just gonna paste out that comment of the WQ author out in full:
I think most people are more annoyed that the promises for the setting made in book one and character arc in book three weren't followed through in the end. Magic wasn't amazing and great in the end. Being a wizard wasn't cool. The magical world wasn't fun. Harry didn't work hard to make himself exceptional, even a little bit in some way, with magic. The bad guy wasn't defeated with magic.
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The fact that magic doesn't solve the world's problems and it is as flawed, unhappy, problematic and dangerous many a time (and more) as the Muggle world's issues and that made the series much more realistic in my eyes.
It is a fantasy - but it is a flawed one. It is a wonderful, fantastical world - with real day to day problems, heartbreaks and failures.
But those problems aren't magical ones. They are regular ones, framed by a paper-thin magical world. They are problems MAGIC SHOULD FIX. Or a good reason should be given why it doesn't fix many of those problems. It is mostly magic In Name Only. The problems that come up and are solved, are ones intentionally divorced from magic. Including Voldemort.
It isn't a wonderful and fantastical world. It is a world just like ours, only with brooms and cursed teapots. And no logical extension of what that actually means to people. These people don't have magical solutions to problems, they just have problems. They just muddle along, when the exciting world outside their windows is full of obvious solutions to daily issues.
Why am I reading about a magical world with problems out of a sitcom if the magical world doesn't even matter? JKR goes out of her way to demagic the magic, making the fantastic mundane to the point that it makes no sense.
Bilbo putting on a magic ring to try and trick a dragon is a hundred million times more magical than anything that happens in Harry Potter, because the magic is actively used to solve part of a fantastic magical problem, and as part of the character's life. When we later learn he used the One Ring to escape awkward visits by relatives...well, that's great practical use of magic. Everyone can see themselves doing the same exact thing, it both situations.
Harry not using his magic to try to solve either Voldemort or everyday teenage problems is a slap in the face to every reader everywhere. That's the first thing we'd all try to do. And after we find out we have some power the guy who killed our parents knows not, one that'll help kill him? You better fucking believe we'd be trying to figure out if we're exceptionally good at magical poisons, or magical curses, or magical jump-kicking people from brooms. And magically trying to wrangle our sexually frustrated friends into line. And magically impressing someone to get a date. And having unrealistic magical power fantasies of our own.
Even if we failed, it would be realistic for us to either struggle or try to hide in this situation. And we'd do both using magic. Ironically, for my argument, Harry just getting dragged along while Hermione magically fixes almost literally every problem in book seven was just sad. It felt less like he was average and struggling through, and more like he just didn't care. Why wasn't he using magic to fix these problems? Him just giving up would have been great if that was the direction the books went in. But they didn't. They just left Harry a limp, useless, non-magical everyman lump all of a sudden.
That's why people write powerful Harry stories, with vampires and veela and ancient bloodlines. Because at least Harry now has possible solutions he can use to magically solve problems, including everyday ones, and more magical problems which need solving on top of that.
Harry didn't work hard to make himself exceptional - that isn't his personality, he's not a striving bookworm or someone who truly pushes themselves in most things. He's (like I've said before) an average guy in a not-so-average circumstance...even for a wizard!
I fervently disagree, but that's just opinion. I can't really prove it. Harry pushes himself all the time, when it matters. And Voldemort should fucking matter. He is, in short, a terrible wizard. And that's never acknowledged in text, like it should based on his actions.
But put that aside. What bugs me is, every time I bring up how unexceptional the non-Hermione characters in Harry Potter are, this "they act like average people" thing is used as a counter, like that is a good thing. Some sort of clever characterization on JKR's part.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione aren't living in average times or doing average things. Heroes are people who step up, even when things get tough. Harry isn't average in the first four books. He constantly steps up. This needs to be for a reason, even if that reason is tragic or a personal weakness--otherwise, that attribute is pointless and misleading.
Not stepping up is an option, and makes people much more average. But once someone steps up in a story, it needs to mean something. They do what is needed to win, because that's the kind of people they are. Or they deal with being average in a harsh situation. Ignoring those conflicting cases entirely isn't good storytelling.
This has nothing to do with studying to power up, or getting swole, or finding ways around British gun laws. It's about human beings in a tough situation holding to a purpose, or failing to, and that being told about in a story. Being continuously average and ineffectual in that sort of situation is a character flaw, but it isn't played like that in Harry Potter.
We're repeatedly asked to feel for Harry (and to some extent Ron) like we would a hero, and there is heroic resolve and similar attributes, but in the end Harry isn't a hero. He's at best a bland Jesus figure. He doesn't do anything to help his fate along, other than just be. And the author doesn't acknowledge this.
Harry either should have been a hero, or very much not a hero, and for good reasons clearly explained. Instead of a strong story about someone who is weak working through their flaws, or someone strong sacrificing everything, we got neither. The author choose not to tell either of those stories in the end.
We got a murky morality play, little magical volition from main characters in a magical world, and no satisfying or logical ending. Events just happen to Harry, who wins because he is fated to. Curtain closes, opens again, babies ever after, then the end.
Let's go back to the basics. The hero's journey is essentially: (possibly average) person (eventually) accepts a call to action, goes to a dark place, and finds something unusual inside themselves (literally or figuratively) that helps them (usually) win in the end.
The first four books promised us an active hero. Harry went through some of these steps, sometimes in lesser ways all through the journey in one book, sometimes partially in larger ways overall. In the last two books, Harry went almost completely limp.
In book six, average bloke Harry wanders aimlessly from one event someone else is in charge of to another. His actions (not his whining) make like nothing in the previous books ever happened or any world events mattered at all, until the very, very end.
In the last book, we got our demagic'd, average bloke Harry and his average mate dragged along by fate and a single swotty friend. And a large number of fans hated that, for good reason. Average isn't a defense for bad storytelling.
The last two Harry Potter books are badly plotted and feature several bad storytelling elements. Those elements are largely what lead people to write more active and dynamic characters in their HP fanfics.
They write those characters badly because they are novice writers who want power fantasy more than balanced characterization, setting, and plot. And yet, people still find those ideas interesting, as shown ITT, because canon let down the characters so badly, even poorly-written power fantasy is appealing in comparison.
-edit minor spelling