Harry Potter and the Trouble with World-building
Harry Potter is a media franchise beloved by many. The books are the best-selling book series in history, with over 600 million sold. The movies that spawned from those books were also similar hits, grossing a total of $7.7 billion over 8 movies (for the mathematically inclined, that’s about $962.5 million per movie). The franchise has a fanbase that spans the globe. But despite all this, despite the excellent movies helmed by brilliant filmmakers like Chris Columbus and David Yates, there’s been one glaring problem with the franchise: JK Rowling isn’t the best at world-building.
Before we begin, I want to state that this is not some great grand revisionism. The notion that JK is a less-than-stellar writer is not a new idea in the literary space, but a lot of that criticism gets shunted off to one side because of the numbers, the logic being, “If she’s as bad as you all claim, how are her books selling this much?” So, I’m gonna address this before getting into the other stuff.
In 2013, JK released The Cuckoo’s Calling, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Why? Who’s to say. What we do know it that it wasn’t doing too well until the revelatory announcement that she was, in fact Robert Galbraith. Sales soared, and positive reviews came flooding in. Make of that what you will.
There’s a couple of things that show JK’s problems with world-building, and I’m going to go over as many as I can. We start with perhaps the most glaring: the actual physical world that the characters inhabit makes very little sense. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter seems like a vibrant, bustling place, filled with life and color on every angle. But that shine is merely a veneer painted over the various cracks. Many decisions seem to be made, not based on any form of in-universe utility or identifiable logic but based on how “mystical” it makes the world seem. You can see it everywhere, from the fact that one house is essentially the “designated evil house”, the choice of toad, owl, or cat as pets, even that horrendous map of all the wizard schools, but the one I’m going to pick is the magical game of Quidditch. Quidditch is special because not only are the rules of the game absolutely nonsensical, but they serve almost no purpose story-wise. A game where teams try to toss a ball (called a quaffle) into a hoop and a keeper on each team tries to prevent that. Sounds like your basic ball sport. But then it gets weird. There’s this thing called a golden snitch and whichever team’s seeker catches this little golden ball ends the game. This creates a problem where majority of the game is pointless so long as some kid catches some strange object. There’s no time limit, and (near as I can tell), no minimum player limit once the game has begun. The players don’t wear helmets despite the clear head injury risks. We have no clue how many Quidditch games are played in a year. In terms of the actual story, you could replace quidditch with cricket and very little (if anything) would change about the story or the characters. It exists purely to add a layer of magical pizzazz to the world.
Second up, the characters. There are exactly three characters that matter in the series: Harry, Ron, and Hermione (actually, it’s only Harry, but that’s a different conversation). Everyone else only exists as much as they are connected to Harry, Ron, or Hermione. Draco, Seamus, the Patil Twins, even Cho. All these guys exist only insofar as they affect the Golden Trio (also, the brazen cheek in naming the only Chinese character Cho Chang). The only one that has any kind of independent character is Neville. And you see this all over the place. Characters being created specifically because of a need that Harry and the gang need only to disappear later on. Take Cho. Harry needs a love interest, in steps Cho Chang. Once that “need” is fulfilled, she is basically never seen again (there’s more to be said about the romances in the series but that’s a different article). During the Tri-Wizard Tournament, two other wizard schools are needed for Harry to compete against, and so two other schools are created seemingly out of nowhere. Once they have fulfilled their purpose, they vanish into the ether, never to be seen again. Character-wise, the Wizarding World is only real once it is connected to the Golden Trio.
Third (and my final point) is the lack of career prospects. If you get a letter from Hogwarts, you are locked into one of two career paths: you either graduate and become a professor at Hogwarts or you graduate and work at the Ministry of Magic (unless you’re Fred and George in which case you drop out and start a hobby shop). There’s no variety in what a magical education can actually do for you. This actually leads into my earlier point on the flimsy nature of the world, but Hogwarts as a school only exists as a place for Harry to have his adventures. Once you leave, it doesn’t matter what you do because you’re not at Hogwarts and so you can no longer affect Harry’s story. You are swallowed by the fog of unimportance, never to be seen again
The Harry Potter franchise is a much-beloved series of best-selling books and blockbuster movies. But maybe, just maybe, it shouldn’t have been.
