Halfway through the series. Literally for retards. Holy fuck it's so bad

It's an absolutely fine series of books for kids. Unfortunately people have fucking picked it to death because the fan base is insane, the author is demented by publicity and everyone who hates it won't stop talking about it.

If it hadn't been the massive global phenomenon that it is most people on Veeky Forums would have no problem with it at all. They just want to be contrarian and the beauty of Harry Potter is that everyone gets to be contrarian.

The main carachter comes off as an idiot and it's not intentional.

The world building is awful. There is no reason the wizzard world could be kept in secret from the muggles and wizzards don't really have a reason either to close themselves off so much apart from the fact that the author wanted to have a whimsical magic setting.

The message is supposedly anti-prejudice, don't judge anyone from his roots, someone like Hermione can be a great magician despite her muggle blood etc. But it contradicts itself because the wizzards are still a self-segregating group that only accept muggleborns in exceptional cases, when they are born with magical abilities. The message would have been clearer if muggles could learn magic, but instead it sais that if one has muggle parents it's 99% chance he won't be magic, and not segregating wizzards and muggleborn kids is only acceptable in those 1 percent of exceptional cases, which are still based on birth and not merit.

>A book series for children written by a single mother who had no idea what she was doing is bad.
hmm

He didn't know about the mirror until after Sirius died. He was retarded for not checking what the package Sirius gave him contained, but it's not like he knew it had a foolproof way of communicating in it.

I agree, nothing about wizzzards makes sense.

No, it's not an absolutely fine series of books for kids. You can find heaps of better series for kids.

HP's world building is one of the worst ever published, the characters are all dumb, incoherent and gimmicky, and the plot struggles to anticipate the end of each books, much less the followings.

And the prose.

Do you complain about issues with the Magic Treehouse books, as well?

But Harry Potter is british, which means at the very least he knows fucking FRANCE exists, so it's not exactly a fucking stretch to imagine an hormone-driven adolescent would have heard about the all-pretty-girls magical school of fucking beauxbatons

George RR Martin should have written Harry Potter. I'd love to see an internally consistent magic universe where the characters aren't so silly and the plot was more complex and mature. Plus I'd love to read everything about the wizard history and their breakfast habits and their tax policy.

...

If you're going to pick an american fantasy meme author (to write a deeply british setting?), at least pick one who's actually good at consistent worldbuilding like sanderson

...

>therefore, since I can't afford to read bad books, I must rely on other people telling me what is good and what isn't instead of forming my own opinion and literary culture.

the absolute state of Veeky Forums

>sorcerers stone

it's...for kids...

I literally couldn't give less of a fuck what schopenhauer has to say about anything. He's the original neckbeard with delusions of grandeur.

Remember user, the series is intended for small children.
The biggest (and really only) issue I have with the books is that Rowling waffles back and forth between condemning prejudice and being shamefully elitist.

>World building
What is this genrepleb neckbeard complaint? Does the Very Hungry Caterpillar have shit worldbuilding too? Does Frog and Toad are Friends need an appendix describing the sociopolitical state and history of frog-and-toadland?

>When an interviewer said that saving Cedric's body resembled the actions of Hector, Achilles, and Patroclus in the Iliad, Rowling said, "That's where it came from. That really, really, really moved me when I read that when I was 19. The idea of the desecration of a body, a very ancient idea... I was thinking of that when Harry saved Cedric's body."

I thought women couldn't appreciate homer Veeky Forums?

>He's British he should know stuff
To be fair a majority of the books take place in Scotland. It makes it more understandable for them all to be inbred retards

I unironically enjoy HP and there's nothing you spergs can do about it

I like Harry Potter alot. It's a part of my childhood, and its whole universe is astounding to me. There is an expanded universe which gets larger all the time.
Too often do I see these people lifting old philosophers and since long dead authors to the sky, praising their literature, like it's all about the classics? Well, I can enjoy a James Joyce or Edgar Allan Poe as much as a Harry Potter, they're all stories. Don't be so narrowminded folks.

>Beowolf.
>The Odyssey.
>Inferno.
>Gilgamesh.
>Worth the paper they're printed on.
kek.

