Holy... I want more

Holy... I want more...

>This is why people over the age of 16 should consider “young adult fiction” bad. This class of literature, which would be more accurate to term “teen fiction” or “preteen fiction,” encompasses pop-culture juggernauts like Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games.

>The narrative is similar in such works. A teenager exists in a society full of mean and boring authority figures that deny his special nature. He goes on a journey of self-discovery to find that it’s actually his special snowflake-ness that ends up proving the adults wrong and saving the day.

>It’s no accident that this sounds like the daydream of a child pouting through a time-out. Her parents instruct the child to think about what she’s done, but in her mind there are no questions; the world is unfair for no reason. What is good is what makes her comfortable and what is bad is what makes her feel upset.

>To think this way is to be juvenile, something ten-year-olds cannot be faulted for. Neither can we fault the novels written with this audience in mind for being cartoons, archetypes stripped of any questions at all. Harry Potter is the good guy and Voldemort is the bad guy. Harry Potter wasn’t appreciated by his mean adoptive parents, but he showed them by becoming a magical hero. No amount of critical thinking can glean more than this.

thefederalist.com/2017/02/27/young-adult-fiction-like-harry-potter-taught-millennials-stupid-ways-view-politics/

Other urls found in this thread:

amazon.com/Michigan-Peat-5240-Compost-40-Pound/dp/B000KL5FP4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1488209918&sr=8-1&keywords=manure
logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/40/Appeal-to-Popularity
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/23/some-groups-of-people-who-may-not-100-deserve-our-eternal-scorn/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

>amazed by that level of insight and analytics
Are you actually 16?

That's the biggest sin of children's shit-lit imo. I've never been much taken in with the argument that simple prose, bad writing is going to be harmful. It's the emotional and moral shallowness of the works that's the real harm. People's world view is in part created by the fiction they consume, no matter how much you try to teach kids the difference between fact and fantasy.

What a pathetic and bitter reduction of storytelling.

It's literally so generic it can be used against any piece of fiction.

>mfw I know actually intelligent adults that claim Harry Potter is actually deep and sophisticated

Bullshit OP.
>The world is unfair for no reason.
Do you disagree with this?

>I know intelligent adults who don't share my opinion on some topic
wew

Well it is deeper than people like you and Bloom accurately say it is.

Bloom is right that it is badly written, but the story itself isn't bad, and has plenty of allusions to Romanticism, Christianity, and several other Western archetypes and narratives.

The world is unfair for plenty of perfectly valid reasons. Understanding this is the key to emotional depth.

Do you think really think this applies to, say, Blood Meridian?

Apply it to The Castle by Franz Kafka

Blood Meridian can be, perversely enough, seen as a coming of age novel. What constitutes coming of age for the Kid, is just written as a lust for gruesome barbarity.

Allusions don't make stories good, they just often accompany good stories. You fucking freshman literature major.

>Allusions don't make stories good, they just often accompany good stories

Yeah, and? Are you saying one of the most popular book series in world history doesn't have a good story?

Then why are people reading them?

>Are you saying one of the most popular book series in world history doesn't have a good story?
>Then why are people reading them?
Are you fucking trolling right now? They are popular kids books

>They are popular kids books

Yes, and they are popular because it's a good story.

People don't read shit stories.

people eat shit food all of the time so why should stories be any different

So number of sales is an objective measure of literary merit?

>appeal to popularity

Come on, senpai. No one says fast food is great food because it's eaten everywhere.

The story is genuinely the worst part.

>plebs have good taste i swear

Am I on /mu/?

>So number of sales is an objective measure of literary merit?

If it isn't an objective measure of literary merit, what exactly is it a measure of?

The 'story' is a meandering mess. It has none of the characteristics you'd expect of a classic story, and especially a childrens' story.
The only thing HP has going for it is the world, because it's top escapism for children.

>No one says fast food is great food because it's eaten everywhere.

I didn't say that either. My argument is that fast food is eaten everywhere because it *is* good, and cheap.

>being mad that books for young people aren't more complex
>being mad that they teach simple moral lessons, just like fairy tales and other forms of children's lit have for millennia

Sure is retarded in here

It's a measure of how many people thought the book was worth $14.95

of marketing acumen

the article criticizes people int he 20s and 30s, dipshit

The problem with this is that if you were to write a story that was essentially the antithesis of this, a story where the special teenager gets shit on by the world of adults, it would really be no different.

If Harry failed at being a wizard and had to go back to his mean adoptive parents so they could rub it in his face that wouldn't be a very good story would it?
It would just be mean spirited and kinda pointless.
Its not like either version of the story is more or less realistic or relateable than the other either.
Sometimes a child does surpass their parents but sometimes they fail too.
So in the end the only difference between these two stories is that one would sell a million copies and one would probably sell very little.

