A break from politics: Harry Potter sucks

A few short hours from writing this post, I will go and pay $15US to see a sneak preview of the new Harry Potter movie. And boy am I excited. What will happen this time? Will Harry start the story being oppressed by his ghastly buttoned-down muggle family? Will he escape to another year of magical boarding school, steaming across the land on a magical train with his two best buddies? Will he struggle in his classes and resent the taunts of his rivals? Will he soar to victory in the flying wizard sport of Quidditch? And will he be caught at the center of a nefarious scheme to return his archrival Voldemort to power?

Actually, the answers to these questions are "The same thing that always happens. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes." Because, even if I hadn't read the Harry Potter books, it would by now be painfully clear to me that the structure of Harry Potter books are so regular as to render them similar to elections in Egypt: anyone who is actually in suspense is kidding themselves.

A quick Google search of key phrases will reveal the staggering popularity of the Harry Potter franchise. For example:
"Harry Potter is great" - 1,430 matches
"Harry Potter is boring" - 378 matches
"Harry Potter is awesome" - 970 matches
"Harry Potter is mediocre" - 22 matches
"Harry Potter is amazing" - 730 matches
"Harry Potter is the best thing ever" - 127 matches
"Harry Potter should be stabbed a million times" - 1 match (and that link is pro-Potter!)

OK, so that's not exactly a scientific poll. But in my own unscientific but still very forceful opinion, Harry Potter is among the most overrated pieces of literature ever to sell 300 million copies. I've read all six of the books published so far, and I went into them with no real expectations, but my opinion has never wavered. Harry P is mediocre.

Why, you ask? Well, I thought you would. So here's my reasons:

1. The scenery never changes. It always starts out in the muggle world, then transitions to the Hogwarts Express (possibly with a sojourn through Diagon Alley), then on to Hogwarts itself. And though the characters sometimes take excursions into the nearby town, it's not well-developed, and we really never see anywhere new after the third book. This robs the series of the mystery, wonder, and sense of exploration that we get from reading fantasy books like Lord of the Rings.

2. The plot outline never changes. It always starts in August and ends in June. We are treated to the same motifs again and again - the train, the sorting hat, the beginning of class, Halloween, Christmas, the Quidditch season, spring cramming, exams, and the final battle against evil. If you don't think It's as regular as I'm describing, observe these two facts: A. Christmas always comes 5 or fewer pages from the halfway point of the book, and B. The final confrontation with evil always happens on the day after final exams. Again, this crushing predictability takes away a big chunk of our sense of wonder.

3. The bad guys are stock. Voldemort is generic in just about every way possible. Don't get me wrong - I'm not always in favor of "humanized villains". In Lord of the Rings, the villains were like forces of nature, and that was good. Other times, like in Batman, the villains are just horrible and cruel in very original ways. But Voldemort is not only a generically named, generically powered, generically motivated villain, he also does nothing un-generically bad. He zaps people and either kills them or puts them in agonizing generic pain. He never curses anyone with elephantiasis of the scrotum or sentences them to an eternal hangover, fills their mouths with live cockroaches or forces them to listen to the Eagles' Greatest Hits for a year solid (the Eagles' Greatest Hits, by the way, is the top-selling album in history).

4. The plot suffers from "outlining disease." The Harry Potter books were some of the most outlined works in the history of literature. Thus, in every book (and in ever section and subsection), the author has to hit a certain number of "plot points". For example, if Harry is currently feeling attracted to Cho Chang, then as he's on his way to some terribly important confrontation with the forces of darkness, he still has to pass Cho in the hall and mentally remark on how nervous he is around her, etc. It's distracting, and takes away from the force and continuity of the writing.

5. Harry himself is a stock character. While it's acceptable and even necessary for supporting characters to be stock characters with stock reactions, one would expect that in a 3000-page series, the main character would at some point do something or think something that is not obvious and natural for a generic "decent kid" to do. But sadly, he pretty much never does. This flaw is less serious than the others, but still annoying.

Anyway, my point is not that Harry Potter sucks, or should be stabbed a million times. My point IS that Harry Potter is mediocre stuff, definitely middle-of-the-pack, nowhere in the league of Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire or...ok, I better stop before you think I'm a geek or something.

But, just as The Eagles will always be causing cosmic injustice by sitting at the top of the all-time album charts, so Harry Potter will be disturbing the karmic flow by being the best-selling book of all time. Because it doesn't deserve to be liked by as many people as like it, as much as they like it. Because my opinion is the true standard of objective quality, and...um...hey, I better go, or I'll be late for the movie...