rowling was just some woman before she accidentally became a kind of mother to an entire generation. it was a burden she did not sign up for, was not vetted for, and ultimately was unprepared to bear
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at least the popularity of the harry potter series taught us that many, many kids wished school was more meaningful, more filled with adventure, more suffused with magic; wished that they were being taught how to actually do cool stuff by teachers they could respect
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there’s just so little to learn from harry’s arc tho. he starts out surviving voldemort because of his mother’s love (did the other mothers who lost children to voldemort love their children any less?) and ends up beating voldemort on a technicality involving the elder wand
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what is there to admire or emulate here? i’ve never heard a single person say out loud that they want to be like harry potter. there’s nothing to be like. harry wins because he’s Special, not because of any exceptional qualities he’s managed to cultivate
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I kinda felt like that was the point
Harry’s notoriety is a result of some cosmic fluke, he’s not thoroughly effortlessly exceptional, he’s not obv Good, he doesn’t do much alone & imo the big theme is watching kids grow into the complexity of the adult world & become part of it
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it’s not super special and it looms in psyches largely bc it doesn’t have some big new bold spiritual/moral message (easily digested by basically everyone) but I’ve never understood what the point of all the critiques were - isn’t it a little cynical?
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in general, my experience of Harry Potter as a child definitely wasn’t hollow or meaningless (I was hype af) & if I’m gonna look back with adult eyes at that I would rather look for why it resonated w baby Maybe like that rather than looking for why it shouldn’t have resonated
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that doesn’t mean no critique of Harry Potter has ever seemed fair or worthwhile to me- I see HPMOR as a critique of Harry Potter that takes care to keep the baby and improve the bath water and I friggin loved that shit. That’s the fuckn stuff.
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but the genre as you called it seems to for the most part do very little w their HP critiques- afaict they’re directed at HP fans or at JK Rowling and I can’t relate to that really; there is nothing important to learn wrt how much $ JKR deserves or how inferior some fandoms are
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and in the case of this thread I don’t know I haven’t had coffee yet so I don’t know if this is too blunt I’m sorry but the thread just felt soo interesting and then once it was about HP wasn’t good enough I felt this transition into basicness and I was like nooooo QC go back!!!!
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blunt is very good keep going, the birdsite is so split between approval and condemnation that i’m starved for measured collaborative critique, please more of this! 🙏