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I was a Percy Jackson kid and I have only been vindicated by time.
:doomer: I was obsessed with it until I was like 13
I did all the quizzes, knew my house, wand, patronus, my house in that pretty fucked-up-in-hindsight north american wizard school, knew the lore inside and out. Got out of it because I became friends with someone who was also obsessed with it but much more so than I, to the point that they ended the friendship a week or so in bc I was a Slytherin. Decided it wasn't worth caring about that much, indulged in my other interests, and later that person became a terf and to this day fawns over R*wling so I clearly dodged a bullet.
When I was looking for an apartment my first year of uni, I thought I had a good spot and started moving in until my then potential roommate was like "ok, first things first, which Hogwarts house are you" so I picked up my bags and left immediately. No exaggeration, I just turned around and walked out the door and never came back.
Of course every teen reader read the Harry Potter books at least once, or at least the first couple.
I also read everything else. Redwall series, Artemis Fowl, Hunger Games, Ender series, Bartimaeus Trilogy, Eragon, Series of Unfortunate Events, Hatchet series, Wayside Stories, Goosebumps, Animorphs, Narnia, Lord of the Rings, etc.
Overall Harry Potter was better than average. Not as good as Ender’s Game, Hatchet or Redwall. Better than Eragon, Hunger Games & Narnia.
Just cause it has a better moral doesn’t make it a better series. It really fell apart at the end effortwise
Isn't the ending "And then the revolution faltered and the protagonist had a shitload of PTSD she never really recovered from?"
The fact I don’t even remember the last book whatsoever is testament to its drop off
and the protagonist had a shitload of PTSD
That was the whole of the third book, and I think it's actually really important that it was written that way. Too many books don't show the aftermath of war. It's not all glory and success and loss and triumph. It's all the pain that follows you afterwards for the rest of your life. I think it's incredibly well-written, and I've never seen another story that does it as well. That's what I didn't like about the movies: since you're watching the characters rather than being in their head, I don't think it could communicate Katniss's emotions and feelings nearly as well.
The author shoehorning in a romantic ending set in the future in the last 5 pages was shit, though.
Idk it’s just the vibe. Harry Potter has some magic feeling that sucks you in at moments, much more immersive as a kid. Hunger Games felt more alien and less immersive, it felt a bit cheesy and on the nose and broke the suspension of disbelief.
I did not feel that way about Hunger Games, and read the entire series in 36 hours.
I will never forgive Orson Scott Card for writing Speaker of the Dead. It's a book largely concerned with understanding an alien culture and smoothing over misunderstandings. He shows how two cultures can be in conflict over different social formations shaped by different living conditions, and how that can be resolved when you stop viewing the other as inherently inferior. It's a beautiful story. And yet Orson Scott Card himself is a ferocious bigot of the homophobic variety.
I never read it but I'm told the last few books he wrote in the Ender series throw everything out and are like "Yeah actually xenocide is good."
Only 3 books you need to care about:
Enders game
Enders shadow
Speaker of the Dead
I remember liking Speaker a lot but I haven’t looked at it in twenty years. Can’t remember if that’s the one where the main characters become incredibly important internet shitposters traveling through the galaxy at near light speed.
That was Ender's Game and it was Ender's siblings. They were convinced a human world war would start if the bug war ended, so they put together a plan to trick the world into being nicer by...having online debates through pseudonyms. The sister would write very paranoid stuff about Russia to seem manic in comparison to the brother, who'd write more pragmatic stuff and deconstruct everything she talked about.
Somehow it worked?
Redwall was fuckin tight. GoT for kids. Artemis Foul would have been good if Eoin Colfer wasn't deathly allergic to writing new characters.
I suppose Diskworld is also pretty easy to get into for younger readers.
It’s a different universe or something. Yeah that always bugged me as a kid it was like, does anybody other than badgers, stoats and rabbits have free will? These are the only morally grey characters that can be good or evil.
I still like it idc
I reread Hatchet as an adult a year or two ago and thought it was great. Narnia really hasn’t aged as well.
Man I was the same age as Harry when the first book came out, I completely grew up with those books and films and I had and still have a lot to say about them.
That said, by book 6 and 7 I can honestly say that I was aware of better literature and was just sticking it out to see how the series ended. Whatever else you can say about her one thing that is absolutely true about JK Rowling is that she needed a better editor from book 5 onwards, the back half of the series dragged.
