Harry Potter was good for the first three books and I still stand by that. They were a simple and enjoyable “who dunnit” type of series with a fantasy twist. Nothing groundbreaking but still fun. I didn’t go in expecting a complex story and it scratched enough of an itch to leave me satisfied.
Then Goblet of Fire came and the series started taking itself too seriously. This is where most of the complaints begin and this is where the lore really got stupid. Had it maintained the original tone of the first three books, Harry Potter would still hold up as a good middle-grade fiction series.
You can see when she became big enough to say no to her editor.
The first one is good, crimping Roald Dahls style, telling a cute little power-fantasy story.
By the Fifth book she’s really far up her own ass.edit: It’s been much longer since I’ve read 2 and 3, but I remember them as being pretty decent. I’ve read the first one a bunch of times because I grew up with it, so it’s good for when I wanna practice another language. I think I’ve read 2 and 3 2 or 3 times, because reading the first one has made me want to go on a nostalgia binge (this is like 8 or 9 years ago, be nice). I haven’t read any of the other ones more than once, but I remember being very disappointed with the movie version of the fourth book because it didn’t really dedicate a lot of time to the quidditch thing a good part of the book is about. Past that is a complete mismatch. I remember the bus scene from the fifth movie because it’s a cool idea and I remember the sixth one having Snape in a book and the seventh one having Ron be worried he’s going to get cucked or something.
Then Goblet of Fire came and the series started
taking itself too seriously.to become tomes of middling quality.i find it started really taking itself too seriously by the 5th or 6th book. i can excuse the goblet of fire for trying to appeal to an audience that grew up a little bit since the first three.
i think it could have worked if the writer was more competent as she transitioned it to a YA novel, but then again maybe i shouldn’t have reread some of them as an adult and let it stay in nostalgia instead of reading too much into it.
When I think of a die hard Harry Potter fan, what I think is a normie. a vapid tasteless normie who doesn’t know anything about the greater science fiction or fantasy genre who’s immature desire for wish fulfillment and simplistic characters keeps them from seeking out greater authors. If they ever attempted the works by Ursula K. Le Guin or Terry Pratchett they would have either put aside Rowling, or more likely, quickly loose interest and revert back to simple pleasures.
Of course, this is a completely unrealistic perspective. It is unnecessarily elitist and patronizing. Nonetheless, it’s still persistent. So I’d be really interested to hear the perspective of super fans of the series like that actually have a wide-ranging experience with different fantasy genres as a comparison point, what they think of those authors people often hold up as superior to Rowling, and why they find Harry Potter so special.
HP fans usually don’t claim that the books are high quality literature, they just fell in love with the story as a kid and like to reminisce in it. The fact that it became so popular allowed people to share their love for the story with their peers and play pretend as magicians as kids. It’s not that deep.
I find that super fans of anything frequently have some form of trauma or emotional harm they are trying to heal through channeling the joy they felt when first getting in contact with the subject of their obsession. I think that’s fine, we all use different ways to cope. They might say that HP is high quality literature to explain to themselves why they like it so much.
Most HP fans I meet do claim it to be high literature.
Really? I know many (ex) HP fans and none of them take it super seriously
No I mean current fans, not ex fans. ex fans don’t, but the people I’ve met that self-describe as a “fan” of Harry Potter does seem to think highly of it
I meant to say both, I know current and ex fans who all would speak highly of the story but who don’t pretend like it’s high literature. I think those are very different things. Most people don’t care if what they’re reading is the best written book or whatever. If the story speaks to them then that’s enough to love it and become a fan.
I meant speak highly as in speak of it as high literature. It’s all anecdotal I guess, but I can tell you those people are out there and they’re not uncommon in my experience
The only person I know (mid 30s) who never really outgrew Harry Potter is also probably the most basic “normie” person I know. And the only person I know who could possibly watch this new HBO series.
Real superfans don’t read anything else, just write endless (and sometimes better than the og) fanfiction. Harry Potter isn’t special, per se, it is just the first vehicle for them to explore their own creativity, with a large enough community that can share in that larger universe.
It is much the same for Tolkien fans, but Tolkien’s sins are a bit more forgivable, as he was literally helping generate an entire genre.
Harry Potter is great when you’re seven and just starting to read longer novels. It helped grow my literacy immensely at that age. I haven’t read them since the seventh book came out though, so I guess that doesn’t make me a die hard fan like you’re describing
Harry potter and the NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO TRANS PEOPLE CANT BE ALLOWED OR IVE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE AND WILL DIE FULL OF REGRET NOOO
It got really frustrating reading through the books, where the recurring implication for Harry’s success was that he’s just inherently special. He doesn’t do that much to prove himself, he’s just the one that everyone’s supposed to like.
