This sounds a bit cliche, or like just a joke, but it's really quite true.

True, but on a personal level I also just really can't enjoy it anymore knowing who's behind it regardless of how I obtain it.

(I also just grew out of it, that too)

No. No I think when its doing ecological damage you need to knock it the fuck off.

For books and merch, second hand also avoids supporting Rowling

I don't know anyone personally that has actually read the whole series, including myself.

I think I have? There might be a side book or two I missed, I think I only read one of the choose your own adventure ones. But I read the main series all the way to the end and the ‘main’ side stories (Hork-Bajir Chronicles, etc). I enjoyed the hell out of it as a kid, it definitely influenced a lot of my anti-war feelings.

I loved that shit as a kid.

I also watch the news and learn about the genocide in Palestine every morning. The biggest difference is that Animorphs was much more fun and had a better ending.

You're both wrong. All books are for nerds. Now hand over your lunch money.

I was a kid back then so I definitely read some of them. Though I have no memory of them having a related story or a contiguous plot line, or really of any of the plot lines anyway. I vaguely remember that there were more books later on, I’m pretty sure the ones I read were like the first few published.

I definitely remember there being Animorphs posters in our school library and shit and the software used to make the cover was very popular, at the time it was also used in several TV shows and such.

Its pretty mid.

I was a book kid, who grew up and was 13 to 17 during the release of the HP series.

I read mountains of YA books and adult alike. Spent tonnes of weekend days at the library.

HP was okay, it wasnt bad.

But it wasnt the best either. I would absolutely say stuff like Sabriel and the Bartimaeus trilogy were substantially better.

Oh and dont even get me started on Redwall, Jacques was an amazing writer who knew how to craft incredible worlds.

By comparison to those, Id score HP closer to a 6 or so.

You’ve only got “UK AKSHULLY NO IT ISNT LALALALA” responses, and I feel obligated to speak up for my late (queer fan) friend and say I’m not a fan but they are completely fine books written better then a shit ton of other books for kids. I’ve read the first four and found them to be between “serviceable” and “great”. They were no “Animorphs” to me, but at no point did I find myself thinking “this is boring and sucks”, so people saying they’re straight-up bad are nuts or just being disingenuous.

If the author wasn’t a mad cunt, I guarantee most of the people saying they’re shit wouldn’t be saying that.

Harry Potter is very well written. Like leagues beyond what you typically get for youth fiction/young adult.

, they said loftily.

It's really not well written, by classical standards. It's very colorful and fun and entertaining. But the story and plot constantly use "deus ex machina". Just try an summarize the actions and plot of the movie, it makes no sense whatsoever. Really the story is garbage, but the characters and adventure still makes it fun.

I think that is a feature of a many modern "web novels" or fan fiction. A sort of liberation of the shackles of good writing. Web novels democratized authorship in a way. We really have far more entertaining authors with much more talent than was made to believe (Tangent: A bit like porn today, now that everybody can do it on their own, from their home without some creepy porn producer, we have far better and more creative porn than ever). Most people are creative and pretty good as amateur writers. They just haven't learned the craft of writing a good story lol (cannot be said about Rowlings though, she should have known better).

Why some things become a hit and others not is an unsolved question. If we could answer that, book publishing and movie studios would work very differently. Don't ascribe to quality which can equally be ascribed to luck or marketing.

You should read His Dark Materials or The Old Kingdom. Both series are much, much more thoughtfully put together. Their plotting and characterization really put HP to shame.

It's not very well written, even by youth / young adult standards.

It's not poorly written either mind.

First, it's only a measure that people consume the media, not that they enjoy it. Hate-watching is a thing, as you can tell from a comment higher up. Or they watched because someone else wanted to watch (or they thought someone else wanted to watch).

Second, enjoyment does not reflect quality. People can like bad media. I like the second D&D movie, and even I can only rate it's quality as "fine".

Third, even at the height of its popularity and among its strongest fans, there are flaws galore in the books. Even ignoring the racism, sexism, ablism, slavery, "ugly is bad" mindset, and all that, there's also stupid plot decisions and lazy world building. Of all the fanfics on AO3, well over a third of them are fix-fics.

There is a historical relation between their stories. So it is a pretty convenient mistake that her history doesn't afford much leeway in.

Nobody said it was a revolution for reading or literacy, but just by sheer number the book still has still likely spawned more readers than any other books in recent decades.

I never read books as a kid for fun, until the 7th book came out when I was in high school. I read them all and never stopped.

HP definitely was one of the most commonly read books by most of my peers, and I'm afraid kids would have read much less without them (in my generation, before the movies were made)

I don't see an answer to my question anywhere in this comment.

A brief glance at their profile shows they mostly spend their time on the fediverse dropping incendiary comments in politically charged threads; we may never get clarification.

I don't really buy Darth Jar Jar, but I can see him being an exiled Jedi. None of his "accidents" worked against the goals of the heroes and he was always where he needed to be. He felt like the drunken fool who would be revealed to a kungfu master by the end. Gin's dismissive lines to him in episode 1 was setting up for something. The whole prequel trilogy was about the corruption of the Jedi and Jar Jar might have been exile or left because of his opposition to it.

It's definitely the most popular character in the franchise.

I read the book, I read **all ** the main series books. Dobby was as useful as Cho Chang to the story, minus one scene.

I happen to think you should feel ashamed for judging what people harmlessly enjoy. Guess we each have our pet peeves.

No fun allowed 😠

Watto and Nute Gunray weren't portrayed as buffoons, though. Jar Jar had the double-whammy of not just referencing an ethnicity, but doing so in a gratuitously insulting way.

(Granted, Watto, being a slaveowner, was certainly not a sympathetic character either, but at least he behaved reasonably enough in the context of the story. A shrewd businessman, but not greedy or duplicitous, you know? At least Lucas stopped short of the really offensive antisemitic tropes.)

Rastafari. Lucas has a bad habit of including a little casual racism in a lot of his works. Less a matter of because hateful and more a matter of being old and out of touch with certain matters.

I feel like it was just because he was trying to make them sound exotic/foreign/alien and wasn't imaginative enough to make up accents from scratch.

There’s also “Small Round” and the Indian banquet from Temple of Doom and the Jewish stereotype Watto from episode 1.

There's also the hyper-Japanese Nute Gunray from the same movie. Lucas was pretty equal-opportunity in his cultural appropriation, LOL!

I also don’t buy that as being the difference between the two. Doby was from a slave race and treated as weird for not wanting to be a slave. That’s way worse than what Lucas did.

Yeah, but that made Dobby a more sympathetic character. There was nothing like that for Jar Jar (especially since the only people that treated him badly were other Gungans, and it was earned). Dobby was oppressed and brainwashed; Jar Jar was just [very convincingly pretending to be] a clumsy oaf with a stereoptyical accent, which basically just makes him an insult to that ethnicity.

Also, keep in mind we're talking about how people feel about the characters themselves, not how people feel about the creators' purpose for writing them that way. So yeah, 100% agree that Rowling was way more problematic than Lucas, but that doesn't mean Dobby was more problematic than Jar Jar.

No