Oh, no, Ms. Rowling never EVER makes mistakes!

[conuly]

They stopped replying :(

So now I'm linking here. It's old, but still confusing. How can you honestly say that somebody doesn't make mistakes? Even if you mean this in the very specialized sense of "she doesn't make mistakes when writing her HP novels", you're still bound to be wrong. She's human. Really. And Harry Potter isn't gold. I like the books, sure, but they're as mistake-prone as anything else out there.

So, anybody care to list mistakes or near-mistakes in Harry Potter? Even trivial things like "I didn't like how she wrote this character" or "she makes the books too damn long" count, though not as much as "she misspelled a word" or "she has a continuity error".

Comments

[wetcircuitry.livejournal.com]

A good site to browse if you have the time is the Harry Potter Lexicon (http://www.hp-lexicon.org/index-2.html). They do a good job of cataloging known mistakes in the novels, amongst other things.

[conuly]

*hugs*

It's my new best friend.

[wetcircuitry.livejournal.com]

Glad I could help! That site is just wonderful.

Erorrs are listed under "Fantastical Facts," I believe, in case you haven't already figured that out. :)

[conuly]

Ah, thanks. I was browsing.

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

Well, here's what I wrote in my blog when I first read the HP series a couple of years ago...

"HP and Bullying"

Having just read all four Harry Potter books (they're the easiest to find online) in the past week, I now have plans to write a thesis upon them analyzing the way they reflect the common bullying that goes on in supposedly safe academic environments. (For those that aren't bored enough to read the books, there is a constant theme of "geeks are bad" running through them. Harry & his friend Ron are both typical average-lazy sorts when it comes to learning, yet their "misfortunes" means they're picked on by more fortunate individuals; true to form, they then constantly turn their frustrations against the one person that doesn't mistreat them, Hermione, because she enjoys learning, is thoughtful, and has both a sense of justice as well as a soft spot for other creatures.

Of course, the whole scenario is more a reflection of the author's own shallowness than an intentional portrayal of how revolting 99% of the humans on the planet truly are -- the narrative comments make that much abundantly clear. (Besides, if she were more of a bookish sort herself, her characters wouldn't be a bunch of one-dimensional cardboard cutouts and there'd be something other than pure action described in each scene...but I digress.)

[conuly]

Besides, if she were more of a bookish sort herself, her characters wouldn't be a bunch of one-dimensional cardboard cutouts and there'd be something other than pure action described in each scene...but I digress.

Two-dimensional. That's a synonym with "flat". One-dimensional is a synonym with "line".

But I completely agree. I'm consistently irritated with the BEAUTIFUL opportunities for depth being overlooked. And the reuse of the same 10 adjectives, over and over again.

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

I'm personally irked by the constant comma splices.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I replied. *toothy grin*

[deceptica]

I think the most obvious mistakes are those with dates, years, weekdays, full moons and such. HP Lexicon has a whole page dedicated to them. They don't ruin the books for me, but they are undeniably there.

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

Just mildly amusing:

"JKR doesn't make mistakes. She accidentally used the Evans name..."

Isn't that a mistake, then? Isn't that one of the very definitions of mistake--accidentally doing something that isn't right? ;)

[masterflare421.livejournal.com]

I don't know why in the world I was looking it up, but I believe in the first book when Harry and all the first years are going through the Sorting Hat ceremony the number of legs on the stool they sit on changes. It goes from a four-legged stool to a three-legged stool within two or three pages. Totally random and obscure, but I thought I might as well mention it.

[phibby.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned the GoF PlayStation mistake to you before. You know, how in Harry's first letter to Sirius, he mentions Dudley threw his PlayStation out the window or some such, yet the PlayStation hadn't come out in Europe until September 1995 or so. If GoF takes place in 1994, which is the thought most fans have, how could Dudley get that PlayStation in the first place? I guess the Dursleys could've imported one from the US or Japan, but I still can't imagine them going that far out of their way, no matter how much they love and spoil him.

Deceptica mentioned the other date problem - the full moon dates of 1993 for PoA. If you search Google for "full moon dates," the second link will show that the full moon in December of 1993 was the 28th, not the 25th, which should not have kept Lupin from the Christmas dinner.

Other than little date problems, remember the big brouhaha over how she screwed up the order Harry's parents came out of Voldemort's wand in GoF? Although I haven't read this myself, Elyse saw that she wrote about this on her site and mentions that after they rushed to fix it, she realized that she had it right all along. Maybe there's more to it than we know, but it's still a good example of a mistake. Or you could look at it like this: even if James did somehow die after Lily, meaning JKR had it right at first, she still made a mistake in changing it again so that Lily came out before James. She could've kept it in as a kind of clue for later plot developments and assured her publishers/whoever got around to fixing it that it should be left that way.

