What is it that has caused Harry Potter to leave such a lasting impact? It's been 20 years and people still obsess over these books like they were released last week.
What is it that has caused Harry Potter to leave such a lasting impact...
Parker Collins
Other urls found in this thread:
amazon.com
twitter.com
Joshua Brooks
Mix of Nostalgia, being over-hyped, easy to read, and wish fulfillment.
Lincoln Kelly
Marketing. Everybody I know who read Harry Potter did so because of the movies. Warner Bros. pushed it all really hard and there are very few book-to-movie adaptations that compare (aside from Lord of the Rings).
Also that it's written by a woman is very important. I'm not /pol/ by it's hard to deny that this a cultural zeitgeist heavily dominated by female issues in media. The rise of female bloggers and journalists writing about issues that they want to resonate with people is why it's so often brought up (familiarity).
Personally, I think it Harry Potter were written by a dude its legacy would only be slighter bigger than Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (a crap movie adaptation curbed more wide-spread appeal).
Robert Johnson
>It's been 20 years
Mason Gomez
>people still obsess over Harry Potter because it's over-hyped
What does that even mean, user?
Cameron Wood
I'm not sure how much this will be worth, but when I was in 4th grade and the books were coming out, I remember being eager to order them via Scholastic because:
>they were the few actual novels available in Scholastic, everything else was like "The Brave Badger Family Learn to Spell!"
>of the few novels available, they were the only ones about something "fun" (magic and wizards), instead of being like "Mordechai doesn't want to wear his Christmas sweater to play lacrosse with his brother. In the end, he learns a valuable lesson about Montreal culture."
>my parents never took me to libraries/bookstores and never forced me to read shit, so I didn't know other books existed
That's basically it. They were the first real novels I wanted to read, because they were the first real novels I had encountered and was able to choose for myself. Everything else was too traditional, and didn't immediately appeal to a kid who was watching Beast Wars and Terminator 2, and playing Zelda.
If my parents had forced me to read The Hobbit and Treasure Island instead, I would have been way better off.
I think the HP books just came around at the right time and were just the right level of junk food entertainment appeal and accessibility.
Thomas Stewart
>Everybody I know who read Harry Potter did so because of the movies.
Well that's nonsense, the books were huge before the first movie was released.
Camden Flores
>The book reached the top of the New York Times list of best-selling fiction in August 1999 and stayed near the top of that list for much of 1999 and 2000.
Okay, I appreciate that I'm wrong about that but I genuinely don't remember hearing about Harry Potter until the movies came out. Weirder because I'm British.
I remember my library at primary school stocking books like the Redwall Series and His Dark Materials but not Harry Potter. This would have been in 1999.
Tyler Robinson
Yeah, I do think the franchise's enduring success is largely a triumph of marketing, and generally has more to do with the films than the novels. raises a fair point though; I remember reading the first two books before any of the films came out (though once they did I resolved to ignore the books and stick with the movies), and most of my classmates were doing the same. But children are routinely captivated with fads; popularity among them isn't really a great predictor for cultural longevity. I do think the success of the film franchise did more to cement HP's legacy than anything else. It helps that they were released over the span of a decade, allowing young audience members to feel that they were growing up with the characters on the screen.
Luis Harris
It's legitimately better written and more entertaining than most fantasy. Also, you're not aware of the huge HP fanfiction community that keeps the series alive, you can find decent stories about literally anything if you search for it.
Luke Fisher
One of the few franchises to properly accomplish aging of characters with the readership.
That fact that Harry and Co.'s apparent emotional age by the end of the books is about MAYBE 16 or 17 is a telling sign.
Cameron Moore
>I remember reading the first two books before any of the films came out (though once they did I resolved to ignore the books and stick with the movies), and most of my classmates were doing the same
I understand that. If Harry Potter ever crops up on my facebook feed then it'll be something to do with the movies or the theme park. I've never seen anybody mention the books, although that might be because I can't imagine what they'd say about them.
Kevin Carter
In my circle it's similar. More often than not, discussion of the franchise is related to the films, but I also know quite a few obsessives who have read the entire series and are chock full of trivia/references. Had the series not been made into a film franchise I can certainly imagine it having a cult following, just nowhere near having made as large an impact on the cultural landscape as it has.
Liam Howard
It's the people who read the books or saw the movies when they were young, and who still view the whole thing through nostalgia goggles.
It happens with every generation - there are people in their 50s who think some garbage TV shows from the 70s are great, simply because they remember them nostalgically.
Henry Thomas
Harry Potter:
>Simple syntax and vocabulary
>Easy to follow plot
>Characters are superficial and easy to follow along with
>Lord of the Rings:
>Obscure vocabulary
>Archaic sentence constructions
>Plot can be confusing if you have not read the Hobbit or The Silmarillion, often times single events last dozens of pages
>Every character and location is ridiculously detailed and deep. Tolkien has entire genealogies of characters who might only be *mentioned* in the story. The ammount of ancillary information is at times overwhelming
>Two fully functioning languages, and a dozen partially finished languages, extremely realistic in nature and used to name everything
There's a reason why one of them is popular with mainstream readers, and another is a timeless work of art. It's like comparing pop music to classical
Nathaniel Morris
I was always really impressed by how much he fleshed out the elvish and orcish languages. That's some major fuckin dedication right there to something that will probably be glossed over by the average reader.