WOW. YOU MUST BE SO INTELLECTUAL TO CRITISIZE HIGHLY REGARDED CLASSICS THAT STOOD THE TEST OF TIME. YOUR PRECIOUS HARRY POTTER AINT GONNA MAKE THE 22ST CENTURY.

Here comes the truthbomb. It's the movies which cemented the nostalgic comfyness everyone associates with these books. Especially the later movies where everything went cozy, cramped up, and timburtony dark fucked up. Who wouldn't want to cuddle with Hermione after drinking a bottle of Firewhiskey while it snows outside in Hogsmeade?

But what's the point of an uninformed opinion? How are you supposed to develop taste or come to your own conclusion about a "great work" if you don't actually read it?

contrapositively..,., how do u know what a bad book is unless u read a lot> of em

Dante's Inferno is legit worse then Harry Shithead or Chubs Martin. It was basically a gossip column.

That's a strange comparison to make when the later books are hundreds of pages long and has the author massacre her supporting cast.

>children's books
>expecting serious adult literature
>complains it's for retards

No, you eejit, the target audience is literally children. What were you expecting?

>b-b-but it's for kids

I was reading A Wizard of Earthsea as a kid with full comprehension. I'll never be able to accept childhood as an excuse. I mean even forgotten realms is better than this trash. Why cant people just acknowledge it is bad?

I would like to cuddle with a cute girl too if possible

Maybe he's expecting that in CURRENT_YEAR people would stop using the "it's for children" meme to excuse garbage.

Good children's literature can be enjoyed by adults as well.

Its almost as if its a children's series or something

I mean I'm not a fan but instead of bashing someone else's writing why not concentrate on your own?

You can't just be pleased that it isn't Captain Underpants?

Oh, sorry. Didn't realize children's books had to be poorly written, that definitely excuses the poor quality.

Maybe I could if I knew what Captain Underpants was

There is a video on Youtube of Roger Scruton talking about Harry Potter and children's literature, and he makes the distinction between children's literature that confines itself to and creates a world modeled upon the mindset of the child (Harry Potter), and quality children's literature, which deals with the world as it actually is, but from the perspective of a child. You might try listening to it. The "well it's for children!" defense is pathetic.

this I suppose?

youtube.com/watch?v=tHGNf6nWUm0

Mate that fucking sounds like Rowling pulled that out of her ass and had no idea what the interviewer was going on about. I fucking doubt welfare case Rowling ever read any Homer. Maybe she read Greek Mythology for Dummies and she ripped a few ideas off from it for ideas like everything else she wrote about.

Yeah, that's it.

Was there a thread about this already?

>chaucer is good because english Veeky Forums majors have to read it

user no. stop

you read homer so you can understand the other great books, not because it is the "greatest" book

Wait... I never finished the series, is that a real page?

Wasn't she teaching ESL in portugal?
It's not really surprising she's read the Iliad then. I mean I've read the odyssey in high school and I'm a far cry from the greek memespouters of this board. Now, wether she's actually taken something valuable from her reading is a whole other discussion.

Stop pretending like Homer is some underground shit. Anyone with a basic formation in literature, such as an ESL teacher would, has had contacts with Homer, and even aside from that it's just basic general culture everyone knows at least the tiniest bits about just by being a white european.

yeh, thats precisely why the greatest English poet of all time was obsessed with it, and derivitves of Dante's Inferno are of the same calibre as Harry Potter Fan Fics

Someone tell T. S. Eliot that Hollow Men belongs with the Ron/Malfoy fanfic I caught my Engineering 203 neighbor reading during lecture.

>The world building is awful.
This is arguably the only thing that Rowling got right. A lot of it is a little unimaginative. Every aspect of the wizarding world is sort of a mirror reflection of the muggle world. “Oh, in England we have a prime minister, so in the wizarding world we’ll have a minister of magic!” In some senses the wizarding world is “isomorphic” to the muggling world. But it fucking works. It all feels so familiar but new and “magical” at the same time.
The whole series is pretty fucking decadent.

Harry Potter is a story about a friendless, loveless, lonely boy who one day through no actions of his own becomes the most popular person in the world (oh and he’s rich also, haha). Harry immediately goes from living in his (literally, considering his room) cramped, dark world to the wide-open, magical world of wizardom.

