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Hogwarts is a fine setting for the first two books. But then you get it again. And again. And again. A single castle is not creative enough to sustain seven books, especially when the characters visit the same parts of it every book in near enough the same chapters, and the same exact things happen.

Beginning: Wacky antics with Durstleys.
Something goes wrong, Harry is separated from them. Then we get a Diagon Alley chapter (this setting can't even sustain two books, let alone the rest of them). Then we get a travelling to Hogwarts chapter. Then we get a sorting hat scene. Then we're introduced to teachers. Then we're introduced to Quidditch.

Speaking of which, the sport is fundamentally all wrong. The golden snitch over-centralises the game completely, and only exists to give Harry all the attention. If games last long enough for it to even matter, it's because the players' brooms are outdated. Why make a sport that's so reliant on the latest technology, that anybody who doesn't have it is massively disadvantaged to the point of unfairness?

Hogsmeade is just a village replica of Diagon Alley, and very little actually happens here. Azkaban, despite being the most enjoyable to read, completely breaks all logic in the universe.

You have a bus that drives around and picks up lost wizards. How do muggles not see these buses, presuming they're all over the world? That's so much maintenance to hide these massive metal behemoths, in a world where teleportation exists. Why wouldn't a wizard just use a regular bus, anyways? Why do we need muggle-wizard bus segregation?

I never read the books

Presuming the buses are invisible to muggles, how do crashes not happen? I'll believe they can make the buses incorporeal, but not the people inside them. They have various methods of teleportation, so why a bus??

Time travel. Just time travel. WHYYY UGH REEEEEEE
Picture this: You've just discovered time travel. It's a new idea to you and has to be kept on the down-low, because you aren't even sure the ins and outs of it yet. What do you do? You give this highly exploitable and inadequately researched system of power to a thirteen-year-old girl so she can attend more classes, of course.

It's a fantasy book. The most exciting setting every episode should not be a fat kid's cartoonishly over-the-top, non-magical house. The most interesting new setting in the second book should not be a haunted toilet. We shouldn't have an entire chapter every instalment dedicated to a singing hat that assigns classes to students we've never heard of...

...especially when we've already seen it happen to the characters who matter. The first third of the first four or five books seem to be complete retellings of the first one, but with characters thrown in that we've never heard of. Why do I care if Timmy Whatshisname gets into Griffindor or Hufflepuff?

And regarding Snape: He is treated like a flat-out villain, and we are only supposed to care about him when it's far too late. Why? He's a former bad guy who has personally seen the error of his ways, and desperately wants to distance himself from his past. Of course if a kid came along and started breaking every single in the book, you'd want the kid kicked out. #JusticeForSnape

He steals a broomstick and chases a kid into the sky, and instead of being kicked out as was threatened, he's given the most important role on the Quidditch team. Who cares if the eleven-year-old breaks his neck because he's never seen a broomstick in his life? He steals potions, breaks into the library plenty of times, goes to fight a kid at midnight after dark, ignores safety regulations regarding Hogsmeade

Yet Harry is the hero and Snape is the bad guy. What?? I feel bad for Snape more than anything. Whew, that's a long rant. I think the reason so many people love this series is because when we read it as kids, we didn't think about how fundamentally flawed it all is. It's a fantastically written kid's book about magical children that spans over thirty pages and takes its young audience seriously.

I'm really tired of hearing about Harry Potter by this point though. There are better stories out there, especially since Rowling keeps rewriting characters and plots via her Twitter page as if that makes it canon. Speaking of which, she has become very nasty lately and is kind of tarnishing her own legacy.

I don't know much about the films since I've only seen the first one, but I love Uncle Vernon's actor. He's perfect. All else I know is that apparently Ginny's character is ruined and that this annoys a lot of fans of the books.

Also I'll consider anything that's in the books to be canon, but anything "amended" by Rowling via her Twitter page doesn't count imo. I shouldn't have to put the book down and go to the author's blog space for something like her time travel to make sense.

For the record, I don't hate Harry Potter - I actually like a lot of it - but I do despise its overexposure. I don't think there's a single story in all of history that deserves this much attention even after twenty years, and certainly not one as nonsensical as the Wizarding World. The books are very fun, but only until you start to think about them, which is what most fantasies are supposed to make you do.

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