The main other stuff I was reading at this time was the Star Wars Expanded Universe, which was doing the Yuuzhan Vong war, which also really dragged on for a few books longer than it needed to, and Warhammer 40k stuff, which I stuck with for a while but dropped off once they started pushing the Horus Heresy stuff. Since then I've basically hated every change they've made to the setting, PrImArIs MaRiNeS can suck on my chode.
Ugh. The Yuuzhan Vong bullshit killed my interest in Star Wars books.
I got out of Star Wars EU before the yuzhan vong but read so many of those books beforehand. It’s still kind of ridiculous to me that Disney didn’t just make those books into movies. Luke as a teacher training the next generation of Jedi on Yavin 4 or falling for the witches of Dathomir or battling Admiral Thrawn was great! But probably not as good as I remember.
They're a lot better than what Disney has come up with in the meantime. I tried to get back into Star Wars books with the Leia book and Lost Stars and I decided I wasn't going to read a third, they were just terrible. When libs try to write politics the only thing they can come up with is "the unwashed masses decide to do fascism because they couldn't be patient and let the smart technocrats fix everything", essentially just writing a worse version of the prequels.
I feel gaslit because it's like everything actually is terrible in a lot of big ways, but the only thing people are complaining about is LGBT/PoC characters.
I was way too old for Harry Potter, though I did read Tolkien stuff as a kid.
I also was way into Tintin which is pretty :LIB: at best and far more problematic than Harry Potter in at least a few cases, so I’m certainly not judging you childhood Potter fans by any means.
I read all the books as a kid. Didn't like the movies at all, they somehow drained all the whimsy I had enjoyed. I can say I'm proud that even as like a 9 year old kid I picked up easily on how weird it was Hermione's friends were mocking her for trying to end elf slavery. I also hated how frequently characters were described as fat in a negative way.
I feel like I came through ok, because while I liked the books, I never involved myself in the wider fandom and I never made it part of my identity. They were just some books I liked among the piles of other books I liked. I thought the massive fandom with webrings, fan art, fanfiction, etc was really weird and unwarranted. The utter obsession with the series always creeped me tf out. I just thought the books were fun and cute. I liked the games too, some pretty good Gameboy titles.
My hometown was strangely ok with Harry Potter. I guess everyone was still tired from saying Pokemon was Satanic, the previous children's fad, so they didn't have time or energy left to care about Harry Potter. My hometown was much busier focused on hating Muslims and gay people.
I read it in elementary school. I thought it was ok. Basically forgot about it when I was done.
And that's the thing, it is generally ok as a series of books for children. Some of them are worse than ok, some maybe a touch better than ok. No idea how it became such a huge thing.
No HP for me. I grew up on Spider-Man, Conan The Barbarian and Tales From The Crypt reprints.
Conan has a lot of problems, but it also stands out to me as a fantasy series with female protagonists who do stuff, which was rare on the ground for a while in fantasy.
Having read quite a lot of Bob Howard's work, he's definitely somebody who came to understand his own prejudices and the negative aspects of the work he was producing. Had he not taken his own life, I suspect this trend would have continued. Also, the Conan canon is very clear on its thesis that civilization and barbarism are cycles that every ethnicity experiences, and that they often exist simultaneously within cultures.
See also: Conan works with people of other races almost as often as against them. Portraying people of color as heroic was rare ground as well.
I was the prime demographic for the books, and then the movies lost me.
I have not read them since I was in my teens
Me and mom read the books together when I was young as she was learning to read English and I was just learning to read in general. So yeah, I have a soft spot for them
Worse... I grew up on C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series, and since I read them out of order (between what my elementary school library had on hand, and the ones that would occasionally pop up in the Scholastic book order catalogs), I didn't catch the whole "ASLAN THE LION IS JEEEEEEESUUUUUUUS" shit until I'd read like my third or fourth one.
Also Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, which I don't remember being all that problematic besides your bog-standard fantasy tropes. And the Welsh names. I vaguely remember there being a Kings Quest-style adventure game of that one on the IBM PC. (Edit: Well shit, there it is: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-black-cauldron-7l )
I read a ton as a youth. So of course kid me read the Harry Potter books as they came out, but to me they were like most of the books I read: entertaining but not an obsession. I never understood when other kids (or adults) read them multiple times. There were so many other books I wanted to read!
For series, I was much more into Animorphs or even Redwall.