In fact, Harry pretty much never works that hard to achieve anything; there’s no self-betterment. (I’ll acknowledge a few minor counterexamples here, such as his forming Dumbledore’s Army to train himself and his peers to become better wizards, but this is really just a plot device and isn’t developed into any broader theme). Most of the time he overcomes conflict because either 1) he has surrounded himself with talented wizards and/or just gets lucky or 2) just because he’s fucking Harry Potter. Take the first book. Early on we learn that Harry just has this innate gift for Quidditch, like just because. Then, in the climax of the novel Hermione saves everyone’s ass twice (once in Devil’s Snare and then a second time during the potions trial after the chess match). Hermione spent all year researching obscure texts and dedicating herself to her academics, and her hard work paid off. In the same episode Ron sacrifices his life (except oh wait nevermind) for his friends. And what does Harry do to overcome the greatest trial in this episode? Oh, well he just touches Professor Quarrel’s face. Why does this work as an offensive tactic? Oh, because he’s Harry Potter you dimwit, you retard, obviously his hands will be caustic to Quarrel’s skin.

As a little appendix, Dumbledore totally rigs the House Cup at the very end of the show and arbitrarily throws points at House Gryffindor because Rowling is too dead-in-the-brain to not have every victory be obtained “magically”.
(1/2)

Agreed, I hated reading them. Not sure if it was just a language barrier though

PAGE 273
Harry could tell that Voldemort was standing right behind him. He felt a great overreaction. Harry tore his eyes from his head and threw them into the forest. Voldemort raised his eyebrows at Harry, who could not see anything at the moment.

"Voldemort, you're a very bad and mean wizard," Harry savagely said. Hermione nodded encouragingly. The tall Death Eater was wearing a shirt that said 'Hermione Has Forgotten How To Dance,' so Hermione dipped his face in mud.

Ron threw a wand at Voldemort and everyone applauded. Ron smiled. Ron reached for his wand slowly.

"Ron's the handsome one," muttered Harry as he reluctantly reached for his. They cast a spell or two, and jets of green light shot out of the Death Eater's heads. Ron flinched.

"Not so handsome now," thought Harry as he dipped Hermione in hot sauce. The Death Eaters were dead now and Harry was hungrier than he had ever been.

***

The Great Hall was filled with incredible moaning chandeliers and a large librarian who had decorated the sinks with books about masonry. Mountains of mice exploded. Several long pumpkins fell out of McGonagall. Dumbledore's hair scooted next to Hermione as Dumbledore arrived at school.

The pig of Hufflepuff pulsed like a large bullfrog. Dumbledore smiled at it, and places his hand on its head: "You are Hagrid now."

Let’s take the second book. Hermione spends her time researching the Chamber of Secrets. Meanwhile Harry spends his entire year moping around with some ghost who lives in a toilet and brooding on the similarities between him and Voldemort. Turns out this latter point would stick around for the duration of the series, and it gets really fucking old. Does Harry ever do anything to address this fear of his, that he and Voldemort might not be very much alike? Sort of, in the fifth book he goes to Ministry of Magic to check out the prophecies, but it’s not like he ever sat down and did some hard reflections like “okay, maybe there is some similarity between me and Voldemort. But so what?! I have agency over my own actions, and even if there is this innate connection, ultimately I don’t have to go the same route as him.” In fact, I think that would have been a much better lesson to teach children--that no matter how the odds are stacked against you, no matter what you still have your own free will and can make a good life for yourself. Apparently this never occurred to Rowling who instead beat the reader over the head with the “bro, just love your friends and everything will be alright” theme for seven novels.

One last thing regarding the second book. How does Harry beat the basilisk? Oh, yeah, now I remember: some phoenix shows up and just gives him a sacred sword. Conveniently, this allows Harry to realize that he’s actually not Voldemort’s also-evil twin. In true Rowling-esque fashion, Harry gets over his problems without really doing anything to address them.

I could go on. You can come up with examples of this throughout the series. When Harry wants a Firebolt but can’t afford it, what happens? But I think you get the point. Putting aside that this is REALLY lazy on Rowling’s part, deus ex-machina’s all over the place, like every time she gets writer’s block she reminds herself “oh wait a second, I’m dealing with Harry Potter for fucksake, no real conflict resolution is necessary.” Putting aside that there are no really dynamic characters in the book and not a single meaningful character arc besides Snape’s (which btw, was actually pretty good for a childrens’ series) and possibly Neville’s. Putting aside those two things, I think the series is kinda unhealthy for children. I think a lot of kids out there take a lesson from Harry Potter when it comes to dealing with conflict in their own lives: sit around and wait for your letter from Hogwarts to come in the mail.

oh it most definitely is. Its Latin and thousands of years old.

