this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Love her or hate her (and my opinions are mixed), I must confess, JK Rowling was a huge influence on why I didn't become a regular author. No shade on people who get what they paid for, but the young reader crowd is just so gimmicky, and not in a good way, and you see that with a lot of works like Percy Jackson and Twilight (but also predominantly with Rowling's work). How do you compete in such a no-rules game?

So then let's talk about one of the cores of the issue. People often have an epiphany when divulging into Harry Potter, and they think "huh, what's the deal with this if that thing is how it is". While noting that conflicts in literary analysis don't always reflect something that doesn't add up and that it could be a hiccup in details/semantics, the questions themselves don't go away. And there's nothing that matches the amount of those having to do with Harry Potter. What example of which strikes you as the most overlooked?

If Rowling herself ever notices that I'm bringing this up, let it be known I do think of her work as a reskinned Brothers Grimm in the universe of The Worst Witch and that I'm collaborating with another author (Samantha Rinne) whose work I would argue deserves Rowling's prestige if Rowling's work deserves it. Thanks (and here is where I run for the hills).

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[–] loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works 16 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Aside from the very much sung "why didn't they use the time turner then", there's a bunch of "Why didn't they stop Voldemort then" that could be inserted at various points of the story; when you consider that:

1- Albus had a spy within the death eaters in the person if Severus Snape.

2- In "the Order of the Phoenix", while Voldy could take Albus 1 on 1, he retreated when more people arrived, implying they could gang up on him.

3- Sure they couldn't kill him without the horcruxes, but another important plot point is that they have a magical prison, staffed with creatures that absorb your life force. Sure, Azkaban seems like a joke considering the number of prisoners breaking out of it... But in the case of Sirius he could escape transformed as a dog because they didn't know he was an animagus and hadn't taken the relevant measures, and the rest were broken out from outside. Certainly, they could hold Voldy with the right measures. Albus was monitoring Voldemort and the death eaters activity the whole time. In the first book/movie, he even had him within his school, unknowingly sure, but he knew Voldemort was likely to try and get his hands on the philosopher's stone, and was just like "don't worry, it's well protected", not even trying to set up an ambush, or to pursue Voldemort once he knows he was there.

[–] lucullus@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

To be fair: With Dumbledoors measures with the mirror of erised they had kind of a trap. The philosophers stone obviously hidden behind some challenges, that are not really that strong, so an attacker would think the last one would also be easy. But there you only got the stonen if you didn't want to use itn ruling out people with nefarious intentions (Dumbledoor didn't know about Voldy in Quirrel at that time). To bad some first graders thought they needed to safe the stone. Quirrel would have been still thereuwhen Dumbledoor arrived, but Harry gave him and Voldy the opportunity to get the stone from him instead from the mirror. A bit of captain hindsight here. He maybe should have thought of that. Or maybe it is understandable that he didn't foresee Harry fucking Potter

[–] loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago

Yeah, but that's only really a trap is there's a way to keep him from escaping. Voldemort escaped pretty easily; had Harry not been there, he could've tried for some time, figured out the trick and then just left to re-evaluate his options.

While not explicitly stated, it's possible that that's actually what he did: If he'd figured out Harry, Ron and Hermione had been snooping around and had found the room with Fluffy, Quirrel might've willingly dropped hints so that they'd check, let the music play longer than he needed to so that they'd know someone was trying to take the stone and he could lure them all the way down.