Anything about Harry Potter that always annoyed you?

"So why is a cloak of invisibility essentially unique?"

It's not. They're rare and expensive, due to the hair needed to make them, which comes from a really rare animal.

Harry's cloak is unique due to lasting generations without ever fading or anything.

edited 26th Jun '11 3:33:32 PM by MrAHR

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I skimmed the thread and didn't see anyone mention this so...

Writers Cannot Do Math.

Seriously, check out the Harry Potter entry on that page. It's enormous. It deserves its own page. And it barely scratches the surface. When JK Rowling sees a number, her brain just stops functioning. That's probably why the school doesn't have regular courses. It would mean that she'd have to include math, and she just can't handle that. I'm surprised that Quidditch even has a point system.

And if I claim to be a wise man, well, it surely means that I don't know.

Arithmancy is math.

And I think there is no math course for the same reason there is no history science or english course. Not magical enough.

edited 26th Jun '11 8:40:29 PM by MrAHR

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Oh, I'm not complaining about that. That's been mentioned previously in the thread. I was referring to the incongruity throughout the novels regarding anything to do with a number.

• Like how every year, September first is a Sunday.
• Like how there are 422 Quidditch cups - even though there's been one every four years for only 521 years.
• Like how, if you pick the schedules apart, students apparently have far too much free time and the teachers don't have nearly enough.
• Like how 750 of the 3000 wizards in Great Britain are between eleven and eighteen years old.
• Like how there are 750 students in Hogwarts, but mathematically there should only be some 280.

Seriously, just click on the link. The list doesn't end.

And if I claim to be a wise man, well, it surely means that I don't know.

Anyone else noticed that Harry displays no real curiosty about his classmates? I was a huge loner and I learned more about my classmates in a month than Harry learned in six years.

Life's Gonna Suck When You Grow Up... But Is It That Great Now?... Also I'm Skylark2 now.

Maybe it's the fact that there're already a lot of detail. Exploring the other students a little more would bump up the page count.

Psycho: Yeah, I get that, but I've learned to suspend my disbelief in terms of math. It's a mistake, but not particularly egregious in terms of plot.

edited 27th Jun '11 6:24:22 AM by MrAHR

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• The special treatment Harry gets. He breaks the rules and gets on a broomstick, something which was specifically forbidden. So what does the famously strict Mc Gonnagal do? She asks the headmaster to break the rules that had been uphold for at least a fucking century, so that Harry can be awarded with a special privilage instead of being punished. And Dubbledoor agrees. Oh, and they give him a brand new broomstick as a present. Just imagine if it was Snape who did this for Malfoy Imagine what would have happened then.
• Also, the invisibility cloak. Who in their right mind would give an invisibility cloak to an eleven year old student? (Granted, this is Dumbledoor we're talking about.)
• The locked corridor in the first book. Sure, the students were given a fair warning, but come on, you can use more efficient means to protect students than a locked door, which can be unlocked with a very simple spell.
• Harry is underage, but there's absolutely nothing stopping him for withdrawing as much gold from his parents' account as he wishes.
• Okay, so the Death Eaters have invaded the ministry. They have full acess to the Mystery Department, including time machines. Apparently, Voldemort never thought that one would be useful.
• Cho brings a friend of hers to join the Dumbledoor's Army.
  • She hates going there, and is actually forced to do so.
  • Her parents work in the ministry.
  • Who would have thought this might go wrong.
• It does go wrong, the facts are revealed. There's an illegal student organisation that trains its members how to fight and (presumably) kill. Things are looking bad for Harry and co, as they're going to be expelled at the very least. But wait! The organisation's name is "Dumbledoor's Army"! That means Dumbledoor is the mastermind behind this, he even confessed himself! That means that the students cannot be punished, because only the leader of an organisation can be blamed for its crimes! Just like the previous war! Remember how, after Voldemort disappeared, the Death Eaters were pardoned for their crimes and no charges were filed against them?

There's always the subject of the spells' names, but that was the translator's fault, so it doesn't belong here.

edited 27th Jun '11 12:45:57 PM by Dealan

it's spelled dumbledore.

if i remember correctly, the time turners were destroyed in the fight.

edited 27th Jun '11 12:37:47 PM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

Yeah, but the Death Eaters were there before the fight. Did they steal a time machine while waiting for the kids to show up?

(And thanks for the spelling.)

i'm pretty sure the death eaters arrived at the same time or just after harry did, or they would have claimed the prophecy first.

