Harry Potter as a school story

[hafl.livejournal.com]

I'm writing this mainly, because I'm procrastinating from studying. It's pretty clear that Harry Potter is based partially on the school story genre, so I want to talk about how the genre influenced Harry Potter and how Rowling sucks at writing school stories in general and at blending epic fantasy and school story in particular. I'll be using examples from other books, but I'll try to explain them.

( This is going to be long )

This is pretty much all the complaints I have about Harry Potter as school story. They all mostly came from the fact that Rowling was not writing a school story, but took the trappings of one without thinking about it. It might have worked out fine if there weren't so many other things to complain about in Harry Potter, but since all the changes Rowling made to the school story formula turned out so badly, I'm inclined to complain about it, because it messes up one of my favourite genres. At least she left the gay subtext alone, though that might not have been intentional. In the end, Harry Potter taught me, that if I want a story about boarding school with magic, I should probably write it myself, because someone else would probably mess it up.