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All good points including Evans Veres also being a huge dick. I am not against children's literature - I am quite a fan of The Three Investigators and they did dumb shit constantly, including going against dangerous hardened criminals alone or crawling into unknown dark caverns just because. I am not at all against the genre and it was not necessarily meant as a criticism of Harry Potter which I also like quite a lot. It was more to point that Harry being moron is a fact and most heroes of these children books are quite self-aware of that.
Yes, Harry Potter acts sort of like you'd expect a kid like him to act: he goes from being the neglected unwanted encumbrance to a world where he's special and famous and treated as exceptional. It's be a very rare person whose head wasn't turned by that! Also, the rule-breaking makes sense given the way he was raised under arbitrary and unfair rules; he has no reason to think the adult authorities in his new life have his interests at heart, and it's obvious from the start that at least one of them (Snape) is actively out to get him even if that means abusing his authority. He wants to be a hero, to soak up all this adulation and special treatment that he's been craving all his life, and it's down to him being basically a decent kid and making the right friends that manages to steer him along the right path. He probably also doesn't have a deeply-felt belief in the dangers of the magical world being real; he's spent the first twelve years of his life with "magic isn't real" so it's hard to break that conditioning, deep down he won't really feel like "this is real and this is dangerous" until he gets more experience of living in that world. He can do magic so that will save him, right?
He grows up during the series, and being an obnoxious teenage boy is a natural part of that. EY's version, however, was Big Special from the start, indulged by his guardians (when a clip round the ear was what was needed), and an obnoxious brat due to his belief in his own genius and that he knew everything so magic couldn't be right and if it did exist then it had to run on what he deemed to be the rules. What everyone else told him was wrong, because it just was, because they weren't smart like him and didn't know Science like him. If he could have been toasted to a crisp by a salamander within ten minutes of arriving at Hogwarts in that world, I'd have cheered. Maybe he got some of the arrogance knocked out of him in later chapters, but I loathed him in the early ones so much, I wasn't going to stick around for more lectures on Rationalist principles from the author insert.
Problem is that JK speaks through a magical macguffin and the Mirror of Erised makes it clear that his real desire is to be with his family.
It's Ron who sees himself as a hero who finally outshines his many brothers when he looks at it. Harry simply doesn't seem to value that in the same way, which makes sense because he already has fame and adulation and it has nothing to do with him: in his mind his fame is unearned, creates insane expectations and is frankly grotesque in that it was born out of the death of the life he could have had.
To try to reconcile both views: I think Harry's drive is less about getting the adulation of being a hero and more just a sort of instinctive mistrust of authority figures and the sense that he should do things himself (he also doesn't like the idea of friends suffering for him which is how Voldemort finally gets him). It being a YA novel, he's at least sometimes right which makes things worse.
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