Harry Potter: Classic Or Dud?

the whole thing just gets too much attention

It's a Harry potter series have some words lads

xp

well yeah, and it's grown so big that even suggesting it's a triumph of marketing above all else will get accused of challopry in some quarters but i'm pretty sure it's a triumph of marketing above its actual merits

i have no major problem with it but the milking of the brand for cash and the associated copycats in hollywood are p depressing.

Why

It was popular but pretty hacky there's nothing to get invested in here unless it's the opportunity cost of what kids would have read besides (imo nett kids probably read more overall after being swept up in the phenomenon) or what Hollywood would have made besides (just different shit)

The big crime here is Daniel Radcliffe obv

they're still churning out plays as well, and there'll be more movies. she should just end it, it's run its course and she's rich enough. it's crass.

i don't lie awake thinking about it.

Stalin should've stopped after year X an all but that's not our world is it

It's probably helping to keep me in a job at the minute tbh.

once again, i'll point out that if we were to limit ourselves to expressing opinions that changed things on ilx we wouldn't have a board

we should prob give that a go tho, perhaps you're right

I'm all for changing things on ilx but I hear ya I hear ya

it's made Rowling so ridiculously rich that she's got money to throw at politics and that's bad enough

on the other hand it winds up Dawkins so maybe there's an up side

Harry Potter among books burned by priests in Poland https://t.co/tN3KID0Tsh

— The Guardian (@guardian) April 1, 2019

Critical support for the priests

Kids Against The Sorcerers, a 2016 cartoon film promoted by a number of Russian government agencies, featured a nefarious western plot backed by Nato and Harry Potter to subvert and corrupt Russian schoolchildren.

read this as to subvert corrupt Russian schoolchildren, the best kind of Russian schoolchildren IMO

BURN
ANOTHER
BOOK

Glad to see the Russian government has taken decisive steps toward preventing their youth from forming underground Quidditch leagues and fraternizing with owls. Would that someone had done likewise before the West crumbled beneath J.K. Rowling's magic wand.

I read a couple of these when I was a kid and they were shite

I read them all when I was in college and thought they were fucking amazing, for the most part. Maybe I should read them again to see if they still hold up.

Too many adjectives my dear Rowlingz.

starting to think that the ppl who wanted to burn these books had the right idea

I read these 10-15 years after the age where I would have been proper into them. Pleasant enough reading, but the plot was distractingly bad.

take that JK Rowling

Harry Potter books are bad, although I stalled out after the first 3 or 4, and have been told I haven't read the "good" ones. I strongly doubt this to be true.

JK Rowling is a pisspoor prose stylist, with the defense being it's a kids book. But who cares? Lots of adults read it, and shouldn't kids also be exposed to decent quality writing?

The world and rituals of Hogwarts always seemed so slapdash and illogical that I just couldn't bring myself to care about it because Rowling didn't put much care into it either.

And I say this all without having yet bothered to find out what stupid thing she said this time.

I am reading them with my kids now, and no, they do not get better, I'm reading Order of the Phoenix right now and it's painful, the plot is meandering and uneventful, the new characters do not have any personality at all, once again everything hinges on how Harry has apparently misunderstood the (stupid) actions of adults, but neither the adults nor Harry are doing anything to address this, over hundreds and hundreds of pages. The first three books were ok, especially the first one, but this one is fucking awful. I have never read a book so in need of a good editor, but JK was shitting gold at this point.

Harry Potter books are bad, although I stalled out after the first 3 or 4, and have been told I haven't read the "good" ones. I strongly doubt this to be true.

i know really deep fans who think the series went really off the rails after the third one

I'm sure this is a thing, but it's odd to me that really deep fans hate most of the series.

i mean it's like only loving a band's early shit, i guess. one of my friends wrote the hp fanfic and she's talked a lot about how the series bent toward sucking hard after the third one

I was the right age for these coming out to be caught up in them, and I definitely thought the fourth was a massive drop in quality and didn't bother with any of them afterwards.

Rowling has been a massive massive disappointment to me as an adult, nothing to do with the books but as a public figure who was always so vocally in favour of the welfare state and how the support it provides allows people to recover from hardship, it's been really grim to see her descend into full TERF insanity.

The thing I always wanted to know - maybe it's explained somewhere but pretty sure it's not in the books - was how people are supposed to have "invented" spells. Like, does someone just try out thousands of combinations of pseudo-Latin words until something happens? Or is there some sort of cosmic computer programming where you work out how to do something and then you save it with a catchy shortcut phrase in the ethereal database?

I don't really know anything about Rowling, but I enjoyed reading the books (which I read after iirc seeing all the movies, and after at least one of my kids read all the books). Honestly not sure why anyone would call them *bad* or awful, which is obviously anyone's preogative, but if these books are bad then pretty much all books of its ilk are unreadable. In fact, one of the biggest (small) problems we had as parents was finding a series for the kids to follow Harry Potter, as in our opinion the next in line (Percy Jackson et al.) were several steps down in quality. Like, if Harry Potter is bad, what are the *good* ones?

This is what happens if you start trying to write down everything that doesn't make sense in Harry Potter - https://www.hpmor.com/

lol I haven’t heard about that thing in years. Isn’t that guy a neoreactionary or an accelerationist think tank guy now

thought it was written by a woman? anyway as you can surely tell, I have no idea.

I'm reading the books now with my daughter, we're up to the third one now. Agree that the prose is awfully leaden & turgid, but I don't think kids mind about that too much.

when i was a kid the harry potter series was introduced to me as being roald dahl-ish and i'd say whoever told me that was full of shit

i was intending to make a point with this post but forgot what it was

For all their prodigious length, the last three Harry Potter books are as vapor in my mind

https://twitter.com/i/events/1269428759297265664

i mean it's like only loving a band's early shit, i guess. one of my friends wrote /the/ hp fanfic and she's talked a lot about how the series bent toward sucking hard after the third one

i am referring to the shoebox project

! I love that one and your friend is great, one of my few fond memories of the series

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/2020/06/08/daniel-radcliffe-responds-to-j-k-rowlings-tweets-on-gender-identity/

Daniel Radcliffe: Classic

yeah that was a very decent response from radcliffe

Feels like a surprisingly hard divide with these - they weren't a thing at all when I was in school, never saw or heard of them until the movies started coming out, but friends 2-3 years younger the books were their adolescence.

same here, I was managing a group of teachers who were 5-12 years younger than me and they were always referring to it

In fact, one of the biggest (small) problems we had as parents was finding a series for the kids to follow Harry Potter, as in our opinion the next in line (Percy Jackson et al.) were several steps down in quality. Like, if Harry Potter is bad, what are the *good* ones?

Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci series, about, er, a boy who goes to wizard school.
Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series, about, er, well you get the picture.

The Worst Witch is also way better, though probably for a younger readership