I read the books this year because I wanted to feel pain, basically, and I wanted to be justified in disliking Harry Potter. I was not disappointed. However, I still don't understand how the fuck the end of the book worked. It was so harebrained and convoluted and sloppy as fuck that I don't know what actually happened. Am I stupid or was it a bad ending? And what the fuck happened? How did they actually kill Voldemort?

    • LeninsRage [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I actually defend the Harry Potter series a lot because it was very much a kind of formative literary experience you grew up with. Like, a cultural phenomenon you had to experience in person to really understand its immense popularity. And not only that, but the books matured with you. When you were hitting puberty and experiencing things like death, depression, and sexual tension for the first time, the later books were addressing those themes in detail. That's the reason the series' quality tends to be overblown - peoples' connections to it aren't that it was incredible genre fiction but that it forms an intense emotional connection to them in their memories. For a lot of people, the Harry Potter series was what got them into reading as a kid.

      My grandmother and aunt gifted me the first four books when I was like 8. I kind of ignored them for a while (I was more of a Civil War history nerd then like Matt) but my dad started reading them to my sister and I aloud before bed. Those are probably the most intimate emotional memories I have of my father. We did that for six books, even up to when we were in high school. It basically became a ritual. When the seventh book came out we were on vacation in the boonies but still made a special trip to town to buy a copy day of. I proceeded to lock myself in my room for three straight days in order to read it cover to cover. This was basically the culmination of a decade of anticipation and it really did pay off at the time.

      There's a lot of positive and quality aspects to those books. But they are nowhere near perfect.

      • chmos [any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Also the setting of a school where all the students know each other and their teachers over seven years is super nostalgic because I went to a small school for seven years and all the friendly/funny/mean interactions between characters reminds me of times I had with the people at my school. My university is way too big to get the same sense of community. I hope when the revolution comes we can find a way to build small communities again instead of everyone being isolated in their suburban homes and only making connections with family and a few friends.

    • TemporalMembrane [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      They're kids books. The worst thing that ever happened to the Harry Potter series was becoming a phenomenon and the people who read it as kids continuing to latch onto it as a neotonous soother as adults. I read plenty of kids books as a kid that don't "hold up" as an adult reader (like Maniac Magee or Holes or stuff like that). They don't hold up because they're meant for children. It's hard to completely blame all these adult fans of Harry Potter because between JK Rowling and Hollywood they were never given a second of breathing time away from this kids series to mature and reflect, Harry Potter kept releasing new films, a play, a different film series, and so on.