Harry Potter: Protagonist?

Harry Potter: Protagonist?

Greetings my readers. Sorry for the delay between posts, real life got in the way. This post has been brewing in my head for quite awhile now, and I needed to share it with the world.

Harry Potter is a bad character.

Before you get upset, let me explain. The world of Harry Potter is rather interesting, an entire world of culture and mythology hidden under the "real" world. The problem is: Harry is the least interesting character in the series.

Think about it. What has Harry really done for himself? Not much. Everything was either done by chance, dumb luck, or assistance from adults and friends.

Let's start off in book one.

Harry, random orphan boy is informed that he is a wizard.
Something that is decided by birth. He didn't choose to be a wizard, he was just born one.

He then discovered that he is a celeb in the wizard world for something that happened to him when he was a baby.
Yet again, through no action on his part.

He goes to Hogwarts, and meets hermione and Ron. Ron basically teaches him about wizard culture, and Hermione acts as his own personal tutor. Yet again, no real effort. Harry and Ron rescue Hermione from a Troll, which was their fault. And they save her using a magic spell that she taught them how to use.

So far it's random guy with two lexicon of knowledge characters.

Next Harry learns to ride a broom. A skill everyone says he must have inherited from his father. I'll give some acknowledgement here. I don't buy that his ability to fly skillfully was inherited. It's still unexplained and random, but I'll give Harry some credit here.

Fast forward. The three manage to stumble upon a mystery that was all but fed to them by every adult in the cast, and they go charging into the puzzle factory after the wrong villain.

First puzzle: three-headed dog. Already dealt with by the villain.

Second puzzle: vines. Hermione saves the day with her endless knowledge.

Third puzzle: keys. Harry uses his leet flying skills to catch the slowest moving key in the room. Not impressive. Anyone could do that. Give me a ladder and I'll get that frigging key.

Fourth puzzle: Chess. Well "lucky" for Harry, Ron is apparently a chess master. Thanks for being useful Ginger.

Fifth puzzle: Potions. Hermione saves the day again.

Now at the end Harry stumbles upon the mirror of Erised. Which he had "accidentally" found earlier. And it was already explained to him by Dumbledore. So Harry acquires the macguffin, through no ability of his own.

Then the real villain shows himself and attacks Harry. Then proceeds to melt. Apparently nobody every told Harry that his skin makes badguys melt. But apparently it does.

So end of book one, all we can tell is that Harry is extremely lucky and his friends can solve puzzles intended for 11-year olds.

Book two.
Alot of the same happens, only now instead of a stolen-object mystery it's a PG rated murder mystery. Yet again Hermione does most of the thinking and Ron provides the wizarding culture info. But let's fast-forward to the main event. Ginny is missing, Hermione is petrified. Harry and his brigade of ginger's must go rescue Ginny.

But what's this? Charlatan professor who was stealing Harry's limelight tries to pull a double-cross. Nevermind. Nevile's wand backfires and bad professor takes himself out of the fight. Another victory to dumb luck.

But now Harry is on his own. No wait, there is Tom Riddle who explains everything to him in true villain fashion.

Why must villains always explain their evil plans? Just kill the hero and complete your evil plan.

Anyways, giant snake appears and Harry reveals his second real skill: running away.
He runs and the Phoenix Fawkes appears and blinds the giant magic snake. Thank you outside interference.

Oh, forgot to mention. Harry also apparently speaks snake. This first appears in the previous book, but it's not important til now. Natural ability. He didn't go to snake translation classes or anything. Just another bit of dumb luck.

So snake is blind. The Phoenix gives Harry a hat to protect him from all the shitty plot raining down from the sky. The hat also happens to contain a magic sword. Yet again, dumb luck.
More running from the snake, the snake is about to bite him, and Harry does what you'd expect of a 12-year old. He puts his hands out between himself and the attacker.
One of his hands is still holding the sword. Which some how managed to kill the snake. Yet again, dumb luck.