But, it is useful as a sort of reference book; themes and motifs are originated there and are called upon in derivative work, just as its easy in our generation to say the words 1984 and Kafkaesque as a means to convey a condensed version of some concept.

>Mountains of mice exploded. Several long pumpkins fell out of McGonagall. Dumbledore's hair scooted next to Hermione as Dumbledore arrived at school.
Fucking brilliant

It's all right

>This is arguably the only thing that Rowling got right. A lot of it is a little unimaginative. Every aspect of the wizarding world is sort of a mirror reflection of the muggle world. “Oh, in England we have a prime minister, so in the wizarding world we’ll have a minister of magic!” In some senses the wizarding world is “isomorphic” to the muggling world. But it fucking works. It all feels so familiar but new and “magical” at the same time.

Certainly fucking not. Allow me, dear user, to demonstrate with a simple example.
In the god-awful play, Hermione is prime minister of magic, despite it being completely opposite to anything we know about her personality. Why is she prime minister then? Well, simply because it's the only fucking gratifying job Rowling has ever managed to mention in a 7 books series aside from quidditch player.
If the world building had been actually thought out and interesting, then maybe it would have been hinted that magic spells need to be invented first, and thus researched. Which means some wizard could specialize in experimental wizardry, and Hermione would have been precisely that, or really anything else that made any fucking sense regarding her personality instead of a fucking token title that just screams to everyone how limited the HP world is, and how much of a wasted opportunity it is.

And don't get me started on the utter waste of potential that the house system is.

*When Harry wants a Firebolt but can’t afford it, what happens? Some anonymous stranger just gives him one.

Hm, yeah these are actually pretty good points.
>And don't get me started on the utter waste of potential that the house system is.
Go on.

Its written by AI

You want to know another thing that really put me off in retrospect? Toward the last books, Rowling decided to clumsily shoehorn in some racial allegory with Voldemort.
Voldemort is obsessed with pureblood wizards, hating half-bloods and non-magic people. However, the major MAJOR problem with this is literally other character is also like that only except they don't make it as explicit. They casually use slurs about the magic-challenged humans behind their back, don't associate with them, and generally act as if wizards are the master race. Yet Voldemort is portrayed as "bad" (well, aside from being a murderer) because he's against miscegenation.

>And don't get me started on the utter waste of potential that the house system is.
>Go on.

Okay, so you know how HP is supposed to be a PC piece about everyone being equal, and love your friends despite your differences, and etc?

The houses are supposed to have kind of cardinal virtues, like Gryffindor is heroism and selflessness bordering on recklessness, hufflepuff is the power of love and friendship, ravenclaw wisdom and knowledge, and slytherin ambition (because y'know, they aren't inherently evil, hahaha, hohoho. We'll get back to that).

So Rowling, being apparently incapable of thinking through anything, puts her 3 heroes into the same house despite said house system perfectly examplifying each of the hero's respective quality.
Hermione isn't particularly courageous, and quite the opposite at the beginning, however she values knowledge above all things. Ron isn't specifically adventurous, and just an average boy who's happy just living life with his friends. They would have been perfect fits for ravenclaw and hufflepuff. But instead they get lumped together with harry in gryffindor, which leads to ravenclaw and hufflepuff being totally irrelevant until the umpteenth book, and requires the invention of luna lovegood to make the system a tad bit less manicheist.

Said manicheism comes from the fact that the only two first antagonists, draco and snapes, come from the opposite house of slytherin, who are veeery obviously evil because their house is green, their symbol is a snake and they're all mean towards newcomers.

So we end up with the good house of gryffindor, the evil house of slytherin and the irrelevant houses of ravenclaw and hufflepuff, in a very manicheist conflict which makes the whole draco character arc feel extremely forced.

