Love her or hate her (and my opinions are mixed), I must confess, JK Rowling was a huge influence on why I didn’t become a regular author. No shade on people who get what they paid for, but the young reader crowd is just so gimmicky, and not in a good way, and you see that with a lot of works like Percy Jackson and Twilight (but also predominantly with Rowling’s work). How do you compete in such a no-rules game?
So then let’s talk about one of the cores of the issue. People often have an epiphany when divulging into Harry Potter, and they think “huh, what’s the deal with this if that thing is how it is”. While noting that conflicts in literary analysis don’t always reflect something that doesn’t add up and that it could be a hiccup in details/semantics, the questions themselves don’t go away. And there’s nothing that matches the amount of those having to do with Harry Potter. What example of which strikes you as the most overlooked?
If Rowling herself ever notices that I’m bringing this up, let it be known I do think of her work as a reskinned Brothers Grimm in the universe of The Worst Witch and that I’m collaborating with another author (Samantha Rinne) whose work I would argue deserves Rowling’s prestige if Rowling’s work deserves it. Thanks (and here is where I run for the hills).
He’s not omniscient, is he? In addition to being quite genre-blind, he’s also never demonstrated to have any clairvoyance or inherent extrasensory capabilities other than knowing when his name is spoken, which is presumably some kind of specific enchantment he uses to terrorize people.
A common rifle bullet travels faster than the speed of sound, and if you fired from a concealed location you could absolutely pop him right in the dome well before the sound of the gunshot even made it to him and before anyone knew you were there. All it would take would be a little scouting to research which graveyard he and his groupies are moping around in and anyone could do him from half a mile off with a $99 surplus Mosin-Nagant.
I suppose it’s possible he walks around with a twenty mile wide circle of detection on himself or some horseshit, but given the aforementioned genre-blindness he’s probably got whatever it is tuned to be looking for other magic users or harmful spells and not, e.g., the Bouncing Betty that some clever asshole left right in front of his crypt.