RomanDavis comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong
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Five was the best book. It just makes the most sense to me, as an ending and as a story. Harry Potter becomes a teacher and freedom fighter. It is no longer the story of a boy, but of a man. The end.
Everything afterward was just a bad dream.
Umbridge ruined that one for me. When you design a character by just stringing together hate-triggers without a single instant of sympathy (which even Voldemort has!), the result is worse than bad writing - it'll break my suspension of disbelief and make me start flipping pages. Something as simple as a pet would have made her fly under the "WARNING: YOU'RE READING A KIDS BOOK" radar.
She has a lot of kitten paraphernalia. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she kept an actual cat that simply never made it into a scene of the book.
It's not the cat itself that I feel is needed; it's a quick scene of her petting a cat (warning: TVtropes). (And it ought to not be an evil Persian, obviously).