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As someone who grew up on HP, there are way better books in the same genre out there anyway. The hype of Harry Potter is all just marketing from Warner Bros (they own most of the rights on merchandise).
If you want an actually good children’s/YA story about a young person learning magic and becoming the hero, try the Tiffany Aching subseries of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. They are much better written than HP.
Also, “A Wizard of Earthsea” by Ursula Le Guin.
Such a good recommendation. Love that series and author!
Since we’re on the topic; what irked me the most about HP is that it feels like a glorification of the aristocracy.
The very idea that individuals born from great families are destined to influence the course of the world while the plebs rot in helpless ignorance is basically what’s wrong with the world. The magic school is clearly an allegory of these fucking ancient private colleges you get to go to if you’re born with status. The whole setup is a privilege fantasy.
This is especially grand considering actual witchcraft was a way to frame, demonize and ultimately neutralize ordinary women’s knowledge and influence, for the sake of tightening the clergy and the nobility’s grip on the layperson.
That’s a problem with many “choosen one” stories, see Star Wars. Only someone coming from the right bloodline can change things, everyone else is just an accessory.
Of course HP takes this to eleven, after all it traces actual British society of recent and past times.
Don’t even pirate it!
Harry Potter’s books lost my interest after I found about JK Rowling’s garbage character.
The thing with boycotts is that it’s such an online thing. You can proclaim a product or an author the product funds to be problematic morally, call to boycott it to support some cause, and most people are indeed going to join the boycott then post about it on social media, do the moral song-and-dance to join the cause.
In reality, the vast majority of those people aren’t invested in the product or the world and wouldn’t have bought anything from it, boycott or not. It’s much harder to say no to things when you’re actually invested into them, meaning boycotts aren’t likely to influence those people. With that in mind, you now have a bunch of free advertisement for the product in a sense that it won’t leave the public consciousness, a bunch of people not interested in the product doing their “activism” and a bunch of fans of the product fighting the boycotters (as seen with Hogwarts Legacy for instance).
I haven’t read or watched or played a single product from JK Rowling’s catalogue, but I’ve seen this happen time and time again with other media or companies such as the infamous Blizzard.
Not me. I own the books and I loved them. Very relatable, among other things. I very much looked forward to a new video game of the series, but the harmful rhetoric of Rowling’s post easily outweighed my personal interest. I’d have bought Hogwarts Legacy but now I wouldn’t even want to “download” it. Same with Blizzard’s performative Overwatch Pride event that was not available for the countries that need it most. That caused me, a longtime Overwatch player, to uninstall the game for good.
Most of the people talking about Harry Potter and perpetuating its relevancy are trans people ironically
Nope it’s the average person still financially supporting JK Rowling by watching Fantastic Beasts and playing Hogwarts Legacy. We’re boycotting that stuff.
How do you figure that?
I literally have not seen anything Harry Potter related outside of trans discussion since the release of that video game and 95% of what I saw about it was not to buy it because of jk.
Weird, but I also tend to run in nerdy circles. I have heard lots of other people talk about it just in passing and been asked directly
While I get the desire for escapism, I’ve never understood how the topic of magic had such a strong appeal to so many, anyway. I want an escape that might actually happen. Everyone should know that magic isn’t real, and it’s at best just science you don’t understand. At worst it’s just lies, misdirection, and slight-of-hand - the preference for which so many people have is what’s ruining everything in the real world as we speak.
could’ve just said you don’t like fantasy
I could have, but that wouldn’t be true. I like fantasy just fine, I just prefer that it is grounded in reality and what’s actually possible/probable.
I like metal, as long as it is slow jazz.