Now, if JKR had a brain and had put harry in gryffindor, ron in hufflepuff and hermione in ravenclaw, she could have put a character arc where Harry tries to make friends with other houses, and is at first rebutted by their differences, but then learns to overcome them and make a team of heroes whose differences complete each others. THAT would have actually fed into the theme of overlooking differences to build a better PC society, and it would also have comparatively made draco less of a binary bad guy and more of just a bit of an asshole with a different opinion on things than Harry. Which would have made his further evolution feel much more natural, and harry learning to overlook his prejudice against mean snake guys much more potent.

I hope I've been clear.

Alternatively, they stay together for the first book, but it turns out the Sorting Hat fucked up and misplaced Ron and Hermione. That way they can build their friendship while not screwing over Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw to irrelevancy, as well as give material to the other books. I always felt like the first three were a lot more memorable than the others, which seemed to combine in an amorphous blob. This can be seen in the movies, where the first two or three movies have tight, self-contained narratives, but the others drag on pointlessly.

>Ron's Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself.
This is it Veeky Forums. AI is finally better writers than humans.

It was Sirius Black that sent him the Firebolt, which makes sense in some ways but also signifies how broken the series is, because Sirius wasn't mentioned at all until after the first book (where it was implied Voldemort killed Harry's parents, and that was that), and by the seventh book, there was a whole goddamned conspiracy out to get Harry Potter.

Did Harry still have the ability to speak Parsel Tongue after he died and was no longer a human Horcrux?

I vaguely think that JKR has tweeted that no

These books introduced me to English literature when they first arrived. I read them all in English from the third onwards.

I can definitely agree that Rowling missed a lot of opportunities with the houses, and for the life of me I can't figure out why it took her so damn long to introduce a major character who didn't belong to Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw. Like, how did it never occur to her that HALF of the student body of Hogwarts was unrepresented.

Regarding the stuff about Ron and Hermione, that could have been a really good arc that would have supported the themes. But I think in this case she maybe had enough foresight to figure out that she wasn't imaginative enough to build a friendship that could overcome the cross-house barriers. I mean, doesn't it seem like 90% of the socializing in Hogwarts takes place at the dining tables, in the common rooms in the dormitories, or at a Quidditch match? Rowling unintentionally wrote into the novel entire chasms between the social life of each respective house.
>harry learning to overlook his prejudice against mean snake guys much more potent.
Regarding this, did you ever get the sense that Draco's and Draco's father's arcs in the 6th and 7th novels were sorta shoehorned in?

*who didn't belong to Gryfindor or Slytherin

>Rowling unintentionally wrote into the novel entire chasms between the social life of each respective house
In my experience that's how house systems work, though. For the first three or so years of secondary school I didn't really know the kids in other houses because all my lessons were with the same class (and we were all part of the same house). So while I agree she could have done much more with it, I think she was just working from what actually exists.

>Regarding this, did you ever get the sense that Draco's and Draco's father's arcs in the 6th and 7th novels were sorta shoehorned in?

I suspect this is one of the very few things JKR actually planned, but it came way too late into the books.

...having said that, afaik in Harry Potter the classes are actually mixed, so maybe not.

The main problem was that despite their differing abilities, the heroes were all lumped into Gryffindor, the villains all lumped into Slytherin, and the other two houses became irrelevant background fodder. Luna Lovegood is pretty much the only character to be anything more than a backdrop or someone's ancestor that went to a non-Gryffindor/Slytherin house, and she didn't even appear until halfway in.

Eliot was ten times the writer Dante was, full stop. Sometimes the greats take influence from scrubs. Have you actually read Dante's Inferno?

What else would you expect from the books that inspired one the dullest franchise in the history of movie franchises. Seriously each episode following the boy wizard and his pals from Hogwarts Academy as they fight assorted villains has been indistinguishable from the others. Aside from the gloomy imagery, the series’ only consistency has been its lack of excitement and ineffective use of special effects, all to make magic unmagical, to make action seem inert.

Perhaps the die was cast when Rowling vetoed the idea of Spielberg directing the series; she made sure the series would never be mistaken for a work of art that meant anything to anybody?just ridiculously profitable cross-promotion for her books. The Harry Potter series might be anti-Christian (or not), but it’s certainly the anti-James Bond series in its refusal of wonder, beauty and excitement. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to.

>a-at least the books were good though
"No!"
The writing is dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs."

