Harry Potter

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Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy books written by J.K. Rowling, whose plot can be summed up as:

An Evil Overlord that was thought to be long gone is coming back. The Chosen One must defeat him by embarking on a epic quest to destroy magical objcets related to said Evil Overlord - objects that reveal ties between Our Hero and the antagonist. He has the assistance of a wise old Wizard with a long grey beard, that will leave him along the journey. Yes, you've seen it before

It's a much beloved young adult fantasy series that started as a story for kids and kinda grew in tone along with the age of the audience. Yes, you've seen that before, too

Oh, did I mention that the boy is an orphan living with his uncles and that the Evil Guy killed his parents?.

Would you like to know more?

The story is about an orphaned boy who one day finds out he's a wizard and so goes to a Wizard boarding school where he makes friends, learns magic, does magical sports, learns about his family and gets wrapped up in affairs involving a Dark Wizard version of Hitler called Lord Voldemort and his associated assholes (including a Dark Wizard version of the Klan called Death Eaters and Nazgul rip-offs called Dementors).

The books sold really well, got a series of very popular movies which grossed higher than any other series of movies in history, probably got a fair bit of people interested in fantasy literature (given that they were mainly targeted to young adult readers) and generated a moderate amount of skub back in its day before the haters moved onto things which were more uniformly panned. Given the target audience, it was also inevitable that the fandom created an unholy amount of fanfiction, including what's universally recognized as the worst fanfiction ever.

In general the series has good characters, even though the main cast looks a bit lacklustre when you think about them, and the main antagonist has not much to him besides "I'm Hitler, but with magic".

The lore and world-building is at best hit and miss, and sometimes you feel that the author is pulling deus ex machinas and lore out of her ass to railroad the story forward, but the series is not the worst gateway drug to the world of fantasy literature a young kid could have, even if traditionalists would favor Tolkien.

Eh, no reason you can't try both.

Main Cast

• Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived and main protagonist. An unassuming English kid with glasses that obtains a pet owl, and takes up his preordained destiny to enter a secret world of magic hidden in plain sight. The Dark Lord tried to kill him when he was a toddler, but his parents loved him and the spell bounced and made the the Dark Lord vanish instead (if that raises questions you've probably already put more thought into it than the author did). Went to stay with his abusive parents and didn't notice he was a Wizard until a hobo came to his house and told him. Not the smartest knife in the drawer, and for much of the series he's actually more hated than loved by the wizardry world due to him being an angsty kid and the author caterign to the needs of his angsty kid audicente.
• Hermione Granger: Smart nerd girl and probably your first erection. When she gets a magical object that allows her to travel through time she uses it to study more instead of, for example, solving every problem ever. Out of the blue she decided to bone the Comic Relief character at the end of the last book despite treating him as a dimwit for 7 years.
• Ron Weasley: Redhead comic relief. That's about it. Once he had a pet rat that was an old hairy man in disguise and slept with him. His brothers, due to the Marauder's Map (a magical object that shows the location of everybody in Hogwarts, with all the unfortunate implications), probably knew about this and was totally ok with it.

Harry Potter stuff relating to tabletop games

• Harry Potter and the Tabletop RPG
• There are up to several GURPS modifications for a Harry Potter-themed setting.