In all seriousness, this is what happens when you write novels without doing any world-building and just put down whatever seems “fun”. The are sooooo many things in that series that make no sense once they are superceded by later plot devices. Rowling didn’t think any of it through ahead of time and gave almost no thought to internal consistency with previous content when she wrote new things.
It’s honestly a terrible series in most regards and it’s kind of disappointing how popular it became.
Also she a trans-hating bigot. Fuck J.K. Rowling. Can’t forget that part whenever discussing her or her work.
All true, though i still found it fun to read when the books came out. At that age my critical thinking skills were not as developed yet, and since that age group is the intended target audience the popularity is not that surprising.
My theory, the first three/four books were written well enough, but the movies carried the rest of the series. She came really close to game of thronesing it too, but apparently average fans didnt mind the dieing baby voldemort in an all white train station ending.
Books 5-7 were awful in my opinion. I hated Harry through the entire last book, which I can’t imagine is intentional.
Yeah. There’s a fan-fic I read recently (also the only HP fan fic I’ve read) called “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” which is set in an alternate universe in which Harry is raised by perfectly pleasant folks with an understanding of the scientific method, and arrives in the wizarding world and immediately starts deconstructing all the bizarre nonsense going on there. It’s very well done, but it’s really hard to recommend precisely because it does refer back to a ton of the stuff that’s developed in the books, so I had to keep looking up stuff I didn’t recall, and I don’t really want to devote brain space to that stuff. (Some of the “rationality” stuff has aged a little bit poorly through the replication crisis, too, though I’m a bit more forgiving of that since it talks so much about updating your beliefs.)
But for anyone who did read the books back when and was frustrated at times by the characters behaving so irrationally, it’s kinda cathartic in that way. For those who are interested: https://github.com/rrthomas/hpmor
Rule of cool supersedes making sense. Yeah there’s a ton of nonsense, but you called it yourself, it’s fun. That’s all that matters.
The issue I have with this line of reasoning is that there are equally whimsical, better written series that just didn’t have good fortune to pop off the way HP did.
It’s marketing. And cover art. And simple timing of fads. It sucks. And it funded a horrible person through pure happenstance
there are equally whimsical, better written series
Which ones can you recommend? I mean, my reading list is already too long but…
If we’re talking ‘young adult’ (which I think is a silly book classification group), the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede always gets my top pick—shorter, sassy, fun, with well-written female protagonists. (All her books are pretty good, really.)
Another of my top choices in the Fantasy YA category are the Tiffany Aching books by Sir Terry Pratchett. Great fun and Sir Terry’s wonderful brand of biting wisdom.
If you like the ‘kids go to boarding school, have magical adventures, save the world’ formula, Mercedes Lackey did a pretty good series called the Shadow Grail. Although the kids are older (and more sensible) than the Harry Potter protagonists.
The Castle Books by John DeChancie are another fun romp of a series. Younger me loved the idea of a castle filled with 144,000 portals to adventure. Although the technology in it is a bit dated—at this point in time, rather humorously so.
Gail Carriger’s book series are all a good read; my favorite she’s done so far is the Finishing Series. Not as much magic as other books on this list, but still a well-thought-out system. Her books are really more steampunk-fantasy with a sprinkling of magic on top.
China Mievelle doesn’t really write series, per se, but all his books are fun and well-written, with interesting twists and ideas. I’d say they are the very definition of whimsical.
If your requirements are ‘good books by authors as awful as JK Rowling’, well, that’s tougher, but fortunately David and Leigh Eddings decided to throw their hats in the ring! Horrible child abusers, but their writings are genuinely good, way better than what Rowling writes.
He liked a pro trans meme once.
