[[I do hope you’ve read the Harry Potter series all the way through. I’m not exactly kind about keeping secrets in this respect, so if you don’t want it to be spoiled, don’t read on!]]

Change is a good thing, and I think I’m at a level where I have a (albeit pathetic) reason to make that an official belief of mine. As I’ve gotten older, a few things about my appearance have changed - I got fed up with keeping my hair short, so I let it get long, and it’s stayed that way for a long time now, trimmed back occasionally to keep me from getting something silly like Geddy hair (it would not look good on me, I promise). I recently switched out a pair of glasses I’d owned for four years, too, and this pair is beautiful - lovely blue frames, a neat rectangular frame shape with the bottom portion of the frame missing, and possibly my favorite part, transition lenses. I love them.

But, all in all, something I’ve recently noticed that has made me heave a sigh of relief is, I no longer resemble Harry Potter.

Things seemed to arrange themselves neatly in the most annoying way possible. I was “psychologically coerced” (my not-so-friendly term for convinced) into reading the first few Harry Potter books. The first one was all right, the second one was only a little better, but the third one was magic. That was when I really got interested in the series. However, not long after I burned through the second, people started realizing the resemblance. At first it was just kind of funny, but when everyone you meet starts comparing you to a character you aren’t spectacularly fond of, things go downhill quickly.

It didn’t help that the series went downhill, either. J.K. Rowling, as a writer, I admire and still admired; the Goblet of Fire was wonderfully written and put together. But the stories began to get a little bit… tiring. I had all kinds of theories as to why the Goblet of Fire was the turning point for me, but I think I’ve narrowed it down to this: the Goblet of Fire was when things started going wrong. The first three books all had upbeat, happy endings, but as soon as you hit book four, things changed.  And far too suddenly.

Naturally, it only got worse from there.  Book Four, we killed some nice guy that I didn’t know all that well. Book Five, we killed Sirius - a man that I personally found amazing, probably the best-developed and best-written character in the series, up there with Dumbledore. Oh, speaking of Dumbledore, we just HAD to kill the most loved not-quite-main character in the series in Book Six. That was charming.

And of course all of this culminated in a final clash in which we killed one - not BOTH, but ONE - of the Weasley Twins, which I kindly term a bitch move, as well as werewolfing Charlie if I remember right, and a number of other unsavory things I am less keen to remember.

Death sometimes is a good plot device - but every plot device has limitations, and one of death’s limitations is that if you use it too much, it starts to get stupid. It starts to turn the reader off unless you can present a very good reason for everything happening. I don’t know if that’s how everyone else feels about it, but I do know that the way Cedric died in the Goblet of Fire was okay - good reason: unwanted witness - and Sirius’ death was excusable - casualty of war - but after that, it was too much. The major deaths were ALWAYS at the climax of the book, too, which means it’s supposed to be a major turning point of the story and the epic occurrence that the entire book has been building up to. Cedric’s death was not the climax, but Sirius’ and Dumbledore’s pretty much were. That put me in the mindset of “Dear Lord, they killed another good character?” Where’s the variety, the suspense? Death becomes predictable.

Besides that, the school elements seemed much more forced and even ignored in later books. Reasonable, I guess; Harry has a lot of other things to focus on. But at the same time, up until book seven, J.K. couldn’t seem to let them go. I get that Harry still has classes to attend to, but that’s not the focus of the story anymore, the focus of the story, the reason anyone should be reading it, is the Harry vs. Voldemort conflict. That’s the point of the book. If you’re going to have him have two lives, make it a bigger deal - if you’re going to downplay the school side, downplay it to the point that it doesn’t matter anymore. That be seen as a ‘cinematic’ approach to some of you, but it’s more what I’m used to and more what I’d be attracted to reading.

This of course excludes the seventh book, which I have taken the liberty of forgetting. I wouldn’t have minded the book at all, I think, under better circumstances - I quite enjoyed the idea that Harry wasn’t going back to school for his seventh year and was instead going to actually finally pay attention to this war erupting all around him. The story of destroying the Horcruxes would have been a fantastic story, if that was how J.K. had wrote it. Instead, though, she made some portion of the story about getting a wand. ONE WAND TO RULE THEM ALL, ONE WAND TO BIND THEM! At least Lord of the Rings was realistic: if you’re going to make an all-powerful artifact, make sure you’re the only one who’s going to be able to use it. I don’t remember too much about the wand Harry was sent looking for, but I do remember thinking “Why do you need this again? Why did you, as a writer, need to include this?” It was the fifth wheel to the story. I would’ve loved the book a whole lot more if Harry had to troop around the world destroying Horcruxes with his own raw power (which wasn’t much) before finally coming together in a final duel with Voldemort. THAT would have been AWESOME, and THAT would have been how I wrote it.

At the end of the seventh book (I don’t even remember its name) Harry ‘dies’. That was almost as forced and useless as the Master Wand or whatever it was called. People had been told for ages before the book came out that someone very important was going to die (Why?) and so to get out of it she killed Harry and had him randomly return to life. Still don’t get that one either. Maybe it would have been better if the entire story was written from someone else’s point of view - Voldemort’s, maybe, or Ron’s, or Hermione’s. Not Harry’s, it just seemed weird from Harry’s.

Don’t get me wrong: I do not feel that I’m any better a writer than J.K. Rowling. She’s a masterful writer in any case, there’s a reason Harry Potter has been so (annoyingly) successful. It is not she that I dislike, any more than I dislike Stephanie Meyers (I can’t talk about Twilight ’cause I haven’t read it…) - it’s simply that I value something about their work that apparently most people do not: fluidity, sense, and the right mixture of elements in the plot. And when it isn’t present, I don’t like it. It’s simply a different style of writing. But it does come down to a simple statement: I don’t like Harry Potter. And I probably won’t be seeing any more of the movies unless I am dragged.