Emma Watson: although widely known for her outspoken and incendiary attacks on religion in such works as “The God Delusion”, she is perhaps best known as Hermione Granger. And what a legacy that is: the Harry Potter franchise has enjoyed honours the world over boasting fans of all age groups despite being billed as a children’s series. But let us take a step back and see if all the hullabaloo is really warranted.
Harry Potter is a great book for the same reason that Rage Comics were funny, or why Buddy Holly frames were cool again: it’s easy, simple, and everyone else likes it. If I had a nickel for every time Twlight was mocked by comparing it to the “vastly superior” Harry Potter, I’d have enough to pay Alan Rickman to read me the phonebook. Harry Potter provides such brilliant and revolutionary insights as “love conquers all”, “believe in yourself”, and “don’t follow people, follow ideas” (okay, I liked the last one). For a series in which combatting prejudice is a major theme, it is ironic that J.K.’s rainbow of ethnic characters could make Black Dynamite blush: Cho Chang the shy Asian girl; Seamus Finnegan the short-tempered and eager-to-fight Irishman; Victor Krum the dark and stoic Eastern European; Fleur Delacour the flirtatious and feminine French girl; and Parvati and Padma Patel the South-Asian sisters who, while all the other wizards get to wear whimsically wizardy dress-robes, wear saris. And what of House Elves? It feels that throughout the series Rowling sets up the plight of house-elves to be analogous of that to slavery, including the notion that that most wizards think that the elves are better off with masters. Does Hermione manage to free the elves or change the perspective of the Wizarding community? No; instead the message seems to be “just don’t be a jerk to your slaves,” with the last sentence in the series being Harry wondering if Kreacher would make him a sandwich, reminiscent of the horrendous post-civil-war myth of “the faithful slave”. Now, this is not counting the epilogue which is so ham-handed and oversaturated with offensively obtuse references, it is a wonder if J.K. Rowling had sneezed into the napkins on which she was writing it and just handed that to her editors. There are so many winks and nods and nudges that you would think that she were having an epileptic fit.
Now, this isn’t to say that the rest of the series was exactly a literary treasure. As opposed to a well thought-out fantasy series with a set and faithfully observed mythology, canon, and law, Harry Potter reads like a game of imagination-play between toddlers, or Dragonball Z, where one minute something is “the best attack ever” and the next there is an “even more the best attack ever”! Isn’t it peculiar that the dark wizards in the first books are almost exclusively employing spells learned by eleven and twelve-year-olds (until, of course, our protagonists learn new spells which the dark wizards then seem to just recall)? Or that the Patronus charm, which was supposed to be only mastered by the greatest of wizards, could be taught to pretty much any teenager? And the whole debacle of time tuners need really not be explained in depth (the only reasonable use for such powerful magic is balancing a thirteen-year-old’s school schedule!) And Harry’s whole dying-but-not-dying at the end? Making something nonsensical is not a shortcut to depth!
In conclusion, Jennifer Lawrence is exceptionally beautiful.
Leave a Reply