What are you disagreeing with?

@Silens Cursor: You're correct, but there is a bigger picture. The answer to "why were the Weasleys so poor" is obvious. Remove all numbers from any text JKR wrote. Innumeracy that bad cannot be reasoned with. To a person like JKR, numbers aren't points on the infinite real line. They cannot be compared to each other. They do not form a group, closed under addition. Multiplication doesn't exist at all, because for it to exist, addition must first exist. All quantities express only feelings: many vs. few, much vs. little, haves vs. have-nots. The Weasleys have little money. The Firebolt costs a lot of money. Many people watched Harry play Quidditch. Many people helped build the World Cup stadium. Harry's vault in Gringotts held what appeared to an eleven year old, a lot of money. The omniculars Harry bought Ron cost a lot of money to Ron but negligible amount of money to Harry. The prize for winning the TWT was substantial. The Weasleys won a bunch of money they spent on a vacation. The prices of goods in Diagon Alleys are random amounts of incomprehensible currency that Hagrid just introduced as impossible to manipulate, because 17 and 29 sound difficult. While reading Philosopher's Stone for the first time, I wrote that down to the book being aimed at eight year olds. But in fact, the author's ability to count is the same as an average eight year old's. That's why, when the protagonist grows up and hits puberty, he does not gain the ability to question demographics or the economy, or even how many people constitute the 10% with the highest grades in the year (four).

JKR works through feelings and intuition, not facts and figures. Trying to apply reasoning to her creation leads only to madness. The universe was created by the rule of quirky, there was no overarching design. People coming from hard science fiction or balanced role playing games don't get that it's not happening in warhammer40k but in a fairytale. More than a decade of frustration led me to this inescapable conclusion: don't. Just don't.In the Potterverse, numbers don't exist. They really don't. It's the only way to be sure.

 

"Thank you for Smoking" was quite cool.

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I disagree with the argument that because Dumbledore might not have Harry's best interest in mind is a reason to bash the character. Bashing is no legitimate tool in a text story.

 

I said:

and then said that Dumbledore is not a white unicorn who farts rainbows. Where did I endorse (or even excuse) bashing?

All I said was that unlike Hermione and the Weasleys, Dumbledore is guilty of harming Harry. A story has cause to portray Dumbledore as someone who does not have Harry's best interests in mind.

 

But that is no justification for bashing so the whole argument to "justify" why people bash characters is completely misguided.

 

Don't I know it - and again, I don't have a huge problem with it, outside of the niggling logic inconsistencies. But then again, it wouldn't be a bad thing if she at least attempted to ground said feelings and intuition in reality or something sensible.

Damn right it was. One of my favourite movies of all time, hands down.

 

So you are saying what exactly? That JKR needs a Beta? Because I completely agree

 

This pretty well touches on my problem with the books past somewhere in the beginning/middle of GoF. Harry Potter started out written for young kids, and the attention to detail and tone of the books show that very clearly. It never really grew up with it's audience though; it only adopted the superficial appearance of maturity (death, some sex) but never developed deeper maturity in terms of pacing, plotting, world building, etc.

 

Doubtful. Ginny would have needed way more kills for Juggernaut... fewer if she had the Hardline Pro perk, but still...

Not to mention that Harry beat Voldemort because of Hax.

Seriously, though: Interesting idea. That section you quoted definitely wasn't an example of Rowling doing Ginny (or Ginny/Harry) any favors. Your alternate version might have helped. A bit. If Ginny actually appeared in the books.

 

But she doesn't. Which is one of my biggest peeves with canon actually...

In any case, Ginny herself is almost a pet peeve of mine in fanfiction. Her character almost as badly hyperbolized as Hermione's.

 

Lol, what character? She doesn't have one, aside from apparently having a temper. As you said, she doesn't even appear in the books even when she and Harry are dating. There's nothing to expand on or to work with. She's as much as a blank slate as Daphne Greengrass.

And that brings me to my biggest pet-peeve in the fandom. Ginny Hate. She's a girl who had a crush on Harry early in the books who ended up with him in the end. But she has no characteristics besides having red hair, a temper, and the ability to cast a bat bogey hex. Nothing else. She's not a slut, she's not a whore, she's not a crowing harpy hell bent on ending up with Harry Potter.

She's a girl with absolutely no canon characteristics who somehow ended up with the hero of the whole series. That's all.

 

Because smoking is basically cheating on the 'cool' factor. Stick a cigarette in a guy's mouth and suddenly he has attitude and is cool without you actually having to do anything to make the reader/viewer think that he's cool.

In my opinion, it comes from cigarette advertising, and the existence of the Camel and the Marlboro Man. Both look cool, and both are meant to appeal to viewers (obviously one is meant to appeal to a different generation than the other), but there you have it.