You have a rags to riches story in the first book, where it kicks off this extensive world that fuses a bunch of fantasy tropes together, you have the “evil” faction that is portrayed as chauvinist along ethnic and class lines, you have a philosophical revelation of how one’s choices matter more than one’s birth, and them it just coasts for the rest of the series on magical curiosities, with Harry excelling and progressing not from doing anything special, but from being special.
The rags to riches story is also thst it just turned out he had a shitload of gold in a wizard bank the whole time.
Yeah, it’s less of a “rags to riches” and more of a “Oh, turns out I didn’t need to be wearing these rags, I was rich the whole time” sort of story.
The alleged reason is that she wanted to create an aspirational character for her sons while she was struggling with poverty as a waitress in the early 90s. Harry is special because he’s mommy’s special little boy who finds out mommy was rich all along. Everyone likes him except for the people who are bad. He lives out some predefined trajectory, created by mommy’s love, where he doesn’t really do anything but exist and be a special little boy. He worries briefly that he may be a bad guy due to being so special and famous but then is reassured by everyone that he can’t be a bad guy because he’s special and famous. Then he lives happily ever after after not doing anything (except being special) to kill the bad guy. Once the bad guys are gone then nobody dislikes him anymore and his fame can reign unchecked.
At best she was a deeply misguided striver who was trying to turn her kids into the same hollow strivers most “pick me” poors are. At worst she was actually writing a MKULTRA program to create the next great tyrant.
At worst she was actually writing a MKULTRA program to create the next great tyrant.
THIS is the kind of take that keeps me logging onto this site. 10/10
6/10 needs more bugs
I feel like shit I just want him back
OpenCommune hasn’t posted anywhere on
in over a year either.Sincerely think we need a “local cranks get a pass” rule for sectarianism. Like, come on, it’s leftist on leftist violence. It’s not like they were being bigoted. What’s a little incoherent ranting among friends? They were like a mascot, and we chased them out. I’ll never forgive the mods! Not in this life or the next!
At worst she was actually writing a MKULTRA program to create the next great tyrant.
I mean…considering how huge Harry Potter got, it wouldn’t surprise me if the CIA got involved at some point in pushing it, they probably wanted people to read the “Neoliberalism and the status quo are great actually!” books a lot more than any other fantasy novels that might’ve made people question the system.
For a second shaun had me worried
My wife, whom I love very much, has one flaw, and that is she still likes Harry Potter even though she knows JKR is a TERF. We’re probably going to watch the HBO series.
at least pirate it
also maybe get her to watch shaun’s video about harry potter? it’s only from the text, none of rowling’s side projects or general shittiness.
The Shaun video was really good, I will see if I can get her to watch it.
We talked piracy but since we currently have the HBO sub it’s kinda moot. Not that we’re really using it at the moment.
Still don’t watch it on HBO. It’ll boost her popularity. If you have to watch it, pirate it.
Harry Potter and the I just woke up and me not being the center of the universe was just a bad dream
I’m proud to say I have never read the books or seen any of the movies. And I’m over 40.
The books were mid and you missed nothing, but very few scifi/fantasy series got a complete set of movies at that level of quality, and that’s a pretty novel concept even today. So many competing books with arguably superior aspects get canceled after season 2 or end up feeling like filler slop.
Many of us grew up with LotR and HP wondering why there are so few tv shows and movie adaptations of similar quality.
So, at the time the first book came out I was 14 and lived in a group home, and to have a fascimile of ‘school’ (I had yet to be enrolled at the local HS) one of the staff stuck me in a room and tried forcing me to read Harry Potter and I adamantly refused because it read like such crap after a few pages. Mind you, I was already a teen and had been reading Dragonlance stuff by Weiss and Hickman for a few years, so this fantasy world seemed rather dull to me. To this day still never had any interest.
In a better timeline we would have an equivalent adaptation of every Dark Tower novel.
Which funnily enough, actually riff on the sneech from quidditch except instead of being a sports ball, it’s just a hand launched guided drone bomb that kills children and is wielded by omnicidal cultists of the Crimson King who seeks to use tortured psychic neurodivergent children’s unmarked the universe.
Stephen King is a shitlib but there are many strokes of genius in that series which make it still one of my favorite fantasy/sci fi works of all time.
The dark tower getting a good adaptation would be nice, but my ideal would be a really good Wheel of time series. It would have to be LONG but that’s also what would be so appealing about it
Currently it is in the hands of Mike Flanagan, who previously worked on Midnight Mass, Doctor Sleep (a Stephen King adaptation that was good, and Fall of the House of Usher which is a Poe adaptation which was also real good. Given all the stuff he has worked on (good and not so good) I think he is perfect for it.
