Power cable linking UK and Ireland now passes near Bronze Age human burial remains instead of fictional grave on Welsh beach
Update: further information by @BigDiction@lemmy.world in the comments below
Power cable linking UK and Ireland now passes near Bronze Age human burial remains instead of fictional grave on Welsh beach
Update: further information by @BigDiction@lemmy.world in the comments below
It’s, of course, a matter of taste whether or not you find them good. But let’s not pretend that we’re not talking about one of he most popular, best-selling children’s book series of all time that spawned a 30+ billion dollar franchise of movies, merch, games, and a theme park. Plenty of people found them plenty good enough to generate that big of a financial success.
hey now, lets not try to get people to realize that other people’s opinions matter.
And we all know that popular equals quality
Popular doesn’t mean great, of course, but it does mean it was at least good enough to be enjoyed by a lot of people. If it were objectively bad, as in it had no good qualities at all, it wouldn’t be popular.
Harry Potter is very well written. Like leagues beyond what you typically get for youth fiction/young adult.
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.
Not to mention Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians (younger audience) and Skyward (true YA audience).
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.
If she hadn’t become a vociferous anti civil rights activist the reality is a lot of us would still be tired of the books and frustrated with elements of them, but there’d be less anger when they come up. There were plenty of people getting real sick of how popular they’d remained in the mid 10s.
I read them all as a kid and loved them, but I was definitely tired of how much cultural space they took up for so fucking long. And the criticisms are valid, the books did an amazing job of inspiring obsession in a kid of the time, they felt like they grew with me, they had so much room to imagine in, and they were also full of holes, mid prose, and the sort of issues I’m kinda shocked my parents didn’t feel the need to have a conversation about.
But also, would people be as vocal about these issues if it wasn’t the largest media franchise under individual control and controlled by someone who has funded massive rollbacks in rights for a group she’s bigoted towards? Obviously not, we’d just still be saying to read another book, not arguing not to continue purchasing products from the franchise.
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.
Sabriel and Redwall were my jam as a kid. I still revisit the Abhorsen series from time to time. Basically I reread them all when Nix releases a new book.
, they said loftily.
It’s not well very written, even by youth / young adult standards.
It’s not poorly written either mind.
Have you actually gone back and read any of the copious amounts of ya books?
Off the top of my head – go and reread a Goosebumps book. They are super simple. HP is downright shakespearian compared to them.
Hardy boys, tom swift series (80s/90s versions) and countless other one shot books that I can barely remember are all super simple too.
Yes, there are always outliers like Redwall but when compared to the whole HP was well written regardless of the trash person who wrote them.
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.
I do think a lot of that popularity was because it came out when internet forums were a novelty. If you’re used to only one or two people liking the same book as you, then you see thousands liking the same book, that book must be popular.
Then the popularity fed itself. Movies, merch, games, everything was done to capitalise on the “popularity” of a new series, and this introduced it to a new audience. Media started to talk about the new book series that people were going mad for. People who didn’t read the books wanted to find out what everyone was talking about. Time passes, and people look back on the books with nostalgia goggles. Even you, when defending the book, can only point to its popularity as an argument.
The actual book doesn’t matter. It’s popular because it’s popular.
Well, that’s a bad assumption. I was appealing to it popularity and financial value because that is a real objective measure that indicates that people liked the series. I didn’t argue with someone on the internet who declared that the books were bad, full stop, over my subjective perception of its merits and quality becuase that is a pointless argument to have. Not to mention, likely one to be met with open hostility on Lemmy. No thanks.
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.
Fan merch doesn’t sell for “fine”. Theme parks aren’t floated on hate-watching. People don’t spend $30 billion ironically. Yea, those things factor in, but they are clearly not the main drivers. And flaws do not make a work not good overall. I’m the first to admit it is flawed, for every reason you mentioned and more. But none of that makes it bad.
