Definitive Decisions

I will not deny that Ms. Rowling has created an intriguing, imaginative fictional world which many people adore, my family among them. I am not one of those people. The serial has been brought up many times this past week at work among my coworkers (one of whom listens to the audiobooks on his iPod instead of actually reading them) and as a result I have formed a more concise reason of why the books just don't work for me.

1.) Dog Latin
My foreign language was Latin, which is dead. I chose it because it was the language of science, and because I have a penchant for Ancient Rome. And a great deal of English words are derived from it, allowing the lay man to both muse and ruse as a scholar of sort. For these reasons it should be granted some flexibility in academic and literary uses where it is far more practical to insert some Latin words than construct an entire language, although it has been done before, and it has an advantage over other languages which do not have any native speakers, like Esperanto. Most often, some words are invented to give the feel of another language, without icky worries of maintaining a grammatical consistency throughout. But please, just do one or the other, at very least be consistent within the pattern you establish for yourself!

2.) Twist Endings

The sorting hat always seems to have a sword in it. The same sword even! While I suppose you could make the argument that the hat serves as some sort of scabbard for it, that does not forgive the convenience that any necessary item will always appear when needed, whether by phoenix or magical mirror. I understand that magic is an integral part of the narrative, but the twist falls flat with me every time. And there's a twist in every book. First it turns out that, luckily, love protects the boy, though he seems hellbent on ending the life his parents sacrificed theirs to save by wandering into dungeons. Dumbledore, like an emaciated Santa Claus, always has a watchful eye on young Harry, even postmortem, and is able to provide not only prophetic advice but enchanted weapons at the very most favorable time, often with that damn hat. The sorting hat defies logic. It sits on children's heads, it can't be that big, yet it carries the Godric's sword on at least two occasions. It's either a really tall hat, or it has hammerspace. Which leads to the question: Why does it have hammerspace? It's a fucking singing hat. Honestly, the thing creeps me out, probably because of this one episode of Darkwing Duck where these evil aliens that looked like hats latched onto people's heads and took over their bodies. Look through the list of plot twists, you'll see that many of those same tired cliches are trod through the Harry Potter series. Is Snape good or bad? Oh it was Quirrell all along! No one would suspect him! Luckily, he turns to ashes when he touches Harry. If only he'd thought to stab instead of strangle.

3.) Quidditch
Sports are meant to be watched, not read about. No other medium can properly convey the excitement of witnessing the action, preferably firsthand. Yes, I mean you, radio sportscasts. The action is greatly obfuscated by the fact that the sport is both fictional and in 3 dimensions, which no sport, with the possible exception of water polo (which even then is only viewed from two dimensions by the audience), does. Plus the rules are retarded. Basically, catch the snitch to win and, in the mean time, bludgeon each other with these cricket bats. Pay no mind to the fact that the children playing this game wear no protective headgear or safety harnesses and fly at high speeds at altitudes that give muggles vertigo. At very least, I would hope that they would wear some sort of protective cup to shelter their manbits in case those dowels get finicky.

Honorable mention: Adverbs.