So it looks like there's going to be a sequel to Harry Potter, and it's a play. It's going to be mostly about Harry's son ( Read more... )

This is something that occurred to me as I was having a conversation with a friend. We were making fun of Harry Potter and he mentioned that he didn't like Dumbledore in the last few books because he was too perfect, too infallible, and absolutely everything went according to his plan. I brought up the potion in the cave as one counterpoint, and he ( Read more... )

A recent paper published in Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that reader identification with with the main character of Harry Potter (and disidentification with Voldemort) positively correlated with reduced bias toward stigmatized minorities in real life.  Researchers found this Harry Potter effect was significant even after controlling ( Read more... )

So a lot of us now have talked long and hard about how there's a ton of capslock in Harry Potter and how that's the sort of writing you'd expect from amateur fanfiction. Recently I was reading a random blog post for a bad novel and the writers of the blog were commenting on how there are some versions of capslock more excusable than others, and ( Read more... )

So I looked at ONTD's "Ten of the most Epidemically Overrated Books," and was incensed to find that books like On the Road and The Great Gatsby made the list but the Harry Potter series didn't (though at least the Twilight series did). I mean really, Harry Potter is the epitome of an overrated book series, given that there are people seriously ( Read more... )

So the last time I visited TVTropes’ Harry Potter pages, I came across someone who said that in actuality, everything about the last book made sense because don’t you see, the events of the series HAD NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE and so the characters COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN HOW ANYTHING WOULD WORK and so all the supposed inconsistencies are really just ( Read more... )

In my opinion, Harry is a character who can be written convincingly as gay, straight, or bisexual. I've noticed, however, that I tend to dislike fan fiction that features Harry in a heterosexual pairing. For a long time, I believed that this was simply because I just generally prefer to read slash romance stories. But after reading several ( Read more... )

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Quite honestly, the Harry Potter stuff on that site has gotten to the point where I can't read it because just about everything is fawning over how great and super-special-awesome the series is, oh, and how Snape is an evil douchebag who wanted to get Harry and James killed so he could keep Lily. But this... this makes me want to scream:

"Hermione ( Read more... )