Let’s hear your harry potter hot takes! :)
Ted Tonks should have been a muggle, not muggleborn. Specifically, I'd love for him to have been a literal Boy Next Door and lived in the townhouse beside the Black residence.
Andromeda should have died when the protections on their house were broken and Death Eaters tortured her for information about Harry's location. Her sacrifice would lead to Ted escaping and going on the run, where he would eventually die when captured by Snatchers alongside Dean.
Draco being in a long-term romantic relationship with Pansy Parkinson is incredibly important to how I view his character. It's also very important to me that Pansy cheats on him with Blaise throughout his sixth and seventh year, and that she's pregnant with Blaise’s kid during the Battle of Hogwarts.
This is absolutely a conspiracy theory of mine, but I will go to my grave believing that JKR originally intended to pair off Bill and Tonks instead of Bill and Fleur. The only reason that I think it didn't happen was because an editor pointed out that she made Bill and Tonks blood relatives in OotP and that they could only sell incest in a book aimed at kids if the bad guys were doing it.
Tonks was marked for death the moment that she was introduced as Bellatrix's niece. She was never going to survive the series and that was a good writing decision.
Hinny is a relationship that needed to happen, but is not something that should ever last long term. However, despite this, it's actually important that Hinny does last a long time and goes on literal years past it's expiry date, and that it ends in an very angry, very loud, and very public argument a few weeks before the wedding.
Remus should have died in a transformed werewolf versus werewolf fight with Greyback in Harry's sixth year while he was on wolfsbane, protecting the kids he once taught from the monster that hurt him as a child.
Harry should have strangled Peter Pettigrew to death at Malfoy Manor. Getting choked by the silver hand was a major cop-out.
Lily should have been the Half-Blood Prince and Sectumsempra should have been her spell, not Snape's. Why? Because we should have been allowed to learn about who Lily actually was as a person in a book where her being a potion's wiz is a huge plot point and not just an anthropomorphized concept of self-sacrificial motherhood for you to project your insecurities onto, Joanne.
Harry should have killed Voldemort with Sectumsempra and not have Tom's Killing Curse rebound off of a disarming charm.
Neither Molly nor Arthur are the greatest parents in the world, but Arthur is a lot better of parent than Molly.
Sirius is who Harry imagines of when he thinks about the concept of fatherhood. He might not be Harry's biological father, but when Harry thinks of who a dad should be for his kids, he's thinking about Sirius and not James.
Nagini never should have been a Horcrux. It should have been the Sorting Hat instead. I think that the reason it couldn't have been is because 90% of the marketing for the series revolved around selling stuff in the four house colours, and killing the means of Sorting as a metaphor for moving beyond the petty things that divided us would have put a dent in WB's ability to sell merch.
Also, Nagini should have died at Godric's Hollow, but not in the house of someone we don't give a fuck about. Instead, the fight should have taken place in the burnt out nursery of the Potter's cottage.
I think that it was a genuine missed opportunity to have Bellatrix, Andromeda, and Narcissa be Sirius and Regulus's cousins instead of their sisters.
Lucius was never physically abusive towards Draco. Narcissa was.
Ginny purposefully and knowingly chose all of the Basilisk victims in CoS in order to get closer to Harry.
Ginny didn't break up with Dean because she thought that he was pushing her through a door. Ginny broke up with Dean because he wanted to have sex and she wanted to save her virginity for Harry. The door was a metaphor.
Ron and Draco are actually incredibly similar people at their cores and once the animosity dies down, they have the potential to become very good friends.
Harry figured out he was bisexual when searching for a date for the Yule Ball and basically went, "Yeah. That tracks," before moving on his his life because he had so much other shit to worry about. Draco doesn't figure out that he's into men until he leaves Hogwarts.
Actually, it was a good decision to make Cho the one that snitched to Umbridge in the movies and not Marietta 'I literally don't know who you are' Edgecombe. They just went about it in the wrong way by having Cho get drugged with Veritaserum instead of having her have doubts because of how it could affect her mother's Ministry career. Why? Because then we could actually learn something about Cho as a person instead of viewing her as the stereotypical Crazy Ex Girlfriend trope that Harry has to use in order to leveling up his sexual experience before getting hitched to his narratively assigned soulmate, Joanne.
Peter Pettigrew is muggleborn.
Peter Pettigrew literally does not make sense to me unless James Potter is a bully who stopped being a bully.
Peter Pettigrew is actually the most interesting Marauder's era character, outside of Lily.
The Prank should have happened after Worst Memories and not before.
Actually, in regards to the war, James wasn't the safe option for Lily to pick if she was looking for political protection from Voldemort. Rather, Snape was, and it says a lot about her character that she chose James over him.
Snape only really learned to love Lily after she died.
