Cool! I love Harry Potter! I started reading them two years ago this spring. My favorite is the last one, but I really like the third one, too.

TOP!

Yeah, I know 2 people who say the 3rd is there favorite. That one is pretty good, but I think the 4rth (the one I'm on) is better,

I just feel like they're too boring. They follow the same formula for each book, and it's really predictable. Like: tortured at his aunt and uncle's\escapes\goes to hogwarts\"strange things" happen\later find out someone's  out to kill him\ fight voldemort\ go back to his parents house. 

@Blonde Heroines Rule: Funny, I just started the 5th one. I'll keep your warning in mind when I read it, though. What did you not like about it??

@Blonde Heroines Rule:

TEAL DEER AHOY. A lot of it. Also spoilers for OotP, but they're marked.

Out of curiosity, are you a teenager? Because if you're not... um, it's rough. And I say this as someone who had an extremely mild time of it in comparison to 99% of the population, because I didn't—and still don't—experience attraction towards anyone. But, yeah, the early years of teenagerdom—12-13, for me—were like a never-ending cycle of misery and being absolutely furious with basically everything and everyone.

I mean, I outright loathed basically anyone I came across and my "friends" were the people whose company I could tolerate enough to not bite their heads off every two seconds. Barely. I got into almost daily shouting matches with my mother, extreme mood swings (I mean, one minute I would be in a murderous rage and the next I would be in the absolute depths of self-loathing for absolutely no reason whatsoever) experience about one anxiety attack per month (not all of them were completely debilitating, but the ones that were left me even more out of sorts for days on end), give or take, got smacked in the face with extreme chronic insomnia for no reason whatsoever (and not helped by the fact that my mother thought I was faking it for attention, but that's another matter entirely and unrelated to adolescence), and deliberately sabotaged my own education because I simply could not bring myself to care (I could have gotten straight A's without much effort, and did in the classes that actually interested me [English, mostly]; in everything else I averaged high C's because I never did any homework and occasionally fell asleep over tests). 

And despite all that, I was widely considered to be unusually level-headed by the adult figures in my life (sans mother, who got the worst of it—although in comparison to my sister, I was quite level-headed). Admittedly, this was at least partly because I didn't (and still don't) give much outward sign of what I felt—I've always been the type to silently stew instead of exploding when I'm feeling particularly emotional (except with mother, as I mentioned).

I also basically stopped doing all of the above (except the insomnia—I still have that today and have been clinically diagnosed and have medication for it) around the time I turned 14. Most of the people I know didn't peter out until several years later—there's a very good reason I didn't really have any real life friends during my freshman and sophomore years in high school, because all my peers were still busy having their brains eaten by wildly osscilating hormone levels. 

So the point I'm trying to make is that making the transition from "child" to "adult" is really, really, really emotionally and mentally stressful and you basically turn into a self-centered, highly emotional, out-of-control brat regardless of how nice or rational you happen to actually be. It's just a thing: your brain is merrily reorganizing itself without the slightest respect for how you feel about it, and you're being flooded daily with all these hormones that make you feel EXTREME and often conflicting emotions over the SLIGHTEST stimulii—which is why teens are often portrayed at equating, say, a minor squabble with a friend to armaggeddon. The only thing you can do really is sing as you go, but you also don't feel much like singing.

And Harry, in addition to all that nonsense, (1) has a psychotic, genocidal maniac trying to kill him, and (2) lives under a government that is actively trying to discredit and render powerless him and the people who are trying to protect him from the aforementioned genocidal maniac. 

In consideration of all that, I say Harry's acting like a self-centered and out-of-control brat is completely understandable, even if it makes me want to shake him and tell him he's being an idiot. Because he is.

