This basically puts the onus for another’s enjoyment on everyone except for the individual enjoying the thing, though. Which I’m not saying is categorically wrong in all cases. If you have a child/niece/nephew/etc. who really enjoys, say, Harry Potter, and you go “well, J.K. Rowling is a transphobic neoliberal and Harry Potter is a story about only fighting against fascism and bigotry when it actively threatens dominant, existing modes of power.” In that case, you are actively robbing enjoyment of something from someone who should be engaging with things uncritically. If you say it to an adult, who should have already developed that degree of literacy, and they complain about having their fun ruined, then they’re basically asking to be infantilized.
If anything, it’s an overly generous reading of a work whose themes and characterization come across as remarkably shallow when examined by anyone with even a hint of genuine critical literacy. I guess the main takeaway is “read another book.”
And I guess the reason you read the whole thing is…that it was so awful? Be honest with yourself.
It’s certainly not without its faults. (One thing I NEVER see mentioned is the excessive fatshaming, I guess there’s not room for more than one narrative at a time.) It is, however, a book written for children and teenagers. And for what it is, the plots and themes ask more of, and give more back to, young readers than so much of the other drivel that is readily available to them. I know this, since I read to my own children and teenagers every day, and buy them books to read for themselves. There is a reason the Potter books are still as popular as ever.
If we’re being honest, the real issue is that Rowling is now le diable du jour, which means everything she ever did is now material for our daily two minutes of hate. The books have to be completely without merit as well because it’s just not possible to hold even mildly conflicting views simultaneously.
And I guess the reason you read the whole thing is…that it was so awful? Be honest with yourself.
I guess the reason I read it is because I was a child and enjoyed detective fiction, which is all Harry Potter effectively is: detective stories with wizards. I read a lot of stuff as a kid that wasn’t very good in retrospect. I also read a shitload of Hardy Boys, and most Hardy Boys novels are fucking awful. Something being entertaining to you when you’re a kid that you can acknowledge was shit when you’re an adult is a normal part of growing up. I’m sure you’ll get there yourself, someday. Or maybe your ability to parse literature will suffer from arrested development. Who can say?
It is, however, a book written for children and teenagers. And for what it is, the plots and themes ask more of, and give more back to, young readers than so much of the other drivel that is readily available to them.
The argument that something should be considered good because there exists other things which can be considered significantly worse is not a very good framework for arguing for the quality of a work of fiction. This is classic “damning by faint praise.”
I know this, since I read to my own children and teenagers every day, and buy them books to read for themselves
The foundational premise of this argument is that you know something to be true because you perceive it to be so. This is like me saying that I know I’m a good cook because I cook every day and enjoy the food that I make for myself. It ignores the obvious possibility that your personal standards for what you are doing are simply garbage.
If we’re being honest, the real issue is that Rowling is now le diable du jour, which means everything she ever did is now material for our daily two minutes of hate. The books have to be completely without merit as well because it’s just not possible to hold even mildly conflicting views simultaneously.
If we’re being honest, her books are simple, accessible, designed for mass appeal, relatively thematically shallow, and were at the time of their initial publication outrageously overhyped because she did what J. J. Abrams does with every single t.v. show he’s ever made and allude to an elaborate set of mysteries that actively drove fan engagement via wild speculation about the future of the series between novels. To add to this, the average American reads so little that for many of them, the novels were the only major series of fiction they’d ever voluntarily read, so there was a period of time on the internet where every piece of fantasy fiction in any medium got immediately compared to Harry Potter. This is admittedly not Harry Potter’s or Rowling’s fault, but it was fucking annoying and served to drive negative sentiment for the series.
Something being entertaining to you when you’re a kid that you can acknowledge was shit when you’re an adult is a normal part of growing up.
Sure, I remember my twenties well enough. And then the next stage in growing up is forgiving your younger self and understanding that books can be good in different ways, and that some books are brilliant for kids and teenagers. Good detective fiction can also be brilliant for what it is. You’re nearly there yourself in your original comment. No one is comparing Harry Potter to Gravity’s Rainbow or Wuthering Heights here.
The argument that something should be considered good because there exists other things which can be considered significantly worse is not a very good framework for arguing for the quality of a work of fiction. This is classic “damning by faint praise.”
