in the political status of house-elves – a subplot so thinly connected to the main story that the movies quite wisely omit it entirely – their struggle against Evil with a capital E is the only thing that defines them. And that's a trait they started out with! Little has been learned, and even less has changed.
This failure is particularly acute in light of the grand elephant in the chamber, being the Wizarding World's hiding from the rest of humanity, despite the murder of a number of Muggles by bad guys, and the literal brain-assaults of innocents by the good guys. I'm betting that, at the very least, magical cops could teleport around the world, bringing all sorts of war criminals to the Hague, and thus saving countless lives by spreading peace, to say nothing of the medical advances that might be gleaned from a cooperation between magic and science. Now, it's true that coming out of the magical closet would probably be very difficult, but taking on arduous tasks is what makes heroes heroic in the first place. Because Harry and his friends are targeted for murder from the start, they never really choose to take on any challenges of note; the entire series is one big reactive/defensive action. And I'm not saying that actually showing a magical coming-out process would make for a good story; indeed, it probably wouldn't. But it would make for a deliciously mind-bending sendoff, in the manner of Neo's promise to wake all of humanity up at the end of The Matrix. An equally bold and bittersweet finale would be to suggest that magic is somehow fading from the world, a la exodus of the Elves from Lord of the Rings. Instead, while Rowling did off a few sympathetic side characters here and there, she overall went with the safest, easiest ending imaginable. Too bad it was also, ironically, an utterly unmagical one.
Conclusion
So, there you have it: despite a very promising first half, the Harry Potter series made the gigantic mistake of delving into its own rather underwhelming backstory instead of constructing a coherent threat or sense of stakes, and further failed to ever really challenge its leads by thrusting them into a larger, more international story that the early Years themselves promised. And since no story with a poor second half can be considered great, I personally am forced to conclude that the Potter saga as a whole ultimately failed to meet its own goals. The first four Years are memorable, yes, but a grand unified epic for the ages, this ain't.
How Harry Lost His Magic: A Video Essay by Gaith
While not without certain ominous flaws, the first four Harry Potter novels were fun and inventive kids' books that promised to build to an overall grand, seven-part epic. But, starting with Year Five, the series took a disastrous stumble from which it never recovered, thus making the series as a whole a noble but ultimately failed effort. The following essay will explain why.
But first, a brief disclaimer: because this is a video essay, I'll be using footage from the movies to make my points. I consider this to be entirely valid because, owing to the movies' remarkable fidelity to their source material, they contain nearly all the books' larger storytelling missteps and failures. So, no, I don't want to hear anyone whine that the movies "don't really represent” the books just because they had Neville and not Dobby tell Harry about gillyweed, or some minor crap like that. If you want to see a movie that really gets its source wrong, watch The Golden Compass, which isn't a bad movie on its own terms, but definitely fails to convey much of Philip Pullman's subtext and drastically alters the narrative, as well. Say what you like about what details the Potter movies condensed, tweaked along the edges or just plain left out; the fact remains that nearly all the books' key story points and themes made it through the adaptation process more or less intact. For this reason, I'll be referring to franchise's installments as Year this or Year that, unless a given element is specific to its particular book or movie.
So, without further ado, let's dive into just how the Harry Potter series lost its magic:
1. After Year Four, Harry's world shrinks.
In every Year leading up to Five, J.K. Rowling's Wizard World got bigger, more detailed, and more interesting. The first Year, of course, introduced us to the story, from Hogwarts to Diagon Alley and the Forbidden Forest. The second Year mostly focused on Hogwarts itself, though by showing us the Chamber of Secrets and a glimpse of the young Voldemort that pretty much told us everything we ever needed to know about him (he's the sole direct descendant of the uber-evil Slytherin, and was pretty much always evil himself), we still got a deeper sense of the surrounding world. The third Year extended our heroes' paths to Hogsmeade, told us lots about Azkaban and the Dementors that haunt it, and fleshed out the backstory of Harry's family history. And then the fourth Year blew things way open by introducing the student bodies of two foreign schools, showing us a Quidditch world cup, and finally bringing Lord Voldemort himself back in the flesh. Now that the big villain was restored to life, one might have expected Harry's surroundings to keep expanding.