But oh noes! Harry is bitten. He's dying, with his last ounce of strength he pulls the fang from his mouth and stabs the villain, freeing Ginny.

Oh, and Fawkes is back. The bird cries. Apparently phoenix tears can heal any wound. How fortuitous!
Oh, and the tiny bird can also carry six kids and one adult back to safety. Yet again, everyone is saved by the bird.

Moving on to book three.
"The adventures of Dad's old friends where Harry royally fucks up their plans."

Yea, so really, the book is about Sirius and Remus. Both are interesting characters with interesting backstories and semi-unique powers. Remus is a werewolf and Sirius is an animagus. Totally awesome right? Well Sirius discovers that the betrayer of his best friends is secretly hiding away in Hogwarts, pretending to be the familiar of Ron Weasley. So he breaks out of jail. It's somewhat dubious as to why he didn't break out sooner, but whatever.

He meets up with his good friend Remus and they make arrangements to get revenge on the bastard. Sirius is a wanted man so they need to capture the rat-bastard somewhere away from prying eyes. Remus takes a job at Hogwarts as the new Datda teacher (their 3rd one in as many years.)

And then things go wonky. The ministry of magic places Dementors all over Hogwarts to find Sirius (these are the same dementors that he escaped from in the first place, not the smartest idea to use the same inept guards for capture.)
The dementors are drawn to Harry because of the piece of Voldemort's soul living in his forehead. Nobody bothers to tell him this. But he just spends the whole book afraid of the damn things.

So time passes, pretty unremarkably. The only thing of note is that Hermione gets A GODDAMN TIME TRAVEL MACHINE that she uses to take extra classes. This is the only book that features the time travel, and it's only used effectively once. The time-turner could be used to great effect all throughout the rest of the series, but nope, apparently it's only used to compensate for over-achievers.

So all the action of the book happens at the end. Sirius and Remus finally manage to get their hands on the Rat (by kidnapping Ron). Harry and Hermione chases after them and interrupt everything, then Snape shows up and lets the Rat escape. gg everyone.

Then to make matters worse, Remus shifts into a werewolf (who the hell plans their attack for the one night in a month when you know you are a liability?) and the rest of the story is about mitigating damage.
End result: Bad guy escapes, but Harry realizes that Sirius isn't a villain. Sirius goes into hiding, and Remus loses his job at Hogwarts. Oh, and Remus manages to teach Harry how to perform a useful spell.
So the only things that Harry succeeds at in this book are through adult intervention, or the introduction of time travel to give himself a second chance because he fucked up the first try.

Book four: Now, with more adult intervention!!
So the tri-wizard tournament comes to town. Harry is 'somehow' enrolled in it through no small amount of cheating. Instead of ruling that Harry's entrance is clearly an attempt at cheating, the adults rule that he must compete anyways.
Test One: Lack pf preparation does mean failure!!
So all of the contestants cheat and find out about the dragons before they enter the arena. Rather than prepare with things like a "Use this spell to make a dragon fall asleep" or something, Harry just ignores his preparation, he is reminded last minute by an adult that he can summon anything to himself. He doesn't have the common sense to say "Accio GODDAMN EGG". Instead he summons his broom and goes on a ridiculous chase scene, wrecking large chunks of the school.

Test two. Breath under water.
Proof that wizards are idiots. Harry tries to find a spell or something to allow him to breath under water, but apparently has never heard of ASKING THE GODDAMN LIBRARIAN. You'd think they'd have some form of an index. "Excuse me miss magical librarian? I'm looking for something to allow me to breath underwater. Do you have any books on that?" "Of course we do, this is a magical library. All you have to say is 'Accio books on underwater activities' and it'll make a goddamn stack of books for you."

Yea, Wizards are idiots.
Hermione Granger is without a doubt the most powerful person in the entire series. She is a never-ending lexicon of knowledge because she spends all of her free time in the library learning new spells, you know, getting the most out of her education.
Eventually an adult interferes again and Harry is taught the most effective way of breathing underwater.

