Baby Boomers vs. Generation X vs. Millennials

everyone i know has read the potter books (well, everyone who read books at all)

Ime HP clicked with the 'I don't really like reading but I like this' crowd above all.

also lol at table using rejection of harry potter to establish teen punk cred

I was born in '75 and have read a few HP books and seen Lion King, although I attribute both to parenthood. Most everyone I know has also read these godawful books.

whats harry potter

Born 1979. I saw the original Star Wars movies as a kid on VHS but didn't develop any attachment to them and, even though I knew the movies were a big deal, I'm not sure I truly understood until college that they were objects of obsessive interest to some of my peers. They just weren't really a part of my immediate world.

I did see The Lion King and all of the other major Disney movies from 1989 to 1996, but I think I was too old to be obsessed with them. In my view, they were generally just well-reviewed movies with good songs. IIRC, I saw The Lion King with a couple of female friends (it was the summer after sophomore year), and then we probably played mini-golf or got ice cream afterwards. Haven't seen it since.

By the time the Harry Potter books came out, I was in college and had no interest whatsoever in reading anything marketed to children. (I'm not as much of a snob as I was then, but I'm still not particularly interested in Harry Potter.)

At age ~10, the narrative series I was most into was probably the King's Quest computer games.

Born in 84, by the time Harry Potter came out I had very defined tastes in sentence-level writing and HP was too clunky for me. Pushed through the first three to see what the fuss was about and then gave up. Did read a lot of Philip Pullman though.

I'd read Pol Potter tho.

Born in 81, had zero knowledge of the existence of the Potter books until the movies blew up - but it seems like people 2-3 years younger found it foundational, with almost a hard line in the middle of 1983.

Christopher Pike novels were my bad YA weapon of choice.

I have vague memories of YA novels from the 70s featuring a smart awkward female protagonist who lives in NYC and may or may not be Jewish meeting a cute, cool boy she does fun things with like attending leftist discussion groups and publishing underground newspapers -- I don't think it was a series.

no that's how the actual lion king goes

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

good teenagers, take off your clothes

I'd read Pol Potter tho.

― pomenitul

pretty sure that's just j.k. rowling's twitter

Between age 10 and 12 I read the first 20 Xanth novels so I could never throw stones at Potterheads.

The closest thing to YA novels I read as a tween were kitsch-ridden tales set in the Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering universes, such as R. A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale Trilogy and Arena.

And does The Wheel of Time count?

After Xanth I got the first Wheel of Time book but there were no puns so fuck that.

Our local braid-tugging and bathing experts will resent that remark

Sometimes I feel like the only person in my age cohort (late eighties/early nineties) who didn't, and still doesn't, get HP. There's something about the whole boarding-school setting that I find inherently repulsive. What a terrible setting for a fantasy!

What a terrible setting for a fantasy!

One about magic, anyway.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Pol Potter: a young man discovers he has the magical powers of genocide

So this is apparently a thing:

https://polpotter.bandcamp.com

xps actual LOL @ unperson & pomenitul

I have vague memories of YA novels from the 70s featuring a smart awkward female protagonist who lives in NYC and may or may not be Jewish meeting a cute, cool boy she does fun things with like attending leftist discussion groups and publishing underground newspapers -- I don't think it was a series.

Sounds like a great candidate for Let's help each other identify books we dimly remember reading as kids !

Is Pol Potter the only one allowed to wear glasses?

listening now -- i am disappointed ...microfascism 2 seemed so promising but it just sounds like fucking around on ipad synth apps

In high school all the girls in my class were heavily into The Mists of Avalon, which came out 1-2 years before most of us were born.

fucking around on ipad synth apps

Meant to approximate the sound of Adolf Hitler in art school iirc.

oh pol potter -- i had such high hopes 4 u

I have vague memories of YA novels from the 70s featuring a smart awkward female protagonist who lives in NYC and may or may not be Jewish meeting a cute, cool boy she does fun things with like attending leftist discussion groups and publishing underground newspapers -- I don't think it was a series.

