Harry Potter fucking sucked. what were we all smoking with that series?

[Himu]

 Harry Potter sucks balls. When remembering it you question how it was ever popular. John Williams probably made more HP fans with that score of his than Rowling.

[Pissy F Benny]

True badass fact: I've never seen (other than a trailer/ad) or read any Harry Potter material 

[Madrun Badrun]

I feel like this is your third anti-HP thread?  HP has some seriously good writing in it (and some pretty poor stuff).  Arguably it's not great fantasy, but its really good for young adult lit. 

[Momo]

Same, have never seen or read any of that shit

[Himu]

True badass fact: I've never seen (other than a trailer/ad) or read any Harry Potter material 

You're very lucky.

kids liked it.

the end.

PD and I were fans even in college and the series has a massive adult fanbase even when it first started to get popular.

So it really ain't the end and doesn't explain what crack we were smoking.

[Himu]

I feel like this is your third anti-HP thread?  HP has some seriously good writing in it (and some pretty poor stuff).  Arguably it's not great fantasy, but its really good for young adult lit.

Is it? I'm getting old.

[Momo]

Wait I'm lying, I watched that Beasts of Eddie Redmayne boogaloo, but only cause I have a straight guy crush on Eddie Redmayne

[Don Rumata]

True badass fact: I've never seen (other than a trailer/ad) or read any Harry Potter material 

Me neither. 
Big contrarian vibes when it came out, and then i was too old to start.

[Madrun Badrun]

I was late high school before I read them I think.  Maybe uni.  I don't think I watched any of them until after I read the books.  The movies aren't that good outside of 5 and 6. 

[Momo]

Can we do Hunger Games next? I want to see how many more people I can safely disregard 

[mormapope]

I remember reading a few books and seeing a few movies.

It's one of few fantasy franchises that have a lot of women as diehard fans. Every other adult woman I've known or dated loves Harry Potter. Even though I don't understand the appeal behind it so many years later, it's fanbase is pretty nontoxic imo.

Can't say that about many fambases.

[Himu]

I remember reading a few books and seeing a few movies.

It's one of few fantasy franchises that have a lot of women as diehard fans. Every other adult woman I've known or dated loves Harry Potter. Even though I don't understand the appeal behind it so many years later, it's fanbase is pretty nontoxic imo.

Can't say that about many fambases.

The fanbase is fine. I'm just trying to understand the appeal. I was a big fan and even I don't know why.

[thisismyusername]

https://www.reddit.com/r/readanotherbook/

That aside: I stopped with Book 4. I should go back and buy/finish Book 5-7, but I just fell out of it. There was just other shit I had to do that I fell out of it.

[team filler]

whoremainey grew up to be hot 

[Momo]

whoremainey grew up to be hot 

she's the blond in that underwater movie right? Or is she from some other kids fantasy series?

[Ghoul]

whoremainey grew up to be hot 

Yeah but she's fucking weird breh.

[team filler]

whoremainey grew up to be hot 

she's the blond in that underwater movie right? Or is she from some other kids fantasy series?

[Tasty]

The books are really good YA books way before that genre got raped to death by publishers, topped off with a satisfying ending by an author at the top of her game at the end of something she clearly planned out (well.) (It's unfortunate how sharp the drop off after that is, though...)

The movies are serviceable-to-decent PG-13 action/YA flicks elevated slightly by a cast of pretty stellar veteran actors and increasing budgets. Prisoner of Azkaban, having been directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, Gravity), is the best of the bunch and great just on its own merits.

[Tasty]

I feel like this is your third anti-HP thread?  HP has some seriously good writing in it (and some pretty poor stuff).  Arguably it's not great fantasy, but its really good for young adult lit. 

Marry me

[Mandark]

Let's repurpose this thread to hate on the Dresden Files.

[Madrun Badrun]

Let's repurpose this thread to hate on the Dresden Files.

No fuck you don't you even dare.

