Word Count: 5300

Reading Time: 40 Minutes

I tossed my Harry Potter books when I moved out of my parents’ house. Part of me regrets it now because of how sentimental they were to me, but they took up too much space. Harry Potter was the biggest literary phenomenon in my lifetime and (if you ask someone who doesn’t read) saved the entire medium from irrelevancy.

The first time I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, I had just gotten my own room separate from my siblings and fantasized every night about an owl showing up at my window with a Hogwarts acceptance letter. My mother, unwilling to buy a new Harry Potter novel every time they came out, got Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets from the library only for our dog to chew on the cover. That was the only time our dog ever went after a book, but my mother had learned her lesson.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was a tonal shift for the series in a way I didn’t understand the gravitas of at the time. I didn’t know then that it was being written during a massive marketing push from Warner Brothers and its parent company Time Warner; now that the series’ future was secure, it was time to drop the kid shit. A positive reception led to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire nearly doubling the word count with a complex story that did not pull its punches. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the longest book in the entire series and very bleak. Every character was miserable all the time, and it was the greatest gift a teenage fan could ask for.

I don’t remember reading the last two novels for the first time. Also, I’m not sure I ever read them a second time. They took up space on the shelf, though! And you could see this very obvious gradient from well-worn childhood favorites to nearly pristine final installments.

For some time now, I’ve wondered if perhaps Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (or: The Philosopher’s Stone) may actually be a brilliant novel held down by bad faith criticism and poor long-term serialization. Many of the things the series is heavily criticized for are present here but work well in the context of a standalone book. There’s also plenty critics forget is good and fun to read. Revisiting the novel, can we find value that was lost to time?

A Brief Summary of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Orphaned Harry Potter lives with his cruel aunt and uncle who spoil their own child Dudley but berate Harry and force him to do the housework. Shortly before his eleventh birthday, Harry starts receiving letters in the mail that his uncle tries to keep from him, but Harry soon learns from a giant man named Hagrid that he is a wizard set to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. His parents did not die in an accident but were killed by the infamous “Lord Voldemort”; Harry alone survived as an infant by somehow reflecting the killing curse back at Voldemort and killing him. During an excursion to get school supplies, Hagrid also picks up a mystery package from a bank vault shortly before it is broken into by an unknown person.

At school, Harry engages with characters such as the brash Ron Weasley, overbearing Hermione Granger, bumbling Neville Longbottom, and sneering Draco Malfoy. Being out after bed results in Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville finding a forbidden corridor where a giant three-headed dog “Fluffy” guards a trapdoor. Harry receives an “invisibility cloak” from a mysterious benefactor claiming it belonged to Harry’s father. This leads him to discover the magic “Mirror of Erised” (which reflects only a person’s deepest desire) and meet, for the first time, enigmatic headmaster Albus Dumbledore, who gives him some words of wisdom before departing.

Harry also must contend with the menacing Professor Severus Snape, who seems to hate him with a passion. Clues suggest that Snape might be trying to find the Philosopher’s Stone that Hagrid took from the bank, even bullying the cowardly Professor Quirrell into explaining how to get it, but it’s fortunately guarded by Fluffy. Things take a turn for the worse when Harry enters the Forbidden Forest for detention and encounters a shambling figure the local centaurs claim is what remains of Voldemort, winnowed by his encounter with Harry as an infant but not dead. Harry is convinced that Snape wants the Stone not for himself but to resurrect Voldemort.

So Harry, Ron, and Hermione go through the trapdoor and manage to pass the tests guarding the Stone. Harry alone reaches the final chamber to discover not Snape but Quirrell, who has been secretly working for Voldemort all along. The last test is the Mirror of Erised, and unlike Quirrell, Harry is able to use it to acquire the Stone. This results in him facing the specter of Voldemort but managing to defend himself for long enough that Dumbledore arrives to take control of the situation.

While he recovers in the hospital wing, Harry learns from Dumbledore that the Philosopher’s Stone has been destroyed to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Dumbledore also reveals that he was the one to gift Harry the invisibility cloak. As the year winds to a close, Harry returns home to his aunt and uncle; everyone is sad to see him return to that horrid place, but Harry is convinced that things will be better now.

