Thoughts on Harry Potter books?

I think what largely fueled the cultural obsession was the obsession itself, like a positive feedback loop. People like being part of the ingroup, the zeitgeist. I never cared much for the story, but I damned sure went to ever book release at the local bookstore. They really were special events. We'll probably never see the world get so excited over books again.

this. The sort of lore around the world was the best part. The stories were poorly written and the plots predictable.

I am on the goblet of fire right now. I am reading just for the meme and to challenge leftists about obscure things that happened in the movies, but didn't happen in the books to see if they actually read it. The story is the same in every book so far, the characters have no development, everything is completely linear. But it takes only a day to read each one so fuck it.

NEOLIBERALS REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Reminder that pic related is arguably canon.

Only read the series once when I was a young lad. Tried last summer and I couldn't bring myself to.

Loved them as a kid, and I still enjoy reading them once a year.

Didn't mean to reply

i-it's okay. I didn't care about that you anyway.......

i wish it was real life and i could magic away all of my problems and also have a really sick scar on my forehead

this, pretty much

There's a lot to say about HP (hack author, "stretched his legs", plot holes, etc.). I know I've said this before, but something happened around mid-way (4th book, but really book 5-7) where it went from a series of memorable adventures with an overarching plot to a forgettable "epic" that involved the Horcruxes, one of those things that only appeared in the second half.

...

I don't like the heavy focus on educational institutions and civil servants as supposedly heroic. It is fantasy for spiritual bureaucrats. I would rather any children I may have read something a bit more classically heroic.

it does, however, contain some of the best world building in YA fiction. Which is to say you can imagine the world persisting unsustained by the the presence of the protagonist. It does this without overloading the reader with too much background information either. So a good balance has been struck here.

Would I really understand them if I haven't read the Logico-Tractatus Philosophicus OR Dianetics?

harry potter is for plebs

Harry's story is complete after three books. Beyond that, it's just another angry Guardian reader.

>Thinks he can understand HP without reading Phenomenology of Spirit
Just stop reading books tbqhfam

we wuz wizerds n shiet

No pseud would ever read Harry Potter.

Spot on about the world building.
I just read the first book, and knowing the plot from the movies, not enjoying the prose or really resonating with anything, the world building and the magic in those books is really a spectacle and has me curious to proceed for at least a little while longer.

Me and my friends went to bar trivia last night. The table behind us had the team name “Ten Points for Gryffindor”. As you may guess, whenever they got a question right or had their name called, they all threw their hands up and belted, “TEN POINTS FOR GRYFFINDOR!!!”. Every time this phrase slipped through their jaws, you could feel the ground shake. They were seismic events that nearly spilled my plastic cup of water on several occasions.

At one point I turned around to take a gander at the folks dedicated to ruining my night. They fit the bill for typical Harry Potter fanatics. Twenty-somethings, phony thick rimmed glasses for their almost perfect eyesight, terrible posture, recent liberal arts graduates doing freelance work for startups. I swear I saw one of them casually browsing their Linkedin profile between rounds. Their lives were extraordinarily uninteresting. The men had ungroomed facial hair that probably hasn’t yet seen soap in 2018. Imagine the smell. The women t-shirts with the most benign “nerd-culture” references possible; one was wearing a Darth Vader shirt that said “Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies”. Take a moment to actually digest this bit of information. A grown ass adult chose to wear that article of clothing in public. My brain can’t process the mental gymnastics it would take to justify wearing that shirt past the ranks of seventh grade.

Yet there they were, screaming like beasts whenever they got a basic pop culture trivia question correct. There was this sense of pride they took in being Harry Potter fans. It’s as if they think they have their own secret club.

You see these people all the time on social media. They’ll take a “Which Harry Potter house do you belong to?” quiz on Facebook and pound that Share button. “Haha, I’m totally a Hufflepuff!” “Oh me? Yeah, heh, I’m Ravenclaw.” “I’ve always known I’m Slytherin

I absolutely agree. It's fun trawling through some of these harry potter fan wikis to see what sort of magical locations, individuals, and spells exist in the HP world.

The books are poorly written and do become redundant after like 4 or 5.

The first two movies are comfy children's fantasy kino though.

...