Alas, not only does this utterly fail happen, the world around our heroes then shrinks for the duration of the series. While Dumbledore urged international anti-evil cooperation in his big speech at the end of the fourth Year, we never really hear about those other schools again, much less whether there are any other magical societies of note. The fifth Year does finally shows us the Ministry of Magic, the governmental head of Wizarding Britain, but it's frankly a giant letdown. For a spectacular location, it'd obviously be nearly impossible to top Hogwarts itself, but Rowling didn't even try, giving us a mere underground bunker-complex beneath London. The most power magical people in the world couldn't have found a bit of a more impressive headquarters than a big-ass basement under one of Muggledom's most colorful cities? And things get worse from there, with much of the fifth and sixth years delving far deeper into Voldemort's past and childhood than was ever necessary (turns out he was pretty much evil from birth), and, when the trio finally does leave Hogwarts, instead of, say, going abroad, to recruit help from other societies, they dick around in a series of forests before going back to the Ministry, back to school, and ultimately back to Platform 9 ¾. Remember how far Frodo and Sam ended up from the Shire, and how epic and terrifying it felt to have gotten there? Yeah. We just don't get that here.
2. Why Exactly is Voldemort So Powerful?
The question of the source of Voldemort's strength is one of the main weaknesses in Rowling's overall narrative. Many grand coming-of-age stories begin with the hero growing up in an overlooked part of a much larger, scarier world where the bad guys are in charge: think of Luke Skywalker growing up in the shadow of the Galactic Empire, the Hobbits living in blissful ignorance of Sauron's massive armies, or Lyra Belacqua never dreaming what horrors are being done to children just like her outside the Oxford walls. Harry, on the other hand, enters a Wizarding Britain that's doing remarkably well: there's no wars, no mention of rising Hogwarts tuition fees, and even allegedly poor families such as the Weasleys have pretty kick-ass houses and lives. Their world is a great place to live, which is important in terms of giving the first years their much-loved whimsy, and their sense of a good state of affairs worth defending.
The trouble is, therefore, that while Voldemort is undeniably one bad, bad dude, it's unclear just why everyone's so afraid of him. Sure, he's powerful, but even though he's secretly invincible right up 'til the end, he's still afraid of being captured: why else did he run away from Dumbledore and the others at the end of Year Five, rather than just killing everyone outright? And how are he and his thugs able to just take over the entire Ministry of Magic, and thus also Hogwarts and the rest of Wizarding Britain, without causing an immediate and open civil war?
Sure, we see glimpses of giants and Dementors helping him out, and the books make a few more vague references to stuff along those lines, but it still doesn't explain why a national or even international police force doesn't take him out the moment he comes out of hiding. JK Rowling could easily have fixed this by having him ally with an entire other, twisted magical society – say, Russians, or, even better, Germans, since the Death Eaters are basically Nazi stand-ins anyway – but since the story is technically set in the present day, that might have offended some countries, and thus dented book and ticket sales there. And we wouldn't want that, now, would we?
3. Just What Are the Stakes, Anyway?
But this failure to internationalize the story also creates another problem, which is that we never really know what the stakes are. Sure, we're given to understand that if Voldemort wins, a few good guys will be murdered and Hogwarts admissions standards will become more restrictive, but while undeniably bad, that wouldn't exactly be the end of the world. Does Voldemort intend on genociding the entire worldwide nonmagical population? Now that'd be a scary threat, but it would also force the saga to extend its scope beyond a bunch of British forests and fields, in that Rowling would have to tell us how other countries' magical societies feel about all these goings-on. (And I know those these other societies do exist, because I've read that Quidditch Through the Ages spin-off book. But maybe other countries are only really worth discussing in the context of sports?)
4. The Diminution of Ron and Hermione (Due to an Excessive Fixation on Backstory)
By providing Harry with two sharply contrasting sidekicks – one an easygoing guy from a magical family, the other a highly motivated gal with no prior connections to the Wizarding World – Rowling balanced Harry's audience-surrogate blandness with supporting personalities who reacted to plot developments in different and engaging ways. But, as the series progressed, it became less and less interested in the development of its three leads, and more and more focused on backstory: Which friend of Harry's parents betrayed them to Voldemort? Who told young Voldemort of the secret lore of horcruxes? Was young Voldemort always evil? (Answer: yes.) Who wrote that book of nasty spells and called himself the “Half-Blood Prince”? Has Snape been a good guy this whole time? Is it because he got a crush on Harry's mom decades ago? Where did Voldemort hide his horcruxes? Who was the “RAB” who destroyed the one from the lake? Who's been in possession of the Elder Wand all this time? Was Voldemort always evil? (Spoiler Alert: Yes. Yes, he was.) Just how many horcruxes did Voldemort make? Why did Dumbledore and his brother stop speaking to each other? Finally – and, believe it or not, this actually turns out to be a major set-up for the climactic battle – how does the ghost of one of Hogwarts' founders feel about a piece of jewellery her mother once owned?