**MAJOR SPOILERS FOR GOF AND ONWARDS SPOILERS! FROM HERE TO THE END OF THE POST! LOTS OF SPOILERS!**

Everything bad that happens to him after he gets to Hogwarts in Fifth Year is ENTIRELY HIS FAULT, because he can't keep his temper in check, can't watch his mouth, can't simply keep his head down and ignore Umbridge's goading, and refuses to stop and think sensibly about anything. Yes, Umbridge went out of her way to provoke him, and yes, Snape towed the line of actually sabotaging their Occlumency lessons by using them at least in part as a vehicle to torment Harry (although strictness-bordering-on-verbal-abuse does kind of seem to be Snape's default teaching strategy, so I don't think he was TRYING to sabotage the lessons—it's just that his caustic personality and teaching style and his hatred for and inability to behave like an adult with regards to Harry really don't mix well), and yes, Harry was under a lot of pressure from all sides.

But ultimately the only person who is responsible for Harry's actions is Harry. If he hadn't mouthed off to Umbridge, he wouldn't have been put in all those detentions. If he'd controlled his temper on the Quidditch pitch, he wouldn't have been kicked off the team. If he'd bothered to put EVEN THE SLIGHTEST EFFORT into the techniques Snape tried to teach him, he'd have learnt how to do Occlumency properly. If he'd practiced self-restraint and not gone trawling through Snape's pensieve, his Occlumency lessons would have continued. If he'd done those last two, he probably wouldn't have had That Vision. And even if he HAD had That Vision, if he'd bothered to stop and think about it, he'd either have realized (a) that Hermione was right and it didn't make sense and that they should TELL AN AUTHORITY FIGURE WITH CONNECTIONS TO THE ORDER, EVEN IF IT'S SNAPE, or (b) remembered about the two-way mirror; either way, he wouldn't have gone to the Ministry and Sirius wouldn't have died.

And Harry realizes this. And that's why it's okay that everything is his fault, from a reader's perspective anyway. He screwed up MAJORLY in OotP, and he pays for it in the form of horrible punishments and ultimately Sirius's death. And I'm convinced that part of the reason Harry gets so, so upset in Dumbledore's office afterwards is that he knows it's all his fault (and not like how he thinks Cedric was his fault—there's literally no way Harry could have known what would happen and he was honestly trying to do the decent thing, ergo Cedric's death wasn't Harry's fault) and he's projecting his anger with himself at Dumbledore. 

But the point is, as soon as Harry realizes what a brat he's been, he grows up post haste. There is no sign of angsty!capslock!Harry in HBP; he's by no means perfect, but he's stopped being an impulsive, rage-filled jerk. Character development, and LOTS of it. 

Cho is also adrift in the sea of Being A Teenager, and she hasn't exactly had it easy either; her boyfriend was murdered less than a year ago, a fact which the Ministry has been blithely covering up and minimalizing in its quest to discredit Harry's and Dumbledore's story about Voldemort's return, and she's vaguely infatuated with the only witness to said former boyfriend's death. And Harry, especially angsty!capslock!Harry, is really, really insensitive and tactless and doesn't know how to deal with his feelings for Cho. Of course it all blows up in their faces on the first date. 

I don't speak from personal experience here, but most (all but one) of my friends and my sister dated pretty seriously in high school (well, as seriously as you can get in high school, which appears to consist of hanging out whenever possible and snogging in hallways a lot. And then having a big emotional blowup and gossiping nastily about each other post-break-up. I don't get it, but everyone does it to a greater or lesser extent. High school was weird) and the awkward I-like-you-you-like-me-but-we-have-no-idea-how-to-relate-to-each-other-outside-of-awkwardly-kissing thing seemed standard for most relationships, at the start at least. Occassionally a couple would get beyond that and then they would just be like friends who happened to kiss each other sometimes and get jealous over weird things (...I think? That's what it looked like to me...), but mostly it was the emotional rollercoaster/inability to communicate properly thing that Cho and Harry did.

