I agree entirely with C.U. (and Anne). Whereas Terry Pratchett wrote a world with such plausibility that you can purchase actual maps of Ankh-Morpork (and The Disc, Lancre and Death’s Domain) and could practically navigate the city with them, Rowling wrote up a world with so many plotholes that you can use it as a bloody fishing net.

The more I read about Harry Potter, the more I think, “This guy is such a Mary Sue.” The rules don’t apply to him. He’s SPECIAL. Now a hero does have to be special in some way (even the idiot hero Phillip J. Fry from Futurama was his own grandfather) but just look at Harry. If your Original Character can do even one third of the things he can do they would be considered a Sue. But because Rowling’s books are ‘official’ because she wrote them, he’s just special.

He’s such an elitist jerk. You see, in a Sue fanfic, any character the author doesn’t like is made to look bad by drawing attention to any flaws the Sue has (which are never addressed nor do they impair Sue anyway).

In Harry Potter, anybody who draws attention to Harry’s lazyness, his arrogance, his belief that he is always right… is portrayed as a jerk. Harry gets these ‘feelings’ and ‘suspiscions’ about various characters and he’s right so often that he makes me wanna puke.

Characters are primarily made to look bad by being jerks to Harry, and it’s only after they’ve been jerks to Harry is it that they can be prats to his backup. Not that Harry really looks any better because it’s hardly like he’s mature enough to withdraw himself from such an argument. He’s just as likely to pull his wand.

He’s such an uninteresting person. All the stress he goes through is never expanded on. Being treated like a slave by his aunt and uncle has no permanent emotional impact – it neither makes him stronger, nor breaks him. It just makes him a martyr. And then he goes to Hogwartz and apparently forgets all about them.

In fact, everything unpleasant that happens to Harry, while it is a perfectly okay reason to have an unhappy history in any story, is portrayed by Rowling so poorly that he always looks like a martyr.

I personally invented a character who was abandoned at birth. But she didn’t become a martyr for it. In fact, her history was, for her first 14 years, tough but character building – her upbringing had a real impact on her life. It was a period of intense pain in her teen years that broke her down into an angry and harsh person. She was brought up to be cold and tough from her school upbringing.

Your upbringing should influence the person you become, but it never does with Harry. It just tries to make me feel sorry for him, but I don’t feel sorry for him because everything turns out freaking perfect at school anyway.