How Can you NOT Like Harry Potter?

Author's Note: I was looking for a good essay topic and Mrs. Reagles said that I should defend one of my favorite books. I naturally chose Harry Potter. I was looking through its reviews on Goodreads. Most of them were good but I came across a few negative ones but then I came across one that was just so illogical it made me want to scream so I decided to rip on it in this essay because it was so illogical. If you want to read it here's the link, but if you just want to read my essay here you go.

The Harry Potter series is the best selling series since J.R.R Tolkiens Lord of the Rings that came out in 1954 and sold over 150 million copies. The first Harry Potter novel came out in 1992 and has blown Lord of the Rings out of the water by selling over 450 million copies making it the best selling book series ever. They're novels of adventure and pure fantasy. They take you on mind blowing journeys through this imaginative world that you wished could be real. It's a classic story of good vs. evil. Plus, you watch the movies and they have cool British accents. How can you not like Harry Potter? Here's the answer. You can't.

There is nothing more mesmerizing than watching or reading Harry Potter, that is why some people don't like it but here's the thing. We're not in the 16th century any more people! I'm not going to read the books and suddenly start casting spells! That creepy part of history is over. The books don't make kids start casting spells, the books enhance their creativity, kids will pretend they're Harry Potter and play with friends and go outside so they can run around and use branches as broomsticks. The Harry Potter novels are books that are easy to have a lot of fun with. There are countless games and activities that have sprouted off of the Harry Potter series letting kids play and imagine whatever they want. If you say no to the Harry Potter series you are saying no to creativity.

There are many other invalid reasons that people that don't like Harry Potter. Mike says,

"I'm not going to comment on the literary shortcomings of this book, the cliches, the painfully long narrative, the fact that the characters will not think about an issue for months, but then suddenly it becomes important again. " The first thing that is wrong with this is that you don't need good writing to have a good book. Just look at Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, most people would not call it a literary masterpiece, you read it for the story of racism and how it was back in the 1920's even after the Civil War. Harry Potter may not be the greatest literary novel but it has a great plot line and the creativity of this world is just amazing. Another thing wrong with Mike's statement about why he doesn't like Harry Potter is that do you really worry about an issue for months and months and months. If you look at a teenage mind we don't really worry about an issue for months, we forget about it until the issue becomes relevant. In Harry Potter, students of Hogwarts have many responsibilities that we don't have here. If you have a problem now that is relevant now, you worry about it. If you have a problem and solve it and then it comes back into relevancy you start to think about it. J.K Rowling was very realistic in putting this in her stories. An example is when Harry Ron and Hermione were trying to find out about the sorcerers stone and they also had to study for their exams. They thought that their exams were most important. They  didn't need to think about the stone then. Also in the sixth book when they saw Malfoy go into Borgin and Burkes they didn't worry about it until they got to Hogwarts when it became the most relevant issue, so Mike's statement is wrong.

Here is more of Mike's painfully incorrect judgment of Harry Potter, "There is so much that is contrary to logic (and I don't mean science, I mean how reasonable people would behave) in the magic of Harry Potter that it drives me crazy. Why is the magical world so separated from the real world? What is their interaction? If magic works in the muggle world, what is preventing someone like Voldemort from completely taking over the muggle world? What is preventing any character from killing any other character by simpling saying the killing curse at any time? Human decency? Obviously there are a lot of characters in the books that don't have any. This never made any sense to me." First things first, Mike's first "point" is that the people in Harry Potter don't behave like normal people would in real life because the magical world is so separated from the muggle world. Why are the people living in the ghetto right now so seperated from us living in Pewaukee? Why don't we interact with them. I'm not saying this is necessarily the behavior any of us should have. I'm saying that it is the behavior some of us do have and it's completely realistic for muggles to be separate from wizards. Maybe J.K Rowling is just addressing a current issue in our society. Another thing that Mike was saying was what was preventing someone from just saying the killing curse and killing somebody. Nothing, but what is preventing you or I from killing someone? We can just as easily murder someone with a kitchen knife but we don't because we have some decency. Mike was also saying that the people who use the killing curse frequently, don't have human decency. You call that unrealistic? Yeah, Hitler had a lot of human decency. Al qaeda are really nice people. The viciousness of Voldemort is completely realistic because people do those kinds of things now or have done them in the past. The Harry Potter world might not be real but the people act like the people in our world would.

In his hateful review of one of the best books published in our generation Mike also stated that Harry Potter wasn't fair and instead he decided to draw a comparison to the pointless T.V show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He wrote, "In Buffy, every time you use magic, you pay for it. For little things, like floating a pencil, you pay for it in concentration, and maybe a little physical energy, but not more than going for a walk. However, the more you take, the more you have to give back in one form or another. The show is not always entirely consistent on this, but the idea makes sense. To bring someone back from the dead, you have to kill something else, or pay some other kind of price. If you want to kill someone, there is a physical price, a mental price. Nothing is free. In Harry Potter, it seems like everything is free." In Harry Potter, witches and wizards don't lose strength for using magic, but do we lose strength for doing anything that we normally do? Exercise aside you and I don't lose strength for lifting a pencil and in Harry Potter they don't do immature things like that with their wands unless they are beginners. Also, people in Harry Potter pay for their crimes, they go to Azkaban, wizard prison if they break the law. This more realistic then paying for something in physical and mental energy. In Harry Potter magic still comes with a price it's just not as childish as losing energy it's the sense of responsibility that you and I both have.

Mike didn't even understand the concept of the wizarding world's most beloved pastime quidditch. He did not understand quidditch because he said that only 90% of the two hour game actually matters. Now look at some of our sports. Look at soccer, the average amount of goals scored in a English match is 1.6(2012 season). Let's round that up to two goals a game and say that it takes twenty seconds to set up the goal. With those numbers only 40 seconds of a 90 minute game actually matter because there are points scored in those 40 seconds but it is still the most popular sport in the world. Quidditch is to the wizarding world as soccer is to our world. It's our livelihood. So if people can sit through eight minutes and 20 seconds of nothing and still love it, don't complain about a game that has the potential to reach at least 300 points every game.

Harry Potter is a classic. There is no denying it. You can formulate all the crack-pot theories you want about how Harry Potter is a horrible but absolutely none of them have any significance. This is one of my favorite books and about 35 million people's favorite too. There is absolutely no reason of why you shouldn't like Harry Potter.