There’s a Lot of Good Here that Often Goes Overlooked

The Wonder of Fantasy

Scattered through my notes are a lot of little positives that belong in a lecture on writing with children in mind. In places, The Philosopher’s Stone reads like a bedtime story complete with vivid descriptions and phonetic sound effects. Techniques such as having a rival who parallels the bully from Harry’s home life is satisfying and keeps the Dursleys feeling relevant. Quidditch is exactly the kind of over-engineered sport a child would come up with and obsess over.

But I want to focus on the fairytale aesthetic. Fantasy in the modern consciousness feels mostly defined by The Lord of the Rings and its derivatives. Whimsey doesn’t capture the adult imagination so easily as the politics in Game of Thrones. If you want something that feels magical, you need the child-friendly writing of Brian Jacques, L. Frank Baum, or J.K. Rowling.

Several boys of about Harry’s age had their noses pressed against a window with broomsticks in it… There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels’ eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon…

This narration contributes to the engaging slow pace of the story. It’s common for modern fiction to hit the ground running and use inferred worldbuilding instead of lingering the way The Philosopher’s Stone does. Harry being an outsider allows for the gradual introduction to a world that is easy to forge an emotional connection with from only a small glimpse at what a magical London may look like. Hogwart continues that theme: The surprise of sweeping gothic interiors, moving portraits, and shifting staircases all contribute to the grandeur of the aesthetic.

History class being taught by a ghost is also very funny.

Then there were doors that wouldn’t open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren’t really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor could walk.

One of the biggest advantages of writing speculative fiction is the ability to literalize metaphors and symbolism. The Philosopher’s Stone is escapist fantasy featuring a character who flees their toxic home environment into a magical world. It can be easy to lose that feature if you don’t give in to the silliness just a little, especially when writing for children.

A Well-Integrated Mystery

Harry Potter is a mystery series, each book taking time to establish a narrative backdrop before introducing some secret or scheme to be investigated. A lot of foreshadowing is able to slip into the books disguised as worldbuilding because the main plot often isn’t explicitly tied into the inciting incident. Perhaps it’s a criticism to say Rowling’s clues are most effective when sprinkled in before the audience is aware they’re reading a mystery novel, but a magic trick needs misdirection to work. As a child, it was exciting to see one-off adventures—Norbert the Dragon, the troll on Halloween, the Mirror of Erised, even chocolate frog cards—tied into a complete narrative.

The novel does a good job keeping the audience on their toes with red herrings and misdirections. It’s exciting to a first-time reader who thinks of mysteries as stuffy old Victorian novels. Harry and his friends are convinced that Professor Snape wants the Philosopher’s Stone in order to live forever. Even this distraction is a push in the right direction. They recognize that someone contributing to the magical defenses guarding the Stone would have an easier time getting past them, but they have the situation backward in a way that young readers are unlikely to guess ahead of time.

But this would fall flat if the payoff was bad. Discovering that the true motivation for finding the Stone is to bring Lord Voldemort back from the brink of death raises the stakes dramatically, and it feels like a surprise while still being hinted at periodically through the pain in Harry’s scar. Harry is able to deduce that Norbert the Dragon’s egg was a ploy to get information from Hagrid and that Dumbledore was lured away to create an opportunity to nab the Stone. Still, it’s only when Harry reaches the end of the gauntlet and finds Quirrell with the Mirror of Erised that everything starts coming into focus.

“Severus?” Quirrell laughed, and it wasn’t his usual quivering treble, either, but cold and sharp. “Yes, Severus does seem the type, doesn’t he? So useful to have him swooping around like an overgrown bat. Next to him, who would suspect p-p-poor, st-stuttering P-Professor Quirrell?”

Harry couldn’t take it in. This couldn’t be true, it couldn’t.

“But Snape tried to kill me!”

“No, no, no. I tried to kill you. Your friend Miss Granger accidentally knocked me over as she rushed to set fire to Snape at that Quidditch match. She broke my eye contact with you. Another few seconds and I’d have got you off that broom. I’d have managed it before then if Snape hadn’t been muttering a countercurse, trying to save you.”

