I'm just glad I never read the 7th book, and there's no way in the 9 levels of hell I'm going to either. The ending of the book (I did read the ending online) just made it sound fucking retarded. I read that he named his kid "Albus Severus Potter" and I lost any and all respect for Harry because I thought he was a total fucking retard. He basically named his child after a child abuser and an old man who manipulated him all his life, and was guilty of being an accomplice to his child abuse.

I just pretend Book 7 never happened and say "Fuck you" to Book 7. Don't care if it was published, and is canon. The book can gtfo.

Which is pretty much why I read fanfiction.

 

I'm sure you can say the exact same thing (and I'm sure many people feel) about Book 6.

As many DLP'ers have said before the greatest dissatisfaction with HP is that around Book 5/6ish Harry experiences this tremendous stunt in his magical growth. I remember being in fifth grade and reading GOF and thinking "woah, shield charm, awesome!" and "dude, stunning spell?! ridiculously cool!"

And then I came to Book 5 and all he does is have bad dreams. He can't even get off his Crucio properly.

 

Yeah.... it's not ambiguous at all. You just can't read.

 

There's a small difference between a stunning spell, which is relatively simple and he is capable of at fourteen, and one of the three most evil and illegal spells in the world. Even then he did a fairly decent job at the Cruciactus curse considering it was his first try, he wasn't able to get any of those other spells first go either.

I think that what you call the stunt in his magical growth can be explained by the fact that it just wasn't shown. We know that he learned a lot of new magic when teaching the DA, for example, even if we never see him learning it on screen, so to speak.

 

That makes sense. I just felt with the DA that JKR was busy emphasizing his "leadership" qualities rather than magic. GOF was just cool in that the sense that it was almost like those Indy!Harry stories where he increases his magical repertoire by an absurd amount by just training. Except that it wasn't fanfiction haha.

And I agree with the difference between Crucio and the stunner - it was exaggeration on my part.

 

But he didn't. That's the problem with GOF. Sure, he shows he is stubborn enough to not be taken over by the Imperius curse - but every Weasley is stubborn as well. That's not talent.

In the first task, he flies around. Something we all know he can already do. The only charm he learns, is Accio, which is a "nice, sample charm" according to Moody, yet it takes him hours upon hours to learn it. Next year, Ron has the ability to cast it, while basically intoxicated by a curse.

In the second task, he can't even find a way to complete it, and needs help from Dobby and others.

In the third task, the only new spell he casts, is the Four-Point Spell or whatever it's called.

I actually found that throughout the books, Harry was actually weak, magically, except for his Patronus. It's only at the end of the fifth, then parts of the sixth and seventh spells that Harry seems to have some magical strength of note (again, outside of his Patronus).

That's what made the ending so frustrating for me. It was the weaker opponent that won not because of skill, ability, or training, but because of an incredible set of circumstances.

Double that, when Harry has no problem casting an Unforgivable in front of his own head of house out of chivalry (how ironic is that-breaking a code of honor to keep a code of honor?) but then refuses to use anything but a disarming spell when faced with his parents murderer.

As I wrote in a crack!fic: It seems JKR wanted Harry "to always be an innocent child like Peter flipping Pan."

 

Incorrect. It was for the final task that Harry learned the shield charm, the reductor curse and the impediment curse, years ahead of his classmates. Remember that most Ministry workers cannot cast a proper shield charm.

At the time of writing these spells were awesome.

Calling Harry weak is something of an exaggeration born of frustration. He's no Dumbledore. Nor is he a Snape, or even a Lupin. But he's still way above average - the average being something like scraping a pass in a couple of OWLs, failing a couple of OWLs, and maybe scraping 1 or 2 NEWTs.

I think calling Harry weak is also something of a result of Harry's learning happening off screen. At the beginning of DH Harry showcases a number of new powerful spells - despite the fact that all the way through HBP we see zero progress on the magical education front from him, other than the HBP related stuff. He's also able to understand and cast the various protection spells around the camp site on his own. We know he did reasonably well at OWL Transfiguration, which means that he can transfigure most things - albeit imperfectly (though by the time he's done with NEWT, maybe OWL will be easier in comparison).

All those stories that begin with Harry reading up a load of Transfiguration and changing all the objects in his room at the Dursleys - he can already do that in canon. That's the kind of stuff that he's already learned. It just happens off screen, and because Harry's inner monologue doesn't dwell on it we tend to assume that he doesn't know it.

