Which means maybe we can talk a bit more openly about the "guilt" side of Harry Potter being a "guilty pleasure"
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(Quidditch seriously almost is to the point of self-parody already though I mean she couldn't just make Harry really good at scoring goals in a game where you win by scoring goals It's set up so Harry does ONE HUGE DRAMATIC THING every match, which ALWAYS ENDS THE GAME)
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Feels weird defending JKR right now, but I feel like a lot of criticisms of the series come from the misguided placing of HP in the YA genre, and not recognising its context as British Children's literature that gradually formed a newer YA genre as the characters grew.
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Replying to @OwenAdamsYT @arthur_affect
And so people read them expecting a sort of proto-Twilight but the lineage for the first few books is much more a sort of mix between Tom Brown's Schooldays and Captain Underpants.
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Replying to @OwenAdamsYT @arthur_affect
Which is not to say "they're for kids, they're not supposed to be good" but that they're for younger kids, and based on younger kids books, than most people think.
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Replying to @OwenAdamsYT @arthur_affect
Yeah! I mean, the clear precedent here would be Roald Dahl, who shares a sense of whimsy and also some of the same problematic backgrounds.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect
Right, HP is like if you took a Roald Dahl magical world, and then bonded it to a Mallory Towers school romp, so you get the absurdism and the grounding. This is why the criticisms that the magical world has no rules sort of misunderstand the idea, I think.
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Which is that the magic is mad, and silly, and dreamlike, and absurd, but before you benefit from it, you have to actually go earn it at a boarding school.
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Replying to @OwenAdamsYT @arthur_affect
Also, I think a lot of Americans were kind of charmed by the concept of boarding schools, so that was a kind of free ride for a lot of it. And it DOES get at the ups and downs of living with your 11-year-old friends full time.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect
Yeah, I had a friend who read them all recently and had mixed feelings, but one of the biggests issues I had discussing it with him is that it is not supposed to be Twilight or Animorphs, it's younger and of a different ancestry.
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Well... Animorphs was explicitly middle-grade fiction and it started before Harry Potter (Animorphs #1 The Invasion was 1996, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was 1997)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein
Sure, but my point is only that, Harry Potter isn't a modern YA, or a 90s US style action adventure series.
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