Its not like you couldn't be critical of these stories but this is the wrong way

>It's a measure of how many people thought the book was worth $14.95

Yeah, and a book has to have something going for it in order for people to think it worth 15 dollars.

Notice that nobody buys a bag of feces for 15 dollars.

Children's literature definitely can be more complex. Read Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, or Little Women, or The Wind in the Willows, and if you can't discern more emotional texture than in a Harry Potter book then I don't know how you can appreciate complex "adult" literature. Even something as slim as Where the Wild Things Are has more to appreciate.

>those are the only two places we can take this concept

Read A Wizard of Earthsea

>Notice that nobody buys a bag of feces for 15 dollars.
amazon.com/Michigan-Peat-5240-Compost-40-Pound/dp/B000KL5FP4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1488209918&sr=8-1&keywords=manure

Touché.

>Appeal to popularity fallacy: the post

>All these people literally arguing that popularity has no connection at all to literary merit

Retarded. So I guess The Road by McCarthy has to be shit then since it sold 1.5 million copies.

I can understand the reservations people might have for YA, and even though it isn't literature, a lot of it isn't worse than "adult" genre fiction. So.

>logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/40/Appeal-to-Popularity

Also nobody is arguing that popularity has no connection whatsoever with literary merit you dichotomous imbecile. They're suggesting that HP's sales are not indicative of its qualities.

Unironically go back to /r/books

>has no connection at all means that popular is bad
You dumb bitch

please take a course in introductory logic for children you subhuman retard

It is indicative of it's qualities.

If nobody wants to read what you write, chances are it's shit.

>If nobody wants to read what you write, chances are it's shit.

logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/40/Appeal-to-Popularity
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

Posting links to other sites aren't an argument you faggot.

Am I a hypocrite if I shit on Harry Potter fans but I watch Pretty Cure?

>So you're saying [total misrepresentation of argument]? I guess [retarded non-sequitor] too then

wew

>people defending the literary merit of Harry Potter in this thread
Reddit has truly taken over

why is harry potter's simplicity bad and beowulf's good?

I do indeed defend it, and nobody has supplied a coherent argument for why it doesn't have any literary merit, other than the words of a fat Jew at Yale.

>people don't read shit stories

wew

It's not Harry Potter's simplicity alone that's bad. And a large part of Beowulf's value is that it is one of the few windows we have into that culture.

Or Stoner

I'm going to get blasted for using this man's lyrics, but he does have some good lines every now and then, and these are particularly relevant to the argument about the relation between sales and merit

>so if your message ain't shit, fuck the records you sold
cuz if you go platinum, it's got nothing to do with luck
it just means that a million people are stupid as fuck

There's also a line about "marketing schemes" earlier in that track. That's what's really going on. The general population is not very intelligent and easily manipulated. For these very reasons, I would argue that many of the most popularly read books today are lacking in "literary merit". 50 Shades of Gray has sold more than 125 million copies since its publication. In that same time, East of Eden has sold about 300,000 copies. I l understand East of Eden has been around a lot longer and so there are less new readers to buy it each year, but I am pretty confident that many of those reading 50 Shades have not read East of Eden, so those numbers are still quite telling.

I don't think this is an absolutely inverse association. High sales figures =/= bad book, and obviously low sales =/= good book. I just think its a bit ridiculous to assume that popularity = merit. The most popular music is fucking shit. Simple maths can explain why its popular, and it ain't because Taylor Swift is the modern-day Wagner.

I agree, but my original comment in this thread was that you can't reduce a piece of art, however shit you personally think it is, to nothing, when it obviously is a cultural phenomenon on a massive scale.

I haven't read 50 Shades of Grey and I hear it's shit, but I have read the Harry Potter series, and I don't think it's as bad as Veeky Forums makes it out, but that certainly doesn't mean that it's equivalent to the Odyssey.

I bet you also believe everybody buys the product with the best cost efficiency/effectiveness.

>I didn't read: the post.

Fair enough.

You clearly have very low reading comprehension skills. My post suggests the exact opposite, you dolt.

He always looked like a fucking wacky cancer patient

>not reading the article
>in keeping with the Veeky Forums tradition of not reading

This is the thread's only post-ironic post, ironically.

1. if you're looking at art as a product of craft then I really don't think this should be a hard question to answer. why is the simplicity of a steak good, but the simplicity of raw lentils bad?

2. fuck beowulf LOL it is actually shitty and definitely closer to lentils than steak in the realm of """""""epics"""""""

>Something can' be good unless it makes a lot of money

This retarded line of thinking needs to disappear. All it does is dumb a product down to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Harry Potter can be seen as an allegory for high school and a general coming of age story though:

>Apiration or whatever its called is driving, if you do it wrong it ends in grotesque accidents and you need to be a certain age

>OWLS obviously things like ACTs etc.