See Past the Surface

Characters in this book are all a bit over-the-top. Dumbledore is eccentric, Neville clumsy, Snape cruel, and Quirrell cowardly. It makes them easy to identify and remember for children while still allowing them to defy their assigned archetype in surprising ways. There are exceptions to this—Harry is fairly straightforward while Ron, Hermione, and Draco don’t do much to veer from our first impressions of them—but many important characters are engaging specifically because of their hidden depth.

Quirrell is lying about who he is, presenting as a nervous young man who returned from a year of fieldwork scared of anything and everything. In the climax, he is calm, threatening, and in control. He actively hides his true nature in order to throw off suspicion, fully aware he can take advantage of Snape’s poor reputation to protect himself. And yet he is a coward even if he won’t admit it to himself; he conceals who he is and allows himself to be berated and tormented by the specter of Voldemort.

Snape is exactly what he appears to be but with an additional secret. He favors Slytherin House unfairly, gives out cruel punishments for minor offenses, and hates Harry with a passion over a schoolboy grudge against his father. But Snape was indeed protecting the Philosopher’s Stone and went out of his way to save Harry’s life. Neither of those facts exonerate his behavior, but they demonstrate a sense of honor that is absent from Quirrell or Malfoy.

Harry spends the novel convinced that Snape is plotting something sinister because he “does seem the type.” Harry also sympathizes with Quirrell, even silently praising him for not giving into Snape. This subversion is important because it drives home for child readers that cruel people are not always scheming or lying and that cowards are not necessarily good people. Quirrell uses people’s biases to hide his evil behavior behind a mask, and people in real life do the same, so it benefits children to engage with that idea in a safe way through fiction.

But there’s more. Neville seems to be a mistake, “not brave enough for Gryffindor.” He’s a hopeless punching back for much of the story despite Ron encouraging him to defend himself from Malfoy. It’s a surprise to see him prevent Harry from leaving the dormitory at the climax. Though this is presented as an obstacle, Neville is rewarded in the final chapter when Dumbledore publicly announces, “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.” Neville may not think himself brave, but his reputation as a poor student with no friends doesn’t hold him back from being celebrated. He’s regarded by Dumbledore (and hopefully the audience) as the equal of a famous hero for embodying the same honesty and courage.

It’s significant that Dumbledore is the one who congratulates Neville. Dumbledore is a very distant mentor figure, important to Harry’s growth but rarely present. The story presents him as… a little off.

“Welcome,” [Dumbledore] said. “Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!

“Thank you!”

He sat back down. Everybody clapped and cheered. Harry didn’t know whether to laugh or not.

“Is he—a bit mad?” he asked Percy uncertainly.

“Mad?” said Percy airily. “He’s a genius! Best wizard in the world! But he is a bit mad, yes. Potatoes, Harry?”

Dumbledore is (at least in this novel) the wisest wizard there ever was while still being playful in comparison to traditional, strict authority figures like Professor McGonagall. It makes him hard to pin down for young audiences. The first time Harry meets him, Dumbeldore talks mostly in riddles, but following the climax, they’re able to speak more plainly. Dumbledore approaches the heavy discussion of Voldemort and the Stone with levity and tact, focusing on the gifts brought by Harry’s friends and giving Harry a chance to dry his tears without being embarrassed. Everybody praises Dumbledore, and it’s easy to see why even if it’s hard to put into words. McGonagall and Snape demand respect, but Dumbledore simply has the gravity and serenity of a wise man, so he doesn’t worry about not being taken seriously.

Voldemort and the Philosophy of Death

In the final chapter, Dumbledore sits down with Harry to talk about what happened with Quirrell. “[The truth] is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with caution,” he warns Harry, but he explains all he can about Voldemort’s survival, Nicolas Flamel, and the significance of the sacrifice Harry’s parents made for him. Adults are often afraid to talk about death with children, believing (correctly) that they’ll have a hard time understanding it. The Philosopher’s Stone does a good job capturing the ethereal nature of death in the eyes of a young kid. It’s scary but somehow mundane, something we live with and in fear of, and how we face it says much about who we are.

