re: #53 freetoken

The more the movies go on, the less sense any of the characters make.

When Harry was 11, of course he’d be enchanted by all sorts of magical things.

But in the middle of the series, when he’s supposed to be 15 or so, why would any 15 year old boy just sit around a house all summer? At that age I was working a summer job. But somehow all the characters, not just Potter, just twiddle away their summers apparently not doing anything.

And why don’t some of the older children in his House at school travel? Don’t they go anywhere?

Sure, I know the books are written for juvenile readers, which is why the setting takes place in a school, as that is what children today know as “childhood”. Something which, though, would not have been true even 150 years ago, which, given the way the movie brings the stories to life, is about the period in which the magical world in the UK seems to be stuck - the Victorian era.

The entire Hogwarts undertaking comes off as extremely weird, in regards to how youth 11-18 years old act. It’s all too simple.

oh good grief. It’s FICTION. And not only is it fiction, it’s magical escapist fiction. Kids don’t have summer jobs in Harry Potter for the same reason we don’t see people taking a shit on Gilligan’s Island: it’s completely outside of the genre that the creator is working in. “Why don’t they study science and math at Hogwarts?” They do study science and math at Hogwarts. It’s called Potions, and it’s taught by Professor Snape. It is basically chemistry, if chemistry labs could result in you being blown up at any time, rather than you simply not being able to determine why your potato slice turned brown. The story is geared towards kids, who already have to do all the mindless bullshit in the real world, like get summer jobs, or take tedious, idiotic language courses that result, after four years, in students who still can’t converse intelligibly in their language of choice. As opposed to that, kids come out of Hogwarts actually knowing stuff and being able to contribute to their magical society. “Why don’t the kids learn the same mindless bullshit that I had to learn in high school?” Because you weren’t born into the 1/10th of 1 percent of the population that can do high-order magic, and therefore, you had to learn mindless bullshit that would make you an effective drone in a capitalistic society. Hogwarts kids don’t learn that crap because they have no need of it. They don’t need to get in cars or planes to visit places. There are various magical ways of moving instantaneously between far reaches of the world.