Harry


It said in the film that boys wouldn't read a book by a female author,though no one has any similar sensitivities for girls... but it occurred to me to wonder if Harry Potter would have been NEARLY as successful as it is IF the heroine was a girl? I would bet not. Sexism and male privilege is taught early and it is just sad to think that there are so many boys who wouldn't read about a girl, and lose out on such fabulous books, while just as many girls read about Harry and love the books just as much as boys. I just wonder why Rowling chose to make the main character a boy.



All I know is, she seemed pretty high and mighty for somebody named after breakfast meat!

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There was a podcast series which discussed this issue. They mentioned popular young adult series His Dark Materials, Twilight and The Hunger Games which have a female main character but then none of those have the same level of success as Harry Potter (nothing does). The obvious challenger is twilight but those books have only sold a quarter of how much Harry Potter has sold.

I think if she choose a girl as the main character, it would be compared too much to the Worst Witch.

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I wouldn't be interested in reading it if it was a female main character. I'm not sexist, since I'm a girl...but if they're afraid that a little thing like the name Joann might interfere with book selling to male audience members, then it's a good thing Harry wasn't a female character.

Twilight is written by a woman, and it's main character is a girl. And we see what that has been doing for the series: nothing but teenaged girls wanting to see Taylor Lautner take his shirt off. Big woop.

Neville: So, blow it up? Boom?!
McGonagall: Boom!

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you can still be sexist against women and be female


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The sad truth is that the majority of the population isn't inclined to invest too much in anything serious if its from a girls' perspective. The female population is more likely to invest in something male-based than the male population is to invest in something girl-based. Society generally caters to the male demographic because they know that girls have had to be more accepting to succumbing to male-related media. If Harry had been a Harriet, there's no way that Harry Potter would be as big of a success as it is, even with the female fanbase. J.K. Rowling most likely knew that, which is why I don't believe her story of Harry already being formed in her mind as a male character.

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In all fairness Bella is no heroine and is nowhere near the female equivalent to Harry.

And really? What about the Disney Princesses that are everywhere and are a huge multibillion dollar industry(especially Tinkerbell and Ariel), what about Alice from Alice in Wonderland(OMG is she so popular right now, are you kidding me?)? Dorothy from Wizard of Oz(or Elphaba who took Broadway by storm and made Wicked the highest grossing Broadway show)? What about Sookie Stackhouse from the Southern Vampire Mysteries(aka True Blood)?

And how many big budget live action fantasy/fairytale movies with a female heroine are coming out? A LOT(3 Snow White movies, 2 Sleeping Beauty movies, 2 Little Mermaid movies, plus Wicked and Hunger Games, etc). Percy flopped terribly, so did Eragon, so did the Spiderwick Chronicles and Cirque Du Freak, and from that they stopped having fantasy movies with a male hero because it doesn't sell like Harry Potter does, but you know what does sell like Harry Potter now? Fantasy&SciFi Trilogies with a female main heroine(and her two gorgeous suitors lol)

Jacks

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Honestly, it just works better as whole to have him as a boy if you think about it. Every main character would have to be changed to a certain degree.

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It's just a matter of perspective- sure, back then it might've been a little different, but I really don't believe that JK Rowling decided for Harry to be a male character because the sales "would have been better." Like what's been said over and over again- she just LOVED writing, and that's the reason she did it. It's not like she was expecting to become a billionaire after writing a children's book, 'cause like it said countless times in the movie, "children's books don't sell."

I personally don't care much whether the main character is a boy or girl, but Harry's story would be SOOO different if he were a girl. But the way I see it, that's just how Jo's idea appeared in her head- Harry, a boy, in a train on his way to school. Sometimes it's just the way ideas start, and then they end that way. I mean, surely not everything in books has to arise from hours of debating ideas with oneself. Right?

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You would make a fair point if it weren't for the fact that the series is from the point of view of Harry, a boy whom the entire wizard world literally revolves around. Let's also look at how many female characters have been explored in depth. Zero. Throughout the books, not one of the female characters is given a decent story arch or backstory. Those are reserved for the males--Dumbledore, Snape, Lupin, Sirius, even James (a dead man) gets more development than the female characters. We don't ever learn anything about McGonagall (whom JKR rated only the most powerful after Voldemort, Dumbledore, and Snape respectively) yet the entire series is woven together by Snape and Dumbledore's backstories and development in DH.

Am I saying that the female characters are weak characters? Certainly not. As both characters and female, they're very strong. However, regardless of their strength, they aren't the focus of the story. The focus of the story is Harry, and that wouldn't be a bad thing, seeing as how the series is about him, except that the only other characters to get any notice aside from him are the male characters. For some reason, JKR reserved all her effort for the male characters (possibly because she thought people would lose interest if she focused too heavily on any of the females).

I'd love for someone to prove my cynical mind wrong. Show me a subplot or backstory from this series that was devoted to a woman (one that lasted more than two pages, I mean) that had some bearing on the plot.

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I agree with you that we do have some fleshed out female characters, but it's painfully obvious that while we do have some interesting characters, their personalities can only take them so far if the writer keeps putting them on the back burner.

While Lily does have a full chapter in Deathly Hallows, she isn't really the focus. The focus is Snape because it is his memory. We're seeing her through his eyes. She is the object, not the subject, that is used to further Snape's development. While she is present throughout the chapter, we don't see any of it through her eyes. This is the problem: the story is focused on solely the male characters. Whenever a woman is involved, she is either inferior in power to her male peers or is used to further that male character's development. Look at Dumbeldore's sister, whose purpose is very similiar to Lily's--an interesting character in her own right with a very interesting backstory but who is used as nothing more than fuel for Dumbeldore's tortured persona. Even Dumbledore's brother gets more focus than she does, even if it is only for less than a chapter. Even though her essence is preserved in a portrait, she never even gets a line. Someone who is so important to Dumbledore's development isn't even worth a line. This is my problem with the series, and with the majority of book and movie series: no matter how interesting or significant a female character is, she will never be more interesting or significant than a male character.

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I aspire to be a published author (gender: female) and I'm probably going to do the same thing that JKR did (even if it was suggested that she did). While there's no guarantee that my books would be successful, I still doubt that a teenage male would want to read a book by an author named "Madison" or "Maddie" (my name/nickname).

Even though my forte is young adult with the occasional romance, being female I am reluctant sometimes to have my main character be a female due to the obscene amount of sexism in the world today. I started writing a manuscript on a sensitive issue with the main character being a teenage girl, and got a bit nervous about that, truth be told. I eventually got so nervous that I gave her a male counterpart, her twin brother. But honestly, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a male main character at all, and I don't think JKR made Harry 'Harry' rather than 'Harriet' because of any reason except for the fact that that's how he appeared in her head.

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If this film has any accuracy at all, I see JK Rowling in Hermoine. Ron was loosely based on her friend Shawn from high school. Harry was the made up one.

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