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

[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.