ShmoopTube

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Shmoop the books from the Harry Potter series have sold a total of over 400 [lots of harry potter books stacked on each other]

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million copies so surely everyone loves them right no well not quite when anything

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gets that popular it's bound to have a critic or 2 or 200 well one wave of

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criticism came from a conservative religious group they accused the series [religious group holding up protest signs]

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of promoting witchcraft in a way depicts magic and Wizardry which is silliness

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even a stuffy old bishop can tell that riding broomsticks with your friends

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would be a lot of fun however this criticism might come from a [two bishopmen riding broomsticks]

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slight misconception its true that witches have their very own religion

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Wicca but what they teach in practice is very different from the goings-on at

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Hogwarts it would be nice to join a religion where Quidditch was a part of [girl flying a broomstick tring to catch a golden snitch]

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the Sunday service but alas such a religion does not exist in our world

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well in other criticism came from feminists who argued that Rowling's [girls marching in protest]

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magical world is too male-dominated well this criticism has been tougher to

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dodge the cast characters is pretty heavily weighted toward male character

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and a majority of the most important ones happened to be male [harry potter characters stood on a weighing scale]

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no one's quite as brave as Harry no one's quite as wives Dumbledore no one

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quite as evil as Voldemort you know well there's even no one quite as mumbling as

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Neville Longbottom good job there Neville well also among the series critics were other [Wizard exploding himself]

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fantasy writers who thought the series wasn't all that imaginative or original

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mmm jealous party of one according to these fantasy writers JK Rowling went to a [woman stood over a well]

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well of relatively common fantasy ideas and tropes without really adding much of

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her own well to be fair to Rowling though she wasn't exactly trying to

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reinvent the wheel or the wheel beasts that infamous fantastical Rowling [woman tapping a wand at an angry looking wheel]

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monster perhaps the harshest criticism though

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came from the professionals literary critics themselves well some

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critics panned to the series as cliched unoriginal unrefined unspectacular [whiteboard with a list of criticisms]

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lacking subtlety and having questionable artistic merit among other things

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basically you could make an entire book out of the criticisms these critics lobbed [harry potter books on a circular table]

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at Rowling and if you have a good sense to put the worst

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Harry Potter on it somewhere well you too might make millions by JK Rowling

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seems to take all the criticisms in stride which is pretty [harry potter critics angrily protesting at the window of a house]

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easy to do when you're worth a billion dollars maybe there is some witchcraft

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layer after all

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