I’m surprised you didn’t link to Wikipedia…but that’s not really the argument here. The point is one of context and being reasonable, and that in the field of young adult fiction, they stand out. Would I say they’re the best childrens books? No. And if you had been more reasonable - not called them “shit” perhaps - it would have been a different story. And I see you skirt the issue, but the reason people go on and on about the failings of Harry Potter these days is very obvious, and it has little to do with literary value.
The foundational premise of this argument is that you know something to be true because you perceive it to be so. This is like me saying that I know I’m a good cook because I cook every day and enjoy the food that I make for myself.
Or like you saying “her books are simple, accessible, designed for mass appeal, relatively thematically shallow…” Of course it’s my assessment, grounded in experience. I’m not going to do a close reading of the series in this format, I’m sorry. But I don’t really see that level of effort from you, either. (And “accessible” is a weird thing to criticize in a work geared towards children, btw…)
because she did what J. J. Abrams does with every single t.v. show he’s ever made and allude to an elaborate set of mysteries that actively drove fan engagement via wild speculation about the future of the series between novels.
Rowling delivered in the end though, which is what JJ never does and why he should be banned from ever making TV again. I don’t see how the comparison is valid, readers may have been disappointed but there were answers and genuine surprises there.
forgiving your younger self and understanding that books can be good in different ways
You can imply whatever you want about me, if it makes you feel better about losing an argument, but I read a lot of stuff that I don’t think is particularly good. That’s the present tense of read, by the way. As you get older, one thing you’ll realize is that you can acknowledge that something being entertaining and something meeting some set criteria of artistic merit are different things. I like a lot of things that I don’t think are executed with a great degree of skill or which have a great degree of literary merit. I acknowledge those things as enjoyable (which I’ve already done for Harry Potter), but I also acknowledge them as flawed in specific ways.
You’re nearly there yourself in your original comment. No one is comparing Harry Potter to Gravity’s Rainbow or Wuthering Heights here.
No, but you can compare it to other, superior works of fiction for that targeted age range. Many of the works of Ursula K. Leguin and Terry Pratchett that were intended for people in the similar age range as Harry Potter put Rowling’s work to shame.
I’m surprised you didn’t link to Wikipedia…but that’s not really the argument here.
I would say I’m surprised you’re complaining about things I haven’t done and arguments I haven’t made, but as I’ve been on the internet for more than five minutes and have engaged in arguments with people like you more than I would ever realistically care to, I can’t say that I am. But that’s not really the argument here, either.
And if you had been more reasonable - not called them “shit” perhaps - it would have been a different story. And I see you skirt the issue, but the reason people go on and on about the failings of Harry Potter these days is very obvious, and it has little to do with literary value.
I think they are shit, though. From the perspective of the entire thing, if you want a more nuanced analysis, the first novel is a masterpiece of world building. The second and third do good jobs of expanding the internal mythology of Harry Potter and his relationship to Voldemort. But that’s all they do. The last four novels become overburderend with meandering, often pointless content and are just hilariously overindulgent.
I think the core issue I have with the novels is that the main characters of the series experience comparatively little in the way of real character development and growth over the course of the series. They are essentially the same people at the end of the seventh novel as they are at the beginning of the first. Hermione is a little bit less insufferable, Ron is a little bit less of a walking inferiority complex. And Harry is a little…angrier? It’s hard to say. They have such little character development because the novels aren’t really focused on the complexities of growing up or the way in which your understanding of the world radically shifts from childhood to adulthood. These things, if they exist in the novels at all, are even less than tertiary to the core focus. The novels themselves are more concerned with action and worldbuilding, which…I get it. It’s accessible. It’s engaging for children. Things like difficult feelings and interpersonal drama are stereotypically boring for kids. Having a lot of stuff going on, a lot of fantasy and mythology and all the other bullshit Harry Potter is known for is part of its core appeal. But it’s also shallow. You don’t like the fact that I think those qualities makes the series “shit,” but I do. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with my criteria. And if you have a problem with my criteria, then I guess…too bad? There’s not really any point in trying to have any more of a discussion after that, because in order to talk about “good” and “bad” art you have to have some semblance of a shared definition, and the simple reality is that we probably don’t. You have your criteria for what you think makes a work of fiction good, and Harry Potter meets it enough for you to think it’s good, and I have my criteria and it simply doesn’t.