That's all I can think of right now.

How disturbing...........

[morganne13.livejournal.com]

That is psycho. Every author makes mistakes. Some are so meticulous that they go over their text a billion times to fix it and get thirty people to double check even before the editing with the publisher, but those people are few and far between. And even then typos or misprints can still occur. To start believing that someone does not make a mistake is just....dangerous.

[wetcircuitry.livejournal.com]

A good site to browse if you have the time is the Harry Potter Lexicon (http://www.hp-lexicon.org/index-2.html). They do a good job of cataloging known mistakes in the novels, amongst other things.

[conuly]

*hugs*

It's my new best friend.

[wetcircuitry.livejournal.com]

Glad I could help! That site is just wonderful.

Erorrs are listed under "Fantastical Facts," I believe, in case you haven't already figured that out. :)

[conuly]

Ah, thanks. I was browsing.

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

Well, here's what I wrote in my blog when I first read the HP series a couple of years ago...

"HP and Bullying"

Having just read all four Harry Potter books (they're the easiest to find online) in the past week, I now have plans to write a thesis upon them analyzing the way they reflect the common bullying that goes on in supposedly safe academic environments. (For those that aren't bored enough to read the books, there is a constant theme of "geeks are bad" running through them. Harry & his friend Ron are both typical average-lazy sorts when it comes to learning, yet their "misfortunes" means they're picked on by more fortunate individuals; true to form, they then constantly turn their frustrations against the one person that doesn't mistreat them, Hermione, because she enjoys learning, is thoughtful, and has both a sense of justice as well as a soft spot for other creatures.

Of course, the whole scenario is more a reflection of the author's own shallowness than an intentional portrayal of how revolting 99% of the humans on the planet truly are -- the narrative comments make that much abundantly clear. (Besides, if she were more of a bookish sort herself, her characters wouldn't be a bunch of one-dimensional cardboard cutouts and there'd be something other than pure action described in each scene...but I digress.)

[conuly]

Besides, if she were more of a bookish sort herself, her characters wouldn't be a bunch of one-dimensional cardboard cutouts and there'd be something other than pure action described in each scene...but I digress.

Two-dimensional. That's a synonym with "flat". One-dimensional is a synonym with "line".

But I completely agree. I'm consistently irritated with the BEAUTIFUL opportunities for depth being overlooked. And the reuse of the same 10 adjectives, over and over again.

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

I'm personally irked by the constant comma splices.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I replied. *toothy grin*

[deceptica]

I think the most obvious mistakes are those with dates, years, weekdays, full moons and such. HP Lexicon has a whole page dedicated to them. They don't ruin the books for me, but they are undeniably there.

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

Just mildly amusing:

"JKR doesn't make mistakes. She accidentally used the Evans name..."

Isn't that a mistake, then? Isn't that one of the very definitions of mistake--accidentally doing something that isn't right? ;)

[masterflare421.livejournal.com]

I don't know why in the world I was looking it up, but I believe in the first book when Harry and all the first years are going through the Sorting Hat ceremony the number of legs on the stool they sit on changes. It goes from a four-legged stool to a three-legged stool within two or three pages. Totally random and obscure, but I thought I might as well mention it.

[phibby.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned the GoF PlayStation mistake to you before. You know, how in Harry's first letter to Sirius, he mentions Dudley threw his PlayStation out the window or some such, yet the PlayStation hadn't come out in Europe until September 1995 or so. If GoF takes place in 1994, which is the thought most fans have, how could Dudley get that PlayStation in the first place? I guess the Dursleys could've imported one from the US or Japan, but I still can't imagine them going that far out of their way, no matter how much they love and spoil him.

Deceptica mentioned the other date problem - the full moon dates of 1993 for PoA. If you search Google for "full moon dates," the second link will show that the full moon in December of 1993 was the 28th, not the 25th, which should not have kept Lupin from the Christmas dinner.

Other than little date problems, remember the big brouhaha over how she screwed up the order Harry's parents came out of Voldemort's wand in GoF? Although I haven't read this myself, Elyse saw that she wrote about this on her site and mentions that after they rushed to fix it, she realized that she had it right all along. Maybe there's more to it than we know, but it's still a good example of a mistake. Or you could look at it like this: even if James did somehow die after Lily, meaning JKR had it right at first, she still made a mistake in changing it again so that Lily came out before James. She could've kept it in as a kind of clue for later plot developments and assured her publishers/whoever got around to fixing it that it should be left that way.

That's all I can think of right now.

How disturbing...........

[morganne13.livejournal.com]

That is psycho. Every author makes mistakes. Some are so meticulous that they go over their text a billion times to fix it and get thirty people to double check even before the editing with the publisher, but those people are few and far between. And even then typos or misprints can still occur. To start believing that someone does not make a mistake is just....dangerous.