Make no mistake: fictional backstories are indeed crucial to establishing emotional tones and maintaining a coherent sense of overall continuity. But Years Five through Seven are so fixated on slowly revealing who once did what when, thus granting this or that unsuspecting character a hidden advantage or hindrance, that they end up overshadowing the present-day plot, to the detriment of our heroes. This isn't a huge liability for Harry, whose blandness is more or less unaffected, but it definitely works against, Ron and especially Hermione. Sam got to carry Frodo up Mount Doom, and Han, Leia, and Lando took out the second Death Star; compared to that, the Potter sidekicks' climactic destruction of a horcrux in the face of, uh, water feels like a glorified footnote. Hermione and He-Ginny deserved better.
5. At the End of All Things, a Failure of Imagination
Finally, we come to the ending itself. Great endings can end with a celebration, an understated note of finality, a sense that more adventures await, or any number of alternatives. But the one thing great endings can't do is leave us with the sense that little has been learned or accomplished, and that's exactly what the conclusion of The Deathly Hallows imparts. Sure, Voldemort has died, and Harry and Company have finally attained what we can only assume are peaceful, quiet lives in Wizarding Britain. But isn't this pretty much what would have happened if Voldemort had been finally and totally killed when he tried to murder the infant Harry? For all the hardship he's gone through, the Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi is a very different, wiser man that he would have been if R2-D2 had never shown him that message. Frodo is so scarred by the War of the Ring that while he returns home, he can never regain the peace of mind he once knew. Even Marty McFly, who just wanted to play his guitar and sing, winds up learning valuable lessons about controlling his temper, and his future is forever changed for the better as a result. Now, we can pretty safely assume that after the Death Eaters have been ousted from power, Harry, Hermione and He-Ginny make up their lost school year and graduate from Hogwarts, but what else? Through seven increasingly long Years, we've seen them learn all sorts of magical minutia and face all kinds of challenges, but apart from Hermione's interest in the political status of house-elves – a subplot so thinly connected to the main story that the movies quite wisely omit it entirely – their struggle against Evil with a capital E is the only thing that defines them. And that's a trait they started out with! Little has been learned, and even less has changed.
This failure is particularly acute in light of the grand elephant in the chamber, being the Wizarding World's hiding from the rest of humanity, despite the murder of a number of Muggles by bad guys, and the literal brain-assaults of innocents by the good guys. I'm betting that, at the very least, magical cops could teleport around the world, bringing all sorts of war criminals to the Hague, and thus saving countless lives by spreading peace, to say nothing of the medical advances that might be gleaned from a cooperation between magic and science. Now, it's true that coming out of the magical closet would probably be very difficult, but taking on arduous tasks is what makes heroes heroic in the first place. Because Harry and his friends are targeted for murder from the start, they never really choose to take on any challenges of note; the entire series is one big reactive/defensive action. And I'm not saying that actually showing a magical coming-out process would make for a good story; indeed, it probably wouldn't. But it would make for a deliciously mind-bending sendoff, in the manner of Neo's promise to wake all of humanity up at the end of The Matrix. An equally bold and bittersweet finale would be to suggest that magic is somehow fading from the world, a la exodus of the Elves from Lord of the Rings. Instead, while Rowling did off a few sympathetic side characters here and there, she overall went with the safest, easiest ending imaginable. Too bad it was also, ironically, an utterly unmagical one.
Conclusion
So, there you have it: despite a very promising first half, the Harry Potter series made the gigantic mistake of delving into its own rather underwhelming backstory instead of constructing a coherent threat or sense of stakes, and further failed to ever really challenge its leads by thrusting them into a larger, more international story that the early Years themselves promised. And since no story with a poor second half can be considered great, I personally am forced to conclude that the Potter saga as a whole ultimately failed to meet its own goals. The first four Years are memorable, yes, but a grand unified epic for the ages, this ain't.