u/Double_Delay1613

Now, I know, this questionable writing decision is a very small complaint about the franchise, it's not nearly as bad as the glorifications of slave, the fatphobia or especially the horrid things Rowling says on her Twitter account. Still, it's something that stuck out to me about the story, and I thought this might be a good place to voice it.

I also do know that Barty wasn't technically killed off, but in terms of his role, he might as well have been, just roll with it.

The most obvious pro that would come from Quirrel surviving Book 1 and Barty surviving Book 4 would be Harry having some more minor villains (aside Lucius Malfoy) that he has history with, making conflicts with them much more personal. A lot of the death eater characters in the later books were pretty forgettable if you ask me, so having these two familiar faces return might have been cool.

Both Quirrel and Barty also suffer from not being characterized all that well due to pretending to be a completely different person for most of their "screentime", far more literally in Barty's case. Though Barty did at least have a family and backstory, but we find out almost nothing about Quirrel. For most of the book, Harry thinks that Snape is the one who's trying to steal the Philosopher's Stone, then we find out it's actually Quirrel, and then Quirrel dies. He's ridiculously underdeveloped, despite being one of the main villains in the first book. He used to the Muggle Studies teacher, and he joined someone who wanted to wipe the Muggles out, there's got to be some interesting development there, but there was simply no time to tell because as soon as we started getting an idea about who he really was, he was basically gone.