Test #3 The maze. Yet again, outside interference. One of the contestants is mind controlled and made to take out the other two so that only Harry will be able to complete the maze. Harry has a burst of courtesy and helps out one of his competitors, so both of them are whisked away from the maze to the graveyard. Voldemort is reborn, the blood wards no longer work. Cedric is killed for the hell of it. etc.
And yet again dumb luck saves the day. Turns out that Voldemort and Harry have matching wands, so they can't kill eachother. Harry escapes.
So end result: Harry is declared the winner Through excessive amounts of cheating, and life goes on.
Harry goes back to live with the Dursleys, which makes zero sense since the blood wards no longer works. The best solution would be to have Harry move in with Sirius, where he could be protected by the Fidilius charm (With Dumbledore as the secret keeper). But no, they don't do the logical thing, cause they are idiots.

Book Four: And introducing Queen Bitch of the universe!
Yea, Deloris Umbridge. Fourth DATDA professor, intent on making everything into a totalitarian state.
Children (through the urging of Hermione) decide to teach themselves how to do defensive magic. Harry teaches them all four of the defensive spells he knows over the course of a long training montage, eventually they are discovered, detention, etc.
Nothing else really happens until Harry has a nightmare where Sirius is being attacked in the dept of mysteries. He raises the alarm and his plucky heroes go to rescue them. This is of course a trap. The adults spring into action, and Sirius is killed in battle. (And to think that Harry thought that prophecies were bogus)
End result: Nothing really happened this book. It's just alot of "things are awful" going on. Sirius dies and Voldemort is proven to be alive. That's about it.

Book six: Cheating? It's not cheating if it's adult intervention!!!
Harry gets a new potions professor and a new potions book, complete with Cliff's notes on the better method of preparing a potion. For some reason Snape can write really effective notes in a book, but he has zero ability to provide these same notes in class.
Stuff happens, not much of it not worthy, eventually Draco helps Deatheaters get into the castle, and before being killed, Dumbledore FINALLY gives Harry his epic quest to destroy the Horcruxs.
Really, Harry doesn't do much in this book, he gets a ton of adult assistance (both knowingly and unknowingly). The real interesting people here are Draco and Snape. Both men are stuck in bad situations and must do awful things to protect those they love. Draco verges on redemption in this book, it's clear that he doesn't want to be evil. He's naturally inclined to be a douchebag, but not an evil douchebag.

Book Seven: The search for the MacGuffin!! And also camping.
The trio goes searching for the five remaining soul fragments. Ron destroys the locket (after unkowingly being assisted by Snape), Neville destroys the snake, Hermione destroys the Chalice, Harry destroys the Diadem, Voldemort destroys the fragment in Harry, and Voldemort somehow dies when the snake dies.

So end result of the franchise:
Harry managed to destroy two fragments of the Villain, taught some people four spells, and was a pretty good flier. Everything else was done by someone else. Harry was saved by dumb luck throughout the series, a vast number of times if the stars hadn't lined up perfectly, he'd be dead. But somehow Harry potter always beats the odds and manages to get to the end of the book by accident.

He's not particularly skilled, he's not smart, he's just lucky, and has a shitload of people saving him.
If anything, the story should be about Hermione Granger, or Neville Long Bottom, or Remus Lupin, or Sirius Black, ANYONE except Harry Potter. Even Draco Malfoy would have made a more interesting main character. The narrative would be so much more interesting if it was told from Draco's perspective. Hermione would have been an amazing character by herself, she didn't need to be babysitting the mary-sue luck monster that is Harry Potter. In book six when he drinks the "Liquid Luck" I was worried that the entire universe would overload with too much luck invested in one person.

So yea, Final word:
The setting of Harry Potter is amazing, but the main character is useless. There is zero reason why the audience should have been forced to follow him. He's boring.