Also, if you don't understand why Harry used a disarming charm against Voldemort then likely you would have bean defeated by Harry too, were you in Voldemort's place. The point is that Harry's defeat of Voldemort relied on wandlore, not skill with conventional magic. The disarming charm was the perfect spell to use.

 

There is also the thing that people sometimes forget. Harry was eighteen when he faced Voldemort and the Death Eaters, but other people like Lupin, Snape, etc where atleast thirty. So by the time that Harry is "Head of the Aurors" as Rowling said, he may be just as good as them... /theory only.

 

It's possible, I suppose... but the problem is that all of the great wizards we hear about excelled during their school days. You could come up with some plausible excuse involving the Horcrux stunting Harry's emotional and mental development, allowing him to excel after its removal... but that's what it would be, an excuse.

 

Agreed with Taure.

 

I'd make more of a case for the annual fighting for his life hurting his development, rather than inventing stupid ideas involving horcruxes. I'd also make the point that Harry did excel during his school years, maybe not academically but he never focused his efforts in that direction.

 

Too true. When you've got a three headed dog, something petrifying students, a supposedly mass murdering godfather escaped from prison, trying to survive in an event intended for those with years of more magical experience, and a deranged dark lord trying to break into your head, you're probably disinclined to focus on academics anyways.

 

You know, since we are talking about Harry's attitude in Hogwarts, I always found it weird that he didn't do anything to better himself in dueling after hearing the Prophecy. I mean, in 5th year he was all about learning how to defeat themselves to the point of starting DA and in 6th year, when he knows it will probably end in a battle between him and Voldemort, he spends most of his time mooning over Ginny and playing Quidditch instead of asking for example Flitwick to practice with him. I know that he trusted Dumbledore to have a plan, but it's still bothers me that he did nothing to improve his chances in future fight.

 

Well, he thought that he would be learning cool shit in Dumbledore's private lessons. He also had a fairly competent DADA teacher in Snape. There's also the fact that it wasn't an indy!Harry fanfic, no matter how much some people would have liked it Harry was never the type of person who was motivated to better himself. And there's the point that Taure made, Harry did improve, it just happened off screen.

 

Question, When Harry "died" and gone to train station he asks to DD about Voldemort having the Elder Wand and DD says Voldemort does have it. So Harry decides to return because of that. But that is wrong isn't it. Harry wasn't defeated by V. he died by his own choice.

Wouldn't that broke the Elder Wand?

 

Voldemort was never the master of the Elder Wand, that was kind of the point. When Dumbledore says that Voldemort has the Elder Wand he means that he physically possesses it, not that he is the master of it. I think that if Harry hadn't returned Voldemort probably would have become master of it. The whole Harry chose to die idea doesn't really work because so did Dumbledore, he allowed himself to be defeated by Malfoy.

 

Ah, but he didn't allow it. He allowed Malfoy to try to kill him, but he never expected him to succeed. When it came to it, Malfoy disarmed Dumbledore against Dumbledore's wishes. Dumbledore was holding his wand and was wanting to keep hold of it: he wanted Snape to be the one to defeat him, not Malfoy.

 

If Dumbledore wanted to keep his wand, he would have been able to keep his wand. I always thought that the scene on the tower went exactly as Dumbledore planned it. What went wrong was that he too failed to properly understand the nature of the wand, he assumed, as Voldemort did, that it would go to Snape if he killed him, regardless of what Malfoy did.

 

No, the scene on the tower was not how things were meant to happen. Draco was never meant to get Death Eaters into the castle. Dumbledore was genuinely angry about that. The vanishing cabinet truly outmanoeuvred him.

Dumbledore lost his wand because he was seriously incapacitated from the effects of the potion he drank in the cave.

 

Exactly. With all the manipulative!Dumbledore stories going around, it's easy to think that every single thing that Dumbledore did in the books was a personal plot/well thought out scheme of his. This is simply not the case. Dumbledore wanted the Elder Wand taken out of play and to do so he insisted that Snape be the one to kill him so its ownership transferred. I highly doubt he ever anticipated the ownership of the wand transferring to Malfoy. Though whether he intended to allow Malfoy to disarm him or not, I'm not quite sure. However, I don't think that Dumbledore believed that death was what was required for ownership of the Elder Wand to transfer - he became the wielder of the Elder Wand without killing Grindelwald, simply defeating and imprisoning him. I feel that would imply he understood the nature of the wand.