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Matt's Five Worst Fictional Schools # 3, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

9/19/2013

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Hello boys and girls, it's Back to School time, and in honor of this wondrous (for parents) occasion, I am dedicating my blog to five of the worst schools that fiction has to offer (please take a look at my # 5 & # 4 entries if you haven't already). So, while you may bemoan how your teacher's grading scale is unfair, or how they show up to study hall hung over, be thankful that you don't have to attend...
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THE SCHOOL: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

PROS: You get to learn magic, and not just of the "if you pray real hard, you might get something you want" variety, no, this is full-on god-like powers kind of magic, which when wielded properly is really, really awesome.
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Improper use, on the other hand, can be quite unpleasant.)
Also, you get this top notch magical education in an authentic (if surprisingly roomy) medieval castle, and with some of the best medical care that magic can provide!
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Yes, we can even fix that.
CONS: Confusing layout. School promotes class/gang warfare and slavery. Understaffing/dangerously negligent hiring standards. Lax security. The fact that you probably will get mutilated at some point during your stay.
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I'm not even going to get into the possibility of ghost molestation and the casual acceptance of date rape drugs (better known as love potions).
The problems at Hogwarts are myriad and entire books have been dedicated to describing all of them (they're called the Harry Potter series). Among the most benign of them is the fact that Hogwarts is poorly laid out. It's common knowledge that Hogwarts' halls are constantly shifting with the layout very rarely lining up the same way twice. On good days this could lead to students being late (most teachers will still punish you for being late, even considering the school's conniving against you), on bad days it could lead to serious injury or death.
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Apparently OSHA doesn't exist in the wizarding world.
The various magical creatures/enchanted paintings/spirits & poltergeists/curses that roam the hallways do not help this matter any.
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Oh look, Nearly-Headless Nick's taken mescaline again!
The social aspects of Hogwarts are even more worrying. Like many a private school, students are sorted into houses. Unlike most schools with houses, Hogwarts has a house that is widely regarded as pretty much entirely evil.
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Yeah, we're more or less entirely awful.
Despite the proven risks and track record of Slytherin house, no additional counseling or mediation is provided to these students to steer them away from their probable future in evil. If anything, this probability is embraced and encouraged with students in this house often proclaiming their racial superiority based on blood purity. Do we ever once see these students taking sensitivity seminars, or even be told that using racial slurs against other students is wrong?
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Though for a school that holds hundreds of these guys as slaves (willing though they may be in this twisted universe), maybe that shouldn't be that much of a surprise.
Of course, considering the staffing problems Hogwarts has, maybe they should be excused for some of the deficiencies in educational standards (including such things as no formal writing or mathematical education). With a school that has at least 300 students (though Rowling herself says there are about 1,000), there are only about 20 adults above the age of 18 to wrangle them, and that's if we're including the support personnel who are often not the most helpful people in the world.
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This guy just radiates trustworthiness, doesn't he?
The only qualifications we seem to see these teachers requiring is a simple desire to teach. As the rotating group of Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers has proved, competence (in the case of Gilderoy Lockhart) and the lack of a criminal record (in the cases of Remus Lupin and Severus Snape) are not particular requirements. Indeed, we have seen classes composed entirely of students staring at smoke (Divination), staring at worms (Care of Magical Creatures) and staring at a narcissistic lunatic staring at himself (Defense Against the Dark Arts under Gilderoy Lockhart). Not once does the administration intervene or try to impose anything resembling a lesson plan (and the one time a lesson plan is installed by an outside force, it is viewed as the worst thing in the world.)
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Though in this particular case, it actually was.
In fact, the regularity with which evil sneaks into the school is alarming, considering that Hogwarts is supposed to be one of the most secure places in the Wizarding World. Indeed, there are so many documented ways to sneak in (including, but not limited to, vanishing cabinets, polyjuice potion, animagi, secret passages, elf magic and the Room of Requirement, among others) that one must wonder if student safety was ever a concern to the administration at Hogwarts.
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Sure, the beard and glasses make him look smart, but he's actually quite careless.
Which leads into the final, and perhaps most impressive point: if you attend Hogwarts, you will get hurt. Over the course of the series, nearly every student is in some way mutilated or injured seriously enough to be sent to the hospital wing for an extended period of time. From magical accidents and wizard duels to exploding potions and vicious animal attacks, Hogwarts does not lack for ways to be terribly injured. They shrug this off because magical medical care is, well, magical, but if any responsible school had this many serious injuries in an average year, they would be closed down by the state.
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Then again, the wizarding world's government doesn't exactly have the most reliable track record.
So what say you, dear readers? Anyone out there who would want to attend Hogwarts? Do you think you could survive a Defense Against the Dark Arts Class? Sound off in the comments!  And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back! 