“accessible” is a weird thing to criticize in a work geared towards children, btw
It’s not a criticism. It’s an, at worst, neutral observation. It’s not like a children’s novel written from the perspective of a child in a concentration camp during the Holocaust and it’s not a children’s novel about a person growing up transgender. These things are comparatively less accessible because they require a degree of abstraction and empathy of which your average child, who likely doesn’t have similar experiences, is almost certainly psychologically incapable. That’s not a knock against kids. It’s just the psychological nature of being a child. Accessibility makes sense and is important for works looking to act as mainstream entertainment. And that’s what Harry Potter succeeds at being: entertaining. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but entertaining and artistically rich are different things.
Realistically, I don’t expect people to just deny expressing criticisms. What I’m asking for is to read the room, and understand that it IS a legitimate concern for some people. If someone actively expresses that they don’t want to hear the criticism, you’re crossing from simple chatting to actively ruining something for someone.
This basically puts the onus for another’s enjoyment on everyone except for the individual enjoying the thing, though. Which I’m not saying is categorically wrong in all cases. If you have a child/niece/nephew/etc. who really enjoys, say, Harry Potter, and you go “well, J.K. Rowling is a transphobic neoliberal and Harry Potter is a story about only fighting against fascism and bigotry when it actively threatens dominant, existing modes of power.” In that case, you are actively robbing enjoyment of something from someone who should be engaging with things uncritically. If you say it to an adult, who should have already developed that degree of literacy, and they complain about having their fun ruined, then they’re basically asking to be infantilized.
Plus it’s an incredibly one-sided and myopic reading of the work that even a child can easily see through.
If anything, it’s an overly generous reading of a work whose themes and characterization come across as remarkably shallow when examined by anyone with even a hint of genuine critical literacy. I guess the main takeaway is “read another book.”
And I guess the reason you read the whole thing is…that it was so awful? Be honest with yourself.
It’s certainly not without its faults. (One thing I NEVER see mentioned is the excessive fatshaming, I guess there’s not room for more than one narrative at a time.) It is, however, a book written for children and teenagers. And for what it is, the plots and themes ask more of, and give more back to, young readers than so much of the other drivel that is readily available to them. I know this, since I read to my own children and teenagers every day, and buy them books to read for themselves. There is a reason the Potter books are still as popular as ever.
If we’re being honest, the real issue is that Rowling is now le diable du jour, which means everything she ever did is now material for our daily two minutes of hate. The books have to be completely without merit as well because it’s just not possible to hold even mildly conflicting views simultaneously.
I guess the reason I read it is because I was a child and enjoyed detective fiction, which is all Harry Potter effectively is: detective stories with wizards. I read a lot of stuff as a kid that wasn’t very good in retrospect. I also read a shitload of Hardy Boys, and most Hardy Boys novels are fucking awful. Something being entertaining to you when you’re a kid that you can acknowledge was shit when you’re an adult is a normal part of growing up. I’m sure you’ll get there yourself, someday. Or maybe your ability to parse literature will suffer from arrested development. Who can say?
The argument that something should be considered good because there exists other things which can be considered significantly worse is not a very good framework for arguing for the quality of a work of fiction. This is classic “damning by faint praise.”
The foundational premise of this argument is that you know something to be true because you perceive it to be so. This is like me saying that I know I’m a good cook because I cook every day and enjoy the food that I make for myself. It ignores the obvious possibility that your personal standards for what you are doing are simply garbage.
If we’re being honest, her books are simple, accessible, designed for mass appeal, relatively thematically shallow, and were at the time of their initial publication outrageously overhyped because she did what J. J. Abrams does with every single t.v. show he’s ever made and allude to an elaborate set of mysteries that actively drove fan engagement via wild speculation about the future of the series between novels. To add to this, the average American reads so little that for many of them, the novels were the only major series of fiction they’d ever voluntarily read, so there was a period of time on the internet where every piece of fantasy fiction in any medium got immediately compared to Harry Potter. This is admittedly not Harry Potter’s or Rowling’s fault, but it was fucking annoying and served to drive negative sentiment for the series.
Sure, I remember my twenties well enough. And then the next stage in growing up is forgiving your younger self and understanding that books can be good in different ways, and that some books are brilliant for kids and teenagers. Good detective fiction can also be brilliant for what it is. You’re nearly there yourself in your original comment. No one is comparing Harry Potter to Gravity’s Rainbow or Wuthering Heights here.
