Harry Potter and the Unaddressed Plotholes

      Please don't misunderstand me. Harry Potter is a fantastically droll and intricately designed story. However, because it is such a widely read and insanely well-praised book, it should be held up to closer scrutiny than it has before. These are six things that I must have put more thought into than J.K Rowling ever did.

1. The Trace

When J.K. (as in “Just Kidding, Harry doesn't really die) Rowling introduced the concept of the Trace in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, it was clear that she didn't really understand the rules for her own magical universe. (“How about, if Harry uses magic, all the car alarms in a 50 mile radius go off?”)

When Dobby uses magic to levitate a pudding in the Dursley household, Harry gets a warning that threatens expulsion the next time he crosses the line. Fine. We can ignore for the moment that magic is less precise than a GPS unit or the kind of tracking device you put in your pet.

If you hate them.

The problem isn't so much that the magic is vague and imprecise, the problem is that the magic is inconsistent.

Let's fast-forward to the fifth book (Harry Potter, the Angsty Little Bitch) where Harry has been expelled (this time for actually doing magic.) He is warned by several adult authority figures not to do any further magic under any circumstances. 

Except, you know, special occasions

         Wisely, Dumbledore sends a bunch of people to sneak Harry stealthily out of his house and into a safe base. These people are totally Special Ops, the best of the best. They're Aurors, Order of the Phoenix Members, Dumbledore's trusted lackeys—they're like ninjas but with wands. So they show up in the middle of the night, slipping under the Ministry's radar... and proceed to magic the shit of out of the house. 

 “Don't worry, the Ministry of Underage Magic sleeps at night.”

           Seriously. Tonks packs Harry's laundry for him (a task impossible to do without at least a woman, if not a wand) and Moody puts a Disillusionment charm on Harry in the same kitchen where the house-elf smashed the pudding three years prior. According to the rules of the Trace, shouldn't Ministry officials be at the door in a flash, incinerating Harry's wand? At the very least, Dumbledore should have warned his friends to keep their wands in their pants around this kid (the joke had to be made sometime). So what is it? Are Aurors that stupid? Or are Disillusionment charms themselves undetectable?

          I have a feeling I've put a lot more thought into this than Ms. Rowling has.

2. Underage Magic

        Okay, so the Trace makes a brave attempt at explaining itself, even though it fails. The rule for underage magic, however, makes no sense whatsoever, and Rowling's increasingly desperate attempts to make sense of it only muddle it further.

 “Under...age...students...can...only...use...magic...on....Wednesdays.”

          So Harry's not allowed to use magic in the summer. At all. Two strikes and his wand is snapped in half and he's left unprotected for Voldemort to sexually molest to his heart's content. (That's...that's what he wants, right?) Doesn't it seem awfully cold to just chuck a kid out of school, out of a culture, out of an entire way of life, just for levitating the cat?

          These students are fifteen year old teenage boys and the authorities expect them to just keep their wands from exploding through sheer force of will? (That's right, Harry Potter fans...dick jokes.) Okay fine. If you use magic twice outside of school you're ostracized from the magical community, all of your family and friends, and made to live like Muggles (who are viewed, if you're a member of the Weasley family, as some sort of strange domesticated pet.) Fine. That's harsh, but those are the rules.

         Oh wait, they're not.

         In magical families, it's assumed that parents will regulate their children's behavior on their own. The parents are doing magic all over the place, so picking out a student's spells among the grown-ups' would be impossible (thanks to the logic of the Trace.) So if you're Muggle-born, an orphan, or a lower-income bracket wizarding family that has to share an apartment with a family of illegal Cuban immigrants, then you get expulsion and jail-time. If you're in a wizarding house, mommy just limits your snack intake.

“Only one pudding cup? Man, I knew I shouldn't have used Avada Kedavra on the cat.”

          This leads us to another problem. Pure-blood wizard kids are always astonished by Muggles' magic-replacements. There are constant exclamations about the use of electricity, phones, cars, video games, and everything else that makes life good and pure. Arthur Weasley is so dumb that he can't read the number 20 on a 20-pound note.

“Is this.... some sort of weapon?”

 

           These Muggle-ignorant adults supposedly spent the first eleven years of their lives without wands and a further six without being able to use magic at home. Did they cope by acting like Muggles and then forgetting how to sew clothes, ride the subway, or cook? The Underage magic law seems to cripple the development of wizards and witches in their own environment.

           So what's the point of the rule? To keep magic secret from Muggles? That sort of makes sense, giving harsher punishment to those at a higher risk of revealing dangerous secrets. But the rule doesn't seem to apply to magical objects, or unusual pets. Having your owl fly letters, riding a broomstick or spraying curtains with doxy poison—none of these things seems to violate the under age rule. So really, this underage law is just another bit of anti-Muggle-born prejudice.

           But I'm sure people will tell me that that makes it intended.

3. Worse Prison System Than 1970s Chile

           Which is saying something. In Chile, though, you just got “disappeared” until you were murdered brutally yet briefly by some Junta asshole who pulled you away from your family in the middle of the night for being an artist. If that makes you never want to visit Chile, then why on earth would you want to be a wizard? You could go to Azkaban instead, where instead of a quick and painful death you are subjected to a slow, torturous loss of identity, memory, and joy. Dementors get off on eating your happiness, and if you piss them off too much, they kiss you so hard your soul falls out.