[Tasty]

I think it's a legit cool world.

Harry Potter World at Universal or whatever is like my dream. 😍

Wanna go there and choose my wand. 😍

[toku]

Read the first four books in a week to impress a girl in grade school. I'm still an idiot.

[Tasty]

Read the first four books in a week to impress a girl in grade school. I'm still an idiot.

Impressive reading skills tho damn. It took me like two months over the summer to get through the fourth on its own.

[VomKriege]

READ SETTLERS OF CATTAN

[Mandark]

Harry Poopoo Peepee is fine, it's children's entertainment. Everyone just gets mad about it now because some adults use it as a worldview, Read Another Book etc

It's kind of funny the lather people (twitter leftists) work themselves up into over people making HP references.

[Himu]

I think it's a legit cool world.

Harry Potter World at Universal or whatever is like my dream. 😍

Wanna go there and choose my wand. 😍

But it's a country. Not a world. A major flaw is you have no idea what's happening outside England. It's such a small world.

[jakefromstatefarm]

Everyone just gets mad about it now because some adults use it as a worldview, Read Another Book etc

even this gets overstated, lets be real

edit: and mandark already did this post. now i see why he’s thebore’s most reviled forums poster

[Tasty]

I think it's a legit cool world.

Harry Potter World at Universal or whatever is like my dream. 😍

Wanna go there and choose my wand. 😍

But it's a country. Not a world. A major flaw is you have no idea what's happening outside England. It's such a small world.

You get more of a sense in the Fantastic Beasts movies which are canon to the books like DB Super is canon to the manga. Turns out America (at least in the 1920s) is fucking boring lmao.

But even beyond that the mechanics of how everything works is more what I meant. And IIRC they do go to various other countries in Yurop by the end of the series.

[Madrun Badrun]

Read the first four books in a week to impress a girl in grade school. I'm still an idiot.

Impressive reading skills tho damn. It took me like two months over the summer to get through the fourth on its own.

He did this last week.

[Tasty]

Describing it as British shonen is pretty apt I feel. Kudos whoever drew that comparison.

[thisismyusername]

Wanna go there and choose my wand. 😍

...You already have a wand...

[team filler]

[Momo]

Can we talk about how Dune (only the Frank Herbert stuff) is amazing and anyone that doesn't agree can fuck off right into a sandworm's ass?

[Trent Dole]

HP is fine as long as you ignore that the author has completely lost her damn mind since writing it.

Can we talk about how Dune (only the Frank Herbert stuff) is amazing and anyone that doesn't agree can fuck off right into a sandworm's ass?

The first 3-4 Dune books are great stuff. They steadily decline in quality so when you stop feeling it just put the series away entirely. At some point one of his kids since picked the series back up and has been steadily been writing books even worse than their father's bottom tier material.

[Mandark]

The first book is basically an homage to Roald Dahl (orphaned British child living in comical levels of deprivation and/or abuse is given a magical escape). When various younger family members were reading HP I used it as a chance to buy them some Dahl books and foist my own childhood on them.

[Madrun Badrun]

The world-building from a long term perspective is one of the worst parts of HP.  Most fantasy elements are introduced in the same book in which they are used to solve some problems, and often it's just right before.  This might have been OK in books 1 and 2 but it goes right till the end.  The Horcruxes and deathly hollows being the worst offenses since they retcon other stuff to do it.  The fact that we don't see much of the outside world is because that was never needed to solve any of their problems. 

[Tasty]

Wanna go there and choose my wand. 😍

...You already have a wand...

One that's magic.

[mormapope]

Atlus making a Persona-esque Harry Potter licensed game would be pretty great. Social links influencing spells and Patronus stuff, all the different classes, dungeon crawling amounting to exploring Hogwarts and being teleported somewhere.

[Mandark]

Let's repurpose this thread to hate on the Dresden Files.