The full context of Lord Voldemort’s reign of terror isn’t described in this book, but one gets the impression of a serial killer cult leader. Even though he’s long dead, people are afraid of his very name, preferring to call him “You-Know-Who” instead. It’s outright scandalous for Harry to do otherwise. “He was starting to get a prickle every time You-Know-Who was mentioned,” the narration explains. “He supposed it was all part of entering the magical world, but it had been a lot more comfortable saying ‘Voldemort’ without worrying.”

There wouldn’t be a novel if Harry’s parents hadn’t died when he was a baby. Losing them also meant losing the life he would have had with them, and it’s keenly felt in how foreign the magical world is to Harry. He grew up instead with abusive relatives who left him lonely and malnourished only to be thrust into a spotlight that would not exist if his life wasn’t defined by his parents’ death. But there is still no parent who doesn’t understand the decision Harry’s parents made for him. Literally, their sacrifice saved Harry’s life, a protection that extends to Harry’s encounter with Voldemort at the climax. Though Voldemort feared death the way characters in this novel fear him, Harry’s parents did neither; their relationship to death changed when they had a child to protect.

At the climax, Harry again faces the Mirror of Erised with the challenge of using it to find the Philosopher’s Stone, a magical artifact that can grant eternal life to whoever uses it. Anyone who looked into the mirror with the intent of using the stone will only see themselves doing so; Harry has only been able to use the mirror to see himself with his parents. Only by processing his feelings about his parents (for the moment!) and focusing on the immediate future is Harry able to see himself finding the stone in the mirror, at which point it appears to him. Again, we see that literalization of themes and metaphor: Harry is worthy of holding the symbol of life once he has accepted death and faced its specter—Voldemort—without fear. It's not that nobody else could, it's just what Harry needed the most.

In the hospital wing afterward, Dumbledore is delighted to discover that Harry knows all about Nicolas Flamel, the inventor of the Philosopher’s Stone. It wasn’t enough for Harry to know what was happening, he needed to understand it as well. Dumbledore explains that without the Stone, Flamel and his wife will die very soon. “To one as young as you, I’m sure it seems incredible, but to Nicolas and Perenelle, it really is like going to bed after a very, very long day. After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” Harry is too young to process death the way an adult does, but it has still been part of his life as much as it is for any kid in the real world. Dumbledore still wants him to understand that it’s not something to fear; Voldemort continues on, neither truly alive but unable to be killed and still longing for power, but Dumbledore says, “Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”

Ultimately, Harry cares less about facing Voldemort or holding the Philosopher’s Stone than he does receiving a scrapbook of pictures of his parents. If that isn’t a sign that the story has its priorities straight, then nothing is. This willingness to engage honestly with children about serious matters makes Harry Potter more than a silly children’s book about a school for magic tricks.

Some Stuff Only Works in Context

The Danger is Part of the Appeal

People die at Hogwarts; no reasonable parent would send an eleven year old child somewhere so dangerous. This is something we just have to accept as part of our willing suspension of disbelief. In order for Hogwarts to be a place of adventure, a “magical kingdom in the form of a school” as described by screenwriter John Truby in The Anatomy of Story, the danger must be real and heightened compared to the normal world Harry leaves.

I want to take pains to avoid the “Thermian argument.” Coined by Dan Olson, this strange variation of scapegoating pretends that the world of the story is “real” in the sense that weak plot developments, out of character behavior, or bigoted stereotypes can be justified with in-universe explanations. The author is treated as a reporter of “true” events rather than a craftsman who made decisions about what their product would look like. I’m not here to defend the actions of characters but instead to show how the decisions of the writer add meaningful weight to the narrative that would not exist if she, like some fans, treated the story as a real world that could be held to our standards of safety and morality.

Moving staircases are a security nightmare. Telling students that out-of-bounds areas are literally deadly is just going to provoke troublemakers looking for a thrill. The Forbidden Forest is actually dangerous well beyond what we see in the book. But none of this is unusual in the kind of children’s adventure series I read growing up. We normally think of a school as a safe place (or did, once upon a time), so it’s tempting to condemn the adults for allowing danger to exist there, but without it, there wouldn’t be an exciting story at all.

