#my friend said it looked like percy jackson (I've only read the 1st book)

[olivsie]

happy birthday :D

Thanks

I made blue blueberry muffins (the brown stuff is streusel)

[crypticbeliever123]

I just want to say this. I first read Harry Potter last year and genuinely, HONESTLY hated it SO. MUCH. I wanted to like these books because it's the biggest book series out there and I could not stand them. Hermione was looked at as crazy, the characters as young as 11 would go on and on about hurting cats, the pacing was glacial and would include SO MUCH FILLER (like really why was Grawp even mentioned in book 5?), the main trio had such similar character voices that I had to keep rereading sections of dialogue because I'd often think Hermione was speaking when it was one of the boys or Ron was speaking instead of Harry etc, the numerous plot holes, and Rowling's insistence on using the cringy phrase "pregnant pause" repeatedly was just weird (pauses can't be pregnant Rowling, that'd be weird).

I DNF'd the series after forcing myself to finish that godawful 5th book, like why was it so fucking long and boring?! It didn't need so much filler and even if Harry had PTSD that doesn't excuse him being an asshole to his friends! And the Cho plotline was just so unnecessary! I don't even recall reading her being revealed as the Dumbledore's Army traitor which I had been expecting on my read through as that would've been interesting and everyone talked about it but I SWEAR it said some friend of hers was the traitor instead and just UGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH! I HATED THOSE 1ST FIVE BOOKS AND DO NOT. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS SANE UNDERSTAND WHY EVERYONE LOVES THEM SO MUCH!!!!!

That said I almost never mention how much I hate the books online because of how much they're loved for fear of backlash being like HOW DARE YOU! HARRY POTTER IS THE EPITOME OF LITERATURE! And getting a bunch of anon hate in my inbox over it. I'll bitch about how much I despise the books in person to my family or the occassional acquaintance but that has less risks involved imo. Even now after the Rowling discourse I still see people talking about how much they love the books and participating in fandom and honestly I like fanon HP more than canon because the fanon stories and interpretations are actually fun to read about. If people are saying they never really liked Harry Potter before, sure maybe some of them are lying, but I'll bet a bunch of them are in the same boat as me as a closeted Harry Potter hater because I cannot be the only one who can't stand these books.

And I like middle grade books. Percy Jackson kickstarted my love of reading back in 2018 and some of my favorite books are from the Rick Riordan presents label. Shout out to Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia and Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi both of which made me cry while reading which is a HUGE feat since I'm not much of a crier. I'm also not a 45 year old man. I'm a 23 year old woman and I don't even think I'd have liked reading these books if I read them as a kid because again: slow af pacing, kids who are pro-elf-slavery, and children wanting to kick cats. I wanted to like Harry Potter as much as I loved Percy Jackson and other middle grade books I've enjoyed. I couldn't. I just couldn't.

Tl;dr I hate Harry Potter with a burning passion and probably a lot of people just pretended to like the books because it was such an unpopular opinion to hate the books.

PS: I liked the movies better because they cut out the tedious filler, the Hermione being crazy for believing house elves deserve freedom plotline, and most of the cat abuse talk.

I’ve been wanting to make this post for a while, but...I’m fascinated by the fact that for well over a decade the Harry Potter series was nearly unchallenged publicly as one of the holy grails of YA/children’s fantasy, seldom criticized at all on quality (and usually by 45+ year old men who hated children’s books in general), and was widely acknowledged by a huge number of readers as having strongly impacted them, and now everyone supposedly never liked Harry Potter anyway and always knew it sucked and that J.K. Rowling was a talentless hack.

