Why I Don't Like Harry Potter

I just finished reading the series for the first time. Here are my thoughts.

Be sure to check out the previous post, A Mental Flight Through the Life of Dr. King

For twenty five years, I lived under a rock.

I was one of the strange few who had never read the Harry Potter series or seen the movies all the way through. Then, on the last day of 2022, I started reading the books—for the first time. 

As I informed my friends of this most important journey, I lost track of the number of people who said they envied me. Everyone wanted to be in my shoes and read these books for the first time again. 

But I gotta say, folks, reading this series was a chore for me. I feel like I missed something. I loved the book’s main narrative and so many moments made me smile, tear up, or cheer, but overall, I found the series dense, meandering, and full of odd choices. While there’s several critiques I have against the series, here’s the main reason why I didn’t like Harry Potter. 

Harry Potter is too Harry

This may seem silly, but hear me out. The Harry Potter series has too much Harry Potter. These books are full of fascinating characters with dark pasts and glittering personalities but the character we spend the most time with is Harry. 

For the vast majority of the books, Rowling writes from Harry’s point of view (POV). To state the obvious, as you read the Harry Potter books, you’re reading what Harry Potter is seeing, feeling, and experiencing. Does that mean we don’t know what other characters are experiencing? Not at all. We learn Hermione is sad but only because Harry sees a sad expression on her face, we know something shocks Ron but only because that same thing shocked Harry. The experiences of other characters are mediated to us through Harry’s POV. 

I know Harry is the main character, the boy who lived, the chosen one, but I found myself wanting to leave Harry’s POV, even for a chapter, to spend time in another character’s POV. Can you imagine seeing Ron and Harry from Hermione’s perspective? Or reading a chapter from Ron’s POV where he’s, I don’t know, eating or trying to talk to a girl or doing something brave? Wouldn’t you love a chapter where McGonagall is just like grading papers? The fact that we hardly have any chapters from another character’s POV just feels like a lost opportunity. 

Let me give you some data. The entire Harry Potter series clocks in at 4,100 pages. Those 4,100 pages are broken into 198 chapters (plus an epilogue) over the course of 7 books. Of those 4,100 pages, only 81 pages are from a POV other than Harry’s. Those 81 pages are 5 chapters out of the 198. Meaning, if you read the entire series, you’ll have read 4,019 pages from a single character’s POV. More than 98% of the—very long—Harry Potter series is from Harry’s POV so only the remaining less than 2% is from another character’s POV. Those 5 chapters, those 81 pages, that less than 2% are some of my favorite parts mainly because they’re different and exciting, they’re not Harry! 

Everybody Else is Doing it 

If the sheer amount of Harry isn’t enough to convince you the series would be better with varied POVs, let me offer another argument. No other long-form fantasy series I’m aware of has such a dominant POV. The Lord of the Rings book series is less than a third the length of the Harry Potter series and it has multiple POVs from different characters. How boring would LOTR be if it was presented only from Frodo’s perspective? The Chronicles of Narnia features a wide range of POVs across its seven books and like Harry Potter it’s geared toward younger audiences. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire famously alternates POVs every chapter to great effect. Even Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, which like Harry Potter has a main character with a dominant POV, varies up the POV chapters without losing focus on the main character. 

My point here isn’t, “If I would’ve written these books, I would’ve written them differently,” because that’s not a valid critique or insight. My point is every other long-form fantasy series I’m aware of features POVs from multiple characters and Harry Potter doesn’t (beyond the less than 2% we’ve already discussed). I’m sure Rowling read or was aware of the series I’ve listed and others, so why did she break this honored rule of long-form fantasy series? Are the books better because we see the wizarding world almost exclusively through Harry’s eyes? I don’t think so. Even if you’re a die-hard Harry Potter fan, can’t you admit these books would be better if we had POVs from multiple characters? Why not do what virtually every long-form fantasy series does and leave Harry in some bind you can’t imagine him getting out of and switch to a chapter from, I don’t know, Luna’s POV. Wouldn’t that be hilarious if not refreshing?