I read like 12 of these books from my YA years to early adulthood and they're all terrible. but they're openly garbage and never pretended to be anything but that.

Yeah I binged on the Spenser books in my teens and even back then reading them together made the formula hard to ignore.

I didn't try Dresden Files until later on and I think it was after reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. That was a mistake.

[thisismyusername]

Wanna go there and choose my wand. 😍

...You already have a wand...

One that's magic.

...Yours shoots white stuff... technically that's magic.

[Tasty]

...Expecto patronum?

[Madrun Badrun]

Let's repurpose this thread to hate on the Dresden Files.

I read like 12 of these books from my YA years to early adulthood and they're all terrible. but they're openly garbage and never pretended to be anything but that.

I honestly can not even conceive of a person who can read Dresden past Changes and still think they are terrible.  They are pure pulp but the highest quality pulp. The first 2.5 are not good but after that, they just keep getting better.   

[Steve Contra]

https://www.reddit.com/r/readanotherbook/

That aside: I stopped with Book 4. I should go back and buy/finish Book 5-7, but I just fell out of it. There was just other shit I had to do that I fell out of it.

I stopped after the fourth one as well. Everything started to feel real contrived even by YA/fantasy standards. I went back years later and watched the movies and it confirmed that I was right in doing so. The third book and especially movie adaptation are great though.

Wanna go there and choose my wand. 😍

...You already have a wand...

One that's magic.

...Yours shoots white stuff... technically that's magic.

And magic where that leads you to watch increasingly weird porn to perform is probably not the best kind of magic.

[thisismyusername]

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/g714w1/the_real_political_compass/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

https://www.reddit.com/r/readanotherbook/

That aside: I stopped with Book 4. I should go back and buy/finish Book 5-7, but I just fell out of it. There was just other shit I had to do that I fell out of it.

I stopped after the fourth one as well. Everything started to feel real contrived even by YA/fantasy standards. I went back years later and watched the movies and it confirmed that I was right in doing so. The third book and especially movie adaptation are great though.

I didn't mind it, but the years wait when she was apparently on like book 6-7 at the time really soured me. This was back in like 7th grade, so Book 1-3 were already out, 8th was book 4. And then while waiting for that, I got into the Hobbit (finished that in like a week) and then started the Lord of the Rings (since the movies were coming out) and that took me like all of high-school and I never went back to 5-7 because at that point I was already doing high-school course-work and reading LotR in my spare-time, playing GTA, Q3A, etc.

[Mandark]

It's totally overstated like everything else on twitter and I originally wanted to put (a small subset of) in my post before I rewrote it but there's just too many good jokes about the relationship The Libs have to the reanimated corpse of dead children's properties but maybe we're all enslaved to that seeing as how we're posting on a spinoff section of a videogame forum in our 30s-50's. I'll leave the analysis of the ideological evolution of the Lion King property to Zizek.

If anything I think irony posters' hate-obsession with HP and The West Wing gives ammo for the idea that American "leftists" are just libs with a different aesthetic.

[jakefromstatefarm]

The fact that we don't see much of the outside world is because that was never needed to solve any of their problems.

back of the napkin analysis: it might be a standard ya trope to isolate your setting from adult influence. rowling does that twice by having the magic world hermetically sealed off from the normal world and then hogwarts sealed off from the rest of the magic world. like a series of matryoshka dolls. then she tried to make the stakes of world-significance in the last three books but all the locations where shit goes down are...the school, the ministry of magic, and their appendages. its like the credits roll of a jrpg where your character travels back through all the plot beats in reverse order

[toku]

Read the first four books in a week to impress a girl in grade school. I'm still an idiot.

Impressive reading skills tho damn. It took me like two months over the summer to get through the fourth on its own.

He did this last week.

suck my dick bro

[Steve Contra]

If you’re really going to go all in on hating a fan base at least do some public good and make it adult Disney fans

[Mandark]

Yeah, pretty clear the HP series wasn't constructed to accommodate the high stakes and breadth of conflict that were in the last couple books, similar to how ASOAIF's ever-increasing entropy has made it impossible for Martin to wrap things up.