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor  

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-- Matt Carter

(We know there's a lot of Matt Carter's online you could spend your time with, so thanks for hanging around this one!)
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Matt's Five Least Favorite Pop Culture Endings # 5, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

8/3/2013

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Hello, one and all, and welcome to August. Yeah, I know, it's not one of my favorite months either. It's one of the hottest and ugliest stretches of summer, and it always brings back memories from when I was a kid, as this was the point that I'd usually realize that the fabled season of summer was about to come to an end.
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But, now that I'm an employed adult and summer is completely irrelevant, I can look at it with a healthy sense of humor and cynicism; a healthy sense of humor and cynicism that tells me, "Hey, you can probably make a list out of this!" And so, in honor of the disappointing end of summer, I am going to dedicate the month of August to five of my least favorite endings in pop culture. As always, I must note that this is hardly going to be a comprehensive list, because let's face it, there's a lot of lousy endings out there. These five moments are ones that I've found disappointing, confusing, and in a couple cases even downright infuriating, and with one exception they all come from pieces of pop culture I've really enjoyed. 

I also shouldn't have to tell you that this list is going to have SPOILER ALERT at the top of pretty much every entry, so take that as a warning now for this one.

So sit back, relax, and let us begin our # 5 moment with...
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I came into the Harry Potter series fairly late in the game. My future wife, Fiona, got me a copy of the first book for my 21st birthday, and though I was hesitant to touch it at first, at her insistence (and, well, we were still just friends at the time, and I thought she was really cute, and I wanted to get in good with her...) I gave it a shot. Within three chapters I was hooked. I wound up flying through the first six books in about two months (the seventh having yet to be released), and loving almost every minute of it. Sure, there were more than a few slow spots here and there, and some plot contrivances that were pretty extreme...
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"Let us never use this to fix things ever again!"
...but all in all I loved the series. Naturally, with anything you love and don't want to let go, I reread the series once or twice soon after, and though little of the magic had rubbed away, the way Rowling used some rather flimsily explained magic to rationalize almost every ending soon became apparent. But it's magic, so I excused it. However, when rereading the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I could suspend disbelief no longer at how little sense the evil plot actually made.
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Mostly because of this guy. More on him later.
For a quick rundown of the plot, Harry has been forced into a magical tournament that will almost certainly get him killed. Through a fair amount of cheating and outside help, he has made it to the final round of the tournament in an excellent position. In the final stretch, he and another competitor, Cedric Diggory, grab the Triwizard Cup to claim a mutual victory, however the cup soon turns out to be a Portkey (magical teleporting device) that transports them to a graveyard. Death Eaters show up, Voldemort is brought back from the grave, Harry escapes back home and finds out before too long that a teacher he's trusted throughout the year was actually another Death Eater in disguise.
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Also Edwa-err, Cedric dies.
Now, on paper, reading this the first time, this was all suitably dramatic and seemed to make perfect sense. However, hidden by the shock of Voldemort finally coming back from the dead is how very little sense all of this evil scheme makes.

First and foremost, why was it necessary to put Harry in the deathsport competition in the first place? Voldemort claims to need Harry alive in order to be resurrected, wouldn't putting him through a series of trials that could very well kill him (as it is acknowledged by multiple characters this tournament is quite good at doing) kind of defeat this purpose? And what if, heaven forbid, Harry actually loses, as he was very well about to when Cedric came along?  
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This is a perfectly sane part of an evil scheme to kill someone, not a scheme to keep them alive!
Second, there is the issue of Mad-Eye Moody, a.k.a. Barty Crouch Jr. With the help of the shapeshifting Polyjuice Potion, Death Eater Barty Crouch Jr. impersonates Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher Mad-Eye Moody and becomes fairly friendly with Harry throughout the course of an entire school year. On several occasions, he is even alone with Harry for extended periods of time. Why did he have to wait until the end of the school year to get Harry out of the school when he could have just easily stunned Harry and kidnapped him on at least a half dozen separate occasions? (And don't say anything about Hogwarts not allowing apparition, that school has more security flaws and secret ways out than it has in). Why does he spend so much time in Hogwarts surrounded by people who actually knew Mad-Eye beforehand and would be likely to figure out he's not who he says he is the longer he stays?
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"My lord, can't I just stun him and-"
"NO! THAT WON'T NEARLY LOOK COOL ENOUGH!"
I know all of this boils down to Voldemort being obsessed with making a spectacle of it, but when resurrection is on the line, being showy should really take a backseat to executing a plan with a high chance of succeeding.

The first three books had well-executed twist endings, and I think in this event, Rowling tried to outdo herself. In crafting an ending that looked cool, coherency was put by the wayside, and an already overlong and plot-hole-riddled book gets a few more massive holes punched in it. I won't necessarily call it a bad ending, but I will call it a very disappointing one.  
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But hey, at least Voldemort looks creepy.
So what do you think? Do you agree with my sentiments, or are you fine with the ending as is? Do you also think the Harry Potter books endings could have used less deus ex machine and a little more logic? Sound off in the comments! 

And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Facebook: http://facebook.com/mattcarterauthor 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MCarterAuthor
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    Author

    Matt Carter is an author of Horror, Sci-Fi, and yes even a little bit of Young Adult fiction. Along with his wife, F.J.R. Titchenell, he is represented by Fran Black of Literary Counsel and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, CA.

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