I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing. Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

a more serious thing that makes the book bad is that it seriously caters to dunning kruger self perceptions
>everyone is mean to me my parents are horrible
>my TRUE parents are fantastic
>I am bad at school but secretly a genius at magic school
>actually I am bad at magic school too (second book) to keep the narrative relateable to retards, but I am still a secret genius
terrible life lessons to teach childre n

Yeah, thats what happens when you read translations instead of the native language.

>Every one of these texts are masterpieces
>What has J. K. Rowling achieved in one book, let alone seven?
There's nothing like seeing someone who's barely fucking literate criticize what others read.

Harry was never smart and his real dad turned out to be sort of an asshole to the point that Snape's hatred of him is actually justified.

>hating Captain Underpants

the entire book series is saturated ful of this stuff and you cant disagree. there is more but I don't feel like effortposting. the book is gold star syndrome for retards

raised a generation of shitheads

Gonna go ahead and plug my effortpost above because what you're saying is vaguely similar to what I said

good effortpost

I'd add to it briefly

I think the reason kids find it relateable today is precisely because they never study hard in school and are saved by test revisions/a for effort culture

I have students that literally cant sit and read for 15 minutes but they're convinced they're a genius and their parents then complain about "standard testing"

fucking shitheads. all of them. they belong in labor camps

Stories like this are appealing to kids is because they have no agency. When it comes to almost any problem in their lives, the best they can hope for is that they'll get lucky or some authority figure will help them. It's no good trying to teach 10 year old to be rugged individualists. I'll also add that Harry is self-aware, he never pretends he did it all by his own skill.

But the examples you gave are so bad it suggests you only looked for what you wanted to see in the series.

Back in my day kid's read only non-fiction, fun was for commies and we threw tomatoes at retards in stocks every other thursday.

To me most fantasy stories that have gotten popular are just a bunch of 'so random xD' ideas that popped into the author's head with some very vague and basic message or theme stuck on to pretend it isn't a dream journal, and Harry Potter is probably the worst example of this. There are examples on every single page of JK just coming up with silly bullshit on the spot with no thought to the past or future implications of said bullshit. She comes up with ridiculous magical concepts to move the plot along and then seems to forget about them immediately after, which creates massive plot holes by establishing that the characters have incredibly useful powers they just dont bother with when they need to use them. She continues to introduce world changing magical principles as late as the 7th book, which makes it so the ending to the series is not the result of things that have been building up the entire series, but rather just some new random bullshit JK decided to stick in the universe sorting out her shitty plotline.

It wasn't that Harry Potter was particularly intelligent but that he had superpowers (that's what magic is, really) that put him above normalfags and could hobnob with, which is where the wish fulfillment comes in. But this leads to major problems which is where we get to , because at some point, the whole "wizard" thing evolved to a separate society with its own magical species (not just a few). The later books really screwed up the problem of "what the hell are kids supposed to do with 7 years of magic training and nothing else", especially since there's apparently a strict ban on using them elsewhere (if you're underage). One could write an entire book on the plot holes presented by Harry Potter (the Weasleys using the Marauder's Map for years but never noticing Pettigrew's/Scabber's footprints is a common one).

children learn agency IF they are taught. books for kids are meant to give them novel ideas that are more difficult than they're used to. kids that play ith blocks age age 10 are stunted. hp has stunted an entire generation

nah you're an idiot. the "revelation" you mentioned is in the very final book, the kids raised on it are 30 by the time they encounter anything other than "ur speshul"

Nowadays, as an adult, I can see the limitations of Harry Potter books, but I still think they're enjoyable. What pissed me off was that I thought Rowling would write a better book series after HP was over, one that would reflect the evolution of her writing, but everything that she did was milk the franchise even more and shitpost on Twitter.

>children learn agency IF they are taught.
Children don't learn agency from books lmao. They learn it from experience, by being given gradually more responsibility as they get older.

>the "revelation" you mentioned is in the very final book,
???
I'm talking about in the 5th book where Harry sees Snape's memory of being bullied by his dad. This is something the book did well. If you have a parent die when you're very young, you probably won't hear anything bad about them until you're older, at least from your loved ones, and when you finally do it can be difficult to reconcile that with the 100% positive vision you've been given.