Harry Potter

I thought it was all so far fetched that they just kept on allowing obviously evil people, people who were opposed to the very ideals of the school, continue with their plots unchallenged. Then 2020 rolled around and I was like "oh... Well this feels familiar".

Examples? You can't go on a rant and then not give examples.

I would like to highlight Harry's character development throughout the series. Although he made several questionable choices in GOF, OOF, and HBP, we should consider that he is a teenager throughout most of the series. Teenagers, umm, well, aren't great decision-makers. As a teenager, I mostly acted mainly on impulse instead of rational thinking.

And talking about individuals defending themselves, not all perspectives find a receptive audience. A perfect example is in OOF, when Dumbledore testifies before the Minister of Magic about Voldemort's return. His statements are met with scepticism and disbelief, mirroring a similar experience Harry had trying to convince others at Hogwarts.

If you want to share counter-examples, I'd be happy to hear them.

I call it "plot by stupid" but TV tropes calls it idiot plot. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotPlot

Tbh, it's always kinda confused me why hp got such acclaim. They're decent books! I enjoyed reading them several times. However, I wouldn't call them hallmarks of fiction or anything.

Yep! It's basically a form of bad writing.

There's something called an idiot plot, where the plot only works because the characters are idiots. If they just did the obviously correct thing, the tension would resolve too quickly.

It's a much harder task to create drama and tension from believable, likable, sensible, consistent characters. If your characters just CAPSLOCK ANGST DRAMA in every situation, it's way easier to keep tension. Annoying, badly written tension.

I felt the same way by the end of the series.

What bothered me even more was the number of situations that could have been solved with a cell phone or computer.

Like the world-building is absolutely busted. They even have these big-ass libraries and put all this emphasis on learning, but they haven't even started to digitize.

Never once saw a middle-school or teenaged student in a standard math or science class. Weasley's dad was the only one that even thought "muggle stuff" was interesting, but he understood about as well as Ariel understood forks.

Bunch of illiterate magic-dependent isolationists that can't do math or use Google Search. Dumbledore would shit a brick if he found out Hogwarts was on Google Earth that whole time.

Ya' know, maybe voldemort would have maybe been able to take over at least one high school if he realised he could owl-mail a pipe bomb instead of all these cartoonish ritual shit.

EDIT: Or just portkey two subcritical halves of an enriched uranium weapon from two seperate places into destinations right next to each other so it forms one supercritical mass when they arrive. Where to get the uranium? Transfigure it of course.

You know what, just get ron's creepy manrat pet to transfigure the whole thing on site. For bonus kek don't tell him about the explosion that usually follows.

That issue is common in literature (my spouse and I call it "Shakespeare's Disease"), as it gives a simple excuse for plot to happen.

Happens in a lot of media unfortunately