SOMEONE POST IT

I'll reply to you, user. I appreciated your meme. I stopped and had a chuckle.

horrifying post, user.
i regularly think thought disturbingly similar to these myself, and seeing you here give such a valid and entirely believable anecdote, and share your terrifyingly similar musings, it has pulled me back behind my own perspective, if you see what i mean, and i'm now seeing the world through two lenses of cynicism, and as an even darker and grimmer place than even before reading this fantastic post
truth is truly stranger than fiction, the old cliché is anything but cliché

My parents were religious and refused to let me watch/read it. Looking back, I thank them.

kek, my girlfriend's mother is psychotically catholic to a fault like that
my mom gave her (my gf) a fleece throw for christmas, and it has some cutesy skulls in the design of it. her mom saw it and immediately started talking like she didn't even want to be around it and acted like it ought to be thrown away! cutesy skulls! on a black and pink blanket! the tool of the devil in physical form, apparently

>Implying I give a fuck about any canon that's outside my head
Wew lad

I loved them when I was a child. I read Harry Potter until the 3rd book I think, then for one reason or another I just stopped while waiting for the fourth book to come out. It's not like I didn't enjoy them, they were good for the time I guess, but I stopped.

I thought multiple times throughout the years to come back to the series, but I think it's too late now, as I can't even stomach "mature" fantasy books. Has anyone here read the books at almost 30 years old? What did you think?

My piano teacher thought Harry Potter books were the devil, so when I brought them to her house I hid them in my backpack

>my parents were religious so they refused to let me watch it/read it
huh?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_influences_and_analogues

Look at all these canon influences. It's pure patrician

decent genre fiction for kids that gets overrated as something insightful by today's vapid pop culture, liked them as a child but as an adult they don't offer much at all besides a comfy world rooted in lower/middle class britain

Same here. Never given the series much thought looking back.

>comfy
Why do I see a 30-yo, bespectacled landwhale every time I read or hear this word??
As for this, I found my stack of HPs from the chldhood last weekend, opened it and read a bit just to see how it stands the test of time; it doesn't. The prose is rubbish and it was actually difficult to read because the senteces are overwhelmingly short and pointless. Still, sorry to say, but it is a modern classic... hold on, anons, calm down before you get a dangerous stroke... this is a modern classic since it's all normies read these days, if not worse. Wouldn't surprise me if it raises to some canonical place some time in the future once tastes and expectations get low enough.

>DAH PROSE

You're not half as intellectual as you think you are

I loved them as a kid and still own the set, maybe someday I will revisit them for myself and if I do have children I will read them to them. While the writing can be weak, the world is a lot of fun, though I can't really see why people are still obsessed as adults. It was my first series and I remember fighting with my brother over who could read the next installment first as they came out, since my parents didn't want to get two copies.

When I was in second grade, 14 years ago, kids were reading this shit talking about how good it was.
Wanting to find out what the boners were over, I decided to attempt to read the first book. I couldn't get past the first page, it almost put me to sleep during reading time at school. So I decided it was garbage and went back to reading Goosebumps. One of the best decisions I ever made I think.

This really

Harry potter is a good series, and its even better if youre like 12. If you're an adult though you can skip it. The movies are kinda lame though.

Who is though? Also, fag response.

A decent and fun story that I loved as a kid, nothing amazing but they're a good read. I think the cult following is a result of the series going on long enough that a lot of people grew up with it.

The HP books and movies, like most books and movies, are objectively better than Twilight. Twilight died because every teen girl fanbase has the attention span of a rodent.

This says more about your dumb kid-brain than Harry Potter to be desu with you.

OMG, loosen up a bit. they are for kids between 10-17 and will surely be entered into the canon (yes kiddie books can get that too)
Of course the prose is simple, but it's treatment of friendship and fate are solid, the world building is genious and the characters are relatable ... maybe not the highbrow dialectic, one is accustomed to around here, but that' s hardly the point

Thats strange because the series is heavily Christian, the last book even has the symbolic passion, death, and resurrection of Christ.

Don't underestimate inane preachers. They also wouldn't let me play pokemon, because it was about battling to find out which monster was more powerful (??).

A sad state, especially since Popes used to do magic and communicate with angels.

Reminds me of this

Jesus Christ, they're children's books.

They are books written for children.

How else can I phrase this for you autists?

I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.

"No!"