Matthew Brooks
On one end, you've got a super accessible, classic good vs. evil story with love story subplots and plot twists. That's a good foundation to build on.
But I think the real success comes in the world-building and how readers connect with that world. Hogwarts is perfect escapism fodder, and people love to imagine themselves as students there (isn't there even an app devoted to that idea?), and the world itself is very receptive to that idea as there's no real limit on who can be there ("Mary Sue is the newest student at Hogwarts and already super popular...").
The same can be said about franchises like Star Wars/Trek, or places like the DC/Marvel Universes -- they're "recruit-friendly" organizations that basically invite the reader/viewer to put themselves in them. There are probably some books that are similar, but I'm drawing a blank right now.
The fact that Harry Potter became a blockbuster, decade-long movie series is what cemented its popularity, but I think in the beginning it had some solid concepts that lead to its resonance.
Jordan Torres
I think you guys are missing the bigger picture here; yes, it's a relatively simply franchise that people feel nostalgic towards. But there are countless other books and films just as straightforward that could arouse nostalgia. The fact that Potter occupies such a prominent place in our consciousness and all of those others don't is worth considering.
Austin Lewis
IMO It has less to do with the work and more with the timing and circumstances.
Not saying the work doesn't have anything with it, but it simply strikes the points needed to make it work, nothing less, nothing more.
It simply was a lucky strike, everything fell into place for that specific series. It's generic, so it doesn't really have anything that would make it harder for it to gain traction in the mainstream.
On the other hand, if it had any truly redeeming quality and original content, it would be more divisive due to the nature of those two points.
I don't like HP and like LOTR but:
>Lord of the Rings:
>Obscure vocabulary
What? It's standard english m8. Unless you have the vocabulary of trump.
>Plot can be confusing
But it's super straightforward. Everything that will happen is explicitly stated.
The next two are just his autism as an author but I wouldn't use them as an argument of good writing necessarily.
Also, I'd say the Silmarillion has to be read after one has gone through the other works. It may be a prequel, but it rides on the premise of delivering the outcomes that creates the plot of the Hobbit and LOTR, people tend to find it a chore compared to those two.
Nicholas Lewis
the very true story of why i hate harry fucking potter and everything it stands for:
the most telling of my childhood memories goes thusly: our parents took my sister in the city for christmas and into some large union square bookstore and said that they would buy us any book we wanted. we were still young at the time so this kind of generosity was a bit surprising. i think they let us browse for 30 or 40 minutes, and i went to my favorite section still unfortunately dubbed "new age & spirituality" at the time, because faggots still haven't realized that astrology and palmistry and numerology all have existed well before the age of aquarius and that spirituality/metaphysics deserves a stand-alone section much more than the shit-tier fanfiction y&a degeneracy that entire rows are dedicated to.
i spent careful time opening up and browsing as many books as i can, carefully weighing the merits of each. we all met up again. this was the book i chose: amazon.com
it was only due to the folly of youth that i read up to the fourth book of the hp series and then utterly abandoned the series. i knew it was shit by the time i got a few pages into the goblet of fire. the only book i reread was the chamber of secrets. i guess there was something about that book that i felt was worth a rereading (something which i do not do often with books).
after almost 20 years later after the release of the first book, my sister uses the kindle her boyfriend gifts her to take the opportunity to reread the entire harry potter series for god knows which time.
as for me...well you all know what i do.
~the end~
Christian Adams
Good post
Daniel Garcia
I literally never hear about harry potter except when you people use it as a meter of your superiority.
Mason Robinson
>lasting impact
Because they are still release content for it.
A new Harry Potter film came out last year. A new Harry Potter play came out last year.
20th anniversary editions of book 1 are being released this month.
It's had a lasting impact because it never fucking left. It's not just one book everyone read twenty years ago then forgot about.
Joseph Robinson
He wasn't going to publish it anyways, it was just his pure autism in his pure autism career.
I think the real reason is that it was huge. Everyone had that impression that kids wouldn't read a book that big, so when they did, they got praised. I remember lots of news stories about how harry potter was so great for getting kids reading.
sugoi
As for me I don't really hate harry potter. I don't read anymore outside of internet posts so when I see people talking about it I'm annoyed that they actually still care. Then on Veeky Forums it's the people annoyed that people care and the people who are envious of the success of the series.
Charles Martinez
LotR was just basic "good guys v bad guys dump the thing in the volcano" straightforward adventure novel. Tolkien did have an interesting thing going in creating cultures with their own histories and literature keeping in mind philosophy and geography, but after the first book he dumps all that over the side of the boat because he can't think of a way to incorporate that into his simple as fuck story structure. So he opted not to. It made them far better paced than the first book which really dragged its feet in places, but it also made them shallow. Also his prose is incredibly weak. He intentionally wrote to make it sound older than it is but the result was clumsy instead of quaint. You need only look at the dialogue, it's entirely unconvincing that such awkward stilted shit would come out the mouths of any intelligent creature, human and fantastical alike.