So, again, it was pretty realistic in that teenagers, generally speaking, WANT to be in relationships for... some... reason... but are also REALLY REALLY BAD at it, and they're too impatient to just wait until their hormones and things have calmed down to have a go at it, so they just make an utter mess of things usually. And I applaud JK for managing to show that without being totally annoying or derailing her ACTUAL plot. (The same goes for the entirely natural growth of the Harry/Ginny relationship—they're good friends, they have chemistry, they're attracted to each other, it's not immediate TWU WUB, they're sensible about it, they last all of six months before breaking up on good terms—that seems about average for 16/17-year-olds in relationships, from what I've seen, although the "good terms" part is hugely variable and most relationships don't, obviously, end because of the threat of insane evil maniacs)

I mean, Harry's not a kid any more. He's not going to act like one. 

As for Sirius: He's an arrogant, emotionally immature jerk and his treatment of Harry is frankly appalling. I mean, he essentially clings to him because he expects Harry to be a carbon copy of James, and Harry isn't, and even if he were, that's a terribly damaging thing to do to anyone, especially to someone like Harry, who (a) grew up unwanted and unloved and (b) is going through the previously-discussed Year of Horribleness. It basically gives the subconscious message that Sirius doesn't care about Harry himself and only "likes" him because he is a reminder of somebody else. Also, in general Sirius acts like an entitled fifteen-year-old (his behavior is alarmingly similar to Harry's at times; sulking because he doesn't want Harry to go back to school, anyone? Purposefully going against Dumbledore's orders—which are for his own protection—to escort Harry to the platform when he knows that the Death Eaters know about his Animagus form AND that everyone outside the Order thinks he's a lunatic criminal working for Voldemort and that he would probably be executed or shipped to the Dementors for a Kiss were he discovered? And the fact that the only difference between Snape's memory!Sirius and today!Sirius is that the past one was less angsty, a change wrought by the Dementors? To say nothing of refusing to see the "feed Snape to Lupin!" thing as anything but an amusing joke. Yeah...)

I do like him. I do. But I also want to slap him and tell him to grow up and caking act his age because he is basically an emotionally stunted teenager.

And finally, on Umbridge: She wasn't annoying, she was heinous. She was every sadistic, unreasonable, pig-headed, patronizing, sickeningly-sweet, toady teacher ever to torment a student rolled into one delicious, fluffy ball of horribleness, PLUS the worst kind of governmental corruption and beaurocratic stupidity personified. And she wore fuzzy pink sweaters and liked kittens and excessive sugar in her tea. She was like an evil, deliberately stupid/un-chessmastery Margolotta.

(I know that probably means nothing to you. That's okay. Just know that Lady Margolotta is one of my absolute favorite characters in the Discworld series and she is, while not evil, not a very nice person at all, but she makes a show of being overly sweet/a vampire's idea of what a human "motherly" person would be like (fluffy pink sweaters [with bats on], chintz upholstery, passive-aggressively patronizing, that sort of thing...) and she appears to very much like "accidentally" pressing people's buttons to see what happens when they get upset or angry. She's also a lot smarter than Umbridge and far less corrupt, but the similarity is there.)

And that's awesome. Because Umbridge, unlike Voldemort, is utterly, utterly loathesome. Voldemort had a bad childhood and that, combined with his sociopathy, sent him down the path to being the cruel, evil psychopath he is in Harry Potter. But he's also pretty generic, as villains go. His backstory is interesting, but nothing particularly new. He appears to feel no emotions except hatred and rage and narcissistic self love. He's boring.* Umbrigde, on the other hand...

*That said, Tom Riddle has all kinds of potential for being pushed in different directions. Which is why Voldemort is one of my least favorite characters and Tom Riddle is one of my favorites. Don't question me. :D 

There is something about characters that wear fluffy pink sweaters and like adorable little kittens that just makes me go "awwww..." Even though I, personally, don't care much for either—my clothing aesthetic runs more to cool, muted colors and varying shades of grey, and I think certain species of birds and reptiles are cuter than kittens (usually. I make exceptions for extremely cute kittens...), characters who like them to excess just... it gives them a lot of character, and it does so in different ways depending on what they're like.