In Amarillo, Texas, there’s a tourist trap of a restaurant called The Big Texan. The Big Texan offers an eating challenge including a 72oz steak, a baked potato, a salad, and a roll. Now, I’ve never partaken of this challenge but I’ve heard though you may be tempted to compartmentalize the food and eat each part to completion, the best way to finish the challenge is to incorporate variety. Eat some steak, then have the salad, then go back to the steak, then maybe hit up that baked potato. The brave partaker of this eating challenge would burn out quickly, in his jaw muscles alone, if he tried to eat the steak completely without switching to another element of the eating challenge.

Harry Potter is the 72oz steak J. K. Rowling is forcing me to eat. Though I beg for a break from Harry Porterhouse, Rowling bans even one nibble on the baked potato (Ron), a salad (McGonagall, I guess?), or a roll (definitely Neville). 

Given the highly disproportionate number of pages devoted to Harry’s POV and the fact that virtually every other long-form fantasy series features varied POVs, I posit the Harry Potter series would go down a whole lot smoother if Rowling varied up the POVs. Here I stand, I can do no else. 

Why I Love Harry Potter

If you’re a fan of the Harry Potter books and you’ve read up until this point, thank you for hearing me out. I must now admit that while I didn’t necessarily like every second of reading the series, I do love these books. 

I loved the depictions of humdrum school life. Rowling really captures the magic of bonding with friends while studying hard material, attending boring lectures, and balancing busy schedules. School is charming and nostalgic and Rowling clearly mined a rich vein when she enrolled us at Hogwarts. 

To me, reading Harry Potter for the first time as an adult, these books are about feeling vastly underqualified for a task you must perform. Harry, a scrawny boy and a hopelessly average student, realizes he must rid the world of one of the most powerful wizards who ever lived. As I read I couldn’t help but root for Harry and feel encouraged in the places in my life where I feel underqualified. They made me feel like I’m not the only one flying by the seat of my pants. 

Ultimately, these books are a wonderful almost moment-by-moment depiction of growing up. Every book, every year, Harry gets older and wiser. Every book, every year, he falls ass first into triumph at the same time his defeats become more disastrous. Not only do we see Harry grow but we also see his friends Hermione and Ron grow. The relationship between these three is iconic. Harry and Ron are just a couple of dudes having fun and trying to survive school while Hermione is a loveable know-it-all who ends up being one of Harry’s most steadfast friends and most vital allies. Her quick thinking and spellcasting in that last book are really astonishing. 

The greatest moment for me was when Harry, sick of seeing others die for him, stood before Voldemort wandless, ready to die if that would put a stop to all the dying. After this, Dumbledore says to Harry, “You wonderful boy. You brave, brave man,” because his favorite pupil Harry has finally grown up (The Deathly Hallows 707). 

At the end of his magnificent exploration of the nature of love, Paul says, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (1 Cor. 13:11). In many ways, growing up is learning how to love others. This education starts as children when we must learn to share our toys. Later, we lose sleep as we try to decipher why and when we developed an attraction to the opposite sex. Marriage ages everyone who enters into that covenant. Finally, we have our own kids, develop a new dimension of love we never thought possible before, and teach them to love by forcing them to share their toys. 

Voldemort is a phenomenal villain but he’s also a boy who never grew up. One of the first and last depictions of Voldemort is him as an awful infant. Though Voldemort excelled at Hogwarts and lived many years mastering spells and evading death, he never learned the first and most basic lesson, to love. Harry, however, did. That made all the difference because “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Cor. 13: 7-8). 

Though many people envied me as I experienced the series for the first time, I wonder if I’ll come to like Harry Potter when I’ve watched him grow up for the hundredth time. 

But I want to hear from you:

• Do you love the Harry Potter series? If so, what do you love most about it?

• Are you aware of another fantasy series dominated by a single character’s POV? 

• If the Harry Potter books included POV chapters from other characters, what characters would you like to see the world through the most?