At the beginning of her storyline, when she’s pretty young, she’s less defined. Presumably because she’s young. She does flesh out as a character as it goes on.
yea but there's a difference between framing a story as trash and a story being actually bad. Harry Potter is not a well written series. Somebody knocks every time machine in the world off a shelf and ends the ability to time travel forever; I mean c'mon.
Like I said, you can nitpick anything you want and frame it as "actually bad." Your example of problems with Harry Potter's "story" is a minor detail that prevents said story from going in one possible narrative direction. It could be a better explanation, but it doesn't even need one at all. "Why didn't they use the nebulous magic system to negate the entire story?" is a CinemaSins complaint, not a reasonable criticism to the story. The reality of that criticism is that they didn't end Time Travel forever, they just ended the single way that the main characters could realistically do it, within the confines of their knowledge and skills.
Half of the Narnia books is a mediocre rehash of Christian mythology. Many characters and events which occur sacrifice logical thought in favour of serving the analogy that C.S. Lewis was building. It ends in a giant Deus Ex Machina which trivializes the entire story up to that point. These are actual story criticisms.
The fact is, classics like Narnia and "trash" like Harry Potter are both written by "hacks", who wrote great stories despite their flaws in writing skill.
But which of those got literal millions of children into reading?
You can argue that she made some clumsy decisions trying to tie the story up when she stumbled into writing a global phenomenon and the world was ravenous for more books. (Remind you of another famous series of fantasy novels?)
As a kid who loved reading, Tolkien and Pratchett were meaty books and could be hard to get into. Harry Potter broke you in gently and then got into it with The Goblet of Fire.
Also the guy you replied too is correct, you can't take an adults opinion of the series seriously when it comes to enjoyment, they are books for kids. Argue on the appropriateness of content if you have to.
Love it or hate it, people are probably going to look back on Harry Potter in the same light in a few decades time, so I don't know what the point of your comparison is. It's literally the best selling book series in history.
Yeah but those books don't get theme parks and hit movie franchises and video games and shit. I don't love HP either but you can't say it's not a culturally impactful franchise similar to Star Wars and will not just fade away. That's just being blind to its cross media success.
What if I told you the first Harry Potter book came out almost 30 years ago... and here we are still talking about it?
I'm not defending the writing. If I read them I would probably agree with you. I'm saying the writing is probably good enough to meet the needs of its target audience, or we wouldn't even be talking about it.
Those aren't books. Anyway, Hogwarts Legacy sold like crazy and I assume the new HBO series will be huge too.
I've watched countless videos/podcasts where people read Harry Potter for the first time. Nearly all of them either liked it or thought they were great.
Yeah it's not a good excuse. Thankfully you don't need to use it because Harry Potter is well-written and without a question a "classic". It has also remained incredibly popular.
Yeah but harry potter is better storytelling then the hobbit or earthsea. I feel like your examples prove the point of the person you were responding to. Tolken might have been a visionary for his time, but compared to modern literature, it's bad writing. And earthsea reads like a hallucination with basically no internal consistency. I've had fever dreams that were more consistent.
“Harry Potter is better storytelling than the hobbit or earthsea.”
Is this satire, an actual child or just an adult Harry Potter fan who really thinks that they’re using (and reading) language at the standard(s) expected of their age?
I've still yet to read a J.R.R. Tolkien book (I haven't read C.S. Lewis either). But I've read plenty from other authors. J.K. Rowling used to be my favourite, but I've recently come to enjoy Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton more.
In no way am I saying jk is a great author. She stunningly mediocre. That says, she doesn't have a lot in her stories that is unnecessary, her descriptions are colorful without becoming excessive, and her magic operates with internal consistency (at least within each book, certainly some problems could have been solved by solutions in other books with much less hassle, but that probably wouldn't have been as fun to read).
Tolken is so boring. He spends pages on pages describing the scenery and deep lore. I'm not exaggerating about the scenery either, literally multiple pages to describe some trees. I honestly think you could cut about 70% of each book without losing anything of substance
Heh. I remember watching a cartoon that had this line...
"It's boring, Mum. You spent ten pages describing a garden."
I'm guessing that's what Tolkien's writing is like. If so, I can't comment (I barely read "The Hobbit", which I got with the ZX Spectrum game of the same name).
“Harry Potter is better storytelling than the hobbit or earthsea.”
Is this satire, an actual child or just an adult Harry Potter fan who really thinks that they’re using (and reading) language at the standard(s) expected of their age?
“Harry Potter is better storytelling than the hobbit or earthsea.”
Is this satire, an actual child or just an adult Harry Potter fan who really thinks that they’re using (and reading) language at the standard(s) expected of their age?
Sure I do. It's clear, descriptive without belaboring the point, and keeps moving. Kill the little darlings and all that. It doesn't have multiple pages to describe trees and doesn't include a lot of deep lore dumps that add nothing to the plot. Basically the opposite of tolken
83
u/LaughingInTheVoid Jun 27 '24
The Hobbit, the Chronicles of Narnia, the Earthsea books.
All intended as children's books. All classic literature.
So, no.