Ok, I know Veeky Forums loves to meme on Harry Potter, but can we talk about what a crazy phenomenon it was. Even before any of the movies were made, I feel like the first 4 books came out super quickly right around the turn of the millennium. Like in a one year period it just blew up.
Anyone else old enough to remember?
hairy pooter LMFAO
Old enough to remember it as the dullest franchise in the history of movie franchises. Seriously each episode following the boy wizard and his pals from Hogwarts Academy as they fight assorted villains has been indistinguishable from the others. Aside from the gloomy imagery, the series’ only consistency has been its lack of excitement and ineffective use of special effects, all to make magic unmagical, to make action seem inert.
Perhaps the die was cast when Rowling vetoed the idea of Spielberg directing the series; she made sure the series would never be mistaken for a work of art that meant anything to anybody; just ridiculously profitable cross-promotion for her books. The Harry Potter series might be anti-Christian (or not), but it’s certainly the anti-James Bond series in its refusal of wonder, beauty and excitement. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to.
>a-at least the books were good though
"No!"
The writing is 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. Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
I was to a launch event for book 4. All I remember is that a lot of people came dressed up and for the first time I felt ashamed for liking something.
what are the other times you have felt ashamed for liking something?
when mommy walk in and i watch sailormoon touchi peepee
>Atlas Shrugged
I remember reading the first one and being excited for the next two or so as a kid. By the time the seventh one came out I was hate-reading them.
The sad thing is that when the first couple came out, it was something to talk to my friends about and I think it legitimately did get some kids to read who didn't read much otherwise, but once the movies became a thing I knew so many people who loved and had seen all the movies who hadn't read the books and just watched the movies instead.
It makes me glad the shitty Golden Compass movie never took off into a big franchise.
I witnessed people well into their teens having serious discussions about which Hogwarts house they belonged to, like it was their fucking horoscope
I think I was in like 5th grade when the last book came out and I had been reading them all since 2nd grade? Something like that? I just remember being happy all of my friends were into reading like I was. It was cool because all my close friends and their older siblings and parents were big into it. Like OP said, it was a pretty crazy event. I mean think about it; 500-700 page books were the hottest thing in America (everywhere? idk how far this stuff reached) and fucking pre-teens were devouring them. That is insane.
Are the books literary masterpieces? No, but I don't think anyone is claiming that they are. I think people are just happy to have a collective nostalgic memory of something that was so uniting and fucking easy to love and escape into. It's pop culture, just in a way that most people have never experienced.
I know people in their 20s that still talk about it like this as well as some people who reread the series several times a year. It bothers me more that they've been hung up on something this long, but it doesn't bother me that it's HP. Like, branch out and read or do something new. Just revisit it every so often, don't fucking live in it.
I still respect the fuck out of these books and dream of someday creating something that sparks so much interest and discussion. How amazing it would be to see your world's depth (even if it's not much like in HP) be not only explored but extrapolated and for persons to listen intently for your revelations and make stories off your details
At that point you are closer to a god
Until they make slash fics of dumb shit of course
BASED
>Perhaps the die was cast when Rowling vetoed the idea of Spielberg directing the series
Spielberg is over rated. Just re-watched war of the worlds. Utter garbage. You're shit and so is your opinion. Harry Potter is better than a lot of shit out there. No one said it was the best. You're talking about a book written about a teenage boy.
Step aside pleb
>Get into an MFA program right after college
>highly ranked, credits get comped if you teach, pretty even mix of late 20's and early 30's etc. etc.
>Take a course on screenwriting as it relates to books and vice versa, talk about what books make good movies and what books make bad movies, the building blocks of each, why certain genres get gravitated towards
>Class is mostly pretty good about keeping "I liked/I didn't like X" types of comments to themselves
>Harry potter is one of the last movies/books we discuss
>people start going apeshit with nostalgia, people who called The Cider House Rules oscarbait start rimjobbing Harry Potter 1
>Mention a few of the strange takes in the film, that the movie takes a pretty long time to figure out what it wants its conflict to be
>also mention that the movie series, just like the book series, suffers from the problem of shifting from one end of the YA scale to the other, which means kids reading it now book-by-book will get more than they bargained for compared to the generation that grew up waiting for each installment
>room goes silent
>one girl starts crying while trying to provide a rebuttal because I criticized her favorite movie of all time
I wish I was making this up
thank you user, I can go to sleep happy now
>go to Veeky Forums from /tv/
>more of this pasta
never asked for this
i remember im primary school our class teacher would read a book to us over the course of a couple of months. At the start of the year we were given a choice between the first harry potter book which had just come out, and a book about a boy and his new dog. Everyone thought that the philosophers stone looked gay as fuck and we all chose the second. I shudder to think what i would have turned out like if we'd chosen the former.
>duuurrr harry potter isn´t a work of art!!
it was just supposed to be a fun read, it´s the obnoxius fans that took it way to seriously
hard to blame them when rowling is just as obnoxious
its originally a Veeky Forums pasta:
What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. 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.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now read only J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn't, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn't that a good thing?
It is not. "Harry Potter" will not lead our children on to Kipling's "Just So Stories" or his "Jungle Book." It will not lead them to Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks" or Kenneth Grahame's "Wind in the Willows" or Lewis Carroll's "Alice."
Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
>seeing people that young discuss it
Oh sweet summer child
The series is an excellent adventure/young adult tale.
You guys are just contrarians.
Even fans concede that the books have gigantic flaws. The first book was good as a stand-alone childrens book. The rest of the series tries to be a grand advanture, yet fails horribly.
You are just a contrarian.
You have to go back
The whole thing was a psyop.
The writing was unremarkable at best , and it too dependent in cliches to be of any interest. Rowling also is too shallow to deal with the themes in a meaningful way. I think that is why these books seem to emotionally stunt the children who read them.
This tends to happen with long things of superior quality. People don't flock til word of mouth gets around. Usually about just passed half-way, where which if it isn't great by then it's definitely never going to be.
>Atlas shrugged god tier
>Notes from the Underground Low Tier
>Wuthering Heights shit tier
jesus christ who ever made this is a retard
KEK half of the users on Veeky Forums have some type of mental deficiency. I honestly don't feel like that is an exaggeration.
>What is marketing?
>What are impressionable children?
>What is group think?
>What is a Gary Stu/Mary Sue?
Answer these questions and you'll understand why it was such a success.