[Himu]

If you’re really going to go all in on hating a fan base at least do some public good and make it adult Disney fans

I don't hate the fanbase. I just don't get the appeal of them. I don't even remember why I liked them. The characters? But Harry sucks and Ron is even more sucky.

[jakefromstatefarm]

It's totally overstated like everything else on twitter and I originally wanted to put (a small subset of) in my post before I rewrote it but there's just too many good jokes about the relationship The Libs have to the reanimated corpse of dead children's properties

oh yeah, the books worldview is dumb. but also endlessly fun to make fun of cause rowling’s so loudly a boring ass burkean lib dem. but its like mandark said, once that fun crosses over into demonizing the fanbase as just-not-getting-it is where the brainworms start to set in. which is itself funny because those people are ostensibly left of center yet unaware that theyre doing consumerist moral psychology

(Image removed from quote.)

slytherin are the closest analogues to literal nazis i can think of in popular fiction. this is brilliant metacommentary that op needs to hateread another book

[El Babua]

Harry Potter would be better if he smoked weed

[Madrun Badrun]

The fact that we don't see much of the outside world is because that was never needed to solve any of their problems.

back of the napkin analysis: it might be a standard ya trope to isolate your setting from adult influence. rowling does that twice by having the magic world hermetically sealed off from the normal world and then hogwarts sealed off from the rest of the magic world. like a series of matryoshka dolls. then she tried to make the stakes of world-significance in the last three books but all the locations where shit goes down are...the school, the ministry of magic, and their appendages. its like the credits roll of a jrpg where your character travels back through all the plot beats in reverse order

I get your point and its true, however, world-building doesn't need to be directly tied to the characters' problems.  For example, they take a history class but don't use that as an opportunity to have a few throwaway lines to mention what is outside the UK.  Like it should have been mentioned that there were the French and Russian schools before the book they appear in.  Not to mention Grindelwald etc.  YA books are restricted in how much extra stuff they can include but these kinds of things could have added much-needed worldbuilding and, more importantly, foreshadowing.  Instead, I feel like she left most of this unsaid so that that it could be new to Harry (and thus the reader) when it becomes necessary, which is good writing for books 1-3 but not so good as the audience becomes accustomed to the world, even if they are kids. 

[Steve Contra]

Yeah, pretty clear the HP series wasn't constructed to accommodate the high stakes and breadth of conflict that were in the last couple books, similar to how ASOAIF's ever-increasing entropy has made it impossible for Martin to wrap things up.

at least in asoiaf the central characters would be the central characters in a continent wide war. The strain of keeping children as the center of the events of Harry Potter killed the later books.

[Mandark]

If you’re really going to go all in on hating a fan base at least do some public good and make it adult Disney fans

I don't have the fanbase. I just don't get the appeal of them. I don't even remember why I liked them. The characters? But Harry sucks and Ron is even more sucky.

Young people like the idea of being able to escape mundane, stressful circumstances and go to a wondrous place where they meet new friends, have crazy adventures, and are told they are special.

[jakefromstatefarm]

are the closest analogues to literal nazis i can think of in popular fiction. this is brilliant metacommentary that op needs to hateread another book

like, if anything, all the houses are in the top right -except hufflepuff because they arent even on the chart- and the author is clueless about this.

[Tasty]

I remember turning 10 and waiting for my Hogwarts letter.

[thisismyusername]

I remember turning 10 and waiting for my Hogwarts letter.

God, you really are a child. (Though Shosta has now beat you)

the reason rowling never touched on the outside world is simple: she's english.

Or because she really couldn't world-build worth a damn.

[jakefromstatefarm]

i think its more she chose to world build at all rather than that she just did it poorly

also, brehs, the second movie is three hours long . who the fuck ok’d this??