People like to say that when you criticize a published work as "feeling like bad fanfic" it's meaningless ("Just say it's bad! Fanfic and profic are the same!") but they are wrong Harry Potter absolutely reads like fanfiction of itself It's a wildly overextended goofy ideahttps://twitter.com/CineastBenRowe/status/1269410264518033408 …
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It's bad in the same specific way as when some obsessive fan tries to take something that wasn't that serious or deep and "put weight on a structure not built to hold it" Trying to imagine the cast of Friends dealing with the political aftermath of 9/11
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The people who are fans of Harry Potter still will defend this and say that's what makes it great That it evolves from a wacky children's adventure into dark epic fantasy over time, it "grows with the reader", Cedric Diggory's death suddenly changes what genre we're in, etc
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I get this concept I think this is a meaningful goal for a middle-grade writer to shoot for in a series (Tamora Pierce, multiple times, did a quadrilogy where suddenly the fourth book introduces "adult themes" of sex etc) JKR sucked at it
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You know how I know for absolute certain she sucked at it Because during the long hiatus after Goblet of Fire all of her teen fans tried to do exactly this, often with a strong self-conscious awareness of the silliness of "taking the Harry Potter books through puberty"
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AND THEY WERE ALL BETTER AT IT
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As cringey as the whole Draco in Leather Pants genre of fanfic was at the time, with all ridiculous attempts to consciously make Harry Potter dark and gritty and hormonal and epic, her actual followup books tried to do the SAME THING And they weren't particularly good examples
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It was the most surreal experience reading the big finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and thinking of exactly how I'd review it if it were a fanfic ("Clumsy attempt at introducing the author's OC MacGuffin, Snape/Lily flashback was the same one we've seen before")
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Replying to @arthur_affect
I still enjoy the first 6 books (the HP world in one's imagination can still be great even if the canon isn't), but I found the 7th absolutely baffling. I could not understand at the time how it came from the same author. It was everything bad fanfic does, in a published novel.
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