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

[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.