I would give Voldemort actual viable reasons for wanting to kill muggles and mudbloods, as well as give Harry some drive. There'd be foreshadowing in the early books so by the end it doesn't seem like I'm pulling shit from my ass. More relationships, more student interaction, and I'd have done something with the Forbidden Forest. Snape wouldn't have been such a cunt.

 

You had me right up until

Snape isn't Snape if he's not a festering cunt.

 

It depends slightly on the school. You take your GCSE's at 15ish, then move on to sixth form for A-Levels. Not every school has a sixth form though, and you don't have to stay at the same one for it. So you could either move to a different school, or move to a college, or, of course, finish education there and then. Post GCSE would be a good point to start Hogwarts if you wanted Harry a little older while still keeping the educational setting.

 

I'd probably keep stuff the way it was until book 5. Personally, I would've wanted to focus on two things.

* What a full scale wizarding war would look like. Including the different fighting styles, kinds of magic, the multiple magical nations and their roles. Magical creatures. Basically going onto far greater detail and far greater scale.

* Character development. Harry starts off as a goodie-goodie and that never really changes. I would've liked to see a lot more development and, in particular, dealing with the reprecussions of potentially having to do some pretty horrible things to win the war.

 

Yeah, let's turn everything into A Song of Ice and Fire.

While I said I would try to make it feel more like a war, I definitely wouldn't try to make it grimderp or something.

 

Quidditch.

 

I'd keep it all the same except for adding a background character called simply "that weird Jewish kid" who nonetheless is surprisingly successful with the Ravenclaw ladies in his year.

 

I agree. It's fine to hate Snape - that's the appeal. That's what he's there for. And it's interesting to have to work with someone you hate, as a reader or as a protagonist.

Actually, I think I dislike Snape more than I do Voldemort. He should have been made into the main antagonist for a book, or something.

 

Well he was really for PS and in HBP you do finally get Harry trying to do something against him, the frustrating thing is that we never see Harry actually win.

It's better that we never see him as the main antagonist because then there'd have to be a resolution and, personally, the reason I hate/enjoy him so much is because he's that dick teacher who's good at his job that you can never do anything about because the institution doesn't want him gone.

 

And they also seem to have completely forgotten that they're supposed to be noire detective stories somewhere around the current halfway point, and it's now devolved into pure action uban fantasy with a semi-predictable plot twist per book (I have, for instance, already called what I'm fairly certain will be the next plot twists/deaths, and time will tell if I'm right).*

I just feel the need to point that out, since I'm a tremendous noirefag, and take my rainy big city backdrops and cigarette smoke filled rooms seriously.

That being said, it's still a good read. I like Files more than I like Iron Druid, but Iron Druid is a bit more scatterbrained in how it works, and is more of a "fun filled entertainment" style story.

*

Spoiler

Fix dies, Elaine takes his place as the Summer Knight as part of a long-running contingency/coincidence on Titania's part, and we're either going to find out that some part of the Winter Lady's job description is screwing over Outsiders, or it will be revealed that the Blackstaff is Mother Winter's missing walking stick.

 

So, Dresden?

 

I would have made wizardry itself a more active part of the story. What is magic? How and why can wizard's channel it?

I would have emphasized magic as an all-pervasive force tied into matter and existence itself, something wizards could perceive and manipulate with technical understanding (think Dumbledore at the entrance to the cave in HBP).

I would have paid more attention to subtler magicks, senses, prescience, and impressions, which Harry often had but which were written off as mere hunches or whatever. I would have used those as a chance to explore that aspect of magic and have Harry use it (building on his already-present deductive reasoning skills and investigative talent.

 

Well that last sentence was already confirmed by WOG.

 

Well, after 14 books, some things get predictable, because you know, you read 14 books by the same author you kinda know how he writes and think.

Also, I like HP in UK, Merlin's old country is synonym with magic for me. That said, a canadian urban fantasy sounds awesome, by the photos and videos I saw, Canada must be one of the most beautiful places in the world.