The Ninja Reader

Hello, friends, and welcome back to my reviews of the Harrietta Potter books!*sigh* We got a bad one today, folks. I just don't mean bad, I mean really, really bad! I've often given many stars to horrible books, as long as I liked the characters, so it probably won't surprise you that I deduct from a rating when an MC annoys/pisses me off. Luckily, that doesn't happen very often! Only a handful of times, really. Bella Swan, Luce Price, Laurel Sewell, Ever Bloom, Nora Gray, Bethany Church... but dear, oh dear, I think there is a special place in this pantheon of horrible MCs for Harrietta Potter. Truly, not since Evermore have I encountered this much priviledge and first-world angst rolled into one big ball of Mary Sue.Harrietta isn't just annoying and whiny - she is so laughingly short-sighted it's a miracle she is still alive. Constantly fighting authority figures without a second thought of the consequences, never listening to her well-meaning friends, putting her petty feelings before the important missions she has to face - from beginning to end, she is a twit, through and through. In one particularly stupid instance, she gets her friends to risk their skin so that she can talk to a fugitive about the fact that her father was a huge douchebag!I might have bought it if she was just your every-day fifteen year old girl, but she isn't! She's been in Hogwarts for four years, faced death at thrice as many times (if not more!) yet she hasn't drawn the simplest of conclusions! How silly is that? Shouldn't she have more sense? Shouldn't she have learned by now to think before she acted? Has she no sense of self-preservance? Honestly, if she were a boy, I'd have said she thought with her dick!*furious whispering*What? What do you mean that she is indeed a boy?*more whispering**puts on glasses and reads the cover again*Oh, it's Harry , not Harrietta! I did wonder why she couldn't get into the girls' dormitories! Well, in that case, it's all fine! Silly me! Please disregard everything I said above, this is surely a literary masterpiece that deserves a five star rating! What jolly good fun!So I was reading this book yesterday when this blogpost by Lindsay Ellis popped into my mind. I've already linked it before in a status update, but I figured that I might just do it again, because it's a really good post on female characters and the standards we hold up to them. It came to mind while I was reading Order of the Phoenix because at one point, I thought: "Merlin, Harry, TSTL much?" And then I paused. TSTL? Don't we usually apply that to female heroines?And then my inner feminazi kicked me in the ass. Note, that's the Zuka Club from Ouran Hight School Host Club. A very nice anime, highly recommended. Yes, yes, Potter fans, I know it's ludicrous that above, I compared Harry to Bella Swan. And, yeah, I guess that maybe I was a bit harsh in my comment. I mean, it's not like Harry mopes, rushes into stupid situations without thought, does exactly what he shouldn't do, and expect his friends to do everything for him......Oh, wait......Well, at least Bella is a couple of years older......Nah...I will go out on a limb and say this, Harry Potter is not as bad as Twilight. It's ludicrous to call it that. For example, most of the characters in the HP books are great, and sympathetic (read: Neville and Snape). In many instances, they are the saving grace of this series (Snape, Snape, Snape... did I mention Snape?). The worldbuilding is awesome. There are actual consequences to the stupid things the characters do. The list goes on and on and on. BUT! I can't deny that Harry gets away with a lot of stupid stuff, some stupid enough to outstage Bella's melodramatic dive in New Moon. Get this: He sees Snape's memory of James Potter torturing him. Gets mopey, and decides to talk to Sirius, but the only fireplace he can use is in Umbridge's office. So he lets Fred and George cause mayham, which gets them expelled, so that he can go in there and talk about the fact that his dad was a bumrag when he was 15. He does this, by the way, even if Sirius gave him a safe means for two-way communication, while Umbridge is just waiting to get him expelled, and knowing that one false step can lead to the discovery of the order and Sirius' immediate execution. Had Harry been a girl, we'd have tripped over ourselves to call him TSTL and Mary Sue. Why do you think Hermione is so likeable and relatable? It's because she's a heroine, and the fact that she isn't the titular character saves her, mostly, from scrutiny. We really do hold up a higher standard for our female protagonists than we do for the men.Why is that? Is it because heroes are traditionally men and women somehow have to one-up them to prove themselves worthy? Is it culture causing these presumptions? Biology? Social constraints? Who knows?Once again, I don't deny the merits of the HP books. In fact, my friend Tamara wrote a my link post on that on the Lantern. Hell, HP7 is the only book I've seen getting people to camp out to get, or at least to preorder in Bulgaria. I love the world of magic Rowling creates, and what a rich, wonderful secondary cast there is. But this whole world revolves around a whiny fifteen-year old that relies on coincidences (and a little help from his friends), to battle villains that are more cartoons than actual, threatening characters. I mean, seriously, Umbridge? She's so ridiculous I'm surprised they haven't used her as a spell against boggarts. Even Lord Voldemort, while creepy in his own right, doesn't seem to live up to all the buildup there is to his return in the first four books. Will Harry always be the hero unquestioned, simply because he's a dude?