harry potter.

while my sister (who, for reference, just got her B.Sc. in biology) was down for the thanksgiving break, she bought the 5th harry potter book on tape for her to listen to on the 5-hour drive back from philadelphia to rochester. as we were driving home from the mall, she insisted we listen to it. just listening to the opening snippet made me finally realize what i don't like about harry potter.

now, there are, apparently, lots of reasons to not like harry potter. the web is full of sites by "hardcore" sf/f fans who won't get within 10 feet of a harry potter book. i'm not really interested in hearing why j.k. rowling sucks because she doesn't follow directly in JRRT's footsteps (and trying to do that often gives you even worse results, c.f. robert jordan *shudder*).

i can also see what's good about harry potter. she's stripped out a lot of the sex and violence and highfalutin philosophy and complicated language that often accompanies fantasy. she's made the fantasy genre completely accessable to the mainstream reader. and as a fantasy fan, i can't say but that's a good thing. the more it gets demystified, and the less things like "using futhork runes" ends up on the ADL website are good things by me (adl.org is a general anti-racism and specifically anti-anti-semitism website. at one point in 1999 or so, they added the futhork runes to their list of signs of white supremicist activity. they were then inundated by hordes of emails from fantasy fans, pointing out that JRRT, among others, used the futhork in his book The Hobbit, and they were needlessly lumping a whole genre of literature in with some admittedly disgusting activity. 3 days later, they took it down).

no, what bugs me about harry potter is her apparent resistance to any tendency to actually develop the characters of harry's muggle family. now, admittedly, making them caricatures makes them easy to hate. but isn't that a little immature? why not make them fully 3-dimensional characters, to be pitied instead of mocked? what harm could that possibly do to the story? actually, i think it would make it better. they're small, close-minded people who are missing any family connection to harry potter. frankly, i think that's sad. instead of giving them trite dialogue, dialogue that can be predicted even if you haven't read the book, why not make them real people? as long as you're going to use them as a framing device for every single bloody book, don't make them a torture to read, please.