This makes me think of Buffalo Brenda by Jill Pinkwater, but there's no main boy character in that one, just India Teidlebaum and her friend Brenda, and also it's from 1989 and they don't live in NYC. Great book though.

sarahell, that sounds like a Norma Klein novel.

Between age 10 and 12 I read the first 20 Xanth novels so I could never throw stones at Potterheads.

You're brave to admit that, milo (oh shit, me too)

I had very defined tastes in sentence-level writing and HP was too clunky for me. Pushed through the first three to see what the fuss was about and then gave up. Did read a lot of Philip Pullman though.

As someone else with very defined tastes in sentence-level writing, I would say that the Potter books hold up in quality as the series goes on better than the Pullman books are doing!

I kinda don't want to know what these books actually were ... I am more content with my vague memories.

xpost Agree that The Amber Spyglass ended up being worse than anything Rowling ever wrote. Of course I had no way of knowing that at age ten, when I read The Golden Compass and the first Harry Potter book and decided I liked Pullman's writing but not Rowling's.

Pullman definitely has some irritating verbal tics, like his habit of giving all his big dramatic scenes a Biblical flavor by starting every sentence with "and." But I think overall he has more of an ear for how words sound together than Rowling does.

I have to grudgingly admit that Rowling does know how to put sentences together, and they work particularly well when read. It's just all so thin compared with a real writer like LeGuin or Tolkein or Twain.

born '87, enjoyed the first 3 HP books well enough at the time, gave up completely after the 4th as it was so shit and have not returned

late to this but: 89, my grandmother bought me the first harry potter book around either elementary or middle school, I read a few chapters and thought it was boring, and forgot about it. then of course it blew up

Xpost to mookie, it wasn't really to establish punk cred lol, I wasn't going around calling Potter fans squares or anything. I was a gay kid who went to need camp and loved grindcore, HP just wasn't my deal.

Like I wrote a book report on the Chuck D biography in 8th grade and had my own zine.

Nerd, not need camp

couldn’t bring myself to read them, but I listened to the whole series as audiobooks

look, i haven't read the books so i can't possibly comment on whether not they are shit, bad writing, etc., but i know plenty of people who at a young age genuinely enjoyed them irrespective of whether or not they were objectively shit. i mean this isn't something like star wars where if you like it i will fucking come at you for your bad opinions.

my youngest cousins were interested, and my pre-teen goddaughter was terrified by voldemort

I tried to experience the books from her point of view. talking with her about them is something I will remember

born in 88, by the time i got to high school HP book releases were the closest thing we had to a monocultural event. which still probably meant 60-70% of the kids in my school didn't read them (barring the english classes where the first book was on the curriculum)

Like I wrote a book report on the Chuck D biography in 8th grade and had my own zine.

haha yes i'm sure you were a very special child indeed! not only was harry potter 'not your deal' but decades later, for no particular reason, you can assure us that you were instead busy getting arrested and writing about chuck d. bless your heart

and you're a very special adult too! you might have considered reading harry potter now -- simply to understand the cultural impact, of course -- but you simply haven't the time while concentrating on very obscure indigenous triplet poets of whom the rest of us are woefully ignorant

i'm sure we won't have to wait long to learn more amazing factoids

oh damn son here it goes 🍿 🍿 🍿

thank god S-zy hasn't posted ITT or shit would be getting really real

the movie that was directed by Alfonso Cuaron holds up pretty well IIRC

Fucksake, Milo - I have zero opinion on Rowling and the HP franchise apart from she’s a horrible TERF who limbered up for outing herself as such by ragging on Jeremy Corbyn for five years (funny how those things mostly go hand-in-hand).

My born-in-‘75 cousin, though, fell hard for the books as a byproduct of being depressed in her early 20s (both parents dead by her 23rd birthday) and took her 4yo to Harry Potter land or whatever when she visited me in 2015, but dropped Rowling like a hot potato when the transphobic shit started. But my cousin died in February, leaving me with nobody in my family who ‘gets it’.

Fuck you mookie. Amazing that just sharing about one's life can be derided so easily.

uh mookie i'm not particularly sure why table's post inspired such an incredibly hostile response from you