Because, you see, with Margolotta—who is mostly on the protagonist's side when she appears in the Discworld books, and moreover is portrayed as capable of actually being nice when it suits her and is generally a more likeable character than Umbridge—the insistence on fluffy sweaters and whatnot is adorable and a bit, er, sad? (that's not really the right word. melancholy, perhaps? but there's always something a bit... forlorn about non-humans who try to act human and get it almost right. Look at the Doctor for a prime example) (it's also a sign of the fact that she's a *reformed* vampire who doesn't drink human blood—they go a bit nuts because of it, see). Umbridge, on the other hand, is generally an unpleasant but nevertheless sacchrine and pseudo-motherly person, and in her case the cutesy vibes make her seem more childish than huggable.

In both cases, however, it serves to humanize the characters—Margolotta because she is obviously trying very hard to appear human, even though she doesn't get it quite right, and Umbridge because it's a sign that she's not an unfeeling evil robot Ministry lackey: she has things that she likes, and they're cute, stereotypically girly things. And that makes her blind adherence to Ministry policy less inhuman, more actual loyalty to the Ministry itself. I always got the sense that she was so antagonistic to Harry not out of sadism so much as (a) a deep love for the Ministry itself and everything it stands for—order in chaos, protection from danger, that sort of thing, even if the current powers aren't very good at it (and she associates this mostly with status quo anyway—in her view, as long as things stay the same FOR HER, she's safe), and (b) extreme fear that Harry is right and her precious Ministry really is doing the exact opposite of what it's supposed to. And, like frightened people are wont to do, she lashes out at the thing she percieves as causing the problem (Harry) instead of thinking rationally and realizing that the problem is a conflict between what she BELIEVES the Ministry is, and what the Ministry ACTUALLY is (and probably what she believes about HERSELF vs. what she actually DOES as well). 

It's sad. I feel sorry for her, because she's demonstrably human and she has human emotions and human fears and therefore she is deserving of pity.

At the same time, she is, as I said, loathesome. She's a terrible person who does terrible things. She's speciesist (werewolves, halfbreeds, Muggleborns), she happily accepts Voldemort's regime in DH, she actively obstructs the one of the most important parts of the entire school's curriculum and does her best to stick her fingers into the rest of it as well, she antagonizes any students who don't fall in line with her extremely narrow views, she's slavishly devoted to the Ministry to the point that she is incapable of questioning it AT ALL no matter how badly it's acting, she appears to take great joy in physically torturing her students (the blood quill). She's petty, and unreasonable, and arrogant, and willfully stupid, and generally just unpleasant.

She's not Voldemort—she's not actively genocidal, she doesn't go out and murder people (sentence innocent Muggleborns to be Kissed, yes, set a Dementor on Harry, yes, but were she to actually, personally kill someone, I'd bet money she would be traumatized by it, because she's not a psychopath, she's just very good at doublethink and rationalizations, i.e., handing people over to Dementors isn't bad because they go against the Ministry and therefore they MUST be bad and deserving of being Kissed. She's wrong, but so long as she doesn't have to witness the aftermath or the actual Kiss itself, she doesn't have to think about what she's doing.) Anyway, the fact that she, unlike Voldemort, clearly has things she cares about, is not a narcissist, has recognizeable emotions, and yet is still this horrible, evil person, makes her a really, really fascinating character. She's deliciously vile, and it's her humanity, not her vileness, that provokes the most violent emotional reactions. There's a very good reason that a lot of people hate her exponentially more than they hate Voldemort. She's recognizeably human, and hits closer to home because of it. 

She's the sort of character you love to hate, unlike Voldemort, whom you hate because he's the antagonist and obviously evil and you're supposed to hate him. ...Am I making any sense at all whatsoever? I feel like I'm not. But I'll stop because this is already way too TL;DR.

**END RANT AND SPOILERS** 

For the record, yes, I am aware that I am extraordinarily long-winded when I rant about Harry Potter. #Icanquitanytime