This is why the Philosopher’s Stone is kept at Hogwarts behind a handful of puzzle traps that couldn’t keep out three pre-teens. Regardless of the in-universe justification for not guarding it better, for the story to be about the Stone, it must be present for the characters to engage with. A climax where heroes wait patiently for a responsible adult to take care of things is just not fun.

Looking at the setting and plot strictly through the eyes of an adult and not the loose understanding of the world that a child has does the novel a disservice. The desire to protect children from harm overwhelms some adults’ ability to understand how the implicit freedom of embracing danger sparks a child’s sense of wonder. It only feels inappropriate because later books will try to appeal to teenagers by pretending the world is more comprehensive than it actually is, and that shift in tone recontextualizes a lot of the events in The Philosopher’s Stone and The Chamber of Secrets in particular.

Dumbledore can do No Wrong Here

Nobody in this series gets more flak than headmaster of Hogwarts Albus Dumbledore. No decision he made during the series (or before!) has escaped being torn apart and scrutinized for a bad-faith interpretation. According to some fans, Dumbledore is the true villain of the series (after the writer and wizard supremacists). It’s rare to see interpretations of the character as anything but stupid or malevolent despite him being the type of headmaster any student would love and look up to. Many people felt so betrayed by his shift from kindly mentor to plotting antihero in later books that it’s easy to overlook how he is the perfect teacher for Harry.

Dumbledore encourages Harry’s inquisitiveness that every other authority figure tries to stifle. He surreptitiously gives Harry the invisibility cloak and always seems to know more about what Harry is up to than he should. “He’s a funny man, Dumbledore,” Harry says to his friends. “I think he knows more or less everything that goes on here… instead of stopping us, he just taught us enough to help… It’s almost like he thought I had the right to face Voldemort if I could…” As a mentor, his duty is to facilitate Harry’s growth as a hero despite the danger it puts him in; he doesn’t interfere with smuggling a baby dragon but does appear when Harry is in danger of becoming obsessed with the Mirror of Erised. His approval as the wisest figure in the story, the man who knows so much that others regard him as mad, is synonymous with the narrative’s approval of Harry’s decisions.

Later retcons make it hard for people to see Dumbledore as anything but an incredibly careless man who sees people as tools. But there is a humanity to Dumbledore that comes across incredibly well in the brief glimpses we get of him. It’s most noticeable in his last conversation with Harry.

“I feared I might be too late.”

“You nearly were, I couldn’t have kept the Stone off him much longer–”

“Not the Stone, boy, you–the effort involved nearly killed you. For one terrible moment there, I was afraid it had. As for the Stone, it has been destroyed.”

Harry is only concerned with the fate of the Philosopher’s Stone, the object of power that the narrative revolves around and that could bring Voldemort back to power. Dumbledore only cares that Harry is alright; the stone is an afterthought. It’s easy to get bogged down in trying to deduce the optimal way for Dumbledore to protect the stone without Harry ever learning about it, to treat the narrative like a puzzle to be solved, and miss what is obvious to the old man: This is a story about Harry Potter. Keeping him in the dark like McGonnagall and Hagrid and Snape wanted was perhaps the best way to protect him but the worst way to help him.

But a lot of people hate Dumbledore for a simpler reason, and it’s the fact that he’s tied up in how badly Rowling handled the Dursleys. Against the advice of his peers, Dumbledore sends Harry to grow up with an abusive family and then sends him back at the end of the school year. He insists Harry will be better growing up away from the magical world until he’s old enough to process the fame thrust onto him. Later retcons will make this look phenomenally stupid, and Rowling will even try to manufacture a Thermian defense of it, but Dumbledore’s reasoning is solid. What separates Harry from Malfoy is that Malfoy grew up thinking he was different from everyone else. Harry feels more kinship with Ron Weasley—a nobody whose family is looked down on—despite being just as famous or more so than Malfoy. Rowling exaggerates the abusive nature of the Dursleys to the point that making Harry live with them is more cruel than what Dumbledore was trying to avoid, but in a world where the Dursleys were written correctly, it’s a narrative decision that makes sense.

