Harry Potter

The other day I was talking to some co-workers about Harry Potter. (I work at a genomics research foundation. What do you want?) We were thinking about the things that bugged us about it, and I thought to myself, where better to talk about something no one cares about than a blog?

(In case you can't guess, there will be some spoilers)

So, the biggest problem for me is that things that work in one book apparently don't work in other books. A lack of consistent internal rules.

First, if time travel is possible, and so commonplace that they let a 13 year old girl do it to take extra classes at school, then why not make it so Voldemort never killed anybody? Or was never born? I mean, they have magic police that show up right after Sirius killed all those people...so why not assess the situation and then show up half an hour earlier?

Second, one of the big plot points is that you can cast a magical spell to make it so no one can ever find something (like the Potter Parents house). So why does everybody hide things behind ridiculous D&D traps? We've got Voldemort hiding his magic death whatevers in the middle of a magic lake surrounded by zombies, we've got Dumbledore hiding the Magic Rock behind the giant chessboard and quiddich test...so why not just hide these things in the magic can't-be-found spell?

Third, the whole self-sacrifice magic thing. What was that supposed to be? I mean, at the end of the last book, we see that Harry used his magic love to protect everybody, just like his parents did to protect him. But he didn't die. His love magic was able to protect hundreds of people just by being willing to die. So, is she telling us that no one in all the magic world was willing to die to stop Voldemort? Not one single person? Remember that it doesn't take an actual death, just being willing to die. I find that hard to believe. (Especially since there were lots of people who actually did sacrifice themselves to stop Voldemort.)

We also thought that there would be some useful spells we would have loved to see, but I'll leave those for another post. This is enough nerd talk for one day.