There is fan merch of The Room. Theme parks don’t need a popular franchise connected to be popular, so long as there’s a rollercoaster and something fun for the whole family. People will happily spend money on nostalgia and fitting in with others, or on gifts for someone you think likes the thing.
All of this is, once again, an appeal to popularity. It has nothing to do with the quality of the books. And you saying the book isn’t bad despite bad plot, world, characters and implications just condemns your judgement.
You know you are being disingenuous. You know plenty of people enjoy(ed) the series. This is a stupid pedantic argument.
Not the original person you’ve been talking to, just an FYI, just a random passerby with an outside perspective who has a question.
So far you’ve only agreed that the HP series has numerous literary flaws, but pointed to popularity and commercial success as measures that it is objectively a good work of literature.
Can you point to any literary reasons as to why the HP series is a good work of literature?
So just to be clear, I was not saying it is objectively good. No piece of media is objectively good. Qualitative goodness is an inherently subjective matter.
As I said, in my very first reply in this chain, whether or not you find it good is entirely a matter of taste. OP had stated that it is not good, which is fine if that is their opinion. But they did so in a way that implies disbelief that others feel differently. That the people defending a site that they hold special due to their fandom are wrong, not because it is a fictional character who fictionally died on a specific spot (as I feel), but because it is wrong to like the story at all.
Again, OP is absolutely free to feel about the story anyway that they want, as is anyone else. But they are not objectively right in that opinion, and their incredulity that other disagree with them is silly as it is incredibly, famously, popular. The popularity of the franchise, in itself, does objectively indicate that a lot of people do feel very differently from them about the franchise. Again, that does not mean that it is objectively good. That means that, objectively, many people think that it is good. Goodness is a subjective qualitative judgement. Popularity is a more quantitative measure of the relative number of people who have judged something to be good. And gross financial success is an objective metric of that Popularity.
Now, as for my opinion on the series, I grew up reading the books. In fact, they were the first chapter books I ever brought myself to actually read of my own volition. As such, I have a fair amount of nostalgia for them. Given I was a child, and as a child, I enjoyed them greatly, I really think it is silly to claim that they are “not even good children’s books”. I enjoyed the messaging about selflessness and heroism. I enjoyed the idea of flying around on a broom a lot. I enjoyed seeing a kid who had grown up with absolutely nothing and told he was nothing overcome that to find out that he was special and had something that others would appreciate.
As an adult, I do find some of the elements a bit distasteful. Most of the things about the House Elves are super problematic (though, Dobby is the least problematic example of them). The race-coded stuff, especially the goblins, is concerning now that I can recognize those things. I do think some of the concern about character names for non-white characters, like Cho Chang, is a bit overblown, but I’ll grant people their feelings over it. Narratively, some of the character decisions are a bit contrived or full-on stupid sometimes. Don’t get me started on the entire climax of the 5th book. And the rules or lack there of around the soft magic system leaves some character choices making no sense.
Then there is the vile bitch author herself who has long since surpassed the retchedness of her Umbridge character. It certainly leaves a disgusting taint on the IP. And I do not begrudge anyone from wanting nothing to do with the property since the revelations as a bigot. I certainly won’t ever provide her another dime in my life.
But I am unable to pretend that the books were bad, that they weren’t formative in my childhood, that they don’t still mean something to me and that I don’t enjoy them overall. As far as I see it, the themes of those books, that people of all sorts are good, that everyone deserves respect, that authority doesn’t deserve respect in itself, that doing good is more important than selling a good image, that bravery and friendship are virtues, that racist pricks can get fucked, that women are as, or often more, smart, brave, talented, and capable as men, that we can honor our dead by carrying on the lessons they taught us and the sacrifices they made for us… they supersede whatever stupid shit that billionaire asshole says these days. They are beyond her.
Everyone is welcome to their opinion. You can think what you want of me too. That’s how I feel.
I’m done arguing against the single argument you’ve made time and time and time again. For my rebuttal, simply look four comments up from this one. Goodbye.