As far as longevity I really hope his take on it lives up to the hype because there are seven very dense books to adapt (excluding Gunslinger which advantageously was originally written as a standalone story and is fairly short).
They could both milk the series for a lot and also result in a very great adaptation since there are a few novellas too. It’s both a blessing and a curse that there is so much material because it’s going to require some incredible creative vision but also has the potential to span a decade of television.
And unlike GoT this epic fantasy tale actually got finished…
Same. I disliked the idea of them from day one. I have loudly refused to read them or participate in anything related although there’s been plenty of people in my orbit trying to get me to read them or watch the movies.
You were probably too old for it when it came out. I’m in my 30s, probably right in the cohort that was at the older side of the targeted age as the books were releasing, and felt too old for it pretty quickly.
I’m afraid to say that book slapped when I was a kid, but the hype elevated once the movies started coming out.
Imagining a world where Eragon had a good movie, it’d probably change the trajectory of a lot of things
The movies really got the boost from having a John Williams score. Even his work on super mid movies is incredibly memorable.
The movies aren’t that bad. Critics, academies, and even the general public at the time held them all in high esteem and they are well made.
I didn’t even like the story after Goblet of Fire but calling the movies mid is really underselling them.
We played stuff from the Harry Potter soundtrack in band one year
Same for me friend, I was really into it as a kid because I was blissfully unaware of everything it really meant. I was fed the slop and I liked it
I was into the first 5, but had super checked out/aged out of them after that. I was like 14 when the 5th one came out. By 6 and 7 I was old enough to realise “oh these actually kinda suck”. Not in a political sense, I just thought the actual books themselves were mid a.f. once I reached my later teens
I was 10 when the last one was released, it really hits different when you still play with sticks
The first ones came out when I was in middle school. I remember hearing about them a lot. I had some friends that read them. They are still huge Harry Potter dorks.
I think he’s like 10 or so in the first book. Since kid’s media tends to really work for kids slightly younger than the protagonists, I feel like someone would have had to have been in their later elementary school years (~3rd-5th grade in burgerland) for it to really take hold.
Middle school is kinda pushing it lol.
I know several people who are my age or older who have basically only read Harry Potter.
I know “read another book” is super cliche at this point, but damn what else can you say to those peopleI literally talked to this friend a few months ago about reading and he just said he was thinking of reading Harry Potter again.
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I’ve posted this before, but it still horrifies me. I know a couple who quit Harry Potter when Rowling publicly went full TERF. Now they exclusively read . . . Harry Potter fan-fiction.
I feel like shonen manga or superhero comics or just not reading anything would all be a step up from that
You were probably too old for it when it came out
Nah, I’m sorry, but age is not a factor here. For people into fantasy, the opening 45 minutes of the first movie are fucking amazing. Doesn’t matter how old you are, it takes a person right back to their childhood.
Fantasy lovers never lose that dream, to be magical and/or live in a magical place.
Saving this because with the new Kid Wizard and the Tropes show coming out, there’s going to be a lot of people who need their shit checked
Kid Wizard and the Tropes
Thank you, thank you
I will be here forever
tim burton core
But Harry was more of a jock, and not really that nerdy.
I never read the books, just saw the movies, by I think JK still wanted him to be perceived as a nerd. He has glasses, he’s the teachers pet (well some of the teachers anyway) he gets bullied, he befriends some of the school nerds. It is in tension with the fact he is an extremely rich sports champ who seems pretty popular with everyone outside of the evil house by the end of Goblet of Fire.
It’s sort of both. He’s a bullied kid who is small and wears glasses, but doesn’t actually do anything nerdy or have any nerdy character traits, then he becomes a jock almost accidentally by discovering a hidden talent for wizard football. So he’s not a “mean jock” who looks down on nerdy kids or tries to be a tough guy or anything, but he also doesn’t have any nerdy traits that could be potentially off-putting to the audience, only surface level aesthetic stuff like wearing glasses and being bullied by his cousin.
He had glasses.
This has got to be tongue in cheek, right?
Yeah. That’s skullboi
Is he the one that did the awesome and scathing reviews of the books? I recognize that skull pfp
Ooh yeah he fucking hates HP and especially Rowling, and for all the right reasons.
Yes
Yeah, the YouTuber Shaun.
welcome back, peter mandelson
“shaun” is probably an anonymous account set up by Stephen Miller.
lmao what
Shaun is a saint. How dare you
This guy is literally a famous BreadTuber (albeit one of the better ones)