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

They said something about only Harry and Voldemort being able to pick up the prophecy from the shelves, because it was them that it reffered to. They were there all the time, just waiting.

oh, really[question mark]

never mind.

also, time travel to the past only happens when a time loop resulting from that particular trip is in place.

there were no loops, so naturally they were not 'fated' to take the time turners.

edited 27th Jun '11 2:05:13 PM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

([question mark]???)

As people are saying, the single most irritating thing in all of Harry Potter to me: time travel. Time travel tends to be one of those things I'm very leery of in general, and the way it's so spectacularly underused and misused in the books drove me mad. I think most of my points on the subject have already been made, but it just has to be reiterated that the Time-Turners are easily the most spectacular example of Misapplied Phlebotinum in the books.

A few secondary pet peeves:

• Romance. Shippers are bad enough without having an actual Romantic Plot Tumor eat up so much of the sixth book*
  ^{Although in general, I agree with the people approving of Rowling's aversion of the Law of Conservation of Detail - it's one of the strengths of the books in my opinion.}
  . They may be teenagers, but I don't care about Harry's, or anyone else's, love life. This is probably a personal thing rather then a legitimate flaw, but this is a subjective thread.
• Harry as Pinball Protagonist - good Merlin, man, I know you tend to act without thinking, but would it kill you to be proactive sometimes? There's not a lot of point in making your lead a Naïve Newcomer when he takes almost no active interest in the setting's background, you know.
• No real internationalism to magic - this has been covered already by other posters.

Edit: I really hate trying to spell phlebotinum.

edited 27th Jun '11 4:17:08 PM by nrjxll

keyboard is broken, i can't use shift row characters.

again, if a time loop doesn't exist, the time travel starting that loop won't happen.

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

Try using caps lock as the shift button until you get your keyboard fixed.

The near-total focus on Houses Gryffindor and Slytherin. The portrayal of pretty much all Slytherins as mean and petty when not outright evil, and the portrayal of nearly all Gryffindors as decent folks in the end.

The whole Chosen One plot.

@annebeeche: Are both Switch keys broken? Presumably you've got a right switch.

edited 27th Jun '11 6:13:05 PM by SavageHeathen

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.

the keyboard is broken.

i have to use an onscreen keyboard and it's retarded about hold-down keys.

its caps lock won't work as long as there isn't a functional keyboard plugged in.

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.

I have a WMG on the exact nature of Time Turners that I see as Fridge Brilliance, and allows me to see them as not a problem for the series.

At first I didn't realize I needed all this stuff...

Please enlighten the lazy.

edited 27th Jun '11 10:57:08 PM by chihuahua0

Yes, do explain, although I still think they would be good for the OP's purposes - I understood s/he was doing a deconstruction of Harry Potter - type fantasy, not a straight out fanfiction.

They are sapient probability manipulators that create contrived events to avoid paradoxes and keep any Stable Time Loop instances stable. Bad things happen to wizards who mess with time not because of the consequences of a paradox (that makes no sense), but because bad things happen to them to prevent them from creating a paradox in the first place. If you try to go back in time to Avada Kedavra your past self, you will suffer a fatal heart attack or some similar fate. Wizards don't use them often because the Time Turners preserve the Idiot Ball-it's a lot easier to prevent time paradoxes if the time travel itself never happens. The Time Turners in the Department Of Mysteries probably killed themselves to permanently prevent themselves from creating paradoxes.

At first I didn't realize I needed all this stuff...

Of course, if it turns out to be the case that there's something in the Time Turners that prevents paradoxes from happening, period, then it would be the single most spectacular case of Misapplied Phlebotinium EVER.

AT ALL.

Seriously!

If you have the means to send information to the past, and it's explicitly impossible to create paradoxes, then you can kick the shit out of P=NP by finding solutions to NP-complete problems in polynomial time. Check it out. [1] Of course, the wizards don't learn mathematic-*SPITS OUT DRINK* HOLY SHIT MAYBE THAT'S WHAT ARITHMANCY IS

edited 28th Jun '11 6:25:16 AM by RiotousRascal

you know what prevents paradoxes from happening/

the properties of math. basic logic. the thing that defines how the universe works.

allowing a paradox to happen is like taking the square root of a negative number. you can't do it. it will never happen. you can only imagine it.

edited 28th Jun '11 8:30:12 AM by annebeeche

Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.