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Even aside from Rowling being an insane monster, Jesus fuck I am sick of hearing about Harry Potter

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HBO, please stop beating the dead horse boy wizard, please, it has no marrow left to squeeze. But we'll let HBO piss away millions as they figure that out for themselves, I suppose.

I never got the fundamental concept--if you're an evil, functionally immortal wizard and some kid is prophesied to end you, why not just wait him out? Wait until he's in the nursing home and muffle him with a pillow. Or just pull the plug on his breathing machine.

TBF if you're the sort of person so afraid of dying you start tearing your soul into little pieces so you can hoard them next to your funko pops, you probably aren't all that good at waiting out your fears.

No part of Alan Moore's work has aged quite as well as the sequence in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that's all about how shit Potter is. A ton of people accused him of sour grapes at the time: now he looks like a prophet (again).

As a British child in the late 2000’s it was unbearable as hell, especially since the books sucked even back then(and at the time I would literally stay awake for 72 hours to read through an entire book in a single sitting like an insane person)

The test of a good fantasy world, to me, is being able to imagine the world extending past the boundaries of the story. It's not all that easy to picture the world of HP including, like, Scotland. Let alone the rest of Europe or (heavens forbid) other continents.

I know the people telling people not to watch it have their hearts in the right place, but I've heard more about the show from them than any advertising. I would barely know it existed otherwise.

The central location is an abbey but as far as I could tell, no actual religion happened there. Just a bunch of woodland animals wearing uniform robes and living communally.

fake@felixforrester.bsky.social

Your friendly neighborhood Felix presenting the eternal PSA: discard unearned nostalgia for the dumb wizard books and JK Whatserface and *acquire* retroactive nostalgia for an actually-good YA series from the same era- Animorphs. Also the author KA Applegate is the opposite of JK in every way.

I was 10 when that came out, and the kids in my neighborhood were a hell of a lot more likely to be caught playing Face/Off than Quidditch or Let's Bully The Orphan.

And in case you were curious, Face/Off is played by picking who gets to be Nic Cage and who's John Travolta, then arguing for 30 minutes about who really gets which face. That's pretty much it.

its a story where in hindsight the only thing really unique about it is that it became extremely popular somehow. At the time I didnt care bc basic ass normies were suddenly reading books but since the films its been like eugh enough

Its wild what an utter failure Fantastic Beasts was And their best answer is "okay lets just do Harry Potter again" lmao The Wizarding World franchise has utterly failed

I feel like there's way more fucking merch and collabs and shit for it now than there EVER was at its peak. Makes me feel like they're trying to reverse engineer popularity/cultural relevance through STUFF.

Yep. like I was a fan of the books as a child but there were and are better books…multitudes even. Like can this generation Of kids have their own fantasy series? Do we really have to keep heating up the same mid children’s fantasy series?

Harry Potter was normie enough to be marketable and catch the zeitgeist. Animorphs was around too and KJ Applegate is a big trans ally. Her books were too weird to get that kinda mainstream appeal though.

The last two books were bad! Like, not just my opinion it was the general consensus. That's like 80% of the reason Rowling turned into an insane monster in the first place, the books stopped being good and she couldn't deal with people moving on!

I wandered into the books at age 24, after watching the first three movies. I was a decent fan, was heavily into fanfic, and bought all the books from 5 on when they released. And the drop in quality and ability to tell a story was so painfully obvious, I never touched 7 again after the first read.

And I realize I got into them as a Xennial - I think I'm technically the same age or a year younger than the characters - but JKR was painfully, obviously showing her lack of skill once the books stopped being so kiddy and breezy. And it floored me that others didn't see that.

Some people really can't handle the idea that their cultural relevance peaked and isn't coming back. Like a comedian that doesn't roll with the times and gets mad because they feel entitled to laughs.

I'm not even a fan of the genre but shit. Children of Time. Library at Mount Char. Both of which were ORIGINAL. They can make that whole series disappear for all I give a shit. JKR is just as shitty as HP Lovecraft or Orson Scott Card but even those nasty racist fucks were ORIGINAL. JKR ain't shit.

listen I used to be a huge Potter nerd. loved it. but I think even in the height of my love for it, if they announced a reboot series just a handful of years after the movies finished, I'd be like alright that's a bit much

I don’t know (and I won’t be watching.) but to me this sounds a lot like complaining at the recent Dune movies are a lot like the old Dune miniseries.

It’s a genuinely vacuous piece of media. There is no subtext because the author was always dim and uncurious. It’s a structurally fairly competent work and the prose is acceptable at conveying what’s happening but you can just tell the author did not think deeper than the actual words on the page.

It’s possible to tell good stories in the Star Wars universe (though mainly, it seems, by ignoring most of Star Wars). It does not seem possible to tell good stories in the Harry Potter universe, even if that were a desirable end.

I never understood the love for it, I think it hit me too late in life. What always struck me in what I know of the stories was seemingly utter abdication of adult responsibilities, leaving a major threat for children and weird magic cups to sort out. YMMV!

Being in the right age group to have grown up with them, I think the "adults are useless" trope in the early books is just typical YA/child fiction at work. The problem is that the books try to age with the reader, leaving the series kind of incoherent in retrospect.

At least that's how I remember it; I kinda stopped caring before the series ended because the writing quality noticeably degrades and I started feeling like I was reading an unedited fan-fiction.

I thought it was an unrepeatable but very interesting idea, writing a series of books for a single age cohort where each book would deal with more sophisticated themes in more sophisticated prose styles as that original group grew older, but it sounds as if that kind of broke down toward the end.

There's this bizarre middle class hang up about it, like it's the new Enid Blyton. It's incredibly frustrating to see people cling into the nostalgia and ignoring the extensive collateral damage. It's just... There are other books? It's not the be all and end all?