James Potter was not an abusive husband. Say it with me again for those in the back: James Potter was not an abusive husband.
At the same time, what James did to Snape was bullying and sexual abuse and not okay in about ten thousand different ways.
Snape was already Marked in Worst Memories.
Snape has killed more people than just Dumbledore. Maybe he didn't use Avada Kedavra on them, but he absolutely didn't develop and become so well known for the use of Sectumsemptra and then not kill people with it.
James Potter died with a wand in his hand buying time for his wife to escape with their baby. I do not care that JKR wrote it differently. He died with a fucking wand in his hand and I will fight anyone that says otherwise.
Both Snape and James are incredibly complex characters who did both good and bad things in their lives, and observing at them through a black-and-white lens where one is evil and one is pure and good does not give you the full look at who they actually were as people.
It's actually very important to their characters that Bellatrix and Voldemort were both victims of abuse, that they perpetuated abuse onto others, and that Bellamort itself is an abusive relationship where Bellatrix is absolutely the victim of Tom.
A lot more Death Eaters than Snape are capable of conjuring a patronus and JKR only thinks that they'd be incapable because she refuses to understand how her own lore works unless it's plot convenient. Bellatrix's is a crow. Voldemort's First War patronus took the form of the Basilisk, but after his return it shifted to Nagini. Lucius and Narcissa have matching peacocks.
Since there are a lot of parallels between James and Draco made throughout the books, I think that we'd see a lot of Lucius and Narcissa in Fleamont and Euphemia Potter, had we ever had the chance to meet them.
Merope really was a squib and Voldemort was technically muggleborn.
We don't know what happened between Merope Gaunt and Tom Riddle Sr. Yes, Merope absolutely could have been a rapist. But she is also just as likely to not have been because all of the accusations leveled against her were being made by two men who were primed to think the worst of Voldemort's origins over seventy years after the fact using hearsay and tampered/incomplete memories set literal decades apart. We literally don't know what happened and treating Dumbledore's leading guesses as fact is doing everyone involved in what actually happened a serious disservice. Also: Fuck JKR and her hatred of ugly, impoverish, abused women who don't fit the very thin set of requirements that she uses to decide who is a person, and fuck her hatred of men whom she thinks deserve to be horrifically violated because they committed the horrible crime of possessing a sex drive.
Cho is a better Quidditch player than Ginny and the only reason that she lost to Ginny two years in a row is because she was going through some terrible, unresolved trauma and was bringing it onto the pitch during her matches. Once she has her life a bit more settled after the war, Cho rocks Ginny's shit every time that the Tornadoes play the Harpies. Ginny thinks that it's about Harry. Cho honestly couldn't give less of a damn and her telling Ginny this after Hinny breaks up is the thing that finally gets Ginny to start moving on.
Actually, it's very important to me that Ginny never marries or has kids. It's also equally as important to me that her and Harry finally sit down in their sixties to apologize to each other for the absolute shitstorm that was their relationship.
Ron and Hermione got together over the summer between Book 6 & 7 and had a temporary break-up after Ron left the group in the stupid fucking tent. That kiss wasn't them getting together. It was them getting back together.
With the exception of the stupid Harry-Hermione almost kiss, the movies did the 'on the run' section of DH so much better than the books. The tent is still an abomination that shouldn't exist, but the movies absolutely handled that particular garbage fire with enough care to make it somewhat acceptable.
That being said, I'm convinced that the stupid Harry-Hermione almost kiss is a result of the fact that Warner Bros. believed for years that JKR was going to pair them off together, and the almost kiss was them saying 'Goodbye' to the pairing... and in doing so, fucked up the potential for one of the best Harry-Ron bonding moments in the series to make its way from the page onto the big screen, and I will never forgive them for that.
Chickening out on killing Arthur was one of the larger mistakes that JKR made in the series.
Umbridge's scene (and the Ministry stuff in general) in DH would have worked better under Scrimgeour's leadership than Thicknesse's. Specifically, I think that the trial that Harry and co. crash should have been Stan Shunpike's and not some random character that we've never heard of before.
Ginny was so much more interesting when she was a weird, lonely girl from Books 2-4. In fact, she would have been a much more effective love interest had her character been combined with Luna's.
And finally, it's actually really bad writing that Dumbledore knew about the multiple Horcruxes before getting Slughorn's true memory. Having the one memory that Harry is tasked with seeking out being something that Dumbledore already knows to exist is just not good on so many levels, especially from someone that claims to be a mystery writer at heart. Also, it stole from us the opportunity for Harry to return to Little Hangleton and the graveyard where one of the most traumatizing moments of his life took place, and I will never forgive JKR for it.
If you've got anything to add or anything to comment on, please feel free to join the discussion!
