Harry Potter - a reappraisal

Suedehead

Suedehead

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The author being repugnant notwithstanding
There is a lot of discourse as to how he/ she are a “good writer, but…”
I disagree
I accept it’s a cultural behemoth and brings in a lot of money but
The films were universally rubbish
And the books were middling at best
By the fourth book I had lost interest anyway
 
It captured the zeitgeist at the right time & then marketing did the rest rather than the books being particularly outstanding. There's plot holes left right & centre & some of the world building is nonsensical.

The below books all did the "kids at magic school" trope better - staunch defender of women JK has never once acknowledged how these obviously inspired her.

Jill Murphy - "The Worst Witch"
Ursula Le Guin - "A Wizard Of Earthsea"
Diana Wynne Jones - "Witch Week"
 
I think they're technically easy to pick apart but they were brilliant commercial fiction for children and young people.

I agree that they essentially sold themselves at the end by being so massive by the fourth book or so, but there's a reason they hit so hard and got so many kids reading.
 
I was the ideal age for it, and I used to reread it often, especially if I was feeling out of sorts it was a good comfort read. But I think my last read through was 2018.

I'm mostly over it now but I was incredibly bitter that something that meant so much to me was spoiled so completely by its authors politics, especially as it seems so at odds with how she wrote Harry, Ron, and Hermione.

All my books and other paraphernalia are in a box at the back of the cupboard and I'll likely never read them again. I did pirate Hogwarts Legacy when that came out and enjoyed it for what it was, but won't feel the need to play the sequel so I think HP is pretty much out of my life.
 
Never ventured into the books nor the films. Just never had any interest. I’m the youngest in my family and have no nieces/nephews so why would I be interested in something that first came out in my late-teens and early 20s?

If I was older or younger then I probably would have, but it hit just at the point when I considered it to be for children at the time, then it passed me by completely.
 
The movies started off kiddie but get better by the third one.

The books, while having some off moments, read very well and get better as they go along. I’ve probably read through them a dozen times or more over the years.

JK has pretty much ruined the legacy of them at this point.
 
Delightful at the time, but then I was exactly the right age for them - think I got the first three books for my 8th birthday and the last one came out when I was 15 about to turn 16. The films were good fun but really anyone who's still a massive fan now...

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I was a little too old for it but I did read the books and enjoyed them at the time. The films never did anything for me.

But yeah, never touching anything that puts money in that hateful old crone's coffers ever again. Hoping the next generation consigns it to the dustbin of history alongside Enid Blyton.
 
I was way too old for this when it 'happened' but I do remember being in town the day one of the books was launched. I had popped through to Edinburgh for some shopping and a change of scene (in the days when that didn't require checking yr bank balance first) and someone in an Edinburgh bookshop was claiming that Waterstones planned to break the embargo; it was going on sale at 4pm, I think, after its main audience had finished school for the day. In the event, they didn't, likely realising they'd be cut out of future promotions. I was back in Glasgow by late afternoon and soon enough, Borders was teeming with schoolkids excitedly grabbing the latest volume in the series. I remember thinking "who cares, if it gets kids reading, it's an automatic good". Somewhere, unbeknownst to anyone, hidden in a deep darkness where no human eye had been in centuries, a finger on a monkey's paw curled inwards...
 
I’ll still love His Dark Materials to THIS DAY though!
 
I enjoyed the books and films when I was younger and enjoyed watching them again with Kylie and Dannii.
Shame about the author though, it's now put me off them.
 
Ellie said:
Never ventured into the books nor the films. Just never had any interest. I’m the youngest in my family and have no nieces/nephews so why would I be interested in something that first came out in my late-teens and early 20s?

If I was older or younger then I probably would have, but it hit just at the point when I considered it to be for children at the time, then it passed me by completely.
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AGinAg (38) said:
Yeah I was about 17 when he came out. I never cared.
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I was younger and I still didn’t care.

As for the films, an ex insisted on showing them to me. I think I saw the first two and still didn’t care.
 
I've never read a single word of it, or seen any of the films. Regardless of the author's views, I've never been interested in it.
 
So strange that so many of us are the same. I’m very much in the minority with people I know. Just the other week I helped out a colleague with booking tickets for the stage show, and they think I’ve seen everything in the West End and that everyone must have seen the films, so we had to have the conversation.
 
Probably just speaks to Moopy’s general demographic. I imagine most of us were just too old to be caught up in it when it truly became a phenomenon. Anecdotally, from running my quizzes it seems to be Gen Z who can really quote chapter and verse on it, because they will have grown up with both the books and the films already embedded in pop culture.
 
Like others I was exactly the right age for it when the first books came out and enjoyed them. By the time it got to the 5th book though I had very much grown out of it and considered myself a bit ABOVE IT ALL. How much was this because her writing was shit, and how much was it down to me being a pretentious teenager? Your mileage may vary.

A few of the later books are incredibly self-indulgent, and incredibly boring, and I've always put this down to her becoming so big that her editors became yes men.
 
Dark Carnival said:
Never been more relieved by my lack of stannage. Not that that was particularly a hard task.
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The reason I didn't give folk too hard a time over it for a few years was because I was a Smiths/Morrissey fan as a pre-teen and teenager and it is difficult to stand back when you've loved something that much. That said, I have the same attitude towards people who still give Morrissey money as I have to people who still give K K Krowling money - stop being such a selfish dicksplash.
 
Too old for it and never went near the books, but as my friend worked on all of the films (make up) and would regale us with stories from the set, I did watch the films, at least to start with, and genuinely enjoyed the first two or three. But I don't think I watched after four or five as it bored me by then.
 
It's still pretty popular with secondary age kids, but probably not as much as it once was. Funnily there's a corelation between some of the queer and gender questioning kids and Harry Potter fans. It's all SUCH A SHAME.
 
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