I’m surprised you didn’t link to Wikipedia…but that’s not really the argument here. The point is one of context and being reasonable, and that in the field of young adult fiction, they stand out. Would I say they’re the best childrens books? No. And if you had been more reasonable - not called them “shit” perhaps - it would have been a different story. And I see you skirt the issue, but the reason people go on and on about the failings of Harry Potter these days is very obvious, and it has little to do with literary value.
Or like you saying “her books are simple, accessible, designed for mass appeal, relatively thematically shallow…” Of course it’s my assessment, grounded in experience. I’m not going to do a close reading of the series in this format, I’m sorry. But I don’t really see that level of effort from you, either. (And “accessible” is a weird thing to criticize in a work geared towards children, btw…)
Rowling delivered in the end though, which is what JJ never does and why he should be banned from ever making TV again. I don’t see how the comparison is valid, readers may have been disappointed but there were answers and genuine surprises there.
You can imply whatever you want about me, if it makes you feel better about losing an argument, but I read a lot of stuff that I don’t think is particularly good. That’s the present tense of read, by the way. As you get older, one thing you’ll realize is that you can acknowledge that something being entertaining and something meeting some set criteria of artistic merit are different things. I like a lot of things that I don’t think are executed with a great degree of skill or which have a great degree of literary merit. I acknowledge those things as enjoyable (which I’ve already done for Harry Potter), but I also acknowledge them as flawed in specific ways.
No, but you can compare it to other, superior works of fiction for that targeted age range. Many of the works of Ursula K. Leguin and Terry Pratchett that were intended for people in the similar age range as Harry Potter put Rowling’s work to shame.
I would say I’m surprised you’re complaining about things I haven’t done and arguments I haven’t made, but as I’ve been on the internet for more than five minutes and have engaged in arguments with people like you more than I would ever realistically care to, I can’t say that I am. But that’s not really the argument here, either.
I think they are shit, though. From the perspective of the entire thing, if you want a more nuanced analysis, the first novel is a masterpiece of world building. The second and third do good jobs of expanding the internal mythology of Harry Potter and his relationship to Voldemort. But that’s all they do. The last four novels become overburderend with meandering, often pointless content and are just hilariously overindulgent.
I think the core issue I have with the novels is that the main characters of the series experience comparatively little in the way of real character development and growth over the course of the series. They are essentially the same people at the end of the seventh novel as they are at the beginning of the first. Hermione is a little bit less insufferable, Ron is a little bit less of a walking inferiority complex. And Harry is a little…angrier? It’s hard to say. They have such little character development because the novels aren’t really focused on the complexities of growing up or the way in which your understanding of the world radically shifts from childhood to adulthood. These things, if they exist in the novels at all, are even less than tertiary to the core focus. The novels themselves are more concerned with action and worldbuilding, which…I get it. It’s accessible. It’s engaging for children. Things like difficult feelings and interpersonal drama are stereotypically boring for kids. Having a lot of stuff going on, a lot of fantasy and mythology and all the other bullshit Harry Potter is known for is part of its core appeal. But it’s also shallow. You don’t like the fact that I think those qualities makes the series “shit,” but I do. If you have a problem with that, then you have a problem with my criteria. And if you have a problem with my criteria, then I guess…too bad? There’s not really any point in trying to have any more of a discussion after that, because in order to talk about “good” and “bad” art you have to have some semblance of a shared definition, and the simple reality is that we probably don’t. You have your criteria for what you think makes a work of fiction good, and Harry Potter meets it enough for you to think it’s good, and I have my criteria and it simply doesn’t.
It’s not a criticism. It’s an, at worst, neutral observation. It’s not like a children’s novel written from the perspective of a child in a concentration camp during the Holocaust and it’s not a children’s novel about a person growing up transgender. These things are comparatively less accessible because they require a degree of abstraction and empathy of which your average child, who likely doesn’t have similar experiences, is almost certainly psychologically incapable. That’s not a knock against kids. It’s just the psychological nature of being a child. Accessibility makes sense and is important for works looking to act as mainstream entertainment. And that’s what Harry Potter succeeds at being: entertaining. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but entertaining and artistically rich are different things.
Realistically, I don’t expect people to just deny expressing criticisms. What I’m asking for is to read the room, and understand that it IS a legitimate concern for some people. If someone actively expresses that they don’t want to hear the criticism, you’re crossing from simple chatting to actively ruining something for someone.