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# Harry Potter

Harry Potter is a franchise and universe by an English female writer J. K. Rowling about wizards and magic { like ACTUAL wizards and magic. ~drummyfish } that started in 1997 as an immensely successful series of seven children and young adult books, was followed by movies and later on by many other spinoff media such as video games. It made J. K. Rowling a billionaire and has become the most famous and successful book series of modern age. At first the books sparked controversies and opposition in religious communities for "promoting witchcraft", in recent years the universe and stories have become a subject of wider political analysis and fights, as most other things. Commerce and politics destroyed it completely, anything new in the franchise is absolute garbage, but the original books are quite good.

Fun fact: did you know that the American version of the books is censored? For example if the original describes some character as "fat", the American version often leaves it out. So read the UK version, American stuff is always inferior.

The immense success and overexposure of the story inevitably generated a shitton of lulz, for example goblins in the books are the most obvious caricature of jews you can imagine, which wasn't a problem back around the year 2000, but of course is suddenly a HUGE problem in 2020s :D On this note the list would be almost endless: characters in the books are always portrayed as the strongest stereotype of whatever race they represent, for example the Chinese girl must be named Cho Chang, the Irish boy's name is Seamus Finnigan etcetera., and of course no one is a tranny or gay except by RETROACTIVE Twitter commentaries by Rowling desperately trying to save the situation, like "mmmm yeah, this and this and this character were actually gay, although they masterfully disguised it for all the seven books, just trust me pls". No less funny is the situation with characters suddenly changing races, like literally in the last movie a guy named Crabbe suddenly changed from white to black :D But that was nothing compared to the controversies of starting to cast black actors for white characters, namely Hermione in some shitty play (with Rowling actually NO KIDDING argued that "she never mentioned in the book she was white" :D) and then Snape (who actually WAS described as overwhelmingly white) for some new show or whatever. This goes on and on and isn't even funny anymore, but then there are also interesting and less controversial phenomena such as the many translations (although even here we may find funny censorship for instance: e.g. the American versions of the books oftentime leave out "offensive" descriptions such as that someone's fat and so on), errors that different countries' translators made and ways in which they dealt with all the invented fantasy words. For example Voldemort was one of the easiest such challenges, most translators just literally kept the name Voldemort, but for some reason the Slovenian translator felt his country needed something special and so he came up with the most bizarre abomination of a name anyone could possibly think of: Mrlakenstein. Not only did he fuck up big time already but also shot himself in the leg considering in the second book the name played a role in an anagram which was then very awkward. And ofc there are tons and tons of fails, autism (some people memorizing the books by heart for example), plot holes and trolling (like those guys who on the release day of the last book drove near book stores yelling spoilers through megaphone) and shit that's a good source of fun for long winter nights.

{ I actually enjoyed the books -- they're not the best in the world, I've read many better ones that would better deserve this kind of attention, but still the work is admirable and of very high quality, it is definitely one of the most comfy book series. There is of course tons of money in the franchise so it's getting raped and milked like any other IP capital, do not follow the new stuff. ~drummyfish }

Plot summary: sorry, we're not writing a plot summary here, thank copyright laws -- yes, fair use allows us to do it but it would make us non free :) Let's just say the story revolves around a boy named Harry Potter who goes to a wizard school with two friends and they're together saving the world from Lord Voldemort, the wizard equivalent of Hitler. Overall the books start on a very light note and get progressively darker and more adult, turning into a story about "World War II but with magic wands instead of guns". It's pretty readable, with unique atmosphere, pleasant coziness and elements of many literary genres, there's nice humor, good ideas and amazing characters. Similarly to Lord of the Rings the books primarily contrast good and evil, but also go deeper, showing for example that what sometimes appears as evil may turn out to in fact be good and vice versa, and also explore themes such as selfless self sacrifice, dealing with mortality etc. Also the lore is very deep, but sometimes doesn't quite make sense and has infamously many plotholes (well, it was made by a woman).

## See Also

- Lord Of The Rings

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