{"id":380,"date":"2003-07-04T05:01:43","date_gmt":"2003-07-04T10:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2003\/07\/04\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-20T20:52:44","modified_gmt":"2005-10-21T00:52:44","slug":"hp5-problematic-at-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2003\/07\/04\/hp5-problematic-at-best\/","title":{"rendered":"HP5: Problematic at best"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It’s been almost two weeks now, so I figured I’d be a sheep and try to distill my thoughts on HP5 into something coherent.<\/p>\n

Spoilers abound, though of course everyone’s read it by now, right?<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/span>

In Prisoner of Azkaban, we finally picked up the threads begun in the first book and started on our way toward an overarching plot. Order of the Phoenix picks up that plot, which was shoved to the back burner for most of Goblet of Fire, and brings it back to the front. I consider this to be a good thing, and hope that she continues to weave the two together in this fashion for the remaining two books.<\/p>\n

Overall, the tone of OotP was darker. Almost angry. And Harry was the outlet for that. He began the book as a sullen, angry teenage boy and he ended the book in the same way. In many ways, this was something that needed to happen. If Harry hadn’t started to react to the pressures and expectations of those around him like this, he would be less realistic. And one of the major points of the series is that he is, above all, an average boy and a human being.<\/p>\n

That said, there were problems with the book. Problems which I can’t dismiss as me being upset at Sirius’s death or disliking the way some of the plot went.<\/p>\n

I think all of the difficulties really had the same root: Harry Potter is a shounen series, and suddenly this book was shoujo.<\/p>\n

When I look at it, this is really the case: HP has the plot elements of a traditional shounen fighting story. We have the hero, who starts off with underpowered companions and distinctly the underdog. We have the mysterious past. We have the evil supervillain whom the hero cannot possibly hope to defeat, but we all know he eventually will. And then we have the long plodding plot where the hero meets intermediate villains and powers himself up on the way to the final battle.<\/p>\n

But suddenly, in book 5, this all stops. Book 5’s plot hinges on misunderstanding, emotional outbursts and sheer, willful stupidity. These are the hallmarks of a shoujo relationship manga. It was as if suddenly Goku and Cell stopped fighting so Goku could try to explain why he’d been seen kissing Vegeta at the Kame House. Guh.<\/p>\n

It just didn’t work. Talking it over with people, trying to pinpoint why the book veered so wildly offcourse at the end, it was pointed out that she probably just couldn’t stand the idea of going back to chapter 5 or 6 and fixing it where the first cracks started appearing. It worked… well enough… if you don’t look too hard at it.<\/p>\n

The problem is that it’s hard not to look that hard at it. I have a hard time believing that her characters are that stupid. And while this was most evident in the scene in the Department of Mysteries, the mysterious stupid-virus pervaded the entire book.<\/p>\n

1) Remus starts talking out loud in the middle of a crowd of students about the fact that he’s a werewolf.
2) Dumbledore storms out of the castle in his grand escape and promptly disappears for more than a hundred pages.
3) Snape leaves Harry alone with the Pensieve. (This one, though, I think may have been on purpose.)
4) Remus speaks to Snape about continuing the Occlumency lessons, but apparently doesn’t make sure that they’re still happening and doesn’t bother to inform Dumbledore about the problem either.<\/p>\n

… this could go on. It was just mind boggling. It’s not that there weren’t times in the other books where the characters behaved in an idiotic manner — it’s just that when it happens so often it ceases to make sense. If these people were THAT DUMB, they would be dead long ago.<\/p>\n

So I’m left feeling unsatisfied. Cheated. Because I think she took the easy route — it’s not hard to make your plot come out the way you want if you force your characters to behave OOCly. Perhaps she felt pressured; perhaps she had writers block. But I can’t help feeling that OotP -could- have been a much more incredible and credible book.<\/span><\/p>\n

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It’s been almost two weeks now, so I figured I’d be a sheep and try to distill my thoughts on HP5 into something coherent. Spoilers abound, though of course everyone’s read it by now, right? Read More…In Prisoner of Azkaban, we finally picked up the threads begun in the first book and started on our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}