Friday is game night.

          Azkaban is Rowling's super-subtle tip of the hat to the island prison Alcatraz. She came up with the name while playing the game “Anagrams of American Landmarks.” Azkaban, like Alcatraz, is an inescapable prison set out in the middle of the ocean with guards that will murder you dead if you try to escape. With Alcatraz it was a way to keep the country's most dangerous criminals sequestered away from decent citizens. It housed murderers and gangsters such as Al “Scarface” Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Arthur “Doc” Barker. So who is so terrible in the wizarding world that he's put into Azkaban without a trial?

         This guy:

Rubeus “Weepy” Hagrid

          That's another thing. Hagrid is never given a trial. Sure, Sirius Black didn't get one either, but that was during the McCarthy era when panic was abound and people were rabid for justice and the excommunication of Communists from Hogwarts. Or something.

          But Hagrid? With no proof that he was remotely connected to either the death of Olive Hornby or the conveniently reversible petrifications, Hagrid is given six months in Azkaban. Six months where Dementors rape his happy place until he is nothing more than a hollow shell. Seriously, if you're a wizard and you get so much as a speeding ticket, suddenly Nazgul-knockoffs are giving you the world's most disturbing version of a “soul kiss.”

Pictured: Dementor Porn

          And this is the wizarding world before Voldemort implements his reign of terror. Kind of puts his social reform policy in a new light, eh?

4. Speaking of Hagrid...

This is a picture of Hagrid's father:

         You can see from the inclusion of Hagrid in said picture, that Mr. Hagrid senior was less than average in stature. According to Hagrid himself, his father was “a tiny bloke” whom he could pick up with one hand by the time he was eleven years old. In contrast, giants are described as not being terribly sentimental or even familial; they are cannibalistic at times, gigantic, smelly and savage. So. Someone please explain to me why 

     a) There is a fetish for tiny male wizards who want to bone gigantic sperm whale-sized women and 

     b) Rowling felt it was a good idea to include this idea in her children's book.

       It really doesn't help that she says that Hagrid's unnatural monster of a mother was married to his minuscule father, either. Picture the woman who gave birth to this:

married to this:

Question: How was Hagrid born in the first place?!!

Answer: Magic.

5. Undocumented Illegal Wizards?

             In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Rowling informs us that the stadium for the Quidditch World Cup holds 100,000 people. There are clearly more wizards than that globally because, according to Arthur Weasley, the Lovegoods weren't even able to score tickets. Maybe the Lovegoods are somehow more poverty-stricken than the Weasleys, but that still implies that the stadium was packed. Throughout the books we find buildings crammed with bustling activity, cramped offices, and people unable to get the jobs they always wanted.

“Defense Against the Dark Arts will be mine.”

           So, there are a lot of wizards, then. Healers, teachers, aurors, ministry officials. There are two hundred Slytherin supporters at one of the Hogwarts' Quidditch matches, and those are just the kids who like sports. So with this thriving, ever-growing community, how many Gryffindor boys do you think would be in Harry's year?

THIS many!

       That's right. Five. Harry, Ron, Dean, Seamus and Neville. That's it. I guess no one else made the cut that year.

        *Fun Fact: Ginny has dated 2/5^th of the Gryffindors in Harry's year. I'm sure that makes her stats around the school legendary.

      So there are several possibilities here. Either the majority of wizards are evil and end up in Slytherin due to their nefarious plots, OR there are hundreds of undocumented wizards sneaking into the country and illegally obtaining back-alley wands from cheap knock-off stores. Either way, Rowling needs to do a recount.

6. Magic Sucks

       Dude, you heard me. Okay, I'll admit it. Changing into someone else via the Polyjuice Potion would be pretty sweet, and yes, I would like my own flying broomstick. But come on. Some of the plots in the Harry Potter books could be solved with the application of simple and wide-spread technology or by reading Computers for Dummies.

       Let's take the first book. Harry spends approximately ¾ of the year trying to figure out the significance of Nicholas Flamel (besides Rowling's insatiable need to drudge up historical and mythical characters.) He reads every book in the library. He gets his friends to read every book in the library. He busts into the restricted section in the middle of the night, breaking dozens of school rules.

       You know what would have been a big fucking help here?

This guy.

          Seriously. Nicholas Flamel's biography is public knowledge, Harry was just looking in the wrong books. Two seconds on Wikipedia could have told him Old Nick's history, life's work, and sexual preference (light bondage and S&M.)

         That's not the only problem with magic, either. Magic actively hates science. Electronic equipment doesn't work within the walls of Hogwarts, and so the students are forced to use moldy old books, lamps instead of flashlights, and quills with ink instead of the infinitely easier mechanical pencils. Voldemort's still using Avada Kedavra when he could be killing thousands of people infinitely faster using nukes and machine-guns.

         Perhaps Rowling hates science so much because even with the power of imagination, the technology we have is still a crap ton better than the shit she makes up.

Haha, suck it, magic.