User blog comment:IamJakuhoRaikoben/Chapter 371: Tartarus Arc: Part 2 - Song of the Heavenly Dragon, Review./@comment-3424593-20140215225420/@comment-5840892-20140217000505

Okay, Rai here's a better opinion:

I read the HP books starting in third grade, and they are fantastic.

Whereas in 5th Grade I read The Hobbit, saw the original animated movie of the Hobbit (Which is actaully better than the movies Peter Jackson tried to make, I just don't see any concievable method of making the Hobbit into a trilogy without shitloads of BS story filler. A Duology HELL YES I can see it, just not a trilogy.) Read The Lord of The Rings in its entirety, and even attempted to read The Silmarillion (my attention wasn't enough to finish it at the age of 11.) Needless to say I found all to be fantastic.

So here's an ubiased opinion.

HP was great and in a few ways HP was better than LOTR, mainly in this area as to my opinion:


 * The Plot was more interesting and humorous from the standpoint of a child (who had had a Post-HS Reading and Comphrension Level since 4th grade) and therefore better an audience of the younger age group as it keeps them interested.


 * The characters were developed well, and when any character died that we the readers knew even a little about it tended to almost always gander to some sort of emotional reaction from the reader.


 * Rowling used a good number of interesting plot twists (Snape anyone? {save my mother who predicted everything about him 100% accurately when she read the 5th Book})


 * Unlike a lot of other people who write books/stories/manga/ect aimed at the audience HP was initially geared towards, she never hesitated to kill off Major/Main or Minor Characters. And when a character was PROVEN to be dead, they STAYED DEAD. (in short no Deus Ex Machina to bring back the dead, and the way in which the Resurection Stone doesn't count in my opinion)

Now as for TLOTR, it had a few good things over HP:


 * The Biggest One: Sauron. Voldemort, he just pales as a villain compared to Sauron. Voldemort earned more pity from me than outright fear. Whereas Sauron we never even have a description of his apearance yet his presence is so omminous. The fact that he is very powerful yet almost entirely unknown entity adds to that element of fear in the series. I can guess what made Sauron such a good antagonist was that he seemed to me to personify one of the common fears of mankind: The Unknown.


 * Their are a few others, but this already to long of a comment. So I'll just leave it at those comparisions.

And yes I know that the Death thing is in both, but LOTR was aimed at an older audinece than HP was initally, I don't see it as impressive.

But I doubt I can ever chose which is better out right. And this is (I hope) a rather unbiased (abiet Carrot fangirl rant long) comment about this subject.