The two biggest flaws in Harry Potter

[lavivi]

I love the Harry Potter series.  I sincerely do.  I perhaps wouldn't call them my favorite series, but I've certainly obsessed over them far more than I have over any other book or movie.  I think J.K. Rowling is a fabulous, fabulous writer, one of the best of our day.

But despite this, I am forced to acknowledge flaws.  Not the Flints - the real, plot flaws, which make me very sad.  In my mind, there are really only two glaring ones.

1. Lord Voldemort.  It's so sad.  But at this stage, I, and many others, have to admit he has no depth.  Ms. Rowling grounded this when she said somewhere that he's never loved anyone.  That was a mistake.
   But the bigger issue is that his motivation for a pureblood world is cardboard.  He's more of a halfblood than Harry is!  I have difficulty, no matter how much else Voldemort has acomplished, seeing Lucius Malfoy truly respect him.  But his evil plan to kill everyone because his Muggle father was a bad man is a cliche and just doesn't fit with the rest of Ms. Rowling's well-rounded world
2. Peter Pettigrew, as seen in the fifth book.  Before the fifth book was published, I read a fanfic called There Is No Such Place by Liz Barr*.  In short, it's a Marauder-era fic.  And in it, Peter is an equal.  He banters with the rest of the Marauders, they don't mock him.  Yes, he has problems with schoolwork, that's canon, but he's part of the Marauders.  You may argue that McGonagall, who knew them for seven years, called him a "tag-along" - but isn't Colin Creevey Harry's tag-along, and if Harry, Ron, and Hermione made something, would they put Colin's name on it?
   But canon is canon, and what we saw in the Pensieve is how things were - with Peter's applause and Sirius' derision.  I accept it - but I have trouble believing that they would really trust him with James and Lily's life.  Unless he went under the miraculous personality change James allegedly suffered, too. 

But what do you think?  Am I crazy, did I miss even bigger ones?

* No Such Place is an abandoned WIP, so investigate at your own emotional risk. ;-)

Comments

[alyndra]

(via D_S)

My initial reaction to Peter in OotP was very similar to yours. I was one of the fans of MoreThanHeSeems!Peter. But as I thought about it more ... I was missing the point of that scene. One of the main reasons for the Better!Wormtail theory (as I understood it) was that James and Sirius were too good to have an nasty useless minion for a friend, and therefore Peter had to have some redeeming qualities.

But as we learned in that scene, James and Sirius weren't all that great. They had prejudices and they weren't always fair and just and right, and they wouldn't be averse to befriending a flattering hanger-on who thought they could do no wrong. The difference between Peter and Colin is that Peter is encouraged and liked for being a "tag-along," and Colin isn't. Peter gets closer than Colin ever does, and the point is that unlike the Golden Trio, the Marauders don't have a storybook friendship. If they did, Peter never would have betrayed them, Remus and Sirius wouldn't have suspected each other of being Death Eaters, and a lot of other things would be different.

This is my way of taking things on the author's terms, I guess. Nothing ruins a story faster than bringing a lot of baggage to it about what it "should" be; this is, IMO, one of the biggest dangers of reading a lot of fanfic of an incomplete series.

That said, here are a couple of good recs including Valid!Peter you might enjoy: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/1097925/1/ and http://www.fanfiction.net/s/437455/1/