this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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As the person before me mentioned, scrutinizing the magic expecting it to be high literature is self-defeating. I never said I would defend the story on the merits of its writing, it's a book series written for young adults.
Deus ex machina is egregious when a story that has otherwise been consistent pulls the rug out from under you with a twist that makes no sense. The magic in Harry Potter is consistently inconsistent, as I mentioned it only makes sense when it's directly in front of the readers eyes. It doesn't just show up as deus ex machina that saves the characters life at the end of the book and leaves the reader feeling betrayed, the reader expects magic to save the day because since page 1 magic has been doing whatever has been conveniently cool to move the plot along in the main character's favor.
It's not less egregious because they do it in every chapter. It's just a bad story. No one is attacking you or your favorite books; but the fact is they're not that good.
You said you wanted to "defend the series" (the books). With books, what else is there to defend except the writing? As other people have mentioned, there are good consistent stories for children and fantasy authors who know what consistency means. It won't affect your life in any way to admit that JK Rowling is not good at writing.
"But she always does this." Lol.
As I mentioned before, I don't really have to work too hard to defend one of the most sold non-religious books of all time.
I suppose, yes, pedantically there's nothing in a book but writing. But that's an issue of semantics, in my view writing can be bad and there's still things like characterization, plot, world building, and character conflict, writing is how you put it together. I can see that that can all be classified as writing, but again, semantics, often people separate writing from those aspects, often they don't. If the word writing bothers you, please, when you read it replace it with the word you think I mean I don't mind.
As I said in the post you responded to, I don't defend her writing, nor did I say it was my favorite book, makes sense that you have to strawman me to try and attack me.