>Despite being in a whimsy magic school characters still complain about homework and what they have to do for class

>Shift in tone during the fourth book meant to describe the transition into adult years and a shifting moral greyness meant to indicate an eventual loss of innocence

>All the characters who died at the end of the last book are the people from high school who end up dying later on, meant to be the final transition from the children's world of good and evil to the adult world with Voldemort's death

I'm so glad I'm not jaded enough to hate Harry Potter

Sorry bout your perpetual diaper rash Veeky Forums

>they actually posted harold bloom's quote/lie about "stretching his legs" being repeated

jesus fucking christ

prove that it's not fanfiction-tier

am I being trolled? go fuck yourself with your shallow, obvious trash

That was not a refutation

number 2:

slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/23/some-groups-of-people-who-may-not-100-deserve-our-eternal-scorn/

>logicallyfallacious.com
You're the type of person who thinks saying the names of fallacies means you're smart.

Please don't do this. The definitions on this website aren't even correct.

>Nobody wanted to buy Van Gogh's paintings
>Therefore they are shit

Masterworks surfacing from obscurity decades (even centuries) later is such a common phenomenon that it's become a cliche.

And in case you say, "Well, Van Gogh is popular now, so that's how we know he's good," consider the following:

>A brilliant mathematician writes a thesis that solves, say, the P = NP problem.
>His/her proofs are airtight, the paper is as clear as it can possibly be, etc.
>The mathematician dies upon finishing the final revision, so his/her discovery is never published.
>It is impossible for this to become popular, but it's clearly excellent.

Is the paper bad?

>Now, suppose a layperson stumbles upon a copy of the thesis.
>He/she attempts to read it, but can't understand a thing, because the symbols & language are unfamiliar.
>He/she throws it out.
>This happens a handful of times, because multiple copies of the thesis exist.
>Eventually, someone throws out the last copy in existence.

Something was clearly lost, no? But nobody wanted to read it, so chances are it's shit.

The author of the article clearly bit his tongue when writing it. What a lack of self-awareness.

how?

This just in: a story that takes place in a school has elements which resemble real-world schools.

By your logic, Naked Came the Stranger was a good book because it had some surface-level similarities to real-world fucking.

But that is ignoring it's impact.

No one here can deny the cultural popularity of Harry Potter nor how many people enjoy it. Most of those people read the series at a younger age with the first book, while reading the others as they grew up. This ties back in to the theme of destruction of innocence, as those younger kids grow into teenagers they start to crave more and more complex themes and "edgier" writing, but still wish to exist in a comfortable world. Rowling recognized this and included darker and darker themes in each book, culminating in the destruction of both absolute evil and absolute good at the end of the book, which is also supposed to represent the reader's growth into such a world. After they finish the series, they are supposed to read more complex fiction and expand their minds while still having the "childhood baseline" on which to build it. This is the true beauty of Harry Potter.

>culminating in the destruction of both absolute evil and absolute good at the end of the book

*series*

Fast food is the best food but because it is so uniform it lacks novelty after a short period of time.

>No one here can deny the cultural popularity of Harry Potter nor how many people enjoy it.

This is a (literal) appeal to popularity. Please refer to any of the other posts in this thread debunking this tool.

> Most of those people read the series at a younger age with the first book, while reading the others as they grew up. This ties back in to the theme of destruction of innocence, as those younger kids grow into teenagers they start to crave more and more complex themes and "edgier" writing, but still wish to exist in a comfortable world. Rowling recognized this . . .

Holding your reader's hand =/= quality. Plenty of books, films, tv shows, etc. make their stories palatable. It's a technique for selling more units, not saying something meaningful.

>After they finish the series, they are supposed to read more complex fiction and expand their minds while still having the "childhood baseline" on which to build it. This is the true beauty of Harry Potter.

If this is the intention, then Rowling is a colossal failure. The emergence of YA as a genre is largely due to Harry Potter's success, and one of the defining characteristics of YA is the lack of integrative complexity that allows these stories to be so comfortable.

Besides, the same defense could be applied to the old Mickey Mouse cartoons. They, like Harry Potter, gradually introduce darker and more complex subject matter, but never go much farther than good-but-somewhat-flawed protagonist vs environment-as-antagonist or obvious bad guy. Theoretically, someone should watch Mickey Mouse cartoons, then move on to more nuanced viewing material, but this doesn't always happen, and sometimes Mickey Mouse is an active impediment to the consumption of better media.

tl;dr — You point out some techniques that Rowling uses, but these techniques make her writing marketable, not good.

Woah, never thought of it like this.
This is the kind of thing I love about this board, is how you people can just open up a whole new avenue of thought for me in just a few lines. Never change, Veeky Forums