When I was a kid and had no understanding of the world, I was a huge fan of Harry Potter. It was my first dive into fantasy and has a lot of positive nostalgia for me. But as soon as I started looking deeper into the subtext I noticed it was full of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. and the basic premise was a rich celebrity jock growing up to be a magic cop. My point is, if even I can let go of my favorite childhood series, anyone can. And it’s not just because of I am a trans person and Rowling is a transphobe, it’s just a horrible series on its own merit. Only literal children have an excuse to enjoy it.
I used to be really into Harry Potter when I was a kid. I loved the books and the video games. Order of the Phoenix is what ruined it for me. I was so hyped for the new book, pre-ordered it and everything but when I actually read it I was met with some of the most boring storytelling I had ever sat through. It was just mindlessly dragging out the length of the story purely so the book could follow the trend of being bigger than the previous ones but the end result is that you get halfway through it and still nothing substantial had happened with the plot. So much of the story is just the characters going through daily life and wondering where the fuck Hagrid is and after 200 pages of that, I completely lost interest in the entire franchise, I never engaged with the series ever again after that aside from pirating the movies just to get the gist of the plot.
This is the kind of writing tactics I used to use in my English exams in high school to pad out my stories and hit the word count.
On a side note I also fucking loathe Lemony Snicket books for using word salad to pad out shitty uninteresting stories. I remember reading A Series of Unfortunate Events, I got about 20 pages in and realised this whole book was going to be using repetition of character speech and what should frankly be an illegal amount of adjectives just to make it look like an actual story is there.
the Harry Potter games were ok sometimes, but the Order of The Phoenix video game on Ps2 was one of the worst games I’ve EVER played. You play as Potter(obv) and you go around doing mini-missions for classmates so they join your secret group. Then halfway through the game, your group gets caught by the professors or some shit and then you have to do missions for ALL OF THOSE CHARACTERS AGAIN!! The missions aren’t fun, they’re busywork. That game alone made me distance myself from Harry Potter before I even knew how sexist and racist the series was subtly. Ok maybe not so subtle but to an 8 year old it was pretty damn subtle.
Attacking Harry Potter is one thing, but going after a Series of Unfortunate Events is another! Those books have a great story individually and collectively, you should have finished reading. The narrator is pretty pompous though and I never bothered with any of the spinoff books because his interjections made me hate him too.
My brothers used to read those w my Dad. They finished the last book w my dad and they hated it lol. Spoiler
spoiler
Apparently they were mad about some sorta mystery involving a sugar bowl or something, they didn’t let it go and said the author was lazy for not following through with some of the clues, I didn’t read it tho, what do you think about said Sugar Bowl?
I thought of it as a plot device first and a mystery second so it didn’t bother me that its contents were never explicitly confirmed. Though the last book implies that it contains a cure for the fungus disease and that’s what the Netflix adaptation went with so there’s that.
When I was a kid and had no understanding of the world, I was a huge fan of Harry Potter. It was my first dive into fantasy and has a lot of positive nostalgia for me. But as soon as I started looking deeper into the subtext I noticed it was full of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. and the basic premise was a rich celebrity jock growing up to be a magic cop. My point is, if even I can let go of my favorite childhood series, anyone can. And it’s not just because of I am a trans person and Rowling is a transphobe, it’s just a horrible series on its own merit. Only literal children have an excuse to enjoy it.
I used to be really into Harry Potter when I was a kid. I loved the books and the video games. Order of the Phoenix is what ruined it for me. I was so hyped for the new book, pre-ordered it and everything but when I actually read it I was met with some of the most boring storytelling I had ever sat through. It was just mindlessly dragging out the length of the story purely so the book could follow the trend of being bigger than the previous ones but the end result is that you get halfway through it and still nothing substantial had happened with the plot. So much of the story is just the characters going through daily life and wondering where the fuck Hagrid is and after 200 pages of that, I completely lost interest in the entire franchise, I never engaged with the series ever again after that aside from pirating the movies just to get the gist of the plot.
This is the kind of writing tactics I used to use in my English exams in high school to pad out my stories and hit the word count.
On a side note I also fucking loathe Lemony Snicket books for using word salad to pad out shitty uninteresting stories. I remember reading A Series of Unfortunate Events, I got about 20 pages in and realised this whole book was going to be using repetition of character speech and what should frankly be an illegal amount of adjectives just to make it look like an actual story is there.
the Harry Potter games were ok sometimes, but the Order of The Phoenix video game on Ps2 was one of the worst games I’ve EVER played. You play as Potter(obv) and you go around doing mini-missions for classmates so they join your secret group. Then halfway through the game, your group gets caught by the professors or some shit and then you have to do missions for ALL OF THOSE CHARACTERS AGAIN!! The missions aren’t fun, they’re busywork. That game alone made me distance myself from Harry Potter before I even knew how sexist and racist the series was subtly. Ok maybe not so subtle but to an 8 year old it was pretty damn subtle.
Attacking Harry Potter is one thing, but going after a Series of Unfortunate Events is another! Those books have a great story individually and collectively, you should have finished reading. The narrator is pretty pompous though and I never bothered with any of the spinoff books because his interjections made me hate him too.
My brothers used to read those w my Dad. They finished the last book w my dad and they hated it lol. Spoiler
spoiler
Apparently they were mad about some sorta mystery involving a sugar bowl or something, they didn’t let it go and said the author was lazy for not following through with some of the clues, I didn’t read it tho, what do you think about said Sugar Bowl?
spoiler
I thought of it as a plot device first and a mystery second so it didn’t bother me that its contents were never explicitly confirmed. Though the last book implies that it contains a cure for the fungus disease and that’s what the Netflix adaptation went with so there’s that.
Ok cool, so at least it wasn’t completely ignored