Escapism is a Tool for Empowerment

Or: The Moment I Lose You

The most universally-agreed upon problem with Harry Potter is the fact Harry is forced to return to his abusive family over the summer holidays. It makes your chest grow cold just to think about. Rowling did her best to mitigate how scary the Dursleys’ abuse is by making them cartoonishly over-the-top, but this was the wrong direction. There’s already a pattern in mass media of abuse being shown as too visible not to spot from a mile away, so irrational that nobody in their right mind would do it, and so rare that people don’t have to worry about it in their daily lives. Children may not be able to recognize the horror in how Harry is treated—forbidden to ask questions about his parents, living in a closet, forced to do chores while verbally harassed—but an adult certainly should. It’s bad enough that nobody steps in to do anything about it, but it makes Dumbledore look like a heartless monster.

The Dursleys are badly executed as a narrative device, but there is a logic to how they’re used. I don’t mean to justify the way abuse is depicted in this story—it was a mistake, and the editor should have said something—but to simply explain the Durlseys' role in the narrative. In a world where the writer was more competent and handled the topic of an unhappy home life seriously, the Dursleys would be a vital pillar of the overarching themes of escapism and empowerment.

Harry comes from a troubled family life, which many children can (and did!) relate to. It’s common for kids in this situation to fantasize that they’re adopted or somehow special in a way that singles them out to be swept up into an exciting life of adventure far from the things they live with at home. But when Harry arrives at Hogwarts, it’s to be confronted by Malfoy, Snape, and Voldemort.

Snape and Malfoy are members of Slytherin House, rival to Gryffindor House where Harry and friends reside. I’m almost entirely indifferent to the Hogwarts houses, but as everyone has said, it’s not good that there’s a designated evil house. Or at least it’s not good that the idea isn’t meaningfully challenged across the series. All the bullies and people the narrative says it’s okay to bully (more on that later, I promise) are lumped in there; if Dudley were a wizard, he’d be in Slytherin.

Above, I talked about the importance of seeing past appearances, but I don’t believe the purpose of Snape or Malfoy is to be secretly complex or redeemable (at least, not here). Their narrative function is to add depth to the escapism. Harry is free from his bullies at home—child and adult alike—but not free from bullying. Snape shows Harry that the magical world is not going to coddle him, and going to adults about Malfoy won’t fix things any more than going to adults would have stopped Dudley. But the magical world gives Harry tools to react and thrive against these new challenges in a way that he couldn’t at home.

While Malfoy is a bully, he’s positioned as a rival in a way that Dudley never was. Any time Harry and him are in conflict, such as over Norbert the dragon or detention in the Forbidden Forest, Harry comes out on top through courage and Malfoy ends up embarrassed because of his cowardice. The most characteristic moment for Malfoy in the book must be when he challenges Harry to a magical duel past curfew only to snitch to the caretaker that students would be out past bedtime. It shows that he has no honor whatsoever and makes it extremely satisfying to see him bumble and fail while Harry succeeds now that he finally has a chance to make decisions for himself.

The very last line of the book has Harry explaining that the Dursleys don’t know he’s not allowed to use magic at home. Dudley has always treated Harry as “his favorite punching bag,” and in the opening chapters, we get a very good understanding of how frustrating it can be to live around people who are openly abusive without having the power to react. The sentiment that Harry is going to “have a lot of fun with Dudley this summer” can certainly be read as a reversal of fortune—that Harry will be the bully now—but it’s crucial to the theme of escapism.

Hogwarts is more fun than the real world, more empowering than the real world, and it feels safer than the real world by virtue of the dangers being less realistic. But the emotional strength Harry finds at Hogwarts is something he will have to bring back with him in order to weather his troubled home life. While children will be sad that Harry doesn’t get to stay in the magical world, they understand intuitively—in a way that seems to escape many adults—that fiction is a temporary escape where they can practice emotions and values that will help them in reality. Harry Potter simply literalizes that.

End of Part 1

In part 2, we will explore the genuine problems in the book and how the passage of time has affected the way the series is seen by fans and critics.

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