For comparison, yes LotR is better than fucking Harry Potter but let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
Wyatt Martin
>havent seen okay guy in 7 years
Asher Turner
Manchildren.
Carson Wilson
>unless you have the vocabulary of trump
imagine being so ideological even LOtR was related to politics
rly makes u think
Matthew Kelly
>A new Harry Potter film came out last year
excuse me
Colton Thompson
>I think the HP books just came around at the right time and were just the right level of junk food entertainment appeal and accessibility.
This is a good diagnosis. Harry Potter caught on just after Pokémon got big, so the kids who two years earlier were involved in a fantastic monster-catching quest were primed for a little more mature, school-based fantasy series with wizards, monsters, and spells.
Justin Ward
Dumbing down of the masses.
Nathan Thomas
For many people its one of the very few (perhaps only) book they read themselves outside of school.
Levi Davis
>harry's pregnant
>he doesn't know if the dad is ron or draco
Ian Perez
>ron ever getting screentime
ruined my suspension of disbelief
Jason Evans
Well which one is it?
Cooper Ross
>envious of the success of the series
as someone young enough to still think that i may end up writing my own book series, i feel being envious is a good thing.
also, someone who's never been published, HP and other kids books provide with a basic guideline as to what sells.
Jose Scott
neither,
harry is biologically male, and no sex change op will give him a working uterus anyway.
harry is not pregnant at all.
Oliver Long
it's Star Wars with magic
Adam Myers
My guess is that it has a lasting impact because of the fusion of the normal world and the wizardry world. Margins of lifetime are blant so the description of a magical parallel world which is already actively involved in ours gives people some sense of excitement. That effect surely is especially strong when children read this and when they grow up thus are confronted with a shitty reality they remember back to imagine that there might be more than everyday normal life.
For example Lord of the Rings does not present such a proximity to our normal life so most people have less occasions and/ or power of imagination to project themselves in such a reality. Harry Potter on the other hand offers an easy way to delude oneself in the possibility that there still could be magic around and in face of a secularized world this certainly is a potent means to overlay some of the dullness or insignificance of existence.
Luis Perry
what would be a series better than LoTR? I just finished the series and thought it was amazing. I'm interested to see what you and many others find better than LoTR.
Bentley Richardson
It takes the form of a religion that is called the desire to believe in magic, or, worship of the "Idea of Magic."
It is a reaction to a reaction, i.e. re-himmelsturmen. Specifically, it is the reaction of capitalist ideology to Marxist materialism.
Dylan Cook
The right books at the right time.
>Hermonie getting pity fucks because she's a plain Jane
Nathan Thompson
Ever notice how every big school or uni wants to compare itself to Harry Potter? It has become such a cultural touche-stone that even fucking Yale can't resist comparisons because
>le old things and le castle like shit
I think this appeals to liberals for several reasons
>Misunderstood kids who are inherently superior than the stupid, ignorant world they came from have a place to go to
>This place is an institution where they are trained to enter bureaucracy
>This bureaucracy has understanding of how the real world works and the real processes behind it
Its just a fap fantasy for people who think they're misunderstood and have a desire to fit in somewhere where they can exert power. I.e. shit eating striver liberals. Moreover like other people have said ITT it is written simply, simple characters, simple themes etc. Modern education doesn't prepare people to engage with anything above a Harry Potter level anyway.
Angel Butler
LOL
Ryan Reyes
>and gets dubs
WTF?!?!? my sides are orbiting the kike god-planet saturn
Jeremiah Rogers
wew
Henry Evans
Someone send this to that horrible Brit hag on twitter right now
Thomas Cox
Trump doesn't have a lightning scar on his face though. Checkmate atheists.
Jose Russell
Because the media forces it, now more so than ever.
If that vampire posts anything on twitter its immediately "trending" on facebook etc. Theres the unnecessary new films, the studio tour to look at some costumes, reprints of books, the series on ITV once a month, the awful and money-grabbing merchandise all playing into "muh nostalgia".
Grayson Moore
>Not understanding Tolkeins intentional echoing of mythology in dialogue and prose style
Maybe read the fucking Bible and some Greektragedy you philistine
Elijah Fisher
> It's been 20 years
A new movie and a play came out last year, user.
Adrian Foster
[[[teh sagas]]]
Luis Thompson
>Every character and location is ridiculously detailed and deep. Tolkien has entire genealogies of characters who might only be *mentioned* in the story. The ammount of ancillary information is at times overwhelming
>Two fully functioning languages, and a dozen partially finished languages, extremely realistic in nature and used to name everything
So LOTR is better because the author had autism?
Grayson White
Series?
Probably none. However, I highly recommend you read The Silmarillion and afterwards Unfinished Tales. You don't have to read the entirety of the later if you really don't want to, but there are at least some chapters that are elongated versions of The Silmarillion which his son pieced together more details using his notes, but didn't want to put in the actual book since he had to "write" part of it himself anyway since his father died before it finished.
I read the Trilogy once and the Return of the King twice. I've read The Silmarillion so many times I couldn't tell you. It's a beautiful piece of literature which you appreciate more every time you read it.