As far as the Weasley's poverty goes, I always thought it was overdone. Yes, I understand that JKR was making a point about poverty (and especially social class differences if you compare the Weasleys to the Malfoys), but, regardless, you can do that without making it overdone. She could've just left it at the fact that a lot of Ron's things are hand-me-downs or second-hand, which an intelligent reader would put together as their family not being well-off, and a kid would simply skip right over it, not understanding the significance.

And, on the subject of Ginny, she is a blank slate, but not to the level of Daphne. What we know about Ginny is that she used to have a huge crush on Harry, apparently has a temper, could compete with the Twins in a prank-war, and has a mean Bat-Bogey Hex. The fanon that she's a whore comes from (probably) conservative readers seeing the fact that she dated like four or five boys over the duration of books five and six.

 

I laugh when I think Harry's wand cost more then everything in the Weasley vault (how did the Weasleys afford all those wands then?). Also, this is just me rambling, but if I were a wizard with a wand, I'd apparate my broke-ass into a muggle bank and clear it out. Sure, the Weasleys may have morals, but think about it, are there any poor Slytherins? Don't mention the Gaunts because I bet they'd be to disgusted to steal muggle money - probably think its beneath them or something.

 

That's not exactly correct. She has 2-3 bigger scenes in OOTP with Harry(After the visit to Arthur and at easter sharing the egg+organizing the twin help,train) where JKR tried to show her character but it's not really enough in the huge book to make some relationship believable. The scene with Luna was longer and emotionally deeper.

Greengrass and almost any other girl besides Hermione,Luna,Ginny and perhaps Bones/Abott/Bulstrode are non entities. The only reason she stands out is the cool name.

 

This is just part of the biggest lost opportunity in the HP series, IMO: Rowling staying locked on 3rd person limited for the last book. I don't actually dislike DH on the balance, but its pacing in the middle of the book just irks me.

I mean, I guess I understand the pitfalls of switching the style of narration just for one book. There are numerous ways in which the whole exercise could crash and burn. Maybe there was just too much "inertia" to make the concept even remotely feasible.

But think of all the things we missed. In the middle chapters of DH, we get to see Harry and company camping, and stumbling around, and sulking. Meanwhile, the Order of the Phoenix is fighting for its survival against horrific odds, and the student resistance at Hogwarts is also fighting, in a more limited way.

That latter in particular was a great opportunity to flesh out the character of Ginny, as well as a bunch of others. We could have seen all these characters, many of which had been nothing more than placeholders, without the Harry filter in place.

I had faint hopes that the people who made the movies would realize this, and break Rowling's 3rd person limited, but they were ultimately too pussified to try.

 

Hence we have DAYD, which is sufficiently horrifying to make up for what Rowling missed.

 

Most people refer to where she dated like three different guys in a year (I'm actually generalising. I don't actually remember how many guys she dated in how much time. She wasn't that memorable for me) for the whole slut/whore image. Which is kind of stupid, really. Lots of teenagers do this without being called sluts or whores.

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This made the Order look really useless too. The Order probably did fight a lot and they probably did a lot behind the scenes but we never see it. Instead it makes them look useless and like they need to really on Harry and company as well as the D.A. for everything.

 

The book was called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, not Ginny Weasley and the Boring Character Development, and definitely not Minor Order Member and the Getting My Ass Kicked By Death Eaters.

In the entire series it only showed two POVs other than Harry and both of those were prologues. JKR wasn't going to sudenly turn it into a multi-POV series just for the last book.

 

The problem is that his POV sucks. It sucks for everything, all seven books.

 

Maybe, but the thing to remember is that it's a story aimed at children. Even in the later books the target age never goes above early teens, most kids that age aren't looking for, or able to follow an intricate plot following multiple POVs. And if it was that bad then none of us would be here.

 

Basically, this. It's incredibly old news that Harry is an unreliable narrator, so we are left with assumptions that we make and conclusions that we draw about anything we're left in the dark about (such as what the Order was really up to during DH). Anything we read is from Harry's perspective, or from an outside source. Very rarely do we receive the truth from anyone who tells Harry something when it's outside a classroom, and, as we said, Harry is an unreliable narrator.

This leads to a lot of fanon, because what JKR did was great for the books, but not the universe. Keeping it to the protagonist cuts down on page length because I'm sure she didn't walk into this thing half-cocked, but a lot of incredible world-building actually gets done by the fans, rather than JKR. And the reason why she did it was purely for entertainment purposes. We've grown to like Harry over the course of seven books, nobody wants to read about a shitty duel between an Order mook and a Death Eater mook.

The movies got away with this because they have CGI to make it look cool in the 30 second to one minute scenes where they actually cut away from Harry in HBP and the DH movies.