H is for Harry Potter - Blogging from A to Z April Challenge

Aww, weren't they adorable in the first movie :).

Yes, today I'm going to witter on about Harry Potter. I think we in the writing line have a lot to thank J.K. Rowling for. Not only did she bring YA into the mainstream, she made it incredibly profitable and proved to the world authors were very much worth talking about again.

I do admit, I came into Harry Potter via the films, but after the first movie I dived headlong into the books. The first one always felt very Roald Dahl-ish to me at the beginning, I was very glad when she dropped that style and went with her own.

I'm definitely not saying the Harry Potter books are perfect, far from it, but they are wonderful. The depth of story telling and world building is superb and they are a delight to read ... mostly. We'll get onto that later.

The biggest thing for me is that Harry Potter inspired me to write, a lot. I had dabbled in fanfic before, but never to the extent I did in the Harry Potter fandom. This is the fandom that made me write and write and write and, thank heavens, improve. HP fandom was so big and had so many talented people in it that it was a wonderful community for talking, exchanging ideas and just having fun. This is really what Harry Potter means to me.

So you may be wondering what drew me to write. It's very simple really, given the fact I'm a slash writer mainly (m/m) what drew me to want to create fanfic was the relationship between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. The classic hero and bad boy that crackled with unresolved tension. It was irresistible.

If you would like to check out any of my HP fanfic, you can find it over here at AO3.

Now, back to the books. I'm not going to go over all of them, just tell you about the highs and lows.

For a long while my favourite book was The Prisoner of Azkaban. It has everything: intrigue, excitement, wrongs righted, friends returned. I loved Sirius and the book is fast paced and well thought out.

The film is not as good, as shown by my husband. It's great for anyone who knows the book, but my dearly beloved has never picked them up and he was confused because the film missed too much out. He never did get the Marauders or, for that matter, wolfsbane potion - all rather important to the plot.

However, I still very much enjoyed it.

However, when The Half-Blood Prince came out I had a new favourite book. This I think is her best work to date. The book is complex and action packed and I loved it, even though it was difficult to read and cry at the same time when I got to the end.

For me, this book is much more the culmination of the series than book seven. It fulfils everything I expect from a Harry Potter novel, with a slightly more grown-up outlook on the whole thing. The interaction between Draco and Harry is also superb.

Those were the highs, now on to the lows. I do not know if I can describe in words how much I loathe Order of the Phoenix. I'll let you into a little secret, I've never actually read the whole book. I tried, but I disliked it so much that I skim read the parts I needed to write fanfic and discarded the rest.

This book is long, tedious and horrid. I really hope it is simply a product of post natal depression or something, because it's one long downer. Harry was totally un-Harry like half the time, Delores Umbridge makes me want to destroy things and then JKR went and killed Sirius for no real reason I could fathom.

As you can tell, I really don't like this book. The only really good thing to come out of it is Dumbledore's Army.

Then there is book seven. Now this is not a bad book per say, not like #5, but I still don't like it. The main reason being; she broke the formula.

The formula for Harry Potter is, Harry goes to school, bad things happen at school which he overcomes, there is a big confrontation at school or somewhere in relation to the school and Harry wins. This is what I liked about the other books. Book seven did not give this to me and I was disappointed.

I also object to the way she kept killing characters off for no real reason. And the epilogue - good heavens, her editor should have ripped the epilogue out and burned it.

Then there was the whole splitting it into two films, which drives me potty (don't even get me started on The Hobbit).

So there you have it, what I love and dislike about the Harry Potter franchise. Do you love or dislike Harry Potter? Are you a book fan or a movie fan? I would love to know.

If you would like to see what all of my posts will be about in advance, click here to see my theme post.
My twin and I are also doing the A to Z Challenge over at our fantasy erotica blog: http://fantasyboysxxx.blogspot.co.uk/