Please. This is embarrassing. You and I both know that Harry Potter has never been “obviously” garbage, nor is it “inexplicable” why it became successful. No, it’s not even close to the best fantasy ever written. Yes, its ideas are not really all that original. No, I don’t really give a shit about it anymore. But this amnesia about what an overwhelming phenomenon in culture it was is SO pointless. We both know that 10 years ago, it was not clear and self-evident that Harry Potter sucked and had no redeeming qualities, and 10 years ago, INCREDIBLY few people in the target audience would have said that. If anyone. I can’t remember ever hearing anyone say the books had no redeeming qualities before, like, a few months ago.

And like, just from a math point of view, it seems like most of us should have been among those who at least somewhat liked Harry Potter. I know I did when I was like 12-15. The number of people claiming they never liked it seems to be too large a proportion. Just considering my memories of how ubiquitous praise of Harry Potter was when I and many of those people would have been among the target audience. Like iirc just like 3 years ago the average rating for the books on goodreads was ridiculously high.

The number of people now who are coming out and saying that they literally can’t understand why Harry Potter appeals to people is just...I don’t know. Sad? That the idea of personally enjoying something that has bigoted or evil influences is so unacceptable we’re all trying to retcon our memories? And also just irritating? I mean maybe you did dislike JKR’s writing style since reading it in 2012, but...Having disliked JKR’s writing style since 2012 or whatever says next to nothing about you? For that matter, your opinion on her writing style has no relationship whatsoever to your attitude toward trans people?

Like??? What is the point??? To prove to one another that we were better and more moral 11 year olds because we always Saw The Truth about JKR’s work? Or are we just that uncomfortable with admitting that a bigot’s artistic work can be appealing to anyone other than a bigot? I don’t think it helps people to pretend that bad people cannot create good art or even art with good qualities. Or to pretend that good people don’t ever like art that contains bigotry.

I mean of course plenty of people always did genuinely dislike Harry Potter. But like. We can’t just hide our eyes and be like ���Oh! I all of a sudden can’t understand why anyone would like Harry Potter! It was always so bad and unoriginal! Why on earth would Harry Potter be popular?” Now that JKR has come out as being a full blown transphobe. That’s not??? A critical attitude??? A critical attitude would be understanding why people like the thing (even if you personally don’t like it) not emphasizing how impossible it is for you to understand a person liking it, as if you’re so pure and untainted that you can’t even mentally understand the appeal in something?

And I guess something bothers me about the response to an artist’s bigotry that’s like,,,trashing every single thing about their artistic skill, even that which has no relationship to their bigotry? I see this constantly. It’s like we want to believe that being bad means someone can’t create good stuff, or if they did create good stuff, they stole their ideas from someone else. And that just doesn’t seem like how the real world works.

Of course, this is not referring to having the association with the artist ruin the art for you, or to seeing bigotry in the art that wasn’t visible for you before. (Definitely both happened to me with Harry Potter.) It’s referring to the sudden insistence that springs into being every time an artist’s evil actions or beliefs come about that they were never any good anyway and that all their good ideas must be stolen or not really good at all. And even that they only became popular because everyone else must have been evil and bigoted.

Like insisting that every piece of art by a bigot seems bad to you is the opposite of being critical of art. I don’t buy that anyone’s artistic taste can sniff out the bigotry of the artist for a second.

And I also don’t buy that it’s ever been a clear fact that one of the most popular book series of all time was shit. The quality of literature doesn’t easily come down to “objectivity,” for one thing. But also...obviously there was some reason people liked it, even if it was a complete accident on the part of the creator, or it came down more to timing. I personally think JKR had quite a bit of creativity and skill with worldbuilding on the small day-to-day scale, even if she didn’t think through the big picture stuff. She knew how to pick out strong, vivid descriptors in her writing, even though she liked to use that ability to describe side characters in nasty and sometimes bigoted ways. She at least sort of knew what she was doing with some stuff. It’s not...wrong to see that.

And also...they’re children’s books. Most of us read them for the first time AS CHILDREN. Children are able to be critical of stories, but not on the same level or in the same way as an adult. Everyone has liked a bad book at some point because they were a kid and they’d never encountered anything like it before. It happens.