Eight ways they could have improved... Harry Potter
— Either make Snape a lot less of a cruel bully, give him a far more legitimate reason to hate James and his little gang, and make his betrayal of the Potters more of an unintended act... or keep him as he is and remove all the undeserved sympathy that he ultimately gets in the narrative. (Seriously, I can write essays on how much Snape sucks.)
— Remove the terrible notion of Dumbledore having been a magical proto-fascist. Just make it explicit in the books that he's gay and was in love with Grindelwald, and that this blinded him to how evil the guy actually was. Instead of having actually been a fascist type for a bit, the source of his shame is that he realised the truth too late, and when he finally did confront Grindelwald, his sister got killed during the fight.
— On that note, also remove the implication that Dumbledore knew perfectly well that Harry had to die, and was basically leading the boy like a lamb to slaughter. Dumbledore is supposed to be the paragon of virtue, and portrayed as such in the earlier books. Harry's loyalty to him is explicitly portrayed as a good and pure thing. Don't tarnish that. Just tweak things a bit so that Dumbledore always had a plan to ensure that Harry could survive his "death".
— Making Slytherin the "designated bad guys club" was a weak move. This is really the result of Rowling projecting her own anger about people who bullied her at school onto a group of fictional characters. (Something she openly admits and is proud of, by the way.) She has a chip on her shoulder, and it hurts her writing. It would have been better if at the end, there had been Slytherins on the good side, and some people from Ravenclaw (for instance) deciding to accept Voldemort's offer to join him.
— I'd prefer it is more relatively unimportant characters died in the final battle, and fewer important characters. Killing off a lot of people that Harry personally knew and cared about seemed like a bit of a tear-jerker ploy, and I'm not fond of it.
— No epilogue set years later. The fates of the main characters are left a bit more ambiguous, and the fates of supporting characters a lot more ambiguous. Fans are left free to imagine the future that they prefer for the characters.
— Cut back on the amateurish world-building, and basically don't try to fill in every bit of the fictional universe after the series has already been written. (And even when the series is still being written, there should be little to no world-building outside of what's in the books, leaving fans to imagine a lot of things for themselves.)
— Further additions to the universe (The Cursed Child, the Fantastic Beasts films, various other odds and ends) are never created.
— Remove the terrible notion of Dumbledore having been a magical proto-fascist. Just make it explicit in the books that he's gay and was in love with Grindelwald, and that this blinded him to how evil the guy actually was. Instead of having actually been a fascist type for a bit, the source of his shame is that he realised the truth too late, and when he finally did confront Grindelwald, his sister got killed during the fight.
— On that note, also remove the implication that Dumbledore knew perfectly well that Harry had to die, and was basically leading the boy like a lamb to slaughter. Dumbledore is supposed to be the paragon of virtue, and portrayed as such in the earlier books. Harry's loyalty to him is explicitly portrayed as a good and pure thing. Don't tarnish that. Just tweak things a bit so that Dumbledore always had a plan to ensure that Harry could survive his "death".
— Making Slytherin the "designated bad guys club" was a weak move. This is really the result of Rowling projecting her own anger about people who bullied her at school onto a group of fictional characters. (Something she openly admits and is proud of, by the way.) She has a chip on her shoulder, and it hurts her writing. It would have been better if at the end, there had been Slytherins on the good side, and some people from Ravenclaw (for instance) deciding to accept Voldemort's offer to join him.
— I'd prefer it is more relatively unimportant characters died in the final battle, and fewer important characters. Killing off a lot of people that Harry personally knew and cared about seemed like a bit of a tear-jerker ploy, and I'm not fond of it.
— No epilogue set years later. The fates of the main characters are left a bit more ambiguous, and the fates of supporting characters a lot more ambiguous. Fans are left free to imagine the future that they prefer for the characters.
— Cut back on the amateurish world-building, and basically don't try to fill in every bit of the fictional universe after the series has already been written. (And even when the series is still being written, there should be little to no world-building outside of what's in the books, leaving fans to imagine a lot of things for themselves.)
— Further additions to the universe (The Cursed Child, the Fantastic Beasts films, various other odds and ends) are never created.
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